Archive for June, 2009

The Fall of My Discontent

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

I don’t know why, but I’m continually growing more afraid of heights. And falling from them. And landing.

I love a good view, especially from tall buildings or mountain ledges. I remind myself that I’m safe, and I work hard to shove my irrationality as deep into my gut as I can, to pretend it doesn’t exist.

When I was perhaps eight years old, I had my first vision of a fall. I imagined that my eyeglasses slid off the bridge of my nose and fell from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Those with poor eyesight will admit how precious eyeglasses are, how they represent our connection with the world around us, and how losing them — at least for the first several hours — is like losing a member of the family. As a young boy, my “vision” of the end-over-end loss of my world was apparently too much for me, because ever since I have grown increasingly nervous at the edges of the world.

Today, it is hard for me to put my forehead against a top-floor window, to step onto a balcony, to stand at a high guardrail, and to climb a long ladder. I hide this from my kids, of course, because I know how awesome it is to see people the size of ants, and entire forests of fall colors, and shining mountain valleys. And yet every one of my possessions is twisted around my arms and wrists, gripped in my hands, and shoved deep into my pockets. Even my neck is tucked down a bit, like the head on a turtle, lest I lose my glasses. It’s like standing over sewer grating with my cars keys out: someday, I am convinced, they will fall into the cracks and never come back out.

Of course, I fear more for my kids than for myself. As a parent, I can’t allow myself to call these fears unfounded; Oren has fallen down stairs twice in three years, though without injury. I have grown to hate staircases, even two-step staircases, especially near the top ledge. And that’s not all. Once he plunged head-first over the couch into the floor. I don’t know which was worse: his falling, or my watching.

I have a whole new perspective of the world now that I have kids. It’s bigger, and a whole lot less flat.

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A Lawn on My Mind

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Oh, it’s so embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m actually publishing this in my blog.

I bought a lawnmower.

I’m so ashamed! For years I looked askew at those men who woke early on weekend mornings, an hour before the ordinary and righteous people of the world stopped sleeping in, and in ragged cutoffs and loosely laced tennis shoes marched patterns on the grasses, the noise of their infernal machines scaring away the birds. I could never understand their longing for the perfect edge, or the wet confetti that stuck to their legs; that grassy smell mixed with exhaust, or the sweat that accumulated in their armpits; the perfection of accessories and specialized tools no other vehicles ever require, like the blade sharpener, the waste bags, the hard black plastic spoon; or worst of all, the weekly devotion to the seeding, wetting, weeding, and heading of a hundred thousand living objects destined to grow back.

This subculture of worship is so alien to the child, the student, the renter, and the condo owner that never once was I offered membership. Instead and unexpectedly, I got thrown overboard from a sinking economy, dashed upon the rocks of my mortgage, and stranded on an island in a sea of greens, worried about the vegetative tide. My new friends at the hardware store were sympathetic, especially when I couldn’t speak “acres.” They talked to me about mulching blades and car engines. They sold me a gas can. And that weekend I collected sticks and rocks and toys, a fatherly mix of Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus, before filling the tank and pumping the choke and yanking the string. (Naturally I spilled gas everywhere and couldn’t figure out the safety bar.)

In my early twenties, I joined the Sierra Club and spent 8 days in the Arizona desert. Every day away from civilization I learned just how unnecessary and even trivial certain amenities can be: television, phone answering machines, laundry machines, even toilets. I discovered that we don’t need these things to survive and live well and simply. I missed my friends and family, and nothing else. And so I try to tell myself that mowing the lawn really isn’t necessary, that if I can give up flush toilets I can sure give up cutting the grass. I even try to explain this to my Sunday-morning neighbors, all of us like synchronized swimmers with our machines, but of course they can’t hear me over the noise.

I miss the desert.

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