Archive
bread and circuses
Maybe a road trip is the ideal time to remember that not only is BP responsible for the oil spill catastrophe but I am as well. I drive they drill ducks get oily. I wish I could get mad like so many of my peers but I don’t feel holy enough to point my finger at anyone at BP. Maybe if I knew more I could know they’re more guilty than me. I know I feel bad because I allow it to happen, and go to baseball games. There’s this whole level of engagement in professional sports that i have gone from experiencing and taking a critical eye. I can easily understand how Marx would consider it an opiate for the masses, some piece of false consciousness to distract us from the oily ducks and the exploitation of man by man. Nonetheless I was thrilled to see Tommy Brookins, whom i listed along with Larry Norman as people I thought were self actualized in my high school psych class. I loved Tommy Brookins, and Kirk Gibson, and Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammel, and all those guys who won the pennant with Sparky. At the game there was a child like joy, mostly in the children. A toddler stood on her mom’s lap and when i would cheer for the Tigers she would too. I told her mom she was raising a little Tiger’s fan. It was fun, engaging, we all shared something. I ran into my friend Isaiah who I thought was a Cubs fan, when I asked him he said, “no, i’m a baseball fan”. If you’ve ever read George Will with an open mind you can’t believe baseball is only false consciousness. A perfect world might need baseball, as well as clean oceans and beaches. My dad has that same childlike spirit about baseball. He knows it all, every Tiger and what they’ve been doing, what their stories are, what pitches they throw and then. Who swings at the first pitch and how quickly they take between pitches. It keeps him engaged in this world. It may be the most important thing in his life. If its not shedding crocodile tears over the fucked up gulf and plotting with his class peers for the dictatorship of the proletariot then fuck Marx and his judgemental bullshit. But nonetheless I drove a gulf oil eating machine halfway across the state to see millionaires play baseball. I am not doing nor planning on doing a damn thing for the oily ducks and all that other bullshit even though I think I am cognizant of how truly awful it all is and that i am personally responsible. A client asked me how bad it really was because he doesn’t trust the news. I told him second cup bad. What? The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead man, and every living thing in the sea died (Revelations 16:3). I refuse the simple comfort of anger at BP and put faith that how i live my life justifies my part in this horrible piece of evil filth our works have created. It will remind me to step up my game, to work smarter if not harder to disengage from the madness. Engage more in the solution.
“The School Dance”
I was planning on writing a piece on persuasion after reading an interesting article on the subject in Scientific American Mind and another on NPR but I am to bushed. I trimmed up the tree in the front yard, used a chainsaw for the first time, and everything. I chickened out from climbing around in it sawing off the dead branches. Instead I tied some rope to a hammer and lassoed the dead branches like I was hanging a bear bag (when you camp you have to hang your food at least 12′ to keep the bears out of it) and then pulled them down. Dad was impressed, didn’t know i had that skill set. So when I want to post but don’t feel like writing its time to post another poem from the past. This one I wrote in that first flurry of school shootings, prior to Columbine. I can’t relate to the desire to commit random violence but I can relate to feeling left out and alone.
Luke Woodham shot some kids at Pearl High
Don’t ask me who, don’t ask me why
Kids got it hard, this is true
Deadbeat Dads and sniffing glue
Luke stabbed his mom or so they say
What a way to start your day
The newspapers say Satan’s to blame
But I know it was cuz he never came
To The School Dance
The School Dance was really Rockin’
After wards all the kids were talkin’
Who you gotta know and what you gotta do
If you want to try… to be cool.
Luke Woodham’s a killer yes I know
But what can you do? Where can you go?
Stuck in a house with a Mom you hate
And there’s no way you’ll get a date
To The School Dance.
The School Dance was really Rockin’
Afterwards all the kids were talkin’
Who you gotta know and what you gotta do
If you want to try… to be cool.
Luke Woodham will spend his life in jail
With no parole, no chance for bail
He was wrong for what he did
Cuz now there’s gonna be two less kids
At The Scho0l Dance.
The School Dance was really Rockin’
Afterwards all the kids were talkin’
What you gotta know, and who you gotta do
If you wanna try… to be cool.
Books
I have been a big reader since my brother taught me to read peering over his shoulder of some classic DC comics. The first full on book I read was The Hobbit and after that I started to chew them up. Reading all the time, stashing books to read in class, on the bus, most of my free time. I read anything I could get my hands on. Growing up in the country or on the road with my truck driving daddy kids books weren’t always handy. I read what i could which was a lot of westerns, romance magazines, and books from garage sales. Reading changed my life. Opened me up to a whole ‘nother realm of experience. It helped make me smart which came to be a big part of my self identity and something to hold onto when the rest of life, not so much.
I still read, a lot. Usually i will crush 2 or 3 books a week. I mix it up with some nonfiction, some great literature, and a lot of crap genre fiction (sci fi and fantasy). Lately I have drifted away from the crap and have been reading several books a little more slowly and carefully than usual. All nonfiction. (the AA Big Book, a Jillian Michaels diet book of all things, some Foucalt) It slowed my pace down. Plus I’m back to reading magazines. Scientific American Mind is my new great read, so much interesting stuff and some interesting points for my groups and my clinical practice. The mind is well worth exploring and i like staying on top of new developments. Plus brother John got me a subscription to The Christian Science Monitor. I can stay on top of it as a weekly but it cuts into my book time. As does facebook.
All of that being said i started reading an S M Stirling novel of the change. Post apocalyptic fantasy, a little formulaic (but thats part of the charm, just ask fans of Law & Order) but likable characters and an intriguing world. I was away long enough to really appreciate staying up a bit later and getting up earlier to squeeze in more reading time. Makes me feel like a kid again.
curriculum vita (a prose poem found in my paint by # calendar Dec. 06)
What is my story, what is the essence of my being? From where does come this hunger to know, to be known? Why mar the blank page? in what hubris it must lay, lie, die.
Oh to be of one and now, but what cost history, even to gain eternity, oh blessed now, the razor’s edge of existence that i can only pretend exists as by the time the light has hit my eyes its history, pure history. And oh, memory, the purest form of imagination. When the brain is eaten through with plaquey-tentacles and the mind from which is sprung is thin and patchy, the mind holds onto childhood. the earliest stories, the purest, the best, the core. oh history i sing your praise and yearn to never forget, even at the cost of the now.
My life a taut quivering string of ambivilance. the cost of a vivid imagination. There’s good reason to believe in everything. any damn thing.
At what cost freedom? At what cost power, even unsought, unutilized, unspent this currency weighs heavy in my pocket. Makes me want to walk all cockeyed, or spend it. or just fucking lay down, rest, forget, dream perhaps, not without struggle but how’s it going to drag you down, when your laying on the bottom?
fall gardening
I was raised gardening. We always had a huge garden when i was growing up. enough to feed our large family, give to friends, and preserve for the winter. My mom always put away 100 pints of corn and 100 quarts of tomatoes. she started with juice and then realized whole tomatoes were easier and just as useful. She also did pickles and freezer jams and green beans and often other things as well but we always had a lot of corn and tomatoes.
My dad drove truck so it varied on when the garden got put in. We always put it in in a couple of days and everyone pitched in. I remember putting in the corn, because those seeds were big for the grasping of little hands. I remember being told not to touch my face and wash my hands and for gods sake don’t eat the little corn, the pink stuff on them is poison. Then dad would leave for the road and all the maintenance fell on us kids. Usually we would ignore it until word came that he was coming back and then we would desultorily do some weeding but we would never get through the endless rows of corn and tomatoes and would get hollered at for being the lazy goodfornothings we were. i swore when i had my own garden i would never grow corn and tomatoes.
the big thing i got out of it was the rhythm of the conventional garden. Till in the spring, anytime after May 15 and plant it all in a couple of days at most. weed all summer, harvest in the fall. Maybe if loads permit put in another batch of corn 2 weeks after the first.
Now its different. i plant pretty much year around. i love the idea of fall crops. the little lettuces and arugula are coming along nicely. I hope to get in some spinach yet. two of the three garlic i planted have already come up and i plan on putting in another head or two yet. I still hope to turn over a full 120 square foot bed and build a little stone wall (out of all the rocks and stones i’ve turned up) around it. saturday i hope to pick up a 1/4 scoop of sand (about 800 #s). I want to add about 300 in the horseshoe pits and the other 5 in the rest of the garden bed.
After the leaves fall on the bush honey locust i am going to cut that down and haul it to the mulch pile. i am going to pull some of the ivies and other crap plants and put in some native wildflower mixes, showy goldenrod and a native clover. I am also going to add a row of paw paw trees across the back of my little wildflower bed. I may lay out a path through the new beds with the trunks of the honey locust. While i’m cutting i’m going to cut back on the mimosa branches from the neighbor’s tree that hang over and hopefully bring a little more light.
And of course spring bulbs, perhaps another mum, and maybe some other fall plants will go in. Fall is as jam packed with planting as spring and they are coming together in my mind, even as i put my carrot bed to sleep. i harvested them last week, piss poor i must say, but i’ll let you know how they taste. i covered that bed with leaves, raked just for that purpose, and will cover that with coffee grounds as soon as my grounds container gets filled up. theres a pot of a delicious triple certified blend from kaldis getting ready to go in the mix right now. closing loops and completing the circle. things are still pretty messed up but some things at least are heading back again in the right direction.
Friend of the world
“If you’re a friend of The World, you’re an enemy of God”, my Grandma Trapp used to say. She was a frighteningly intense woman of strong belief and an unforgiving nature. I feared her like little else but was also attracted to her strange intensity for the spiritual that I found lacking in my own nuclear family. We were frequent visitors to her home and when I was 9 my dad had a big ranch house built next to the family farm and we were neighbors.
As idle hands are the devil’s workshop I largely tried to steer clear of her or I’d easily get pulled into some serious chores or at least a serious scolding for my sins were multitude. I wore shorts and was disrespectful of the Sabbath. My work effort was less than salutary and I was wasteful in many things. I had not lived through the Great Depression where the rag men came looking for scraps of cloth for their mysterious purposes. My life was one of leisure that surely was spoiling my immortal soul.
I didn’t attend church but for some reason was drawn to Camp Meetings and Revivals, probably for the road trip. Grandma would drive and preach on the wondrousness of The Lord, hands frequently leaving the wheel for halleluiahs and hosannas, God be praised. The family joke was that the fact she hadn’t wrapped the old Buick around a tree proved the existence of a watchful and caring Savior.
The sermons always delivered by intense and scary old white men with drawls and the occasional shooting of spittle were awe inspiring and terrifying. They were all on sin and Godlessness and apostasy and other cool sounding words that I stepped cautiously around if not understanding. At almost everyone I walked my sinful little self to the altar to beg for forgiveness and promise to do better. Promises forgotten before I finished the walk from her house to mine.
Grandma lived in an old farm house, dusty from the coal furnace. The entire upstairs was filled floor to ceiling with clutter with only walkways. She was incapable of throwing anything away. She didn’t pay for the rural trash service we did but would bring over her trash once a month or so, a coffee can of bottle lids and such. Everything else was saved, re-used, recycled, or burned in the coal furnace.
Grandma also was a devoted organic gardener, though she never used that term. She just gardened as she’d been taught. Her big money maker was the asparagus patch. She left some to go to seed and it seemed like such an easy piece of work. The Popster says their was metal wreckage, can’s old car frames and the like, buried under the patch. That asparagus does best in poor rocky soils and that was their way of duplicating such in the rich black soils of my childhood.
Grandma also read Organic Gardening magazine, and because I have been a literary addict since the age of 4, I did too. Wasn’t aught else to read at Grandma’s excepting the Bible. I became intrigued by double digging even though I wasn’t able to put it into practice until my teen years when we moved into town and I got charge of the garden.
After we lost the house in Ida and the 9 acres of the family farm to the twin destroyers of rising diesel and deregulated shipping rates we moved into town. Ultimately we settled on Roeder Street and I put in the little garden bed behind the garage, mostly for tomatoes. The first year their was 4-6 inches of top soil but after close to 20 years of double digging the top soil went down two feet. I wish Grandma had lived longer, she died in my early 20s, when I was too young to look past the fire and brimstone and see the wealth of knowledge of days gone by. Nonetheless I learned a trick or two and for that I am thankful.
Up North Part 9 – Riding with Ray
There was a nice long ramp with a guard rail for sitting on the 75 South on-ramp. It was an easy curve so traffic was moving by quicker than I liked and yet not as quick as well. I was uneasy hanging out where pedestrians don’t really go with a big bag pack in sight of the bridge. Bomb threats and all, a newly uncertain world. Not wholly new but far more intense. I did not feel confident under the steely gaze of the guys in white pickups with Bridge Authority emblazoned on the door when they drove by.
Before I have even filled in all the letters on the Grayling Please sign a big rig pulls to the side and hits his breaks and stops about 20 feet behind me. There is a giant cross done in blue lights across the grill of the rig, there are 8 or 10 extra lights across the top, and it is flying too many flags to count. As I stash the sign (another hiker might find it useful) grab my pack and hoof it towards the door. I was taking in all of the WWJDs, including How Would Jesus Drive?, Praise The Lord and all manner of similar such things. I did not have time to take them all in. I knew what I was likely getting myself into and was grateful nonetheless.
I also took in the driver, an older red headed guy in a mesh cap. He was grinning and moving shit out of the passenger seat. The lanes were narrow and there was a lot of traffic and the threat of terrorism response coming down kept me hurrying. I opened the door, stepped up on the first step and poked my head in. “Here pass that in and I’ll stow it in back” and I handed him my pack and he tossed it in the sleeper.
I stood awkwardly on the step as the driver finished clearing off the last of his gear. It seems he was using it as more of an office but eventually I sat down and he pulled out on to the ramp. He said, “Ray” and I said “Michael” as we shook hands between him grabbing gears. Ray asked me where I was heading and to cover my bases in case he was going down 27 or 75, I said “Lansing or Monroe.”
“Well which is it?” Ray responded. As I thought about the best way to respond Ray said, “Well, I’m heading to Chicago out 10 so I can get you to Claire.
“Sounds great. I’d rather go to Lansing anyway. That’s where I live.” I started to warm up in the heat of the cab and started to unzip my jacket until i realized i had picked up a powerful odor and decided to leave it on. Ray then turned up the volume of the previously inaudible cassette player in his rig and I heard Carman of all people. The cheesiest, Las Vegas lounge lizard turned crooner for Christ that I’d ever heard. It was one I hadn’t heard, a patriotic number with God Bless America swelling in the background and Carman is doing some kind of stilted spoken word number about patriotism and such. “We need to stop handing out condoms in schools and start handing out Bibles.”
When Ray first turned up the tape he just looked at me and grinned. I didn’t noticeably wince, I don’t think, and tried to put on a face of bemused appreciation, although it was more for starting to ride down the Mackinac Bridge and at worst get preached at a little instead of sitting in fear waiting to get shook down as a potential terrorist. Carman could be OK if you can appreciate the utter ridiculousness of it. He could on occasion at least be clever in his word play.
Ray then turned down the music and opened up a conversation about how beautiful it all is. We talked about what it must have been like for the Indians crossing the straights by canoe. We talked about where we were from and Ray told me about his job a bit. He then said, “Let me show you this,” and pulled out a vinyl cassette holder with a capacity of twelve or so. Every cassette is Carman. “I’ve got them all” Ray grinned proudly. He went on with a disclaimer, a couple that were missing or only out on CD and he went on to tell me about his efforts to track down Carman cassettes.
I casually mentioned that I saw Carman in concert once and that I had a lot of respect for the fact that he does his shows for free. Ray was blown away and I could see an innocent jealousy slide across his face. “He has a powerful message for the young,” Ray told me.
I nodded and smiled and remembered my falling out with Carman. I had actually been a pretty big fan in my teen years. I had a keen appreciation for fundamentalist novelty music and Carman walked tall in that little niche. As I grew up though I came to challenge the ethnocentrism of my native fundamentalism and ultimately had embraced a larger view of truth. I had seen Carman as a penniless high schooler and gotten on a mailing list and had sent him a few bucks on occasion. Until I read in one his flyers that “nine out of ten missing children end up sacrificed on a ‘satanic altar’. My brother is a cop so I know.”
This ridiculous hyperbole, this incredible bald faced lie, so offended my sense of truth I had severed my relationship and never played his stuff. I didn’t even think about sharing this with Ray under anything but a direct question because hitchhikers are agreeable by nature and practice.
Then of course it came. “So since you’re a Carman fan I assume you’re born again?”
I told him “yes” more because I didn’t want to fend off Ray’s clumsy attempts to win me to The Lord though the actual answer to that question really requires more than a one word answer. I had in fact made that long walk to the altar on the seventh verse of a five verse song and asked Jesus to forgive my sins at the Monroe First Church of the Nazarene back in 1981. I still believe that “except one become like a little child one shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven”, I just think it may mean something more. So I took the easy way out and did not elaborate my conflictions on the term, besides in the moment I was kind of feeling it pretty heavy too. It had been a long week of thoughtful wonder in the wilderness and the unknown guarded over by wonder and naive enthusiasm.
Ray of course was delighted with yes. “I knew it all along. You see the Lord told me to pick you up. You may not believe it but I have been driving over the road for seven years and you’re the third hitchhiker I’ve ever picked up. Every one of them a Christian. I’m not supposed to have passengers in the rig, but my boss is a Christian too and he’d have to understand. When God tells me to do something I listen.”
I nodded agreeably wondering if I was going to get the follow up questions. “So where do you go to church ?” or try to pin you down on doctrine “so you must believe that Jesus is the only way to Heaven?” Instead Ray just started talking and told me his story, his testimony if you will.
It was the sixties and Ray was in high school and he had a sweetheart. This was all in Oxford Ohio and Ray was hoping to get a job at Miami University like his father and his grandfather before him. He wanted to marry his sweetheart but she wanted to wait until he was settled with the University. Before Ray got settled he got drafted.
He reported to his physical but failed the exam. It seemed that Ray’s mom had been doing his homework for a good long time. Safe with his classification of “too dumb to fight” he got his dream job driving truck for Miami U. and plans for the wedding move forward. Than this bucolic scene was rudely interrupted when Ray was drafted anyway.
Ray was classified as infantry material and shipped off to Germany where he was assigned to a tank battalion. Ray struggled through his tank training and was two instructional hours away from testing for tanker status he was reassigned to Vietnam.
Ray halted his narrative and pulled off at an exit to stop at his favorite truck stop. He bought us coffee and chatted up the woman at the counter. He looked at lights and bought two based more on his budget than what he wanted, which was all of them. I just followed, orbiting his energy and intensity and waiting to get back in the truck and hear the rest of the story, which he did, picking it up without a pause.
While home on leave he tried to marry his sweetheart but there was not enough time. They decided to marry after Ray returned from Vietnam. He was shipped to Vietnam and faithfully wrote, daily. After six months the letters from his sweetheart stopped. His mother then wrote that she had married another guy.
Ray took this badly and so became a machine gunner volunteering for every dangerous mission. “Whoo I kept my guardian angel busy Michael. When I arrive at the pearly gates my guardian angel is going to say, ‘boy you kept me busy’, yes sir.” Miraculously Ray made it back to civilian life, was pursued by a friend’s wife and married unhappily, but maintained it for the sake of the children, in spite of her infidelity.
Eight years later Ray ran into his sweetheart, divorced for four years now. Ray quickly followed suit and at last was with the only true love of his life. Four years later he lost her to cancer. “She’s with the Lord now dancing on streets of gold.”
It was really a sweet story and I didn’t add much beyond taking it all in as the miles flew by on our journey south. As we drove Ray pointed to a squirrel, dead on the side of the road. “Can I tell you a secret Mike? If I could ask the Lord for one gift it would be to raise those poor critters from the dead. They don’t know any better. They can’t read or nothing. Isn’t that foolish?”
“I don’t think that’s foolish at all Ray. Jesus himself tells us that ‘the Lord knows when even a sparrow falls’. I can’t help but think that he feels the loss. It’s refreshing really. Not enough Christians care about the critters and the rest of the natural world. Have you ever read Psalms 104 Ray?”
“Well I can’t say that I have off the top of my head.”
“Some call it the environmental psalm Ray. Its really cool and you should check it out. It says there” that the mountains belong to the wild goats”. We like to think it was all given to us to use as we please but that is not so. God made all of the species we are driving to extinction and the wild places that hold them for a reason and we are thoughtlessly and methodically killing off God’s creation for a profit.”
Ray perked up when I started rolling, giving my mini-sermon. I realized I hadn’t said more than a handful of words on our hours long journey and we had bonded in the telling of Ray’s story but I was a tabula rosa that Ray for the first time realized could talk. Ray asked again for the name of the psalm and he wrote it in his little steno pad he kept in his shirt pocket.
Ray then gave me a really searching look, paused, and said, “It says in the Good Book you never know when you ‘may be hosting angels unaware’”. He looked at me conspiratorially and I just nodded.
“Angel is just the Greek word for messenger Ray”. All too soon we were at the fork in the road where Ray went to Chicago and I continued south towards Lansing. Ray let me out on the side of the road ahead of where he was splitting off on 10. As Ray pulled away I walked away from the highway into the grass and sat down. It was another abrupt shift in environment and I wasn’t quite ready to deal. I sat in the grass and smoked a cigarette.
My thoughts turned to when I was in junior high and Cindy Ball who was the mother of a couple of my church buddies and would frequently give me a ride picked up a vagrant. She left us in the car while they had pie and coffee in a diner late one night, perhaps after church. She had quoted the same verse and was convinced of a miraculous encounter. I believed what I had said to Ray, anyone can carry a message. I tried to write a bit of verse as I stowed my stuff for walking to bolster my trepidation about being stranded on the junction of two highways and having to walk some up the interstate:
If you wanna be an angel
You don’t tell them your last name
That we’re all the same
Lost and confused
You give a few tricks for the game
Tell them they’re not to blame
When they’ve been abused
You listen more than you talk
Then show you’ve walked the walk
And have something to say
This bit came easy as I shouldered my pack and began making the difficult trek along the slope of the ditch, not yet wanting to dare the interstate.
I Kicked a Home Run (and i bought a house)
Wednesday I did the final walk through on the house and learned everything was a go for the Thursday closing. My realtor invited me to play kick ball with some of his friends which really turned into big fun. He said bring the leg of David Beckham and the spirit of a 7 year old, and it was a really fun group. I kicked a home run (something i never did as a 7 year old), which i got more excited about then the house, so homeownership hasn’t changed me yet. Yesterday I got the keys and signed my life away but the kickball is going to be a regular Wednesday thing so i think i’m going to be alright. This weekend I’m taking a long one and riding up with The Popster to MI/OH for my cousin’s wedding and to get a truck load of his and my stuff we abandoned with other family members when neither of us had a place. I’m still staying at Sarah’s till maybe the middle of next week but The Popster is probably drinking coffee at the new Trapp homestead right now.
a new poem
After reading John’s comment on his blog it got me thinking and remembering and I put together this little poem, which i feel pretty good about. I also have to give a nod to Hannah who suggested the novel whose name i used for my new poem. I also have to thank John for getting the registration up and going so if you have tried to make comments and couldn’t register, it now works, comment away.
A Good and Happy Child
Standing in the back
At the little clapboard church
In oversized rubber boots
And muddy from mushrooming
I felt ashamed and out of place
That I was dirty and poor
And my daddy was drunk
And he didn’t believe
In this shit anymore.
John was there too
And we never talked about
What we were feeling
But I bet his was
Anger and not shame
He was three years older
And his boots fit too
And he didn’t have a potbelly
He was trim like Dad
he coulda been a rider
For the Pony Express
But it was the wrong 70s
No doubt about that
And we both heard
That we were sinners
And I think we both believed
It was the LaSalle Gospel Tabernacle
A box of good news
Cuz this sinner
Learned to feel bad
And hence how to feel
And that sinner
Learned to spurn
The admiration of god and man
And hence how to be free
truck loading redux
Yesterday I helped my friends Terry and Kirsten move. They had a household’s worth of stuff to put in a 32’ rental so Terry could drive their stuff from the garage of their old house in Columbia Missouri to their new home of Corvalis Oregon. I always think of Corvalis as the last bastion of civilization because of David Brin’s The Postman. They kept the lights on when no one else did. Good science fiction serves as a thought experiment; a way to illuminate “what if”. Brin convinced me that when the shit hits the fan communities survive, not individuals, no matter how strong the redoubt or how advanced the warning.
I’d told Terry after he asked for help that I would be happy too, as loading trucks was something of a specialty of mine. My dad drives truck, when I was a youngster he used to haul furniture. When I was three years old he gave up his career as a meat manager at Foodtown to drive truck for Beacon Van Lines, after my little brother drowned in our swimming pool. It was a way to runaway without really running away. He took one trip on his own, discovered he was powerful lonely, and grabbed me up for the next one, and all the ones after that till the accursed state decided I should be in school “learning something”. By kindergarten I’d been to 43 states but my moving days getting limited to Summer it took me till I was 12 to get the 48 continental states, and I’m still waiting on Alaska and Hawaii.
My main job was keeping Dad awake on the long night drives. I used to sit “Indian style” on the doghouse, the plastic console covering the engine raised up between the seats in the old cabovers he drove back then. He would confide in me and share his plans and dreams, hopes and regrets and tell me about the world we were driving past and what excitements lay ahead. I would share questions, jokes and stories and my thoughts on all we’d seen and what lay ahead.
Driving truck is brutal. Getting paid by the mile, it’s the last piecework. There is heavy pressure, Darwinian survival pressure even, to drive fast and even more so to drive long. There was no getting off work, only getting laid over when there was no work. Furniture haulers have it the worst. Hump heavy shit all day into a metal oven whose ambient temperature is running 20 degrees higher than outside than drive all night so you can hump it back out the next day. I was not only told the value of hard work but also, observed it first hand, and was soon enough actively participating in it. Carrying lampshades and the like and learning quickly the art of staying out of the way led to ever increasing workloads. By eight I could handle an end of a dresser and we didn’t always hire an extra guy anymore. I felt pride and a sense of accomplishment. I realized quickly how lucky I was to see the world and all the different ways that people could live, later how rare to have my father’s undivided attention for hours and hours day after day as we drove across this grand land of ours.
I also learned a thing or two about the loading of trucks. Just as my dad would survey the assembled objects that were to be carefully arranged for the long haul, I surveyed their things and sketched a plan in my mind. “I want the washer and dryer and we’re going to have to unbury the deep freeze for the first layer”. I tried to explain the process so I wouldn’t sound imperious as I pretty much stayed in the truck building the first layers and calling out for what I needed next. Between layers we started roping box springs and mattresses as they became increasingly less elegant as the game of Tetris was played with increasingly bizarre shaped pieces.
Terry and Kirsten’s 4-½ year old son Kai started carrying up some of the lighter items. I called him sir and thanked him and marveled at the size of his carries as I remembered the many workmen doing over me when I was his age. I praised him and his parents in front of him for staying out from underfoot and following directions. Even Ben at 2 ½ waddled up an item or two, his pudgy toddler legs pumping up the sandpaper ramp like mine must have in those early days.
It brought a smile to my face and the heady joy of some serious nostalgia even in the hard work in the heat and the humidity. My carriers faded in and out as more helpers arrived and other helpers got engrossed in conversation or childcare as the day progressed, but I didn’t relinquish the loading job till the very end. I’d paid my dues carrying and watching Dad build the layers, thousands and thousands of layers, trying to anticipate what he was going to need next. I’d earned my “Alright I want those three purple tubs and all the rest of the heavy boxes. Then I’ll take those long handled tools.”
The saddest part of the day was when the layer got seriously funky and I had to say; “Lets keep the kids out of the truck now, its no longer safe.” Saddened to see my remembrances cut short I was still glad to be done before the serious heat of the day. Hopefully Kai will have as sweet memories of driving truck as I do.
Michael Trapp
7/29/07 1:00 pm CST
Multiconstruct 
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