Turning 60

For Jan at 60

Round and full

complete in itself

Eternal.

At the top of a column

you climb and climb---a decade’s worth of years

then pause

at rest in the equilibrium of a perfect number:

a year of evenness and self-sufficiency.

Moving down the column (although up in numbers)

even at midway---it’s nothing, really,

not very far from the top.

But then close, close come those latter years that crush together

and I forget which one; I am just older until

another symmetry is attained, again a cause for celebration.

Now on the right hand of the ranks,

Columns approaching the edge of the ledger

March toward a double perfection, entirely theoretical.  

November 14, 2009
at Steady Eddy’s
Flint, Michigan

April Drama: the Tulip Tree

It’s really a saucer magnolia, magnolia x soulangeana, or tulip tree, or Japanese magnolia. This year in Flint they bloomed the last week in April, flamboyant and glorious when all other trees are still bare. Only the willows have begun to look like yellow-green spaghettini. One discussion in Flint this spring concerns community gardens: volunteers plant in the vacant spaces left from demolished houses close to downtown. Their empty rectangles rapidly greening in early spring reveal the outline of century-old landscaping. Dogwood pokes through vines and brambles marking the perimeter of a city lot where a house once stood. Although the old houses were multi-storied, the average city lot in the early twentieth century was small by today's standards. Ideal for planting.

By the first of May the Flint magnolias are past their best; the petals are falling and their glory is fading. They still overwhelm the weeping cherry, a more delicate and thoughtful tree, prissy when pruned into umbrellas. Here and there dense clusters of deep magenta poke through---crabapple? Near Hurley Hospital tulips stand erect and optimistic in front of an empty house, the red and yellow bulbs that have returned are large; someone tended the beds around the foundation not too long ago. Now the metal siding hangs askew, peeled back. Faux brick siding shows underneath, an earlier attempt at modernization to cover wood and avoid painting. They've survived another winter, these hulks of houses with their flaking paint, vandalized metal siding, cracked steps, sagging screens.

Urban decay now appears in the context of mortgage crisis. Commentators intone that we’ve gone too far with everyone wanting to own their own house, with becoming a nation of homeowners. What utter folly; we should have been renting all along.

My parents and their friends in the early 1950s were very tired of renting. During the Depression and then in wartime they had moved a lot. Family businesses were lost; colleges closed their doors when tuition could not be paid. They moved from hometown to jobs---and grateful to have them---elsewhere in the state or the country, to a navy port or army base, lucky when taken in by a relative on one of the coasts. Always room for another relative or friend in three-story houses like those now being demolished in Flint. Pillar to post, they said. “We met new people from all over the country, we lived in walk-ups with Murphy beds, not enough room to swing a cat, went roller skating on dates, dined for a few dollars in North Beach---wine included.”

After the war, what was there to go back to? A small town banker took a chance on a mortgage for a veteran. And so it began: decades of gardening, slow improvements---from septic tank to sewer, concrete steps poured with a neighbor, a room added on. No furniture and hardly any light (so it seems in the old photos), but enough space to raise a child and bring impoverished grandparents to live with them. I saw my grandmother's social security card recently; she and my invalid grandfather were saved by a postwar house. Those old Flint houses, many on their way to demolition, deserve respect. They did service to generations in their day; the least we could give their plots is a nice garden.

Re-connecting with my skis

It’s been several years since I was last out on cross-country skis, since before I got a partial knee replacement.  I’m not as confident as before.  Never having really learned how to scoot along properly, my motion is awkward until unexpectedly the skis fulfill their design and I begin to glide.  The movement doesn’t seem practical until I think that having this much snow for half the year and few other means of transport would make it logical.
 

I live on a corner in Mott Park, across from the golf course. Whoever built this house must have been a skier. There is a rack of dowels in the basement from which to hang skis and poles. In winter when we have a foot or so of snow I can go out my front door, snap on some cross-country skis and be off.  Usually I head down to the cul de sac, unhitch my skis, and walk down a hill too steep for my skills to a meadow alongside the Flint River.  The days that I try this cannot be very cold; my baseline temperature is about 20 degrees and no wind.  The exertion warms me up and in the meadow it is very quiet.  Bending over to clamp down the baffles back onto my duckbilled ski shoes, I can see little web shaped indentations from animals and two long swathes cut by midnight skimobiles.
 

My skis are old---bought more than two decades ago.  Åsnes tur-langrenn are among the last wooden skis produced before the switch to fiberglass.  Wooden cross country skis were constructed from a composite of woods; mine seem to be hickory on the bottom. The poles are bamboo. Flexible and resilient materials. Wood has its devotees; people even make their own birch skis. On the internet dedicated craftsmen, woodworking offspring of Mother Earth News and Foxfire, plane away.  Or see the process of treating the skis in six steps, three kinds of wax (including the enigmatic, never translated from the Norwegian, klister), and pine tar, the application of which requires a hot air gun or a propane torch with a fare tip. Easy. Once this is finished, you can carry different kinds of wax for changing temperatures with you in your back pack; gracefully pull up to a tree and re-wax your skis en route.
 

The skis date back to my marriage, from its closing era when we thought that doing some family activity together would improve our lives.  After dinner we could ski under the lights of the nearby park---even take the dog with us; we would warm our hands around mugs of hot chocolate afterwards looking like the people in an Eddie Bauer winter catalog.  We might still make it. What happened?

Endless fiddling with wax, debates about the temperature and which wax to fiddle with.  The dog was not an eager to please golden retriever (catalogs must have entire kennels of goldens), but a beagle mix who shot out of the garage and disappeared for hours.  The flatness of the park got boring.  Snow soaked through our socks (it was in the days of low cut ski boots). We came back to the house mid-way to apply more wax and change socks.  Second trip back to the house the project sank into disagreements and not very good hot chocolate in front of heaters festooned with wet socks and jeans.   The skis dripped in the basement. 

Plans for gaiters and more authentic (and presumably more comfortable) clothing faded, eventually subsumed by divorce. Somehow the skis made it from broken family to apartment storage, and finally to a house in Mott Park where as if by some omen (that I only now recognize) a basement ski rack was waiting. There my skis have hung, clapped together with a bungee cord but without, alas, the requisite block between them to maintain their camber---the arc beneath your boot that presses to the ground. 
 

Last week, when we had fresh snow and the temperature was in the mid-twenties, I remembered my skis. With a quick waxing the skis slid along pretty well, or at least as well as I could manage.  I still need to get my wax tins organized and find an old iron to melt in the klister. My son, a former snowboarder, says ironing is the trick. The pine tar base layer is another story---that propane torch deal.

If I can convince my partner Dennis, we might drive north to a cross country ski place and seek out a native to apply a new coating of pine tar. One of those bearded craftsmen from the internet. 
 

Leaning in the corner next to the back door, the skis remind me to do a little scraping and waxing. I am less impatient with the care they require and more respectful of their nature. This week the house creaks and groans; the temperature has dropped and it is too cold to ski.  I can wait. We have survived, these skis and I, from another era.