Chrome Diaries, part IV

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Stir until desired tenderness. Serves four.

While the western lowbaggers are bringing to a close, late in 2007, their historic descent of the rivers Green and Colorado, my re-united family and I are inspecting, with a similar sense of destiny, the trickle of water in the basement of our newly acquired old house in the principle city of our adopted northern nation.

“Is there someone we can sue?” says Sebastian.  Boy, is that one American.  Friendly as the day is long, popular in every country he’s lived in.  But every so often you remember he was born in Trenton (“Trenton Makes, The World Takes”) New Jersey, and he isn’t messing around.  The other day we’re sitting in a restaurant along the Danforth and a whole passel of police cars goes flying east down the Danforth.  Five minutes later, maybe even ten, a passel of police cars goes flying by the other way.  “Wrong address,” Sebastian observes wryly. 

Not yet twelve, he’s already deep into the hidden injuries of class, injustice, and the donut consumption practices of law enforcement officers.  Sebastian is beautiful and heavily caressed by nicknames in playgrounds. Seb! Sebbie! Bastian! Sebas!, the children call, a general exhalation, and he waves vaguely and smiles as amicably as the lord mayor.  He hunches a bit the way tall people bend into the carapace of social expectation. 

Sebastian is the kind of kid who can hand his assignments in late and get away with it.  At the restaurant, when a waiter goes by with chorizo dramatically flaming on a stick, Sebastian says, “just like my homework, done at the last minute.”

In the basement, Sebastian and I watch the water, a little stream running south by southeast in the direction of Lake Ontario, one of the last large repositories of fossil water on the planet.  Sebastian has been interested lately in my critique of democracy, a system invented by some slave-holding Greeks as a way of extending the thuggish power of the majority and of performing interesting science experiments on philosophers, like making them drink hemlock poison.  Democracy is something you learn in high school, and they have special places for it called locker rooms.  “Who thinks I should kick Kramer in the nuts, raise your hand.  Hey, douchebag, you’re not raising your hand.”  Sebastian has been wanting to know what you could have besides democracy.  Let’s try nothing and work out from there, I think. 

Liam is watching the rivulet to see if he can float a boat in it.  Outside, chickadees rehearsing their name.  Somewhere some schoolgirls extending the notes of a burst of laughter they’re unwilling to relinquish.  “Watershed,” I say to Sebastian, “that’s what we can have instead of democracy.  If you can drink the water in your basement, then you’re in the right relationship with your neighbors.”  Sebastian stares dubiously at the muddy floor.  “Daddy’s crazy,” Liam calls up the stairwell, “he says we should drink the basement.”

We’ve had a rough year, and now that we’re back together we’re all feeling the need for a grand gesture, something to mark our survival as a family.  At the last house, there wasn’t time to lowbag the garage into a passive solar unit or anything, but my friend Zarko and I threw a new roof on for resale value.  At 8:30 a.m. on the blustery morning of 16 November, 2007, Zarko and I placed a morning newspaper, a little note about time capsules, three Lego persons and a rubber ducky into a wooden trough in the eaves above the soffit on the northeast corner of the garage and sealed it solemnly with plywood and new shingles.  Liam came running out and yelled, “oi, who pinched my duck?”  But we explained to him about the time capsule, how they might open it up in the next century.  He climbed up the ladder and prodded the shingles with his foot.  We added more shingles.  Then at 9:30 we ripped the whole thing apart because it turned out the fascia board was rotten.  Zarko took it philosophically.  Of the capsule’s sole hour in repose he said, “time enough for reminiscence.”  Liam got his ducky and slithered down the ladder.

It’s all about connection.  We’re together again.  In the bathroom I slowly turn the rheostat down as Eva-Lynn brushes her teeth.  My wrinkles gradually disappear.  I keep adjusting the picture.  “Tell me when you think I’m sexy,” I say to her.

Liam’s on to me, my relation to the international power grid: every fiddling with a switch means more exhaust pours up the distant stack of a coal-burning power plant shaped like a Dr. Seuss illustration.  “Daddy’s blowing smoke in Ohio,” Liam says.

In Home Hardware, I try to do ESP with a clerk in Plumbing and Fixtures who is being harassed by a mean lady.  He can’t hear me.  I take a 12-foot section of PVC that looks like it might be good for the hamsters, and I swing it around till the far end is right by the clerk’s ear as he fusses with some pipe while the woman continues to yell at him.  “It’s okay,” I whisper into his ear, “she’s a jerk.”  Think of the technology we could have as a society if we hadn’t put all our energy into cell phones.

The clerk ignores me.

Humph, I think, so much for solidarity.  Maybe the woman’s right, maybe the guy should be harassed.

In the new neighborhood, you can skate as long as you want for free.  No British, says a sign.  No Tag, says another.  Pleasure Skating Only.  Why does the word pleasure fit so easily with this sport and not, say, wrestling?  Pleasure hockey?  What about pleasure, oh, what’s the name of that sport like bowling on ice but where they have a little team of housekeepers sweeping fastidiously in front of a giant puck? 

The pleasure in skating must be about its acoustical delights—as good as it gets if you don’t count ping-pong.  On a quiet morning, steel tougher than the Titanic rending ice crystals.

The seven acres at the top of the watershed have seven trees big as virgins, but we’re in the city, the whole shebang of streetcars and trains and bikes, the rear basket on my bike clean of writing right now but still an imagined palimpsest of cherished insults against cars.  The cars themselves have names in jaunty chrome scrawled along their flanks, but these are aliases, false nicknames.  An attempt to travel incognito.   

On the subway, an ad for a university threatens people, “You Know Where Education Leads.”  At Dewson Elementary, signs remind the students, “No Loitering For Purposes Inconsistent With the Education Act.”  Loitering appears consistent, and if there are education acts they are engaged in with at least partially consenting minors.

“Do you believe in God, Daddy?” Liam asks on the way of home from school.

“Yes.”

“It’s amazing how the four of us each believe something different,” he says.  Ahead of us, walkers hoping for streetcars look repeatedly over their shoulders the way prey might.  The dry tracks of cats and raccoons crisscross each other in the old cement of the sidewalk.

“What do you believe in, Liam?”

“Zeus and the twelve gods.”

Well, maybe that’s better than democracy.  And it’s probably easier to get baklava.

We’re all together in our new nest.  Sebastian will be home from basketball soon.  Eva-Lynn’s smiling out through the plate glass as we come up the drive, her image half ghosted onto a reflection of the 20-story soletta behind us, a white apartment building throwing light from the westering sun back down upon us in a great luminous wash.  My heart isn’t hurting these days, though it flutters a bit in a way that might be valve trouble but at the very least is love. 

Some settling of contents may have occurred during shipping and handling.

It’s a thaw late in January.  The creeks are on the move.  Even the buried streams find their old courses and remember the distant sun.