Half Cleveland Dad

Discontent

This spring I’ll have lived in Cleveland, Ohio for ten years.  I’ve always been discontent here, so I raise my eyebrows a bit and say, hmmm!, when I picture the number 10 in this context, but I'm accustomed to being rather chronically discontent, and out of place, and I'm aware of my failure to answer the if not here, where sorts of questions regarding Cleveland, Ohio, so it would be inaccurate to say I'm surprised, because, if nothing else, I know I'm still here.  I'm getting a clue, though:

 

The other day Sweet Potato and I were walking around the neighborhood in the snow.  She was watching her feet and listening to her crunchy steps, but stuck up her mitten and said lets hode heands, dad.  Then I was holding hands with a two-year old, walking through the snow, singing Happy Birthday and Twinkle Twinkle, and I had to admit to myself, this is the best my life will ever be.  It wasn’t a Proustian revelation or anything, but more of an admission, or settling.  My general discontent settled a bit with acknowledgment that, yep, this was a dreamt-for moment; a sudden, sweet pool along a crooked, tentative rivulet. 

 

I did thumb through a little Proust after our walk, and Remembrance of Things Past made a new kind of sense.  I used to think it was about love and art, but now it seems like an enlightenment tale:  life is suffering, and suffering is desire, and desire is whining about how you can’t always get what you want, but when you do get it you whine about it even more, until you leave it all behind in order to really think about it, based on a hint of transcendence you get from a chance sense-memory, and then you develop your hint into a meditative practice based on writing that eventually floods you with understanding and compassion for everyone, the result of years sequestered not in a mountaintop hut but in a cork-lined room. 

Fog, Reality, Death, Swinging

A thaw after a chilly week made for a foggy couple of days.  Sweet Potato and I went out to see what there was to see.

I think Sweet Potato's anxious expression over the dead possum had more to do with her earlier observation, daht possum has reao shahp teet-th; izzy gohn-eenta bite us?, than a soul-opening encounter with the concept of mortality, although, walking back to the car, she first said, I'm dead ... and you're dead, too.

A neighbor once surprised a possum in his yard, and it flopped over in simulated death -- it played possum.  So at first I thought this possum might only have shorted out.  But it was too cold.

The day before this, Sweet Potato bent over a flower pot in front of our house.  Look!  Lookaddat!  It was her small beanbag bear.  It's Beah!  She felt bad that he'd been outside for many days.  He'd been buried in a snowdrift, and was grimy with the thaw.  I said I'd wash him.  Noooo!  I wandta seep widt him in my bed! 

Winter morning commute

This is the interesting part of my morning commute.

It's great here in the snow.  Grimy, stark motion below; above, an ambient, soft, winter grey.

One morning a storm was clearing, moving north.  On the right, an intense winter sun poured horizontal light through a small cataract of blue sky, but to my left, it was still swirling night.  Ahead, the city was sharp and bright against the black sky, and over the lake gulls glinted like tumbling gold.

 

Camo Jacket

Walking around in a big city, I’d be on the street with everyone else in the city.  In a small city, like Cleveland, sometimes it’s just me and some bums.

First of all, I don’t know how to refer to these folks spending all day out on the street.  It seems presumptuous to call them “homeless”; and “street people” is awfully categorical.  So, without much more consideration, I've reached for an out-dated term, and taken up “bums.” 

I’ve resisted writing about bums here because I hadn’t been able to make the tie-in to being Half Cleveland Dad, but every time I sit down nowadays I think about them, and I think of Sweet Potato, and our world, and the future, and our place embedded in the endless brilliant continuum of suffering pulsing through the rich sticky biomass slathered all over the whole hopeless surface of our hopeless earth. 

A few times a week I used to see a guy in a cotton camo jacket.  He had a particular limp, in which his left leg would describe an outward, circular stride.  Stomp swing-out, stomp swing-out.  He would get a bowl of cereal from the Salvation Army truck across Superior Avenue from the Renaissance Hotel, then take his jaunty, swinging strut over the bridge spanning the Cuyahoga River, to St. Malachi or West Side Catholic.  We did the “all right” nodding thing for a couple of years; then began exchanging morning salutations.  At some point we addressed each other as “brother man,” which led to greetings that involved something of a hug, like politicians do before a debate.  I do not know his name.  In the early summer I saw him at lunchtime, in the library garden, where he declined to share my lunch.  He looked like he’d just put his lunch into his arm.  I missed him for a couple months, but then he overlapped my schedule again.  He looked about 30 pounds thinner, with spit in his beard, and an unfocused fear in his eyes, like he’d had a stroke.  When we did whatever that tripartite handshake is called, soul-shake or whatever, he held my hand for a while, like an old man needing to get steady and take a breather.  The last time I saw him he was standing on the sidewalk, facing a parking lot fence, stiff and drooling, pants at his calves, wet foul shit down his leg. 

Now the hard weather’s come in, and the men are keeping their faces down on their daily, migratory drift over the bridge.

Radio

Here's one of the great things about Cleveland, available for you to enjoy through the magic of the internet: WRUW.  The website offers downloads of each program for the current week; that is, you can listen to this week's On the One, but after Sunday night the fresh show is posted.  I love this site, and listen to most of these programs every week:

• On the One.  Beautiful groovin' music.  One of the programmers is named Charles; he picks his music from someplace deep and wide awake.
• Aaja Nachle.  A Bollywood and hip-hop mix that I never would have imagined.
• Bluegrass Breakdown.  WRUW also used to have a show that featured old-timey and bluegrass music by women, programmed, I think, by the same dj who did separate shows of music from Romania and Australia.
• Good Brains Gone Bad.  Nostalgia for the old guy.
• Blackout Tuneout.  What rock sounds like when it doesn't suck.
• Exploding Plastic Inevitable.  A marvelous show programmed by a sexy (my imagination), oddball genius (not my imagination). 
• Prosper Hazzard.  Comfort music for someone who always loves to hear things like new music for soprano and theorbo.
• Diversified Inc.  This show is so long and eclectic and full of surprises, it's like browsing an $2 record store on an weekday afternoon in a city you're visiting for the first time when you're 19 years old.  (Which in turn reminds me of Lightnin' Hopkins and the Revillos.)

I guess I can also link to my old radio love, WKCR.  Without much of a chance to stream it, I wonder how Phil Schaap is doing. Good morning everybody.  It's eight-twenty a.m. and you're listening -- to Bird Flight .... 

Now it's great to hear Rachel Grimes or Modest Mouse for the first time on the internet, but the magical thing about old radio was how delicious it was to participate in the truly ephemeral event.  There was always the serendipitous tingle. When your "favorite song" came on you weren't just glad to hear it -- you felt lucky, too. 

More fall

For leaves, fall this year was particularly beautiful.  I’m not quite sure how to write about leaves; I’m not that much of a nature guy, and I haven’t thought about it much before.  The colors were particularly intense, and the sky was soft enough to let them glow, and the weather was mild enough not to blow all the leaves off right away.  One day we drove past an orange tree (not an orange tree), and Sweet Potato said wow!  ...  I was talking with a Burmese man who’s learning English.  He said, autumn.  I said, yes this is autumn.  He said, beautiful.  ...  In the car you notice that the leaves are a little different in different places, maybe because someplace gets more sun or a wetter breeze or something, who knows, but you notice it along I-77 or near the zoo.  And you notice that it changes noticably, over a couple of days; leaf peak is quicker than I had thought; its contour passes over the landscape like a slow wave.

Sweet Potato’s been collecting natural objects all fall:  rocks, sticks, leaves, berries.  Acorns.  The back seat of our car makes me think of a raccoon’s nest. 

Beeb the Mom’s been quiet and steady and her mellow beauty seems to be growing richer.  She knits and we watch movies and read books we check out from the library. 

I’m busy with work and sometimes when I'm by myself I wonder if I'm acting like a dick.  I guess I could ask around.

What are you?

“Parenting” themes generally focus on what you can or should or shouldn’t or wouldn’t pass on to your kids through your efforts at self-improvement or enlightenment.  But what about the shit we can’t control, but pass on to our kids anyway?  There are good and bad traits, like physical prowess or beauty, or a neurological predisposition to love cocaine over all other things in life; there are also conditions, or situations, like poverty or celebrity.

One of those things is ethnicity.  There are ethnic traits, of course, but I wonder what I’m passing on to Sweet Potato in terms of the condition of her ethnicity.  I come from a Japanese American concentration camp family.  The concentration camp thing has gotten a lot of press in the past twenty years or so, arising from the ethno-political cultural discussion, but when I was a small child, Farewell to Manzanar hadn’t come out, and “camp” was occasionally mentioned, but never discussed.  This was, let’s say, 25 years after the end of internment. 

One of the legacies of the internment is a kind of chronic shame that initially developed in silence.  Before internment, the Japanese were probably like any other immigrant group, making their way slowly into the American milieu, probably assimilating more or less at a steady pace.  The postwar effect of the internment was to concentrate and isolate the Japanese, and you get the sense that after the war, the Japanese were in a period of great tension and struggle, yet there was no talk about it.  They formed closed postwar communities in west coast cities.  There was toughness, and a kind of omerta, but it protected a crime committed by FDR and the Joint Chiefs.

The California Central Valley in the early 1970s was more John Steinbeck than Ken Kesey, and we were a queer little family with home haircuts and too many books.  Our family friends seemed to be mostly camp Japanese, interested in Buddhism, Jung, aikido, and Canadian whisky.  For all their love of talk, my parents seemed to play down the camp thing -- after all, they were small children during the dispossession, and, perhaps it wasn’t devoid of fun for them.  I also think, though, they had no way of talking about it yet; camp Japanese still hadn’t figured out what to say about it (Fred Korematsu excepted). 

I used to think it was an ethnic thing, the shame, but maybe it’s more like a crime victim type of thing.  The population was dispossessed, humiliated, then set back outside with a pat on the head.  The shame and the anger stayed in your family, but transferred, effectively enough, without discussion.  The salt burns less in me than in my parents, it’s less in them than it was in their parents.  It’s a feeling hard to analyze and even hard to pinpoint, but I have it. 

Last night I was in a coolish locavore place, at the bar, wrapping up dinner with a business friend, when the bartender cunt decided to play Guess the Orientals, which is a variation of What Are You Anyways?  I was seething; fucken Ohio can be as backward as anywhere.  My South Korean friend, though, a more worldly and gracious person, responded without my defensiveness, and talked easily about different Asian people. 

I’m impressed when people meet casual racism without defensiveness.  For a while we lived in Hawaii, where the local Japanese Americans, never interned, are coarse, expansive, natural.  I envy their ability to react without my ingrained shame, which is both inaccessible and so immediate. 

How will I pass it on to Sweet Potato?

Summertime

A muscular greening seizes Cleveland in the summer:  it’s wet and bright and hot; the days are long; by midsummer the city is heavy with wild grape, mulberry, ailanthus, honeysuckle, day lily, honey locust; every type of fuzzy weed matted knee high; birdseed grows, and eight-foot sunflowers bobble over fencetops.  Lawnmowers gnarl constantly, even at night, and in open windows the sound blends with the hollow roar of the airport flight path above, cats yowling below.  Harley-Davidson once tried to trademark the sound of its engines.  A night breeze can suddenly fill a room with skunk stink or the scent of tree blossoms.  Late, the almost subliminal sounds of freight trains or boat klaxons push up from the river a mile away.  Bath towels don’t dry overnight, and you’re always trying to get rid of a tinge of mildew in the house.

It’s a lovely feeling, the way the leg remembers the bike pedal.

If you can get a babysitter you hope to be drinking in a backyard while someone pokes at chicken pieces on a grill; if not, you’re the one poking the chicken.  Guests bring bottles of wine, but the evenings float on gin and beer and DEET.  You can’t remember names in a static, muffled conversation about how work’s keeping you busy, which is great in this economy, and how someone went to Atlanta for a cousin’s wedding, which was nice.  Lake Erie is stale and lukewarm, but it draws a long, fine horizon; and, for the purpose of becoming visually mesmerized, the important thing is to have an unbroken horizon, so that your eyes don’t have a focal point as they swing from canthus to canthus.  Later, you see your friends smoking; you hadn’t known they smoke.