A Morning at the Wulf's House: Birds Come and Save Me

We needed to know if what he said about there being no food in the cupboards was true; after the search we no longer questioned his other instructions. I stood in his room and tried to imagine what it was like to be him and I realized that his interior landscape was much wider than mine and that I was grateful for his friendship. Noah walked in trance-like and took the guitar and mandolin--his only greeting, "Geez Dad, there's a lot of picks." Within minutes the downstairs was filled with the Tennessee Waltz. Later, when Joseph awoke and ambled outdoors I said "Good morning," then pointed to the tire swing, "look what I made for you." Joseph smiled and thanked me with genuine gratitude because he knew I was lying but also knew that I would've made him that swing if he had asked me to.

Gracie and I jumped on the trampoline--first as rabbits, then as monster and trickster, then as dad and daughter, but suddenly the feel was not right and Gracie went inside for a moment then opened the door and said, "Mom talked me into coming back out." We lay on our backs and looked at the broken tree branch and then looked at the cat playing dead and then tried to bounce on our backs. When we went inside for water Jill said to me, "I saw you watching me shoot baskets the other day." Once again, I realized that Jill has all of my numbers and I went to her and kissed her and when our lips parted she breathed on me and it was like driving through a field of blackberries and I wanted to crawl down her throat and rest my head on the dark clumps within her lungs and then she pouted and said, "Everywhere we go there is coffee. There is always coffee." And this made me think of coffee. And so I went to the freezer, as instructed, and took out the yogurt container and plied the lid and smelled the frozen beans and it made me happy to be an addict. I made the coffee, as instructed, and then greeted Benjamin at the back door and watched him feed the dog and stared at his pony tail and wondered about the comfort that his long hair provides.

I walked upstairs and Gracie followed and we stood in each of the girls rooms and looked and Gracie said, "I wish I lived in a girl house," and I felt sad for her and when I saw a cluster of feathers in Maggie's room I sang her a song about cardinals and blue jays and yellow finches coming to save a little girl and she sang the spontaneous chorus with me, "birds come and save me, birds come and save me" and this was about the one millionth time that Gracie has broken my heart.

What I Want to Say to the Waitress in the Montreal Cafe

It's your crooked teeth that makes you desireable.
I know your friends suggest orthodontia.
They're jealous.
Your blue quarried eyes and
moonglow skin--
your marbled beauty is admired,
never touched.
But when you smile
your heart becomes visible,
like a dying star
that attracts a lover
to whisper
his secret grief.

What I Remember of My Sons' Recollection of their Math Teacher's Mountain Biking Years

His racing name was "The Kid." They don't know why--heighth? Lack of facial hair? They have no idea. They think he was young when he raced. There was some guy named "Red Elk." He was just a regular white guy but he had a red afro and wore terry cloth headbands. Red Elk was a real character. It should be known that The Kid once beat Lance Armstrong. Don't expect to find this fact on the internet because Lance will never admit it and there were no reporters. But it happened. No one could beat The Kid in Colorado. The Kid treated the mountains of Colorado like it was his personal playground. That's why Lance couldn't win. The race was in Colorado.

It takes about two minutes to change a blown inner tube. Most guys change two tubes per race. Not so for Red Elk. Red Elk wore pre-inflated tubes around his neck when he rode. Not fully inflated, but just enough to carry across your chest like an archer's bow; probably about half inflated. He also carried CO2 cartridges in his pockets. You really shouldn't carry CO2 cartridges in your pockets, especially in a mountain bike race in Colorado. But that's just the kind of thing Red Elk did. Red Elk had no concern for personal safety. When Red Elk blew a tire he would simply replace it with the half inflated tire and then connect a CO2 cartridge. No pumping. You see? That gave Red Elk a two minute advantage over the other racers. But none of this mattered to The Kid. The Kid beat Red Elk every time. Especially in Colorado. Actually, it wouldn't have mattered if Red Elk didn't change any tires, he had no chance and he knew he had no chance, but every race he'd look at The Kid and say, "Today's the day kid, today's the day." But it was never the day. The boys can't emphasize enough The Kid's home field advantage in Colorado. It was ridiculous.

One time The Kid showed up to the starting line and he hadn't finished his coffee. It was a really good coffee. He didn't usually get this kind of coffee. The race started but The Kid just couldn't toss that coffee on the ground, because it was a special type that was really rare. So he had to finish that coffee. If he had a thermos he would've saved the coffee but he left his thermos in the truck. So he sat at the starting line and finished his coffee. He started the race like five minutes behind the rest of the racers but he still won. It was only by a minute or two, but he still beat everyone. When he passed Red Elk, Red Elk threw one of his half-inflated tubes at him. It was just a joke, but it ended up going over The Kid's helmet and blinding him for a few seconds on a really dangerous gravel hill. Red Elk didn't know it would blind The Kid. Red Elk was actually really good friends with The Kid. He didn't mind that The Kid won every single race. One time The Kid was in Istanbul and he stayed at a downtown hotel for three days, as he was chekcing out he ran into Red Elk. Red Elk had been at the hotel next door for the exact same three days and they never knew it. They were both totally blown away. They were both in Istanbul, staying right next to each other, and never saw each other. Not even once. They were totally surprised. It was The Kid who noticed Red Elk. Red Elk was just walking by carrying a backpack. He only saw him from behind, but The Kid knew immediately. It was the red afro. You don't see many of those. Anyways, when Red Elk threw the half-inflated tire, The Kid had to ride blind for a few seconds. Most guys would've hit a tree, but this was in Colorado--The Kid could've rode the whole course blind. That's how well he knew the Colorado trails.

They pause and wonder why people would spend money traveling to Colorado, back in those days, when they knew they had no chance against The Kid. Not even Lance Armstrong (though he'd never admit to it) and you won't find it on the internet, but it's true. They swear to God it's true. The Kid told them himself and he's a math teacher. And math never lies.

In Preparation For Releasing My Father's Ashes

Early summer and the front yard’s overgrown.
The light falls spotted through the black walnut leaves.
“We are all like the grass,”
the scriptures sing again and again,
“Here today and tomorrow thrown into the oven.”
Green grass, shot through
with mysterious,
unending,
green.
The passage,
like your absence,
is familiar and dreamlike;
hard to follow while lying on my back
smoking this cigar,
blowing circles
to the June sky.
Grass or sun,
cigars or human beings,
all memory is made from burning.

Five summers AWOL.
I still see your mischievous smile,
your helpless tears.
Your life now a story,
a picture book,
a fable,
an inspiration--
dependent on the teller.
“All stories are untrue,” you once told an audience,
knowing full well that stories are all we have of the truth.
This is my story:
We loved each other as best we could.

With your hands
I gather the cut blades,
pour the grey diesel,
drop the wet stained tobacco,
then stand
vigil
while the red rolling waves spray
foxtails like fireworks.
I stir
and rake
and stir.
Still I see
green never burns.

My Real Story Is Not a Real Story

Last night I sat on the front porch and watched the day fade until the magnolia leaves were outlined against the sky with perfect clarity. It's a saucer magnolia. Very cool, slightly oblong leaves with that succinctly hooked point. The magnolia is always reminding you that while it is not a large tree it is a three-dimensional tree. Maybe this is the secret of its survival. No matter how far you walk away or go up on tiptoes to see a leaf from the side. The fleshy leaves hold themselves scooped and curved along the spine; the whole growth habit of the thing is unruly. Even from a quarter mile away you see rebellious runners and odd splashes of white. The magnolia is also a terrible planner: it blooms too early. I actually couldn't write about this while it was blooming because the whole thing makes me nervous. I was afraid to jinx it by pointing out that once again it (she? he?) was completely covered in these dirty-white blossoms maybe three weeks too early, maybe three weeks before the last frost date. And way too profusely: what's the point, magnolia? Half that many blossoms, properly white, would overwhelm even the most indifferent shit-gazing or cellphone-bound dogwalker. So many blossoms that the tree seems in danger of capsizing, and flung violently into bloom on those odd little shoots that are themselves flung two feet beyond what the architect intended or the engineer approved. The blossoms wait much longer than you would think to fully bloom. In this pose that suggests some extreme sport for hand models and glove factory inspectors. They stay that way for two weeks, collecting dust and snow and blemishes before they have even bloomed. As I write this I am dismayed again at the profligacy of the whole thing. As if a troupe of acrobats walked for miles into a forest, found a single ancient beer can and concluded that they must walk much further. And only upon finding the point equidistant from aesthetisizing eyes in all directions does one of them step up on a fallen magnolia twig, and the others climb silently over eachothers' shoulders into an organic, unnameable shape. And the last one finds a place on the outermost branch of the pelleton, where viewed from the ground against the gentle swaying of the rest of the troupe, he looks to be falling, or maybe about to drift upwards, but is actually holding perfectly still.

The Torture Game

“Who wants to be on the torture list?”

The seven year old girl in a strawberry stained dress and white sweat pants promenades around the noon foursquare game. Her arms outstretched she holds a sheet of yellow construction paper with a list of names written in primitive red crayon.

“Who wants to be on the torture list?” She singsongs her invitation over the sounds of the foursquare boys who shout at the game like racetrack gamblers.

“What happens if you’re on the torture list?” I ask the four foot interrogator and her two friends when they pass by. “It means you’re bad,” scowls the girl with the list, whose knit cap weighs heavy over her eyes. “And we carry you to our torture room and we torture you,” adds the dark-haired assistant. Curious I ask them to describe the activities within the torture room. They pause, look at one another sheepishly, then realize they haven’t thought that far ahead. The leader shrugs her shoulders in embarrassment, grabs the sleeves of her friends and pulls them along while frowning at me, “Let’s get away from him!”

During the week that I serve as volunteer recess monitor at my sons’ school I watch these girls and their friends engage in the torture game. The game is disturbing—the list of names, the mock torture room hidden within a circle of shrubs, the kids carried away while giggling and shouting “Don’t torture me!” The victims laid on the rain soaked ground while the girls march in a circle pointing and shouting, “You are bad. You are very bad.”

The paid teachers and parents monitoring the lunch recess react differently to the torture game. One mother confronts the girls and in abstract phrases like “This is inappropriate play” tries to communicate the dehumanizing nature of their game and suggests the girls run over to the jungle gym. With flat expressions the three friends nod their heads obediently and then carefully wait until the mother moves to the other side of the playground before resuming their covert operations. Other parents who notice the game shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. “I guess they’re trying to make sense of it,” one father suggests and then half mumbles, “I guess we all are.”

In the same way that children have difficulty imagining a world without cell phones or mp3 players, the images and language of torture is now part of the landscape of life within which young people are being formed. Whether photographs of snarling dogs lurching at the throats of shirtless men and naked bodies attached to electric wires or radio newscasters debating the merits of “simulated drowning,” children now take for granted that their country inflicts cruelty and pain on other human beings.

In the Imperial County Jail, behind a two-inch Plexiglas wall stands 76 year old Father Louis Vitale in an orange jumpsuit. He has a large, slightly goofy grin. His white, half-moon hair sticks up like he’s rubbed it with a balloon. After the guards unlock his shackles, he waves at my friend Frank and me then sits down, lifting a heavy black phone up to each ear, “Welcome to the Imperial jail!” he shouts.

Franciscan Louis Vitale is in the third month of a five month sentence. In November of 2006, he and Jesuit Stephen Kelly attempted to deliver a letter opposing the teaching of torture techniques at Fort Huachuca, Arizona--headquarters of US Army Intelligence and the training center for military interrogators. The priests were arrested as they knelt in prayer halfway up the driveway at the army base. I drove out to the Imperial jail, just ninety minutes east of San Diego because I too, like the children at my son’s school, am trying to absorb the reality that ours is a nation that inflicts cruel and inhuman punishment on other human beings.

Sitting across from Father Louis I ask why he’s willing to be jailed for this issue. “Hearing that this country is engaging in torture just hit me in the gut. It should hit everyone in the gut. That’s where I feel God, in my gut. I just had to do something. I think if I didn’t, I’d just get depressed.” He leans forward toward the glass and pauses to look me in the eye then adds, “this isn’t just about the victims, this is about the people who have to inflict the suffering as well.” He tells me about Alyssa Peterson, a young US Army interpreter who trained at Ft. Huachuca. She was sent as part of the interrogation team to one of the US prisons in Iraq. After just two sessions in the cages, she committed suicide. “This has got to stop,” Father Louis later writes from his prison cell, “Not just because of what it’s doing to the victims, but because of what it’s doing to the souls of the men and women in our military.”

What’s most striking about Father Vitale is his demeanor. Torture is a serious issue and obviously Vitale is responding with his life, and yet his demeanor is light, he smiles and laughs easily, there’s little animosity in his voice toward the military commanders or Bush administration officials who have authorized and advocated for torture. In conversing with him I notice how often he tries to see things through the perspective of those who carried out these crimes, “I can see myself in their shoes, I used to be in the military, I shared many of their viewpoints at one time…” he tells me. When I ask him how he’s able to keep from getting bitter and angry, how he avoids demonizing those who have placed him in prison he smiles and says, “Well I like people. I’ve always liked people. I’ve never met anyone that I wanted dead. I’ve never met a person that I wanted to see in hell or anything like that. I’ve always liked people.”

And there it was. The key to holding the sorrow of our country’s engagement in cruel and inhuman practices. The way to resist and root out our involvement in torture, war and perpetual violence. You have to like people. You have to value people above ideology or structures, you have to value human beings, even those who have done terrible things, above politics or patriotism. You have to remember the perspective from the great religions, that each of us, every one of us, harbors a little piece of holiness within. And that everyone, even the most criminal among us, should be treated with a basic dignity.

To be liked is much more powerful then to be loved. To love is often an obligation, a commandment, an expectation. How many times have I listened to adult friends tell me of neglectful and abusive parents but then end their comments with “But I know they loved me.” If given a choice I would much rather be liked then loved. This is the genius of Father Vitale…he likes people, he likes the person who is being tortured as well as the military commander inflicting the punishment. When you like people more than ideas, you can’t stand to see them harmed, the reality of torture hits you in the gut, shocks your conscience, and you have to do something, you have to make it stop.

This past Sunday as I sat in church I noticed the girl from the torture game sitting in the pew in front of me. She wore a light floral dress and held a chocolate candy bar. During the hymns she stood up on the pew, then turned and like a wild badger frowned and flashed her brown smeared teeth at me. This was a post-Easter service and so we were singing and smiling and celebrating the enduring life of Jesus that was able to absorb and transcend the fear, hatred, and violence that lives within the human creatures. And I wondered if the girl in front of me connected the hymns, the stories of Jesus and his suffering on the cross to the dark and shadow torture game that she likes to play. Despite the children’s sermons and Sunday school classes, my suspicion is that this little girl will continue to struggle to understand the reality that human beings, human beings from her country, systematically and secretly inflict pain on other people.

Meanwhile I look at the little girl and her smeared chocolate face. Just like at school her eyebrows are furrowed, her eyes narrowed and serious. While the congregation sings joyful hymns the ring leader of the torture game keeps her back to the altar and scrunches her face at me. I lower my hymnal and take this girl in. I match her eyes. I think of Father Louis Vitale. I think of his smiling face and remember his parting words, “Don’t feel sorry for me, I’m a blessed man, I’m following my gut!” And then I look at the little girl and I realize…I like her.

My Daughter's Rabbit: A Play in One Act [notes and opening scene]

Notes to Director:

[1. The difficulty in communicating the power of this work lies in making the facial features of the Rabbit character visible. This issue might be addressed through video projection, intimate seating, or having the action of the play pause from time to time while "Rabbit" moves to the edge of the stage allowing the audience to perceive Rabbit's emotive features. Once registered, Rabbit then returns to his mark and the drama resumes.

2. Regarding the part of Rabbit, it is best played by an actor no larger than 18 inches in height. The actor should be flexible and nimble with quick reflexes. A background in Mime Corporal is also helpful to the part. Rabbit needs to embody a range of emotional expression including: terror, nervous terror, cautious terror, nocturnal terror, terrified shock, confused or misplaced terror, terrifying rage, wistful terror, curious terror, and lust. Unlike most children's plays that resort to oversized masks and stuffed costumes, it is best for the facial features of the Rabbit character to be visible. The actor should be sans costume, painted in the black and white patches of a traditional Dutch bunny, with a simple cotton tail above the buttocks and some sort of elongated ears attached to the side of the head.

3. Note the use of a video screen placed above the stage. Much like background music in cinema, this screen is used to display words and images that cue the audience to the emotional meaning within the scene.]

Setting: Present day. A town in rural Oregon whose economy depends on the rise and fall of the biomass industry.

Staging: A pellet stove glows orange on stage left. A leather couch with visible teeth marks on the four legs sits facing the television set in the center of the room. There are also claw and teeth marks on the television stand, the wood paneling, and every other prop within two feet of the floor. The electrical cords for the television, lamp, playstation game are all taped two feet above the floor, out of Rabbit's reach. A small kitchen sits stage right.

Characters:

Rabbit
Daughter [Five years old]
Father

[As the scene opens, Daughter is watching a public television show entitled, "Baby Animals." Father is absorbed in preparing his morning coffee. The portable rabbit cage sits center stage, its water bottle empty and wrenched sideways, the feed trough filled with wood chips and rabbit droppings. There is a partly chewed Kleenex box in the cage. Rabbit sits in his cage facing the audience with a look of uncertain, unfocused, terror.]

Screen display: "Guantanamo"

Father: [While carefully filling coffee grinder] Shouldn't you let the bunny out? I don't think he's been out of his cage in two days.

[Father grinds the coffee. The electric whir startles Rabbit sending him to scramble for safety within his four by two foot cage. Rabbit kicks up wood chips, black rabbit droppings, and bits of chewed cardboard in search of shelter.]

[The grinder stops.]

Father: [Glancing at Daughter]: Sweetie? Shouldn't you spend time with your rabbit? Rabbits need attention to feel loved.

Screen display: "We all need petting."

[Daughter stands, eyes still directed at television screen, walks over and unlatches cage door. Rabbit, startled by the sound of the latch, frantically attempts to dig through plastic cage floor. Daughter returns to couch. Rabbit eventually stops digging, nervously peeks out of cage. Meanwhile, father opens dishwasher door, removes coffee cup]