A Little Spittle

I’m riding home on the train as usual: head bobbing, checking e-mail on the iPhone, reading a book until drowsiness sets in and the terror of missing my stop brings me to abrupt attention. I take inventory of my fellow passengers. The neck of the Cordon Bleu-uniformed chef-in-training strains at a crazy angle, his head bobbing in sleep. A couple and their four young kids occupy two booths, the kids sprawled in sleep, their dozing father’s mouth hanging agape, framed by a dark goatee.

The fellow facing me, sitting one row ahead, works his laptop computer and phone intermittently. Something glistening on his lower lip draws my attention. Gradually, the glistening stuff grows, forming a tiny pond of bubbles where the top and bottom lips meet.

Then he inhales. The tiny bubbles disappear.

He exhales, and the pond of white bubbly froth grows again, this time larger. Stealthily, I watch as the glistening glob threatens to grow large enough to descend from lip to chin and splash upon his computer’s screen. Surely, he knows of the threat; he’s not even asleep!

He again sucks in his breath. The spittle disappears in a tug-of-war against gravity. For thirty minutes, the battle rages unabated.

I steal a photograph, diverting his attention by imitating video game maneuvers on my iPhone. But it’s tough capturing moving spit on a bounding train while ducking the occasional roving eye of The Spittle King. I capture the mere glisten of the froth.

It all seems so normal to him, this spit-balancing act. Is he unaware of the gag-inducing display? A wedding band encircles his finger. Surely his spouse has attempted to set aright this dismaying demonstration of salivary locomotion!

It’s my train stop. No need to leave the show; it’s also The Spittle King’s stop. I wait for him to exit the train before me. I follow him, examining the pavement for wet, glistening bubbles in his trail.

As I turn toward home, I wonder what sort of King I myself might be. My own ingrained habits are invisible to me. But to the neighbors in my life, they glisten, distract and annoy.

Time to start the inventory.

Webs

I happened by this stairwell walking through a college campus near my home.

I’ve been here before. The restroom at the top of the stairs has on occasion provided me very welcome relief during my two-mile hikes to and from my commuter trains each weekday.

On a previous dark morning visit, I had just taken relief at this facility. At the top of the stairs, I startled a landscape maintenance worker who had expected to encounter nobody else at that early hour. His name is Joe, and now, some two years later, we still eagerly look for each other, encouraging one other to make the best of the day as we pass–me, hiking to the train, and he, riding his tiny orange maintenance vehicle into the dark. By varying our routines by one or two minutes, we will miss one another entirely.

A slight change in schedule would also cause me to miss the tall woman dressed in black who vigorously walks a trail around a small park. If our trajectories coincide, we pass one another at just the right spot, each simultaneously tossing out a good-morning-greeting before plunging back into our individual worlds.

If I leave the house a few minutes earlier or later, I will also miss the woman wearing a fluorescent orange jumpsuit, silently doing her early morning tai chi ballet-like routines while focusing on a water fountain. I’m sure she misses her friends, who are performing their tai chi exercises in the company of other comrades half a word away. I greet her quietly to avoid breaking her concentration and move along.

Similar small early morning webs of interactions between onetime strangers occur around me without my knowledge, all captured in their own world of routine and circumstance, all governed by moments of the clock. Move the hands of the clock slightly, and the world of our relationships change.

Back to the stairway.

For this occasion of my visit, someone had used fishing line to create an intricate geometric pattern by tying each tiny thread to the handrail. The resulting weave created a spider web that continued up the entire height of the stairwell, fastening to the ceiling itself.

I’m guessing college students pulled this off; college students can do weird things. For me, this thing was both a weird and a wonderful thing.

The intricate geometric weave is like the web that surrounds us as we travel to the train and through time. Each strand has a name: Joe, and the tall woman walker dressed in black, the orange jump-suited tai chi-performing woman.

On my next visit to the stairwell, the web was gone. But in the distance, I heard Joe calling my name.

Strategic Reserves

The stretch of beach is strewn with large rocks, not the sort of place that invites sandal-shodden strolls. Contrasting color divides the scene. On one side, rough rocks protect the underlying sand from erosion. On the other side, crazy algae splashes the sand like streaks of fashionably dyed green swaths in an edgy contemporary hair coiffure. With each fall of the tide, the algae gleams green at sun, sand and shore as if it were its last appearance on stage. It is at home, abandoned to the forces of the elements. The riot of color catches the eye and the heart.

A coastal oil spill would play havoc with this bright green outcropping. Oil is our lifeblood, so we keep strategic reserves secure in deep underground salt domes. Dark, still, ancient, lifeless reserves harbored in salt domes. Very dreary.

At face value, we know the oil is far more important to us than this patch of green. It plies a place of security since it provides untold improvements in our lives. We need it. We keep it secure.

The poor algae knows no better than to play with wild abandon, shunning the dull brown rocks for the small stretch of sand. Unprotected and prone to the elements, its time may be short.

Still, our hearts belong to the algae. It is yet alive. It provides us an antidote for an otherwise drab scene.

We walk on, as we eventually must, and we are left to wonder. In the ebb and flow of our own life events, is there enough gaudy bright green to offset the cold, dark reserves that gather with age?

Swimming Sideways

The rainy, blustery weekend finally yielded to an azure sky during a recent camping trip, though camping is hardly the word. Gargantuan recreational vehicles, buses commandeered by graying couples and their miniature pooches, dwarfed our tiny fold-up trailer, which disappeared into their neighboring shadows. But we were living the high life: full connections to water and electricity—and a porta potty.

When the sun eventually broke through, we headed for the hot tub, where I soaked until my wrinkled skin steamed. Then it was off to the pool to attack a few of the exercise laps I had deferred for years.

As I descended the steps into the water, an elderly man bisected my anticipated lap lane. He was swimming sideways, across my lane. Not only that, the lane stripe was painted across the pool. But why?

Adjusting to the altered terrain, I heaved my trunks, and me with them, to join the sideways-swimmer. With my crosswise laps accomplished, my curiosity wouldn’t subside. So I paced, or rather bounced along the bottom of the pool, measuring the length and width of the pool with my stride. I discovered the pool was actually perfectly square. The rest was optical illusion. The lane stripe could have been painted either direction with equal merit. Which direction to swim? Lengthwise, at right angles to the older guy, or with him, across the pool? It didn’t matter. Same distance.

The illusion gave voice to a struggle that had been rising all weekend: what was a youngish guy like me doing hanging around this generation of RV-commandeering oldsters? The pool lanes described my dilemma. I was out for a brisk, youthful pool-length lap workout. Instead, an old guy drifted lazily, blocking my swimming lane, and I fell in behind him. Where were the high-energy folks my age that I could hang with? Our youthful, tiny trailer was buried amid hulking, slow-moving diesels with scarcely a non-wrinkly face within sight.

That evening, on our way to the restroom, we paused to view the RV resort’s neighboring meeting room, reserved for social gatherings. It was packed with oldsters, chatting convivially around tables bedecked with emptying wine bottles. One of the partygoers beckoned us to come in. Warily, we cracked open the door.

“Come on in!” she invited. “It’s a birthday party! For all of us! None of us wants to admit our birthday anymore, so it’s a birthday for nobody and everybody!”

Oldsters again. Where were the hip RV’ers our own age? We couldn’t get away. We seated ourselves beside the couple that invited us in. The wine bottles emptied as the guests intermittently nibbled on chocolate birthday cake soaked with melting vanilla ice cream.

We exchanged pleasantries with the older couple that invited us in. Where were they from? Where did they meet? Where did they go to college? Gradually, our swapped stories filled in the details of our lives.

Within minutes, lightning struck. In one of those rare lifetime moments you experience with someone you’ve never met, we realized our lives intersected. With a start, I discovered that I was talking to the sister of a girl I went to college with! In Chicago, in the 1970s.

And that meant that the older-looking woman I was speaking with, along with a good many other folks in the room were roughly—my own age!

In some ways, we will always miss our past, our youth. But we also know that we really don’t want to live that uncertainty and stress all over again.

We don’t belong there, but we’re not sure we belong here, either: older, among these older people. Is this really who we have become? At moments like these, we’re not sure how to go forward. Can we muster the courage to become like these people?

Ah, yes, I realize…I already am one of “these people.”

Maybe all of us are most comfortable when we reckon ourselves neither young nor old. Someone’s always behind, but someone else is also ahead of us. We’re always just arriving, always capable of, and ready for–change.

So which way do we swim the laps in the pool? Lengthwise, as we did since we were young? Or sideways, joining the older generation?

It turns out that they’re the same distance. Remember, the pool is square.

I think I’ll swim the diagonal.

The Trouble with Mushrooms

Several years ago, the apricot tree in our front yard yielded so much fruit that we couldn’t use or give it all away. It was a favorite of the Department of Agriculture, who annually set small traps in its limbs to monitor for the presence of Mediterranean fruit flies.

Then, without warning, branches started to wither. Within two years, there was no more fruit and there were no more leaves. Two hundred dollars removed the dead tree from our yard, but not from our affections.

One felled tree tells a history in the rings. In them, one can see the emerging story of a life, first as a young sapling, then as an adolescent and finally as a tree with a mature trunk, limbs and leaves providing refuge from the sun and generous fruit.

Our vocations are like trees. As we grow in expertise, they provide maturing experiences and increasing financial rewards. Eventually, they bloom and yield fruit in our lives.

Maybe that’s the way things used to be.

Increasingly, vocations and the workplace have become far less secure. Like trees being felled, many friends have had their employment cut from under them, and we wonder if we can hear the same chainsaws approaching us. If we’re fortunate, the saws come close and pass by. They’re after a different tree, for now at least.

Mushrooms proliferate in the decaying tree stump, feasting on the nutrients that were once a tree.

Those who have suffered the loss of a vocation wistfully examine the remains, hoping to find a green shoot that will offer a new future and source of provision. In place of the tree, however, there are only mushrooms.

But mushrooms are fragile things that come and go quickly, leaving behind no limbs, no leaves, no shade, and no fruit.

That’s the trouble with mushrooms.

A Curious Visage

A remarkable face stared at me from an isolated garage window behind a dilapidated apartment complex. It gaped from behind bars, forlorn and hopeless. His impassive and imprisoned gaze locked onto the outside world.

This is Buster Keaton, icon of the motion picture industry in its infancy. The icy stare and cocked hat are borrowed directly from a scene in Keaton’s 1921 movie, The Goat, in which Keaton’s face is substituted on a “wanted” poster by a clever escaped convict, thereby managing to conceal the criminal’s own identity.

Stop the press!

Closer scrutiny of the artwork reveals far more. Gradually, we come to recognize the form of the face, the sculpted nose and the overdrawn eyes. They don’t belong to Keaton. Had the artist drawn a single glove on one hand, we would recognize that this is Michael Jackson gazing out at us!

Usually, most of us don’t feel imprisoned.

But standing before a mirror, sometimes we can see an image resembling one or both of our parents, or grandparents, peering back at us.

I wonder who else is?

Chrome Cathedral

If this sculpture were in a museum, it’s uncertain how it would be judged. Apart from its obvious automotive origin, how would we view it?

In some respects, this 1958 Oldsmobile, parked outside a grocery store, is laughable – too much chrome? Too overstated? Yup, maybe so. But also perhaps forgivable, in an age absorbed with rocket technology, fins and dreams of futuristic ideals.

As an overstatement, it’s a bit like Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral; there’s way too much going on here.

But maybe that’s why we find this treatment so fascinating. Unlike the ubiquitous boxes of today’s identical-DNA automotive generation (and, likewise, many standard-boxed non-Crystal Cathedral churches appearing in strip centers), it shouts “There is no other one like this!”

And, after all, isn’t that what we’re all wishing for?

It’s like nothing else. It soars. It’s unforgettable. Just what we’d want from a car and a cathedral.

And ourselves.

The No-Show Super Bowl

Mt Helix, El Cajon, CA

The Cowboys Stadium’s 80,000 folded seats resembled bats with wings neatly tucked, awaiting their night flight from a grand cave. It was barren as an abandoned Roman coliseum.

Food vendors tried hawking their wares to — no one. Team paraphernalia bedecked with logos and favorite player numbers remained boxed and unsold. Even the women’s restrooms, with their customary interminably long lines, were empty and silent, save the incessant dripping of leaking faucets. Pigeons, expecting crumbs from the crowds, lurched awkwardly, pecking at nothing. Scoreboards displayed scores of zero, awaiting digital signals that would never come.

This year, no one attended the Super Bowl. The looming question is: “Why?”

Everyone who should have been there stayed home. Instead of pouring into their cars and clogging the roadways, they reneged. Rare as a Super Lotto winner, the odds of everybody deciding – the same day – that they, like me, would stay home, were long odds indeed.

Some say this year’s Bowl was cursed. Freezing weather across the center of the country, including a rare ice and snowstorm in Dallas, made traveling foreboding, even hazardous.

Perhaps the stay-at-home populous staged a silent protest of the Super Bowl venue, NFL’s newest football shrine, the $1.15 billion Dallas Cowboys Stadium that lined the pockets of the wealthy while homeless squatters huddled in the shadows of the nearby metropolis.

Some said it was because would-be fans had grown weary of watching hired guns, football behemoths who had no natural linkage, except for their paychecks, to the respective teams and cities that employed them.

Suppose they “gave a Super Bowl” and nobody came?

Someday, we may actually find out.

The Ten Percent Solution

I’m within ten percent of getting my budget to work. I confirmed this after two frustrating weeks of trying to upgrade to the next generation of personal financial software, which I’m discovering is not so different from the previous generation of my personal financial software. My budget was ten percent bloated on that one, too. I’ve resolved to somehow change my budgetary wandering ways.

I recently patronized the restaurant pictured above, and the revelation I received there could hold the answer to my dilemma. A small table sits in an awkward location connecting two parts of the dining room. The kitchen is adjacent to it. The persistent clinking of glasses and dishware, the murmurs of cooks and waiters, the constant hustle to serve an endless stream of customers, and the discomforting flushes emanating from the neighboring bathrooms conspire to make this a less-than-idyllic setting for a dining experience. To appease customers relegated to this forlorn table, a sign posted above it humanely announces a “Worst Table 10% Off” discount. The waiter affirmed the veracity of this incredible value, and it set my budget-busting wheels a-spinning.

By not snagging this table, I had narrowly missed a way to fractionally reduce my spending. I could have recovered a portion of my ten percent deficit by momentarily putting up with swearing cooks, harried waiters and the flushing of nearby commodes! So…why not redeem this lost opportunity by applying the ten percent reduction principle to all my future expenses, thereby achieving the so-far evasive goal of slashing my budget?

I’ve devised a plan:

Henceforth, I will reduce my job-related transportation expenses by disembarking from my train one stop earlier, thereby reducing my ticket expense by at least ten percent (and, incidentally, increasing my daily walking exercise routine by 15.8 miles).

Henceforth, when giving gifts, I will curtail spending wasted resources on fancy gift-wrap, choosing to use free plastic grocery bags instead. (Oops, I do this already….)

Henceforth, on the same theme, I will reduce by ten percent the actual number of presents I choose to give throughout the year—which will also effectively reduce my circle of friends by ten percent.

Henceforth, I will follow the trailblazing practices of UPS, making only right hand turns in order to reduce fuel costs. Calculating my fuel cost to the grocery store suggests I will save 4.5 cents. (My return trip home, however, will cost $6.32; making all right hand turns will result in traveling an additional 57 miles since I will be led down streets to a neighboring town before I arrive home.)

Henceforth, I will purchase only long-sleeved shirts and long-legged trousers. Over time, as my clothing develops holes in the knees and elbows, the sleeves and pant legs will be unceremoniously lopped off, providing me a breezy-cool summer wardrobe—and save myself the expense of buying summer clothes!

Henceforth, I will rent out ten percent of my house to the ever-increasing populous of neighborhood kids (for which, I will charge them ten percent of my mortgage payment). Their resultant 150 square feet of rental space may be used as they desire: a clubhouse and fort, or perhaps a small, kid-staffed veterinary facility to resuscitate highway-mangled rodents, frogs, and night-traveling marsupials.

I’m so confident in the success of my anticipated budgetary surplus that I’ve hired an investment consultant to handle the increased savings, which, unfortunately, sets my budget back–by about ten percent.

Surf and Turf at Morro Bay

Where the ocean meets the shore, they wrestle for supremacy.

Day and night, in stealth maneuvers, they steal from each other; tides yield temporary victories, first to one, then to the other.

In storms, the sea makes power grabs for more sand and rock while the shore resists.

The ocean knows that, though it may be a long, long time in coming, it will prevail.

Note to self: Next time in Morro Bay, bring burdens to the shore where, like the sand and rock, they will wash away.