Crans

It might have been because of Inspector Gadget. Or possibly Mr. Wizard.

Or maybe there's some natural phase during which little kids just want to be inventors. Probably when they're around seven, about the time they realize they're their own little selves. About the time they look around and figure out that nothing--in the whole grey, knee-scrapy world--nothing is how it is because they made it that way.

Babies think the outside world is them. If they feel pain, the whole world is pain: joy, joy. Seven year olds, maybe suddenly, see that nothing of the world is them, that everything is impacting and nothing has been impacted.

Maybe they even feel as Elizabeth Bishop did:

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.

(Looks ever-so-slightly as if she could have come from my mom's family)

And when I became a David of six years and 362 days--on August 30th, 1989--I needed to make something that I could put my mark on, so that I'd stop falling off the meaningless world.

Though I doubt the exact date, I actually believe that I had some existential feeling like Bishop's around that time, spurred on by a Where's Waldo-induced sense of anonymity. But I think it's equally true that an Inspector Gadget marathon and a marathon session of drawing pictures with my crayons on a large roll of butcher paper was just as important in launching my career as an inventor.

Because I hated the permanence of crayons.

Smeary and imprecise as they are, crayons left me dissatisfied with my blue houses and half-suns, my chimneys and robotic dragons, my cities on the moon and my dinosaur butts alike. My drawings were sometimes half-decent, but what I really wanted to do was clean them up. Why I wasn't satisfied starting all over again, I don't know. I still have a tough time abandoning any work I've done, maybe out of vanity. Except I don't need anything to be perfect, I just need it to have a some kind of use. I have an overactive need to be practical (which, incidentally, also slows down my writing instinct), and did then too.

So, if I drew a useless Triceratops ass, I'd have a difficult time convincing myself that coloring was a useful vocation the next time I picked up the Aquamarine (why I drew butts in Aquamarine, I can't tell you). Same goes now for a useless, is-this-worth-it poem (except the difference is I can keep tweaking those).

Crayon drawings were forever.

So, I set to work on what would be my first invention: The Crayon Eraser. I think I'd picked up somewhere that inventors were supposed to identify a problem they saw in the world, and then address it. Crayons (pronounced "crans") and their indubitable indelibility (pronounced in-doo-bi-ti-bull in-del-i-bil-i-tee) were my world's biggest dilemma.

The creativity involved in identifying this problem was not matched by the creativity that would have been required for solving this problem. I had no working knowledge of eraser components, or potentially effective astringents, or detergents, or trichloroethanes, or magic.

I did know addition, though, so when I thought about crans and erasers, I figured 1 cran + 1 eraser = 2 cranerasers. And so I jammed little pieces of Aquamarine and Black, Chestnut and Lavender into the pinkish, parelellogramic pencil eraser I had on-hand and hoped for the best. I surmised that each color I wanted to eventually erase would need to be embedded in that pencil eraser--each bit a kind of kiddie anti-matter that would neutralize wayward outside-the-linesing.




When all was set, I allowed the eraser to marinate for awhile. Then I began my experiment by trying to erase a half-sun, and since you've been patient up until this point, I won't drum up any extra suspense: as you will have guessed, my eraser failed, and it failed miserably. A dappled Forest Green covered that half-sun before my dream crumbled all over the butcher paper.

Alas. I went to wash up before supper.

This had been a cold, blue-black moment.
But I still felt: You are an Inventor!

_______________

P.S. I've just read that Baking Soda might be an effective crayon eraser, and so, since my erasing idea has come into being, I'll be taking my next post to expand on the six other invention ideas I've developed since 1989, lest they all be made obsolete by a common household Soda or Starch.

Ow, Ow

This week, because I'd been feeling slothful, I took up a physical challenge: on Monday, I ran two miles in 20 minutes, Tuesday brought it down to 19, then 18, and on until yesterday when I ran two painful miles in 15 minutes. I'm no cross country star, and this jogging has made me entirely sleepy.

Today, in the seventh day, I'd planned on trying the 10,560 feet in a mere 14 minutes (754 feet per minute). I calculated that I'd have to average 8.6 on the treadmill and 9.4 on the pain scale.

But I was particularly exercised to do this because Megan tells a story (dubious) about having to run this exact distance in this exact amount of time to qualify for girls' soccer at her high school.

Regardless of the truth of that story, today I wanted to qualify for girls' soccer.

Today, I wanted to run like a Lindsay.

At my own high school, Girls' Soccer was a showy sport. Young ladies who played the beautiful game used to shout out "aoww aoww Girls' Soccer" at assemblies and meals and when they got good grades on tests and, generally, whenever they damn pleased. So "Aoww aoww Girls' Soccer" became a thing my more cynical friends and I said too, in darker circumstances.

Didn't make the trivia team? Year Book has a picture of you dressed as Gandalf? Girl you like is dating a guy named Travis? Aoww, Aoww Girls' Soccer indeed.

Still, I thought that Megan's story and my own memories of Deerfield Academy soccer joy could motivate me. I wanted to make the team.

Though this is far too much setup for what will turn out only to be a moderately successful pun, I didn't quite succeed today, didn't have it in me to break 14 minutes, or really even try after nearly falling asleep on my feet this morning.

And so after a slower, and still sore-making jog, I just keep thinking, "Ow, Ow Girls' Soccer."

The Birthplace of the Tomato

A few months ago, I made this short movie about tomatoes. Right now seems like a decent time for some summer.

Spelling Trouble

Winsome, adj., "Attractive or appealing in appearance or character."

Maybe I was that in fifth grade, maybe not, but one thing's for sure: I was a top-notch speller, and I was often left on my own during Language Arts to compile five words for my extra-special-top-notch-end-of-the-alphabet spelling test, while most of the other students toiled with words like toil and test and trouble.

I'm on W, I might have taunted. Have fun back at T.

Tasked thusly, I took to the classroom Webster's--which we kept next to the giant black-and-white throw rug we used as a chessboard, next to the Ukraine-less globe, next to our Starter-jacket-stuffed cubbies--to find my words.

Winsome would work. Hard enough to satisfy the teacher, Mrs. Kimball (who sometimes referred to herself as The Dragon Lady for difficult-to-discern reasons), and easy enough that it wouldn't give me any sort of real trouble. Winsome. An attractive word, mnemonically simple. I winsome, I losesome. I get my golden star.

Whydah, n. "Mostly black African weaverbird."



We were studying African-American history--including the Revolutionary era black poet Phyllis Wheatley (W-H-E-A-T-L-E-Y), whose struggles, for difficult-to-discern reasons, caused me to giggle uncontrollably--and I had already started to develop my love of really sketchy tangential connections, so maybe I figured Whydah would work as an addition to our curriculum.

Whydah would also allow me some cursing opportunities, as in Whydahhell not? (I loved to curse innocently and I added "damn" onto the end of any popular song lyrics I could remember--"Say Live and Let Die, Damn, Damn, Damn"--which incited more giggles among my fellow W-word chums).

We were weird.

Wholesomeness, adj., "conducive to or suggestive of good health."

(If I don't know what wholesomeness means I promise I won't know what conducive means, Webster. You don't understand my problems.)

Meanwhile, I was pretty wholesome at the time, as you can probably tell by the fact that I found "damn" to be a most scandalous curseword. I remember tattling to my teacher about a paraprofessional who muttered the word under her breath. (Nothing was done and she was left unimprisoned).

Damn aside, it was in fifth grade that my cynicism started to bud like a useless--totally useless--simile. Take my treatment of former slave Phyllis Wheatley. How could I giggle about her travails: her impoverished circumstances, the fact that her grocer husband, John Peters, was sent to debtors' prison?

I remember that his arrest seemed like a grand hoot of misfortune after my gleeful recess. And I guess I can understand laughing at the most inappropriate thing in class, or at the troublemaker's struggle, or even sneering at what seemed to be the exaggerated opulence of Mrs. Wheatley's pain.

But it seems like all of those reactions require a weird kind of maturity--a recognition of standards--that also should have kept me from being so cruel. Somehow, though, I was old enough to notice the dark humor of desperation, but not old enough to wipe that smile off my damn face, or recognize an actual person's actual damn humanity.

In other (spelling) words, I was edging out of Wholesomeness but hadn't come close to Wisdom.



Wistful, adj. having or showing a feeling of vague or regretful longing.

What was I then, anyway? Shortpantsed spelling champion, or rebellious curser? Wholesome or wise? And where would I be headed in sixth grade? With the kids who already wore deodorant and undershirts, or with the kids who'd always smell forever and ever?

And why couldn't I be wholesome and damn-trumpeting at the same time? For that matter, what was to stop me from saying "shit" on my birthday and still kiss my mother with that mouth?

All of these questions. All W's. Who. Where. Why. What.

I wasn't sure of the answers, but I knew I wasn't what I'd been in third grade, nimrodishly studying long division while somehow still captaining the schoolyard soccer team; powerful enough to institute rules that only benefited my team of jocks while brainstrong enough to semi-master all things quotient.

How had the Davids diverged?

Wistful. It seemed easy to spell.

Whore, n., the same as prostitute.

(If I don't know what whore means I promise I won't know what prostitute means, Webster. You don't understand my problems.)

I don't remember picking this word as a prank, but is it possible I was unaware what a prostitute was? Yes, I think so. Pretty Woman had come out and its ads are among my first pop culture referents, but the meaning of the movie definitely evaded me.

And I think it's possible I thought that the new spelling word was an archaic question--whither, wherefore, whence, whatsoever, wherewith, howsoever, whore. And I wouldn't have been able to conceive that something so naughty could actually appear in a school dictionary anyway.

Mrs. Kimball dealt with all of this very well when I presented my list to her. She said I should find a replacement for this particular W. I wondered why.

"Is it a swear?"

"Not really. It's just not a polite word," she said.

"Oh."

She probably thought she was being duped, the target of a nasty 11-year-old's nasty joke. Either that or she felt sorry for me. I was, after all, about to be fed to the middle school wolves and, as I've painfully catalogued elsewhere, I had a limited vocabulary when it came to crudeness. How would I survive? Would I have to ask what a prick was and be thereafter labeled prick-ignorant?

I replaced whore with whatever.

After I passed my test, the group of us got demoted back to T, task and toil, and I remember having some unexpected trouble spelling trouble.

Spring Lit Fest Update

Fiction Writer Amy Hempel will visit OU for Lit Fest this year.



Amy Hempel is the author of four collections of stories. Her COLLECTED STORIES won the Ambassador Award for Best Fiction of the Year, and was named one of the New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year. It was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Hempel has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Foundation fellowship, the REA Award for Fiction, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

Her stories have appeared in Harper's, GQ, Vanity Fair, The Quarterly, The Yale Review, Tin House, Playboy and many other publications; they have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and others.

Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Vogue, O, the Oprah Magazine and many more.

She co-edited, with Jim Shepard, the poetry collection UNLEASHED, and is a Contributing Editor to Bomb magazine.

A founding board member of The Deja Foundation, she teaches creative writing at Harvard and at Bennington.

Madel(e)ine

In the book In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, as every poseur knows, writes about a tiny cookie--a madeleine--which has the power to transport him back to his childhood, or, in the other direction, to bring his childhood into the present. One whiff of this little cookie and back he goes (or here it comes), and he can feel his little-boy cheeks squeezed by all manner of aunt.


When I hear the song "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes, I don't think of my childhood--it was recorded 19 years before I was born--but I do experience an immediate association, a kind of Madeline Moment.

I misspell that for a reason. Because "Be My Baby" puts me back with Madeline Adams herself, a young woman I met in my formative years. This Madeline was very beautiful, almost mythically so, and I've never heard the opening four-beat drum-burst of "BMB" without thinking of her smiling and then riding off on a school bus with me, farther and farther into the distance, oh won't you please.


Fine. So Madeline may have been made-up, a character from The Wonder Years on whom Kevin Arnold had a desperate and scandalous crush, but my cause-and-effect memory of her is very real. Be My Baby = Madeline + the creepy-sweet teen lust she seemed to represent.

I'll make you happy, baby. Just wait and see. For every kiss you give me, I'll give you three.

(Quick aside: until this week, I'd never considered that the title The Wonder Years is a double meaning, encapsulating both nostalgia--the noun--and debilitating adolescent doubt--the verb.)

(Quicker aside: "Be My Baby" was written and produced by notable murderer Phil Spector, a fact which only adds to its haunting nature).

You know I will adore you 'til eternity.

I can't dance about architecture or write about music, but I think what's so effective about the song is the mix of a sweet, intimate declaration--"Be My Little Baby"--with the sultry, invasive backup-singer repetition of that declaration. The speaker of the song is the ultimate crush-come-true who, unfortunately, turns out not to be in full possession of her marbles. She has multiple personalities or, at the very least, she's got some home-girl-voyeurs chanting from her closet, and they all really want you to stay over and make mistakes. Both the angel and devil on your broad shoulders are whispering "Be Her Little Baby," and it's too late to run.



And if I had the chance I'd--never let you go.

***

In the years since I saw that Wonder Years episode--"Heartbreak" it's called--I've played the soundtracked scene back in my brain--my consciousmess, my wit mine, my thoughtjockey, my grey lady, my me blob, my skullbug--an estaimted eleven times. Kevin and Winnie are on a field trip. They've broken up because Winnie saw Kevin standing with Madeline and because Winnie likes another fellow. They board their buses--K & W are now at separate high schools so they've got separate rides--and the buses turn in different directions. Madeline, the symbol of all this teen-anguish, is still on Kevin's bus and she's still totally smoking. But he doesn't care any more: "Be My Baby" plays: I tingle.

It's all very simple. And it's so cemented in my wit mine--I'm sorry, my brain--that I've told Megan about its effect on me whenever we hear The Ronettes. Or any band I mistake for The Ronettes, including: The Marvelletes, the Chirelles, the Shantelles, the Shrangri-la's, and the Velvelettes). I sometimes share this Wonder Years plotline even when I listen to "Please Mr. Postman," which is the virginal twin-sister of "Be My Baby."

At every rate, the scene is a dominant memory.



When I was a sophomore, I constantly shirked my Chemistry homework to watch Wonder Years reruns from 9 to 10, so I probably saw "Heartbreak" half-a-dozen times (poetic clause). Maybe that constant watching set me up to have some strange romantic expectations. Anyway, I'd just started going to a school that had girls, I was a serial idolizer of them, and, reinforcing that unfair perception, I took doses of girl-next-door-schmaltz in the form of The Wonder Years every night. I was hoping that, just as I tried to jump into the screen, my very own Winnie-Madeline would jump off of it and save me with her virtue.

All that is to say that there was no way I wasn't going to check out that episode when it became available to me on Netflix the other day. I shepherded Megan toward the TV, as she shepherds me toward certain episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I asked her to wait 21-minutes for the knee-buckling conclusion.

First she lightly chastised me for still having a TV-crush on Madeline. I proposed to her that this was an instance of Alex-Mackification; that is, TV characters, like Alex Mack, who were older than us when we first watched their shows will always be remembered as grown-ups, so therefore it isn't totally creepy when we're retroactively fond of their formerly contemporary 14-year old faces.

(Totally more than a year older than me).

Megan mostly agreed with the logic--probably because she still has a crush on Rufio from Hook--and then we found out that Julie Condra, who played Madeline, had been 20 when the episode aired. So I was absolved of any suspected fourth-degree-skeeviness.

Meanwhile, in the show, the buses pulled away, here it came, oh since the day I saw you, I have been waiting for you. . .

And then the Beach Boys' song "God Only Knows" started playing. If you should ever leave me, well, life would still go ON believe me. This was totally wrong. How could a memory so specific and, let's be honest, obsessive, turn out to be invaded by Brian Wilson?

I stammered only for a minute, and then refused to give up on my own Mem-o-matic (again, I'm referring to my brain. Please try to keep up). "Be My Baby" must have been featured in another episode. And I did find, after a time, that "Be My Baby" had played during "Ninth Grade Man," a minute of which is included below.



Madeline appears while the song plays, and it's ominous. I was right. But wrong. And I had to wonder at/about my own memory, which had been sharp enough to connect a pop-song from the 60s with a 20-year-old actress in a 20-year old dramedy, and sharp enough to develop an uncanny association. But it was also too dull to actually be accurate.

Here, we see the beginning of the end of Kevin and Winnie and "Be My Baby" plays. In a later episode, Madeline actually figures in the end of their relationship and it's "God Only Knows" that plays. My patternsmith--i.e., brain--must have decided that the songs ought to have been switched, and would have been even more unsettling if they had been.

Or, more likely, the frazzled traffic cop above my neck--i.e., ibid--just threw up its hands at my memory-jam and said, as Ronnie Spector does in "Be My Baby," wait, oh wait, wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Hydrants

Megan came home a couple days ago, surprised. She'd heard from a few local friends that they didn't have fire hydrants in their neighborhoods, and that when the occasion arose, firefighters would pump water from a lake before rushing to the hypothetical scene. This was another reminder of how rural the surrounding area is.

"But, wait," I said, ever the curious contrarian. In my own 0ff-the-sewer-grid childhood neighborhood, did we have fire hydrants?

I never danced in the flow of a broken hydrant on a pavement-shimmering summer afternoon. And I can't remember using hydrants as finish lines in bike races. So I called my mom yesterday to check on the geography of my nostalgia. She couldn't confirm anything.

"We've had fires, so we must have hydrants," she declared, laughing at her logic before she'd even finished the sentence.

And, in fact, we have had some fires on Brookside Avenue, a post-war outcropping of single-family homes about three miles from Greenfield Center. The most ironic one came only a few hours after the decommisioning of our volunteer fire department, a tiny garage at the first loop of Brookside that blocked the path to the Gravel Pit (I never, ever went to the Gravel Pit, which, if my mom was to be believed, is about as dangerous as a motorcycle ride; playing there would result in gruesome dismemberment--or at least some pretty nasty abrasions).

In that tiny garage, a tiny fire truck lay idle, breeding ghosts (besides ghosts, there were also many beetles).

That early-morning fire--The Koblanski Fire--has always been my symbol of Harlot Fortune: HF being the nasty, androgynous world-spirit who plays arsonist just a few hours after anything can be done about the flames.

But besides that attention-getting neighborhood legend--only retold because the Koblanski house was spared--fire was never on my mind. Maybe we didn't have hydrants. Maybe we too would have had to wait for a pumping truck if our fireplace-flue ever got really gunked up, or if a wayward casserole went forgotten in all its blackening-Durkee-Onion-glory.

My belief in my own hydrantless childhood grew.

"Nutmeg never peed on a fire hydrant. And if we had hydrants in the neighborhood, we would have joked about her going on them," I told my mom, with the sort of air-loose logic that might be hereditary.

"Girl dogs don't go on hydrants," she countered, echoing Megan's, "she was a girl dog so she wouldn't lift a leg."

Why must they always gang up on me? I knew my dog. And if there had been a hydrant in her realm, she would have figured out a way to do something disgusting to it. And if she did that, I would remember it, I thought.

But as today's photographic evidence proves, I was wrong:

(This hydrant sits near where an old, excellent VW bug with white window shutters used to hang out. The green house in the background always had very scary dogs. Across the street in a vermillion colonial (not-pictured) lived a witch).

(The opposite curve of our circle was filled with very ancient people, all nice, all with sun-porches).

(I can barely even see this hydrant so I almost refuse to believe in its existence. Even if I stipulate to the pictorial evidence, I assert that this hydrant is a post-2000 addition).

(My mother points to the memory-jogging hydrant. Seeing my breath, enduring my soggy feet, I almost feel Nutmeg pulling me with her flexi towards this oasis of urine. The red house behind it is not ours; the house behind that house is ours. I probably should have remembered this one, seeing as how it's a couple dozen yards from my old bedroom).