The house I grew up in is gone.

My grandfather was born in a small farmhouse in Sheffield, Massachusetts, in 1913. Sixty-three years later, my parents brought me home from the hospital to the same house. My grandfather retired to Ft. Myers, Florida, but left a small camper that he and my grandmother stayed in when they visited. Grandpa was a small man, but he lit up a room with his smile. He didn’t hand out approval easily, but when he did it hit like a wave. He was wiry and weathered the way you imagine old New Englanders; Robert Frost and E. E. Cummings, rugged and righteous, wise and wise-ass. I looked forward to those visits every summer. When Grandpa was there, we never watched TV. We worked hard outside all day; he always looked the place up and down when he arrived, sighed with his whole body, then went into the garage and got his old tools and got to work. I followed him around, learning things about plants that my father either didn’t know or didn’t care to teach me. We stayed up late and drank lemonade and played dice and caught fireflies. My sister told me that while she was dating her husband, she pointed at my grandfather and said, “Watch that man. He’ll teach you everything you need to know.” I could have told him that.

The house sat at the base of Mount Everett, and that mountain was my playground. My brothers were older and knew more of it than I did, but I spent my childhood climbing giant rocks and trees and swimming in a winding brook in my very own Terabithia. Years later, I proposed to my wife on that mountain. It wasn’t elaborate. It probably didn’t give her much of a story. But I couldn’t think of a better place to ask someone to spend the rest of her life with me than the magical kingdom where I’d faced and overcome so many dangers. I knocked myself unconscious one winter sledding head first down the narrow trail where the woods met the mountain. I remember seeing my friends running away before things went black; I assume they came back, possibly with an adult.

Sleepovers at my house meant sleeping bags in the barn, late-night games of flashlight tag in the corn field, and even later-night terrified sprints to the house to sleep on the dining room floor. One summer my friends and I found dirty magazines in the hay loft. It was very exciting and dramatic. After what seemed like an eternity but was probably a couple months of tantalizing guilt and pre-adolescent confusion, we nobly set them out in the rain. It’s easy to roll my eyes now, but in that moment we were purified.

We fed our wood stove all winter to heat the house, and that meant splitting firewood during the fall to stock the shed. We’d set the splitter up across the street and fill pickup truck after pickup truck in the crisp fall air, and while I’m sure I complained plenty, I never felt closer to my family. My brothers and sisters were teenagers and at least nine years older, but on those weekends we were together, doing honest work and banking our survival. Getting up first on a New England February morning and starting the fire with wood from the back of the shed – that was love.

I left for college in 1994. I came back during breaks, and much as I wanted to play the “college guy” part, nothing felt better than curling up under my old blanket on my bed next to the chimney. I sat in my room during winter breaks and wrote terrible poetry and felt very Thomas Pynchon, but I had seen Paris (Ohio), so how were they gonna keep me down on the farm? I came home on breaks less and less as college went on, and finally I graduated and rented an apartment just outside Dayton. I was a Midwesterner.

My mother died in 2005, 10 years after my grandfather. My father sold the house while she was in the hospital. My father, the self-appointed minister, the arbiter of all things holy, the man who taught me that the road to God was narrow and ran right through his backyard, unmade my connection to family, to history, to beautiful dreams and knuckle-scraping reality. The house that passed from generation to generation didn’t make it to mine.

I haven’t spoken to him since.

I hear the house looks lovely these days. The barn fell down before my mother died, and the old garage and driveway are gone. I hear there’s a nice circular drive. I don’t know if the new owner tore it down and rebuilt or just remodeled the old house. I don’t know which I’d prefer. I’ve said for years that I don’t care who owns it as long as it’s loved. I’m such a liar.

I won’t belabor the metaphor. I have some things to set out in the rain.

I have Ruffles and Coke. With ice. Mom would get it.

The talking heads on the news keep telling me that this is the fifth anniversary of Katrina, but to me, they’re burying the lead. Katrina was background noise five years ago. The real story was in the bed in the hospital room where my mother lay dying.

My mother was a tiny woman with hidden strength. And I’m not talking about that wispy emotional strength everyone attributes to their mothers. She had that, too, but Mom was just plain tough. She had polio and spent years of her childhood at the roller rink, crying her way through lap after lap as she stretched her Achilles’ tendons. She had metal rods in her legs, but she never used a cane; hardly even limped.

Barely out of her teens, she lost all her teeth in a car accident when her mouth collided with the steering wheel. She chewed peanuts with her gums to toughen them up for the dentures she would wear the rest of her life. Five sons who towered over her not-quite-five-foot frame each foolishly tested her will at some point in our teens; I don’t think any of us did it twice.

So when I walked into her hospital room five years ago and saw her lying there connected to tubes and wires, I was shaken to see her looking so frail. The cancer we thought they had cut out of her uterus had made its way to her lungs, and then to her brain. She smiled weakly and mumbled something at me; everyone else in the room acted like she had jumped up and hugged me. Once I got over the initial shock, I settled in with my brother and sisters for the long wait. A table with a few chairs stood in the corner, and my sister had piled it high with snacks, including Mom’s cure for everything from the common cold to a broken heart, Ruffles and Coke. With ice. The only thing missing from Mom’s “Had a Bad Day, Kid?” sampler platter was a jigsaw puzzle, and I think we’d have set one up if there had been room.

The long night became a long day, which became another long night and longer day, and eventually somebody cracked and turned on the TV. Hurricane Katrina. It just didn’t sink in. We were busy watching every single ragged breath Mom took. Those breaths got more and more ragged, and one evening my sister, a nurse who knows a thing or three about this sort of thing, called us around Mom’s bed. We cried and prayed and sang and hugged her and did all the things you do when it’s time. We waited for her last breath to come. And waited. And waited.

She just kept taking them. Because Mom was just plain tough, her body didn’t get the hint that she was about to die. I think my sister felt a little foolish for telling us it was time, but I think she was right. Mom was different after that night. Her doctor told us that her body might take days or weeks to catch up to … he didn’t say soul. I filled that in myself. So I went back to Chicago. Early the next week, I got the call.

Mom died August 30, 2005. She was the strongest person I have ever known, and while I’ve come to recognize her failings more and more in the years since she died, I am proud to be her son. She never quit giving. She loved unconditionally. And she was damn near unsinkable. Sometimes I worry I don’t live up to the example she set. Well, ok, every minute of every day I am absolutely convinced that I don’t live up to the example she set. But I can try again today.

After Ruffles and a Coke. With ice. Mom, I hope one day I get it.

My wife is there. She doesn’t eat meat. She’s not afraid to call herself a vegetarian. She’s probably going to be vegan before long. I’m not there, but it’s not out of any particular love of the taste of meat. Oh, sure, I love that I can swing through Wendy’s and eat something filling in like 10 seconds, but that’s not really about meat, that’s about the lure of convenience and deep-fat fryers. I was pretty consistent for two, nearly three months, but as the holidays approached, my resolve receded. Thanksgiving dinner. Christmas dinner. Turkey. Ham. These things are important. Not to me, of course, but to our hosts. Think how people will feel, I said to my patient wife, if we turn our noses up at their food. We’ll be awful, awful people.

Of course, we didn’t go to the usual family gathering for Thanksgiving, but I still insisted on making a turkey. We had Christmas dinner at home, and I made ham. My wife made a vegetarian lasagna for the big family gathering, and it disappeared before I could blink. No one would have noticed if I didn’t eat the ham. But I did.
Careful readers who are smarter than I am already know what I just figured out. Food isn’t fuel. Food is folklore. Food is collective unconscious, tribal, bone deep. Food intertwines us. To withdraw from those traditions, to push away from the table, is to unhook myself from my background. And that terrifies me. It reeks of betrayal. Because these things are important. Not the food, but what the food represents.

Of course, there are plenty of cultures steeped in vegetarianism. Not mine, though. And that’s the disconnect I need to pull together. As an American descended mostly from western Europeans, my vegetarianism seems ruthlessly efficient, calculating, cold. It’s good for me, it’s good for the environment, it’s good for avoiding the disgusting, soulless, assembly-line meat plants, but it’s not guttural. It’s not primal. It’s got no barbaric yawp. Feeding my daughter this food is indoctrination, not initiation.

I’m on a quest now to find and experience traditional western vegetarian food. If you’ve got suggestions, send them my way. If I come up empty, I might have to start my own. At least I’ll know what came (or didn’t come, as it may be) before.

More to come. You have been warned.

In 1996, I couldn’t have written this.

Well, sure, I could have gone to the computer lab. But in my room? Nope. Not on a keyboard. I didn’t own a computer.

It sounds insane now. I’m not sure I believe it myself. But I just didn’t need one. Then my roommate took a year off to pay his student loans down (insanity, I was sure at the time – ah, hindsight), and when he returned, he was packing a high tech, state of the art, bad ass Pentium. Thing cost him three grand, easy, but it was worth it. I bet it had 12 MB of RAM. We were living off campus, far from the loving embrace of the computer lab, so I just had to get me one of what he had. So I dragged my girlfriend (now my ever patient wife) off to Best Buy and I got me a computerator.

It’s all been downhill from there.
Backing up slightly. The summer before my roommate came back from his factory exile, I lived in a dump with a bunch of idiots I hated. I owned a guitar and a notebook and enough clothes to get me through a week. I spent my free time at a used bookstore I found about 20 minutes away with a killer musty basement full of old science fiction. I snagged copies of The Hugo Winners, Dangerous Visions, Again, Dangerous Visions – brain warping stuff, and all kinds of awesome. I read those books, I played my guitar, and I wrote stories in my notebook. That, as I understood it, was the good life.
The summer after college, I got a factory job unloading trucks for a furniture store. Naturally, when the local comic book store put a Help Wanted sign in the window, I jumped at it. It was there that I learned the unending joys of Magic: the Gathering, a brilliant little game that conspired with my employee discount to own my very soul. That summer, I wrote a lot less in my notebook, and I played a lot less guitar.

Around 2000, the group of fun-loving nerds I played Magic with discovered EverQuest. Since I owned a computer, I was in like Flynn. Though I did hold out for a while. I even got some free cards from my friend who was too busy playing EverQuest on the store computer to ring me up. His dismissive hand wave was my tournament sideboard. But eventually, I rolled up an Erudite Wizard and the rest, as someone probably said once, is history. I didn’t know where my notebook was, and I’m pretty sure my guitar had a couple broken strings.

In 2001, my daughter was born. I sold off my Magic collection to buy diapers and formula, but my EverQuest addiction lingered. After all, I needed that computer for theoretically useful things that I never actually used it for, and since it was there, who was I not to kite wyverns in Cobalt Scar? I didn’t give up EverQuest for another year, but I’ve been over all that.

Here’s my point. I swear.

October was National Get Rid of Useless Crap Month. I like doing that. I make scapegoats out of innocent clutter because it’s easier than dealing with the real issue. I find causes to champion that don’t get at the heart of what’s important to me. I fight other people’s battles. So, here’s hoping, I’m taking one last swing at the right target.

The Internet owns my ass.

I’m going back to my notebook. I’m going back to my guitar. Obviously, I’m not going to cut off my digital nose to spite my face. There are too many useful things online, and too many relationships I can’t maintain any other way. But this place is getting to me. I’m getting the Fear. And 99% of the Internet is waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in my eye.
National Get Rid of Useless Crap Month wasn’t all desperate casting about for something to blame. I’m happy I cut out cable last month, since watching TV keeps me from my notebook. I’m happy I gave up meat for the past two months, since that taught me some valuable lessons and some delicious recipes. I’m not giving up meat for good, though. That’s not my fight.

My fight is with words. My fight is with Willa Cather’s words, and William Faulkner’s words, and Ernest Hemingway’s words, and E.E. Cummings’ words, and T.S. Eliot’s words, and, forgive my damnable arrogance, my words. In the long long ago – in the before time – my idea of a perfect day was a long walk in the snow followed by a double date with Michael Stipe and Sherwood Anderson. Cool? Hell no. Better than Facebook? For me.

I ate meat.

See, I put that right up front because if I didn’t, I’d feel like I was trying to hide it. Now, the backfill.
About a month ago, I cracked a tooth. It was a back molar, and it was my own fault. Several (and I mean several) years ago, I had a root canal done on this tooth, but between sessions, I got a job offer out of state. I jumped at it and took my temporary cap halfway across the country. I’ve been to the dentist since. I have a wonderful, kind dentist who’s not into passing judgment. I could have had him take care of this tooth. I didn’t. So it broke, and I sheepishly called my wonderful, kind dentist for help. He was optimistic at first, but the more he looked at it (and drilled into it, the bast- wonderfully kind man), the more I could tell he thought the tooth was a lost cause. Still, he referred me to a periodontist for “crown lengthening,” which is Dentist for “paring back your gums so we can attach a crown to the nub of tooth that’s left.” The periodontist decided that was nuts, so he, as is the fashion with dentists, immediately started jabbing things into my mouth. An hour later, I was minus one back top molar.

For the last couple days, I’ve been a miserable cuss in every sense. I had to bite down to keep the gauze on the untooth, which wouldn’t freaking stop bleeding. I couldn’t chew anything hard, and I wasn’t allowed to have any hot liquids. This left me with roughly ice cream. If I were 10, I’d be in heaven. I’m not 10. Since dentists terrify me, I didn’t eat anything before my appointment, so my body was getting really pissed at me around 8pm last night. My wife was awesome and bought me a burrito, but my body was still in “Dude, you haven’t eaten jack in over two days. Protein! Now!” mode, so today at lunch, I hit Wendy’s for chicken nuggets. They were a’ight.
I don’t feel terrible about this. I don’t consider this THE END of my meatless experiment. Honestly, I totally figured I’d eat meat before now. I’d be more worried if I were “sneaking” meat, which I’ve had plenty of chances to do. I don’t want it like I thought I would. I figured after the initial rush of Life Changing Decision(tm), I’d be looking for chances to get the wife and kid out of the house so I could down aWindows 7 Whopper. That didn’t happen. I know, I’m as shocked as you are. If I eat cheap fast food chicken every time I go two days without eating, I guess I’m comfortable with that.  My goal was never to attain moral superiority. It was just to acknowledge the consequences of my decisions. Hence, my little confession. Meantime, I found an awesome recipe for vegetarian lasagna I want to try once I can chew a little better.

As for writing, NaNoWriMo kicked off this week, and I got off to a very respectable start. Through Tuesday, I had 4,320 words, which is just 680 words off pace. Of course, now it’s Friday and I still have 4,320 words, which is about 4,000 words off pace. Now that I’m back on my feet and nearly able to chew (and consume hot liquids – do dentists not understand that people need coffee?), I’m going to try to make a dent in that this weekend. 3,000 words a day would put me right back on target, so that’s what I’m shooting for, but there are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.

So, how’s NaNo going for you?