Labor Day

My car broke down on the way to the train station. I was heading to pick up Lisa and Matt, which made it even worse. Having never met the guy before, I was hoping to make a strong first impression. He was dating my daughter after all, and I knew very little about him, except from what Lisa had told her mom, who had told me, very little indeed, just the basics. I knew that he worked as a credit analyst for a bank (probably one of those faceless goons, the same ones that torpedoed my store), I knew that he was blonde and from the pictures kind of looked like Kevin Loranga (my high school nemesis), and I knew that his family was originally from Austria (birthplace of Hitler). I intended to fill in the gaps in my knowledge with silent intimidation. I'll be completely honest with you; I wanted to scare this kid.

I never had any practice with scaring boyfriends, Lisa had never brought one home in high school. She had gone to her senior prom with her friends, they picked her up in a minivan with tinted windows. She climbed in and I saw a flash of flushed teenage faces, eyes dark with heavy mascara, white teeth illuminated by glowing phone displays. After the van was halfway down the street, Brianna turned to me and said, "Do you smell vodka?". She immediately realized her mistake and hid my car keys so I couldn't follow them. Later, when Lisa returned, I asked her how her night had gone. She smiled, "Good", in her mysterious way and headed upstairs to her room. Brianna handed me a bag of kale chips. "Some reward," I muttered. I later found my keys near the bottom of the bag.

In college, the story was the same, but the characters were different.

Lisa was secluded in the basement of the school library, studying for a chemistry exam.

Lisa was attending an employee party at the public radio station.

Lisa was interning at Woods Hole, organizing saltwater jellies into Tupperware containers according to their transparency. She told me she liked the way the boats smelled.

Brianna was ever hopeful. "Lots of guys in the science department," Brianna said, raising her eyebrows (she knows I hate this). "Lot's of smart guys." I grab her sweater, pull it up, tickle her stomach. "I'll show you a smart guy."

Later, she said, "Working at a radio station, close quarters, dark lights, very romantic." I told her that radio stations smell like sweat and liberal disappointment. Brianna grabbed my chin, and smiled. "My little republican."

Later still, she said, "Betcha there's going to be a few hunks working on the boats, huh?" I snorted, trying to imagine Lisa married to a fisherman. I pictured Ben Affleck in The Perfect Storm. "Yeah, I'm sure Lisa would love a man that smells like fish." She smiled and turned back to her computer.

The truth was, I didn't know what kind of man I envisioned for my daughter. Completely uncertain. I felt like most fathers just knew, instinctively. I blame it on all the boys I grew up with. No sisters, just brothers. All my cousins? Guys, all nine of them. The Y chromosome ran strong in the DeMarco family. When I was a kid, I always wanted a sister. When I was older, I decided I wanted a daughter. I made vague plans of raising her to be the ultimate tom boy. I never really anticipated it would happen. When Brianna got pregnant, everyone on my side of the family suggested some great American names like Harry or Lou or Roger or possibly, if we were feeling festive, Clint. Brianna had other plans.

Brianna came from a family of gypsy's. I mean actual, off-the-boat-from-Romania, gypsy's. They were nothing like I expected; her father had found work as a lineman for the local electric company, worked for thirty five years, and retired with exactly one million dollars in the bank. Her mother had opened a dog-grooming business and qualified for the New York Marathon five years in a row. Whenever I came over to their house, they forced me to play a game of Scrabble (said it helped them with their English, even though they spoke better than I did). They argued about local politics, and sat in on PTA meetings (all of their children had graduated long ago).

Probably the most anti-gypsy thing about them was Brianna. Imagine this: a black girl from Baltimore adopted by a immigrant gypsy couple from Romania. Her mother wasn't infertile, either. She went on to have three more dark eyed pale skinned gypsy kids. One night, during a 4th of July party, I got drunk and asked her mother why they had adopted a black girl. She responded, "We wanted to be American. It was a good thing to do." Standing in the heavy blackness of that summer backyard, the glow of fireworks reflected in eyes, it struck me as an extremely sensible answer. 

Still, there remained something mysterious about them. Some gypsyness that must have been stronger than DNA because Brianna had it. Lisa had it. Predicting rain. Knowing when a pot of water was boiling and when it wasn't. A supernatural affinity for growing peppers. During Brianna's pregnancy the topic of gender had come up over dinner. I said, "It's definitely going to be a boy. Only boys on this side!" I forked some mashed potatoes into my mouth to seal the deal. Brianna immediately looked at her mother, who smiled with her eyes and at her father who said, "Who can tell these things?" I immediately knew at that moment, with mashed potato still in my mouth, that the DeMarco Y chromosome streak was over. Four weeks later, Brianna gave birth to Lisa.

Now I sat in my car, broken down on the side of Route 24. The cracked concrete shoulder was home to a very strong family of weeds. I kicked at them as I waited for the tow truck.

Lisa and Matt ended up taking a taxi to the house. The tow truck driver pulled into my driveway twenty minutes later. I hopped down from the cab, initiating a small avalanche of stained receipts, crushed paper cups, and empty candy wrappers. I was brushing my clothes and turned around just in time to catch a glimpse of the inside of my house. It was like I had x-ray glasses. The front door was open and I could see inside, into the front hallway, the stair case, and part of the dining room, the kitchen beyond. I could see Lisa standing near the door, her bags at her feet, and Brianna next to her. And I could see a man standing next to Brianna. My eyes narrowed. So this was Matt.

Lisa turned and looked through the doorway, and my heart broke in half at the thought of what I must have looked like, haphazardly exiting the litter filled cab of a tow truck. I payed the driver and tried to reassemble my heart as I walked toward the door.

"Hey baby." Huge hug. She scratched at my neck with her fingernails like she always did and whispered in my ear, "Hey daddy."

I looked past Matt, for a moment, at Brianna. She was looking at me with one eye brow cocked and a smile on her lips.

"And you must be Matt." I gave him the strongest handshake I could.

"Mr. DeMarco, very nice to meet you." He looked me and cracked an easy smile. He was lean and wiry, easily two inches taller than me, with arms that dangled. He wore a smart watch and his hands fingers were long and skinny. I finally realized what people meant when they said "hands of a pianist".  He was extraordinarily pale, his skin almost translucent in places, showcasing a spiderweb of blue veins. He held himself very easily, with confidence, like someone who felt supremely comfortable in their own skin. What can I say? I immediately liked him.

This threw a huge wrench in my plans.

"Welcome to our house."

We sat down for dinner, which I had prepared two hours before. Roasted lamb with grilled veggies on a bed of pasta. Not too bad if I say so myself. I couldn't let Brianna cook. Brianna is absolutely horrible at cooking, a complete disgrace. She hated it, it was a big point of contention for us. Early in our relationship we would fight over who would cook for guests. One night she gave Mike and Joanne Kosco a bout of food poisoning so powerful they later admitted themselves to the country emergency room for dehydration. "Mike works for the state," she said, in self defense. "He's got great insurance."

After that night, we struck an agreement. I would do all the cooking, she would take all the credit.

Matt spoke up. "This food is wonderful Mrs. DeMarco!"

She beamed. "Thanks Matt. Know what my special trick is?"

Matt wiped his mouth with his napkin in a very upscale way (I reflected at that moment that no one had ever wiped their mouth like that in our dining room before), and turned his attention. Brianna continued, "I include a little vanilla in the sauce and let it simmer for an hour. It breaks down into a really wonderful flavor, you probably didn't notice." Lisa started laughing and then started coughing.

Matt slapped her back a couple of times. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," she wheezed with closed eyes, rice stuck to the sides of her mouth.

"She's always been like that," I said. "Real messy eater, horrible to take out to a restaurant."

Matt laughed. "You're telling me. The first time we----"

Lisa spoke up, hastily clearing her throat. "Don't you tell that story."

Matt continued in a whisper, looking at Brianna first and then me. Lisa put on a mock look of dissatisfaction, the kind of look she would use with me as a kid.

"The first time we went out for dinner, everything's going great. At first. But then, as time goes on, Lisa starts to act weird. I couldn't really put my finger on it. But weird."

Lisa is covering her face with shame.

Matt continues, motioning with his hands. "So she's acting weird, and of course, I ask her if the foods okay. She says its fine. I ask if she sure and she says its fine again, so I drop it. I grew up with a sister who was a very picky eaters, so I know the signs."

He turns to me and says, "So I start to look at her plate and I notice that its almost empty---"

Brianna cuts in again, laughing so hard she can hardly speak. "Matt, please, don't."

Matt stops, smiles, and then continues on even louder and more confident than before. "So I notice her plate is almost empty and I ask her,  "Where are you putting this food? Her plate was completely empty at this point, I mean, she cleared it. Completely gone!"

At this point Lisa was almost in tears, laughing her snorting, inhaling laugh of hers. I had never seen her laugh like that before. But the story wasn't done. The best part was yet to come.

"This story is not done." Matt said. "The best part hasn't even happened yet." He clears his throat and closes his eyes for a moment, like he's rehearsing the next few lines in his head.

"So the waitress comes and collects our plates, and you can tell she was a little surprised too, but she was a very professional lady, so she didn't stare too long. She's grabs Lisa's plate, and Lisa goes to drop her napkin on top. She brings her napkin up for her lap, underneath the table, and its all balled up, and as shes placing it on her plate, it sort of unravels a little bit, the cloths just unballs itself and spreads open, and all of this food pours out of it, I'm talking like an avalanche of food, everything from her plate basically, artichokes, ravioli, spinach, there were things in that napkin that I didn't even know we had ordered. She had been squirreling away all of this food over the past forty-five minutes."

Lisa is laughing so hard that no noise is coming out. A neighborhood predator, creeping through our backyard, peering through the window, could not have been faulted for assuming her to be having some sort of seizure. This is the type of laughter that we were witnessing.

Brianna is smiling really widely, and looking at me the whole time. "Remember?"

My cue. I wrack my brain for a relevant memory. Pure panic for a moment, and then, I've got it. I compose myself before starting, trying my best to appear as though these stories are bundled in my brain in groups of ten, instead of hidden away one by one behind cobwebs and thousands of hours of SportsCenter statistics.

"When Lisa was, oh I don't know, about six years old," I said, "she would do the same thing. For about two months the only thing that she would eat was peanut butter and potatoes, weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life."

Brianna speaks up, her eyes sparkling. "Mr. Strict Dad over here was helpless. Didn't do a darn thing."

"What could I do? For a while I didn't even know she was hiding the food. She would never say anything, never complain, nothing. Just automatically begin to sneak it into her napkin, or stuff it into her pockets."

Lisa is again covering her face in shame. She's stopped laughing, her dark sphinx eyes peeking through her spread fingers, her smile wide and a little toothy, madly happy.

"Anyway, yeah, this went on for like two whole months before someone finally caught her. She was at a friend's birthday party. The blonde girl with all the pet birds. Nancy?"

"Nina." Lisa whispers, still staring, still smiling her sweet, knowing, mysterious gypsy smile. She hasn't looked at me this intently in years.

"Yeah, Nina, that's what I said. Anyway, Nina's parents throw her a birthday party and invite all her friends, and they cook up a bunch of food, and bake a cake, the whole nine yards. Later that night, Mom goes to pick her up. Total disaster. Food everywhere. I'm talkin' her backpack, her jacket pockets. Absolute disgrace," I chuckle.

Matt is staring at Lisa, Lisa is staring at me, Brianna is alternating between me and Lisa, and I'm staring at the ceiling trying to remember where I was that night.

Later, I sit with Brianna in the living room. Matt and Lisa stay in the kitchen and take care of the dishes. He's washing, she's drying. After she dries a dish, she places it upside down in the cabinet. I poke Brianna in the ribs. "Notice that?"

She looks over and turns back to me, one African-American gypsy eyebrow raised seductively. "Sexual tension, I noticed it too."

"No, dammit Brianna. The glasses!" I hiss angrily.

"So what?"

"It's different! We always dried them a different way."

She touches my chest and doesn't say anything. I feel a little stupid and turn back around.

Brianna drove them back to the train station. I sat in the living room and wept silently for about five minutes. Just wept. The kind of weeping that looks more like chest spasms, or cardiac arrest. The kind of weeping that looks like a ghost is performing the Heimlich maneuver on you. The tears stopped suddenly like they always do, and I felt a little fake, like I always do after I cry. My chest was sore and my hands were clenched tight, but the rest of my body felt cool and loose. I felt the wind blow in from the open window across the room. It was good air, late April after a rainstorm kind of air. I felt the softness of the couch on the skin of my arms and on the back of my neck. I lay there for a while longer and then stood up, walked to the kitchen and flipped the glasses right side up. I felt a little childish. I flipped them back again, turning them upside down, and then shut the cabinet a little too loudly.

I turned around and looked at the empty kitchen. I looked at the linoleum where Lisa had built a fort under the scuffed garage sale table set. I looked at the refrigerator, where the ghosts of a dozen elementary school spelling tests still silently prowled. I looked at the stove top where I had watched mother and daughter stand together, attempting to fix a mangled and burnt father's day cake. I stood and looked and remembered. I stood and mused on the sin of aging. I looked and dreamed of time travel.

Power Plant

A new power company had moved into our neighborhood and was at war with the old power company. The war was fought over control of our electric bill. The electricity still came from the local power plant, there was no question about that. I realized that the only difference between Company A and Company B would be the logo on top of the monthly bill. The blender would still work, as would the microwave, even the teddy bear nightlight in the empty room. Everything would go on as it did before.

Still, I felt special, like they were fighting over me. At first, the war was fought with pamphlets and flyers. I came home one day in autumn and from across the dry lawn, I could see a neon blue flyer tucked neatly into the screen door. The next day another flyer, this time a deep red, was placed in the same spot. Cath said it was more of a "burgundy". She liked it so much, she pinned it to the fridge with two souvenir magnets from my uncle's retirement party in Barbados.

The following day brought another blue flyer, which I immediately hung on the fridge, right next to the burgundy, using two souvenir magnets from my parent's 35th wedding anniversary in the Dominican Republic. I was brushing my teeth that night, when Cath shouted from downstairs, "Oh, so you like that company better?"

"Not really," I mumbled back through the toothpaste, but I don't think she heard me. The truth was that I didn't have an opinion, but I couldn't swallow the idea of her monopolizing the fridge.

The next day, three more burgundy flyers had appeared on the fridge, held up with souvenir magnets from my brother's 28th birthday bash in Key West. I suspected that Cath had stolen them from around the neighborhood, but said nothing.

By the time an actual human came to ring our doorbell, our refrigerator was completely covered in these flyers with glittering Carribean-themed magnets peeking through the cracks. We invited Mr. Burgundy into the house. Actually, Cath invited him in. I used to answer the door, but the sound of the bell now gives me panic attacks, so Cath has taken over as resident gatekeeper. I let her do the talking.

She sat him down at the kitchen table. He kept tapping with his fingers on his blue clipboard, one of those that doubles as a waterproof binder. I stood next to the dishwasher while they chatted about variable rates. "Looming", Cath calls it. She used to say to me, "You're six foot five. You're too tall to stand over people when they sit." 

It seemed like the conversation was going pretty well, until Cath got up to grab a jar of lemonade and the man, turning politely, happened to glance at the impromptu refrigerator shrine.To his credit, he recovered pretty quickly, but there was no hiding the horror in his eyes as he turned back around, his chair squeaking against the linoleum. "Wonderful house you have here."

Out of guilt or possibly embarrassment, we spent the next fifteen minutes signing the paperwork to open an account. As we ushered the man out, he explained that we might experience a very brief power disruption as the service was switched over. "Don't forget to reset your clocks!" He laughed nervously, threw one last glance towards the kitchen, and politely jogged to his van.

The power went out sometime early in the morning the very next day. I started watching the Goonies on demand at midnight and I fell asleep before they made it to the wishing well. When I woke up, the TV was off and Cath had pulled a blanket on top of me. I got up and, with moaning ankles, made my way to the kitchen for water. All the lights were out. Even the digital clock on the oven was missing. Fortunately, Cath's old clock from college was mounted on the wall. Its glow in the dark hands pointed to 3AM over a "Dole '96!!!" background.

When I woke up again, it was ten in the morning. Cath had already taped the refrigerator door shut.

I was limited to canned foods. I had inherited a considerable collection about five years earlier when my brother in law died. He had been a doomsday prepper, one of those people who prepares for societal collapse by hoarding canned food, ammunition, and pennies minted before 1982. He had kept a blog called "Peter the Prepper". When he died, Cath had asked me to help her take down the website. I couldn't figure it out, and she was crying every night. After a week, the crying turned into dry sobbing, so I just blocked the site on her computer so she could get some sleep and rehydrate.

My options were peaches, baked beans, or evaporated milk. I decided to go with peaches. With my mind set on playing solitaire, I spent the next twenty minutes searching for a deck, before concluding that Cath had already claimed them. The house was really quiet. It was missing all the tiny sounds associated with electricity, the humming, the creaking, the hissing. I ended up spending the next six hours alphabetizing my collection of Magic the Gathering cards.

I went upstairs to take a shower. Cath's door was closed, and it was quiet on the other side, so I carefully placed my mouth near the crack and whispered, "Hey, is the water heater still working?" I waited a moment and then pressed my ear closer. I could hear the faintest echo of her breathing. She was never a loud sleeper, but never silent either. If I had to pick three words to describe Cath, "quiet, steady, snoring" wouldn't be the worst choice. I had mostly forgotten the sound.

Later, we ate dinner together. I ordered pizza and clumsily lit a couple of candles. Cath placed a bottle of wine on the table and spooned salad into two bowls. She ate with small bites and spent most of the time examining the buttons on her shirt. This made me curious about the buttons on my shirt, so I looked down to find a white tee with a stain. At first, I was disappointed by the lack of buttons, but I soon began to notice a striking resemblance between my stain and the island of Great Britain, which held my attention for several minutes.

I looked back up and Cath was staring at me. It was her unique, trademark expression, the same look she had given me after our first date, like I had done something wrong, committed some horrible and unspoken social offense. The look that made me hesitate when I picked up the phone to ask her for a second date. The look that I later learned wasn't cold at all, but merely an unconscious reflex, emerging when she lost herself in maximum fascination, maximum affection. She was, under the surface, warmer and more vulnerable than anyone I had ever known. Outwardly, she was molded in the form of something harder, more oblique. Inwardly, she was tender, an extraordinarily deep reserve of empathy.

It had taken my family much longer to see it than me, but even they had eventually acknowledged her loyalty, her truthfulness, her magnetism to small and broken things, the baby birds she had rescued, the spiders she would spend hours carefully seducing into the narrow gap between a cup and credit card, the aquarium-loving boy across the street whom, for his birthday, she surprised with a tank she had found at a yard sale and de-scratched in our garage. I had no idea she went to yard sales. I had no idea she knew how to remove scratches from glass.

In recent years, it seemed that her capacity for selflessness grew at approximately the same rate as mine decreased. Maybe I hated it for it. Her face was now etched with lines, small ones at the corners of her eyes, and deeper ones that no one could see except me.

The kitchen was dark now, the cabinets flickered with the funeral flames of the candles. Cath looked at me for a moment, and I knew the moment would end, knew everything would end eventually. Still, I tried frantically to hold on to something, anything. Words moved on the back of my tongue and then collapsed, frozen, choking. I realized I had forgotten what her mouth tasted like. I realized I had forgotten the recipe for the triple cheese nachos we had invented the night before our wedding. I realized I would never play basketball again. I realized that over the last five years, she had lost so much more than I had. I looked down to see someone else clenching my silverware, their knuckles straining white.

The lights came back on a few moments later and I dropped my pizza in surprise. Cath giggled softly. There was a time, not so long ago now, when I would have desperately tried something else to make her laugh again. I would have acted like an idiot, made a ridiculous face or an embarrassing sound effect, anything, just to further propel the delicate momentum of her laughter.

Now I sat, surrounded by walls buzzing with electricity.

"I'll clean up."

She smiled and murmured a soft thanks before heading upstairs.

I continued to sit for a few minutes more, trying to think of five years ago, trying to think of five minutes ago. The fridge sat, the compressor quietly humming, its front face covered with flyers, its door still taped shut. I sat there for a few minutes more and then got up, stacked the dishes and, with moaning ankles, made my way to the sink.

Back Room

I recently organized my memory box. Surely everyone has something like this, right? A cardboard box full of old receipts, post cards, and photographs? Mine is a gray plastic milk carton with deep scratches, and a faded warning labeled on the side proclaiming "case misuse punishable by law". It includes a couple of long discarded cell phones, my Gameboy color from 1998, and a mysterious USB drive (I did not check the contents, in this case imagination is likely far more enjoyable than reality). I have never organized this box before. It has moved around a lot, seen the inside of the closet of my college dorm rooms, the underside of my mattress in a dingy Queens apartment, and most recently the attic of my mom's house. It has seen a lot of the inside of my car. Things have been added to it over time. There is a ticket for a 2008 Death Cab for Cutie concert at M Park Pool in Brooklyn, a concert I went to as a senior in high school with my best friend's older sister who I was lackadaisically in love with. There is a wrinkled composition book from high school, filled with my rambling critiques of an assigned piece of poetry.

In 2015 I read forty four books. This is six shy of the fifty books that I pledged to myself that I would read. The list is below:

Submergence - J.M. Ledgard

Giraffe - J.M. Ledgard

Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Wolf

Crow Fair - Thomas McGuane

And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Old Gringo -- Carlos Fuentes

Anthem -- Ayn Rand

Missoula -- John Krakauer

The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

Nothing's Impossible - Lorraine Monroe

The Possession - Annie Ernaux

The Awakening - Kate Chopin

Beacon 23 - Hugh Howey

Injured Reserves - DC Bourune

The Emperor of all Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee

Flatland - Edwin Abbott Abbott

In the Orchard, the Swallows - Peter Hobbs

Genius, The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick

Einstein: His Life and Universe - Walter Isaacson

Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius - Leonard Shlain

Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

Into the Woods - Bill Bryson

Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

The Trial - Franz Kafka

The Girl from Krakow - Alex Rosenberg

The Hundred Year Flood - Matthew Salesses

The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins

Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sacks

Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie

Blindsided - Jay Giles

A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Crystal Crypt - Philip K. Dick

The Scarlet Plague - Jack London

The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan

My Man Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse

Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome

The Next 100 Years - George Freidman

So, I've failed my resolution to read 50 books in a year. My most ardent fans will remember that this marks the second consecutive year I have failed to meet the same resolution. I'm not too upset about it, overall. Of course I would have loved to have met my goal. But let's face facts: I read a lot more than most people do, and some of these books were pretty amazing. It's funny now, glancing back through the list. I think more about the circumstances surrounding the reading than the actual content of the book. Of course, some plot shines through, some characters cling, but the first memory is almost always where I was and what I was doing while reading it. 

There was a big chunk of these books read during the summer on my motorcycle road trip. I downloaded a big chunk of them to my Kindle and just blasted through them, one after the other, late at night, tucked away in my dark tent, listening to the engine of my nearby Honda slowly tick away as it cooled down. 

I remember being frightened, bruised, and exhausted, reading The Emperor of All Maladies in the backwoods of the the Arapho National Forest. I had just blown out my front tire and crashed, and I was miles from the nearest gas station. But I remember reading that book and thinking about cancer and the history of cancer research, and I was taken away from that situation and completely transported to a world of malignant cells and radiation treatment and surgical margins. That book helped me to forget myself for a few hours, and this happened with almost every book I read this year. Books can transport you, and that is what makes them so great. That is what, in my opinion, make authors such powerful people. 

The best book I read this year was probably a tie between The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes (dark, haunting, beautiful) and Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (irreverant and honest).

My resolution for the new year will be to write (and publish to this blog) one piece of short fiction every month.

Here's a photograph I took near Montauk Point Lighthouse.

Fish Tank

A pivotal thing recently happened: I have a running fish tank in my classroom, for the first time ever. It's a rather small and simple tank, 10 gallons, but I have a really nice filter, really nice lights, and I've stuffed it full of plants. In terms of animals, so far I only have four cherry shrimp and three neon tetras (the sole survivors of an initial batch of ten, but these three have hung on for weeks now, so I think they're here to stay). This might not seem like a huge accomplishment, but allow me to provide a bit of context:

Three years ago I was teaching in a rundown middle school classroom in a rundown school building in a rundown section of Queens. My students were quiet twelve year old girls who weighed 120 pounds each and rowdy twelve year old boys who weighed 85 pounds each. They were mostly African American or were immigrants from Ghana or East India. All black, and intensely racist of each other. They treated me, white and unprepared, with vague amusement. I was a part of the structure after awhile, a door frame, a cracked chair. It was fall and my girlfriend was spending the weekend with me.

I was embarrassed to have her there. Embarrassed by my small apartment living above a Bengali family on a street with cars parked one inch away from each other. Embarrassed by the trash bags by the F train which ran inconsistently, rank with the smell of urine and discarded fast food containers. I envisioned her coming to New York, arriving at that holy city, that central point, visible from space, visible on even the simplest maps, and then making a sharp detour, another train, the city slowly fading, disappearing, before finally arriving in a broken pseudo-suburbia where I would meet her and give her a big hug. We were both wrapped in thick coats to ward off the cold fall, the leaves had abandoned the branches early that year. She was so genuinely happy to see me, and that only added to my sense of shame.

I had the great idea to start a fish tank. There were few empty 29 gallon tanks in the science lab upstairs. There was a spot in my classroom that would be perfect. Custodians worked in the school on the weekends, they would let me in. We traveled to Chinatown and found a small fish store owned by an extremely energetic young man who spoke English without an accent and had a much more attractive hair cut than me. His store was full of filters, animals, plants, gravel, chemicals, lights, and old Chinese men. He upsold me and I walked out with three huge plastic bags, two each filled with a large bag of gravel and the third filled with an expensive canister filter and some tiny plastic bottles filled with water treatment chemicals. 

The trip back to my school was exhausting. My school was located on the top of a not-so-small hill, any by the time we finally got inside, my arms felt like they were going to fall off at the shoulders, the handles of the plastic bags were stretched to thin strips of razor line cutting into my fingers. We had just dropped everything off inside of my classroom when I realized my first big mistake: there was no source of water. The nearest place was a water fountain at the end of the hallway, probably two hundred feet away. I had a 2 gallon bucket. 

It took about three hours to fill the tank with gravel, fill the tank with water, and setup the filter, not including a 45 minute delay when, during a materials scavenging expedition, I locked my keys inside of the third floor science lab. The custodians, who I truly believed lived in the walls were hard to find, and would scatter as they heard my footsteps approaching. Finally I tracked one down, a weather beaten 65 year old white man who had a ring dangling from his belt that held maybe a two hundred keys.

The tank was full of metallic smelling Queens public school water fountain water. The pump was running, quietly tucked away under the sturdy metal desk positioned in the corner of the room out of direct sunlight, exactly like I had read online. I added a few drops of the water conditioner, a foul smelling liquid that was chock full of beneficial bacteria to keep my fish healthy. The fish I hadn't bought yet, the fish I was waiting to buy, I told myself that I would buy fish after a few weeks, let the water sit there and become safe and healthy. I had a plan to organize my tank around plants, bright green plants, providing a natural habitat for the fish. I wanted to build an oasis in my chaotic classroom. I wanted to give the students something to look at besides the walls and their worksheets.

It never really panned out. The tank sat there in the corner of my room, full of room temperature water. The filter quietly pulsed away for the next four months, recycling the same water again and again, never having the chance to remove the fish poop it was designed to. Occasionally I would add water to the tank to fill it up.

Students would ask what had happened to the tank. When was I going to get fish? Other teachers would say the same thing. I didn't really have an answer. I would just shrug my shoulders and give the same look that people give when asked, "Why is life so hard?". This is just the way it is folks. The fish tank is full of water and empty of fish.

Of course, in reality the tank wasn't really empty. I was playing host to a whole colony of bacteria and algae, playing out their own microscopic circle of life. Thousands of generations giving birth, dying, fighting, getting sick, falling in and out of positive relations with each other, migrating to new and exciting parts of the fish tank. For them, the tank was the entire known universe, and this notion provided me with some excellent material for daydreaming on many an afternoon when, after the last student had left for the day, I would sit at my desk and feel empty and broken.

Things are very different now. I'm still bone tired at the end of a school day, but this tiredness is not an aimless, pointless-seeming thing anymore. I feel purposeful, some days more than others, but still, the fact remains that I can more clearly see the benefits of my work. I have taken great pleasure in watching myself grow as an educator, and even if I do not feel that this job is what I seek to build my life around, even if I feel like I may get up and leave one year and never come back, I still find myself fascinated at the ways in which it has become easy, almost effortless, to manage a classroom full of students, to convince them of the value of being there, even if momentarily, and to expose them to things that they are not used to seeing or hearing, like a beautiful fish tank, full of fish.


Here's a picture of my fish tank taken by one of my illustrative students Casey:

Never Ending

Okay guys, time for a throwback post. When I reflect on the history of my blog, and really my writing in general, it's clear to me that it all started off very political and motivated. I was young and energized and I communicated my thoughts, ideas, and opinions with a forceful, sometimes offensive vigor. This was mostly conversations with my immediate family and, as I grew older, friends. I remember, as a young boy, being told many times that things would make more sense when I was older. I remember being told, always with a soft chuckle, "I used to be like you." I made a promise to myself that I would never say something like that to a child, something so thoughtlessly damaging, so quietly dehumanizing. So far I've kept that promise, but I try to remain aware and vigilant, for in my current role as a teacher I stand at the precipice of a chasm of influence, toeing stones into the void, and its very deep and the consequences will rattle through the years long after I've died.

The advent of online writing represented a sea change for me. It gave me a platform, bathed in the comforting glow of anonymity. I could say anything I wanted to, and there was the exciting, almost promiscuous promise of anonymous readership. Anyone could be reading what I wrote, at any time, from any place on earth.

Now, in reality, very few people read what I wrote, whether in the form of my earliest website or in the current incarnation of this blog. And truth be told, I'm okay with that. I've grown comfortable in this routine, the simulacrum of conversation, the empty walls echoing. The closest I've had to real interaction from this and other blogs have been the dappled-eyed awestruck chords of an occasional lover who, upon researching my name and online presence, has stumbled upon my writing and then proceeded to bring it up in conversation. Many times this has resulted in a conversation, perhaps the defining conversation of any romance I've ever had that has failed, the conversation of writing as occupation. It presents a seemingly irresistible allure to so many of the people that I have met. Almost all of my relationships, platonic and otherwise, without exception, and sometimes ever so briefly, at one point or another, have stumbled through the mire of that conversation, complete with the awkward period at the end where I struggle to explain why I write, why I have failed to follow that course in my career or my study. Why does it exist at the fringes of my life. Why not make it a central part. It is my journal, my diary, my sacred cathedral of personal reflection, pointless if full of people. Why write online at all? I guess it all comes back to that perverse sense of reverse voyeurism.

So, here's the throwback post, a post about issues of politics, of global economies, of human suffering and aspiration: Let's talk about childbirth.

This sacred ritual is enthroned in our society, the pregnant mother held up against the sunlight, child held in arms at stomach level, cast in bronze, left to glow in a leaf-dappled square somewhere out in the half-civilized wilderness of our collective national conscious. She is sacred because she enables a continuation, a generation to succeed. The baby is corrupt, we have seen it a thousand times. Humans become horrible as they grow older, but until they are born, they are shrouded in promise and secrecy. Literally pregnant with potential. In spite of my decidedly liberal leanings regarding women's health and other topics, my Catholic upbringing always rears it head, ever briefly, during these moments of introspection.

It is birth that has, for millions of years, represented the saving grace of our species, of really any species. It's genetic, the urge to reproduce. And while I've learned enough about evolutionary biology (and certainly spent enough in tuition and textbooks) to understand that only a certain percentage of a population will feel a desire to reproduce, high in some species, low in others, and always changing, it still represents a shared social goal. We are too altruistic of a species to be capable of instinctively casting a disparaging eye on this process.

But it is childbirth that is sinking us. Population increase will be the catalyst that forces our hand on this planet. It is unquestionable. The rolling tide of humanity, increasing every year, very slowly in the developed world, but astonishingly rapidly in the developing world, will eventually break over the seawall of this fine place and leave everything in ruins. Now, obviously, it is the poorest countries that are the locus of this problem. When you have eight or ten children, and 75% of them survive to adulthood....well you can paint the rest of that picture. And also, perhaps even more obvious, it is clear that only by empowering these poor people economically can we ever hope to reduce their birth rates. Much of this economic empowerment, maybe all of it, must come from a reduction and restructuring of the global wealth system, starting with us, the people who have everything. Most people who have witnessed crippling poverty first hand can never quite shake the feeling that our economic system is unsustainable in the long run. Something will have to change. But with a rapidly globalized economy, and the ever increasing effectiveness and, can I say this, near-miraculous nature of new technologies, I believe that the sacrifices will neither be as deep-reaching nor as widespread as some may say.

No, it is not the developing countries who are the focus of this post. Why would they be? Not only do I feel removed from them in a practical sense but also in a moral sense. I cannot cast judgement or aspersions on a society that I don't live. Neither can I beatify or pile up platitudes. I simply don't possess the appropriate volume of empathy required for that. Instead, I will focus on the world and society that I do live in. The United States of America, home of the free et cetera.

Here's my thesis: If you live in America, and if you graduated from high school and (lets winnow the excuses as much as we can) you attended college for at least two years, and demonstrated at least a rudimentary appreciation of basic concepts of social science and life science, and you proceed to have more than two biological children in your lifetime, you should be considered a criminal and locked up because you have failed to treat this planet with the respect that it deserves. That's it. Have more than two kids (knowing of the consequences), boom, locked up, key thrown away. I don't want to share my country with people like that. I just don't! And it's not intolerance, no more than someone who grimaces when observing someone throw trash out of the window of a moving car. It is wrong, objectively wrong, to have more than two children in this day. Not when the stakes are as high as they are. It is selfish and short sighted. It represents the slimiest of human characteristics and also represents a disturbing lack of awareness and altruism. And unlike verifying the origin of every purchase you make at the grocery store, this singular act of humanistic responsibility is rather easy to make. If you can't sit down with a clear head, after having two children, and say "Whelp, that's it. No more for me or for this planet" then you are a person of the most foolish and self-entitled category. And you're taking advantage of an institution that puts childbirth on a pedestal in order to continue to contribute to the process of environmental destruction through over population. And, also, if you even begin to articulate an argument that starts off, "If we don't have enough kids, America might lose to other countries..." then please clear a path because I've already stopped listening to you and I need to go home and take a shower and try to scrub my brain clean of the memory of our conversation.

I want to make it clear here, at the end of this long ramble, that I'm not talking specifically about women, although, upon re-reading this post, it certainly may seem that way, and so I apologize in advance. My guess is that, if you assumed that I was talking specifically about women, you probably stopped reading a while back, so I'll just say goodbye to you and then finish up this post. Men share a responsibility, absolutely they do. In many relationships (most relationships?) the man certainly holds more control over the reproductive process than the women. Only recently has attention been called to the issue of redefining sexual abuse to give a more accurate representation of the kinds of lopsided power struggles that occur behind countless closed bedroom doors in America. Women and men are both entangled in this mess, and I also acknowledge that the choice to have children or not have children is never as easy as it may seem from an outside perspective. But it is obviously worth thinking about. It will be the greatest struggle of this century, and I am certain that childbirth will be the issue that determines the trajectory of our species past that point.

Of course, as someone without children, who I am to make these claims? "You'll understand when you're older." That's something else that they used to say to me.




Here's a photograph I took near my campsite in the Keibab National Forest.

Older Chests

Hello blog! I totally forgot to update in July, a truly remarkable failure on my part, especially since I had been so diligent over the last two years. Well, I'm updating now!

The summer of 2015 has been a busy and productive summer. I started off by attending an AP Chemistry workshop right after the last day of the school year. I met a bunch of other chemistry teachers from across the country. We spent our days practicing experiments and calculations and after two weeks I walked away with a certificate of completion and eight free textbooks.

After that, I left for a motorcycle trip to California. This was my first cross-country motorcycle trip and I was very pleased with how it went. There were a few minor hiccups, as there always are, but I cannot complain in the slightest. I took a bunch of pictures, some of which will show up here periodically, over the next decade or so.

I'm committed to taking on more trips like this in the future. But here are two things that I will be changing:

• I would like to find a motorcycle that is more fuel efficient. Riding a sport bike for 7,000 miles is uncomfortable and expensive and I can only tolerate one of those at a time.

• My film camera takes up too much room in my pack, so unless I can find a motorcycle with greater storage, it won't be making the cut on the next trip.

On the way back to CT, I camped and hiked in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. Famous national parks, the ones I could clearly see in my earliest memories of deserts and back seats. I also found several new spots, roads and state parks, that were winding and lonely and made me feel very small. 

After fifteen days I came home, but I sometimes worry that I cut my trip too short. What did I miss? When will I be back?

Here's a picture I took just outside of Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.

Cold Outside

Recently the weather has turned much warmer. The air heats up and gets thicker, the humidity building. The sky turns from blue to gray and the clouds rolls in, diffuse, spread and gather just beyond the horizon. Suddenly you wake up and the sky is just bursting with the promise of rain. Nothing moves outside, not even the birds. The grass lies thick, browning slightly (a foreshadowing of summer), until late evening when the drops fall heavily, dark splotches on sidewalks, windshields, and clothing. The rain is cool and it falls heavier now. As the sun sinks, the heat that was holding everything together takes a vacation. Everything falls apart and the sky bleeds. These early summer rainstorms are critical. They bring water to the ground where it is immediately taken back up by plants, still shooting and growing, still recovering from winter. They also bring relief. When you wake up, the air is thin, you can see through it for miles, or at least until a distant hill or stand of trees gets in the way. More than anything else, you can feel the difference in the temperature. The morning after is always cold. 

I rode my motorcycle to work this morning, regretting it about halfway through. I wasn't uncomfortable, but I had grown used to the warm weather, the sweat, the tight fitting heat of my helmet, my jacket, my gloves. Riding my motorcycle often takes on a womb like experience, dry heating bouncing crazily from the muffler off my right leg. I can feel the heat from the pavement through my boots. I can feel it in the tank pressed against my thighs. These cold mornings take me by surprise. For a moment, I forget who I am. There is some thrill in it. Cold weather riding comes with its own special type of adrenaline rush. 20 mph feels faster, and I need to open my visor at stop lights to ward off the condensation. 

I feel like an outsider. On days that begin with these types of mornings, I feel like all of the things that I thought I knew have shifted slightly. Like a burglar broke into my home and moved everything a couple inches. The world continues to turn, and I feel left alone, trying to understand the movements.

Here's a photograph I recently took of my brother blowing out the candles on his birthday cake: