Watermark

It is with amusement -- I'm sitting here grinning -- that I consider how just now, at the nadir of my confidence in Buddhist institutions and in some of its claims, I have been busily preaching the Dharma in several unfortunate people's comment-threads. Who am I hoping to convince? Three guesses.

Well. The rose blossoms across the sky.

I say, I know this, or I know that, but I don't. There's the hugeness of the sky, and the sweetness of the rose, and beyond that, who cares? Not me.

Ring the bell once, twice, three times. Bow to the Buddha, bow to your own awakened mind. Suppose you are looking at the blue sky through a fragment of blue glass. And someone says: which blue are you looking at?

You remember, from the high places, you look down on the western sea, at about five o'clock? And it's nothing but shimmering. Like that. And you realize that the sea isn't made of water at all -- what a ridiculous error! -- it's actually made of light, and the light is made of metal. Steel, maybe.

And then when the sun drops over the horizon you forget all this. You look at the gray heaving sea, and you say -- oh yes, how foolish! the sea isn't made of water; it's made of fog. And the fog is made of dirty rags. Everyone knows that.

Knell of the Magi

Flames swirl, and servants
Lay three shrouds in the coals;
A shivering brotherhood
Shudders and swells in the shoals.

Sweet burning, the purling
Extravagance of light;
Endwarped cedarwood,
Curling and turning to white.

At play in the plunge of fire,
In the glowing shallows of hell,
Still longing to be understood,
Each pulls at the tongue of a bell.

Some Great Sudden Hest

And in thy face strange motions have appeared,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest.

All of Oregon seems to be laboring under some great sudden hest, this weekend: a damp hundred-degree heat and a gray haze; a breathless restraint, a sullen crawling yellowish heaven. What treason the sky may be contemplating, I can't say, but its dependents must fret until they know.

My mood is unsuited to this oppression. I, for once, am breathing freely. I've made a rash decision and scrambled on board a ship bound for God knows where; but now that we're fairly underway, and land is disappearing astern, there's no point in regret, and no way to second-guess my decision even if I wanted to. Obeying a great sudden hest of quite a different sort.

Among my rash acts has been applying to massage school, to begin evening classes in the Fall. I have an interview there Thursday evening. Suddenly all sorts of unthinkable things are thinkable. A binding has broken loose, since Montreal, and I am unstuck.

Also unsecured. I've thrown up all my sangha work. I am taking refuge in Samsara; and no doubt Samsara is already thinking of ways to let me down. But at present I feel I simply have to throw a tuft of grass up for the wind to catch, follow it, and take the adventure God sends me.

Campus

A perfect day, sunny but not too hot. I bought a sandwich, which they gave to me in a bag, and then I climbed a grassy embankment, and dodged across the five-lane road. There was a campus here that I'd always meant to visit. I knew they held community college classes; I'd considered brushing up my Spanish here. And there were offices of the University of Oregon System and a couple high-tech training institutes. Well and good. A campus, I thought. I'll sit in the shade, eat my lunch, and watch the students walk by.

There was a banked wall of lawn and then a moat of parking lot -- for which you needed a quarterly pass, I presumed to keep interlopers such as I from just drifting in -- which surrounded the campus on all sides. The lot was more than half full. But there were no students to be seen. Half a dozen very large buildings, inscrutable in their reflective, smoked-glass windows. Evidence of a couple hundred people having arrived, in the form of empty cars. But not a soul in sight.

I walked clear around the campus. In that time I saw exactly four human beings. Outside a job-training office a young woman sat on a bit of lawn, spreading sunblock on her bare legs. Outside a -- what? an industrial arts building? -- a stout young man hesitated, casting anxious surreptitious glances at me. Around by the System offices a tall woman walked briskly, talking into her cell-phone, also glancing sidewise at me, determined not to meet my eyes. And around the back, marked "staff parking" -- the servants' quarters, by the dumpsters -- an anomalous woman in heels and dark elegant suit strode past me, rummaging in her leather bag.

There was a shady bit of lawn. I did sit down and eat my sandwich. But a crawling horror of this place began to prickle around my neck. To walk from a sandwich shop to the campus -- my subversive scheme for visiting the campus even though I wasn't purchasing any education -- involved crossing pristine, never-trodden lawns (presumably soaked in weed-poison, to maintain that unearthly green purity), and then crossing the parking lots to arrive at the first sidewalks. No sidewalks led from the street into the campus. Why would they? Who would do such an outlandish thing as walk into the campus from the road?

I had thought that the place and its parking were designed to keep me out of some inner place, some courtyard where students laughed and played. I could understand this plan, even if I didn't approve of it, and planned to flout it.

But there was no inner place. There was no place at all, here. They were not keeping me out -- there was nothing to keep anyone out of. This was not a creation of over-controlling authority. It was the naturally occurring loneliness of the suburbs. Nobody had to encourage these people to dart from car to classroom, from classroom to car. They did this by instinct. I had pictured questioning, or at least flustering, authority; but I was the one getting flustered.

Back across the banked pristine lawn, the five-lane road, and down the banked pristine lawn on the other side, that walled off the mall parking lot. Into my beat-up van. I drove back to work -- driving in through yet another wall of poisoned grass, and into yet another moat of parking lot. Not a soul. This is how you do it, I thought to myself, not very coherently, as I parked. This is it. This is how you train people to drop bombs on civilians. If they're lonely enough they'll do anything.

A New War

Here, slightly edited, is part of mail I sent today to a friend I've been in some conflict with since the latest fighting began in the Mideast. I copy it here in hopes that it may make my otherwise (I'm afraid) erratic and difficult behavior more intelligible.

I should know by now that when new war starts, I should simply leave cyberspace for a week or two. The hatred is just too much for me, it's so toxic to me, and I start thrashing, and trying to make everbody who comes down on one side see the other side with love and understanding, and it's just stupid, the worst possible time to try to do that. I can't seem to help myself, though. I forget -- since I don't do television and only occasionally do radio or newspapers -- that I'm talking to people with the images fresh in their minds: they're seeing the children bleeding in their parents' arms, and that's what's important: preachy little buddhists are very far away and very unimportant.

Shorts

There's a short short of mine up at Qarrtsiluni, titled the 5th of July. The latest Qarrt topic is turning up some really interesting stuff. Extra credit: devise the plot of the novel that would have as integral parts all of these short shorts.

Black Oaks

Black oaks against an intensely blue sky, their leaves glittering and gleaming. I don't understand how they do that. From this distance you would think that each node of each leaf was inset with a fragment of mirror, catching the sun. Look at a single leaf up close and it's a dull, dark green -- no luster, no shine. How do they shimmer and sparkle like that?

I walked down to look at the brown water of Cedar Mill Creek. The blue-black backs of the swallows shone like tempered metal as they flickered, hunting, under the bridge, under my feet. Directly below, the reflection of the noonday sun was as impossible to look at as his counterpart in the sky. A predatory dragonfly skimmed the water, a hungry blue-green jewel.

Love. Love and hunger, hunger and love: I think of nothing else these days.

All that wanting.
All that wanting.

A fragment of Cyndi Lauper floats through my head:

We think we know what we're doing
We don't know a thing.

Burned by the sun above, and the sun below. A man with thinning hair needs to learn to wear a hat, on a day like this.

On either bank the young thickets of blackberries grow strongly, fiercely, exulting in the light, pushing their iron thorns out above, thrusting their iron roots out below. They mean to keep what they have taken.

Because it's all in the past now
Money changes everything
Money
Money changes everything.

Winter will come here, whether we believe it or not. The gentle rain, the endless shifting silver clouds. The sky will learn softness and mercy. The creek will whisper in a happy undertone to the reeds. The colors will fade to the grays and drabs and tans of my childhood, and the only brilliance will be the young green of soaked grass, the dripping of holly leaves.

Love turns into hunger, and hunger into love. They must contain each other somehow. But turning this dusky matte oak-leaf in my fingers, I can't imagine how.

Hurry

I resolved this morning that today -- just today -- I will not hurry. I'm finding it a queerly difficult vow to follow, and queerly rich to observe. I had not realized how much of my day I hurry, how much, in various ways, I strain to somehow push something faster than it wants to go. It does not, I think, make anything move much faster, but it does cloud and fret and abrade my mind.

-------------------

Is nature more real than the human, and is the body more real than awareness?

Put baldly, both questions are clearly stupid, questions to make a philosophy professor shrug his shoulders impatiently. I am not interested in the correct answers to these questions -- if I thought they were available, I suppose I would be -- but I'm interested in my kneejerk answers to them, which are yes, and yes.

Put the questions a slightly different way: Is nature more important than the human? Is the body more important than awareness?

Or put the questions yet another way: Is the human derived from nature? Is awareness derived from the body?

Again, these are stupid questions. They make assumptions that are false: among them, that these are discrete categories, when they're clearly overlapping. And these questions beg other questions: what is real? Important to whom? And, most important of all: why do you ask?

-------------------------

Three baby crows have fallen from their nest above our front yard. Two have come to grief: one hit by a car, one killed by a cat. The third made its way to the back yard -- a dangerous be-catted place. Martha, who always prefers action to waiting, and who learned from the Audobon wildlife people that the handling of baby birds does not, as folk tradition avers, put their parents off them, took the baby crow and put it on the trampoline, and sealed off the entrance: with high netting all around, but open above, it was cat-proof but crow-accessible. A clever solution.

But not one that pleased the mother crow. She was infuriated, diving repeatedly at Martha and screaming at her. Martha couldn't step out of the house without the crow denouncing her in vehement shrieks.

After a day of this, Martha told me, "I think she wants me to put the baby back down in the yard."

I disagreed. I thought she just wanted us to leave the baby alone and stay the hell away.

The next day, after being scolded all morning by a mother crow that refused to eat our Judas dog kibbles, Martha took her life in her hands, acted on her intuition and took the baby off the trampoline and put it in the bushes behind.

The mother crow's fury abated. She complained, of course -- you're not a crow if you don't complain -- but the edge was off it, and that afternoon she came to the back porch for kibbles, meeting Martha's gaze with some embarassment (which crows express by repeatedly wiping their bills against something.) And next day, all was back to normal.

Meeting for Lunch

I took the train into work yesterday. The drive generally takes forty-five minutes; by train it took a little over an hour going in, and an hour and forty-five minutes coming back. Not sure I can face adding an hour to my commute time. Though that does include twenty minutes' walking, which doesn't count as time lost. Still.

Anyway. The interesting thing is how vulnerable I felt, being un-carred. Imperceptibly I've become accustomed to having that metal shell around me when I'm out and about. I've been working in the suburbs for years now, and all my walking and bussing habits have gradually disappeared. I've become car-dependent. It's insidious.

I've speculated before about the attraction of cars having more to do with territory than with convenience. It's a little private space of your own, travelling around with you. The speed at which you travel confers a kind of anonymity. So you're picking your nose at 158th avenue; who will ever know it was you, by the time you get to 182nd? Everything goes away. The world is disposable. But this little lair, with whatever comforts most signify to you, it does accompany you. A room of your own.

Recently, rather than going into the Burgerville to have lunch, I went through its drive-thru, and then stopped in the grocery-store parking lot to eat my hamburger in my car. It is not a pleasant parking lot, of course. There are no pleasant parking lots. It's a field of asphalt with cars parked in it.

Even the interior of Burgerville is a far pleasanter place. What impulse drove me to eat here? Just that it was my own nest, my little six square yards of territory. I had escaped from the public space of cubicle-land. I wanted to be in my own space, however unpromising that space might be. I cranked up my radio, unwrapped my hamburger, and ate.

When I was done I licked my fingers, wiped them, crumpled up the paper bag with the hamburger-wrapping and napkins inside -- with a strong twinge of environmental guilt -- and put the car in reverse. Time to drive back to the office.

For the first time I focused on the car directly facing mine. It wasn't empty. Through the reflections on the windshield I could see a woman, dressed in office casual, hunched in the driver's seat. Her head was bowed over a little cardboard tray of french fries. I could see her tousled brown hair, but not her face. She was plucking the french fries up in bunches, and loading them methodically into an unseen mouth. She didn't look up as I backed my car away from hers.

Maybe I will start taking the train.

Answer to Dweezila, 5

Jean commented, You do realise you have to carry on now? Having got this involved, we need to know the whole story of how you got from there to here. I falter, at that. How did I get here?

I know things that looked like turning-points at the time. I view them with some skepticism. People love to find turning points. Decisive battles. Reigns of great kings. Declarations of rights. History, and personal history especially, is usually considerably more messy and inconclusive than that.

But here's a thing like a turning point. It was summer. I must have been thirteen. I stood in my bare feet on the sidewalk in front of my stepfather's house -- my house. The cement was already hot in the morning sun. Ants hurried erratically past, chasing their shadows.

I said aloud, "I have to get out of here within a year."

Or at least somebody said it in my voice, and I knew it was true. I had to get out.

"She may die. I still have to get out," said the same voice.

My mother's second marriage went bad faster than her first. She had made friends in graduate school, and her friends didn't like her husband -- and as always, she was fatally susceptible to other people's stories; their story was that this was a sensitive woman's unhappy marriage to a boorish alcoholic. It was not, to my mind, particularly true. Mostly what was true was that they -- and she -- were lefty New-Agey idealistic psychology students, and he was a phlegmatic, no-nonsense, Republican engineer. And she knew the way out of a marriage, now, which must have sped things up.

So anyway, after a brief disorienting time of having my mother energetic and happy, we were back to what I knew as real life: slow revolution around a center of brooding despair, an implacable machine for devouring chocolate, gazing blankly at the television soap-operas. The spell of depression was broken from time to time fits of sudden extravagant affection. She would seize me and hug me. I was the apple of my mother's eye. I was cheerful and encouraging, affectionate and sweet. The one unbroken piece of her life. I was not at all sure that she would survive, if I left home. Suicide -- never talked about -- hovered in the corners of the house. I might be abandoning her to die, if I went away. I looked at that and decided to go.

My sister had been away for two years already at a couple different free schools. My brother was sometimes at the house, more often not -- drinking heavily, bussing dishes at a steak house, showing up at random in the early-morning hours on his motorcycle. Sometimes he had his own apartment, sometimes not.

Next year my sister was going back to the New School, in Spokane, one of those free schools. I sounded the idea that I might go too.

I was only thirteen. But I was going to hell in a handbasket. I had always been an A-and-occasional-B student, but in the last two years my grades had plunged to C's and D's. Nearly flunking some classes. And I was starting to get in trouble sometimes. There was not, my mother may have thought, much to lose; it was worth playing a longshot that a radically different environment would straighten me out.

I was in terror -- as I always have been since -- of talking to strangers on the telephone. Then as now I will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it. My mother eventually agreed that I could go to the New School. But only if I was willing to make the phone call to arrange it.

I made the phone call. Stammered my way through a conversation with the director of the school. I got out.

I was to spend a couple more summers, and one strange twilight year, my sixteenth, living with my mother, back in Eugene, in a big empty house on the heights above the Willamette River. But in my mind I always think of myself as having left home at age thirteen. I left home the moment I decided to let my mother die.

Gazing

Dave reprinted one of my favorite posts of his -- he had forgotten it, he says, but I had not -- which chimes interestingly with the self-portrait project: Looking Ourselves Over. I am apparently, by Apache standards, egregiously a whiteman. Almost everything irritating that whites do, I do to even greater excess (well, except for speaking rapidly and aggressively). Particularly looking long and directly into someone's eyes.

Long ago and far away, when I was in graduate school, I used to have coffee sometimes with a friend, and we'd talk about this and that, gossip about department doings and so on. I'd just drop by the coffeeshop and see if she was there; if she was, I'd sit down and have a cup. It was an easy and rewarding relationship.

One day I sat down, and she was looking bemused. "Just before you got here, the girl at the counter asked me if we were in love," she said. "She said we were always gazing into each other's eyes."

She laughed, and added (with what seemed to me unnecessary emphasis), "I said NO!"

The long night of childrearing descended on me, then, and since I had no social life how much I looked into people's eyes was not an issue. But recently, emerging slowly from my burrow as I have been, it's a matter of interest again. I had lunch with a woman last month, and I thought of my grad school friend, and of the Apaches, so I paid some attention. Sure enough, I was gazing into her eyes. I consciously did a bit less of that, turned my body slightly aside, looked elsewhere. Every time I checked, though, there I was again. Violating the Apache sense of decorum and probably even the Portland one. Gazing. It's not easy to shift such habits. It will take some mindfulness and practice.

I can trace it back. For many years of my life the only relationships I was at all interested in having were love-relationships. I don't think I ever learned the body language of friendship. So I treat everyone as a lover. No wonder I make hetero men uncomfortable. (Why, I wonder, do I not make lesbians uncomfortable? I don't seem to. I'll have to ask.)

I always needed to push. The Apaches have that tagged right. It is aggressive, challenging, to lock onto people's eyes like that. Even -- or maybe I should say especially -- when it's an affectionate gaze. I'm demanding more than my share.

Measure for Measure

... God in my mouth,
As if I did but only chew his name,
And in my heart the strong and swelling evil
Of my conception.

Along with Richard II, it is my favorite: Measure for Measure. It is neither wise nor satisfying. Its end is ludicrous, or horrible; everything holy is trampled on. The Duke of Dark Corners is indeed God as Renaissance England conceived him; righteous, capricious, irresponsible, putting people through agonies for their own unexplained and unexplainable good. Present when he likes and absent when you call on him. Never apologize, never explain. God learned his statecraft from Disraeli.

Death is a fearful thing. There is nothing edifying in this play. To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot. We are reduced to the brute resistance of Barnardine: I'll not consent to die today on any man's persuasion.

Why do I love this horrible play? Because it's Shakespeare at the ragged edges, Shakespeare out of control. There's no play that better reveals the strange vampiric opportunist that drove the Lord Chamberlain's men. It solves nothing. Shakespeare doesn't fall back on the empty grandeur and stagewide desolation with which he brilliantly and dishonestly begs the question in Hamlet and Lear. There's nothing here but the poet, the man who can't stop seeing.

Trees

All night long, the trees have been writhing, quarreling, pushing and shoving, showering down leaves and twigs, pacing back and forth in their narrow lanes between the sidewalks and the streets. They stop me to earnestly explain things in their whispery voices. When I can't understand them they become agitated. They shiver and sway and complain.

I go walking beside them, trying to explain in my turn, but my mouth is all full of a huge, meaty tongue; saliva drips from my mouth, but no words will come out. The trees moan in frustration, fretting the bark of their limbs together. I want to reassure them, but they point at my mouth and shudder. I realize I'm soft and repulsive to them, as a slug might be to us, and that my huge tongue is for them the crowning horror. I want to explain to them -- it's not always like this, I don't know why it's this way, this isn't how people usually are -- but I can't get intelligible words past it, only slaverings and grunts come out, and the trees crowd away from me, muttering in alarm.

At dawn they get quieter, and knowing they will not be awake long, I kneel down in the muddy track -- they've churned the ground all up with their roots -- and I try to draw them pictures in the dirt. They all lean over, shaking their heads. Slowly my tongue shrinks, and their movement dwindles. I make as if to stand up, but I find my knees have take root, tendrils run out from them far under the sidewalk, under the street; there are little trickling waterways down there that they find with delight. Now my tongue is gone. I can only whisper and sway. The talk of the trees is almost intelligible to me now, but even as I understand them their voices die away into a faint murmur. With a sigh I lift up my arms. It's more comfortable that way. As the morning gathers around us, my fingers grow longer, split, grow longer still; and then without warning they burst into leaf.

Only Light

Threading my fingers through your hair. The warmth of your scalp, like sun-warmed metal, glows against my fingertips. Words, words spoken, words written, scatter from this central point, dissolving. They spin slowly away. Even desire stops pulling. There's only light.

Suddenly I'm walking alone in a wide place. The smell and sound of the sea, just out of sight. I'm not sure what door I've gone through. I'm a girl walking in the wind. Not really alone. A hint of the future shimmers somewhere. Also out of sight.

I kiss the corners of your eyes. For a moment everything fits together. The smell of you, the smell of the sea, your breath on my face, the wind off the headland. The taste of salt on my lips.

I climb over the crest, and down below is the endless wrinkled sea, flecked with grains of pollen from the blossoming sun. The wind threads its fingers through my hair. Kiss me. Kiss me, again.

Quilting

The idea is stuck in my head, like a burr in a sock -- the idea making a book out of some of my blog posts. It would be like a quilting project. I have all the made squares; I just need a frame, and to arrange them so that the colors please each other at the edges and the whole thing makes a satisfying pattern.

It does not strike me as a good idea, but that doesn't make it go away. Its first incarnation was the thought that I could make a poetry chapbook. I like some of my poems, now. But I gathered them all together, and there weren't enough good ones to fill a chapbook. Half a dozen, maybe, struck me as good enough to bother with.

Even as I was gathering them, I was thinking, this isn't the right thing to do. Poetry isn't my strong suit. My strong suits are short rhapsodic prose meditations (I loathe the term "prose poem," but I suppose that's probably their proper name) and informal essays on practicing the Dharma. Could those be made into a book? Dubious. One that would sell? That's not dubious at all. Of course such a book wouldn't sell.

But it might be fun to make. It's been interesting just to pull out pieces and think about them as parts of something bigger, to think about juxtapositions, to think about what a frame might look like. I might be far enough distant from the toxic (to me) ambition to "be a writer" to actually have some fun with that sort of thing.

Apple Pathways

He lay face down in the grass, with his black wings swept down close to his sides, like a perching falcon's. Martha turned him over tenderly. His eye glittered, too bright for death. At his throat a single white underfeather curled like a bunch of lace.

Not a mark on him. We buried him in the back yard without much ceremony, murmuring a few om manis. There is always the moment, burying an animal, when you have cover its eyes with dirt. That's always the real moment of death, for me. Doing something you could not conceivably do to a living creature. I do it gently and unhappily.

We don't know which crow this was, of the three or four who visit regularly. The brash one who swooped straight down to the back porch rail to pick up his kibbles? The prudent one who hung back on a branch of the apple tree, waiting to see what happened to the first before commiting himself? The one who complained if we were late, going round from window to window to remind us of our duties? No telling. Maybe he wasn't even one of ours.

Yesterday I went through my blogroll from top to bottom. I don't keep it up well. Some of the blogs are gone altogether. Three have become private, asking me for passwords; I always wonder if I should email their owners and ask, but I think I already know the answer. Then there are the ones that simply stop. Six months, nine months, a year ago. Those are the ones that trouble me. I suppose I should just have a cut-off date, and move them to a second tucked away blogroll. Title it "inactive" or "hiatus" or something. But it feels like that moment of covering those bright, glittering eyes with earth. I keep putting it off.

Last night I got a comment on one of my posts from one Nasra Al Adawi, whom I didn't know:

Your web was listed as Gulnaz's friends .

In tribute to her Please spread the message and please visit my blog to see what I wrote

The tribute is here. It's lovely. I suppose lots of us fell a little in love with Gulnaz. If any of you knows, please let us know.

Mosquito's Song

The night is interminable
And you are far away
Only the mosquito's song
For company.

Finally silence,
And I can hear it --
The echo of longing,
The thin wail of grief.

Answer to Dweezila, 4

My mother likes to tell entertaining stories about me. This is one of her favorites.

I read virtually all the time. I used to walk from class to class, reading. One day I walked into gym class, reading, completely absorbed, forgetting to suit up. The gym teacher said, in some exasperation, "if you want to read, Dale, maybe you should go to the library."

I looked up blankly. "Oh." I said. "Okay." And I turned around and walked off, still reading, to go to the library.

This story, she says, was told to her ruefully by the gym teacher, who was dumbfounded to see me walk out of his class. My innocence in taking him at his word was so patent that he just let me go. He didn't know what else to do.

Probably, like most of the stories my mother tells about me, this one is almost true. I have no clear recollection of this incident. If I ever had one, it would have been buried long ago under the repetitions of my mother's version of it. But my horror of gym class was so deep that I would never have gone into it so defenseless. My sensitivity to sarcasm was so fine that I could never have misunderstood him. If I really did trail off to the library, it would have been with full exultant knowledge of what I had pulled off. This is not a story of innocence; it's actually a story of deep duplicity.

I try very hard not to tell stories about my children. Particularly not droll little stories illustrating their charming foibles. Everyone, I believe passionately, should be allowed to tell the stories of his or her own life. No one else ever really knows what these stories mean.

Answer to Dweezila, 3

I had a set of little blue plastic soldiers, half an inch high. They were supposed to be Foreign Legionairies. Why they were blue, I have no idea. At the time I had not the slightest idea of what the Foreign Legion was, so I saw no reason they shouldn't wear blue clothes, carry blue rifles, and have blue hands and faces.

I had them at the dinner table, that first night in our new house with my new stepfather. I marched them in a circuit around my plate. Set them up in strategic positions on my napkin and silverware. Eventually they spilled onto the plate itself, taking up positions behind green beans, standing sentry over the meatloaf barracks, cautiously climbing the dinner-roll to survey the terrain. I was dimly aware of disappointing the people around me. But I always disappointed the people around me. What was wanted was a good-natured, cheerful, outgoing, mischievous boy. Something in the Tom Sawyer line. A boy with enthusiasm, a boy who made friends, a boy who scorned girls. What was wanted was someone to fill the role of Beaver at the "Leave it to Beaver" dinner table -- brash, impetuous, full of impish ideas; no harm in him.

I was reserved, sullen, and pessimistic. I had no friends. I liked girls. I had no ideas that had to do with actually doing or making anything. My ideas were about how to communicate with alien species. What the consequences of the population explosion would be. Whether infinity admitted of degree. That sort of thing. And there was harm in me. Oh yes, Precious. There was harm in me.

I was intensely visual. As a particularly enterprising legionary scaled my milk glass, and perched uncertainly on the rim, I became enamored of the blue and white. I loved then, as I love still, the intersection of planes and three-dimensional objects. The Legionary slipped and fell into the glass. He floated there, half-submerged, the lines of intersection with the surface making fascinating curves of blue against white. Soon his comrades, a whole lemming Foreign Legion, were dropping into the milk.

"That's it," rumbled my stepfather. I looked up in some surprise. He was standing up. My mother was making half-hearted protests. What was going on?

"He's just trying to see how much he can get away with," said my stepfather, almost kindly. He wasn't especially angry; it was just clear to him that it was time to exert some authority. It took me a few moments to understand what he meant, and when I did I flushed with rage. By that time he had hold of me -- he was a big and very strong man -- and he marched me into my new room, bent me over his knee, and spanked me, hard.

I had been struck exactly once by an adult, before this. One short sharp richly deserved swat. Never this kind of ritual humiliation, deliberate and extended.

When he finally allowed me to stand up, dry-eyed, speechless, and trembling with fury, I said not a word. From that moment till I left his house, I hated him, coldly, implacably, and absolutely. Oh yes. There was harm in me.

Answer to Dweezila, 2

Kids didn't wear backpacks in America in those days. You just carried your books. If you were unpopular, somebody might knock the books out of your hands and into a mud puddle. Dirty water would seep into your algebra book, and soak your homework.

There was a TV show, of excruciating stupidity, called The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Crude Cold War propaganda, but I didn't notice that, of course. What I noticed was the swaggering hero's sidekick. This sidekick was a small, sensitive, reserved Russian defector, played by David MacCallum. I even remember the character's name: Ilya Kuriakin. He wore black turtlenecks. He had no home. He had hopelessly divided loyalties. He carried a black attache case.

Attache cases were fetishes of enormous power, in the years of the Cold War. Do you remember? I talked my mother into buying me one. It wasn't quite the same, somehow. It was plastic. It was too fat -- really it was more a dwarfish suitcase. But at least it was black. I carried my books in it to school, and I'm sure I looked quite ridiculous. It would have served to confirm my dork status, if that had needed any confirmation. I wore black turtlenecks, too. They somehow failed to make my pudgy pink Norwegian face pale, thin, sensitive and slavic like Ilya Kuriakin's, but I persevered.

There were always science fiction books stuffed into this case. I read all the science fiction in my school library. There wasn't much -- science fiction was still marginal in those days. So after school I went to the town library. It had a whole wall-full. I simply started at the A's (Asimov) and read every single one.