A Tale of Dispossession

It was early 1977, and my family had just moved from South India with its temples and monkeys and identical black bicycles to...well, to Minneapolis, with its skyscrapers and stadiums and malls. So this was a big move. I was eight when we moved away. My brother, whose story I am telling here, was ten. And it must have been soon after our arrival that this incident occurred.

The house in which we were staying was located on 46th Ave South, and it belonged to my grandparents on my father’s side. We were borrowing it, which worked out fine, because the two of them were down in Texas for the winter so that my grandfather could play some golf. He had retired recently and wanted to play the amateur circuit. They were to be away till the late Spring.

Back then the streets of South Minneapolis were still lined with elms. The houses had canvas awnings and stucco siding, and if you went inside of them, they smelled like roast beef and potatoes. The names on the mailboxes were names like Ellingson and Starr and Tollerud and Arnold. And of course ours said Bjornstad.

The nearest heavily trafficked street (or “main drag,” as my father liked to say) lay only about six blocks away. This was Lake Street. And right across Lake stood a convenience store, a Seven Eleven. It was to this Seven Eleven that my mother sent my brother Kris, one winter afternoon.

“For dinner tonight, I need some curd,” she said, handing him some money.

Now most American readers would probably recognize the word “curd” as something out of a nursery rhyme and nothing more: “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey.” Otherwise the word here is rare and about as meaningful as “tuffet.”

But back in India, we had used the word practically every day, because practically every day, we ate the stuff it signified. Curd, when served with curry, cooled the mouth. Plus it added protein to the diet. And when you asked for it at the dinner table, you’d say “could you please pass the curd?” and it arrived in your hands and that was that.

Had my mother forgotten that Americans said “yogurt,” instead of “curd?”

Maybe.

Was she out of her mind anyway, thinking, back in 1977, that there would be yogurt available at the Seven Eleven on Lake Street and 46th? Probably. 

But in any case, my brother took her at her word that the errand was possible, and headed out to the Seven Eleven for curd. Though as he left, my mother made sure to tell him--and with some urgency--NOT to cross the street unless the pedestrian light said WALK. Was that understood? If it said DONT WALK, he was not to cross. Was that clear?

Yes he answered, of course he understood.

About thirty minutes later, having successfully crossed Lake Street on WALK, he was at the Seven Eleven, searching for curd. It was, of course, taking him some time. After all, the stuff he was searching for probably wasn’t there, and even if it had been, he was searching for it under the wrong name.

He doubled down on his efforts. He continued to search the aisles: The gum and candy aisle. The snack-cake aisle. The aisle with the batteries and the headache medicine. He also checked and re-checked the fogged-up refrigerated cases containing the ice cream in boxes and the milk in plastic jugs...

Finally the cashier asked what he was looking for.

“Curd,” said my brother.

“Curd, what’s curd?" asked the cashier. What, was the guy kidding? What was my brother supposed to say?

Well so there was nothing for it. My brother left the store, and went and stood on the corner of Lake and 46th, and waited for DONT WALK to turn to WALK. It was winter. It was cold. It was taking a long time.

It was still taking a long time...

The DONT WALK wasn’t changing...

He stood there for fifteen minutes or so, waiting for the light to change to WALK.

“But so why did that happen with the light?” I asked my brother. This was just last week when he told me this story--for what I think was the first time--some thirty-seven years after it happened.

“What do you mean?” he asked, “why did what happen with the light?”

“How come it said WALK getting to the store, but DONT WALK on the way back?”

“I have no idea.”

“And how come you didn’t just press the pedestrian request button to get the light to change?”

“Because I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Mom didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

I considered this for awhile. Then I said:

“Seems kind of existential.”

“How so?”

“Well, I’m thinking, if it had been me, I would have felt as if I was getting a DONT WALK signal because I didn’t have the curd. Because I hadn’t completed the quest.”

“That’s because you take everything so personally. You take the whole universe personally.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“Of course it’s true.”

“So what happened?”

“Dad came and got me. Mom must have gotten worried.”

“Figures, she didn’t come herself.”

“She was probably still fixing the dinner.”

So my brother told me this story just this last week. And I can’t get it out of my head. And what I’ve been wondering about it is this: how was his probable emotional state, as he stood on that corner, a ten-year-old, waiting, waiting, really all that different from mine now in middle age?

I’m serious.

Here I am, forty-five years old, and over and over again these days I get the feeling that the big quest on which I was sent when I was born, is just not going all that well. Whatever I was supposed to get; whatever I was supposed to achieve; whatever I was supposed to discover before turning around and heading back home--well I just don’t have it, or I just haven’t done it. I haven’t located and purchased the curd of life. And now it’s starting to get late and what do I do? How do I go back so empty-handed to mother earth? And I wonder if maybe others around me on this planet might feel the same way. Maybe, Dear Reader, you?

“So, what are you looking for?” people ask me, in so many words.

“Well,” I say, “you know, I’m looking for the really nourishing stuff--the curds of life.” And I’m picturing the sunshine and wind and rain. The laughter of friends. My own two hands in the rich black earth. Lots of conversations with family. Campfires. Hymn-sings. The superb pleasure of sitting in a circle in the living room, just passing around someone’s new baby, and commenting on how super-cute her cheeks are, while she gurgles back and smiles.

And of course I’ve HAD that. Sure, sure I’ve experienced all that. But the point is, that I want more of it, so much more, in fact, that it sometimes feels as though I haven’t even had what I’ve had. Plus, as my brother was learning that day at the street corner, the fact is that this whole project of curd isn’t something any of us can really do on our own. Like the angels that sing in choirs “alleluia” and the bees that dance in code, in the middle of a crowd of other bees, saying “here’s the honey, here!” we’re social beings. We're dependent on others for so much of the meaning in our lives. Which means that other people’s poverty of understanding and experience is our own. Inward, outward, material, imaginative, it doesn’t matter. Other people’s poverty is our own. 

But these ordinary pleasures: why, in our time, have they become so rare and undervalued? Heck, I have to admit to that I’ve undervalued them myself. I’ve allowed my impatience with people to ruin time spent with them. I’ve devalued and avoided physical labor, simply because it was physical and somehow therefore “below” me. And I believed for ever so long that the only thing wrong with my own privileged life as a citizen of the richest country on the planet was that the privilege wasn’t spread around quite yet. But time would take care of that, right? Time and science and progressive politics and maybe a smattering of the stock market and the Federal Reserve. Right? Right? 

I’m working on mending my ways, but it pains me to think of how much meaning and how much real honest life I’ve missed over the years on account of my participation in the "what’s-the-curd-of-life?" lifestyle. 

Time to unplug all that smart-stuff and put the i-phones in context. Time to cool it on the packaging. The pure convenience. The consumption. And really cool it. Time for life, real life. Life with the grit in the gears. Life with the grubs on the leaf. Life lived in connection with the earth. Time to encourage other people, by way of example, to do the same. 

Maybe my writing here at 9-volt amounts to a kind of penance for me. A way of confessing my collusion with the forces of depletion. A way of trying to nurture the many life-sustaining connections that for so long I have so thoughtlessly lived to prevent. A way of finding and staying happy exactly where I am, and not demanding more of what really does not inwardly satisfy. A way of accepting that others really do have what I need--that I just cannot find meaning on my own. A way of begging for my curds, with a bowl of words.

So how about it? Any curds for a needy nomad? Any curds? Anyone? Any curds?

HB

27 Questions Intended to Evoke a State of Wonder

1. Can any creature hear the fall of a snowflake? What could that sound like?
2. Concerning King Tut: was there, on the occasion of his funeral and interment, any music? Did anyone play a wrong note?
3. If, long long ago, there were dinosaurs at the south pole, and if, when the darker solstice came, they migrated northward to a place where the vegetation didn't die off (for lack of light), what was that like, a dinosaur migration? Could you feel it from a distance, in your feet? Those enormous creatures on the move? 
4. Considering the poet Sappho: when was the last copy of her poems lost? Or maybe does a copy of them still survive, somewhere in a remote desert cave--an ancient scroll waiting to be found and deciphered? Who will find it? When?
5. Was there really a Helen of Troy? To get a glimpse of her face, how many days would I walk?
6. Consider all the fine painters who died young: can we imagine a museum containing all the works they WOULD have produced, if they had been given another five years to create? A Louvre of what might have been! 
7. If I could come into possession of any lost  relic of the past--Marlowe's last quill, a butterfly specimen from the Jurassic, a bottle of Nefertiti's perfume, capped with an ivory plug...what would I want to have?
8. If the sum of human pain, over the full course of history, could be expressed as an alien planetary landscape, what would that planet look like?
9. Now what about a planet expressive of the sum of human joy?  
10. Now can we imagine a trumpeter who dreamed nightly that he was an astronaut on both these planets, and every morning picked up his horn to express them both?
11. Is wonder an emotion necessarily tied to melancholy? To what is no longer here? To what was never born? To what we know for certain cannot last?
12. Do spiders ever take joyrides on clock-pendulums?
13. If all mammals dream, what about prairie dogs? What do prairie dogs dream of?  Hawks, kestrels? Prairie dog love? Building new tunnels? Reinforcing old tunnels? Taking wrong turns in tunnels? Tasty roots?
14. What is the composite musical pitch of the buzz of a honey bee hive? Does that pitch differ from species to species and from hive to hive? Who sets the pitch? The queen? Or is this something the drones have a say in?
15. If robins can hear earthworms crawling beneath the ground, can earthworms hear robins walking above the ground?
16. What makes a soap bubble beautiful? Its perfect roundness, never obese? The floating nature of its existence? It's multi-colored swirlish nature? The shortness of its life? The eye of the beholder, itself a mortal sphere?
17. How did these questions get from me to you, really? Where did they come from originally? Where will they eventually go? Are they common property, or do they already belong to their ultimate destination? 
18. What is the ultimate destination of all our questions?
19. Consider: there are bonsai plants in Japan that have been handed down in families for generations. Presumably, some of these plants, if left un-watered even for a week or two, would die. Now, what is the most delicate plant handed down for the longest time?
20. Can the bonsai in constant need of care, be compared to human love, which must consistently be expressed, or else will die?
21. If yesterday I learned that an apple is really a kind of rose (in the same way that French is a kind of Latin) how can I live today not hungering for some other beautiful fact I do not know?
22. If emotions possessed texture, so that you could identify them by feel (like a pot of lemongrass or a swatch of corduroy) how, I wonder, would wonder feel? Smooth as polished gold? Somehow electric?
23. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, why only one eye? What's in the other eye?
24. Consider an old LP recording, featuring a string quartet, all four members of which are long since dead. This is recording of a late quartet of Beethoven. Now play it on an old turn table, and listen, and what exactly is happening here? Isn't this a kind of five-fold resurrection? A springing back to life of four people's passion and intelligence for the music of one who came even before them? 
25. Doesn't the needle, as it digs and scrapes the groove, amount to a sort of miraculous grave digger, undoing and transforming the effects of death, one of which is certainly silence?
26. How long can we keep listening like this?
27. Or is this deep attention to the music of the moment, the very meaning of forever?

      ?HB?

Your Farm is Beautiful

After all those months of snow and cold here in Valparaiso, and after a late short spring (you almost blinked and it was gone) it's good to have the family garden back. I'm especially enjoying the fresh vegetables. It's such a gift: to eat crisp lettuce again, cut just minutes ago from the garden bed, or to pop strawberry after ripe strawberry (that original earth-candy) into the expectant mouth and chew. Gardeners have a reputation for complaint and for seditious murmurings against misfortune, but the truth is that their investments of time and labor are in the end generally well-rewarded. Because even after the winter cold, the cabbage-worms, the wind and the hail, the digging mole and the nibbling rabbits--even after these have all had their say, usually the earth still finds a way to get its gifts through to us. Like a hand pushing sweet pulp through a sieve. 

Sometimes our rewards as gardeners arrive from unexpected sources and in currencies other than food. Such a thing happened to me just the other day. Our vegetable garden is bordered on the west by an alleyway, and about a week ago, as I was weeding one of our potato beds, a woman came along the alley, walking a small dog. She paused and looked over the picket fence: at the sweet peas climbing their graph-like trellises of twine and the young squash-vines just starting to crawl. At the tall wispy asparagus leaning in chorus in the breeze and the tomato plants vigorously climbing their cages. At the white-flowering buckwheat all abuzz with bees and little golden flies.

"Your farm is beautiful," she said.

Now to my ears, this was two compliments rolled into one. First, I was happy enough that she had called the scene "beautiful," and I told her so. Way too many people, I said, think that vegetable gardens have to be dowdy. We at Sunnyside think otherwise. And we strive to prove our point. 

Second, I was really touched that she had called our garden a "farm." "Your garden's beautiful," would have been a nice enough compliment. But to call it a farm! That was really extravagant praise. It was like tossing a bouquet of carnations for me to catch, even as she applauded.

Her point of course was not that our six hundred square feet of vegetable beds actually amounted to a farm. Or that we were actually making a living cultivating our garden. Her point was that to her it was obvious that our garden wasn't just a hobby or a pastime--a fun little extra--but a place and a pursuit approached with sustained commitment and affection. Something integral to our lives. Something like the real professional thing. 

I think that when it comes to encouragement, almost nothing beats a compliment from a stranger. Such compliments fire up the mind. They charge up the will. They confirm us in our principles. They remind us that what may feel like a solitary pursuit--in this case a low-carbon lifestyle--is often enough actually a public performance. The neighbors really do take note. They come and see. They pass by and admire. And sometimes, in certain happy moments, their appreciation comes full circle back to you.

I of course thanked the alley-walker for her compliments. I told her that it made me happy that other people could enjoy looking at our garden, even as we enjoyed eating what it provided for us. She told me to have a good day and then moved on, her terrier in the vanguard sniffing the gravel and jingling its tags.

Well. Time to get back to those weeds.

HB

Facing the Music

A few nights ago, I watched a film called A Late Quartet. I don't intend to review it here, though I will say I found it consistently interesting, and would recommend it to anyone who wants to see an intelligent film about Western classical music, and what it's like to take part in the work of perpetuating that great tradition. For the purposes of this post, though, I mention the film because it served as the prompt for the thoughts that follow.

The story of A Late Quartet follows the members of a fictional string quartet, called The Fugue, which has been playing together for some twenty-five years, but which finds itself suddenly in the midst of a staffing crisis. Its cellist has just been diagnosed with Parkinson's. His continuing with the group is out of the question; drugs might help him for awhile, but not for long; at most for another season. He wants to leave with dignity and not out of embarrassing necessity, and so he recommends that, before his playing gets any worse, the quartet immediately replace him with a cellist who has substituted for him before, and who he believes would do beautifully. His first desire is to see the life of the group continue on. 

I happen to think that the world is facing a set of circumstances a great deal like the loss of a cellist to a string quartet. We're losing something basic, something fundamental, something that touches on every aspect of our civilization. Something serious enough to stop the music as we know it. We're losing the cheap resource base on which we depend. We're losing easy oil, cheap ores, fertile soil, and clean water. And these are not extras. These are necessities.

Now there's plenty of denial about all of this still, but the truth is that the game of cheap resource extraction was up about ten years ago now, when the general price of commodities (for the first time in a century) began to rise instead of fall. And while it's true that we are a long ways from having extracted all of everything--we'll never get there, thankfully!--we have come to certain limits of expense; we have come to the place where, if we want more of any given resource, we are going to have to pay progressively more for the work of getting it out; and every year, more and more.  

Already an ounce of gold costs more to extract and refine than it can command on the market, even at today's historically high prices. Already groundwater is running dangerously low everywhere from Saudi Arabia to India to the American West (and again the costs of alternatives such as desalination are prohibitive!). Topsoil is blowing away at alarming rates, so that the cost of growing food on less and less fertile soil can only go up. Fisheries are collapsing as well; recently a single Pacific blue-fin tuna sold for more than a million dollars! So. Maybe our present way of life can continue for a season or two. That is, maybe for a time, we can blind ourselves to the facts and manifold facets of decline, and continue to live as though our present pace of consumption can continue forever. Eventually though, a reckoning will come. Eventually we'll have no choice but to change. And we'll have to learn to live with less. And live more lightly on the earth.

Here's a short list of what will strike many people as the downside of change. None of this is predictive; it is diagnostic. All of it is already taking place, at least in the developed world. 

• Rising prices for basic necessities, as measured against people's ability to pay for them, and not necessarily in the official inflation rate.
• Widespread break-down of urban infrastructure. 
• Declining real wages.
• Changing employment patterns: with fewer and fewer people participating in the labor force, and more and more of those who do take part, doing so part-time only.
• A rise in the underground un-taxed economy, say in bartering for skills, or renting out properties informally for vacationers, or living with family. 
• Less travel.

Here are some changes that are more in the embryonic stages, but will probably become much more a part of our lives as time goes on. 

• More gardening and local food production. Not just as a hobby, or because it's green and progressive, but really out of a practical need to feed ourselves.
• Less money spent on research and development, in everything from cancer research to nano-technology.
• In general a greater sense of distance--with geography making a difference again, in world trade, for example.

How will people react to having to make these necessary changes? Well in general, I suppose it makes sense to say that they will not like them. Will resist them. Will continually want to believe that limitless progress and economic growth is right around the corner.

There is an instructive scene in the movie, in which our cellist attends an exercise class for Parkinson's patients. The instructor opens class by saying that, with Parkinson's, everything in the patient's life contracts and bunches up: the shoulders hunch, the handwriting shrinks, the hand can no longer palm the grapefruit. She then leads the class in stretching exercises, the point being, as she says, to take control of the symptoms. To face the facts of contraction, and do your best to deal with them. To take responsibility for the only body you have, shaky as it is, hunched as it is becoming.

The class begins the stretching exercises, with every student taking part except the cellist and another man behind him with a cane. The man with the cane seems oblivious, and our cellist can only look on in horrified disbelief. He stares and stares, unable to get himself to do the stretches. It's a painful scene. And yet later it becomes clear that he's learning to cope, and with a kind of noble humility. In particular we see him in a harness on treadmill. Just walking walking walking--into his new reality.

I see much my work as a householder at Sunnyside as a sort of analogue to the treadmill scene, though I will say I consider my own work a great deal more cheery! Still, it's work! Learning to garden. Learning to preserve food. Learning to do with less. Learning to say "I don't need that," or "I can do that myself," or "instead of this, I'll do this." Part of the trouble with the work I'm describing is that the necessity for it isn't always viscerally clear yet. My family, if it wished, could spend more freely. We could turn the thermostat back up to where it was, say, five years ago in the wintertime! We could drive a lot more. We could decide the garden was just too much work and turn it all back to grass. And to entertain ourselves and maybe to impress the neighbors, we could buy a lot of things that we don't need. 

But all that would be to move backwards, not forwards, into a world in which it's time (at long last) to share with the poor. Time to care about the effects of our lifestyle upon the life systems of the planet. Time to labor to add beauty and life to the world, not consume the same beauty and life. Time to accept the reality of a grand universal contraction, and learn what the new situation, however painful, has to teach us. 

I hope you consider joining me.

HB

Until Saturday the 18th!