Things undone

Discoveries like this one have a way of moving me in two directions at once: back in time and deeper in the present moment. This truck makes me think of what I’ve never finished and, if I’m honest, what I might never. 

When I was a freshman in college, my dad found a 1946 Ford pickup much like the one in this picture. I noticed this one on my morning walk, a practice that has inclined me toward my age in ways I had yet to discover. I walk in the five o’clock hour of the morning as the sun comes up with the acid in my stomach for most of the first couple miles because I hate early mornings. But I hate how sedentary I have become more. So I walk.

There are many benefits to this choice I’ve made to get moving before most of the LA traffic and people in the sleepy suburb we live in (I tell myself). I’m done before my kids get up for school. I’m guaranteed to accomplish something with my day (a feeling writing has not provided me for a long time). And I am awake enough to have lucid conversations with my family before the weight of my daily schedule renders me monosyllabic. And most important, the walks force me to slow down and contemplate what I would otherwise push right past toward the goal of completing a regular workout.

Who’s got next? Pretty sure it’s Amish rules on this court.

Like that truck, I end up finding small pieces of the neighborhood that make me smile pretty regularly. For example, this random basketball hoop hanging from a telephone pole in the neighborhood. Not sure who’s hooping next to the faux-farmhouse these days, but the former player in me appreciates the nod to the game I love.

 

 

Sunrise over Uptown.

I also get to see the sun come up over the foothills, a form of compensation I have not earned much in my life. And there are moments, like this one, where I forget for a second that, in the past, I only ever saw skies like this at the end of long, sleepless nights.

 

 

But back to the truck from the beginning of this post. So my dad found this truck, out in the country outside of Modesto, California where my folks had recently moved, and he bought it as a project. It needed work—body, frame, engine—that he intended to share with me over the next couple of years. We’d talked project cars for years, but we never had the money or the time for one.

So we started when I finished that first year, tearing the truck down to the frame and pulling the huge engine the previous owner had dropped in the thing and then grinding and sanding and working over the body panels between the demands of Dad’s job pastoring a new church and my 15-17 hours a day stocking shelves for Pepsi. I think I worked on the hood alone for more than a week.

As we worked, Dad told me about what he wanted to do with the truck. Pull the original bench in the cab and replace it with bucket seats. Pull the rusted-out bed off the back and replace it with a flatbed of treated oak panels. Beef up the rear axle with a heavier gauge of gears to handle an engine and transmission combo that was much larger than Henry Ford ever intended for this model.

He also told me stories of the cars he’d worked when he was younger while we poured over catalogs and went to stores and junk yards looking for parts we needed at prices my folks could afford. And, more than anything, we dreamed about what we hoped our truck would turn out like. We scraped and ground and worked until, as they all do, that summer came to an end and I left for Los Angeles and my sophomore year.

And that was the end of it. I never lived in their house again, my summers committed to jobs that would help pay for my next year of school and internships I hoped would get me a career after I was done. I’d check in every once in a while about the progress Dad had made, but it slowed and then stopped and then he’d sold the truck.

I still remember standing in the space it had occupied in the garage the first time I visited after he sold it. It felt like a personal failure. Like I’d lost the chance to help Dad do something he’d always wanted to do. My parents were the types who sacrificed a lot to raise us, and I just wanted to give a little back. But life doesn’t always give that kind of time to what we want.

Years passed and, other than in the scattered conversations we had about that truck, I hadn’t really thought about it until I came across this one on my walk. It’s not the same (a double axle vs. our single, original engine vs. the Pontiac beast we had, it’s likely a year or two more recent a model). But for all intents and purposes, it is the same truck and I felt that same feeling of loss…but only for a moment.

Call it part of the aging process, but I’ve learned that some projects—some seasons in life for that matter—are brief and never meant to be complete. Rather, they highlight our desires and, if we’re fortunate, give us even a moments’ time to engage in them. For a few months, my dad and I shared a project and a dream for what it might become. We never finished, but we’d made a point of working together simply because we both wanted to. If there is a more relevant model of being a father, I haven’t found it.

I guess what it reminds me is that not everything I do needs to be completed to be of value. It’s the willingness to engage the passion and need of my moment that matters most. This, when I allow it to be, has acted as leavening to my Type A tendencies.

I took a picture of the new truck not to write about it, but to send it to Pops. His reply: How much is the guy asking? It wasn’t for sale. But then, three weeks later, it was. So I’m inquiring, reminded that just because a dream doesn’t happen on our schedule doesn’t mean it won’t ever be realized.

A Writer’s Prayer

Photo by Heather Clark

Maybe we can’t plot the moment when we were changed irrevocably; when we ricocheted off of greatness along a new course that would become our trajectory; when we saw, for a moment, what we wanted to reach for before we died.

Or maybe, if we look closely enough, we can.

I read a lot growing up. I don’t know a writer who didn’t. And, given my context, I read a broad swath of material. Hemingway when I was eight. Stephen King when I was nine. Catton and Hughes when I was ten. Austen when I was eleven. Didion when I was twelve. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare by the time I was fourteen. Alice Walker almost got me kicked out of high school when I was a freshman.  

Somehow, though, I missed Walt Whitman until I was a senior. Or, more precisely, until I was almost done being a senior.

Uncle Walt was like one of those bands you knew that you needed to “know” but you didn’t know how to “know” so you just pretended you knew what people who actually “knew” them talked to you.

Random Dude in High School: “You like Bad Brains, right? I mean, those guys were like pioneers.” 

Me: “Totally. I mean, I’m kinda partial to Black Flag because, like, Henry Rollins is a poet or something, but…”

Random Dude: “Totally.”

So it was with Whitman, until that sappy moment when, at the end of the senior slide show at the end of prom, when the Walt truck hit me. Let me set the unlikely stage. Kids in tuxes and formal gowns. On a paddle boat. Almost to the after party. Video slide show with Whitney Houston as a soundtrack. And then – cue the synth orchestra – the words of “Oh Me! Oh Life!” roll up the screen.

And there I was, through the swirl and clatter of gossip and teenage nostalgia and plates being cleared, transfixed by a poem I should have already known.

Oh Me! Oh Life!
Walt Whitman

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
                                       

                                                        Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Source: Leaves of Grass (1892)

This. This was my moment. I always loved to read. But this, this simple profundity, this small moment of stable clarity in a world that felt like it just wouldn’t stop shifting under my feet. This was it.

I’m fairly certain this is the beginning of my journey as a writer, not that I knew it at the time. There were other influential points on the plot line, but this was my genesis moment. My garden and my fall and my intention to journey toward making sense of it all for someone else.

Twenty years later, I’m still working. Still grinding. Still trying to be even a cut-rate Walt. But I’m still certain of these things:

I am here.

The actors are still on the stage.

And my verse may still yet get read.

What was your moment? Who authored it? Let me know.