by Peter Rodman
Besides that, everyone kept asking John if he shaved his mustache or if he just pruned back his nose hairs a few inches. It started getting on the boy's nerves, so he's growing it back. He seems happier and his face is less lonesome.
It occurs to me that it's been about 25 years since you've seen your cousin John, and that he didn't have much of a mustache when he was twelve years old.
I am sending a potato in a separate package. Enjoy it. I am not sending instructions. I hope you can figure out what to do with it.
Love, Uncle Clyde
Pray for the Whales
I gave myself an assignment; I do that sometimes. I have two lists of words for ways a person might feel. One of good feelings, the other unpleasant. My assignment was that three or four times a day I'd pull out the lists and see how I felt that moment.
The experiment quickly got awful.
I found that much of my day I felt bad, and when I went beyond how I felt to what was bothering me, I wandered off in my imagination to places where I'd felt different.
SMOTHERED: A huge expanse of underground office space, lit by florescent tubes, with thick cement pillars supporting the building above, telephones chirping in a random scattering throughout the room, and employees talking quietly so as not to disturb each other.
FREE: The edge of a cliff at dawn overlooking a valley sliced from the earth by a glacier. The light of sunrise crawls down the opposite face of the valley while mists from a waterfall I can't see drift into the shadows below me.
DISMAL: A windowless restroom, tiled in earth tones from floor to ceiling, cold and echoing, haunted by thunking thumping pipes and invaded by water that gushes and sprays from the plumbing. Perfume pretends to freshen the air.
WONDROUS: A thin dribble of water from a rockface where two strata meet. The water winds down the wall, its path banked on both sides by thick green moss that thins and fades to nothing on the dry stone. The trickle ends in a small pool at the base of the rock, where it seeps into the ground. A bird's footprint is in the mud at the edge of the pool.
Man makes for himself perverse caricatures of nature and lives in them.
A long, tiled hallway with office doors open along its length. The office lights splash over the tile, which has had the little gold flecks worn away by so many shod feet walking the length of the hall. All the sunlight is blotted out by mini-blinds to keep the glare from the video display screens. The only sounds are the thunk of keys on computer keyboards and the rush of air conditioning.
A winding path through the pines, worn by feet through the humus to the bare mineral earth. Not all of the feet have been human. The sunlight is only slightly strained by the tree needles; dry mounds of past years' needles carpet the ground. The warm breeze swells and falls at random. Occasionally, a bird calls.
An automatic teller machine has a viewscreen burnt with lines from being on for months, so it's impossible to read in daylight; nonetheless, it tries hard to be polite.
A bank of blackberry brambles buries its dusty ripe fruit deep among the drooping canes--protected by hooked thorns.
A sheet of newspaper, two plastic bags and a hamburger wrapper blown up against a cyclone fence. A feather caught in a spider web.
A clock. A sunset.
Our creations mimic Creation, and only on the surface. A carpet is soft, even, and attractive. But it doesn't feel like moss, or grass, or fur under the hand, it feels like straw or frosty dead turf, and smells of poison.
There are layers to nature man can only discover and be amazed by, never duplicate. So we set up standards and when we meet the minimum standards, quit trying. A florescent light produces convenient light of sufficient brightness. It's almost white. Much better than they used to be. Rather than being terrible, modern florescent lights are only awful; they make people look only three days dead instead of a week.
Having had a houseguest for a weekend, it was odd to go back into our normal routine. The music was off and the dinner conversation was quiet again, with lulls of silence. In the silence, I started realizing the layers of sound.
I could hear the clock tick and the scrape of the fork on the plate. Quieter still was the crunch of lettuce being chewed. Even quieter was the whooshing of gas in the wall heater. Still quieter--outside the house and through the closed doors and windows--was the roar of traffic on the freeway two blocks away, like surf breaking on the beach. And finally, I could faintly hear a dog barking outside somewhere in the distance.
Music blots out everything but itself; I can only make it louder, softer, or turn it off. Conversation blots out everything but itself. A painting blots out everything but itself. A computer blots out, a television blots out, and on and on.
Man makes unnature. Man himself is a natural animal, but he cuts the world up into pieces he can digest and pushes everything else off the plate. It's easier that way, always easier to create some understandable thing and pay attention only to the creation--pretend nothing else exists. But if our only concern is this week's tune, tonight's TV, today's crisis, tomorrow's memo, and crimes committed on people we don't know and never will, then we are lying.
We have built a dead world for ourselves and live like it's all there is. We can never be anything but unhappy in it, like any natural creature.
And if we ever bothered to ask them, I doubt the whales would care whether we saved them or not. To my knowledge, whales don't need causes.
Go Indirectly to Jail
The woman I went to prison with was not my wife. Of course, my wife knows her, she's been a friend of the family for a few years and it would be hard to hide something like a visit to a state penitentiary from my wife anyway.
I wouldn't have minded if my wife came, but it's the nature of the state prison system that if you're going to visit an inmate, you don't always go when you want or bring along anyone that's interested. He's a friend of mine and I went with his moll.
Evidently there is a settling-in period that an inmate has to go through before he can have visitors. Then the inmate has to send forms to the people he wants to visit him, they fill out the forms, the prison checks out the people, and if everything is okay, the prison tells the inmate and the inmate tells the visitors. I don't know how long this could take or should take, but it took 5 months.
The prison is completely indifferent to whether the prisoner has visitors or not. There is no visitor's information center I could find, no maps, no pamphlet of what to do, and all forms and information comes from the inmate, who seems to be as bewildered as the visitors.
We didn't have a map, because the prison has decided that inmates should not be sending out maps of the prison. Our instructions were to drive past the pastel colored buildings that looked like apartments to the ugly gray buildings that no one could mistake for anything but a penitentiary.
We didn't find any pastel apartments, but we did find the ugly gray buildings with high double fences topped by razor wire and surrounded by watchtowers. No problem, it was a penitentiary.
When arriving at prison, it is not a good idea to follow people who appear to know what they're doing. Signs don't usually help, though you are responsible for knowing what they say.
We parked in the lot for visitors and walked a quarter mile to a building that seemed the only place to go. The man at the counter explained we could each have $20 in change (no paper money), a driver's license, 2 car keys only, and nothing else. I have a very old driver's license and two tattered renewal cards.
"What about my renewal cards?" I asked the guy.
"Nope. Just the driver's license, 2 keys and pocket change."
I took everything else back a quarter mile to the car-- pen, comb, handkerchief, penknife, wallets, cigarettes, lighter--and ran back. When I came back they'd called our numbers. The next person, a woman, was not pleased.
"I called your numbers. Once I call a number, I don't go back again," she greeted us. "I need your I.D."
We each showe
d our driver's license.
"This is expired," she told me. "It's no good without the extensions."
"The guy at the last counter told me I had to lock them in the car, so I did," I said.
"I need your renewal," she said. "You can get it after you process in. Do you know the inmate's number?"
His moll recited his name and number then started on his address: "CMF-S, cell--"
"Did you say, 'S'?" she said.
"Yes, 'S'," said the moll.
"This is 'M'--main, you want 'S'--south."
Wrong prison.
The first awful place we drove to was the nice prison with the pastel apartment houses. I suppose if black is a color, gray is a pastel shade of black. I suppose if the place you're living in has windows like the arrow slits in a medieval castle, then a prison with windows wider than they are tall looks like an apartment house.
Our instructions came from the inmate, who didn't drive there himself, and probably wasn't in much of a mood to take notes on his way to prison. The prison doesn't supply maps.
The second awful place we drove to was worse. The buildings were multi-story slabs of concrete with slit windows and no overhangs. The heating and air conditioning ductwork was exposed on the roofs. Building after building, yard after yard, all identically awful.
Two keys, pocket change (no paper money), my driver's license (with renewals), and the pink piece of paper that said I was approved to visit. I was an old hand at this.
"She was going to make you go back to the car to get your renewals," laughed the moll. "Wouldn't've bothered her a bit." We walked another quarter mile from another visitor's lot to another building, and went in.
The moll ran through the inmate's name and number, and they pulled his visitor's list. The moll's name was on it, mine wasn't. But I had the pink piece of paper and they would let me visit their prison.
They stamped our wrists with snail slime in the pattern of the day. It would glow under black light when we wanted out.
"Shoes, belt, watch, and empty your pockets," the counter guy said. I put all that on the counter and the woman poked at the pink piece of paper.
"You can't bring that in," she said.
"That's your permission for me to visit." I said.
"Can't bring it in. Put it in a locker." The moll laughed, I put my pink piece of paper in a locker and walked through the metal detector in my stocking feet. I got my stuff back on the other side.
When the moll emptied her pockets she said casually, "I can keep my Kleenex, can't I?"
It was my turn to laugh, I didn't even have to wait for the woman to say, "Give it to me!" A thick wad of fresh new Kleenex fell into the trash. The moll went through the metal detector and got her stuff on the other side.
We stood waiting on the other side of the metal detector. Neither one of us thought it was a good idea to try to open and go through a door. Someone finally turned around and noticed us standing there and asked us what we wanted.
"Now what?" I asked.
"Through the door, through the gate, down the concrete steps to that building with the blue doors."
"Oh." The door wouldn't open, they had to push a button to draw the bolt. The gate wouldn't open, they had to push a button to draw the bolt. There was a guard tower about fifty feet tall and fifty feet away that cast the only shade.
The building with the blue door was where we visited. The moll got some toilet paper from the bathroom to use as Kleenex. We showed our passes and our I.D. to the guard in the glassed booth. He pushed a button and the iron bars rolled back then closed behind us.
We visited. There are 10,000 men in that prison, and it can expand easily. They have it down to a system. First add a perimeter fence and let the inmates do the concrete foundation work. The walls are precast by a contractor and trucked in, then stood up with a crane. Inmates do more concrete and metal fabrication inside the building, and make the ductwork and framing for the ventilation system in prison shops. The heating and air conditioning is bolted together on the roof. Do that four times and you can keep another thousand men locked up.
The prison can expand from within like snail adding to its shell. It can extrude itself across the landscape like a suburb.
With that many inmates, prisons can't do anything. They don't train anyone, don't educate, don't counsel, don't even pretend to get to the root of a problem. They don't even punish directly--just by keeping the prisoners from doing anything, by watching them, and by completely ignoring everything else about them.
A pot of bad soup left ignored on the stove will not be more palatable after simmering for twenty years. The difference between soup and a prisoner is that you can choose not to eat the soup.
Consider our prisoners an investment in the future.
A Gift to the Street
I know a house where the owner planted two nectarine trees in the narrow strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the curb. The trees are in his yard, but a gift to the street.
Each spring they flower, set fruit, and as the fruit ripens people passing on the sidewalk pluck and eat it. I know the passersby pick it, because the pattern of fruit on the tree starts looking like the pattern of leaves on a ceanothus bush in the foothills: the branches the deer can reach are eaten bare, while those they can't are leafed.
The nectarine trees have been pruned to grow low and broad, but some branches have grown out of people's reach. By midsummer only a few overripe pieces of fruit dangle on the highest limbs until they fall or rot.
I could tell you exactly where these trees are, but if I did, you wouldn't get any fruit. The people in pickup trucks would come with ladders and strip the trees clean before the fruit was even ripe. People do that. But if you keep walking down new streets in the late summer and look up into the trees, eventually you'll find the place.
Someone has a saying--some say the Arabs, some say the Chinese--that "He who dies without planting a tree shall go coffinless to his grave." I lean towards the Arabs on that one; it has the sound of desert justice to it. To my knowledge the Arabs do not yet have a folk saying about what happens to the person who drops soiled disposable diapers in the gutter, but I'm hopeful.
Naturally there is much more to giving a gift to the street than just planting a tree. The tree has to do some good. The palm trees up the center of Broadway in Oak Park are a joke. The city needed something large and living in a hurry to show the remarkable strides redevelopment is making in this depressed area. Full-grown palm trees will survive transplanting (nothing else will), so Oak Park got palm trees.
Even when stores and businesses condescend to landscape, they often do it more for decoration than from generosity, and a deciding factor is usually, "will it be a bother?" There's nothing wrong with attractive plants, but spiny bushes and twisting pyramids of juniper don't do much for the street.
The landscaping at the Burger King on Broadway at 24th is a big improvement over the previous Bibs Beltbuster Burgers, and the plane trees along 24th will be a big help to the street in a few years. But the tree by the bus stop bench never will grow big enough to do bus patrons any good, and an adult can't use the sidewalk along Broadway without ducking his head because the branches block the sidewalk.
Not that anyone would walk along Broadway in the summer: there's very little shade. It's like strolling Fulton Avenue. On Broadway, trees planted in the squares cut in the walks either are smashed by cars driving up the ramped curbs onto the sidewalk or die from lack of water because there's no way to get a hose out to them. The planter spaces usually end up holding a splintered stump and old wine bottles.
But there are some nice surprises. Along X Street at 15th is a line of tall liquidambers stuck out there beside the road at the gas station. They are probably the best placed trees in Sacramento. At 4 o'clock on a summer afternoon when the temperature is 103º, those trees throw a solid shadow across the road exactly where traffic sits to wait for the signal to change. It's a long wa
it for a short green light, and those trees make missing the green during rush hour a little easier to take.
CalTrans has a way of setting its trees so far back from the roadway that our grandchildren will be the only ones to get a slice of their shade. Take a look at the plantings along W Street by the elevated freeway. The theory seems to be that if the tree is near the roadway, someone will smash a car into it. So CalTrans tucks the trees back from the roads and people smash cars into roadsigns, telephone poles, and bridge abutments.
Actually, almost any tree planting not designed to keep the public moving along ends up doing the street some good. The town's most useful trees weren't planted--they grew. In vacant lots, in cracks in the alley asphalt, along the edges of parking lots, and in three foot wide spaces between Victorians, ailanthus trees sprout, grow, and give dense shade. Some lots hold small forests. The trees dump leaves and seeds, and branches break off in the wind, but they are such enthusiastic citizens that they improve any spot they inhabit, then pop up somewhere else when they're asked to move on by builders' bulldozers. No hard feelings.
I try to maintain the trees in front of the house I rent as gifts to the street, though none of them are fruit or nut trees. I prune them broad and open, to shade the sidewalk and the curb. None of my trees are very big yet, but they already give pleasant pools of cool in the summer, and my neighbors compete with me for the parking spots in the afternoon shade in front of my house.
White Food
"This bagel is stale," says Sheila, putting some shoulder behind her knife to work the cream cheese into the bun. It is lunchtime at work. I supervise her food.
"How can you eat cream cheese?" I say. "It looks a little like--"
"What?" she says, biting down on the bagel.
"Never mind." It's impolite to mention what something looks like while a person is chewing it. Childish too. I could hardly restrain myself.
"At least it's better than what cottage cheese looks like," Sheila says.
"I don't like that either."