How It All Began

It was a nice warm day in Spring, and I was nine or so, and this was a little more than a year after our big move from India--India to the States--a move that had represented a huge change for me and my family, and which I'll get to in time. That day though I was walking home from school, and this was St. Paul Minnesota, and the snow was pretty much done melting that year, after a hard winter. It was just in patches now, gritty and gray, rendering up its final troves of pull tabs, pennies, soggy rags. I found it a bit depressing--all that litter--although the shinier stuff I knew had some attraction for the crows. They stashed that stuff away in their nests for a rainy day, when I suppose it cheered them up just to have something beautiful around.

Those were hard winters in the late seventies early eighties, in part I suppose on account of natural variation, but also because one of those years (1980) Mt. St. Helens blew its literal top, pumping ash high up, way into the stratosphere, ash that acted as a sort of planetary parasol, blocking out enough of the sun to impart a brrrr factor to weather all around the globe, and especially the northern hemisphere. That was the year when all those little glass vials of ash went up for sale all over the country, so that you could own a piece of the stratosphere too, and maybe you remember that pair of photos published I think in the National Geographic: I mean the two sequential photos, of that woman skier standing on a mountainside a fair distance from the eruption. In the first pic she's upright, looking out at the picture-perfect scene of mountain^snowy mountain^snowy^mountain; then in the second pic, boom in the distance there's the eruption (a cloud of ash and smoke and steam) and where is she now, the skier? Well, she's sitting in the snow, hand to her head, just overwhelmed by the sight, and after all, why wouldn't she be? It seems reasonable, when a mountain blows up right in front of you, to have a seat. Take a deep breath. Regroup the mental committee.

(By the way, speaking of the mental committee, I'm big into the notion that, although we would like to think otherwise, our personalities are not as unified as we think. We're not machines made with a formal purpose to do this or that exact particular thing, but something more like weather systems or ocean currents always given to disorganization, distraction, and dissipation. "A bundle of vain strivings tied," was how Emerson described himself, which feels about right. So how do we humans change ourselves, when the need to do so presents itself? Or how do we even focus ourselves enough to come up with a stable set of convictions by which to run our lives? Well, the answer is, it's tough, although we are given some help, in part (paradoxically) by exactly what slapped the skier down that day: namely a  fundamental sense of smallness, mortality, and limits, of entropy and the proximity of ruin. That sense of limitation helps to focus us, because it reminds us we don't have forever. Stay with it, says the volcano. Think now, think here, think this is enough. Love what you have. Above all, away with the kind of ambition that seeks only to conquer, and in doing so, destroys.)

But again, it's Spring in St. Paul and I'm nine years old and school is out for the day and the weather is particularly fine and I'm heading home whistling a tune, and mind you it's not just the weather that has me in a good mood; the weather is just serving as my surrounding element and I'm moving sweetly through that surrounding element; I'm a psychological goldfish fanning my way through crystal clear waters of can-do optimism, nothing in my way; you see I'm going to build something, which...it's going to be spectacular. Able to break speed records in the alley. So fast in fact, that to brake it, I'm going to need a definite parachute.

In those days my family lived  in a duplex that belonged to my grandparents. My grandmother and grandfather lived upstairs, and we lived down below.  Which meant that their guests, when they came to visit, were more or less always our guests as well. The previous summer, for instance, when one of my sets of Uncles and Aunts had visited from Ohio, along with their teenage son Lars,  I'd gotten to see them all too. Or actually I had met my uncle and aunt, but not really Lars. Lars for pretty much the duration of the visit had been out in the garage building something; he was just this tinkering presence out there, this hidden-away force of popular mechanics. I had made certain inquiries, which my grandfather had taken it upon himself to answer. Lars, he said, had found an old lawn-mower engine and hauled it to the garage. Now he was attempting to mount it on a chassis, of his own design. In the end he'd have a go-cart.

Well by now Lars was long gone, back in Ohio, taking the lawn mower engine and chassis with him. Not that it mattered of course, because Lars was not the point. Lars had never been the point. The point was, what a wonderful idea of mine it was, to build my own go-cart! What a lucky inspiration of mine! And what better time to build that go-cart than the present!

I hadn't bothered with making a diagram. Drawing stinks and anyhow the trouble with drawings and diagrams is that the KGB could get its hands on them and hoodwink their  prisoners in the gulag or just their lackeys and goons to take your diagram and use it to build a cart of their own, thereby stealing all the credit for whatever revolutionary feature you'd included in the plan. Now how would that make you feel? Exactly. Far better to leave off the pictures and just make lists. And even then, in order to head off such grim Soviet eventualities, best leave off an item or two. Seriously, this is the real world folks.

In the end I had never even really made a list but in my head. First of all, number one, there were going to be four wheels. Second of all,  number two, a seat of some sort. Third of all, something to steer with, such as a steering wheel or a stick. Fourth of all, and I know I've already mentioned this, but there was going to be a parachute, and actually some serious work in regards to this item had been already been accomplished, by which I'm saying the material had already been procured. Most parachutes, I understood, were made of silk, but since I didn't really have daily access to silk, aside from my mother's good silks from India, which I didn't suppose she wanted applied to a motoring project, I had compromised and gone with a garbage bag. Heavy duty. Ten gallon. Two ply. I'd lifted one of these from where they were stored in my house, which was in a cardboard box under the kitchen sink. And now it was lying in my top dresser drawer, under my socks and underwear, safe and secure. Next item? 

Okay it was a nine volt. That was my plan, my brilliant notion, the weekly Hope diamond of my brain. Yes sir a nine volt, one of those rectangular jobs you could hold in the palm of your hand. I figured that, with the right sort of motor, I could just make the whole thing go on that. And I do mean the whole thing. All four wheels, the chassis, and the load of me on board. You see I figured why bother with all that gas and oil and junk when it was way better to go clean and electrical? The cell would be silver-colored. I would purchase it at the corner store down the hill, then stash it away along with my parachute in the dresser. Really I looked forward to being famous. At least locally so. Like an interview with WCCO. I liked those call letters. To me it appeared as if the C in the series tried twice to become an O, then finally managed to pull it off. Which was kind of heroic and inspiring.

There now, there I was, almost back at home, whistling my way up the five stairs inside the entry way. Whistling. Whistling.  I should mention that the only trouble about this whole nine-volt purchase business, was this: I wanted the nine volt that day, and if I was going to purchase the nine volt that day, I would have to ask for an advance. "Mom, could I have an advance on my allowance?" Or "Dad, could I have an advance on my allowance?" Normally you see I got my allowance only on Sundays, and this was a Tuesday, and the fact was that the day before--i.e. Monday--I had accidentally spent my week's supply of money on a Milky Way and some volcanic rock candy (cherry).  So there was that. On the other hand, what could you do, but try? I mean you never knew. Parents sometimes came through for you.

In any case, it was time (no doubt) to apply the sweet talk and the schmooze.

The door opened, according to the wishes of my hand.

"Mom? Dad?"

HB