Take A Large Hoe And A Shovel Also And Dig "Til You Gently Perspire"

There are two ways we can begin this evening.

No, there are a dozen, or a score. There are a hundred ways. It is a large, an unknown, even an unknowable number of ways we might wiggle into our story. Out of the same few thousand words, what used to be a decent high school graduate's vocabulary, we might make every story ever told, tell each a thousand different ways, and never suspect the first line of the first iteration of the next variation on some genius or madman or ordinary average person's tale of his or her crash into a particular paragraph of the human condition.

The roads ramify. Choices abound. But the hour is late and my compensation small. I'll offer two . If you want a bigger show, visit a better venue and follow a flashier star.

It's all the same; there is the personal and there is the general. Live and extrapolate or study and reduce. Come, let us go then, you and I.

I feel I'm hitting better than .500. The boy and I go out in public from time to time, to grocery stores and lumber yards. He advises bag boys on how to pack our purchases; checkout girls say, "Oh, he's so cute." Older women smile at us. A considerable number of these brief encounters provide information about how we look to the world, to persons who do not know our story or the story before that or the collateral trails and quiet triumphs and terrible lonely nights and hopeless days that out of an infinite skein of possible futures brought our lives into common course when he was but five months and I (too soon I thought) fifty-five (years).

Some say, "Are you helping grandpa shop?" Others, "How old is your son?" I have only one demeanor: aloof, remote, sardonic; Karter can be precocious, talkative, charming or obnoxious and bent on causing a scene. I don't think we throw off different clues on different days; we just are —make of us as you see the strangers before you. More than half of those who indicate a choice conclude we are father and son. That is, a majority appear to believe I do not look as broken and beat up and aching and heartsick as I feel on most days. It seems plausible that I am father to this boy. I find this encouraging. I believe a degree of denial, abetted by happy collusion and encouragement from others, is helpful in pushing back the threshold that, once crossed and admitted and accepted can lead only to decline and death and an end to this string of sometimes formless essays.

I do not exercise. I have no time for or interest in yoga, meditation, healing ministry or reading groups. Neither do I eat dietary supplements or vitamin tablets, or spend my money on "energy drinks." I am losing my hair slowly, quietly, without anxiety or special combing techniques. I do not have a comfortable retirement nest egg. In short, life has and may do with me as it will. Yet I appear young enough to reasonably and naturally be the father of a toddler ( he objects strenuously to this term, insisting that he is, rather, "a pre-schooler," which, given his knowledge of and experience with school [none] I find annoyingly anachronistic, but there is nothing to be gained by arguing this point with him).

Alternatively, I may look every inch and mile of the hard-slogged roads that have brought me to the cracked and dingy portal of my fifty-ninth year, yet still exude such a dynamic, robust, virile, life-affirming, sexually-charged aura that these young women think, "My God, that man is old enough to be my father (great uncle, grandfather, as you like), but I can easily see why any woman would want to bear his children and co-mingle her genes with his and make of this hard, dark world a better place by extending his line through her willingness, nay eage r ness to give her life and heart and body to him for the betterment of us all." Or something like that. I imagine the less articulate of them just forming a thought balloon proclaiming " Awesome! "

I attribute this noteworthy illusion of vitality not to any elixir or fountain or pill or cream or tanning bed, but to the simple fact that I either never learned or somehow transcended fear of the shovel. For young Karter and I spend our time together hoisting rocks and digging holes and cutting bushes and leveling one spot or elevating another. We redirect the flow of water across our earth. We raise up forests where once grew only grasses and forbs, and we likewise cut down large trees that we might again admit the sun to the ground.

Had he remained in the care of either of his parents (for, yes, hard though many of you find it to believe, I am indeed his grandfather), he probably would live a more normal life, enjoying television and even video games. But circumstance and a lady judge up in Rockland have bent his young life to the axe and the plow, and he as yet does not suspect how cruelly he has been deprived of a good American childhood.

In his innocence and ignorance and exuberance he accepts and enjoys the hardships he has been set among. Of biting insects he merely says: "I wish bugs liked to eat grass instead of our blood ." He seldom complains of heat or cold and will work in considerable rain, stopping only when I object to our muddy conditions. Last weekend he began learning to steer the tractor, over-steering wildly at first, but soon calming down and getting a feel for the more subtle adjustments necessary to keep us on course.

So here's the point toward which I've been leading you on this visit to the garden of my life. Likely the bright lights and big city, the thrill of the quick edit and the charge one gets from violence and velocity will creep into his life. I shall lose this wonderful boy, to a degree neither of us can yet guess, to convention, to commerce, to the mainstream, the shopping mall, to mediocrity. Yet he cannot be unchanged by our years together in the garden and the woods. His body will know how to turn over dirt with a round-point shovel, how to raise a rock wall, how to split oak and maple with a maul. He will remember how unlike a locust is a pine, how grand our magnolias and unending the variations in the genus Hosta . He will likely go away for a time, but if the world does not kill him he will find his way back, I hope his own son or daughter and grandchildren to raise up in turn, half-wild and unafraid of bites and stings and scrapes and falls and all that lives and grows by dark and day.

"We are the workers!" he affirms joyously, his body filthy and his heart free. "We move big loads." There is boasting, of course: "My friend Ben couldn't lift this." (He could.) "This rock would be too heavy for Bardo." (Actually, Bardo has an excavator.) "We are stronger than grandma." (Yes, but grandma has more money and fewer dogs, and health insurance, and probably more friends.) But mostly there is obvious, natural, infectious joy in work, in productivity, in the natural, animal functions of mind and body and purpose.

Here's the other door into this room I promised some lines back. Monday morning I bought a Portland Press Herald. This is almost always a mistake. It has become so thin that I actually picked up two, thinking even that combined mass little enough to hold a day's news. The stories were predictably shallow and corporate, the writing embarrassing; I got what I expected. The front page reiterated the governor's infatuation with wood pellets (why burn wood when you can process it using electricity and oil, wrap it in paper and plastic, ship it through one or more middlemen, and then burn it?) It affirmed that the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage bundling outfits, despite their obvious mismanagement, are "too big to fail."

A piece at the bottom continued the story of the Maine Democratic Party's suit seeking to ban Independent Herbert Hoffman from the November ballot because he's running a campaign based upon some degree of aversion to the Bush-positive principles that Tom Allen has favored all his years in office. That story contained this remarkable paragraph: "Party officials say they are trying to protect the integrity of the petitioning process and prevent Hoffman from gathering enough votes to derail Allen's bid." No, folks, it's either-or: are you protec t ing integrity or pr e venting Hoffman ? Don't bother answering.

Depressing. Disturbing. Predictable. Seventy-five cents for this worthless foam! And smack in the middle of the page, this: "Westbrook is deciding if it can let a quarry expand without hurting its efforts to attract high-tech jobs." That is, does the city allow a gravel and hot top company to replace an old facility with a newer, quieter cleaner one so it can continue to supply useful, necessary products to residents and businesses and local government? Yes, you think? Not so fast—it seems Westbrook imagines a beautiful future in "an environment that attracts high-tech firms with good jobs for thousands of people."

And these magical high-tech firms won't pave their parking lots?

The city planners have staked out this future: "biotech and precision manufacturing, information technology and financial services sectors." No mud, no dust, no concrete or stone or pickaxes or shovels or hammers or wrenches. No grease; no grunt. Good God, what a turn we have taken in how few decades since the frontier closed. We are not only getting more stupid by the day, less well-read or even interested in reading, more inclined to vote for an idiot or a jerk or a crook or a straddler, we are getting lame and weak and soft and afraid of real work and real things and real life.

Don't worry too much about "the terrorists" the politicians tell us lurk without and within. We're like slugs in the sun, lacking backbone or carapace or purpose. We seek ease and we are easily diverted and we are the agents of our own undoing.

I shall live out my days keeping company with men and boys who fall asleep tired and sore but satisfied in muscle and soul. If you see me with a Press Herald

in hand you might remind me that no good will come of my spending my ten minutes following its shallow courses to their unhappy, unnatural conclusions.