Moving the Goats

The bait: BBQ at our friends' house. The switch: "Can you help us move the goats?"

I've mentioned these friends before. They live in a large house a couple of towns away, the sort of voluminous newly-built home on a grand scale that has frequently been the subject of derision in this space, but which in their hands feels truly homey. Although the woman of the house calls it the "Plastic Palace," it's been the site of some lovely small gatherings and warm conversation. And they have a freezer full of venison donated by their oil guy. And hell, the man of the house is a Brit, the good kind--he even gets to wear a funny wig and a black robe, like, officially--and they have a kid named after a working man's folk hero, while the lady of the house is worldly and writes for a travel blog and if these two want a McMansion well then let 'em have it.

Another thing you can't argue with is the way they engage with the large meadow that surrounds it. They borrowed goats from a farm up the road.

As we drove up the long dirt driveway across this long expanse of meadow, we noticed that the portable paddock had been moved around to one of the overgrown areas in front of the house. No camera, of course, but the juxtaposition of the two goats (one black, one white), the chest-high weeds, the thick metal tubing of the fence, and the stately home with its Palladian windows and stone facing was quite something.

We entered and had our white wine, natch, and chatted about this and that, and admired the rosemary-covered chickens roasting on the rotisserie on the deck, then our friend casually said that the farmer had called and asked them to rotate the livestock. In other words, pick up the paddock sections and move them to an uneaten portion of the meadow and get the goats back inside.

Naturally the males of the group -- the risk management consultant, the marketing professional, the architect, the college student -- began ritual primate displays and paraded outside (after another fortifying Sauvignon Blanc) to show these beasts who was boss.

It took a humbling half hour, not so much to move the fence sections, but to persuade Mushroom, the more capricious of the two goats, to get back into the pen once we'd moved it. Lured by white bread, the much more tame Seven had wandered in directly. No, the funny bit was each of us trying in turn to get Mushroom's attention or herd Mushroom or persuade Mushroom to go to her home. Things goats don't respond to: clicking sounds, claps, whistles, kissing noises, their name, injunctions to "come on" delivered while slapping both thighs and bending forward. Walking toward a recalcitrant goat may cause a rearing, snorting, and suggestive horn-flinging in the direction of the walker, who, if he is a white-collar professional wearing a polo shirt, will step back in some confusion and utter a single "I say!"

We finally hit on the plan of opening the section of the pen nearest Mushroom really wide, and she walked in.

That morning at the organic farm I'd been talking to one of the local agitators, a man who refurbishes old houses and turns them into sustainable businesses, who railed against one village's unwillingness to envision a future that didn't depend entirely on oil; a self-sufficient future, with local jobs, local food sources, local culture, local commerce. We talked up over and around it for a while then said seeya, and later that evening I found myself moving a goat pen in front of a McMansion with my educated, citified, worldly friends before stepping inside to a delicious dinner and highbrow conversation.

If we're lucky and we plan right, moving the goats is the future. I certainly hope it -- or something like it -- is in my future. Because many of the alternatives are a lot worse.



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Taking Out the Garbage

Our household waste goes into a bunch of piles.
  • Compost
  • Glass, plastic, metal
  • Cardboard, paper
  • Back to the diaper service
  • Traditional garbage -- paper towels/tissues, packaging, non-compost food waste
  • The corpses of those who would call us self-righteous and smug

So what's actually great about this is that I get to go outside a lot, where the animals dwell. It's not that we're BETTER than anyone else. Anyone who clogs our landscape -- and the children, and freedom -- with cigarette butts, Schlitz cans, old stuffed animals, etc., is perfectly fine with me. I just like making piles. And if every time I wash out a dirty cloth diaper it makes the Virgin Mary smile, so much the better.

I can't believe I'm going to post this, but I checked in the bucket of things to say and it was empty except for this post. You have my apologies. Do check back sometime, wouldya?

UPDATE: You deserve better. Here's something from the commute:






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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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Impspulse Control

They say you should never go shopping when you're hungry, and I say you should never make large, hard-to-retract decisions during the holiday season. Or on a Sunday night. That's when the hunger is there, for me -- nothing but devils on my shoulders and an additional small one on my head having Cheetos, all of them suggesting new life paths, new detours, Big Changes. None of them looking at a spreadsheet with monthly expenses on it or this year's healthcare spending or the Ten Year Vision or any such thing.

No, they're more likely to be trading ideas about opening a brewery or visiting the Arctic or finishing a novel--and not just FINISHING a novel, but sitting down tomorrow and doing NOTHING ELSE until it's done. And I would believe them, it would be Art, it would be me following my passion, except that the devils only come visit when nothing else seems like a good idea. Where are they when I'm having my raisin bran before work, or while I'm paying the bills or getting the kids up in the morning? They're not around then, when convincing me would take effort, take commitment. They're the worst kind of foul-weather friends--the kind who goad you into breaking something the day after you get dumped and who drive away when the cops come, or who cheer you up with vodka but only till your money runs out.

So instead of listening to that kind of horseshit, I'm spending an hour a day before work assembling a glass sphere, copper tubing, electrodes, a bait pan and a bamboo cage hung from a silver wire to create a trap for the little fuckers. And every holiday season and every Sunday night I'm going to hang it near the cat box and put a few Deferred Hopes and Momentary Discomforts into the bait pan and wait. When one of the little red guys flits down onto that soggy mass, ZAP.

Once I've stunned a few and have the cage full, into the river they'll go, and I can go back to methodically finishing my writing projects.



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The Multiplex Parkway

It's that time of year -- commuting home in the dark, when the Movies start playing. Most SUVs and minivans seem to have televisions these days, and driving along beside one, it's hard to tell whether the driver or a backseat passenger is the audience. In fact, it's hard to see that there's anything in those cars at all, living. Just the blue ghost near the ceiling, vague forms drifting across it, silent, a square of illness in the quiet dark of the highway.

Unfortunately humans are programmed to look at points of light in the dark, and I find that invariably my foot strays from the gas as I pull up to pass one of these large dark shapes with its sweet sweet teevee center. What are they watching? I wonder. And I ease my little car a tad closer, craning my neck. Is that I Love Lucy? And then I slowly sidle over to the passenger seat and pop the door, then step out. I'm sure I can see what's playing if I can just get a little closer.

Then, I die.


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Reading This? Thank Blame a Librarian.

It might be that I don't know enough about the history and philosophy of libraries to hold forth on the topic, but I do know a committed, civic-minded, performance-driven librarian whose budget just passed yesterday, and who does a lot of personal good for the town where she works. And while I mostly didn't like the crotchety old ladies who ran MY library growing up, you'd've had to pry me out of there with a, like, a Twinkie or something if you wanted me to stop reading or shuffling my feet along the carpet and then touching the abstract bronze to get a shock. If I'd had a librarian who resembled this one, I might've been a lot better-read and a lot thinner (because, I guess the joke here is that someone was always prying me out of the library with Twinkies, I don't know).

So also there's Nancy Pearl...is she a phenomenon of Seattle, or does she make Seattle? Does it matter? Could I make a more obvious and done-to-death librarian-outsider reference? Anyway, from what I hear about the ALA conferences, Ms. Pearl comes out on stage through a burst of dry-ice smoke in a rhinestone-covered suit wearing a giant pair of cat's-eye glasses and the hall goes freaking nuts, and there's a reason for that and it's books.

But not just books. Most librarians have something a little off about them -- and I know how many of you there are out there, and that one or more of you might be reading this, and I want to be on record that "a little off" is JUST FINE WITH ME, but really, admit it -- and it's that slight touch of the mystic, a little witch-doctorishness that comes with knowing how to know...and I suspect that people either respect that or fear it.

And that fear might be the only reason that every library budget in the country doesn't pass with flying colors, the only reason that governments aren't building ever bigger, better public libraries, with huge windows and quiet rooms, auditoriums and exceptional collections, brand-new best-sellers gleaming in their ranks, tried and true classics lovingly stored alphabetically, the runic Dewey Decimal system ranging far and wide over human inquiry, placing all thought on an equal footing. Fear because knowledge is scary. You know why? I have to go back to Spidey, here, but with great power comes great responsibility. Once you know something -- say, about Darfur, global warming, evolution, the Tuskeegee study or where your own sewage goes when you flush, you can't un-know it. And even if you don't do something -- change your behavior, donate to a cause, enlist, quit your job, stop flushing so much -- you feel that nagging sense that you should be doing something. That nagging is discomforting. We like comfort. And that's why libraries inspire fear.

I guess they should. But in the meantime, you can also use them to escape, and that's just as important. So go ye forth, and get ye to your local public library, and kiss the industrial carpet, shake hands with the reference librarian, scream "thank you!" as loud as they'll let you (hint: not very) and take out a book. You'll be glad you did.


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The Raccoon Informs Me That It's Time to Write About Compost (with Curses!)

Each morning this week I've come out to find the compost bin open and unidentified compost missing. The raccoons, with their nimble fingers, can slide back the admittedly easy catch on the lid and then flip it off. (In fact, writing this at 9:45pm, I think I hear someone knocking around out there right now. Fucker.) Of course, the sliding catch is intended more as a defense against a strong breeze or random chance, as opposed to a determined omnivore who smells the delicious aroma of coffee grounds atop macaroni and cheese.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about; let's just leave the raccoons to their mischief, shall we? They're welcome to their little bit of rotting vegetation, if that's what it takes to keep them from breaking into the car and stealing the current book on CD. The little scamps. No, I'm here to talk about the joy of composting. Did I say joy? I meant joys.

The main thing is that between recycling (plastic, paper, glass, metal), the cloth diapers, the cloth dinner napkins, and the composted food scraps, we have to SEARCH THE HOUSE to find things to throw in the regular garbage. Actually, that's not true: food packaging, paper towels/tissues, and cat shit will do nicely, thanks. But that's really about it. And as primary garbage-taker-outer, I have to say that it's an improvement over the old forklift and manual labor process. The sanitation guys seem to be happier, too -- they've stopped pelting our car with leftovers, anyway.

Second, though, all that rich foody goodness, plus some leaves and grass clippings, decays into the most incredibly rich, dark, trufflacious stuff, bursting with nutriments for the plants. This year I planted a single tomato plant in a patch of soil dug in with last summer's compost. Okay, yeah, every tomato had blossom-end rot (we ate some anyway), but we got four crossbred pumpkin-zucchini that grew out of the compost. And that's fuckin' spooky.













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Addicted to your health

I probably never would have noticed this post's Big Observation if I hadn't gone to Florida. See, there, last year, I had gone to Eckerd's drugstore, as one does, for some children's Tylenol and maps and Vitamin C. And I saw something for sale that stopped me for a split second because it was unfamiliar. Up near the front there was a little display of corncob pipes.

"That's odd," I thought. "Corncob pipes!" And then I thought "wow, even weirder, smoking paraphrenalia in a drugstore. Only in Florida!" Shaking my head, I turned to pay and noticed the entire wall of cigarettes behind the cash registers. The same wall I'd seen one million times before, oh, right, THAT wall.

Well. A few weeks ago I had occasion to take a stroll around a northeastern CVS to see just how well these drugstores are covering their bases.











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Cult-Like Programs I've Embraced, Part III: The Kerry-Edwards Campaign

November 6, 2004

The speaker was a 68-year old Army veteran who had served two years in the 1950s and was proud of it. He was a middle-class working man, a grandfather, a husband, a senior citizen. He was probably a churchgoer. I stood in his driveway in Bedford, Ohio, listening.

“He’s a punk,” he was saying. Almost beside himself, he was trapped between a desire to make clear his disgust for George Bush and a wish not to be brought to low language. “This guy? He’s a scumbag.” He looked uncomfortable having to speak this way. “The middle class is paying the taxes and fighting the war. A deserter. And he says John Kerry didn’t serve honorably? This guy’s a deserter, and deserters used to get shot.”

His grandson graduated from one of the top electrical engineering programs in the country; of twenty graduates, only two had gotten jobs. His grandchildren range in age from 24 down to 14. “If those kids want to go to Canada, I’ll drive ’em.”

We stood alongside a trim and modest suburban house on a clear, windy fall day, the day before the election. I was rapt. Label me (an East Coast editor for a British auction house) if you want, but I dare you to call this guy an “elitist,” or whatever it is they’re calling Kerry supporters now. Call him a bullshit-spotter. Call him a man of honor, someone with an understanding of hard work – not the kind you see other people do on television, but the kind you do yourself. He had my instant respect: sincerity, sensitivity, and above all, anger, came off him in waves. Call him what he is: a patriot.

I had come to Ohio on my own hook, getting up early one morning to drive from New York City’s far-northern suburbs to Cleveland. The ACT office there needed canvassers, and I had done some work in that line in 1991. That had been Thursday, October 28; my intention had been to return home on Sunday to catch my son’s first real Halloween. Instead, I was drawn in.

The intensity of the work was part of it, but the Cause overlaid the entire experience. No task was too mundane. Nothing was extraneous. Not once did I hear someone turn down a job. And in us all — New Yorkers, Californians, Ohioans, celebrity phone-bankers — there shone a joyous light, the knowledge of Doing Right so clear and so keen that it leapt from our eyes and our brows and our fingers as we sorted and packed and studied and clipped, and finally as we ushered the righteous walkers out the door and into the streets. When the training room was empty, we followed them out and brought the light forth ourselves.

The details of the work are important. When I walked in and reported for duty, as it were, someone took me aside and gave me a stack of forms to alphabetize. The beautiful thing, the architectural thing, about this job was its place in the scheme. I was sorting forms filled out by phone bankers who had spoken with potential volunteers and logged their contact information and availability. My forms held contact information for those volunteers who had been left messages and who would call back to obtain their confirmed assignment for the massive voter outreach effort that would happen over the weekend and through Tuesday. In the Cleveland area, about 2,000 canvassers and phone bankers were expected, with a target of reaching some 150,000 households. These forms had to be in order so that when the return-call hotline rang, Ken, the volunteer assigned to it, could find the caller swiftly and finalize their assignment.

Not long afterward, I was loaned out to the AFL-CIO, and thence to the NAACP, for a foray into the center of Cleveland to remedy attempts to suppress the black vote. Cloaked in a yellow “NAACP Voter Protection” jacket, I walked streets with alternating patches of well-kept yards, boarded-up windows and street-hardened dogs, knocking on doors and handing out Voters’ Bills of Rights. Everyone I spoke to planned to vote (the guy with three tattooed tears on one cheek sitting on the porch with the boarded up door seemed agreeable, at least), and they knew that forces were at work to take away their rights. That was evident in the thick metal gates through which we spoke. As darkness fell the blue flicker of TVs maintained its own twilight. Most everyone watched with the lights off there.

Every job was like that – its impact was incremental, but its necessity was evident. Over the course of the next days I performed dozens of discrete tasks, from data entry to raiding AAA for road maps to moving tables, ferrying messages and carrying food. At one point I was placed in charge of a team of volunteers creating canvass packets assembly-line style, highly reminiscent of my first post-college temp assignment. The meat and potatoes of my Ohio stint, however, was canvasser training.

Thirteen years earlier I had worked out of NYPIRG’s Albany office as a canvasser — at 22, I was among the older crew members. Filling in one day for the assistant canvas director, I cleaned the office and roused the troops with a briefing on Fear, which, combined with my generally successful neighborhood outings, landed me the assistant director job on through the summer and into the fall. Here in Ohio I was back again, trained by mid-20s SEIU organizers to motivate volunteers, to touch every sympathetic voter in a 10-mile radius. It felt powerful, and on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I would train and then go out myself, full of this astouding reservoir of belief.

The place I visited was not unlike Queens, but politicized, earnest, proud and American. I learned that the electoral map trumpeted by the media is a fiction. I fell in love with Ohio. On my map, the state is Red, but Ohio is no more Red than Orange County, New York is Blue. Blue and Red are just different names for Black and White, and to see the world that way is to deny not just the subtleties of your country, but to deny your spirit the richness of its full potential. Look no further than this Bedford man in his working-man’s driveway, speaking his mind with huge conviction and true emotion, forced — by a deeply-held knowledge of what is right — to denigrate the President. The pain of it was heartbreaking, and the yearning for a respectable presidency never felt so real to me.

Bush doesn’t matter, of course. Our efforts will one day be shown to have saved the world in some unlooked-for way. Perhaps we activated someone in some inner-city neighborhood; maybe someone’s child looked after one of us as we left her house and wondered why we walked; maybe my angry friend’s grandsons will refuse the offer of a ride to Canada and will instead lead a march on Washington. Maybe displaying hope was enough. Regardless, in the continuing struggle against injustice, poverty, corporate control of government, environmental destruction, and enforced religion, no effort is a waste, no task is unimportant, and no voice should be silent.


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A Long, Earnest Post About Literature, or Something


Popular Eschatology
A lot of people I like and respect have an incredibly pessimistic view of the future. One just loaned me The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I read it over the course of two commutes. While McCarthy isn’t exactly known for his sunny vision (cf. Blood Meridian), this was a particularly brutal look ahead. I loved it – the story of a father and son traversing post-nuclear Appalachia and “carrying the fire” satisfied my inner need for political vindication, perhaps, or dovetailed perfectly and painfully with my own expectations. Terrifying, disgusting and above all sad, it was delivered with McCarthy’s Hemingwayan, journalistic spareness. Every detail reported, even the most explosive or enraging, using simply the words on the page.

Were there no need for apocalypse in the popular imagination, you wouldn’t have Mad Max. And Mad Max wouldn’t have formed my (for instance) narrative expectation of doom, destruction, and desert. The same goes for Edward Abbey’s Good News. I suppose Kevin Costner’s movies The Postman and Waterworld are in that canon, but I haven’t seen them. Certainly the book and film Children of Men feel right in that company. Even in Anne Lamott’s angst-ridden parenting journal, Operating Instructions, she envisions raising her son to be the “leader of the resistance.”

Oddly, this isn’t a political stance. Conservative end-timers, liberals, intellectuals and militarists all feel like it’s coming down. They’ve felt this way for centuries, in many cultures around the world. To be honest, I don’t know who William Miller was, but I know this: he thought the world was going to end on a particular date. And he was only one of dozens in a famous lineage. Today we have whatsisname, the Peak Oil guy.

Nuclear weapons only bolster the ancient narrative of Ragnarok. The narrative, the expectation, was there before nukes, which suggests that the invention of race-ending technology only serves a peculiarly homo sapiens hunger for world’s end. Why aren’t we tempering population growth? How come we’re all resigned to massive global climate change, brought about by our own excesses? Why are these books and films and religious movements so popular? I submit it’s because it just feels right.

This fear and expectation grows from the knowledge of individual mortality: each of our individual worlds will end one day, and that's frightening. A cynical view of organized religion suggests that the codified narrative of apocalyse was caused by/crafted to capitalize on this fear. It’s another mode of control, based on the assumption that attaining heaven is not good enough. Only by even more truly embracing the faith (or sacrificing your enemies, or donating to Pat Robertson) can you save yourself after that fateful day.

So it is with The Road. “We’re carrying the fire,” the man tells his son. And there’s no mention of precisely what the fire is, but the reader knows. It’s a perfectly developed device, because there isn’t a reader in the world who’d read that and NOT nod his or her head in shared understanding. Yeah, we think, reading. You and me both. And it doesn’t matter what you picture burning there in your own consciousness – intellectual curiousity, civilizing impulses, belief in law, the flame of the Enlightenment, protective love of family, religious faith, Yankee fever – you know that you’ve got it, too.

And you’re right. That’s the crucial thing. We’re all carrying SOME fire. Each one of us – right now, you, me, the person in the next cubicle – believes it. Even the most debased and evil people in the world believe it. The cannibals in McCarthy’s book? That mohawk dude, Wez, in The Road Warrior? They believe it, too.

So maybe, instead of hoping/waiting for/expecting the future world to explode in a refining event that brings out the One True Fire, we can start to look at the world we have as a place already replete with beings of pure flame, each bearing his or her single spark. If you know that the person in the cubicle next to you, or your nation’s enemy hiding in a cave someplace, both believe the same thing about themselves that you do — I’m chosen — doesn’t it make it more worthwhile to save and improve the world we live in today?


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The Difference

When you work hard at something you believe in, something unfueled by the engine of commerce, your hands and your back get called into play pretty quickly. Yesterday was the annual Memorial Day fundraising picnic at the library in an exurban community not far from where I live. A highly-placed woman in that organization, who lives with me, advised me to take part on the grassroots level. I was on sign-making, photography, table-moving, cinderblock-hauling and street-sweeping duty.

How hard do you work for your job? If the printer chokes, do you slip your tie between the second and third button, roll up your sleeves, and stick your arm into the rollers like James Herriot birthing a calf? When you came in that morning, did you PLAN to get toner on yourself for the good of the company and for your own bottom line? Your own sense of satisfaction?

If you work with your hands for your livelihood, what made you choose your job? Good prospects in the field? Scarcity of willing labor? Lack of other opportunity? A particular skill?

Whomever you are, do you take on jobs you know will take time, get you dirty and pay nothing? Do you go out and collect garbage along the riverfront? Have you ever helped a family rebuild after a storm?

Maybe this past weekend, like me, you watched a parade dedicated to people who’ve taken on dirty jobs because they thought it would help. Sure, soldiers enlist for all kinds of reasons, informed and otherwise, noble and material. But mostly, these are people who’ve been taught to love something and are willing to protect it regardless of the cost. They see a job that they believe needs doing, and they step forward and agree to take it on, no matter how bad it’s going to get. That surrender has an inherent nobility.

Which makes it infinitely wrong to betray them with lies. It makes it wrong to taint their selflessness with commerce. It makes it immoral to luxuriate in wealth, security and ignorance while they toil at your command. It debases their choice; future soldiers can no longer make their choice in faith that their goodwill will go toward the envisioned good.

The “hard work” I did this weekend was not only easy, it was fun. Carrying one of the library’s heavy particle-board folding tables back down into the electric closet, I knew that the board president on the other end wasn’t making any money on the deal either. His time’s more valuable than mine, in fact, if you look at the balance sheet.

He could have just taken another week’s vacation and sat it out. If he wanted, he could be doing his token hard work at home, clearing brush from his own acreage, behind the gates, up the hill.

But no, this president is working on something he believes in. So he’s down in town, carrying his end of the table.


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The New York Times People

A friend and I were recently discussing the No Impact couple from the New York Times. They seem nice enough, making a good effort, but they clearly fall into the otherworld inhabited by the New York Times People.

Right now I'm writing from home. Two floors below, I can hear the fire department's powerful pump sucking a mixture of air and water from the sump in my cellar floor. My pump is also working. Hoses lead down the driveway, joining the streams coming from other flooded basements. Driving back to the house from our friends' place this morning after dropping the kids off at daycare, we observed large-scale flooding of waterways. In our yard, the flow has eroded a pit against a retaining wall. Last night it was spouting water from between the railroad ties like a Dutch nightmare.

Here's what the New York Times People were doing yesterday:

"Coming on a weekend, the storm had a relatively light impact on most residents. Many shops and restaurants that normally would have been open yesterday were shuttered, but without jobs or schools to attend, many people spent the day indoors with the Sunday papers, relaxing with music to go with the silken lash of rain hissing at the windows, dripping on a lazy afternoon."

What I want to know is, which papers? What's a really good, thick Sunday paper around here? Is there one with a crossword that could kill some time? And how come the Times don't pursue the story a little further? Just what relaxing music were "many people" enjoying? How come Robert D. McFadden, Kareem Fahim, Abby Gruen, Danny Hakim, John Holl, Jennifer 8. Lee (known for her impeccable researching), Trymaine Lee, Angela Macropoulos, Barry Meier, Fernanda Santos, Nate Schweber, Melody Simmons, Michael Wilson and Katie Zezima couldn't find that out? I'd think it'd be simple enough if you're calling around a lot of people and finding out they were relaxing to the silken lash, you could just say, you know, are you listening to Django Reinhardt? WQXR? What?

At 11:30 last night, when my neighbor and a friend and I finally gave up attempting to get a third pump working, I was shivering uncontrollably. I'd been in- and outside for about six hours, and hypothermia was a very real threat. The water had just about reached the ignition on the oil burner (sorry, New York Times People -- we leave that on and we burn oil because we don't have enough time to cut the wood we'd need to run the wood stove we don't have because we're commuting two hours to work and just making it even in a cheap house even on one NYC and one local salary). I shut it off and we packed and left.

Let's hear it for the New York Times people. They're fighting the Mommy Wars. They're pushing the case for real war. They're seeing trends in the cutest little places. They very often get it right. But they very often plug into something that, statistically speaking, just doesn't exist.




Breaking news: There's a boil-water advisory in effect here.

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The Hiding

Winter lets you see more. When the leaves drop, after the first big wind in November, the land is laid bare, but the browns and blacks of the tree trunks and the browns and blacks of the passing leaves mask the contours. I love that season too, that muddy chill, but it is not a season of seeing.

Call the snow down, though, and you’re suddenly looking at a blown-out Xerox of your landscape, where only the thickly drawn dark outlines stay visible. Then you’re seeing the bones of the country; its high points and low, its undetectable ridges, lines, lifts and inclines. The fringe of trees limns it all in dense charcoal, and steeley waterways, lakes and ponds provide stark flat planes. Evergreens remind you in an understated way that this land is alive.

At the height of winter, there is no fog, no cloudy shroud, no airborne water at all. Just the sun, and the frigid air, and the things that freeze beneath. For as long as you can stand it, you can look deeper, further, with all the clarity of winter and all the angled light of the sun, shining into crevices it normally doesn’t touch. Truth is a reward worth the ice and inconvenience.

And now we’re coming to the Big Concealment. Life speeds up again. Buds form and the smudging finger descends upon the charcoal lines. The snow melts and the mud takes on the color of the trunks again. A gentle brush bearing watered-down green begins to apply its layers. Mist rises off the river and cloaks the places where land and water, air and land meet; insects, birds and thin vines further blur the boundaries. Our vision closes in; there is much much more to see, up close, and the world’s bones hide themselves for another year, which is awfully nice of them, considering.

It’s playtime. But as you go and play, you take that vision of winter with you, that season of far sight, of seeing deeper. Winter is not death; it is sleep. And sleep is when we dream. Play. But be a grownup, and remember what you’ve learned about playtime.

1) Share.
2) Eventually you’ve got to go in.
3) You have to clean up before that.

Further reading.

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Going Small

Written in May 2006, before the move. Still holds up.


It turns out that my wife and I are radicals. We may seem like ordinary suburban commuters expecting a second child, but we are doing the unthinkable: we’re downsizing. Next month we’ll be moving from a modestly-sized home — by today’s McMansion standards — to a 1,100-square-foot, three-bedroom cottage. To some, it’s an oversized dollhouse.

It made perfect sense to us, but our colleagues, friends, families, neighbors and realtor all thought we’d misspoken: “You mean a larger house, right?”

Some of them are actively worried about us.

Although living in a smaller house is a healthy environmental strategy, I admit that we’re mostly buying smaller for financial reasons; this house is cheaper than the one we live in now. It’s got more character, too – built in 1915, its proportions and stone foundation embody an early 20th century aesthetic. It’s in a great location. We love the town. And did I mention it’s cheaper?

To our people, however, we seem a little tetched. Despite the growing voices of progressive environmentalists, the heaviest weight of society is still against personal downsizing. The accepted trajectory at our age is to Go Big: our exurban neighbors pursue bigger houses, more land, larger TVs with louder speaker systems, and bigger Hummers to drive to BJ’s for bulk-pak potato chips while wolfing down super-sized fast-food meals and gallons of soda. If it’s not stuff, it’s money – who wants to earn less next year? If it’s not money or stuff, it’s prestige. My kid is the highest scorer, my office is bigger than yours, I oversee the largest department. Mothers and fathers compare their children's height, weight and cranial circumference – ostensibly checking to make sure they’re within a healthy range, but secretly proud of any numerical edge. If it’s not money, stuff, or prestige, it’s quantified experience – bagging the most peaks, shooting the biggest bear. And as you get older, it had all better get bigger, or you’re a failure.

It is an insidious and attractive dynamic. You need only look at a tape measure or a speaker wattage or a bank statement to know precisely where you stand. But quality becomes meaningless: when you’re racing to die with the most toys, you don’t have time to care whether they’re any good.

Even more disheartening than that cheapening of taste is the poverty of opportunity that comes with oversizing. Put simply: the less space you take up, the more there is to explore.

Einstein said “the environment is everything that is not me.” To expand on that, the world I can reach out to, learn, and revel in is everything that is not already in my house. This isn’t an abstract concept. It’s not even about ecology. For instance, our new home sits on a third of an acre – a generous lot by most measures, but half the size of the one we’re selling. Next door is the public library and a big park with baseball fields, pools and a playground. If every private lot around the park was double its current size, there would be no park. It would all just be…yards. I suppose someone would have the biggest one by a few inches, but you couldn’t play baseball.

Every ounce of surplus food I don’t purchase and consume could theoretically find its way to a mouth that needs it. Every time my car fits in a single parking space, someone else gets to go to the movies. For every ten square feet of space that my new house doesn’t encompass, ten square feet of the planet remains available.

Some of the people who question us choose to live bigger, but they are intelligent and self-aware, raise great kids, care about their neighbors and value open space. It’s just that one summer I lived in a tent for six weeks; I spent another summer in a car. Eleven hundred square feet is big enough for the four of us.

Physics tells us that the universe is finite but unbounded. So external space, be it the earth’s surface or my neighborhood, can get too crowded, too congested — too full of me — and thus needs to be conserved. I suspect that the space within — within my family, within my friendships, within my spirit and my mind – is bounded but infinite. I aspire to find out.

Will we huddle together on tiptoe, sacrificing all comfort and sense of place to leave the smallest possible footprint? No. To live is to assert one’s presence. But to live compactly, efficiently – to live Big Enough – is a moral goal and an increasingly less radical one. And to live Big Enough while in pursuit of quality – that sounds like a sweet life to me.


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