Holly Jolly

 

“In the evening the wind stops. A low gray ceiling of clouds hangs over the desert from horizon to horizon, silent and still. One small opening remains in the west. The sun peers through as it goes down.” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

I ate too much ham, stuffing and mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner and felt like a real, red-blooded American. Excess consumption, no better than a sow at the trough. I didn’t need that last piece of ham, but there it was, and I ate it. The soldiers who accompanied Lewis & Clark on their exploration of the Missouri river and the virgin west were said to consume seven pounds of meat per day. Salt pork, deer and buffalo. Every day those men did hard, physical labor, always exposed to the elements. On a good day, they made twenty river miles. They required large amounts of protein. 

On the Saturday after the holiday I worked the opening shift for the first time. 6:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Lunch break at 10:00 a.m. I left the house at 5:15 and rode my bike under a clear sky with lots of stars. It was a brisk 50 degrees or so, nothing to complain about. I have North Face gloves. By the time I was chugging up Garden Street I was comfortable enough. “Fresh” is how a man I used to train with at the dojo would describe the morning. I was reminded of when I was a very young man of 19, living in a tiny apartment in Tachikawa, Japan, about a mile from the train station. Yokota Air Base where I worked was a thirty-five minute ride and a half mile walk to the west. I had to be out of the apartment at 4:30 a.m. to make it to work on time. It was tough in winter, when the temperature was in the 30’s. I walked to the train station in the dark, my footsteps echoing in the street. At that hour the platform was sparsely populated, with very few headed for Fussa, the station nearest the main gate of Yokota. Smell of cigarette smoke. The usual jumble of bicycles outside the station, a few taxis idling, the drivers leaning against their cars, smoking and talking. A few drunks from the night before, sitting on benches, muttering to themselves. A sleepy-looking JNR employee in a rumpled blue uniform. I’m the only foreigner, a military man, though I’m dressed in civilian clothes. I never wore my uniform outside the gates of Yokota; I always wanted to blend in, not stand out. I’d board the train and find a seat and close my eyes. In the winter the train was warm, and I’d fall asleep easily. There’s nothing like sleeping on a train. 

The morning shift is the opposite of the closing shift. Locking up the shopping carts is one of the last tasks I do when I close, but the first when opening. The grocery team arrives at 4:00 and the aisles are jammed with pallets, cartons, balls of shrink wrap. Music blares from at least three different sources. The store opens at 7:00. The Marborg garbage truck rolls in at 6:30 to tip the dumpster. The behemoth cardboard bailer, my nemesis, is nearly full from the previous night and will need to be emptied soon to accommodate all the cardboard the grocery team will bring out. The giant machine seems to mock me. These processes are like the tides: every day the same. Every job is repetitive to a certain extent, but at the store we’re always racing the clock. I walk the aisles with a long-handled broom and dustpan, sweeping up pieces of wood from the pallets, scraps of paper, price tags that have eloped from merchandise, some flour left from a burst bag. Once that’s done I head for the restrooms to make sure they are ready for customers, reminding myself to check that there is enough toilet paper, seat covers, and paper towels. 

One difference between the school district and the Market is that in the grocery business the managers also work, and what I mean is that when needed they bag groceries, run the registers, deal with Amazon returns, and work on product displays. They have a rudimentary knowledge of every job in the store. One thing they don’t do is spend hours upon hours in meetings, talking, talking, talking, or staring at slide decks, charts, graphs. I hated management meetings and avoided them at all costs. Most were a complete waste of my time. Very few people know how to run an effective meeting. School administrators love to hear themselves talk. 

It gets dark early now. The end of November. Christmas music plays in the store. Holly jolly. 

Patience & Stillness

 “The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change.” Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

I saw a podiatrist and he diagnosed my foot problem as Morton’s Neuroma. Most of my shoes have a tapered toe box, and when I wear those shoes the nerve in my foot is compressed and causes a burning sensation in my third and fourth toes. The diagnosis confirms my own experiments with different shoes. Before I started working at the Market I bought a nice pair of Columbia hiking shoes, not considering that the narrow toe box would cause me problems. The only shoes I can wear for my job are an old pair of AllBirds, which are comfortable enough but dangerous on wet floors. At least I now know what I’m dealing with. 

Now, if I can fix the biceps tendonitis in my left arm, I’ll be 100%. This condition really bothers me at night when I sleep, I often wake up with my shoulder howling, and of course it restricts my training.  What’s next in this process of aging? Hair loss (in progress), flagging sex drive, forgetfulness, indigestion, wrinkles, liver spots, constipation. Aging requires coming to terms with loss -- of physical and mental capabilities, of friends and relatives, of jobs and settled routines -- and forces us to to get it through our thick heads: nothing is solid, nothing lasts forever, the sand is always shifting beneath our feet. Even though we know how life ends, we must walk on, through loss and disappointment, pain and suffering. This takes honesty and courage -- or a strong gin & tonic. 

November. Thanksgiving on the way, a strange holiday that I can take or leave. We don’t yet have a family get-together planned, and have given no thought to buying a turkey. The day is over-hyped to get the public to spend money, to set up a vigil outside Target; what’s the hot gift this year? What can’t the children live without? You have to give advertisers credit for linking holidays with consumption. I’m sure there are people who believe that shopping is the point of Thanksgiving, the reason for the day. Get out there and plunge yourself deeper into debt! It’s your patriotic duty! Pilgrims, what pilgrims? Amazon Prime, baby! Instant gratification. 

It’s overcast today. The orange cat from next door is in the front yard, hiding beneath a cactus, within two feet of the spot where small birds congregate. Perhaps the cat will finally get one. The cat is a study in patience and stillness. His owner’s name is Bob. Bob is over six feet tall, completely bald, and often wears suspenders. His one-car garage is as neat as a pin, everything in its place. We don’t see Bob that often. He makes a trip to Costco once a week; from our kitchen window I watch him unload his Toyota Highlander. Patience and stillness isn’t encouraged in our society. I always laugh when I’m working at the Market and a customer, usually a younger female, enters the store on her phone, and remains on the phone, gabbing away, through the produce and dairy aisles, past the meat counter and the prepared food islands, through the baked goods, the wine and beer section, and even while she’s checking out; phone clutched between shoulder and ear as she digs in her purse for her debit card. In the waiting room of the podiatrist’s office I counted eight people, myself included, all over the age of fifty, and only one man on his phone. An older woman was reading a book. The others were just sitting quietly, lost in their own thoughts. 

Is the cat taking a nap? Slumber or eternal vigilance? 

My wife and I marked our 29th wedding anniversary on the 7th of this month. My brother turned 64 on the 11th. Milestones of time. 

I’m reading Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose, and The Big Seven, a novel by Jim Harrison. 

To Have and Have Not

 They start off shy, watching us from across the street as we begin bringing things out of the house and setting them on the sidewalk. Then a short, brown-skinned woman in a long skirt, large white t-shirt, and sandals comes across the street with a toddler by her side and pushing a stroller in which an infant sleeps. The toddler hugs her side. She appraises the stuff on the sidewalk, and asks my wife how much, in Spanish. Free my wife says, which makes the woman smile. Almost as soon as that magic word is spoken and understood, more women appear, as if summoned by an unseen bell, also with small children in tow; two or three of the women are pregnant. All wear long skirts and sandals, none wears a mask. They whisper among themselves. An older woman emerges from the small house next door and makes a beeline for a standing lamp. My brother-in-law and I wrestle a queen mattress and box spring out of the house and set it against the white picket fence. It is immediately claimed and the box spring is carried across the street by a short, slight man wearing Nike slides. When he returns for the mattress I gesture an offer of help, but he just smiles, gets the mattress over his back, and staggers across the street beneath the load. The metal frame is left in the dirt of the front yard. The women grow bolder; one even enters the yard through the open gate and starts sifting through a pile of electrical cords, an ancient computer tower, a keyboard, cable modem, and a couple of surge protectors. We politely ask her to stay beyond the fence. Two toddlers are climbing inside an old china hutch. My wife and her sister Kathy bring out glassware, small kitchen appliances, purses, coats, a box of canned goods, a red cookie jar shaped like a rooster. 

This is our third trip to clean out Nancy’s house in Santa Maria. Nancy is my wife’s older sister. Nancy and I actually went to high school together. She had a stroke in August, open heart surgery in September, and has been in a rehab facility in Arroyo Grande since. She has suffered from diabetes for many years, is almost totally blind, and needs kidney dialysis three times a week. She will not return to the small, dilapidated two-bedroom house she has rented for the last 20 years. My wife and sister-in-law are making decisions about what to keep and what to toss or put on the sidewalk. The house is a mess. One bedroom is jammed from stem to stern with stuff that has piled up over time. On our first trip we found a four-year-old Canon inkjet printer that had never been opened. There were a few pieces of furniture that had belonged to my wife’s long deceased grandparents. Boxes of albums, Barbie dolls, a collection of Star Wars toys, two soccer balls autographed by Rod Stewart, the musician Nancy had followed for years, attending more than 100 of his concerts. There was mold in the bathroom, rust stains in the toilet, and the smell of dogs in the carpet. Dust bunnies followed in our wake across the kitchen floor. 

I began filling two four-yard dumpsters with all the junk we had piled in the carport two weeks ago.  It had obviously been picked over. Blankets, boxes of papers, lengths of carpet, beach towels, Christmas ornaments, cracked pottery, chipped cups. The crowd of women and children on the sidewalk had expanded and now numbered more than a dozen. They watched us expectantly, wondering what treasure might emerge from the house next. As I made my trips from the carport to the dumpster the absence of color on this block of Fesler Street struck me. Drab. Older cars and pickups lined every foot of curb, a sign that the little houses were occupied by multiple families. I heard the cry of small children from the house next door, though I had no way of knowing how many there might be. I’m glad that some of Nancy’s stuff will be put to use by others, but this scene depresses me, as it has every time; this is poverty. One of the mothers is younger than my daughter and already has two little ones and another on the way. Why? I want to scream. Don’t you see that the more kids you have the deeper into poverty you sink? I think of the influence of the Catholic Church, its stubborn resistance to birth control and family planning. Children are a gift from God, insurance for old age, is this how these women think? I don’t know and don’t have the language to ask. What I see is that Nancy’s junk is their upgrade. What I think is that the places they came from must have been dire. I feel anger building inside at the injustice of the world, of the twists of fate, luck, and misfortune that define so many human lives; of the indifference of the wealthy. I look at the woman, most of them heavy, and wonder what ailments they will face in the future. Diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure? There must be a school nearby because in the mid-afternoon kids stream past the house; two teenage boys don Latex gloves and climb into the dumpsters. I count five children under the age of twelve entering the house next door. How many souls live under that roof?

On this trip we make good progress but will need to return one or possibly two times more. The house must be vacated by the 15th. We will put Nancy’s belongings in storage and see where she lands. In addition to everything else, she has tested positive for Covid. We’re all beat after a long day. We head down the 101 to Los Alamos and eat flatbread and drink two bottles of good wine between the four of us. The sun begins to set over the hills. Even with a full stomach and a warm shower in my immediate future I can’t get the appraising eyes of those women on Fesler Street out of my head. 

Selective Mercies

“The trick, as always, the key to human success and domination, is to be selective in your mercies.” Ian McEwan, Saturday

I haven’t had time to write anything new for the Balcony. Semi-retirement is busy, a different routine, but still a routine. One thing that has changed is the way I wake up in the morning. No alarm, for one thing, and no rolling out of bed like a soldier roused from sleep. Even when I work until 10:30, p.m., I wake up between 6:00 and 7:00, but now I have the luxury of laying in bed until I’m fully awake. I usually stretch and flex my feet, and then perform eye exercises, glancing from left to right, right to left, up and down, and then rolling them one way and the other. I don’t know if these daily exercises provide any benefit for my vision, which is wonky to begin with, but they feel good. Then it’s off to the bathroom. 

There’s something optimistic about brewing a pot of coffee, pouring that first cup. I’m sure I drink too much of the stuff, just as I drink more wine than is good for me. I sit down at the dining room table with my laptop and notebooks, read some news and watch a few videos on YouTube. Like coffee and wine, I know I need to reduce, if not eliminate, my consumption of political news; it puts me in a foul, defeatist and bitter frame of mind which sometimes stays with me for several hours. We’re living in an age of idiocy, of treason, of cruelty, of misplaced anger, of political malfeasance, of endemic corruption and stupidity. No samaritan is coming to winch us out of the ditch. As Hunter S. Thompson would say, we’re well and truly fucked. I wrote here after Trump’s defeat that at best all Joe Biden will be able to do is slow the slide. The Democrats are on course to lose the House and possibly the Senate in 2022, which could very well pave the way for a return of the Orange Menace in January 2025. 

I’ve been off for a couple of days but return to work tonight for my usual 2:00 - 10:30 shift. My partner, Jose, is on vacation so I’ll be the only maintenance person on duty for eight hours. The electronic minder I carry will remind me of the hourly inspections of aisles, bathrooms, and the front of the store. Being midweek there’s bound to be lots of cardboard to bail. The bailer is the color of a battleship, a huge piece of machine powered by hydraulics. The U-boats that line the narrow hallway that run behind the store will be loaded with product and empty cartons. If my average holds, I will walk between 12 and 13 miles. The pain in my left foot that I’ve been dealing with for a while has been alleviated with stretches for my lower back. I suspect I suffer from sciatica. The test now is to see if I can work pain-free regardless of the shoes I decide to wear. 

My other physical problem is my left shoulder. It has been bothering me for a while, and might be the result of bursitis, tendonitis, or a rotator cuff tear. My mobility isn’t terrible, but it comes with pain, and I don’t have much strength. I’ve got a series of exercises that I do that have helped some, but I need to see a doctor. I had a rotator cuff tear in my right shoulder in 2012 that had to be surgically repaired. I see how the kind of work I’m doing now can break a person’s body down over the long term. Long hours on your feet, standing, walking, bending, twisting, reaching, stooping, pushing and pulling. I must be weird, but I enjoy the physical aspect of the work, even with these nagging ailments. The challenge is to ward off the incredibly repetitious nature of the work. I’m very fortunate to only have to do it part-time. I’m not sure I could handle 40 hours a week. My injuries haven’t kept me off the job, and I can work safely provided I’m conscious of what I’m doing and my body mechanics. Where the shoulder issue really plagues me is when I sleep; I’m a habitual side sleeper who must now sleep on his back. 

I’m writing book reviews for the California Review of Books, the website I co-founded with David Starkey and Michelle Drown. The latest one I’ve got in the hopper is Humane by Samuel Moyn, a brilliant analysis of how the US has made war more humane but at the same time never-ending. It boggles my mind to think we spent two decades fighting in Afghanistan, longer than the Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam, combined. I just received John McWhorter’s Woke Racism, and this morning I finished reading the novel Saturday by Ian McEwan. I’m about fifty pages into Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose. 

Change is constant, time is finite, and suffering is unavoidable.