Garbage:
Many of you know I wrote a novel, Marker. Got close to publishment a couple years ago, but in the end, no. Did a pretty thorough revision in the winter, agent took it back and cast the nets. Couple nibbles early spring and then a big bite from a major house you'd recognize. Things looked promising for a while, but in the end, as in the other ends, no. Been at final desks or thereabout three times, now. I'll say that rejection is very good for the ego, keeping it in check and all. Also aids in existential angst, immobilizing self-doubt and generating giant ponderous questions that keep one from sleeping too much. So, back in the shoebox goes Marker. Gonna try to invent success through failure.
Local university posted a job for a strength and conditioning coach. My interest was high. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was the sorta job I was made for. Dusted off the resume, put the emphasis on coaching/teaching, thought, hell, this ain't a stretch, I make a pretty good candidate. Many years experience coaching football and wrestling. Some as a head, several as a dutiful assistant. State Champion, National prep title. Three CrossFit certifications, years of training very fit and very un-fit adults who quickly walk if the trainer doesn't get them results. Built myself from the ground up three different times. None pull ups to 30 butterfly in 10 short months. I can do this job. Damnit, I can kill this job. But I wasn't allowed to apply. The HR folks at said university required an exercise science or related degree. Just to apply. Me no habla exercise science. A deal breaker. If philosophy and writing aren't related to teaching, coaching, and communicating what is? Apparently knowing how to calculate a VO2 max and where that puts one on the perceived rate of exertion scale is more important. (actually I do speak a little ES, but consider it mostly falderal.) The irony was not lost on Lut who pointed out that after a lifetime of running from the dumb jock label, the jocks finally exacted their revenge on me. They don't want anything to do with a nerdy reader who honed his coaching skills in the (wrinkle nose) classroom. I'll save HR departments for another post. Anyway, can't get the job they won't let you apply for. Kinda bitter about it.
Nearby private school was looking for an English teacher with capacity in American Lit, creative writing and some teaching experience. This seemed like a decent fit if not lines out of my bio so I applied and they even let me. But after some hemming and hawing the job went part time and then was hand delivered to a faculty spouse. No interview for this guy. Them's is the breaks sometimes. School did me the solid of a really succinct form letter letting me know I wasn't up to snuff. Man, I hate form letters more than greeting cards. (Maybe greeting cards don't hate form letters. They should) Not bitter but feeling kinda like hen shit on a pump handle. I have been cleared for work, though I am supposed to avoid neckties and filing. I'd like to be productive, to contribute. Some scratch would be good. I'm a poor to terrible employee but I'm good at what I do, can pull my weight and some more. If you know of an opening for someone curious, well-read and particular, let me know. Got any other ideas, let me know. I'm open to suggestion. Heather suggested Bachelorette party entertainment services, but she might've been being mean.
The boy started football practice this week. He's all vim and joy and full of movement and hope. The coaches are yellers and screamers, no idea about crowd control er team management. They found their running backs in death by 40yd sprints, pulling last finishers out until only two remained. Yeah, you want a fast running back, but. . . I don't know what I was expecting from the midget league D team, but it probably starts with bedrock fundamentals, three point stances, feet that keep moving, understanding the game, not a position. Heavy sigh. I don't really want the boy to like the game though I could hardly blame him if he did. It is the most fun you can have not steering a wave runner. I still have dreams where I get to suit up one more time. Pilcher and Naughton are usually there and I often am short one crucial piece of equipment. You don't need to be a shrink for that one.
Groceries:
The boy likes baseball too. Loves it, really. His favorite player is a center fielder for the Lancaster Barnstormers, that's an unaffiliated minor league team. We walk to the park some evenings and keep score on Lut's scoresheet. When the team is away the boy listens to the games on the radio and gives me the report in the morning while scarfing down a banana before we head out to the gym. I hope he didn't inherit my arm. I once was clocked at 49mph. which is pretty good for T-ball, but I was 17 and the laughing stock of the field trip. I still burn with the shame, but somehow it makes me smile too. I think it makes me a true crossfitter, not being able to throw. And this is surely evidence that success can result from failure. It just doesn't always look the way we think it will.
This ain't an exercise blog no more, but my numbers are good. Squat is up. Clean is up. Jerk is up. Last week I snatched 165 which is the number I relapsed at. Not a big number, but a huge number if you follow me. I have settled into a 9am class, teaching it, that is, at Crossfit Chupacabra. Like all my classes they resisted me at first because I am hard to get along with but we understand and trust one another now and they are making huge gains and I'm so proud of how far we've come. It's true what the blog says, there's always room for improvement.
Jimmy Z made his first quarterly trip back to the states and he made it in high James Adam Zientek fashion. To sum up: the door to the pinball machine's change box is broken, you have to wedge a piece of cardboard in there or hold it with your knee. But if you get a good game going, your knee will get tired. The dually still has steel belts peeking through thin spots on the tread. It has been titled to me, but I'll be damned if I'm springing for tires. I only do motorcycle tires. If someone else is buying. The dually DOES NOT fit on a 20ft trailer. Or a 15 footer for that matter, both have been tried. The color of the Chevy pickup purchased at a US Marshall's auction (6 inch lift, hail damage, prehistoric fruit in the cab) is not black. It is Charcoal Gray. Jim (I like to call him Pete and encourage you to do so as well) owns .00011 of all the 1970 Corvettes ever made. One of them has a new radiator and if you only hand tools to the guy on the carpet-remnant creeper, you don't get to take any credit. For the radiator. Other things may be all your doing. When Jim visits he drinks low carb beer. I think he does this for me which I find ridiculous and touching at the same time. He wasn't gone two hours when the girls asked "when's Jimmy coming back?" I take delivery of the dually Thursday afternoon. A tailgate party will probably result.
We live close to Plum Street in Lancaster. The street Plum is home to six or seven bars in about 4 blocks. The Plum Street Crawl. I can't really vouch for any but The American Bar and Grill. 40 cent wings, tattooed waitresses and Golden Tee. Every couple weeks we hike down there for wings and happy hour drink prices, teach the kids how to play video golf and tie knots in cherry stems. This link is a recent shot that will not disappoint. I am identified by the initials PNT. Long as I've been playing vid, I've always been POT, for a couple obvious reasons. Many years, many many high-score lists. So I hit this shot and the machine flips out and says do you want to post your shot to YouTube? Of course the answer is NO. Unless you're with your 8 year old son. Please dad, please dad, please dad, please dad. PLEASE. DAD. PLEASE. Long fake sigh....ok. Then, while entering my initials, the boy's excitement sent him into the track ball just before I hit start. PNT. Might have to keep it.
Last week HG took the girls to NYC for a couple nights in a fancy hotel and Central Park and the Library and being young women about town. It was their birthday. The boy and I struck out for the coast of Maine. On the way we listened to a Mike Lupica book about an American Legion baseball team in Florida. A very Jeter-like character and a very A-Rod like character. Totally enjoyable. We also got in 10 or 12 chapters of Huck Finn. Makes 16 hours almost slip away. Got caught in Boston traffic. We stopped in TroyNY to have lunch with KME and son, Rex. Totally worth it. I wish all my friends lived closer. If you have kids, you've probably noticed all the storybooks that are set in Maine. That's because it's pretty much a storybook place. Bracing cold water, boats, and puffy clouds and sunshine and lobster pots and views of the Atlantic that lodge in the soul-mind and you can take with you. I know of no kids books set in Troy NY. The place produced KME, so I'm not going to be hasty with my conclusions. Down East the boy was white-knuckled on the sailboat, brave as a native on the fishing boat, ate like a horse, slept like a dog, and barely cried when he took a fastball on the knee (my fastball, but still). The Luts were ever so gracious, would have driven twice as far for half the stay. You just can't sleep without the sound of surf the way you can with it.
Finally, this is not like me at all, but I am determined to live frankly and honestly in the time left. Seriously determined and the blog reminds me. Less ducking, dissembling, pretending, posturing (unless for humor's sake). With more vulnerability (especially for humor's sake). This is normally something I'd sit on for a long time, but I think it's important to push on the limits of comfort, test the default settings. So here goes: When the agent pulled the plug on Marker he insisted he liked my stuff and asked if I had anything else. In fact I've been accruing pages. And they were starting to take some kind of shape. Epistolary novel. Dying man to young son. (don't roll your eyes yet) The man has only his guns to leave the son and through them and their stories he tells the boy his own story. It's a brief excerpt in much better shape than the rest of the pages, if it's in any shape at all. I submit it for the reasons noted above, but also to leverage myself. It's harder not to work when people know you should be working. You are not encouraged to comment. I am not soliciting feedback. Do so if you like, of course, I've probably heard much worse than you can cook up. Simply want you to know what I am up to. Let us know what you're doing.
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| Sant, Sant, Sant, Potter, Potter aboard the Lark |
11-87
Won in a poker game. Another man's wedding band was in the pot
too. And a stereo with speakers as high
as your head is now. I gave the ring
back. What was I going to do with
somebody else's jewelry? Pawn it or melt
it down, I guess. I didn't want that on
my conscience, too. The marriage was
shot. I knew it. John Decker, that's probably a name you
remember if not the man. His wife Jenny
and I were friendly when she and John were not.
I told you I would be leaving soon and you said daddy write me a letter
and it broke my heart near to pieces. I
said, What should it say? And you said, everything. Well that's a start at everything, at all the
things you wouldn't know. Like me and
Jenny Decker. She was a good
woman. Nothing compared to your mother,
not a moon-cast shadow, but a good person.
Hell, so was John. He wasn't much
of a husband, but I'm one to talk. Not
one to talk is what I mean. Shitfire but
this is going to be hard.
I killed every turkey on
the wall of the basement with that gun, the 11-87. And I would have killed myself with it too,
if I could've found the stones to do so.
There were a couple times there when it was bad, but I never could screw
up the guts. It was mostly a lack of
courage, I want you to know that, but I was also troubled by the idea of you
all cleaning up after me. When I was a boy a man down the street blew his
brains out in the basement. A hell of a
thing. The ambulance was there for about
three minutes and the cleaning van three days. We knew more about the mess than the old man,
apparently he'd just had enough, a feeling I know. But they had a hell of a time scrubbing
pieces and stains of him out of the parge coat and the house sat vacant for
years. I thought that would just not be
right and I have always to do right by you.
It will doubtless be years before your mother lets you have this, but I
die confident that whatever thoughts you have of me you will know that. That I tried to do right by you.
You said tell you
everything and your eight-year-old psyche knew what your brain yet could
not. That there was much to tell. That's why you didn't say tell me a story how
you usually do. I'm convinced. Everything, you said. You've always had an old soul and if the soul
is deathless like we are told, mine will wander the cosmos looking for yours, a
piece of itself. I gotta tell you, I
doubt it like hell, the soul and all, but the idea of yours gives me great
comfort.
And you surely will want
to know the manner of my decline and what of your family, the part that is me
and the parts that are your mother and all of it. I would if I were you. Everything, you said. I will tell you, though I am not much
inclined to discuss a good part of it.
My sickness. The fool I was with
your mother. I will tell you everything
I can think to tell, as those were your instructions. And I'll give you everything too. Such as there is to give. My guns.
There is more, papers and effects I think they say. But it is worthless, and it will be just a
less gory version of cleaning up after me.
I wish there were more. I wish I
had more to leave you. But I do not. Some iron, some ammo, a good name.
Certainly there will be
those who contradict what I tell you here.
Certainly. You will make up your own
mind as you should. All I'll say is I
aim for you to know the truth, to know me as best you can from what you
remember and what I can provide for you here.
Just the other day you came in from playing baseball, your hair was
matted with sweat and you smelled like outside.
I could tell you had forgotten about me, about your situation, our
situation. Forgotten it in your
play. When you came in I could see it
all snap at your attention like a choke chain does a neck, the oxygen, the
meds, the hospice lady. I would just as
soon die as have to see that look come over your face anymore. I hope there are many days to come for you
where you are no longer burdened with the fact of me in this state, days
unencumbered by fatherlessness. I know
that is a bold hope. I hope too there is
some memory left of our salad days.
Like that summer we lived
in a row house on the east side of the city.
The Hospital was very close and at night the helicopters hovered in low
over the houses looking for the pad. The
sirens cried down Lime Street and the cruisers shone their searches in the
raceways, across the porches and into the yards. Children's voices could be heard late into
the night, voices of adults fighting, and then police voices squelching over
the radios in the cars idling in the street.
Our block was a row of
peeling Victorians cut up into apartments. Our house was much like the others,
except whole, un-apportioned. This was your first home and whenever we drive
back through the neighborhood you thrill to see it, though I'm not sure how
much you could remember. Our neighbors
were renters and retirees and laborers and drunks and crazies and petty
crooks. And the immigrants Cuban,
Kosovar, Ethiopian and Dominican. There
were no trees on the street, so we broke a slab and planted a maple hoping for
shade someday. In the back yard I
planted a redbud that I hoped would grow to shade your sandbox.
I remember you were in the
sandbox when I told you I was sick and you were there again when I came back
from Baltimore for the first time.
The sandbox I built for
you. You went down for a nap and I got a
shovel and commenced digging. I didn’t
know how, but I didn’t not know how either.
Your mother asked me what I was doing and I said digging a sandbox and
something about it made her want to cry.
Simple things always made her cry.
The hard things, the whoppers, the things that torture your sleep and
you fear in the belly, she would set her jaw against them and not flinch. But the simplest things would fill her eyes
and her eyes sparkled even more than usual when they were filled with
tears. I could almost cry myself
thinking about it, if I wasn't all cried out.
She stopped me from digging and held me tight and then kissed me below
the ear. The surest ways to win her over
were making her laugh or doing something for you. And I always knew I had her won when she
kissed me below the ear.
I kept digging and filled
the flower beds with top soil, then the pots.
Filled the neighbor's beds and the neighbor's pots too. I dug past the top soil and threw the outtake
in the alley, taped the blister on my thumb.
The yard was long and narrow, so I believed that the sandbox should be very
deep, and it was. Silly deep. The deepest sandbox ever, I declared. I lined the bottom with pavers and dumped in
bags and bags and bags of sand. It’s awfully deep your mother said. Not deep, I said, profound. And that got me another kiss. I thought it would take you another year to
get to the bottom but that evening while we were eating a picnic dinner on
blanket in the yard you dug down and down until you put your feet on the cinder
pavers so pleased with yourself. That’s
the way you have always been. The first
time I gave you a sandwich cookie you studied it as you ate it and when I gave
you a second cookie, you studied it a moment more and then pulled the two
halves apart with aplomb and went at the icing, squirrel to nuts. People never believe that story, so I stopped
telling it, but it’s true.
When I came back from
Baltimore the first time you were in the sandbox beneath the redbud. You rubbed my bald head and said haircut,
haircut. Yes, haircut, I said, and we
filled the trucks with sand then emptied them, buried the trucks to excavate
them.
One morning I came into
your room. You were standing in your
crib with a book and you said, Today I am Christopher Robin. I said, What would you like to do today
Christopher Robin? And you said, See
Pooh and Piglet.
As I say, this is the way
you always were. We were very
happy. We had a son and a new house and your
mother got tenure at the university. I
took you to the park and the museums and the market. In the spring I went turkey hunting mornings
on what was your grandfather's land. In
May I brought home a tom I killed. It was
a prize bird, maybe a record if I had bothered to check. A fat old tom whose
beard I could see dragging in the dirt at 60 yards. He was magnificent and he strutted the field
I was watching as if he knew his own beauty.
Turkeys are so haughty and regal anyway, but this one was a
specimen—puffed up and self assured, proud and domineering. I had hunted hard all spring without taking a
shot. That morning, the old tom gobbled from
his roost before first light. I gave a
soft sleepy call and he roared back at me two three four times in a row, double
gobbles. Our hearts racing, I knew he
flew down because of the thump on the forest floor, so big and close he
was. I called again, meek and soft, but
he was mum. I was patient. I could hear him scratching the leaves. When I called again he answered but he was farther
away and making tracks. I gave him time
to make some distance so that I could follow him without spooking him, calling
every 50 yards or so. He was heading
south and dawn was breaking bright. Towhees
were calling and somewhere a woodpecker laughed. If I closed the distance between the tom and
me, he answered. If I stayed put and
called, he was silent. It went on like
that, call and gobble, me following. I
crossed two property lines, the big stream down into a draw, up a rise and had
to laugh being called by a gobbler instead of the other way around. When I crested the rise I saw where I was,
the near side of Haskill’s field and I knew the score. Haskill had just turned his field that week. The tom was off to feed on the worms and
grubs in the new dirt and there wasn't any stopping him, just like chickens
will hot step after you carrying a shovel of kitchen scraps through the
yard. On my hands and knees I crawled to
the tree line and waited on the bird. It
was a long time and my heart swelled for the tom. He gobbled at nothing and spat and drummed
and puffed up and turned like a tank on maneuvers. I hated to kill him. I always hate killing turkeys, but I was
determined to make you a call from the wing bones. When the tom fed behind a wheel on Haskill’s
hay wagon I gave a call that brought him to me.
That night you and I slobbered over turkey and gravy like a couple of
roadside crows. That tom’s wing bones I
boiled free of cartilage and sinew. I
cleaned out the little bit of marrow left and fit them together with an
epoxy. It is a fine call. I painted it with some Elmer’s glue and
water, at trick I learned from the guy who did the English mount of the
ten-point that hangs in your room. The
glue is bone white and gives a protective coating. It is probably overkill for a wing-bone call,
but I wanted you to have something nice.
You’ll find it in the gun safe. I
had intended to give it to you for your birthday that year but then everything
happened. Your mother will see that you
get it at some point, I’m sure. And now
you know its story. Haskill is who found
your grandfather. Don't know if you know
that or not. You should go see him if
he's still breathing. He would talk to
you, I'm sure, and let you hunt, if you hunt.
Remember his field when it is newly plowed. Set up in the tree line and do not call as
you normally would. They will come to
you.
excerpted
from the novel in progress
I'm Gonna Miss You When I'm
Gone
by Christopher
Potter
