The Magic of Peaches
How many stops?
How many stops?
How many stops?
To the reindeer
station?
Yesterday I bought four peaches though I didn’t need them. When I went into the grocery store I did not have any interest in peaches. I wanted to buy something else but I can’t remember now what it was.
I was walking through the fruit section to get what has been forgotten when I saw the peaches. Peaches were not my destination but I stopped and looked at them, anyway. They were beautiful peaches but still that wasn’t reason enough for me to buy them. I have seen a lot of good-looking peaches in my time.
Without thinking I picked up one of the peaches to feel how firm it was, and it felt just right, but hundreds of peaches over dozens of years have felt the same way.
What was going to cause me to buy peaches that I did not need?
Then I smelled a peach and it smelled just like my childhood. I stood there travelling back as if on a railroad train into the past where a peach could be an extraordinary event, almost like a reindeer station with a herd of deer waiting patiently for the train on a summer’s day and all carrying bags of peaches to the end of the line.
Times Square in Montana
PART ONE:
I write in a small room at the top of an old barn made out of redwood a long time ago, when many people were alive who are dead now; Billy the Kid, Louis Pasteur, Queen Victoria, Mark Twain, Emperor Meiji of Japan, and Thomas Edison.
There are no redwood trees in these mountains of Montana, so the wood was brought over from the Pacific Coast and made into this huge barn which is over three stories high if stories is the right word to apply to the height of a barn.
The foundation of the barn is made out of glacial rocks placed in perfect companionship to each other to hold the redwood and all the things that are a barn up to the constantly changing Montana sky where I sit writing just a few feet below it.
The rocks also form a huge basement for the barn, which is kind of unusual because not many barns have a basement. The basement to this barn is another world best left to another time.
Later…
To get to my writing room high in this barn there is a flight of stairs that are almost metaphysical in their design climbing step-by-step starkly like death and desire up to just below the sky which now is filled with falling snow. The stairs are divided into two landings and I have a railing, so I won’t fall off the barn on my way to writing or when returning.
…not a good idea.
There is a light bulb at the top of the first landing where the stairs turn to go up another flight ending at a second light bulb.
I have a switch in the barn and a switch at the top of the stairs. It is a two-way switch, so that I can control the lights from the barn or at the top of the stairs, either way. When I turn the switch on, the barn is bathed in a beautiful reddish light like a sundown from the wood and I am illuminated in my comings and goings.
I like to turn the switch on and off. It is very dramatic because the stairs are a cream-colored pine shining like a bridge against the redwood sunset and an important junction in my day-to-day life here in Montana.
[A slight meandering here because I just wanted to say that there are birds living in this barn that keep me company and there are some rabbits spending the winter downstairs where the hay for the horses is stored. There are little outcroppings of rabbit shit lying in mushroom-like designs in the loose hay from the bales. Sometimes when I feel lonely it is comforting to know that there are rabbits sharing my huge literary house, though I have never seen one, just their perfect poetic shit. Let’s return to the lights.]
I receive pleasure from turning the lights on and off when coming and going from words like these. For some reason unknown to me I have been using bulbs of low wattage to shine my way.
Yesterday I discovered that the bulb at the top of the first landing was only 25 watts and the bulb at the top of the second landing where my room is, was only 75 watts, for a total of 100 watts of seeing power.
I thought about it after I finished writing and decided to increase the wattage and consequently the light in the barn. Last night after watching a high school basketball game in town, I went to a store that is open 24 hours a day and bought two light bulbs, which was one of the greatest adventures of my lite.
I originally thought of increasing the bulbs to 150 watts, knowing all the time that 100 watts apiece would be a dramatic change, especially at the top of the first landing which had had a 25 watt globe for God only knows how long.
Maybe years…
Who keeps track of light bulb anniversaries these days, not unless you suddenly notice that you haven’t changed a bulb in say, fifty years? Then you pay some attention, call out the media, but mostly you just forget about it. There are other things to think about: Does my wife love me? Why does she laugh a little too loud at my jokes when I know they aren’t that funny or what am I going to do with the rest of my life?
Things other than light bulbs take up our time, which is not unreasonable.
Anyway, there I was standing in the light bulb section gazing fondly at wattage. From the way I looked you might think I was a collector of electric postage stamps and was just adding some very rare ones to my collection. Two 100 watt bulbs would be very adequate, but then I got to thinking why not go for some dramatic lighting like 150 watt bulbs?
That would really be something to see when I turned them on at night for the first time. The barn would explode in light like a Broadway play.
I liked that idea a lot, and then I saw some 200 watt bulbs. My heart almost skipped a beat like a critic falling in love with a play.
200 watt bulbs!
What an opportunity for fun!
I could light up my Montana redwood barn just like Times Square. Why settle for a Broadway play when you can have one of the world’s most famous theater districts in your barn?
I bought the two bulbs with an eager anticipation for the next day when I would put them in the barn and the next night when I would turn them on for the first time.
Well, now it’s the day of that night, eleven o’clock, and the hours pass here in Montana for night to come and then Times Square in my barn.
These are the pleasures of my life.
I wait like a child for my electric light dessert.
PART TWO:
I waited through the day, and night carne to Montana as it always does… and the moment to Times-Square my barn with a Great White Way of 200 watt bulbs, all two of them.
I had told my wife about the bulbs and my excitement to see the barn shining like Broadway and she got a daffodil from a bunch we’d bought in town earlier and put it in a little old bottle and we headed out through the snow to the barn. I had a feeling of magic in my hand as I touched the switch and the barn exploded into light, bathed in bounty like Times Square.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
I was so proud of the light that I couldn’t think of anything to say. We started upstairs. She was walking in front of me, carrying the daffodil.
We reached the top of the first landing and I looked at the light bulb shining away. I felt like stroking it as if it were a cat, and if I did, I knew that it would start purring.
We walked up the second flight of stairs and just as we reached the top, the light blew out. My heart dropped like a stone into a cold well.
“Oh, no!” I said, staring in disbelief at the suddenly, eternally gone light bulb.
My wife had a sympathetic expression on her face. She was showing empathy because she knew how much that light bulb meant to me.
I opened the door to my writing room and I turned the light on in there and she put the daffodil on the desk. I was still in a state of shock.
She said something which I can’t remember to try and make me feel better about the bulb burning out. It was as if half of Times Square had gone out at midnight, a blackout, leavi
ng people in a state of surprise and shock.
Just after she finished saying that which was very nice—too bad I have forgotten what it was—there was another flash in the barn like a small explosion.
Through a window in my writing room that looks back into the barn where the flash had come from, I could see that the stairs were dark.
“Oh, no!”
I opened the door and all of Times Square was gone. The other 200 watt bulb had blown out, too.
“Poor man,” my wife said.
I found the 25 watt bulb that I had retired in my room and screwed it in at the top of the stairs, just outside the door.
We made our way down the stairs.
There was a dim bulb on the main floor of the barn that helped provide us with enough light so as not to make it a hazardous journey.
As we went down, I retrieved the two burnt-out bulbs.
“You know what I’m going to do with these bulbs?” I said to my wife, my voice reflecting anger.
“No,” she said, cautiously. She’s Japanese and sometimes she gets cautious when I make dramatic announcements. She comes from a different culture. The Japanese do not respond to life the way I do. “What are you going to do?” she said.
“Take them back to the store and get some more bulbs.”
“Do you think they’ll accept them?”
“Yes,” I said, my voice rising. “They don’t work! LIGHT BULBS SHOULD LAST LONGER THAN TEN SECONDS!”
I don’t think she really thought that I was going to do it. The idea of a store accepting and exchanging burnt-out light bulbs seemed like a foreign idea to her. I don’t think that was a common practice in Japan, but right now I didn’t care about Japan. I had been wronged and I wanted satisfaction.
We were going to town to watch another basketball game that evening, so I put the bulbs in a paper bag, along with the receipt for the bulbs and took them into town with me.
After the game, we stopped at the store.
She still didn’t believe that I was going to try and exchange two burnt-out light bulbs. She thought of a convenient reason to stay out in the car and I stormed into the store carrying a paper bag with two burnt-out light bulbs in it.
The store was huge and abandoned because it was after ten and there was a snowstorm going on in Montana. People were not interested in shopping at that time and under those conditions, and I think this was ultimately to my advantage.
There was a middle-aged lady at the checkout counter. She was just standing there with a dreamy-late-February-night expression on her face, no customers and not much prospect of getting any.
Then I was standing there with my paper bag in my hands. I was carrying the bag in such a way as to return her from wherever she was dreaming to the direct reality of the store and somebody mysteriously appearing out of a winter storm holding a paper bag dramatically in his hands.
“Can I help you?” she said automatically, and probably hoping that I wasn’t some kind of crazed stick-up man with a bomb in a bag on a winter night.
“These light bulbs,” I said, reaching into the bag and taking out two light bulbs. “They burned out within a few seconds after I turned the light on,” I said. I put the bulbs down on the counter. She stared at them. I don’t think anyone had ever walked out of a snowstorm and put two burnt-out light bulbs on the counter before.
It was a first.
“I put them in the barn,” I said. “It’s wired for 220 and I have circuit breakers but the bulbs just burnt out. They lasted for only a few seconds. I think light bulbs should last longer than that. I’d like to return them,” I said, already having returned them because they were now lying on the counter between the checker and me. Now I would have to see what would happen.
My wife waited in the car, probably examining her decision to marry me or at least looking at it in a different perspective.
“Sounds reasonable to me,” the woman said.
One of life’s victories had just fallen into my hands!
“Do you want to see the receipt?” I said, thinking that it would add a nice professional touch to it all.
“No,” she said. “That’s not necessary. I remember you.”
That was interesting because I didn’t remember her. I wonder why she remembered me. Oh, well, it was just another life detail better left banished to oblivion.
“Do you want your money back or two more light bulbs?” she said.
“I want two more light bulbs,” I said. “But I don’t want 200 watters. I don’t trust them. I want 150 watt bulbs. I have faith in them.”
I had learned my lesson about experimental light bulbs.
I had never seen a 200 watt bulb before and I didn’t want to see another one again. I would stick to the traditional ways of light.
Times Square was a good idea but if it didn’t work, what good was it? I would retreat to the electric power of a Broadway play in my barn.
That would satisfy me.
A total wattage increase from 100 watts to 300 watts would be enough for me and my barn.
After I got the two 150 watt bulbs, we had to make a price adjustment because the 150 watt bulbs were more expensive. The transaction was an exchange of a few pennies.
I went out and got into the car with an air of triumph carrying a different bag with my two new light bulbs.
“What happened?” my Japanese wife said.
I held the bag toward her.
“Electric sushi,” I said.
Today I put the two 150 watt bulbs in the barn and now I will wait again for night to come and to see my barn light up like a Broadway play.
…hopefully.
PART THREE:
My barn just opened like a Broadway play, the hottest ticket in town, when I turned the lights on. These two 150 watt bulbs are like starring John Barrymore and Sarah Bernhardt in a tap-dancing version of Hamlet with original music composed and played by Mozart.
What a ticket!
My barn tonight.
Wind in the Ground
I have admired the Japanese novelist for years and at my request somebody has arranged this meeting between us. We are having dinner in a Tokyo restaurant. Suddenly, the novelist reaches into a bag he is carrying and takes out a pair of goggles and puts them on.
Now: The two of us are sitting across from each other and he is wearing a pair of goggles. The people in the restaurant are staring at us. I act as if it is perfectly natural for a man to be wearing a pair of goggles in a restaurant, but I am thinking very gently, and directing a single thought at him: Please take the fucking goggles off.
I don’t say a word about him wearing the goggles. My face does not betray what I am thinking. I admire him so much. I don’t want him to be wearing goggles at dinner. I keep directing my single thought at him. Maybe three minutes pass and then suddenly, just as suddenly as he put the goggles on, he takes them off and they go back into the bag… good.
Later he talks about the big earthquake that occurred a few days before in Tokyo. He says that he has a son who is not mentally normal and he’s been trying to explain to the child what an earthquake is, so the boy will understand and not be frightened, but he can’t find a way to do it.
“Does he understand what the wind is?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Tell him that an earthquake is a wind that blows through the ground.”
The Japanese novelist likes the idea.
I admire him so much.
I am glad he has put his goggles away.
Tokyo Snow Story
I have a vice in Tokyo that I am trying to break. It is a small weed in my soul and I must pull it out. I got started doing it last year when I was in Japan, and it’s very hard to break.
I fall asleep watching television.
I know that in the dominions of vice it is one dimensional compared to some vices that are four dimensional and howl like a toothless vampire in the endless garlic mirrors of eternity.
I turn the television soun
d down very low until Japanese voices murmur like the sea at descending tide. I love the sound of Japanese being spoken. It sounds like music to me and I fall asleep with hundreds of Japanese people talking very quietly across the room from my bed.
Now that you have a little background I will tell you what makes it a vice. Eventually all the programs and commercials disappear and the voices of midnight samurai dramas turn into droning snow that after a while wakes me up in the middle of the night.
I get out of bed and stumble from sleep over to the set and turn it off.
The noisy snow vanishes and it is the rainy season again here in Tokyo. I get back in bed and it takes a little while for me to fall asleep and sometimes I feel lonely because the hundreds of Japanese people have left me all alone again and I lie here in the middle of the Tokyo night, waiting for sleep to come like a friend and keep me company.
Even as I write this, vowing to end this vice and tool of loneliness, I know I will fall asleep tonight with hundreds of Japanese people talking quietly a few feet away like the sea from my bed until they turn to snow.
The Last of My
Armstrong Spring Creek
Mosquito Bites
The last of my Armstrong Spring Creek mosquito bites fade quickly from my body like the end of a movie leaving the screen.
I’m here on the California coast. It’s foggy. The Pacific crashes. I’m far away from that beautiful creek outside of Livingston, Montana, where the sunset echoed off the mountains to remain in my eyes longer than its existence. I could still see the sunset after it was gone.
The mosquitoes bit the hell out of me a few evenings ago while I explored a hatch of May flies like an astronomer but instead of discovering a new comet, I hooked a good German brown trout on my rod.
I lost him but I didn’t feel bad because I’ve come to know that there isn’t enough space in your life to keep everything.
You’d run out of room.
Good-bye, mosquito bites.
Clouds over Egypt
A train is travelling from Cairo to Alexandria. It is a blue sky, white cloud day in Egypt. I am watching the train on television here in California, a long way from the Middle East.
The Tokyo-Montana Express Page 9