father and son.

There are two partners in the bankruptcy law firm where I work, a father and son.  Mr. Lawyer, Sr. lives vicariously through his younger son who, despite Sr.'s beliefs, is quite a bit less interested in law than his father.  I think he'd much rather teach Russian or Spanish in a University somewhere up north, but he is waiting in line to take over his father's law firm. Dad continues to press son to do things that I believe he himself would rather like to do but thinks he can't because his prime time is over.  One of these ventures is a local civil service position. 

Son lawyer recently ran for this position of Environment Overseer in the elections.  His name was buried in the pile of indiscriminates on the back of the ballot that are hardly ever read and less often marked.  The position is one that less than three percent of the population has any care about and, to top it all off, his was the last name on the list.  

Going into the elections he knew that he was unlikely to win based on voting trends and statistics on how locals know almost nothing about their local elected officials.  However his father spent hours creating visually appealing advertisements for the local papers, meticulously editing slogans, making phone calls and collecting a band of voters to back his son.  Lawyer Jr.'s mother made buttons that she distributed to her friends and placed in buckets on the counter at her nail salon and dry cleaner.  This was a family affair which, by some unfair default, I was dragged into.  Apparently the position of "Receptionist" has no clear limitations or boundaries.  Several hours of my time on the clock in the law office were spent stapling signs to metal stakes to be stuck on corners around town.  One morning of sign construction I was even chastised for placing my staples too far apart.  "Do you think those will really hold up?!" Lawyer Sr. asked me exasperated. Good grief.

He took the day off on November 4th to campaign at the polls on the outskirts of town. The two paralegals and I waited with bated breath for the results.

He didn't win.  I came in a few minutes before nine on Wednesday morning and Rene told me he'd come in second out of four with twenty-seven percent.  The other guy got thirty-four.  I was surprised by my own disappointment.  It was raining too, and cold.

At 9:45 he came into the office, a few minutes before his first appointment of the day.  He was red-faced and his short hair was pressed down matted on the left side.  His collar was flipped up on one side revealing the neck of his striped tie.  

"Morning," I said kindly, quietly.  He responded with a somewhat spastic hello and he seemed flustered.  After getting a brief summary from Rene, he retreated to his office.  Nobody had mentioned the election.  Everyone knew he'd lost.  It was bizarre, a big fat orange elephant in a very small parlor that had, over the past thirty-six hours, grown in importance to everyone.  Everyone, that is, except Lawyer Sr., to whom the election had always been of the highest importance.  

His first appointment was a no-show, so he stayed in his office.  At one point I poked my head into his door to ask him about a file.  As I left I said, "hey, sorry about the election."

"Oh! It's okay! Those things happen, you know?  That's just the way it goes sometimes!"  He exclaimed it like a city hot dog hawker selling lunch to passers-by.  I was startled and nodded, eyes wide.  

A gentleman came in not long after that.  He walked through the door regally, though his clothes were worn out with his rumpled white hair.  He walked right up to the window and said, "Is Mr. Lawyer Jr. in today?"  

His confidence took me back, considering most of the people who come to that window are generally beaten down and pretty miserable.  He asked if he could see Lawyer Jr. and I asked if he had an appointment.

"Oh, no appointment necessary! I just wanted to commend him on the election! It was a good race, commendable." 

I went back to the office and pushed the door open.

"Wil," I said, "an old client of yours is here.  Says he wants to commend you on the election."

He did come out of his office to the window and that old bankrupt businessman shook Wil's hand and told him what a fine job he'd done running for the position and what a fine man he was in this community of Winston-Salem.  And all Wil could say was "thanks" and nod his head.  But when the man walked out the door and Wil walked back to his office, it finally felt like the tension had broken.  Wil even made a joke about having fewer meetings to worry about.  Of course, when his father came in I thought he might just break down into tears.  But I guess there are some things that just have to be left alone.  

off of Pine Valley road, autumn explosion!

some night.

After a long evening they drove back to her apartment in the dark.  These nights were fun because they got to help out with the meetings and see their friends, but they didn't really see much of each other.  A couple times during the night he had come up behind her and touched her to tell her, "here, behind you!"  He'd smile at her across the room in between conversations and she would wink back.  They'd stay late afterwards to help clean up.

"My paycheck is late again," she said as they wound around streets on the residential shortcut that gave them a fifteen-minute catch-up window.  The trees, which were so brilliant by day, looked various shades of gray and black in the cloudy evening.  "Maybe if I was making decent money that wouldn't matter, but I'm not.  Four hundred dollars matters!"

"That's obnoxious," he said.  "What's the hold up?  Did the boss tell you when you'd get it?"

"He said late Thursday. Maybe Friday."  She was annoyed.

When they got to her apartment, he turned off the car and they both got out.  She went before him down the walkway and unlocked the door.  They went inside and he stood in the doorjamb as she put her purse and plastic coffee mug on the island.

"Alright, well I hope you have a great day at work tomorrow," she said as she turned around and stood face-to-face with him.  She hugged him and stood there for a minute.

He wrapped his arms around her back and rested his head on her temple.  She looked out the window into the black nighttime and he, looking at the mirror on the wall across the room, said, "I wish I could get an artist's depiction of this, right now."

"Of what?" she asked.

"My big arms wrapped around your little self, and your beautiful hair.  It's just cute."

She laughed pulling her head back to see his face and kissed his cheek.

"Love you."  He walked away from the door and she quickly lost his silhouette with the kitchen light behind her and the moonless night outside.

Patty Griffin.

Patty Griffin sings from her soul.  You would know it even if she sang in Portuguese because of the way you can hear her guts coming through the sound of her voice.  Her music moves my spirit in a way that no other music ever has.  It is full of her deepest appetites and her simplest stories and to listen is to quench some unidentified hope for sweet, sweet music.

Her songs are honey in this fall season; her strumming is the perfect soundtrack for the rustling leaves and her voice sounds the way the rust treetops turn bronze in the five o'clock hour when the light is most scintillating.  She has wrapped her voice around the essence of autumn.  And like fall, when everything is so beautifully dying so that it can spring up later and begin again, Patty narrates the reality of life--all of its death and living and struggling and breathing.

Fall has a bewitching power over me.  The sky is almost the bluest blue that can be found outside of poetry and the way that the afternoon light pushes through the cracks of the leaves that canopy across the streets makes me forget where I am.  I could live with this forever.  And as I have found myself lately at a loss for words, Ms. Patty's folk songs seem to be the solution.

 

teaching an old dog young tricks.

My boss is a bankruptcy lawyer.  His son, also his partner, refers to his father in a business-like manner calling him "Wen" rather than dad.  It is strange.  I was hired at the firm as a receptionist for the morning hours.  It is a quiet job, answering phones, making copies, smiling at our clients who, I am certain, roll their eyes inwardly when I say, "Have a great day!"  I'm bankrupt, lady. 

The unconventional portion of this job is that I have become the boss's personal typist.  He is from the old school, for lack of a more perfectly suited term, and he prefers to write things out shorthand on a legal pad.  This is ridiculous considering the changing times... also considering that he is writing a novel which will, eventually, have to be entirely typed.  He, however, chooses to remain the same and reject modern commonalities such as voicemail, Microsoft Word and spell checker.  

In my initial interview I felt somewhat sheepish and young and got the distinct feeling of being looked down upon.  However, once my boss realized what a wealth of technological, vocabulary and internet intelligence I was (really not that much, but much more than he), he began to treat me with greater interest.  I was a daily champion at work, a great tutor in modern writing tools.

Kyle, my seventeen-year-old brother, called me from Florida this evening as I was eating dinner.  He was trying to unlock something on the computer which I, once a resident of our household, had set up with a password that he didn't know.  After I told him the key he, in a moment of sheer other-mindedness, asked me how I was doing--a big thing from the subdued child who despises talking on the phone.  And I, on a whim of really wanting to chat with him, took the bait and told him.  

"I am studying for the GRE."

"The what?" he said.

"The GRE.  It's a test to get into graduate school.  I have it on Thursday.  It's kind of like a vamped up SAT.  But there is math, which I am terrible at, so I'm pretty much SOL."

"Maybe I could help you," he said, laughing because of the reference to an expletive as well as the fact that his realm of mathematical knowledge exceeded mine when he was fourteen.  

"Do you have time?" I said, chuckling sheepishly.

"Yeah, I do."  I heard him smile.

We spent the following thirty minutes on the phone.  I'd tell him the practice problem and he'd write it down.  He walked me through the steps of solving for y, and told me the formulas for finding the volume and surface area of a cylinder.  He reminded me that you can't have a negative exponent and that the easy formulas for triangle solving only work for the right triangles which, for my information, have one ninety-degree angle.

I chewed on the end of my pen, scribbling notes down on the yellow legal pad, asking all kinds of questions and, more than once, "Wait, say that again.  I don't understand."  Then he'd go back and try to explain it all over again.

Kyle was totally patient, an excellent and well versed teacher.  At the end as I scanned my notes to make sure I'd asked him all of my questions I heard him snicker on the other end of the phone a thousand miles away.

"You know," he said, "I charge ten bucks an hour for tutoring."

Laughing, I said, "You can collect from mom and dad.  Tell them it's part of my continuing education."

Maybe, in continuing education, instructors come from behind, like cars coming up to pass in your blind spot, and surprise you with insight you never could've learned from an elder.

Thanks, Kyle :)  

flag football.

The guys were all sitting on the wood beam at the edge of the parking lot facing the field when we pulled up.  I got out of the car in jeans and flip flops and grabbed a brown fleece zip-up out of the back seat.  

Drew stood up.  "I can't believe y'all come out here to these games," he said, shoving his sandals into a bag. 

I smiled. "Of course we come to these games.  This is the only football I really care about!"  

He shook his head and laughed.  "Y'all are some kinda fans, that's for sure."

Tuesday is the new Monday... in Winston-Salem, anyway.  Flag football; it is admittedly a little uncouth and refs are clearly not overly concerned with accuracy, and the city could really afford to spring for some new light bulbs for past-sunset games, but it is simple and organic and, in my opinion, the best kind of football there is.

The games last an hour.  They start sometime between 6:30 and 8:30 depending on your slot.  Fall comes a little later in North Carolina, but by now it gets pretty chilly when the sun goes down and it feels right to watch a game with hands in pockets of jackets and jeans.  

Some of the teams take it pretty seriously.  They've got jerseys and plenty of subs.  I think they practice.  Last years' champs hit the field looking like the Kansas Jayhawks.  My cynical side wants to make fun of the uniforms, but they are are good at football so I hold my tongue. 

Freakway, the team to which I claim allegiance, has jerseys too.  Matt, a bartender at Firebirds restaurant, made them one Sunday afternoon.  White Hanes brand t-shirts printed on with Sharpie with the team name on the front.  The store didn't have enough adult sizes when he bought them so a few of the guys wear a child large.  Kyle's hit at midriff the first week.  They've since remedied the situation... it was ugly.  

They all get there fifteen minutes before the game and line up by the field, swapping Birkenstocks for football cleats, stretching and warming up.  They throw around a couple of old footballs and swear off the stupid mistakes of previous games.  Brad blows off pre-game steam and Kyle ties up his renegade hair with an elastic

 head band.  

When the referee puts his hand up, Mark and the opposing captain meet in the middle of the field.  They shake hands to begin and then, as if the engine was suddenly started, they get serious and play football.

Kyle rushes through the line to sack the quarterback who's hopping back and forth looking for a wingman, dodging under and around the linemen.  Josh and some of the others chase down the receivers, trailing flags and flying for the interception.  Somehow Blake usually appears out of nowhere to snag a flag off the shorts of the guy who has caught the ball not three seconds beforehand.  Brad, who played football in college, drives into every play with such ferocity I think he might actually break his neck when he hits the ground and it never ceases to amaze me when he stands up again.  Mark is the quarterback.  He's got a rocket arm and he dodges defensive linemen like a mig.  Blake once said, "Mark runs as fast backwards as he does forward!"  I think he's right.  And when Mark launches the football it spirals down the field and connects perfectly to Josh's hands, or Kyle's, as if they have an invisible avenue between them.  And this is not to mention the way that somehow Seth seems to find a way up into the middle of opposition passes and snatch the ball from out of the air between them or the way that Justin comes up from underneath to catch passes that appeared to be going nowhere.  

For the first time I actually love football.  And it's not the sport.  Football has never really captivated me.  But it's the way that this game on Tuesday nights affords the guys such a good old time. It feels like for an hour once a week they can all forget about their jobs and quit worrying about the economy.  They can leave futures and girlfriends and wives and kids and just play.  They are fifteen again and the only thing that matters is the end zone.

southbound sunday afternoon.

 On the western side along the highway in the mountains of Virginia the trees are a symphony of orange and pomegranate.  They are booming, deafening even, and the harmony hazes my eyes and my arm hair stands on end.  Inside the car, I press power on the dash to turn off the radio.  It's quiet except for the engine and the reverberating harmonies of the autumn mountainscape. The sun keeps dumping its heated rays in through my window.  My shoulders are warm but my unclad toes are translucent with cold.  It is fall, the season of prime age.

While I drive, you pull the lever on the right side of the seat and push your seat back to a slight recline.  You cover your eyes with your baseball cap, the one that is shredded because you wore it so many years in a row; it turned from navy to gray before I even met you.  Your slightly tan arms are crossed and, though you don't make a sound, I know you are sleeping because you are mostly still.  When you twitch it makes me laugh.  

In time I forget that you are a passenger and send up open-eyed prayers on your behalf as if you were somewhere else, far away from me.  I hum instrumental songs and turn my cell phone to silent to guiltlessly escape in the mountains.  

middle school and san francisco.

"Did you know that the New York City water system thing is like two hundred years old?" Tess asked me.  

"No way," I said. 

"Yeah, and nobody has even seen it or touched it since it was first built."

I laughed, "I doubt that's true."

"Well," she said, recovering, "well they have never stopped the water, I mean.  I was watching the History channel and they were saying that they're afraid that if they stop it to check it, they won't be able to start it again.  And all of the water for the entire city is in this old water system underground."

I believed her.  She was totally enamored by this water system.  In fact, she even seemed afraid for the good of New Yorkers, that this decrepit rusted water system would give way and leave everyone thirsty and desperate for a shower.  I wasn't as interested in the potential water cessation as I was in her genuine interest in the problem.  When I said then that I thought it'd be fun to live in the Big Apple for a few years, she was adamantly opposed because of the possibility that I'd run out of water.  This seemed to me like such a far-off adult problem, yet eleven year old Tess was confounded.

We drove along the parkway for a few minutes listening to her choice radio station, which is typical.  She tends to scan the radio and sing along, generally content in casual conversation and singing along.  After a while she looked at me and, with the resolute chin dig, said, "If I was going to live in a city, it would have to be San Francisco.  I mean, not forever, but for some time."  She had been thinking about this.  "Some people don't like how it's foggy.  But you know it's just cause it's by the Bay.  I think it's elegant."  

I nodded, watching the road, electing to wait and listen rather than chime in.

"I love the cable cars," she bounced up from the seat and stuck her hands underneath of her to land, an effort to somehow harness a bit of her fizzing excitement.  She spoke emphatically, but it wasn't enough.  She wanted me to understand the regal eminence of San Francisco.  "That is definitely my favorite part--the cable cars.  But make sure, when you go, to pack warm stuff because it's cold there.  I mean, we were there in the middle of August and it was so cold."  She paused and looked out the window.  "But it doesn't matter that it's cold.  San Francisco is the best place on earth.

"You can just go and eat chinese whenever you want right in Chinatown.  And there is this Mediterranean place... oh my gosh it is so good."  She emphasized the words with her inflection and her sprawled fingers.  

"There is a Mediterranean place in Chinatown?" I asked, smiling a little bit.

"No!" she exclaimed, appalled by my ignorance and distressed for me to understand.  Looking out the window seemed to bring her back to earth a bit and she said softly, "it would be perfect to be an artist in San Francisco."  She looked at me with crystal eyes and said, in complete sincerity, "Have you ever heard the song, I Left My Heart in San Francisco?"

I nodded.

"That song explains it perfectly."  

"Tess," I laughed, "I have never seen you so passionate about anything."

She didn't say anything and I knew she was dreaming of her city esteemed.  We turned onto the street where I would drop her off at girl scouts.  When we got to the front of the church she opened the door and said, with stoic conviction, "Go to San Francisco.  Do it."  Then she got out of the car and ran inside.

the incredible shrinking house.

When I was young, during the pre-elementary school years that everyone sort of vaguely remembers in a fuzzy dream, we lived in a house on Hillside Drive.  It was a white cape cod with a gray slated roof that angled sharply from a point in the center of the cubic house down to the top of the first floor.  Our street ran right behind the hospital where, once a year, they would hold the most glamorous fair with Aladdin's carpet slide and cotton candy machines.  My sister and I shared a room on the second story and my parents had the other across the hall.  There was a bathroom up there too, but I can't remember now the color of the wall paper.

I had won a contest, a drawing I think, at the dentist office.  The prize was a colossal stuffed dinosaur that was roughly five inches taller than I.  Owing to the fact that my favorite movie of all time (at that point) was Puff the Magic Dragon, it was quite possibly the greatest day of my life when I won.  They brought me into the office, put one of those floppy pointed princess hats on my head, and took portraits of me and my new guardian.  Then I took him home and dragged him around our castle of a house every day.  

Puff sat underneath the window in our room that looked out over the backyard.  There was an enormous tree reaching toward the window with grabbing hands that would moan and shiver in the wind.  It was the kind of tree that is incredibly enticing in daylight, yet completely terrifying during the night.  My dragon was the mystical keeper of our bedroom and then, when I got tired, my transportable bed of sorts.

When we moved away from West Chester I cried for months in desperation for the old house with the towering pointed roof, the grandfather trees and the window that was so high up above the ground.  Our new house was one story and seemed so diminutive to me then.  "Ginny," my dad would say softly to me, patiently, brushing my unruly hair away from my wet cheeks, "that house was much smaller than this house.  It just seemed bigger because it was tall."  I didn't buy it.  

In time I got used to the new house and I would lean up against Puff watching television in the basement.  He began shrinking, as I recall.  

Eventually we went back to visit the old house on Hillside Drive.  A blind man with a mean old seeing eye dog had purchased the home from us. He had torn down the white picket fence my father had put up and painted one summer as a gift to my mom and erected a five-foot chain-link replacement.  He filled my mom's flower beds with plastic toys for his son.  The brick porch was crumbling and the house seemed slightly less white and more grayish.  It was drizzling, as I recall, and I'm not good with rain, slightly seasonally affective.  

I was shocked.  "It looks so puny," I said to my parents with a kind of unimpressed grimace. We sat in the car with the doors closed, staring out the windows.  "It seemed so much bigger before."

"You were a lot smaller," my dad said.

"I just can't believe it!" I exclaimed. "I thought it was so enormous." I was thirteen now.  

"It was, to you," my mother said.

good old boys.

When I pulled up to the garage at eight thirty in the morning and the sun was in its foggy and blinding morning glory, I was sweaty from a run and in much need of some coffee.  I had to get some new tires put on my car.  Mark and I had gotten a flat tire in the middle of the West Virginia mountains which then caused me to discover that three of my four tires were all but stripped.  Par a recommendation of the Rudnicke's, I headed over to Mock Tire, a flat sprawled building with tires all stacked around the garage doors and black and white tiled floor in the office.  The place was buzzing with men, some in blue mechanic suits and some in loafers and short-sleeved Oxfords.  A few women lingered around the door.  

I was admittedly a bit awkward walking in.  I always get nervous going into a car place because I feel totally out of my element, primarily because I'm a female.  Secondly because I always end up divulging my ignorance about cars when they ask me questions like, 'when's the last time you got your filters changed?' or 'what kind of engine have you?' or 'what size tires do you need?' I don't know.  

However, this time it was different.  There were four men behind the counter; two were older gentlemen wearing starched white collared shirts and khakis.  They both had white hair combed back and one of them had a mustache.  They were just gentlemen, well-postured and southern and they reminded me of my grandfather.  Another man who was a bit younger and wore a mechanic suit helped me figure out what I would need, taking care to explain to me what type of tires I'd be getting and why I really should get the cheapest ones because they were just as good as the $80 ones, never once making me feel that I should already have mastered the tire market.  The fourth gentleman bore a striking resemblance to Robert Redford and his voice had the calm rubbing sound of sandpaper. Wholly relieved, I sat down to wait.

I waited for about forty minutes, watching them work on my car from the window.  A handful of of older gentleman came in and lingered around the office, talking candidly and laughing with the managers of the store.  All salty and weathered, they discussed the economy and the seasons and asked about each other's wives.  "I don't know a thing you're qualified to do," joked one squat gentleman to his friend the manager.  Most of the visitors didn't have a car needing work, they just came to pass the morning, respectable members of an established city club. It occurred to me, watching the gentlemen, that they were in no hurry.  The reputable managers with their clean shaven faces, the mechanics with their relaxed and efficient working hands and the men who dropped by Mock Tire to pay a visit were happy in their well-fitted matrix of friendship and years and a doubtless myriad of histories.  Glad to shoot the breeze, they just easily took the morning like they always have, I suppose.