by Gary Soto
I could study humankind, of course. But now, with the summery light vanquished, I’m pausing to consider nature as a subject worth knowing. I’m unfamiliar with foliage, for instance. Last summer a child held up a flower and asked, “What genus is this?” I twirled the stalk and answered, “The yellow bloom group.” I pointed to another cluster and replied, “Those are from the white-power flower group.” I led the child to the lake. With confidence I remarked that the moon is responsible for making waves pitch upwards to tremendous heights and for making men go crazy. I told this neighbor child that my beard stands up when I pull laundry from the dryer — static electricity, you know, along with the ghosts of the Industrial Revolution.
The sun wheeled, darkness spread its ash, and the winds of autumn removed strands of my hair. The day was nearly over when the child asked, “What star is that?”
“Which star?” I asked, standing near the apple tree in my yard.
The child pointed. “The one next to Polaris, just outside of Orion’s belt.”
Was this boy a genius with a Band-Aid on his elbow? I bit my thumbnail, feigning deep rumination, and replied, “That there, sonny, is the Lucky Star.”
The wind picked up, taking a few more strands of my hair, the ones I considered bangs. I sighed and named this sigh Shame. I do not possess even a GED in time or in planets. Let Cassiopeia shift, roll, spin, or hurl — whatever she can do to fill the black holes of my education.
Gombrich’s history fails to touch upon folklore — a pity. I wonder what our early efforts were like, chewing the fat around a Neanderthal campfire. What stories were made up to scare children, for instance? I sometimes return to the cautionary tales of my own childhood, to Chicken Little and the Big Bad Wolf. They’re worth pondering, I think. It’s too bad that the Three Blind Mice and the Tortoise and Hare are absent from the historian’s timeline of human nature. I would have enjoyed his interpretation of Humpty Dumpty’s tumble from the wall. Was the big egg nothing but an omelet that never found his way to a plate?
With daylight savings time, I may bone up on myths and folklore. Or I may narrow my interest to everyday creatures that tread on all fours, such as my cat, who is presently napping in my recliner. He thinks he’s me. I have known him for 16 years but he has known me, in cat years, for 103. At least this is what I calculate from my position on the carpeted floor. I move from an easy yoga pose into a deep stretch, hand gripping the knob of my big toe. When I meow in slight pain, he opens one eye, assesses my presence, then closes that eye. Opening both eyes just to see me would be too much trouble.
In our reversed roles, he in the recliner and me on the floor, there must be another cautionary tale. Am I nothing but an older man, or do my bushy eyebrows signal the start of a new species? Or could these eyebrows represent a gene leftover from Mr. Neanderthal? I’ll have to read A Little History of the World more thoroughly, to see if it was possible for those genes to travel over the centuries into my own polluted bloodstream. For now, I recognize my genetic history only as backdrop. In my standing yoga pose, I’m shadow and light. That’s all some of us can be: shadow and light. I am a doer of no great deeds, powerless to arouse a meow from my cat. He won’t even open both eyes for me.
Welcome to daylight savings time.
* * *
The day speeds across the sky, siphoning gratitude away. True, there is some sunlight, and true, we can get much done in these shortened times. That said, I pay homage to DeLoss McGraw, a friend and artist of whimsical nature and enduring charm, who is underappreciated by our nation. Why doesn’t a foundation award him a prize? Why doesn’t Mr. Google open a large wallet and say, “Pick out the hundreds”? I possess five of McGraw’s paintings. One hangs in the hallway; I pass it every few minutes as I move around the house. It’s a largish pastel of my wife Carolyn and me in our best light and maybe our best years: we’re young, standing face to face, with our arms coming up to touch one another. There is a fire above Carolyn’s head, the genius of love. Here is the positive nature of marriage done in bright blues, yellows, and reds. The foreground holds a house: love has found a house and will live there for many years.
We have black holes in our education and much larger holes in our gratitude. DeLoss McGraw, favorite artist, if you would allow me to open my wallet, you may pick out all the twenties.
WORDS WE DON’T KNOW
I use the public library weekly and, when I return home, stash my haul on a bookshelf. On the shelf at this moment are several histories, a gardening book, and Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, a novel about the abduction of a three-year-old girl and the unraveling of her parents’ marriage — guilt, anger, grief, loneliness. I’m a quarter of the way through this tidy novel but may return it to the library, unfinished. Words are underlined in pencil by one of the previous readers who, I suspect, was trying to improve her vocabulary — “deciduous,” “reptilian,” “affability,” “provenance,” “slow loris,” “averse,” etc.
The underlined words have halted my progress and not because of annoyance. As a poet, invariably searching for the right words myself, I began to consider the author of these pencil strikes. I couldn’t help but wonder about this previous reader — the culprit, let’s say. She was female, near my age (early sixties), and reflective about the years lost on a no-good husband. Like the dainty pencil marks, she was understated in every way — touch, voice, makeup, and clothes. I began to imagine her as a reader of admirably crafted contemporary fiction (published in 1987, I still consider McEwan’s novel “contemporary”). Perhaps a nurse attracted to the novel’s theme — a child abducted and nowhere to be found. Or a psychologist — but no, that was wrong too. A psychologist would have known most of the underlined words, as would a nurse. Maybe an inexperienced bookworm, on her way to the morning shift by bus?
Who was she? I assigned her the details of a life story. A widow, she read the novel late at night, with cotton balls in her ears against the noisy neighbor above, while a moth batted around the lamp and a cat the color of smoke slept at her feet. No — she was an office worker on her lunch hour in a park with graffiti-marked trees. A duck with a white ring around its neck was eyeballing her from three feet away. Did she have a crust of bread to quiet its quacking? But no, I was hasty: she was really a florist in rubber boots, her breath condensing in the cold, with a surplus of roses in tall buckets to sell by late afternoon.
Conjecture, all of it, but one fact remained: a reader had underlined words. In doing so, she had embraced the view that learning doesn’t end. She might have been a mail carrier padding about in corrective shoes (this is how I saw her by page 180), but she was not about to give up on her head, now capped with grayish hair.
There are thousands of words we don’t know, long or short, soft or clunky, seen in print or heard in conversation. We can just let them go, like passersby, and be none the worse because of it. But we also can give new words a try on their own. Who is this person who looks like a dogmatic priest? What sort of fluctuating shopper is she? Where did they get that dubious car? These adjectives may not quite fit the nouns, but the attempts are interesting. Why don’t we forge the refrigerator? Close but not quite.
In a recent novel, I paused at this sentence: “ ‘She’s fly,’ said Mathew to his best friend, Ronald.” Fly? I mouthed the word, quietly befuddled. Was this a typo? Did the author mean to say “She’s flying”? That wasn’t probable because the scenes in the novel were grounded — nothing about planes, terminals, check-in, and such. Failing to grasp the meaning, I asked a young man eating lunch on a bench, who said that fly meant lovely or pretty or hot. Then the young man put down his sandwich and informed me that the word was like a Blackberry — no longer in use.
Oh.
I might finish McEwan’s novel — it’s very good, after all. But as my eyes peruse his prose, I can’t help but think of the previous reader — nurse, psychologist, florist, or mail carrier — as concocting a subplot, a sleuth with a pencil poised. With affability, she turne
d the reptilian page and, through reading glasses thick as mine, made aversive checkmarks on her dubious self-improvement, while her cat and her stuffed slow loris watched with provenance from the end of a very comfy and deciduous bed.
YOU WEAR IT WELL
This is me several years ago at the British-themed Jack Wills shop on King’s Road in London. With sudden rain, umbrellas were thrust skyward, some like large bright petals and others black as funerals. Hurrying pedestrians knocked into each other. Rain drenched the public, even the stylish dogs in yellow slickers, and leaves choked the gutters.
We stepped into this clothing shop, where I shook my shoulders of wetness, while my wife pulled away to inspect the baggy pants, bright as toucans, that she had spied across the room. I was left to stand in the middle of the store, alone. I considered the displays mildly amusing. Every item seemed youngish, and the sales help were all young and bright as candy. The music from the speakers was a sort of electronic garble — the throbbing sounds that robots might dance to.
I found an old velvet chair, got comfy, and opened the program of Richard Bean’s “English People Very Nice,” which we had just seen in a matinee at the National Theatre. It had been a memorable experience; the play is about Indian immigration to Great Britain and the racist comments uttered by the characters sometimes made me grip the arms of my chair. Overall, I thought the show hilarious and so touching that I expected to see it again. In the program, there was a cartoonish display of great moments in immigration, including a 1904 scene in which worshippers at an ultra-Orthodox synagogue (once a Huguenot Protestant church and later, after the synagogue years, a mosque) were pelted with bacon sandwiches by Jewish anarchists on Yom Kippur. I was imagining this moment of flying club sandwiches when my wife called, “Gary, come here.”
I stood up and looked about, ostrich-like, for Carolyn, who is short and can often disappear among the racks of clothes. When she called again, I got moving and found her on the stairwell, waving for me to giddyup. I followed with a hand on the rail for balance. Soon I was standing before a wall and asking, “What am I looking at?”
“The jacket,” she pointed.
Since there was a display of six jackets, I risked, “Which one?”
“The maroon one — get it down and try it on.”
The maroon jacket was made of heavy wool and had a school crest and brass buttons. I had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. The lining was yellowish from age. I put it on and shrugged at the cuffs.
“Look in the mirror,” Carolyn commanded.
I turned and saw myself, shoes splayed, jeans wrinkled, thinning bangs wild from wind and rain. The schoolboy’s jacket was stylishly hip. I turned sideways, noting that my butt hadn’t fallen all that far. You could pull this off, I told myself. I inhaled so that my paunch disappeared, a temporary liposuction that lasted no more than seconds.
I stripped the jacket off and handed it to my wife, who began to search for a price tag. Finding none, she walked upstairs with me in tow. She called to a young man in periwinkle-colored shorts, “How much is this?”
The young man wore bright red sunglasses on top of his head. He approached in leather boaters, wearing no socks; the cuffs of his trousers ended around the tops of his ankles. He took the jacket and hunted for a price tag, his face crumpling. The hunt ended when a clerk behind the counter hollered, “Scott, it’s not for sale. It’s display.”
The clerk’s voice was high, as if on tiptoes. He was all of twenty-five and wore a boyish part in his hair. Nevertheless, he appeared to be the boss of the moment, the one who directed the even more youthful staff to go here, go there. He sent the boy with the boaters back to his station on the second floor.
“Not for sale?” my wife asked. She seemed bewildered at this piece of news. Like, what was the world coming to if you couldn’t buy something that hung on the wall at a store!
“It’s for display, ma’am,” the clerk explained. He was wearing orange-colored pedal pushers, and a striped T-shirt hugged his lean body. Unlike many of his generation, his throat was not inked with an undecipherable tattoo.
“Why?” Carolyn demanded.
He said that the jacket was intended to color the walls with a British sensibility, then remarked, with prideful confession, that the shop had previously sold only one of this jacket — to Rod Stewart. But he had let something out of the bag, and my wife was on it.
“Then why don’t you sell this one to us?” she said, having already taken possession of the jacket.
The young man stalled. “Because,” he replied, blinking a set of pretty eyes at my wife. “Because, oh, how do I say this?”
What he said was that they had sold the same maroon-colored schoolboy jacket to Rod Stewart because Rod was a celebrity, hinting that I was just a man off the street, a husband and nothing more. Then he looked out onto that street, his attention captured by the toot of a taxi.
My wife jumped in. “But do you know who my husband is?”
His eyes moved slowly from Carolyn to me. He pondered me for a second before answering. “No, but I think you’re from New York — am I right?”
“He’s a famous writer. In America, everyone knows him.” She added that we were from California, but didn’t mention that our second home was in Fresno.
I felt embarrassed, but also enlightened at the power of the human will. For the first time in our thirty-six years of marriage, I understood Carolyn as a true, go-for-broke shopper. But really! A “famous writer” was a dead person who has his or her sober image on a coffee cup. Whereas two of my recent books had already been remaindered, with the others, like lemmings, ready to follow them over the cliff.
The clerk gazed at me with eyes as clear as unpolluted sky. After a moment, he said, “I like novels if I can see the movie first.”
He pondered me for a few more hard seconds. Maybe he is a writer of note, the lad was thinking, or perhaps he just resembles my gramps. Finally he confided, “You know, sir, you have the same build as Mr. Stewart.”
Rod and me? Remarkable.
“Let me check something. What is your name, sir?”
“Gary Soto,” my wife answered.
The young clerk turned away, walking briskly to the counter. When he opened a laptop computer, his face, already bright, brightened even more with reflected light. His fingers began to scramble across the keys.
Meanwhile, my wife and I cut across several islands of sweaters, long-sleeved jerseys with British overtones, then passed a table of impossibly slim-fitting jeans, stopping finally at a cubbyhole display of jackets. While I rummaged absently, an obvious novice, she speedily peeled away one jacket after another. She was now frantic in her quest to make me appear dapper (I was in my late fifties at the time) and also mad that my writerly credentials were suspect. It did not matter that she had described me to the clerk as a best-selling author, not a poet with a couple of lucky textbook hits that made a nice seasonable income. But even if I was not as rich as Rod Stewart, he and I shared the same build. Wasn’t that worth something?
“I hope we get it,” she muttered at the rack of jackets, yanking at the sleeves, searching for the one that said Gary.
I spent my time ogling the price tags. The jackets were all wool, all 1960s retro, all damn expensive. I was pondering a tag marked down from 150 pounds to 85 pounds in vicious red when my wife said, “This is nice.”
I tried on the nice jacket. It fit, and I figured it would fit Mr. Stewart too. We were of the same build and almost the same era, though he was slightly older, of course. Despite his age, he was trying to regroup, to discover some new music. I had hair like his once, when I was in my early twenties. In those days, I had sported his trademark rooster look. But in that department Rod was now the clear winner: his hair, though dyed, remained much bushier, while mine went with the wind.
The clerk returned and said cheerfully, “I looked you up.” He halted in front of Carolyn but spoke of me. “He is famous. We can sell the jacket, I think.” The youn
g man explained that he had to talk to the regional manager, who was not present, then left, flipping open his cell phone.
My wife veered off to the sweaters and began ripping through them, while I used the wait to pick up a pair of argyle socks. Priced at ten pounds a pair, no wonder the staff didn’t wear them.
When the clerk returned, he informed us that, yes, the jacket could be sold. He and Carolyn haggled over the price while I drifted away to look at the sweaters that I would not buy.
In the end, we bought the schoolboy jacket with the crest and bronze buttons as well as the other nice jacket that my wife had located. We left Jack Wills, my wife going first. She is invincible when she sets her mind to shopping. We looked around, squinting because the sun had come out. The sky was as blue as that young clerk’s eyes. It was humid, though, and late in the afternoon. Time for a pint, I thought, time for my mouth to pucker up with a proper drink. But Carolyn had spied a women’s shoe store with a half-off sale banner across the street.
“Aren’t you exhausted?” I asked.
“Exhausted? Yeah, but so?”
She told me to hurry up — the light was about to turn red.
I followed, a husband and nothing more.
A NIGHT OUT
My buddy David Ruenzel and I recently went to Cobb’s Comedy Club in San Francisco and heard jokes from a flabby T-shirted comic like this: “The kid was, like, lonely, so lonely that he went into the jungle and came out with poison ivy.” LOL from the comic, chuckles from a party of three at a small wagon-wheel-shaped table. Two young men, tall as giraffes, got up to visit the john.
Jesus, I thought, we paid for this? We finished our beers and left without pushing our chairs back into place.
Outside, the rain had become only slightly annoying, no longer the pelting anger we had faced earlier while racing up Columbus Street, awning to awning. Hunched in our jackets, we hustled toward City Lights Bookstore, our beacon and reminder that books were Good and comedy Bad. The evening had started off well, with hand-made ravioli and a shared bottle of Chianti Rufina at a small restaurant called Satchel’s. We had been seated by the window, watching the office types hurrying home, the street lit with drizzle, an umbrella tumbling from a tall man’s shoulders, so very much like a Hitchcock scene. While we ate, David and I had talked about Madame Bovary, our favorite novel of all time, and how we, too, sustained ourselves on the same blood as Dr. Bovary, the human qualities of ineptness, caution, domestic routine, and giddiness over small accomplishments — which included, for me, finding on-street parking! We both also were penny-pinchers — an embarrassing admission after the comedy club’s feeble entertainment, our tickets bought half-price on Goldstar.
