Grand Canyon

We drove the old familiar road and my wife said, "When we were kids we used to ride our bikes to that ice cream stand. I used to love those vanilla cones dipped in chocolate."

"You still do," I said. "And when I was a kid I rode my bike to that hardware store for nails to build forts. I remember we built a two story deal out of scraps in the back wood where they tossed all the construction cast offs."

"Two stories? You were lucky you didn't kill yourselves."

"Not only for that," I said.

From the padded plastic car seat in the back my 2-year old daughter said, "When I was a lion I used to eat birds and mice."

"Were they tasty?" I said. A quick glance in the rear view mirror. She was straining to see past the sides of the car seat and out the side window. A small group of crows ascended from the bank's front lawn.

"But I don't eat them now," she said.

"How about mice?"

"But maybe I can have a mouse."

"For dinner?"

"No, silly. To live in the mouse house."

My wife said, "When I was a tiger I used to eat chickens."

Tiny mental wheels calculated. The child said, "Mommy, you not a tiger. You're mommy."

I said, "Daddy's a lion."

"No, Daddy. You a bird."

"But don't the lions eat the birds?"

"But you don't need scared, Daddy. Yesterday I a lion. Today I Michelle."

And then twenty two years went by.

---

Last week I stood with my toes on the edge of the Bright Angel limestone, looking down past the Redwall to the Vishnu Schist. From the south rim tourist area there's only one place you can get a glimpse of the mighty Colorado that carved the Grand Canyon and I was not at that place. But if I could get some height, fly out over the abyss, perhaps then I could see it.

"I first saw this twenty five years ago," I said, trying to remember how it felt to fall through miles of open air and then catch myself as if my toes touched the rug at my bedside.

"What?"

"It was like I'd never been born. I felt so small."

The blond haired girl joined me at the edge of the precipice.

She said, "And then what?"

I thought about flying. Adding the gyrations of up and down to my usual two dimensional motation, and how this version me of doesn't well tolerate amusement park spins and drops. When I was younger, I craved it.

"Am I remembering a dream?"

"Are you?"

"I'd lived in the suburbs of big cities my whole life. So many different places that are all the same. The farthest you can see at any one time was either to the next stop light or upward to the moon. When I got here, I thought I'd reached heaven. It's an epiphany in rock. One of those indescribable visions you have in a dream that dissolves to nothing when you turn on the bedroom light. I remember standing here thinking angels were speaking to me. I think they are."

She searched me with her eyes and I wondered if my emotions were visible. Maybe she could decode them. Explain them to me the way a doctor tells you which pains are benign, and which require chemotherapy.

But she said, "Ok. So you saw the great outdoors for the first time and it opened your eyes to something new."

"Maybe that's all it was." A lump of something firm and sad rose in my throat and I swallowed it down. Keep it down.

"What's wrong?"

In my mind I repeated, "It was something else," but none of the words made it to my lips.

Instead, my eyes welled with tears and I took her hand and led her from the brink of the most beautiful descent on earth, back to the rental car.

---

The canyon is different every second of every day. As the hour hand arcs, sunlight swings through crevasses and over wide plains simultaneously revealing what had been in shadow and hiding what had been baked under the oppressive heat of full day. Rocks turn from golden, to orange, to red, to brown.

Distances are deceptive. A small head-sized chunk of granite a few feet away turns out to be a house-sized boulder a mile distant. The green thread of river seen from the rim becomes a seething monster at the shore, replete with man eating standing waves and rapids that pulverize human contrivances with an ease that borders on thermonuclear. This is the water that ate through the earth. This is the power of Shiva, there to remind you that the dispassionate destruction of solid rock yields a silent gargantuan beauty.

Every death is a birth.

Twenty two years ago I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with a few other engineer friends from RCA in New Jersey. We took the South Kaibab trail to the Phantom Ranch. It's a steeper yet shorter route than the Bright Angel. As the trailhead is not close to the tourist centers, it's less traveled. Though unlike the Bright Angel trail where running water is available every 1.5 miles, there is no available water on the Kaibab. So one must carry his own - enough to assure safe arrival at the bottom. This quantity amounts to about a gallon for the downward journey, provided one leaves before daybreak and walks in the colder part of the day.

We took our trip on July 4th weekend. Temperatures at the rim were in the 90's Fahrenheit, and at the bottom they would be closer to 120F.

I had been anticipating the trip for the year it took to plan. After my first look at the canyon some two years prior I had been yearning to get back the way Roy Neery needed to meet the aliens at devil's tower. I dreamed of the canyon. I read books. I reviewed the photos I had taken over and over.

And then I was there at the banks of the Colorado at the Phantom Ranch. It was 118F in the shade.

That didn't stop me from filling up my canteens and walking up the North Kaibab trail so I could say to myself I'd been closer to the North Rim than anyone else on our trek.

I remember sleeping fitfully in a bunkhouse with 7 other hikers. Being roused at 4AM by the rangers, fed a pancake breakfast at 5, and being shooed off on our way back up to the south rim before the July temperatures turned us into a death statistic in the Park's Department register.

My friend Mel and I made it from the Phantom Ranch to the south rim tourist centers by 10AM. We were young and full of energy. We pulled away from the rest of our team early on, and walked most of the journey with only each other as company.

The whole time I was certain there was someone walking with us. I could hear footsteps behind me.

Later in life I read the story of Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance, and how when crossing South Georgia island he felt there was a fourth member of the team hiking along side them.

With perfect historical hindsight we can develop the explanation that by the time Shackleton and his men reached South Georgia he was starved, sleep deprived, dehydrated, and probably close to death, and that in that state a man can hardly be blamed for hallucination.

But I was none of those things.

And I am not now. And the companion is with me, next to me as I write.

---

We are born and we die many times in one life. Each death teases us, lures us into the complacency of stasis. It's far easier just simply not to try than to endure the trials. Each death suggests silence. Calm. Remain and all is well.

Each birth, an elevator door opening on a room we've never seen, home nowhere in sight.

At each juncture, the opportunity to speak.

At each of those times the angels pause, listening, awaiting our guidance. They can't live down here. They can't even breathe. They watch us they way we absorb television pixels.

-What made you decide?

-What will you do next?

-We can't believe you got this far. Look at what happened.

-How does it feel?

The Grand Canyon is sacred ground to the Yavapai, Havasupai, and the Hopi.

Far from the tourist trails there is a cave. In the cave is a Kiva. At the center of the Kiva is the Sipapu, a hole in the ground that descends beyond the center of the world to the beginning of all creation. It is the channel life took to Earth's surface. It is the origin of all of us, all time, all things.

I know it is here. Standing on the white shale at the rim it vibrates the stones under my feet and sends a pure note through on the wind. The camera laden tourists push past and every now and then one will pause and ask another, "What was that? Did you hear that?"

I was like that, once.

"Are you okay?" said the blonde haired girl.

And I could hear her the way someone lost hears the the rescuer's calls echo off the stone.

It's been a lifetime since my last descent of the Grand Canyon. My lifetime. Now in climbing it steals my breath. It tears at my heart and legs. The thought crossed my mind on the ascent once, maybe twice - I won't make it.

Now at the rim after seven hours climb she asks, "Are you okay? What's wrong?"

The Canyon is immutable. Though it changes constantly, I would recognize its brink through the darkest night and deepest snows. But I am no longer the young man who ascended from the Ranch in five hours. That one is dead and this scarred and imperfect replica has risen in his place.

I can put my feet in the same places I did those years ago and stare out over the gulf to the shattered rock knowing that the Canyon is measured in millions of lifetimes since the first being emerged from its depths. But likely, only one lifetime from now I shall not stand again in this holy place.

"What's hurting?"

And because we live poetic lives, an osprey swooped down from behind us and soared into the abyss. We watched as it became a silhouette became a dot became nothing against Shiva's temple.

I said, "When I was a bird I killed small animals and taunted the lions."

But no one needs fear me now.

Today I am just a man.

No User Servicable Parts Inside

The good thing about being old is you've lived to tell about it. It's an unavoidable fact of living that after a couple of decades of breathing one will have had several occasions to slip the mortal coil through one's own stupidity, and it's the folks who manage to tally up sheets of documented bogosity as long as a cow's leg that owe the most debt of gratitude to the forces of the universe.

When I was in engineering school in the early 1980's they were still interested in teaching some of us about big thick wires hung from aluminum towers you needed helicopters to visit. While my degree was to be in semiconductor physics, a discipline involving things so small everyone is sure magic is involved, I decided I wanted to learn how the other half lived. I wanted to see the great big turbines. The big ball bearings. The megavolts. The multi-Tesla magnets. The big boy toys.

So I took an elective in power generation and distribution systems.

The nice thing about power distribution and generation was the math was absolutely trivial compared to the partial differential world of quantum physics. All the answers involve the square root of two. Most power systems math can be summed this way: take a really big number and multiply by the square root of two. You can use three sometimes, but only when things are totally out of control.

Now that you know the math, you're ready to be an engineer.

For instance, take two really thick copper wires. Bolt them to a big piece of concrete on the floor. Send a couple hundred amps down them at once. The answer about what happens is something times something times the square root of two. It's cool to watch. The bolts fly out of the concrete sending shrapnel everywhere. The wires try to go to opposite ends of the universe taking the building and everything in their way with them. The smoke fills the lab and sets off the fire alarm. Enough ozone is created by the arcing to replenish the hole over Antarctica. Burning is everywhere.

The professor, who has been in the teacher's lounge the whole time, comes in and sees the lab wrecked and screams something about Lorentz. Then he goes to work in 7-Eleven selling Big Gulps because kids aren't supposed to be left alone with so many amps.

Why would anyone bolt big wires to concrete and shoot lots of juice down them? The answer is simple.

Women.

Women make boys want to burn things. And when there's nothing to burn, they want to blow things up. And when there's nothing to blow up, they make rail guns.

In our case, before our gun's self-immolition, the projectile (a thick aluminum bar we stole from the ceramic lab) imbedded itself in a cinder block wall. Despite our efforts we were not rewarded by being killed by our invention because God loved us that day. That's what Al said, anyway. Then he went and became a priest.

Even with Al out of contention, we still didn't get any dates.

Lack of women sent me to power generation lab. In the lab they have a big machine called, the synchronous machine. It's basically a rotating shaft with a bunch of wire coils around it. Some of these coils turn with the shaft, some don't. The ones that don't are called stators, and the ones that do are called something else. There are commutators in there to get electricity in and out. Etc. You know what you need to know. Multiply by the square root of two. Things spin. Meters deflect. You make graphs. They give you a degree. You go to work in nuclear power plants.

Of course, that might not happen. Let's say you connect the synchronous machine to three-phase 440V 60AMP, 60Hz power. This may not sound like much to you, but you could run a big ride at Disney World on that alone.

So let's say you put that juice in one synchronous machine thing and get it spinning. Then you connect the synchronous machine to a diesel engine, just because you're a boy and you can. Then you crank up the engine so it's really torquing the synchronous machine. You can actually help the electric company supply the world. Your electric meter runs backward and you suspect you've just discovered a great way for the university to save money through the totally inefficient, indirect generation of power through diesel generators.

I was admiring the backward running electric meter, holding two wires in my hand. These two wires represented one of the three phases of the 440V, 60A supply we were dealing with. I was waiting to plug these wires into an important socket when June Eccleston came into the lab.

June was one of the few female engineers in our class and having her in the lab outside class with so few guys around gave me odds I could never have otherwise. My mating genes engaged. I was ready to show all my feathers.

What I did to convince her I was worthy of breeding was that while trying to get up the guts to ask her to the Devo concert I casually touched my thumbs to the bare ends of the wires, forming a circuit that went from Jersey Central Power and Light's plant in Livingston to my left thumb to hand to arm to body to heart to arm to hand to right thumb and back into the universe of electrons generated by the power plant.

In this case, the square root of three is involved when calculating the total charge I conducted. And then you have to consider real versus imaginary power -- where only the real power was involved in the actual cooking of me. When I woke up my arms were frozen in a contracted position. There was smoke coming from my shirt. Something was burning, and it smelled like hamburger. It turned out to be coming from the machine. We ground up some sort of vole in there.

My lab partner was sure he saw an angel of God tearing one of the leads out of my convulsing hand. Either that or it was the wire melting. He ran off to become a priest. He was out of the running for the women, but it didn't make much difference.

Instead of having me expelled, professor Rankin gave me an 'A' for that class because I was making adequate use of the square-root-of-two key on my calculator. My arms returned to normal after a couple of hours.

June didn't seem to care. Later I would learn that probability of survival is something a woman looks for in a mate, and nearly frying yourself alive in front of one was unlikely to help win her heart.

The aplomb with which I absorbed electrons or survived their catastrophic propulsion earned me some noteriety. (Actually the US Army suggested I might be a good candidate for their pulse-power conditioning lab where they generate titanic electrical pulses to run huge lasers to blast missiles out of the sky, but I never did that.) I kept my concentration in physics where except for the poison gas, the small, non-lethal voltages would keep me out of trouble.

When you get a graduate degree in electrical engineering, the first thing people say to you is: "Hey, when are you going to come by and fix my TV?" After a while you get tired of telling them engineering is not TV repair. You get tired of hearing them say, "So what good are you?" You start thinking the matchbook course on TV and VCR repair would have made you more popular than working for a big electronics company that does things nobody understands.

People understand when their TV works and when it doesn't. The fact you helped put satellites in orbit or put megahertz in someone's computer pales in comparison with bringing Jerry Springer into people's homes.

So when my mother-in-law's TV broke, why couldn't college-educated me fix it? I did know something about complicated TV electronics, didn't I? After all, physics is one thing, but TVs are God's work. And by the way, Bobby Sweeney from across the street fixed his mother's TV when it broke, and he was an accountant.

If you kill yourself by sticking your wet finger on the flyback transformer of an active television set, your life insurance agent laughs at your widow and child and sends them away penniless. So every moderately educated person knows not to do that. Everyone who has ever opened the back of a computer monitor or television set knows how to discharge the great big capacitor that stores enough electrons to burn your aorta to a chip. Everybody knows how to take the screwdriver and short the terminals to the case to prevent the laughing during the eulogy.

I had determined the thermally-actuated crowbar circuit in the Sony's power supply was kicking in prematurely and shutting down the TV. I was smart enough to figure that out. I was smart enough to figure out which transistor was causing the problem.

Because there isn't enough college education available to humanity to help a deeply and fundamentally stupid, suicidal person, I decided to do some testing with the TV turned on, to make sure my fix was going to take. I defeated the safety interlock that prevented one from switching the set on with the case opened. The yellow sticker that said, "No user serviceable parts inside" was a taunt. The little international symbol man being zapped from the sky by God only meant "sinners need not pass these sacred electronic gates". For I was a holy man of lightning.

Didn't they know who I was? Did they expect I could be demeaned by being catalogued a "user"? They, who invented stickers, had never met me. I vowed the "they" who did these things would be sorry someday.

It was hot. My home's tiny airconditioner wasn't cooling down our living room, where I had my in-law's TV in pieces on the coffee table. My shirt was off and I was covered in sweat.

I was holding a high-voltage probe from a fluke multimeter against a terminal of the thirty-thousand volt power supply when something made me move. I think I was reaching for a sip of coca-cola. Or maybe I was raising my hands to prayer, or maybe I just wanted to scratch my tongue, because the truth is that those brain cells have been char-broiled and are now rattling around in my skull like dried mexican beans.

I woke up sitting upright, wobbling from side to side. The lights in the house were flickering. There was a streak of red across my chest and a thin trail of smoke where the hair had been singed off. The electricity had gone from one wet finger across my sweaty chest to the other, burning a track as it went.

When my wife came into the living room and saw me burning on the floor she said the only thing worth contributing to the world of knowledge and altruism when confronted with a self-destructive engineering idiot.

"Did you fix it?"

It turns out I had, and so was now on par with Bobby Sweeney, the accountant TV maintenance genius from across the street.

A few days later, I met Bob in the town bar and I asked him about fixing his mother's TV, because after all, between amateur TV repair and becoming a navy seal, it was unclear to me which was less dangerous.

He didn't remember fixing the TV. Just that the remote needed batteries.

House Full of Ghosts

Note to Government: Make Love, not war.
Note to Teenagers: Make Music, not love.
Note to Musicians: Music is not war.
Note to Self: There would be no music if lovers never went to war.


*


I don't want to be a writer anymore.
I'm tired of the self-destruction.
Is it all to justify the pain,
Or to cause it?
Once I asked my dad if he thought there was an end to it.
He was younger than I am now when I did,
And I remember that he said to me,
"No. It never does,"
That back then it brought me such hope.


*


My TiVO captures a show called "Ghost Hunters."
I like this show.
People go into dark houses and try to capture shadows and mists with digital equipment, all to prove in playback such things occur.

Inevitably, something happens. Most of the time the results are inconclusive. Once in a while the things are so clear we suspect trickery.

A few episodes ago they captured the voice of Princess Caroline saying, "Yes, I hear you. Who's there?" across the decades, the seemingly impenetrable boundary of life and time.

Then they cut to commercial.

We turned off the TV. We went to Costco. We needed to restock our supplies of dried nuts and unsalted butter.


*


I remember watching the lights in the sky, standing in the airport parking lot under an afternoon rain in Juneau. A brilliant blue white star pierced the cloud deck. After a few moments, I could see the black shadows behind the glare. The red and green wing tip lights. Then the fuselage as the nose tipped slightly upward and the landing gear extended to grab the asphalt.

The rumbling came as the pilot reversed the engines and the plane rolled past and slowed, reached the taxiway, and pivoted toward the terminal.

I remember I waved, not knowing if they were sitting on the left or the right, or if they were even peering out the windows at Alaska.

What were they thinking, then, my three? My children coming to visit after the divorce. Could they see me? I waved harder. I shouted. The plane docked at the gate.

Both hands above my head.

"Hey."

I'm here.

Everything I still loved in the world sitting in row fourteen. My precious cargo.

Could they still see me?


*


I remember my friend Bill, standing with me in the cold rain outside a restaurant in Los Gatos, right after I told him my wife of 23 years and I were breaking up.

The accomplished author, university fellow, award winner: he asked me, "Do you think it will make you a better writer?"

It seemed insulting - but Bill didn't have a mean streak. So it had to be something else.

"I'm not getting divorced to have more time to write."

"No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that."

"Because, right now I don't care if I write another word in my life," I said.

"Of course you don't." He laid a hand on my shoulder. "Let's go inside. I'm getting cold."


*


When I get to the top of the mountain on my bicycle I make a point to talk to the dead people. I thank them for having been in my life when they were. I do not try to capture their responses digitally. It doesn't matter I bring back "proof", and it doesn't matter that I speak to them on a hilltop or in the restroom at my office.

Because time doesn't matter for them, they may already be captured and speaking through some advanced time/space warping device developed in the year 2221. Maybe then people know life and death are as interchangeable as matter and energy.

Or it's all illusion.

If the dead do speak they tell us that in the afterlife they yearn for the one real thing. It's what they say to the ghost hunters, to the mediums, to the priests and witch doctors.

How ironic. It seems it's what I want most to avoid, but spend the most time trying to produce.


*


Mornings can be the worst. Waking up requires we reset ourselves. We have to bring back the diurnal cycle after we've been floating in timelessness.

I expect to see my bedroom shadows resolve to timeful reality.

I expect to hear my children arguing about the television channel, or who got the last of the sugary cereal.

Once in a while I accidentally say my wife's name.

That's when the ghosts surround me reminding me matter and energy are interchangeable.

And I never want to write again.


*


"What's wrong?" asks the blond haired girl.

I say, "Nothing," as I have since I could speak. I say, "Nothing," as a six-year old stealing his father's tools. I say, "Nothing," as a four year old drilling holes in the living room floor. I say, "Nothing," as a teenager dropping Molotov cocktails down a storm drain to create admirable fireballs.

I say, "Nothing," because she is not part of that madness and it is cruel to drag her into it.

I say, "Nothing," because it is my past, not hers. "Nothing," is my decision, from the start. "Nothing," is what I do to my seconds, minutes, and earthy years.

Ask the psychics what they get from the other side.

"Nothing," is sitting at the lawyer, agreeing on everything and him saying he has never seen this before and asking if we are sure.

"Nothing," is the end to that life and the beginning to this.

"Nothing," is how effective some of us are at creating the hurt.

"Nothing," is what the Ghost Hunters record on their memory sticks and infrared video.

Because I am the envy of all the disembodied spirits.

"We have proof," says the lead Ghost Hunter. "Listen. It was dark and nobody was around."

"Nothing."

From the ether, clear as a bell.

Glass is a Liquid

A few weeks ago one of my daughter's friends was swept out to sea off the California coast. This happened a couple months after one of the upper classmen on the high school football team dropped dead from a blood clot to the lung while walking between math and science class, and before the freshman girl committed suicide.

I had just found out the guy had gone missing because it was in the newspaper. The blonde haired girl came to me with the San Jose Mercury. "Have you seen this?" she asked. I hadn't.

"This is the guy your daughter had a crush on for the past 3 years. She used to sit on the sofa in front of the TV staring at her cell, hoping he'd invite her to the movies or a school dance."

"I didn't know that."

"No, you didn't."

---

I went to work in the attic to install some lighting and discovered two switches had been wired badly by the prior owner. Somewhere the black and white wires had been crossed and it was causing me problems with the new in-ceiling lighting I was trying to install. I had to crawl back out of the attic and go over to the garage to hit a circuit breaker.

Stepping off the ladder I almost ran into my daughter who was waiting for me, quietly. She asked, "Dad, do you have any wire?"

I have a lot of wire. Call me Mr. Wire.

"What kind of wire do you need, honey?"

"We want to put a memorial poster on the beach and we don't want it to blow away so we want to tie it to some rocks with wire."

I looked at the sign they had made. It was a piece of white cardboard with the words painted, "We love you Dennis." There were hearts on it. They had glued pictures of the boy to it, and pictures of themselves. A bunch of kids had signed it. My daughter's eyes were misty but her voice was steady.

I told her I had wire but my mind spiraled around the thought that when I was a kid, kids didn't die. Ozzie and Harriet didn't divorce. What had I done to my children? Why did my kid have to go through this trial when I had it so easy? How to take this burden from her shoulders?

I found a spool of bailing wire in the garage. I showed my daughter how to use a lineman's pliers to cut the wire and twist it firm. She watched me quietly. Asked no questions.

She took the wire and the pilers and the sign and got into a car full of kids headed to the beach where Dennis was last seen alive. They were not smiling and hooting. It was less a car full of teenagers than a carload of senior citizens heading to the clinic for injections.

I went back to work on the house wiring as fast as I could. Deep in the attic amid the insulation and wiring a man can shut off his headlamp and not be seen.

---

Sometime later, while crawling on my hands and knees through a particularly narrow part of the attic I decided it was a good time to cry.

I didn't go through with it, at first.

This is what I told myself I was thinking: I was calculating how to get my hands and knees on the ceiling joists so I didn't fall through the ceiling into the living room. Then the image of my daughter's face came into my mind.

Then I was too weak to stop it.

Sometimes I am not a very strong man.

---

"She told me she'd had a crush on him since grammar school," said the blonde haired girl about my daughter. She was making dinner in the kitchen. I was unloading the dishwasher. My daughter was still at the beach putting up signs for the boy who was swept out to sea.

"Did they go out?"

"He never knew."

"So he wasn't her boyfriend. Just a friend."

"Sometimes I think there's a glimmer of hope that you actually understand women. But then you say something like that."

"I'm glad she was at her mother's birthday party and not at the beach party with the rest of them. I doubt she would have tried swimming in that surf, but to have been there when the guy disappeared. That's the kind of thing that really damages someone."

"I'm not sure it makes much difference right now."

"I think I need to be cut a break."

"If you keep talking nonsense..."

"When I was a kid we were all immortal. We did all sorts of stupid things: we drove like idiots, we climbed rotten trees, we went into abandoned buildings, we swam during hurricanes, I actually went scuba diving during a lightning storm - that should have killed us, but it didn't happen. All those bad things happen other places to other people. How come my kid can't have that kind of childhood?"

"I don't know."

"Nobody knows," I said, "and I'm getting sick and tired of nobody knowing anything."

I broke a glass, then. I wasn't intending to, but my body made the point my mind was screaming.

---

My father was a glass man. He ran factories that made bottles in the back yonder when things came wrapped in brittle glass, and not flexible hydrocarbonized envelopes.

The first plastic bottles promised "UNBREAKABLE", and when my mother brought home a soft drink so packaged, I tossed it to the kitchen floor, upon which it exploded under pressure spewing froth from wall to wall.

"But it said..." I said, because we were glass people in a glass house. She handed me a towel. It took me hours to clean it.

My father told me, "Glass is a liquid," because even when it hardened, it flowed on a geological time scale. Stained glass windows in ancient churches were thicker at the bottom than the top. These things happened, even though we didn't see them. Puddles of glass that were our bottles and watch crystals will greet our future distant progeny.

My father made mayonnaise jars and soda bottles. He would pick up any glass container he saw and make a recitation about it. He would flip over the mayo jar, look at the markings on the bottom, and tell you the name of the company that made it, and on which date.

I believe that from years of listening to him opine on things glassine, I still can, too.

And when the blonde-haired girl comes home I tell her these things about my father and me. I point to our flowing glass house windows, and the gentle flow of the virgin olive oil container, structured from glass (not plastic) blown somewhere in Sicily, birth home of my grandfather.

I hope these information morsels can make my memories real to her. So she can think of them as I do, and perhaps she could think of me as my mother still thinks of my father in the lost decade of the mind.

"Midland glass company," I tell her, upside down mayo jar in hand. "They're still around. See this? Glass. Not plastic."

She grabs my wrist and twists the jar upright, too late - the top falls from the jar and it emits a blob of mayo to splatter upon our kitchen floor.

"Don't dump the condiments," she says. "You clean that, now."

"I was just reading the bottom of that jar."

"Great. Can you make sure the lid is screwed on tight before you do it again?"

"Not many people can tell you what the marks mean on jar bottoms."

She hands me a wet rag. As I commence to clean I explain, "It's a lost art."

"Not very useful," she says.

"Art doesn't need to be useful."

"Do you want pasta or soup for dinner?"

"This is something I can do. You never know when it will come in handy."

"Chicken or lentil?"

"So we've already decided - soup?"

"Can you go get the bag of lentils out of the pantry?"

"There are many reasons to love me, you know. I'm a plethora of lovability."

"All the soup bowls are in the dishwasher."

---

When I'm sad I think this way. I do normal things and my mind erupts into bad poetry. These words in my head while I walk in the dark, trying to escape myself. I think:

My love, I wear your Petzl at night. We walk in the grass on the mountainside, me and the dog. This is the dirt trail that leads to the summit. The dog can see quite well, but I am night blind and helpless without your Petzl.

The eyes of forest animals reflect the headlight. Mostly green, sometimes red - but mostly green. The eyes of the deer. Feral cats. Raccoons. Ocular doublets, animated plant light, frozen to camouflage as part of the inanimate universe.

Fear not for it is I, man vulnerable. Unable to suss the rocks and pits in the ground I am prey without my technical head-mounted contrivance. Though, assuming my position at the top of the food chain, I take my right to violate this space with my prosthetic sun, thus I freeze the forest inhabitants as if they were the abductees of UFO aliens.

Then on the dirt trail before me, glints of crystalline blue. Brilliant blue like fractured cobalt glass. Deep blue - a careless hiker's gems knocked loose from the setting. Droplets of liquid electricity.

Then close, these are eyes staring upward into my beam. A tiny brain cogitates. A couple of neural bits at most have taken hold in a non-mammalian carbonized automation. Even the dirt is intelligent, it seems.

Until closer I see the wolf spider.

---

When I hear a good song I think of my children and whether I could convince them to like it. I would share with them the times I spent tapping my fingers on the steering wheel, traffic bound, driving to work or school or home. Flipping toll quarters from down rolled windows (when windows were rolled, and not button-pushed) daydreaming of the future when everything would track through the greased grooves I'd laid as a young man and they would benefit from the fruit of my labor. Inching through summer traffic on the Garden State Parkway, in my faded blue Mercury Marquis, back when paint faded and cars rusted, when computers were only ownable by corporations and states, and man had walked on the moon, I was a the guy who wondered who they would be.

When I hear a good song I become part of the historical record. And I explain to my children how things were different then than they are now - and I would leave out all the parts about how I wished for time to pass quickly to get to the parts of life where stress and strife were minimized by the benefit of experience. How I would get to the "when," when things would be better, then.

And they would enjoy and become part of that history and like the songs I like for the same reasons, and sing along in tone-driven ecstasy, marking life with the same music, and the same movies and books.

This is what I have left. These memories of these songs on endless drives between obligations.

They would see me with eyes shining

and love the things I love.

So there would be no choice.

They'd have to love me, then.

---

"Let me hug you again," I say to my daughter.

"Dad..." she says in that condescending, correcting voice you get from teenagers who want to explain to you that it is highly improbable that you understand them.

But she doesn't pull away from me.

"I have to get all my hugs in before my arms fall off. You just have to put up with it."

"People's arms don't fall off just because they get old."

"Mine might. Did you put up your sign?"

"Yes. Thanks for the wire."

"Did you put the lineman's pliers back in the tool box?"

"Yes."

"Ok, let me hug you some more. I feel my arms coming off."

"Daaaad."

---

I chose electronics for my career because I wasn't a good enough writer or musician to starve for my art.

The basis of electronics, these days, is silicon. It used to be germanium and selenium and various other inorganic compounds. Now it's silicon.

We in the silicon business like to say we're in the sand business, because sand is silicon dioxide and most electronics parts start off as sand that gets melted down and turned into crystal boules that get cut into wafers, have circuits printed onto them, then diced and packaged for insertion into iPods. And it's cool to suggest we are magicians who take the beach sand you wash from the lining of your bathing suit and turn it into satellite receivers.

But it's actually sort of true.

I remember walking through the glass factory with my father, watching orange globs of molten glass drop from pipes in the ceiling into molds that turned them into mayo jars and coke bottles.

The molten glass came from furnaces heated to thousands of degrees by massive electric coils.

"What are you melting in there?" I asked my dad. He could barely hear me over the din of the factory - churning greased gears, conveyor belts, and high-pressure air.

"Mostly sand. Glass is made from sand."

---

For my 50th birthday the blonde haired girl and my children surprised me with a dinner at a fancy California restaurant.

We ate strange foods like bacon ice cream and basil foam.

I poured wine for my under-aged daughters, because at 50, even in America a man is able to do that without fear.

"How do you hold the wine glass?" my middle daughter asked me.

So I explained how white wine was different from red, and that the serving temperatures were different, and white wine glasses should be held by the base or stem so the heat from the hand doesn't warm it up, while red wine glasses are larger and bowl-like and you could cup them in the palm so the aromas hit the nose.

And she accepted what I said without comment, trying out the wine holding procedures I outlined.

"I never know these things," she said.

"Well, you're young and you have to learn. That's what you do when you're a kid. You ask questions and people tell you things. I have a lot of things to tell you if you're interested."

"Yes, we know," said my youngest, sarcastically.

"Did I tell you that when he was young my father used to make glass bottles?" I said, keeping up with the whole glass motif.

"Yes, Dad. A hundred times."

"Did I tell you that glass is made from sand and sand is also what we make electronics out of?"

"Really?"

"It's true."

My oldest said, "I don't think any of us are going into a glass business, though."

I said, "That's ok. You will all do your own thing."

"Dad," said my middle daughter, "the side view mirror is coming off my car and the car place said it would cost $300 to fix it, but my friend told me you could buy one of those for $60 and put it on yourself."

"That's probably true. It's always cheaper if you do it yourself."

"Well, I wish I knew how to do that."

"I can show you if you want."

"If I get a new mirror can I come over and you can show me how to put it on?"

"Yes of course. Please come over soon. We can work on it together."

"This bacon ice cream tastes weird."

"Did you know glass was a liquid like water? Only it's really thick, like ultra-thick pancake syrup."

"No. How can that be?"

"It's true. And did you know that some spiders have blue eyes? Check it out."

"I don't think..."

"And did you know that song you were humming to in the car on the way over is by David Byrne?"

"Yeah."

"And did you know before that song he had a band called the Talking Heads?"

"Dad, you don't have to tell us everything tonight."

"But have to tell you everything. Before my arms fall off."

"Dad, nobody's arms fall off."

"My father's did. And now he can't hug me anymore."

"Dad..."