Chips off the old block

My wife and I were driving a babysitter home not long after we'd moved up to this town from the other town to the south, and as we passed the country club where I'd married a beautiful, intelligent, progressive and funny woman one time, I saw a white-spotted pink boulder nestled in a stone wall.

"Rebecca," I said to the babysitter. "Do you know what kind of rock that is?"

Rebecca did not. Not because she wasn't smart, but because there was really no reason for a 16-year-old girl to know anything about Schunnemunk conglomerate, not unless she wore thick braids and coke-bottle glasses and played English horn and collected bugs, and these things Rebecca did not do.

Nevertheless, for a couple of minutes — as long as I harangued her about the distinctive rock, which is found nowhere else in the region and appears only in smaller patches in northern New Jersey — she was edified on the subject. Schunnemunk conglomerate. Doubtless she forced the mineral out of her mind as quickly as possible upon arriving home (home, which was back in the town we'd lived in earlier; this was before we'd integrated into our new digs, when the people of our new town still called us city folk and threw kittens into our well) by listening to that M&M and that Molly Cyprus woman or watching Dancing with the Chef.

This is what it looks like, and this is where it comes from.








Schunnemunk is a long narrow ridge, recently named a state park, that is ribboned with trails and rattlesnakes. That scene in Michael Clayton, when Clooney runs away from the burning car? He runs up the northern terminus of the Jessup Trail, which continues for about ten miles along the ridge. Also up there are the Dark Hollow, the Sweet Clover, the Long Path, and the trail up High Knob. At the high points where the soil doesn't cling, this peculiar pink stone larded with quartz shows itself between the pine scrub. It's a tacky-colored puddingstone, mauve, from the late Devonian, when such things were in fashion.

Here's where a better or worse writer might go for the metaphor. Certainly the territory is rich: remember, we're driving past the site of our wedding, the stones of this mountain are made up of these tiny quartz moments embedded in sandstone, and the whole ridge — a 3,000-foot thick cap of conglomerate atop earlier Devonian deposits — is highly durable and resistant to the elements. People have used the stone for centuries around these parts, and it has made its way from town to town. There's a millstone made from it beside a pond in Monroe; chunks of the rock are mixed in with the local gneiss in the stone planters outside the Town Hall in Highland Mills; Central Valley's got it in spades. Like the bits of quartz in their sandy matrix, pieces of Schunnemunk are embedded in the lives of the people who live in this region.

A better or worse writer might say that it is like my wife and me, this slightly tacky but useful stone, comprising sand and fire, part of the earth of these valleys; sometimes slightly invisible to the residents, but slowly incorporating into the local fabric.

But what a better or worse writer might not realize is that there's no excuse for boring a high school junior with her whole life ahead of her so badly that her eyes wander to the distant horizon, over the ridge she doesn't even see anymore, to dream of a place — far, far away from this town and the aging nerd in the front seat, babbling about rocks — from which she will never want to return.



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Meeting the Internet

The last couple of months have seen several in-person meetings with actual live bloggers. (Not actual live-bloggers, although some of them might do that if witness to something fascinating, or if they had a cell phone, a restroom and a Twitter account. Because they're addicts.) Big bloggers, regular ones, all of them very talented and incredibly good looking. And here's the weird thing: like the runners I'm privileged to know, they all seem to be decent people who support one another in their endeavors and who don't politicize the dynamic or judge you for your skill or your reactions or your thinning hair. I know that's not everyone's experience, but I'm new here.

It was natural that I'd combine the two pursuits sooner or later, so when I read on the Internet that Heather B. was running 5k's I thought "oh, I'll have to invite her down for a run sometime this summer," and as I thought that I passed a big banner for the first annual 5k at a local church, and I thought "yeah, I'll have to remember to find a race that makes sense and email her," and then I ran over a guy painting arrows to mark the course and I thought "yeah, if there were only a race of the correct distance nearby, I could totally invite her" and then I crashed my car into the race director and said "duh! I could invite her to this race! The one that starts about a foot from my driveway!" And naturally, having read her blog, seen her photos, read her Twitters and met her once, my next thought was "what kind of booze should I use as bait?"

I needn't have bothered with the booze: she never hesitated from the moment I suggested a run. An excellence of spirit and openness to new experience seem to be what Heather B. is all about, and I now know that "No pasa nada" translates to "yeah, I'm in." So she came down, refused mojitos and had some wine, got up completely game, and ran that race like an absolute pro with a form-perfect kick for the last fifty yards that was grace itself.

I made eggs, but didn't serve mimosas. Then Heather offered (ahem, for the record) to watch our kids for an hour when we announced that we had an appointment, which I had sort of neglected to mention. But after that lapse in good hosting, THEN, we took her to watch Polly turn seven, which is not something you see every day, I don't care what kind of fancy blogger you are.


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$1m Ideas: Niche Social Media & Retiring "Wooooo"

I.
I was writing an email earlier and started describing this novel I'm listening to on the CD, when it occurred to me that I should just put my impressions on Goodreads, where my correspondent would still see them, and I wouldn't have to go to the trouble of re-keying my opinion every time I wanted to tell it to someone. It then occurred to me: why not continue the fragmentation of subject-specific social media sites to the point of utter absurdity? For instance (and I'm sure these URLs are already taken, but obviously for the wrong reasons):



















































If you want to… then visit… and…
tell someone what you’re doing twitter.com update your status for your followers.
recommend a moving book goodreads.com apply five stars to your latest read.
seek sympathy during your kids’ illnesses snottovoce.com update the phlegm volume monitor and color chart.
describe an argument with your S.O. bicker.net create a graph of how many times that jerk said "you're pronouncing it wrong."
proclaim allegience to your local professional sports franchise fansonly.com log in to your home field and place a fanpoints wager on the big game.
discuss the way you feel when you see your child succeed at something new boasteez.com use the big hammer to hit the pride bell, which causes ring.wav to launch on your followers’ pages.
let your professional connections know about your latest project linkedin.com complete the “What are you working on?” field.
note that you’ve found a weird bruise on your leg, but can’t remember bumping it on anything contusia.org build-a-bruise™ using a color palette in yellows, purples and browns while your friends rate your injury with up to five(!) ice-packs.
extend this joke any farther the comments link do it there.





II.
Can we please stop screeching "Woooooo?" It's embarrassing. I recommend that "Woooo" be replaced with a simple humming sound. How majestic that would be as it swelled over the crowd at the parade, sports event, or concert.

How old I must be.


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Benchmarking: a Study in What Passes for Discomfort Among the Affluent

I’d never really encountered the word benchmarking until I came to my current job in the financial services industry. I’ve since warmed to it. Because it’s what I do all the time as I wonder just how other people are making it.

Don’t get me wrong: we’re making it. I’ve been told that enough times by enough people who know, and things are definitely more comfortable around here this year. I’m convinced, finally. But if we’re making it, why the pit in the stomach? Why the sense that we’re one room short of a full complement of rooms? Why do the ceilings seem a couple of inches too low and we powerless to change that?

I started writing this entry, then came up against the fact of our making it and had to cast my mind back, had to relocate my principles. Oh, that’s right: we chose it. A manifesto was perhaps written.

Once in a while, that rankles. The principles and justifications seem a little more elusive, a little less apparent. Are the kids just growing faster than we thought? Are the toy piles and innovative storage solutions (nooks, crannies) getting overfilled? Is it just the persistent sugar ants and nonresponsive exterminators that make us feel a hair below the comfort zone of privilege we feel we should inhabit? Hard to say. The people I meet, the bloggers I read, I want to know: how are they making it? It’s not about status per se. It’s more about the practicalities. "Look honey, that’s a one-income household but their ceilings are higher than ours!" It’s not about the high ceilings. It’s about the how. How do they have higher ceilings than ours?

If we’re making it, and we wanted higher ceilings, why do we have these low ones? I go back to our decisions, and realize again: we chose it. [Just squashed an ant.] Tonight, again, writing that first paragraph, I reran the math we ran when we sold the more expensive, larger house to purchase this 1,100 square foot one. I see what we did. I remember why. And I calm down a little.

But here’s the rub, for me: my fiscal conservatism is characterized more by fear of failure and pessimism than it is by frugality and intelligently converting money into more money.

So I benchmark, and it comes out like this: There are people with a near-innate self assurance. It comes across as street smarts, business savvy, negotiating skill. Sometimes there’s physical handiness. It combines tolerance for risk with an apparently willful lack of imagination regarding risk. Some of the least socially adept people I know have it. CEOs have it. It’s in the easy self-assurance of the lawyer, or the contractor, or the banker. It’s not just blind certainty; it’s that coupled with skill at mitigating risk. Many entrepreneurs have it—but it doesn’t seem prevalent in the more distant reaches of the cube farms. Sometimes those who possess this complex of traits actually fail, but I suspect they simply pick up and move on to the next project.

I haven’t got the gene. So what I DO have is a small old house whose purchase was very safe and which left us in pretty good shape for college down the road, PLUS a job in a cube, swoopy floors, little sugar ants, unfinished novels, a floody basement, poor air circulation, bats, and, sometimes, a sense that even this can’t last.

And that, friends, is what passes for making it. How are you making it?


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Assembly Required

I.


We have a neighbor – single mom to a four-year-old. She works full time, owns her house where she lives with her sister and the kid. She can install molding. She knows how to demo sheet rock and clean it up proper. Ceiling fan? She could do it.

She made fun of me this weekend because I chose to use an innovative technique to attach the front panel of my deerproof Plant Containment Unit to the body of the thing. She would have used a hinge. I went with the plastic zip ties. Because I moved AWAY from the upper east side, thank you very much, and I don’t need a hinge to open the damn thing. That’s what the can is for. I use another zip tie to close it.

I hope that when Lopsides crashes through her yard chewing on a cucumber, wrapped in chicken wire, the lashings and tomato stakes that make up my garden fence trailing from his farkakte antlers, that I am there to take a picture to share with you, O Internet.

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II.


In our town, on May 28th each year, the A/C Man comes through the main street on his great waggon that is drawn by four and twenty white oxen and piled to the canvas with the shiny bodies of sparkling new air conditioners. These his strapping sons heave down to the children of the town who give their tuppence to the sister, a barefooted redhaired girl in gingham who prances along with a tin pot for the money and who always keeps the change. The town children don’t seem to mind; it is the season. Hoisting their massive metal burdens to their narrow shoulders they stagger gamely home up the side streets on the hill, calling to their parents “Mother, Father, come see! It’s the Haier Koolblast ZX90! Do come, and bring baby Zillah, I’m sure she’d like to see her face reflected in its surface!” And the parents come, leading the little ones, who gurgle at the corrugated knobs and who must be chided for trying to lick the glistening side panels.

Then the Dads collect a few choice items and, with a prodigious will and profusion of sweat, take the window sashes out wrong, attach the brackets like a crazy person, slam the fucking thing into the godDAMN window frame, remove it because it’s WRONG, bend a couple of pieces of metal to fit around the projecting thing in the non-standard window, then carefully put…it…backDOWNONTHEIRMOTHERFUCKINGPINKY and finally shove a piece of plywood into the open space above, drive several screws into it haphazardly and assume they’ll figure it out in autumn. Fuck. They need a beer.

The A/C Man eats last fall’s thawed venison with the mayor and they laugh late into the night over a tankard of mead while watching Blazing Saddles on the TiVo. His children tend the air conditioners, making sure each has its ration of freon and straw, before they fall asleep under the wain, dreaming of sunshine and shade.

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III.





















When the Chattanooga Iron Works closed down, the men walked the high-summer streets forlorn, their denim-ticking overalls picking up the red clay dust, until they came to Herd’s Garage. Clement Herd sat out front on a crate happy as a pig in shit and they stood around and one of them pulled out a mason jar half full and they passed it until finally someone said “Clem, why the hell are you so all-fired happy?” And Clem pulled out the blueprints for the cast iron and steel Char-Griller Super Pro Charcoal Grill/Smoker and all the men threw their caps in the air and they opened the shop that very week.

And, much later, I got one of those and I put it together. And I made this:



May all your parts fit snugly, and may all your washers be included in the original packaging this summer.


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Summer's Here. Time to Perspire.

Life is hard. Avoiding it shouldn't have to be.

Maybe this sounds familiar. You arrive at work, boot up your computer, get coffee, hit the john, make some cereal, reboot your computer, get another coffee, eat your cereal, wash your bowl, check your personal email, check your RSS feeds, check Twitter, get another coffee, check your work email, realize you're late to a 10:00 meeting, attend the meeting, check your personal email, check Twitter, check your work email, launch Word, launch Excel, launch Adobe Acrobat, close Excel, open the Word document you were working on last, check your personal email, go to lunch.

And before you know it, the whole day may have gone by with you slaving away accomplishing things, no one thanking you, the world still on its axis, and at 4:48 or so, when you start to pack up, you think "why am I knocking myself out like this?"

There's a better way.

You can slow down.

You can get more from each moment.

And a new blog, Perspire About the Little Things, can show you how.

Instead of the scene I've just painted, imagine instead that you arrive at work and then spend a few minutes staring off into space, reliving the commute. Instead of rushing to boot up your computer, maybe you take five minutes to retrace the steps your career has taken to get you to this point -- 9:05 on a Tuesday, seething over a cluttered desk, about to switch on your electronic overlord for another mind-numbing eight hour shift churning out money for other people. Or you take a little time to reflect on how the clerk at the little coffee stand put the lid on with the sip-flap directly over the seam in the cup...why do they always do that? Are they trying to make it dribble?

When you truly focus your attention on little things like these, time takes on new character. It passes more quickly, but you get less done. No more leaping from task to task like a chinchilla on bennies. No more rushing from room to room in your mind trying to straighten tottering piles of stacked information about products and services you don't understand. No. You are focused. Deliberate. Intentional.

Because Perspire gives you the tools you need to choose how you'll kill time. Simple tips, succinctly communicated. When you start reading Perspire About the Little Things regularly and put just one or two strategies into practice, you'll be amazed at the change you'll experience. And if you incorporate them all, you'll change your whole identity.

You'll never again have to wonder where the day went, or why the report on the Jenkins account still isn't up to date, or who was your biggest enemy at summer camp that one year. Because you Perspired, you'll always know where you stand, and you'll be able to look back at the blank periods in your day -- in your week, in your year -- and know that you decided how they should be spent.

On the little things.

You have the power to change. Start today, and check back on Tuesdays and Fridays.


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Rock Star

I didn't realize that we weren't going to finish the race until pretty late the day before. By that time I'd purchased the makings for a stellar Elvis belt -- rhinestones, glitter, pleather -- and was resolved to stick with the Presley troupe for most of the course.

Which is how it played out. We launched our shopping-cart barge into a sea of kooks, got treated like Kings for four and a half miles, then I changed into running gear and made my way to the beach, after the course was closed, through a couple of police barricades and past a surprising number of live bison. From the time I started I was the only one running. For a stretch I was the only one on my feet -- never have so many gotten so wasted for so little. I covered the last two miles solo, through Golden Gate Park's eucalyptus and pines, and was the last to cross the finish line as they dismantled it.

My knee didn't bother me once, nor the next day. I'm back, baby. Long live the King.

Pictures of me and the Elvis phenomenon and the race itself.

•

Flowers in my hair. Thin flowers.

Tomorrow I follow in Mark Twain's footsteps and fly to San Francisco to visit friends and run the Bay to Breakers. While running, of course, I will be dressed as Elvis Presley, who disliked hippies, mostly, but did lots of drugs and sang about Love.

Mark Twain famously said, of the Bay to Breakers, "I think that much the most enjoyable of all races is a steamboat race; but, next to that, I prefer the gay and joyous mule-rush." He finished in 44:30, about a six-minute mile, and was so mad at not winning that he rent his gold lamé shad suit asunder and attended the after party in nothing but a boater, socks, and garters. Of that party, he said "It is not nakedness that gives the sense of immodesty, the modifying the nakedness is what does it." He then began attempting to get everyone else to take off their clothes, slurringly admonishing anyone who would listen that "Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more. Modesty died when clothes were born. Modesty died when false modesty was born." And everyone was pretty cool with that and several traditions were born.

Elvis, on the other hand, said of Mark Twain, "cats were born to give you acne," then stumbled into a completely disjointed version of "I've Got a Woman" before launching into his famous tirade against newspapers and newspapermen, particularly Twain. Presley's time in the Bay to Breakers was a sad showing in his later years; he finished his final race a full seven minutes slower than the PR of 50:36 set in 1952.

You can read about the race here. I would like to return to many comments lauding my time, whatever it may be.

•

Punchline: I get a speeding ticket

I used to tell the following joke when I was a kid, to virtually anyone who would come by. The first script I’d ever memorized: “Once there was this guy, and his plane was on fire. So he pulled the cord and nothing came out but strings. Then he pulled the emergency spoke and nothing came out but strings. Then this BIIIIG FAT moth flew by, and it said ‘I can’t believe I ate the whooooole thing.’ ”

So I’m driving to work Monday morning – because on what other day would this happen? – along the gently winding double-yellow-line road through the wealthy woodland suburbs of Westchester. This is my secret back way to work that avoids highways with the first name “I-”. It’s a perfectly driveable little road. Very nice, actually, with gentle slopes, plenty of visibility, and large houses on vast spreads set well back from the road behind sturdy stone walls.

Sort of in the middle portion of this back road there’s a speed zone where the limit is 25 miles per hour; a speed limit I’d thought was reserved for nursing-home parking lots or golf courses. Shoot, there are toll booths you’re allowed to roll through at faster than 25 miles per hour. But I gather the plutocrats of [REDACTED] don’t want non-Lexii to bypass the highways at the expense of their early-morning serenity. So 25 it is.

Now right in the center of this slow-mo zone, or slowmozone, as it will henceforth be called, is one of those gizmos that tells you how fast you’re going. I never read it, because who cares? But Monday morning, a mile past this gizmo, just at the clubhouse for the country club, there’s a cop standing at the side of the road, and he motions me to pull over.

And nothing. Came out. But strings.


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Soda, Pop

I've been to the bar Soda two times. The first time was about a month ago, for the post-memorial drinks and Mac slideshow in honor of a departed friend, at which no eye was dry and no future seemed quite right to anyone in attendance, without him.

The second time was this past Wednesday, when a kind insider included me on an email announcing drinks and a book signing for Things I Learned About my Dad (in Therapy), where Heather Armstrong, her husband Jon, Alice Bradley, Doug French, Sarah Brown, and Greg Allen (whom I didn't meet...was he there?) would all be in attendance, sitting in a small circle, entertaining the occasional reader who dropped in with stories of human cannibalism, climbing K2, writing novels with q-tips dipped in the jet-black ink of the elusive Architeuthis hartingii, and raising toddlers.

It was sort of like that, toward the end. When I arrived, however, there was a line snaking through the room, the books were all sold out, people were waiting to have non-books signed, and clusters of people who'd already been signed were still settled into booths rehashing their experience. Heather and the others were clearly enjoying real, prolonged face-time with actual readers, and the process aspect of the meet and greet had stalled. I reached this conclusion as I stood aside, waiting to greet my friends in that tiny circle of celebrity: society has reached the point where there are bloggers who need "people." Make of that what you will. It was a little more settled at the end, although even then, when we headed off toward the next venue for this month's Cringe reading, at which Alice and her husband were to perform, Heather and Jon were still on the sidewalk in a scrum of fans. Time and again, the crowd turned un-anonymous, as some long-time reader, commenter or Goodreads connection came forward to one of these folks to say "oh hi, you sort of know me." Perhaps best of all, Heather B. was there to have beer and marvel at the madness.

In traffic, and recognition, and self-identification as a blogger, I am orbiting at the very outermost fringe of that crew. But I've had a couple of tastes of it recently, and there's definitely something there. Whatever that means, I know this: Soda will never be just a bar for this blogger.

•

Freeing up hard drive space

This weekend, five years after first buying a house, I went to Long Island to remove stuff from my old bedroom. In addition to the boxes of D&D materials, comic books, and letters with which I could not part, there were many items whose only value lay in their status as visual reminders of themselves. If that makes sense. So I took pictures of some of them, then set them free.

Then I posted the pictures on Flickr, natch.




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So Much to Say, All of it About Spring, and I am Lazy at the Very Thought of it

Where to begin? First, my in-laws' neighbors are clearly harboring a fugitive Nazi (hello, Mike Godwin!).

I was driving the Lad to a playdate and got there early, so drove around a little more and saw a cooler with a sign posted reading "organic eggs, $4/doz." A week later, a food-conscious woman who eats with me brought home a dozen of them. They are multicolored and utterly fabulous. I have three books on raising chickens out of the library now.

I had dinner with very talented people in New York City and they made me feel like one of an elite tribe.

Recently we ate at Woody's, an all-natural, grass-fed, mostly local beef, all-local-produce burger joint in a nearby town and boy howdy let me tell you that you should go to Woody's, even if you're a vegeminarian, because they even have a portabello sandwich for which one might opt to die. The burgers themselves you will also offer to die for, but! You don't have to. Just pay.

We went to Florida.

There's much to be said about the books Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I've said a little something about each at Goodreads.com.

At the tail end of a shitty April, in which bad things befell wonderful people and we had a scare of our own, my sister had a son, and he is quite beautiful. So spring gets another chance.

•

You Dig?

It hit me as I scanned the narrow patch of open sky behind our house, trying to figure out where to attempt tomatoes again: we live in the woods. It doesn't always feel like woods, what with the cleared land next door where the library and ballfields are and the main road not far off, but stitching together the open space, set off just slightly from the houses, are woodlands and scrub, with towering, massive oaks, mature evergreens of several varieties, black walnuts, opportunistic maples and who knows what-all.

This luxuriant cover does not admit much sun for vegetables. But right up against the house I think I've found a spot, between the heating oil fill pipe and the Bilco doors, that will get sun longer than any other part of the property. It's about six feet wide, this patch, and could comfortably extend out about six feet from the wall. Okay, fine -- two tomatoes, two sunflowers (school project), two cukes.

Except that to put seeds in the ground is to serve a salad bar for our friends the whitetailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus. So I'm going in heavy. At the last house, I dug a 12x16' patch in the front yard beside the driveway and built what I called the Plant Detention Center: heavy-gauge chicken wire strung on eight-foot two by fours set in concrete, with a gate and everything. It was hideous. However, the plot produced decent crops of strawberries, broccoli, tomatoes, tomatillos, peas, green beans, cucumbers, zukes, one green pepper, marigolds and probably some other things. The couple from the Bronx who bought our house that May tore down the PDC before the strawberries came up. The blank stares they leveled at me over the closing table while I told them that actual strawberries were going to come out of the dirty ground in about a week was one of the first inputs that eventually resulted in the name of this blog.

"But this is only going to be six by six feet," you say. Deer don't care. The library tried to grow sunflowers in a similarly-sized patch, but after a few months had produced just twelve thin brown sticks about eight inches tall. They had used thin nylon netting and five-foot metal posts driven into the ground, and at night the laughter of the deer while they pushed it over and ate the budding stalks was a terrible thing. I blame Lopsides and his posse.

And because I cannot think to scale, I am building PDC CB2. This one will be a freestanding booth of pressure-treated two by fours with a gate (or possibly a screen door) set into the front. CB2 will have three sides, the back of it abutting the wall of the house. It will make the first PDC look like the Taj Mahal.




•

Donations in honor of Greg Sewell

From Greg's wife:

Donations in honor of our beloved Greg Sewell may be made to Millennium Promise, a community-led development project aimed at helping rural African villages lift themselves out of extreme poverty.

All donations in Greg's name will be specifically earmarked for a cluster of six villages in central Ghana, where key initiatives include bed net distribution to combat the spread of malaria; training farmers in agricultural techniques; constructing and renovating health clinics; and providing safe water.

Greg spent a life-changing year in Ghana as a volunteer, teaching computer literacy as part of his passionate belief that access to knowledge can help people create better lives for themselves. His experience in Ghana set him on a course of volunteer work and galvanized his commitment to helping others less fortunate than himself. In September he would have started a Masters degree at Columbia, specializing in international human rights. Please help us continue Greg's work and his dreams of a healthier and more peaceful Africa with your kind contribution to Millennium Promise.

To make an on-line contribution in memory of Greg, please visit the Millennium Promise website.

Mark the box, “Check if you would like to make an honor or memorial gift.” Once “memorial gift” has been selected, please enter in Greg’s name in the space provided.

To make a donation by cheque, please make cheque out to Millennium Promise and send to:

Millennium Promise
Attn: Cassandra Ryan
432 Park Avenue South, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10016

*Please add “In memory of Greg Sewell” in the memo line.

With deepest gratitude at this time of our incalculable loss,
Frances

And from me (Bill) thank you all for your kind comments and well wishes. They've been very comforting to many people.

•

RIP, Greg Sewell

"When I come back, I'll roll around in it." That's what Greg wrote to me from Ghana in 2003, speaking of our lush green suburban lawn, such a far cry from the dusty sandlots of Accra.

And I so wanted him to do so. But dragging a cosmopolitan like Greg from one of his cities -- London, New York, Toronto, Accra, Doha -- was like pulling a tooth from a healthy person. I knew he wanted to come up this way, but I also knew he couldn't. He was of Brooklyn. Once you move out of that environment, you see how hard it is to entice someone from the city north, especially someone without a car.

And so we didn't overlap as we once did. Even in New York, it was hard for the metropolitan woman who shared my apartment and me to meet up with our friends. We lived in Rego Park, they lived in Williamsburg and Prospect Heights. On occasion after the Lad was born we would eat bagels and drink mimosas, talk about politics, watch the marathon go by. We still felt mobile, they still seemed like our circle. But we moved, and our contact became sporadic, thrice-yearly. Nevertheless, even without direct replacement in our new geographic lives, these earlier ties remained just as important.

And then, this. Our dear Greg -- he who trod lightest upon the social circle, being somehow central to it but seeming least invested -- has left us. Pneumonia followed by sepsis followed by complications, and after thirteen days of valiant battle, Greg moved on. Irreligious and unapologetic, Greg had other plans for death, it's fair to say. He lived well, and savored, and immersed himself -- especially in music -- and was too young to ship.

The other day, when things looked particularly bad for Greg, I stepped out of my office in its office park and stood by the trunk of a willow that leaned far out over a constructed streamlet. This tree is older than the buildings, I think, with its thickset trunk and myriad branches. As I stared, it transformed into a lung. Its trunk drew sustenance from the earth and spread it into the leaves. Sure, maybe I had it backwards -- the leafy tendrils drew in carbon dioxide and transferred it to the wood, and my forced parallel to Greg's condition was just that. However, I took a few deep breaths and thought of my breath entering Greg's lungs, and I thanked the tree for its gift of oxygen. Connection of any sort, a tether in unmoored times.

In the past two weeks I've seen an outpouring of love and goodwill that tells me something: Greg made this. As a volunteer, coordinator, consultant, Greg's metier has been to give people a small gift of light, whether they be schoolchildren struggling to enter the modern capitalist consumer society, or victims of its worst excesses. Charm, erudition, wit, arty glasses -- Greg was someone to whom you wished to be close. By his very life itself, Greg created this outpouring of love, which only seems sudden in light of his death. It was there, a constant, during his life, even, and especially, toward the end. But there from the beginning, else the end could not have happened as it did.

Greg left us surrounded by love, borne someplace on love's cushion, drawing love forth from his friends and family, generating a gigantic gyre of loving feeling and goodwill from around the world, a violent light of love calling him to health and recovery but acknowledging the possibility of his passing, and celebrating all with equal recognition of his life. Greg is gone, but that love can only be spent among we who remain. I'm pouring forth my share to all who hear me.

Today the crocuses and hostas are pushing up. The daffodils are starting their green rise. The air is warm, the sky that particular shade of spring blue. And the grass, the grass is greening. It misses Greg, the grass does, and calls out for the shape of him to mold its contours and to lie briefly remembered in its embrace.

As he lies in ours, remembered, loved, always.



















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Arrest this Development

They’re planning a housing development up this way…two, in fact. One of them—the one I'm going to talk about—is along a woodland road bounded by old stone walls, steep hills and rushing streams. It's a place where you can drive a little faster, if that’s your thing, or look off into the trees and see the places where the rocks are exposed and the land slants upward rapidly into these human-scale heights that beckon the hiker or picnicker. Deer, of course, abound. This road often serves cyclists and runners, although it’s too rich for my blood with an extended climb that’s got to be a mile long.

So they want to build on it, 300 or so houses, McMansions, of course, because that’s what builders build when they build new. An ignorant newspaper editor around these parts recently praised the sketches intended for the other development because each one was different! And had lots of windows!

Anyway, here’s my point. My point is, if you’ve got to build it, build it compactly. Build it around the intersection at the heart of this proposed development, and make half of it town houses, insert a few true mansions among them, limit the number of large single-lot homes, put in a green, leave a median strip between the homes and the main road, have multiple access points to it, and add a convenience store and a post office relay station and a place where the library can park a book mobile once a week, and sidewalks, trails into the woods, a traffic light at the intersection, designate a small daycare facility, and save the entire area another headache that none of us need. From every perspective—environmental to taxational to educational to aesthetic—this is the better way.

Advantages of building the way I’ve described:
  • School buses can pick up multiple children at fewer stops, thus saving gas, increasing public safety, reducing traffic delays (thus saving even more gas), and requiring fewer buses which will get less wear and tear.
  • Police and fire coverage will not need to be as dispersed.
  • Garbage pickup will be more consolidated.
  • The woodland character can be largely preserved, thus improving the value of the homes.
  • A convenience store will require fewer car trips to the nearest grocery store for essentials, thus saving gas, time, and traffic and allowing single-car families to move in.
  • Pedestrian traffic along the main road would be reduced, thus preserving public safety.
  • Kids could have a safe place to play within sight of homes and businesses.
  • The rural/recreational advantages of the area would be retained, even improved.
  • Stream runoff will be less impacted by the forced runoff from lawns and pavement, thus preserving biodiversity in regional waterways.
  • Public transportation (bus) becomes a viable option to serve the development, connecting it to regional rail and commuter bus lines.
  • The bonds of community will remain stronger than in developments with large homes separated by daunting swaths of non-native plantings.
  • Retaining trees means cooler, cleaner air.

Those pestilential McMansion developments exist in the region, of course, in a sort of rough ring around our semi-protected little swath, and those woods are one of the buffers. Coming north you pass out of a large commercial zone, past a few developments built up against sensitive habitat, then enter a long cool green corridor, where some conscientious prankster, alarmed at the speeding traffic, has pasted pairs of deer-eye-sized reflectors in the trees to encourage people to slow down at night. The stone walls. The thick trunks fading back into the darkness of hillsides, then a rushing torrent pouring down from the east. This, a developer wants to ruin, making it house after house after house after house, replacing forest with lawn, replacing native stone walls with imported, pasting up the shitty architecture of least common denominator over triple garage doors, the whole thing taking up the whole space.

To the developer who thinks there’s no market for such an idyllic development as the one I've described, I say: look at the towns nearby. They were built the same way, 150 years ago, and they're fully occupied with homes that retain their value even in real estate downturns. Imagine if the closely-built, walkable, traditional homes in this area were brand new? Demand would soar.

To the local governments who claim that they have no power in the face of such developers and can’t rezone the area for adjoined housing or redraw the property lines, I say, you’re just not using your imagination. Considering that housing prices would be more stable, if not higher, if you build the way I suggest, and that the community would benefit, it seems that developer and town could easily reach agreement on the particulars.

For the record, I'm not against growth per se (although my preference would be to see density increase in established zones before we rip out more woodland). I wouldn't be surprised to know that the developer has been here longer than I have. No, my take on development is not "last one in lock the door." Rather, it's more like "next one in, don’t fuck the place up."

Anyone who knows anything about how to accomplish such feats of exurbitude, please comment below.

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