I. Finding

I made it a point to visit a few bookstores in New York. My favorite given the limited time I had was Book Court, which I visited twice. The first visit was a glance in the window; reconnaissance during the lunch hour of the conference I was attending as I tried to map its location during daylight. I crossed Adams, the main thoroughfare in front of the hotel and turned onto Court Street, hoping that I was going in the right direction.

II. Walking

Walking in Brooklyn is unique to my urban experience in America. In Los Angeles I did a lot of walking from where I parked. In San Francisco my walks up and down the hilly city were accompanied by other tourists looking at their maps and pointing towards points of orientation. When it wasn’t tourists, it was workers since most of my walks were in the financial district. Even in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury I had a feeling most of the people I walked by were externals, like me. In places like Kansas City walks are designed, an imposition of walkability in an otherwise sprawled cityscape. Even in Manhattan the walk felt different for one principle reason: to walk in Brooklyn is to be surrounded by its inhabitants. That’s how I felt walking south on Court Street passing fruit stands, flower shops, and local restaurants.

III. Singing

It was later that evening when I started back. Evening had the same magic to it that had sparked my interest at midday. Although I might have been inclined to listen to music, I chose instead to just listen to the sounds of the city around me. It’s moments like that when I have the words of Walt Whitman’s poem I hear America singing come back to me and the clarity of my first experience with the words sits in firm contrast with being here. When I’d read it I always dreamed I’d be a part of the singing but I’m convinced that even American citizenship won’t bring me to a full immersion with the noises that reverberate from what fits into my conceptual imagination of this country: the people, the experience, the politics, the language, the place.

IV. Presence

The bookstore was everything I thought: new books, excellent range, well organized, and staff that subtly showed an awareness of your presence but left you alone to browse the shelves in peace. I overheard them talking about an in store reading – the “another one?” phrase revealing a sentiment that bordered between nonchalance and inconvenience. I wondered who it would be as I looked at the bookshelf on the far wall. There was a basement in the bookstore and finding my way upstairs after having a look I saw the author whose reading was shortly to ensue. She was tall both physically and as a presence, and as they waited for her publicist I took a step behind some different shelves to have a look.

V. Pedigree

Well educated, I guessed, pretty but not striking, part of the New York writing scene, and very young. She seemed to know I was studying her and performed the trick that confirmed her status as a well endowed member of The Scene, successful even if modestly so: she looked over me. She looked through me.

VI. Envy

I wondered about the book. I don’t often find envy but at that moment I thought of our differences. I thought about Biola, my alma mater, in its Real Housewives of Orange County context; wealthy suburban kids for whom college was either a fun detour into family life or spiritual seekers who chose it because it held the quaintness of spirituality with which they’d grown up. I thought about my house in South Dakota, the 1994 Buick Regal I drive, and the converted warehouse where I work. I thought about the doors at Yale, the walls around Harvard, and the way I’d felt like I could see but not be seen when I walked around either campus. I thought about driving down Highway 1 in New Jersey and turning right onto Washington Ave towards Princeton. As I crossed the bridge over Lake Carnegie, I could see crew teams practicing in the water. I loved the experience of putting a concrete experience to a fascination I’ve always had in good schools, the art of learning, and wondering at the people whose footsteps I would traverse at these institutions of merit. I hated how it made me dislike my past and question my own pedigree.

VII. Memoir

I wondered about the book and then found out it was a memoir. My curiosity vanished; I have a large tub in which I categorize memoirists, with a principle conclusion that neither am I that interested to write all about my life at book’s length nor am I interested in reading another person’s unless they are notable in some way. The Ivy League, I think, may qualify you to be envied, but it does not qualify you to be read. I didn’t wait for the reading to start though I did make a note of the name thinking I’d have to amuse myself by finding out what her shtick was in writing a memoir at such a young age.

I found out that evening while eating my box of takeout pizza that Sarah Manguso was named Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Sunday Book Review and won Best Nonfiction Book for the Year from The San Francisco Chronicle. Awards include The Joseph Brosdky Rome Prize in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A Memoir?

VIII. Terrible, Sparse, Beautiful

The book is called The Two Kinds of Decay and it’s about a debilitating disease Sarah gets in her junior year of college – a rarity that is related to but not the same as Guillan-Barre called Chronic Idiopathic Demyelinating Polyradiculoneuropathy or CIDP. The disease is as horrible as it sounds, and the book in its delicately crafted prose does not obscure the ordeal she went through before recovering.

It’s a memoir, to be sure, but the way the prose is that of a poet: words are not wasted, meter is evident, and you get as much out of the negative space of what’s unsaid as you do with each sentence. Pieces of it are better read aloud.

“… Think of spacetime , through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.

There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.

But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.”

I don’t read quickly but 20, then 30 pages turn as I read more into what happened. The writing is exquisite, the illness it describes so beautifully seems an equally exquisite torture.

The fresh frozen plasma was thawed before it was infused. The four half-liter glass bottles of albumin were left at room temperature.

For the first twenty or thirty apheresis sessions, I lay under several blankets, which didn’t help the cold but helped me think at least I was trying.

The temperature in blood vessels is warmer than room temperature, of course, by about thirty degrees Fahrenheit. I was very slowly infused with several liters of fluid that was thirty degrees colder than the rest of my body.

By the time I had the permanent line, the cold infusions went in very close to my heart. I need to describe that feeling, make a reader stop reading for a moment and think, Now I understand how cold it felt.

But I’m just going to say if felt like liquid, thirty degrees colder than my body, being infused slowly but directly into my heart, for four hours.

And then I realize the thing about writing, writers, and memoirs. Each time you put pen to paper you give a piece of yourself away. Just as our lives can shrink or expand with curiosity, what the writer gives grows in proportion to how much of themselves they put out for us to see. It comes neither with New York, nor with any institution of merit. It comes with a type of courage and sacrifice that is rare.

I should have stayed that day in Book Court and waited along with everybody else for the publicist. I should like to have known the cadence of the book as read aloud by its author whom I no longer envy but hold with a newfound respect.

When I rushed out into the street, a few blocks and a turn back to the confident framework of seeing a person that I’d made up in my head to represent the hobgoblins of my own foolish consistency, I missed the beauty of a person opening up for a rare conversation, the type that one pockets for a lifelong memory.

At least I have the book.

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Both.

Oops. Should be posted on Metadeveloper, sorry kids.

}

I went back to the chess club last night. One fellow wearing a Ron Paul button had the delicate features and acne of a teenager, but his voice and comportment suggested him as an adult. I overheard him talking with someone about a failed bid for the South Dakota State Senate which convinced me that his look did belie his true age. The local county commissioner plays chess as well, and from what I saw his game is very strong; he was the state champion as a youngster. The Grandmaster stopped in but only for a few moments to discuss a tournament this Saturday. I wonder if I'll ever see him play anyone from the club; from what I observe chess protocol frowns upon the wasting of a Grandmaster's time.

But the Grandmaster's time and conversation were the irony: he was talking about his kids and wife, kvetching the way most normal people do: "I was busy... who's gonna watch the kids..." and so on. It's so strange to see a person in the mundane whose name only a week before you circled in the New York Times. It puts fame into a different light for those of us who pursue a modest amount: perhaps a name in a newspaper is even more sad than anonymity because it's a lie that you avoid the malaise of day-to-day living we all experience.

My best moment, however, was when the organizer of the chess club, Mr R, opened up and told me a little bit about his life. I'd played twice, losing the first game playing black¹ while being impatient, then having a complete collapse when my opponent, J, turned the board around and let me play white. J is a jolly fellow who managed to repeat the word "devastation" without sounding condescending. His matter of fact "I devastated you" description was as emotionally mute as a box score. After being left to ponder my "devastating move²" that lead to my "devastating loss," Mr R pulled up a chair. He gave me a chess puzzle which I failed miserably. It was a simple test of whether I could think more than one move ahead at a time.

Mr R revealed that he is a Chicago native and at the tender age of 5 was written up in The Tribune as a chess prodigy. He said "I didn't have the nickel it took to get from where I lived to the chess tournaments" and I took this on as a euphemism. Did his parents care? How rough were the times? I made my closer examination of his face seem casual and guessed he was in the waning years of his 70s. He continued, probably aware he'd got my attention, saying that after missing that opportunity for "a nickel" he fought in World War 2 which was more evidence that he was likely a youngster during the depression and the misfortune of that timing was what held him back from the game. During the war he said he played anyone he could and "never lost" a game of chess. He thought he was "pretty good" at the time and may have come back to the game, but he returned home to married life and children. Mr R's pivot point in life and chess was when he and his wife parted ways and it was in this aftermath that he started to play again, entering tournaments while he was in his 40s - the same type of tournaments he would have played when in as an adolescent if he'd had that nickel. I wonder what it's like to look at the precocious teenager on the other side of the board who is the younger form of you, the form that had the opportunity to play without the baggage of depression, war, and a failed marriage.

Whether he intended it or not, I think he was trying to tell me that he too had started late and with many obstacles. Earlier in the week he had called me to encourage me to come back to the chess club after I'd skipped a week. I offered the excuse of having an infant - my presumed carte blanche to invoke everyone's false sense that a family is an excuse not to play regularly, to put a pause button on the game so that life can go on. He didn't respond and we spent an uncomfortable moment listening to a white noise resembling the type of crackling you might hear on your television when there's snow.

Last night, after telling me about himself he gave me three magazines, recommending I start with Chess Life For Kids.

¹In chess, white always gets the first turn. This is a small advantage since you get a chance to control the tempo of the game in the first moves. What throws me off as much is that most of my books are from the white perspective so I'm just used to looking at things that way.

²Reading my chess book this morning I realized that there is a name for my bad play with black: "Damiano's Defense." Here is what Pandolfini says: "Other than resigning, or making a suicidal decision... this is practically the worst defense Black has."

Ory grew up in Nairobi, probably not too far from me. She's one of the New Africans for whom I'll keep my ears perked. By "New African" I mean a person who lives a life between Africa and the first world, educated here but with a heart and family that's left over... we aren't typical immigrants you see and in Ory's case, she went back to make a difference. You can see her talk at TED here, make sure you get past the Harvard name dropping to the meat of her message.

I remember long ago, sitting across from M in a Whittier cafe when he showed me his schedule for the new year. Down to the quarter hour it revealed everything: work, eating time, study, exercise, sleep, and chess.

Today I made a plan and I'm feeling as fanciful.  Plans never seem to survive the friction of day to day living.  It's time to get some sleep so I can fail better tomorrow.

The irony of turning 30 was that so much was new: I'd gotten married the preceding March, I was a month into my new job, and was still learning the ins and outs of our apartment near the downtown portion of Sioux Falls. Three years later and much seems old hat: marriage life has founds its steady rhythm, Sioux Falls poses less of a mystery and work, despite another change in company, is much the same as its always been.  In that sense the day is more of a formality except for the fact that this will be my last birthday without children. 

I've read two books about old men in the last year or so and ended both despising the would be protagonists. Jonathan Raban's Foreign Land and Philip Roth's Everyman were books I would have wanted to like; books that might tell me a little about my future should I live a long life. Instead, ironically, they both wound up as good Christian books to me*: morality tales on how choices have consequences and human relationships are what persist in value when death looms close enough to eliminate all of life's normal pretensions. The two old men suffered from a narcissism I recognize in our high school selves - such self obsession that all conversation turns inward and we stop to really "see" the people around us because we're so busy making everything an aspect of that big old number one: ourselves. This thought really crystallized over the weekend when an old friend from my school days in Nairobi stopped by on a cross country trip with his family. Not only did we recollect different things, I felt a sense of us really seeing each other despite all that time we'd spent doing the equivalent of "shooting hoops" through those teen years. Jed the father, I hardly recognized you -

Well, here's to being 33, and here's to the hope that I keep seeing even when I'm old. Here's to human relationships, the preservation of marriage and the hope of longer life.

*I'm sure both authors would be quite unhappy with this opinion.

I love new forms of dance that crossbreed from one culture to another. Here are two breakdancing spinoffs from Japan and France respectively.

Teaching a class this week and of course feeling very old...

A few months ago I saw Randy Pausch's Last Lecture - the backstory being his diagnosis with a terminal illness and departure from Carnegie Mellon.  He passed away yesterday and this morning I watched it again perhaps as an attempt to hold onto what he was planning to leave those alive with after his death. It was as moving today as it was when I first saw it, especially with his ending "head fake"; that the lecture was for his children.

What an inspired life; even though I can't physically be surrounded by people like Randy, listening to him makes me feel the cushion of listening to another dreamer whose dreams were done.

Added: A New York Times summary has some good links related to Dr. Pausch