Tonight was a typical night, at least for this summer. The boy and I had dinner – tonight was leftovers, he had steak, I had monkfish – but it was later than usual as he had spent the late afternoon swimming with his friend. We watched the last bit of a Pixar film and by that time it was within an hour of lights out, so he got his second hour of screen time – playing an interminable online game where one solves idiotic puzzles and logic games to get points to, in his case, build an airport – before brushing his teeth and going to bed. He gave me a big hug, told me he didn’t have any clean clothes – I reminded him he had a giant pile of clean clothes that he had forgotten to bring up to his room and put away properly – he told me okay – we hugged some more, the light went out, and I left the room. I checked again in 15 minutes and it was silent, completely silent, the way only eight year olds can be silent when sleeping. If he had been trying to fool me, there would have been sound.
Continue reading “Space”Sleep
Every night is different. Some nights, the boy goes loco after having too much cookies and cream ice cream. Some nights, the dog goes loco for no reason at all, chasing endlessly around the stairs and the back room and the front porch, chasing what, an imaginary squirrel? a ghostly deer? Some nights nothing happens at all, and the boy goes to sleep quickly after talking about the Hardy Boys, and the dog quickly relieves herself in the front lawn and hurriedly comes back inside, and I watch Hogan’s Heroes and compose myself ready to bed.
Risk tolerance
I’m on the first business trip since the Covid-19 thing began, back in Atlanta for a series of meetings, and I’ve been struck by the contrasts. The airports are quiet in a way I’ve never seen in my life, and I’ve been more or less constantly in the air since I was eighteen years old. There is less ambient noise but you can hear individual conversations much more readily because when people do talk with one another, they have to raise their voice to be heard through their masks. And everyone is in a mask once you enter the air travel zone: it’s not like out on the street in some places – Atlanta prime among them – where only a minority are wearing them in public.
The race for capital
The inequalities built into the United States have mystified me for a long time. I was born and raised in Maine, a poor state and, incidentally, the whitest state in the Union by a wide margin (well, maybe Vermont can compete). We were taught that black people had been – and continued to be – discriminated against by society from an early age; I can remember Mr. Casey in seventh grade – he had an amazing moustache, and the girls all had a crush on him – writing outlines on a transparency projector about Martin Luther King, and about equal opportunity, and about bias and Native American oppression and slavery and the Klan. I had good teachers: they told me that the story of America wasn’t a great one, even if it had some good moments, and that we all had a responsibility to make up for the evils of our past.
The moment you knew
The moment I knew – well, the first one – was at a good old fashioned proper funk-ska album release party in Ballard. She had been talking for awhile about wanting to go out dancing – not big band swing dancing, but proper dancing, she wanted to smoke up ahead of time and then just let go – and while I didn’t need to smoke up to dance, I went along with it. It was a great band, locals, Blacks and Whites together, the Whites mostly on horns but not exclusively, the Blacks on vocals but not exclusively, and two drummers that were clearly on something. Three hours of funk with a ten minute intermission where we went outside and had a cigarette, and in between, just dancing – release, full on, full out, jump up and up and get down, and take it down Timmy, and originals and James Brown and you couldn’t have stopped me with a blackjack and a shiv.