Golden Means and Such

Although there are many things about our current home that I’ve learned to adjust to, (such as strange hallway acoustics that make it sound like you’re talking into a bucket) one of the house's quirks that remains outside the grasp of my adjustability is its inability to produce a consistently comfortable water temperature.

I should have had some idea when I first looked in the basement (what my wife refers to as “the archaeological dig” due to the multi-layered dugout earth floor) and set eyes on the tank of a water heater/furnace. It’ probably only a few hundred years old.

My showers were never super hot, but I began to agree that something was wrong when heating enough water for Lyric’s bath regularly required a kettle of hot water from the stove. It turns out that the temperature setting for hot water output was much too low, so says the maintenance man whom I finally coaxed out of a prolonged “vacation” to come look at my dinosaur fossil in the archaeological dig. Turning up the temp seems to do the trick – we’re able to have nice hot showers most of the time. It’s also much easier to burn your hands when washing dishes.

If you wash dishes by hand every day, you usually get to know the dynamics of the hot water output, how far to turn the faucet handle left or right in order to produce which temperature. I like to have the water nice and hot for rinsing dishes, right before the scald-skin-off-hands stage. But for some reason, this level of intimacy with my hot water heater eludes me (I think we need counseling) and I continue to be surprised by an inconsistent temperature of water, either to cold or too hot.

The same thing happens to me in the shower, which also seems to have a life of its own. Allow me to attempt description. First, it takes about a minute for the hot water to kick in at all so you let gallons and gallons of Mr. Cold rush down the drain until Miss Hot arrives with vengeance. So for another minute you try to convince Miss Hot to back off to a manageable level by adjusting and readjusting the little hand knob. At the moment when you feel you have finally reached that pristine little paradise of just-right-mmmm-hot shower temp, you jump in and realize that Miss Hot is trying to peel strips of skin off your back. I’ve finally come to realize that Mr. Cold and Miss Hot do not like to compromise. There is a specific point on the dial of the water knob that seems to be the dividing line between scalding and luke-warm with no middle ground. Only if I can turn the knob ever so slightly between these two states of reality do I sometimes find a compromise – but my joy is short-lived because in the midst of all this vascillating, there is a constant decline of water tempt overall of the dinosaur fossil’s willingness to keep up with Miss Hot’s output. (Mr. Dinosaur also needs counseling) So because of all these strained relationships, even a short five-minute shower (between attempts to find the right temp and then maintain it) requires dozens of water knob adjustments – a regular nightmare for an obsessive compulsive guy like me.

I’ve been thinking there must be a useful analogy here somewhere, and I think I’ve found it. Life is about finding balance, right? (the “golden mean” of Plato, or was it Aristotle?) Without the ability to balance out extremes – in this case hot and cold – discomfort and pain and difficulty results. And what greater example of the need for balance than the marriage? What an amazing idea, attempting to blend and mesh and fuse two entities who are stock full of the un-blend-able, the un-mesh-able, the non-fuse-able. One is a clean freak, the other finds that the path to enlightenment leads through a house scattered with randomly strewn objects. One is helpless and maimed without well-planned schedules, detailed lists and clear goals while the other enjoys floating about like jetsam and flotsam on troubled seas. One has their scrooge wound tightly, the other enjoys casual spending and finds receipts trifling. (You know who you are out there.)

So I like to think of myself as Mr. Cold and my wife as Miss Hot. She is goal-oriented and a visionary, a disciplined worker for the most part with a good grasp of the big picture. I tend to be oriented toward the nebulous and undefined, get absorbed in the details and constantly forget my wallet and keys while I am trying to suck the marrow out of life’s bones. Sometimes her hot is entirely essential, sometimes my cold is absolutely necessary.

She is the one who woke me up at age 18 by randomly walking up behind me and dumping Queen Ann’s Lace on my head (hot water), but I’m the one who’s kept her sane through residency (cold water). She’s the one who got me off my duff to start running again (hot water) but I’m the one who can mediate familial conflicts with cold water. Hands down, my life is better because of Miss Hot. She’s opened a world to me that I couldn’t have found just sitting around sucking on bones and I’ve opened a world to her that she couldn’t have found by chasing goals and checking off lists.

I suppose we could survive on our own (it’s impossible even to imagine that after seven years of marriage) but there are so many ways we can help each other – if we can find the elusive middle ground between scalding and luke-warm. If we can learn to use each other’s strengths at the appropriate times - learn to compromise just a bit for the task at hand - if we can blend our hot and cold – we can be dynamite.

Sleep Deprivation, Part 3 of 3

written August 11, 2008

so we’ve been in PA for what . . . two weeks now? it is definitely strange to have rushed out of our little house in Akron, zoomed across PA, stuffed all our belongings into a small storage space and then flopped into a secluded cabin. we are left trying to make sense of it all. there has been no shortage of excitement: in two short weeks, Lyric has gotten a bee sting, been shocked by the electric fence, been nibbled on by a donkey, had a splinter removed from her foot, and has taken a trip to the emergency room because of a scratch on her eye. she’s learning that it is a different set of survival skills in the country than the city. Olivia and I are trying to adapt as well. the insects and birds are a wonderful new sound to listen to, but sometimes they keep us up at night, even though we could sleep through garbage trucks and Harleys in Akron. it is startling to not see any other humans around outside, only trees, insects and birds and the occasional small mammal.

we continue to adjust to parenting two girls instead of one . . . we are gradually readjusting to getting only a few hours of sleep at a time instead of one nice big chunk. two nights ago we didn’t get to sleep until around five in the morning. even then I lay in bed wide awake, writing an imaginary article in my head entitled “The Will to Parenthood: the complete eradication of self.”

we had been getting into a fairly nice routine of putting Lyric (5) to bed around 9:30 and putting Maggie (two months old at the time) to bed between 10 or 11and having a few hours of the evening to ourselves. I was taking particular pride in this on Saturday evening as I talked to Mom on the phone. however, my optimism was to be soon overturned and trampled upon. about 10:30 we heard Maggie starting to cry and simultaneously, Lyric crying too. Since Lyric hardly ever wakes up when Maggie cries, we knew something unusual might be afoot. Olivia and I gave each other the “oh boy, aren’t we glad to be parents!” look and I took Maggie while she tended to Lyric. Lyric was complaining of something in her eye and refused to let us look at it or open it. Maggie soon settled and went back to sleep for a few minutes. she continued to wake up frequently but her role in the story is pretty irrelevant after this. Lyric continued to moan, groan and be generally insulted by the pain in her eye that dared to come upon her. we double-teamed her and tried to look in her eye, without finding much of anything. after some amount of wrestling with Lyric and discussion on our part, we attempted to get her back to sleep. she would doze off briefly and then suddenly cry out in pain, becoming more and more restless and anxious about the whole affair. after a few hours of this we realized more drastic measures would have to be taken. we held Lyric down and tried to flush out the eye with water, apparently to no effect other than to create more pain and anxiety in Lyric. (not the least of which was losing faith in her parents) we tried going to bed again and then repeated the yelling/flushing procedure yet again. and yet again, this only resulted in more anxiety in Lyric and despair in us. we discussed going to the emergency room but were hesitant based on the fact that we did not at the moment have medical insurance due to having just moved and being between jobs. in a last ditch effort we brought Lyric to bed with us. I told her a Pooh Bear story and stroked her hair. she knew we were contemplating going to the hospital, something she absolutely wanted to avoid since we had gone to the doctor’s office last week where she had received four shots. so realizing that if she went back to sleep she wouldn’t have to go to the doctor, she resolutely tried to go to sleep and not whimper in pain. she relaxed and drifted off to sleep, but at last, the pain was too much and we finally resolved to take her to the emergency room.

I strapped a sleepy and distraught Lyric in the car and we drove off in the darkness of early morning. the doctor was unable to see any foreign bodies in Lyric’s eye but was able to detect a nice big spot of scratches on Lyric’s cornea which was causing pretty severe pain. whatever had been in there was gone. they gave her some numbing drops and the pain gradually decreased. we knew the pain must have been pretty bad because Lyric didn’t open her eyes the entire next day.

till all was said and done we got everyone back in their respective beds around 5 o-clock a.m. at least we got some sleep before Maggie got up demanding to be fed around 7.

let’s just say that some nights are better than others. raising a family is hard work, but the hard work makes you a family for keeps, and a family that you are willing to work hard for.

Favorite Photographs from October

form in lewisburg 1

box play: proof that a cardboard box is the all-around best toy in the world

faces of interest: Lyric the dramatist, Daddy the manic, Maggie the philosopher



arch: Lyric complies with fathers explorative photography

Frodo: at the recent heritage days, I found Frodo making fresh apple cider, I didn't see the ring

generational craft: knitters at heritage days

framed photographs: my display

form in lewisburg 2

Where We Were

so we decided to make Friday our shopping day, the day where we would “take care of that Christmas list” by double teaming it during our annual pilgrimage to the MALL. well aware that partaking in consumerism within densely stocked stores densely placed within acres of concrete and pavement tends to make me giddy with depression, I prepared myself ahead of time – talked myself down, took on an optimistic outlook, a ride-with-the-waves mentality. so we walked into the mall and made our way through the large stores into the main mall complex, past the Santa picture-taking and the cell phone salesman with the alluring foreign accent, past the kiddie rides and the little pig that flips and oinks outside the toy store. we passed an elderly man in Velcro shoes slowly eating an ice cream cone when suddenly my wife says quietly, “Here we are.”

Sleep Deprivation part 2

Olivia professionally reacts to her 27th page for the weekend, mostly from silly, overparenting mothers.



written 11-25-08

last night was a “duze-ee”. we attempted to go to bed early and for once in a rarity, we did. lights out at 10:48 . . . plenty of time for some good rest. but we couldn’t sleep. we rolled around some, tried to breathe slowly and evenly, pinched our eyes shut . . . but Olivia took her turn with a drippy throat and regular coughs like clockwork, marking the passing minutes abruptly with mini shock waves throughout the bed. finally I begin to doze off, just in time to hear Maggie coughing and doing her half-wail, not so much that she is in desperate straits as just lonely or sad. I sigh and throw on my heavy bathrobe – the hallway is always such an ice house experience. I get Maggie settled and then come back to bed to restart the relaxing process that will hopefully again lead towards subconscious sleep.

but Olivia’s anxiety demons are out in full force tonight and will not take no for an answer. Olivia rants angrily about how unfair it is not to be able to sleep when exhausted. we’ve been pinching our eyes shut for an hour. I try every trick in the book. I fight fire with fire, raise the volume of my voice for intimidating effect, and rant about being ranted against. the demons multiply. Olivia moans and groans about how she will become a complete medical professional failure, how the patients and their demands mount up like a tsunami rushing toward her in full force, and she is the sole mud-and-thatch hut right on the edge of the beach – IMMINENT DESTRUCTION! the demons scream, IMMINENT DESTRUCTION!

Realizing the demons are beyond intimidation I switch tactics. I try rationalization, despite the fact that it has never worked in my marriage. I am met with more dire pronouncements of fatality and complete hopelessness. I finally give my wife three choices: 1 leave the bed and go do some journaling, have it out on paper, 2 lay there quietly in bed and accept that fact that she might soon self-destruct, or 3 allow me to read to her. After some whining and resistance (she wants to keep fighting the demons) she allows me to read to her.

at 1 a.m. I read Klinkenborg, chapters about farming and fathers and the subtle motivations that drive us and identify us to ourselves. He thinks that our physical surroundings depict precisely who we are inside, we cannot hide. He says that in our rebellion we think that we can choose our influences, but later we realize that they are the ones who choose us. I read for some time, periodically checking Olivia’s face for any sign of relaxation. She continues to look like she is struggling for mental air, her skin a bit gray – but at least she is quiet while I read. at one point she has the covers pulled over her head. I secretly laugh. Eventually we decide to try sleeping again. It doesn’t work.

In a final attempt – I bring up funny memories from our honeymoon; the time I got snorted on by a horse, the time we couldn’t find anything to eat except day-old dried-out egg sandwiches and killer-fire Doritos. She chuckles some and I think that we might be gaining ground. I stroke her hair into the night and listen carefully for her breathing to change. It does ever so slightly and I think I feel her toe twitch, a sign that her muscles are being handed over to the autonomic system – I wait and wait, but her breathing again becomes short, and she swallows several times. My best attempts have come short, she continues to cough and toss and turn.

I doze briefly and then Maggie is awake. I must have scared a demon off of Olivia that attacked Maggie. Usually all that Maggie requires is one or two Nuk-reinsertions or some blankie-rearranging, but this time she is audibly upset. She has a grievance and wants to discuss it with me in loud tones. I listen to what she has to say, patiently reinserting the Nuk between her dogmatic reiterations of her 5 month woes and her endless coughing. She sounds like her lungs are under water. I consider giving her formula but it is only 3:30 in the morning, not the time or the place in which to begin a nice, comfy tradition that will be expected again tomorrow morning. So I opt instead to stand there for fifteen minutes and coax Maggie back to sleep. I think about how similar it was trying to coax Olivia to sleep, only the methods vary.

Dealing with sleep deprivation is probably one of the least anticipated skills I’ve had to learn since becoming a parent. I don’t know if skill is the right word . . . it’s really a new form of reality – seeing the world through half-open eyes maybe. Not that you see less things, but you see different things. Sleep is such a healing experience, one that I miss. Without it there are more demons, and they are harder to deal with. But music sounds sweeter and I am for once motivated to get up at 6:30 in the morning for nothing else but to write out a silly description of it. Surely there is a place for chaos and demons to help build us into better people. We must believe this or else we would have to surrender to it and them. We must always muster the creative instinct along with the will to live and go on. There is always a new sun on the morrow, regardless of how much we have or have not slept.

Poetry in Photography

"The main task for the Haiku poet," Veda explained, "is to immerse himself into the heart of an object or an incident ... and to catch the impersonal mood it shares with the universe." - Colin Westerbeck quoting Veda who wrote the essay "Basho on the Art of the Haiku: Impersonality in Poetry"

quotes taken from Westerbeck writing about the Poet Basho's influence on the photographer Yasuhir Ishimoto in a book of Ishimotos photography under the title "Yasuhiro Ishimoto"

... the profound perceptions of the poet can be sustained only for a few moments at most. His revelations are but a glimpse into the nature of things.

If you get a flash of insight into an object, ... let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write ... never hesitate at that moment. The instantaneous quality that the composition of the poem must have makes it like leaping at a formidable enemy, ... or like biting into a pear.

" ... simply observe what children do," Basho says.

The poet does not flee from the world of ordinary men; he is in the middle of it, understanding and sharing the feelings of ordinary men; he has only to be a bystander, who calmly and smilingly observes them.

Sleep Deprivation: part 1

(in 3 parts)

written September 6, 2008:

In attempt to help my wife out, I agreed to get up in the middle of the night in order to check on the tomato “sauce” that was cooking in the oven all day and all night. We wanted it to be “thick” so that when we made pizza later this year, the sauce did not run like water out over the crust and onto the pan. We baked that sauce – I checked on it twice during the night – and it got scorched.

So we had the necessary discussion regarding the potential benefits and inconveniences of canning one’s own food. For instance, does it really save money? This depends on how much time one invests in obtaining the vegetables, like, say, hours and hours invested in a garden. Or if one buys vegetables at a competitive Farmer’s Market, or if one lives within a network of family and friends who share crops and labor. Till one obtains all the “necessary equipment”, like, say, a large stainless steel pot in which to cook sauce down properly, and a kitchen large enough to stash the canning supplies, and room to work – by then perhaps one’s children are grown and gone. Is a half day in the kitchen making 6 half pints of relish worth about 4 dollars that you have saved?

Although canning in our time is hardly efficient, we decide, other imbedded values dust off our resolve to keep trying. Our generation is not a canning generation. Our grandparents preserved food in glass Ball jars as a way of life. Our parents canned as an option which they were largely excited about foregoing when faced with the grinning canned goods so accessible in the supermarkets. Today we can food only by a conscious effort of squeezing a few spare hours to invest in saving ourselves from being devoured by a thoughtless consumption that makes Wal-Mart possible. But it is work and it is time.

Canning food brings awareness. Spending time selecting vegetables, sorting, washing, cutting, cooking, canning and shelving; one enters a process and develops a relationship with the canned product – we commune with the earth and its fruit. Jars are reused year after year.

Tonight we rode on a horse-drawn wagon through the late-summer Pennsylvania countryside. It had rained all day – a good ground-soaking rain that eased days and weeks of parching ache. The huge black haunches of the work horses bulged and strained easily in the harness until sweat glistened in the twilight. They moved our loaded wagon easily through the rolling hills of color saturated by the sudden clearing of the rain and the evening light among the wet air. We passed through tall straight rows of corn, dark green and yellow; the brown thatch of dried summer grass; the bright green of recently sown buckwheat. Everywhere moisture and light gave visible life to the network of plant life. Faces were happy and thoughtful, at ease on this placid ride.

Dog Ownership II

-posted by Olivia-

I plead guilty as charged to lobbying for a dog. My punishment? Getting to live with what I lobbied for.

Bob Dylan was awfully cute and frisky at the breeders. We picked him out of the tumbling pack of pups because he seemed to be the most outgoing. He was just a bit bigger than his brothers and sisters. The biology major in me should have known—he was a dominant male—but I was taken by his friendly tail and curiosity.

All through chief year, my stay-at-home husband looked glummer and glummer as the winter months marched by and more and more muddy paw prints accumulated on the linoleum and wood flooring. I could tell how many times Matthew had to clean up after “THE DOG” by the tightness of the lines on his face when I walked in the door after work.

Like a good working spouse, I pleaded Dylan’s case. “Let me work with him,” I’d say, remembering with fondness my preteen years with Banjo, my childhood Shetland Sheepdog. Banjo and I were great buddies. I taught him to sit, shake, and even jump through a hoop. I dreamed of dressing as a clown, with Banjo doing tricks as a sidekick. I even checked out books about magic tricks at the library and gave a matinee with my obliging cousins as an audience. We were both innocent of the great cataclysmic turn my life was about to take: late adolescence with its hours cooped in my bedroom, studying, practicing the violin, and dreaming about guys.

I thought I could still codger up some of my old dog-training finesse, though. Armed with Matthew’s hand signals and leash, I took Dylan on a walk. Did I forget to mention I was pregnant at the time? I thought my lower back would never recover. By then, Dylan was a good sized adolescent Golden Retriever. He pulled me around the block, and almost induced a healthy episode of emesis from his expecting companion when he made a healthy deposit on the sidewalk. “You mean,” I the working spouse thought to myself, “Matthew has to scoop this stuff up with a little baggie every time it happens?”

Needless to say, I didn’t walk Dylan much more after that. Even the removal of both of his testosterone producing organs could not quell his spirit. My abdomen only got more ponderous, and Maggie was soon born, so I had plenty of excuses. When Matthew had his last Existential crisis with the DOG question, I decided I had to be more helpful. We bought a training collar, and I resolved to learn to use it.

Dylan has been making slow and steady progress with Matthew’s training, and they (usually) have mutual love for one another. I harbor a sneaking suspicion, however, that Dylan has viewed me as “one of The Master’s pups” ever since he laid eyes on me. Whenever I try one of Matthew’s hand signals, Dylan gets a big grin on his furry face and maws at my hand. When I try to make him sit to put on the training collar, he deftly chomps on the collar and tosses it effortlessly away from my frantic graspings. “No, Dylan, Off!!!,” I squeal.

Usually, I come into the house in despair and enlist Matthew the Master’s help.
Today was no different. I got past my habitual fears of running in the cold. “Do I have to run outside today?” I ask Matthew. “Every time you come in from running outside, you thank me for making you go,” he replies. I bundled up to face the November chill, and grabbed the leash. FAILURE. Every attempt to place the training collar over Dylan’s head was met with happy, chomping teeth.

Matthew came out onto the porch with his flannel pajama pants and sweatshirt on. “You’ll have to be more stern with him!” he said, invoking the usual argument we have over dog parenting. (He thinks it works to spank, and I don’t). “That doesn’t work for me!” I glare. Matthew stands by while Dylan—now obedient in the presence of the Great Master—allows the placement of the collar. We are off!!!

We jog over the mighty Susquehanna, and down a side road with old houses on one side and a field on the other. I remind myself not to panic with the cold blasts of air and the tightenings of my stomach muscles as I breathe. I practice making my voice deeper, more assertive. “No Dylan, HEEL!” I think about how stressful it is to face exasperated parents, how much I wish I could do everything perfectly, and how deeply I wish people would forgive me when I can’t. I remember an article I read from a journal for women in the medical profession. The author writes about female physicians needing to lobby for workshops in assertiveness training at their workplaces.

“Hey,” I think to myself, “Dylan is my own personal assertiveness training!” Dylan and I jog down the road. He buries his nose in the snow like a doggy snowplow as we trek along. I feel refreshed, renewed, and ready to face just a few more days of coughs, runny noses, and tight schedules.

We round the corner, and there are the remains of a dead animal on the road. Dylan is overcome with glee. He rubs his head and body repeatedly in the roadkill before I can realize what is happening. A greasy man in a pickup roars by, grinning at me, the yuppy with my disobedient dog. I try to grin—assertively—back. “No Dylan,” I squeal, dragging him away from the grime. He continues to seize in pleasure. “NO Dylan!” I squeal a little louder. The doggy seizing continues. I reach into the deepest hollows of my soul, past my anxieties, past my niceness, and pull out a roar, “NO DYLAN! COME!!!” He stops seizing, rights himself, and resumes a trot by my side.

We re-cross the Susquehanna and turn down the block toward home. We have a lot of work to do, but I am grateful for this furry beast and the lessons we have to learn together.

so this past weekend we made our third trip to Ohio in as many months - (we keep vowing to end our travel habits as Maggie has been on 5 big trips in her first 4 months) this time primarily for my cousin's wedding - it was also the only weekend in the near future that my sibs were going to be in one place so we went ahead and held the "Wenger family Christmas", sandwiched in a few hours on Sunday morning, between a busy wedding weekend where our quartet sang (after not singing for months and months) and Dawn leaving for Canada. hurray for the little family time that we have now . . . but at least we have it, and our family is as good as the next. a few pics from the weekend and this week:



on the way home Olivia made me stop and photograph this post-election sign specifically for Jen & Darren

Mom and Maggie happily reunited.

Lyric gets to eat pop tarts for breakfast for the first time since we left Ohio (Mom needs to adjust the toaster)

as per Marty tradition, he immediately wears as many of his Christmas gifts as possible - this time his sweater, shirt and pants strikingly remind us of L. L. Bean and he grabs a piece of wood to complete the image.

Olivia reads her two daughters a bed-time story while Dad exercises Dylan - eventually we'll get 'em all tucked in.

Darren: a poetic-historical exploration

Anyone who knows Darren has undoubtedly encountered and appreciated his unique view of the world - a view that he expresses candidly with his prolific writing and photographic ability. However, few of us have been priveleged to see Darren himself scrutinized by the camera lens. In attempt to fill that gap, I am posting pictures of "the big D" made a few weekends ago, positioned alongside text written by Darren himself. I've taken the liberty to extract quotes from several papers he has written over the past 5 years. It is my hope that these glimpses, while taken out of context, remain true to who Darren is, historically, presently and poetically.

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A guest editorial by Olivia follows . . .

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I cannot completely articulate or recover the origins of my faith. Yet I believe I am a product of the Truth, both poetic and historical, I have observed and absorbed. I can Live only in the present. And at present this is what I believe.



Life on this earth is impermanent.

We are all alive – more or less, and . . . all of us can fly.

I will not be content to define my self merely as a socio-cultural product in which I exist as a single event in a sea of dialectical impulses (or do I?)

I am not simply an individual member of a conservative Anabaptist sect, or even a single schizophrenic citizen of two kingdoms simultaneously. Rather I am a contradictory and somewhat ambiguous amalgamation of all sorts of processes.

I would like to think I comprise one part and at the same time the whole of my community – by internalizing, reformulating and contributing to the chemistry of Mennonite ideology and society.

As I search for what gives me meaning and purpose, I want to think carefully about why I chose Jesus as an archetype of right living, justice and salvation.

Am I a Mennonite because I am afraid to be alone? Is it possible to be alone?

I hope to move beyond the simple and comfortable empiricist mode of thought toward a more relational or dialectical approach to identity.

Although I’m still a boy, I feel as though I am beginning down the path of Life and Truth.

I cannot know about worlds to which I have not yet been exposed. I can only analyze the possibilities.

This is how I live, by choosing to follow life from tree to tree, flitting from relation to relation and back in a constant flow, measuring truth against truth and settling only to be upset(tled).

I want every day to be a new day when there’s a distilled sense of perception, a spare- ness, every line firm, irredundant, and the cherry blossoms are beginning to bloom, and nothing is wasted or unseen.

I would like to be able to make an intensely individualized art meaningful to the world.

The flourishing of any genuine work of art depends on its roots in native soil. “We are plants which - whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not – must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom in the ether and bear fruit” . . . The problem is to recover a viable homeland in which meaningful roots can be established. Place construction therefore is about the maintenance of roots and the art of dwelling.

It is a novel wonder of basic sensation to observe the quotidian world – to look across a measured space and to be undistracted by the convention of signs and traffic lights and Sikh taxis and Mexican scaffolding, by your own sputtering mind, sorting schedules that simulate spreadsheets, and by the energy people make, lunch crowds with razor sharp cell phones cutting through traffic like nobody’s business, the lion roar of buses on the brake, Nigerian bike messengers bound by chains of paper pettiness, all that consciousness powering down the flumes of Manhattan, the tumultuous center of the “knowing” world, so that it is impossible to see that across the street the ghost of the moon is rising over a moon temple masquerading as a Harlem tenement.

What I have written is not my final or completely articulated situation, but it is close to my heart and my idea of Truth.

________________________

Darren is the kind of person whose thoughts will drive the next social uprising.

I see a Mennonite father, the former owner of a Holmes county bulk food store, approaching Darren’s desk.

“Sit down,” Darren says. He turns in his swivel chair—upholstered in leather even though his wife is vegetarian—and tilts his head. “What can I do for you?”

The Mennonite father fingers his shirt collar nervously. He looks across the desk at Darren’s Party uniform. He clears his throat.

“Well, I ah, came to ask you for help with getting visas for my family. The new laws won’t let us own the store anymore, and yesterday some of our neighbors broke into our garage and took the food we had kept. We would like to leave. I thought you might understand, because…ah…your father…and…growing up like us…and”

Darren lifts the cigar he had been smoking before the man’s entrance from the ashtray. His lips are set in a line. He thinks about borders between countries and crossings and fathers. His eyes are cruel, but objective to their cruelty, like the eyes of a lioness ripping into her prey. He takes a long, quiet, drag on his cigar.


When the Mennonite Big Bang happened, Darren somehow ended up on a meteor heading top speed toward the limits of outer space. And yet, he looks pretty good with a beard. I wonder how he will bring the contradictions of himself together some day. He has determined to leave the traditions of Anabaptism behind, yet declares the dogma of Community from a lonely pedestal in the urban wilderness and wants to lose himself in the midst of the deep cultural traditions of an Asian tribe. He butchers any weaknesses he sees with bloodthirsty relish, but the only hint of these serial killings is a flicker of condescending light in his eyes. He holds his victims in an unforgiving grasp—brutally kicking them as they lie curled on the floor. But he will never be convicted in a court of law and will soon have the confidence to spurn the courts of religion too.

If Darren were a panther in the zoo, I’d sit there on a bench and watch him pace for a long time. I’d even write a poem about him, like Rilke, and give it to his wife. She would be another animal in the zoo I’d like to watch for awhile, but being behind bars would be so painful for her she’d flutter helplessly against the cage until she her feathers were broken and her song silent. I’d have to wait until no one was watching and steal the keys to her cage.