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A Memoir by Charles Robert Andres

Perhaps because

now I am outside it

and can roll across the floor

and see the pure humor

and irony

of this mess

I can laugh for now

~ Kati Frazier

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And it starts like this

We crave to be kissed
By a moment complete in its happiness
Far away from the things we wish to escape
That lead us top think we are not awake
We are ourselves

Despite ourselves
This place gets smaller as the universe swells
We come to terms eventually,

Eventually, eventually.

~ Josh Joplin

I was born in Mountain View, California, about thirty miles west of my Parents’ San Jose home. The ground in San Jose was Bay Area brown during the summer, and that didn’t change much in the wintertime. San Jose is spared by the Santa Cruz Mountains of San Francisco’s fog, but the sprawling hills also trap most of the ocean’s moisture on the seaward side leading to a very arid climate. It is normal on a summer day for it to be in the sixties in San Francisco, and hit ninety-five in Silicon Valley.

A friend of mine, Sam Mlynec, lived on Summit road in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which I had never understood because their house wasn’t on the summit. The summit they were referring to was another mile up and west; Loma Prieta, the tallest mountain in the Santa Cruz range. Since I lived down in the valley, visiting the mountains was like stepping into another world. Sam’s yard was full of old-growth redwood trees that seemed about as tall as any building I had ever seen. Partway up one of those trees was a splendid wooden tree house, big enough to stand inside or throw water balloons out of. There aren’t many trees in the valley besides scrub oleander and palm, which aren’t good tree house trees at all. In fact, I could count the trees in my yard with great ease at a very young age. Two almond trees, one in the front yard and one in the back. One mimosa tree right in the middle of the front yard. Two black walnut trees; large, but impossible to climb because of the sticky black oil that oozes out of the numerous walnuts. One magnolia tree in the side yard that I called a “Gun-Gee” tree at age two because of the sound the large seeds made when they hit round objects like my Dad’s head. Three oleander trees acting like an addition to the back fence to keep the neighbors out. These trees were wonderful for climbing up to about age six, when I discovered to my dismay that the rubbery texture of the oleander branch isn’t made to hold a large human.

Then there was Tall Bee. Tall Bee was, well, he was tall. He might have been an ancient arborvitae that grew out of control, because he did look like a gigantic bush. Bush or tree, he seemed to go on forever. He seemed twice as tall as our house, and I was quite proud of that. Whenever I was asked a “What house do you live in?” type of question, which wasn’t often enough for me, I would point to or describe Tall Bee, and claim to live in the house behind him. When I was six, my parents began talking seriously about putting a small addition on the front of the house. I was all for the added space, and even the chance of a new bedroom, until I realized that the process would involve killing Tall Bee. I couldn’t understand the death of any tree, much less one so grand as Tall Bee. I begged and threw a tantrum, and Tall Bee stayed. For all I know, Tall Bee is still there, keeping his vigilant watch over Homerite Drive; taking in the dusty air of Silicon Valley, unbothered by the matters of humans or machines. I hope so.

Understand the things I say
Donąt turn away from me
Cause I spent half my life out there
You wouldnąt disagree
Dąyou see me, dąyou see
Do you like me, do you like me standing there
Dąyou notice, dąyou know
Do you see me, do you see me
Does anyone care.

~ The Cranberries

She always had a purse, rain or shine, fog or hail, and her whole life was closed up inside of it. Twice a year, when the seasons changed, she would always switch from her summer purse to her winter purse, or back again. On that day, her life would be revealed to all who cared to see it. Receipts, checks, ticket stubs, change, medical forms, passports, a stick of gum – she always carried gum – a peanut butter cracker, a child’s baby tooth, a piece of molding that fell off her car, a squirt gun requisitioned from a naughty child, a strand of hair, her dignity, her resourcefulness, her pride. She carried her successful past, her anger at her parents for breaking her dreams, and her eagerness for a change in life. She carried her spontaneity and level headedness, her judgments and her thoughts. She carried her love of life.

Her daughter never carried anything more than fashion dictated. One day she carried a purse, but left it in a movie theater with twenty-four dollars, and decided it wasn’t worth it to go back and retrieve it. She carried a stick of lip-gloss for application out of her mother’s prying eyes, until the day it went through the wash by accident and dyed an entire load of laundry bright red. She would carry a jar of nail polish, a small hairbrush, and just enough money to buy a slice of cheese pizza and a coke at lunch. On school days, she would either carry or roll her backpack depending on the current trend. In the fall, she would carry her field hockey bag. In the spring and summer, she would carry a smile and in the winter she would carry a frown. Usually, she was most satisfied when other people would carry her life around for her.

Her father carried a briefcase to work; a compact case with a laptop, cellular phone, portable mouse and keyboard, modem, and file. His pockets were always full. He carried a palm pilot that he used as to record everything his real head might forget. He carried a wallet, two or three pens – always a black and a red pen – and a watch. He carried himself well in suits when he had to and he slouched in casual wear when he didn’t. He preferred to carry a backpack full of camping gear, or a pair of ski boots across his shoulder. He always carried his life as a burden on his back, weighing him down and preventing him from following his dreams, yet he carried his weight well. He carried it not for himself, but for those he loved, and that gave him the will to go on.

Hey man, this is criminal
This hard line symmetry of people and pets
We don't bother anyone
We keep to ourselves
The mailman visits each of us in turn
We don't bother anyone
We keep to ourselves
The mailman visits each of us in time

~ Live

Across the street from us lived an elderly couple named The Albertsons. Three or four times a year, they would have a yard sale for some charity or other. The cause didn’t matter to me, but for three glorious days a few times a year, their yard became heaven. For the most part, things in California were expensive, and most shops were of the high-end variety. Antique shops were for five-hundred-dollar Waterford crystal vases, not the exciting jumble of goodies that can be found at many New England antique stores. Therefore, the prospect of an open-air shop of junk right across the street from me was extremely exciting. The first day of the yard sale, I would beg and beg to be taken across the street. When I finally was, I would run around to see what goodies I could get and – the hard part – afford. Once, the find was a children’s book about a bulldozer. My father read that book to me every night for over a year, and I loved it every single time. Another day, the find was a box of model trains and track. With my love of trains, I spend a lot of time getting that engine, caboose, and broken cattle car zooming down the track. Since it was supposed to be permanently mounted on a table, the track fell apart a lot, but I kept putting it together over and over again. When I got a bit older, I would stick around the yard sale longer, looking at everything and talking to all the interesting people. Sometimes it was just a chance to bring up that I did in fact live across the street from this amazing yard sale, and yes, that terrifically tall tree out front was mine. By the third day of the yard sale, almost everything good was gone, and I was starting to get tired of looking at the same stuff over and over again. If there was anything left I liked, I would try to get it for free. If not, I would say goodbye to the Albertsons and look forward to the next yard sale, only a few months off in the future.

Destruction leads to a very rough road
But it also breeds creation
And earthquakes are to a girl’s guitar
They’re just another good vibration
And tidal waves couldn’t save the world
From Californication…

~ Red Hot Chili Peppers

“I’m going to the bathroom for a second, Sam.” Chas said. “ Please don’t touch anything.”

“Oh, sure thing.” I replied, nonchalantly. As I walked into his living room, the first thing that stood out to me was the pinball machine. What kind of family would actually own a pinball machine? At closer glance, though, I was let down. It wasn’t one of the new ones like they had at the Blossom Hill arcade, it was one of those seventies mechanical clunkers. On a table next to the pinball machine was a little brass ashtray. Odd, because neither of Chas’ parents’ smoked. At least not in front of us. I quickly picked up the shiny bit of bronze, and was surprised when half of it crashed to the ground. It was in the shape of a flower, and half of the petals just peeled right off. At least, I hoped they were supposed to. If not, I just trashed it. Not wanting to take a chance, I nonchalantly picked up the pieces and walked into the kitchen. There was a stove, chrome and built like a battleship. Another clunker that looked at least forty years older than the house. Cary Grant was probably still popular when this stove was new, I mused. It was pretty large, though. You could probably cook three pizzas inside at the same time. Four, if you stacked them right. Looking back toward the living room to make sure no one was angrily approaching with the rest of the ashtray in hand, I spotted a small plastic stove belonging to Chas’ younger sister. Indeed, this stove could cook four pizzas – providing they were made from plastic or rubber. In fact, the whole plastic set came with enough plastic food to feed a whole tub of plastic army men, and still have enough left over for Barbie and her friends. Providing the army men didn’t blow a hole in Barbie first, of course. As I was about to walk toward it, I heard movement from the other side of the kitchen. Silently, I stepped out of the French doors and into the sunlight before someone caught on about that ashtray.

All the screens are filled with heroes and losers
but the sky's still filled with stars
This junky palace might be on fire
’til the winners lose desire
Let it go…

Let it go…

~ Midnight Oil

Fool’s gold is funnily named, because it isn’t gold colored, and it’s hard to imagine anyone getting fooled by it. In fact, it is in gold panning where fools gold can fool you. It glints like gold, and when you’re just talking about flakes of gold anyway it can seem like a huge strike. I discovered this first-hand when I went to California’s gold country on a vacation the summer before I started First Grade. This was an unusual trip from the beginning, as I was allowed to choose the family’s destination for the only time in my life. My choices were between gold country and the Sacramento railway museum. What made the decision for me was the promise that there would be trains in gold country along with the gold, while Sacramento was decidedly gold-less. It was a wonderful trip, and there indeed were trains. My only problem was that on the last day I tipped all the gold we panned back into the trough, losing it forever. I was distraught as we left, going home without any gold. I didn’t think much about the trip again until my birthday came around in late September. On it, I received a souvenir my parents bought on the trip and never told me about. It is a little statue of a gold panner about an inch tall. He is made of silver, and wears a small hat on his head like a true ‘49er or any other old west character would proudly sport. He has a long flowing beard, and is kneeling down with a gold pan in his hand. In the pan he has collected more than a few flakes of pure gold. There is also gold spattered around on the chunk of fool’s gold that the miner is kneeling on. It is a nugget about two inches long, and an inch high, with mica and quartz deposits on the back. This lucky miner was literally rolling in gold, and his success made me forget my failure. I have kept him on my desk ever since.

I'm not afraid of anything in this world
There's nothing you can throw at me
That I haven't already heard
I'm just trying to find a decent melody
A song that I can sing in my own company…

~U2

In first grade, we had a field trip to a park about twenty minutes from school. I believe it was a pow-wow to celebrate Thanksgiving or National Indian Day or something. We were all driven to the park by our parents, excited for the feast to come. I wore my yellow and black striped shirt, and my mom was helping to cook the delicious food. When we got there, we all walked over to a barbeque area with picnic benches. Since no one wanted restless elementary students on their hands, it was decided that some of the teachers would take the students on a short walk through the woods. When we returned, a piping hot feast would be waiting for us. We set out following a trail into a deciduous forest of elm, oleander, and eucalyptus. We were walking in a single file line, and near the end of the line a large fourth grader named Nathan had picked up a stick and began poking it in holes as we walked to pass the time. Just as we were about to loop back toward the feast, Nathan poked that stick into the worst possible hole, and it happened to land right in the middle of some bees’ living room. Now, California bees, yellow jackets mostly, are usually lazy and harmless. However, the can turn absolutely nasty if they feel that their home is threatened. Since this was true thanks to Nathan’s stick, they decided to give our innocent class a good scare. Of course, I only heard the screams of “Bees! Bees!” from the ranks behind me, and the straight line being broken as if enemy snipers had ambushed our first grade class from the rear. I was stuck behind a rather large girl who also happened to be one of the slowest in the class. Since the path was narrow with steep embankments on either side, I was virtually stuck behind her. Whether it was that, or my yellow and black striped shirt (I guessed bees could identify better with their own kind), I had bees all over me as we ran screaming back toward the feast and the picnic benches. Upon seeing us, the parents ran over, screaming and trying to stay calm at the same time. Someone’s mother pulled off my shirt and the dozens of bees that were all over me began to fly off in search of better prey. I was wrapped in a towel and we were all sped back to the school where we might get our stings treated. I was lucky to escape with only five bee stings, mostly on my chest and shoulders. My yellow and black shirt was given back to us the next day, and it sat in my mom’s trunk for weeks. I never wore it again.

I've this creeping
Suspicion that things here are not as they seem
Reassure me
Why do I feel as if I'm in too deep?
Now I've been praying
For some way to show them
I'm not what they see
Yes, I have done wrong
But what I did I thought needed be done
I swear…

~ Dave Matthews

Once I was in an Osco Drugstore. I don’t think that chain is still in business, but it was like a CVS, only larger and with more bright distractions for my seven-year-old mind. A country song was playing on the stereo, a cowgirl singing her latest tune about lost love. I listened to the song with muted interest as I was led around the store and my mom shopped while my sister gawked. We traveled down the foreboding isles all in a row, making our way glacially from one end of the store to the other. The makeup isle was closest to the wall, then hair care, tooth care, and medicine. The entire incident is etched into my brain as if with an India ink pen. I was in a somber mood that day, and shopping didn’t help any. I wanted to see a movie, but I didn’t know what I wanted to see. Mentally, I worked my way thought the genres. Love movies never interested me. They were boring, sappy, and all the same. War movies? Thrillers? I never liked them. Sure, they were okay for a while, but before long they got old, tired, and pointless. How many times could a guy die and you think it’s interesting? Mysteries? What’s the point? They were all too easy and bland anyway. (This comes from the same person that always looked at the answer key in those Usbourne puzzle books) That left comedy, which I liked quite a bit, but I was worrying that one day I would hear all of the jokes and things would stop being funny, sort of how Barney the Dinosaur wasn’t so witty anymore. “Mom?” I asked, speaking up finally. “What happens when I run out of jokes? What movies will I watch?” I don’t think my mom understood.

“What do you mean…run out of jokes?” She replied, quizzically.

“You know,” I said in exasperation. “In comedy movies. When the jokes get unfunny. What will I watch then?”

“Well,” She said, still not totally understanding, “I’m sure you’ll fund some movie you’ll want to watch. There are so many of them.”

I wasn’t so sure. Suddenly, the entire world became a factual, genre-classified mess for me, a world where I would be left on the outside. I would never be able to enjoy any forms of entertainment, all movies and television shows would follow the same boring, contrived formulas that had already begun to cease to interest me at seven years old. Since people lived basically forever, then what was I going to do when I was old? There are only so many books in the world, and only so long before those get old and boring too. I want to say that this was the moment that I decided to write stories and direct films that didn’t just fit into basic, boring genres. I would also be perfectly content saying that this was the moment that I realized things could be taken on many different levels that a seven year old couldn’t even comprehend. But at this moment, I felt like I was above everything on the planet that might amuse me, so I became sad and depressed. I wasn’t until days later that I watched some cartoons on television, and decided that I might as well enjoy them while I could.

I can hear your words
When you speak of what you are and have seen
I can see your hand
Reaching out through a shining daydream
Where the days and nights are not the same
Captured happy in a picture frame

Honey I will be there
Yes I'll be there

~ Steely Dan

I found it on one of the trips to my grandparents rambling old farmhouse in Maine.

Every trip until she died, my Grandmother would play the part of Tyresius, and lead me up the narrow, steep staircase to her ancient attic. The lighting was bad up there, the only sources of illumination being the two small windows at either side. The place was musty, and a curtain of dust perpetually hung in the air. It smelled of unfinished wood and bookworms, of rusting metal and 40 year old rat poison. The floor was rotting away, and near the enormous brick chimney towering in the middle of the room was a deep hole, a portal to a deep abyssal void. The ceiling was in an upside-down ‘V’ shape, so if you walked near the edges, you would have to duck or risk getting clobbered by a wooden beam. As a young child, this was the most glorious place on earth. My dad had four siblings, two boys and two girls, and all of the toys from their youth were preserved up here, gathering dust and waiting for a new generation of children to discover them. There were tin cars with tiny plastic drivers, cellulite blocks for building whole universes, doll houses with the complete compliment of furniture, and coffee cans full of odds and ends, random bits of plastic and wooden memory. It was during one of these trips, surely, that my fingers grasped hold of a dull, brass ring.

I don’t know what attracted it to me, or me to it. It’s dull, and it looks like it hasn’t been polished or even washed in its whole life. Parts of it are starting to wear off, revealing it might not even be brass after all, but some sort of steel alloy. On it, two letters are emblazoned in basic typewriter print. They are thick black letters, giving the chunk of metal the appearance of a crude initial ring. It looks like something that was given to a small child for their birthday years ago. To me, the ring just said. “Is.” I put it in my pocket.

This is what my mom swears happened. I have asked numerous people since then, and no one else has an idea of how this ring came into my life. It could have come from a yard sale in California, buried in one of the numerous ten-cent bargain boxes. I could have picked it up off of the side of the road walking around Los Gatos or San Jose. I could have found it in the halls of a pre-kindergarten school, or buried in the dirt in my backyard. It could have just appeared in my room one day when I was asleep, like a mystical creature waiting to be discovered. I know the memory of having it has been with me as long as I can remember, but the memory of finding it eludes me to this day.

Since I have found the ring, I have always carried it with me like a good luck talisman. In the years after my grandmother died, my room became as full as that attic with my own cast-off toys, yet the simple brass ring stayed with me, always managing to elude the clutter. I haven’t always had it within my grasp, in fact years have gone by where I haven’t been aware of where the ring lay, but whenever the thought of it came to my mind, it would suddenly appear in the most unlikely places. I don’t know if it is possible for me to truly lose the ring, as it seems to always find its way back into my possession. At one point I decided to give it to my girlfriend as a gesture of my commitment, but without the ring in my possession I didn’t feel I was myself – I felt like I was missing a part of me, like it was alluding me for the first time in my life. The girl gave the ring to gave it back a while later – she said it didn’t feel like it was hers to have, and once I had it back I felt whole again. I decided it was better to keep in my own possession, for the next time I might not get it back.

I have often wondered what the ring truly is, what power it manages to have over me, and where it’s path crossed with mine. All that I’ve heard back from it are the two letters printed on the front – Is. Perhaps the ring just is, just as I am.

I was taught a month ago
To bide my time and take it slow
But then I learned just yesterday
To rush and never waste the day
Well I'm convinced the whole day long
That all I learn is always wrong
and things are true that I forget
But no one taught that to me yet

~ Phish

Energy isn’t supposed to be something that you have to struggle for, fight for. Energy is supposed to be yours for the low low price of a night’s rest, a bowl of wheaties (The breakfast of champions!), and a decently good attitude. That is what people would have you believe, at any rate. There is nothing in life that doesn’t need energy of some sort. Pure energy is the valuable commodity, not coal or oil. We’re infinitely lucky that energy, for us, is a renewable resource. The renewing takes some effort, though. Struggles to stay awake lead to struggles to steal energy from others, which usually take more energy to commit than is gain from the act. It’s a vicious cycle, isn’t it? Energy can only be found within one’s self, and from there is where it must come.

Don't look back
A new day is breakin'
It's been too long since I felt this way
I don't mind where I get taken
The road is callin'
Today is the day

~Boston

When I was seven, I moved from San Jose, California, to the rural backwoods of New England. I gave up security and friendships at a pivotal time in my youth, and faced a total unknown. Right before we moved, our family spent a week living with Sam’s family. It was bittersweet; because when I left I had no idea if I would ever see him again. That final morning, he said to me “You know, I hope when you come and visit, you won’t have one of those New England accents. ‘Bonjour!’ and all of that.”

“Don’t worry!” I exclaimed. “That’s an accent from Old England! I’m going to New England!” Neither of us realized that ‘Bonjour’ was a French word, and it didn’t really matter. I was going off to an alien culture, a land that seemed farther away than anything either of us had experienced before. The only things that I knew about New England came from visits to my grandparents’ house in Maine. What I knew of Maine was that it had lots of gray clouds and lobsters. I knew it had snow too, I suppose, and I was looking forward to real snow in my backyard, but I was imagining a winter straight out of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons – Non-stop sledding, snowballs, and fun. Shaking my head clear of all of these thoughts, I turned to leave Sam’s house and step into my new life. I wouldn’t see him again for three years.

The airplane flight from San Francisco to Boston was no different than any of the previous cross-country flights. When my feet stepped from the jet way ramp onto the plane, and the stewardess welcomed us aboard, I casually noted that I had stepped through the threshold and out of California at last. I took a window seat next to my dad, who looked out the window past me in muted anticipation. There were no final words of wisdom, no lasting dialog to mark my last moments there. At least, none that I still remember. I looked out the window as the plane took off, but I was more interested in reading the comic books I had stuffed in my traveling backpack. I just figured that if I didn’t look out of the window in the window seat, my dad might ask to take it, and I didn’t want to sit in his seat. At that moment, I was happy to be gone. I was tired of the smog, and my parents had instilled in me a sense that New England was where I belonged. I wanted to get to this place that I belonged in more than California, which was the only place I knew. After reading comic books for a while, I put on some headphones and watched the in-flight news magazine, casually noting the items about Boston. “Boston. That’s home now.” I mused, excited by the strange way the word formed in my mouth. Boston. It didn’t sound like home. Everything I was used to had the flowing Spanish feel about it. Los Gatos. San Jose. Santa Cruz. Embarcadero. Salinas. In New England, things were less elegant. Boston. Maine. Watertown. Wuss-ter. Who would name a city Wuss-ter? I supposed I would find out soon enough. It was darkening when we landed at Logan Airport on a typical early-September evening in Boston. There were light clouds overhead, and the sun glinted off the John Hancock and Prudential towers. As I stepped off the plane, I took a deep breath. “It’s clean!” I pronounced. “No smog!”

“I know!” my mom said, taking a breath at the same time. “You’ll miss California, though.”

“Yeah, I’m sure I will one day.” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. New England was my home now, after all. I belonged there.

Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us

To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again

Dragged by force of some inner tide
At a higher altitude with flag unfurled
We reached the dizzy heights of that dreamed-of world

~ Pink Floyd

When we got to New England, we moved into an apartment in Lowell, Massachusetts as a temporary residence while we went house hunting. It was fairly small, with a kitchen-living-dining area and two bedrooms. I had to share a room with my sister, marking the first time in my life I didn’t have a place to really call my own. Since I was still very young and got along with her very well, I didn’t mind too much. I took the back side, facing the small lake, and my sister took the front near the door. The teachers at my old school gave my mom some work that I would be ready for at the beginning of second grade. Since we got to New England in early September with no idea how long it would be until we found a real house, I wasn’t enrolled in Lowell’s public school system. Instead, I was home schooled by my mom. For the first month, I did math problems in the sheets from California, scientific observations on the pond in the back of the apartment complex, and read those books about the youths of famous historical figures. I got through the Wright Brothers, Einstein, and quite a few presidents before we moved on to more interesting books. All the while, we looked for houses to buy or even rent on a more permanent basis. Before we left California, we put a few boxes of our stuff aside so that we would get them delivered early. After about three weeks in Lowell, these few boxes were delivered to our apartment. It felt like Christmastime, but the move sunk in for good at that moment. Here were our things, things that belonged in our house in California, but they had come here, packed in boxes with red and green moving labels. I was, though, ecstatic to get my comic books back, which went in the pile of early stuff at no small request by me. I didn’t want to leave them out of my site for even that long, but there were simply too many to bring on the plane with us. I counted the days from when we left until I could get them back.

I was able to adapt to apartment life quite well in an innocent sort of way. I really didn’t understand life outside of the suburbs, and the vices that suburbia hides from those who grow up exclusively inside of it were all alien to me. One day, we were walking home from the supermarket across the street laden with shopping bags. I couldn’t get over the fact that there was a supermarket right across the street! That seemed to me to be the greatest convenience in the world. That day, on the way back my mother stopped to say hello to a young mother and her toddling daughter on the front steps. She seemed about twenty, with black hair and a deep look of sadness and desperation on her face. She was smoking a cigarette so naturally that it looked like it was a part of her. I had just learned that ‘drugs were bad’, so I asked her why she was smoking a cigarette. I asked her if she knew if they were bad for her.

“Yeah, I know.” She mumbled. “But I just can’t quit. I tried, but I can’t.”

“Well,” I started, like I had all the wisdom in the world. “Just lock yourself up in a room without cigarettes, and pretty soon you won’t want to smoke them anymore.” At this, I was whisked away for being “so rude”. I was puzzled. What had I done wrong? I was just trying to help that sad-looking woman with her cigarettes. I vowed to try and be nice to her whenever I saw her so that she would forget that I “made fun of her serious addiction”, which was apparently what I had done.

A few days later, I saw a plastic tricycle halfway submerged in a swamp on the other side of the road, down the street from the market. Not thinking this was discarded trash but instead was forgotten treasure, (There were no swamps, much less buried toys in San Jose!) I begged to be allowed to salvage it. My mom thought this was gross and disgusting and my dad didn’t think any higher of the plan, but eventually I was able to get him to dredge it out of the muck. When it came out, it was covered in ooze and it smelled like marsh gas. We cleaned it off, but it wasn’t in good shape, nor was it big enough for me. I decided to leave it in the yard of the smoking woman as a present for her daughter. She didn’t know who did this, but from time to time I saw the toddler riding the trike around the complex. It was probably one of the only toys she ever owned.

As for me, I was fascinated by the pond out back. San Jose had a park with a lake, but a pond right outside my house was something else entirely. One day, I saw a boat that someone had made out of some straws, plastic cups, and a two liter sprite bottle. I thought this was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and I began making my own boats out of soda cans, plastic bags, and whatever else I could get my hands on. I would put sails on them, and try to follow them around the pond. Since it was Canadian goose migration season, the pond was full of them, and sometimes to my delight the boat would scare one of them into the air. I would try to sneak up on these very large birds as well, but they were always able to outsmart me. I never got within a few feet of one without it honking and flying off. California never had birds like this, especially not right outside my house. Life was good.

Birthdays in Lowell, though, were exceptionally pathetic. Since we moved in September, my birthday showed up within the first few weeks we were there. I didn’t have any friends on the entire east coast, so I just had a small party with my family. This was in sharp contrast to my birthday-extravaganzas of the past, so it was a bit of a shock. Still, I got some comic books and I was happy. It was my sister’s birthday that was truly pathetic. She did have a friend by this time, a girl about her age who lived down the hall. That only made the situation worse. My mom had thoughtfully packed some birthday decorations in the boxes we were given early, but those made the day even sadder. Seeing the decorations that looked so proud in California draped around the apartment made the entire place seem empty and bleak. It was another harsh reminder that we really did move, and we weren’t going back, not even for the magical moments that birthdays celebrate. Birthdays would no longer be spent in the sun of our backyard, enjoying one of the last swimming days of the year. They would be spent in a small apartment with one friend and the neighbor’s pot roast wafting through the crack in the door.

I was so hard to please.
Look around,
Leaves are brown,
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.

~ Paul Simon

The first time that I saw snow in my own backyard was when we finally moved into our first New England house in Hollis, New Hampshire. It seemed that the snow held off just in time for us to get settled, because it was rather late that year. I was in my room after dinner, and I was reading a faded book about witches, black cats, and Halloween. My mom called up to us in a very excited tone. “It’s snowing!” she cried at the top of her lungs. My sister and I bolted to the kitchen, where my mom pointed out the window at the white flakes mystically falling from the sky. We begged to step outside and feel it, to let the cold beauty of the snow take us in and fill us full of its magic. She complied, also wanting to feel the snow for herself, and opened the door to the icy blast of winter. The cold slammed into us, but we didn’t care. Snow was magical; existent only in storybooks and far-off lands we would sometimes visit. It wasn’t something that lived at my house, at least not until now. I felt the people who lived with snow never appreciated it enough. I vowed to always appreciate the snow, and never to curse the first snowfall of the year. That promise only kept a few years until the snow really did seep in and fill me – and I now shudder like most true New Englanders when that first bite of cold hits me in October. On that day though, nothing could have been more exciting than that snow. I reached down to the front step, and scooped up enough powdery snow to fashion a loose snowball. It was loose snow, but that didn’t stop me from throwing the powder everywhere I could. That first winter, the snow made up for its lateness by pummeling down on us hard and often. It was the snowiest winter I have ever been in, even still. We bought one of those Post Office boxes that they store your mail in when you need to hold it during a vacation, and used it as a crude block-building mold for snow walls. We made an igloo, snow forts, and sledding runs. We had snowball fights and sledding contests. For one winter, at least, it truly was a wonderland.

I feel like a quote out of context
Withholding the rest
So I can be free what you want to see
I got the gesture and sound
Got the timing down
It's uncanny, yeah, you think it was me

~ Ben Folds

April fools day was a huge holiday for me, right up there with Christmas and my birthday. Valentines day was fun up to a point, but by fourth grade I felt I had outgrown it. The little kids would all give each other valentines, stuffing them through too-small slits in glittered shoebox tops. The shoeboxes should have been decorated during the previous day’s art class, but usually the teacher forgot so the kids would go home and smother the boxes with enough glitter to choke a swarm of pixies. Then came the matter of valentines. You had to give one to everyone in the glass, boy or girl. That was a given. Most people were lazy, and they just went to the store and bought Garfield and Snoopy valentines. They filled out the classmates’ names in the back, but left everything else untouched and unpersonalized. The people who thought ahead bought candy valentines (this was mostly boys) so that they would have something to munch on during the Valentine’s Day melee. The others (mostly girls) got better valentines. Sometimes they even made ones themselves, with written notes on the back of each one. To a second grade boy, Valentines Day is nothing more than a lesser, easier form of Halloween. (The candy comes to you!) Therefore, most of these well-made valentines ended up right in the garbage can. I read them all, though, and never ate any candy at the melee. I was a notorious candy hoarder, and I took my shoebox home, unopened, and would read the cards and sort the candy. Then, I’d throw out the box and cards, and hide the candy in a bag in a closet, usually with my leftover Halloween stash. I would then ration it out piece by piece, saving the best for last when it would get eaten by somebody else or spoil after sitting in a bag for over a year.

By fourth grade, however, Valentines Day was out and April Fools Day was in as the holiday of choice. My mom made it painfully clear that she was not to be messed with, and I knew if I did anything to my sister death to myself wouldn’t be far behind. Plus, it was always more fun if she was in on the jokes too. That left my dad, who was the perfect patsy to face the April Fools Day brunt. My favorite joke involved turning on the water in the sink to make his shower icy cold, then throwing paper confetti at him as he walked out of the bathroom, sopping wet and wrapped in a towel. Since I did this every year, he probably knew it was coming, but he was always a good sport about it. One year, I got my ambitious and hid the hard drive icon on his desktop under hundreds of little electronic folders that popped up and had messages he had to read, mostly pertaining to his buying me lots of comic books. He thought this was a clever joke, but I didn’t get any comic books until Christmastime.

Christmases were much nicer once we got to New England. In California, Christmas was much more liable to sneak right up on you without giving you a chance to get ready for it. Since the weather never really changed, one day it would just be time to get a Christmas tree, and next thing you’d know, Santa Claus would be practically knocking at your door. It was a fun time of year, but the weather adds a dimension that can only be appreciated by those who know Christmas without it. The leaves fall, the weather turns, the snow and ice fly, all in anticipation. For an eight-year-old, seeing the weather get ready for Christmas just like it did in books and movies truly was magical. The first Christmas in Hollis brought me my first sled, one of those flying saucers. My sister got one as well, and since there was already plenty of snow we went outside and tried them out. Saucers aren’t all that good for going downhill, as we soon learned, but with my dad pushing they were wonderful. After sledding, we went inside for a mug of hot chocolate and a few more presents. To this day, snow on Christmas is still one of the moments I find is truly magical about living in New England.

But if I can't swim after forty days
and my mind is crushed by the thrashing waves
Lift me up so high that I cannot fall
Lift me up
Lift me up - when I'm falling
Lift me up - I'm weak and I'm dying
Lift me up - I need you to hold me
Lift me up - Keep me from drowning again

~ Jars of Clay

After one winter in Hollis, we found our permanent house in Harvard, Massachusetts. From age 8 to 11, known mostly to me as grades 3 through 5, I attended Harvard Elementary School. The thing that scared me the most during my three years in Harvard was a horrid practice that took place twice a year. This was The Mile Run.

Now, I believe all public schools, or at least all public elementary schools such as the one I went to, were required to give the Presidential Fitness Test every year. Apparently, this was something set up by John F. Kennedy in the Sixties to make sure American youths were exercising enough and not turning into TV junkies. There were even spiffy little prizes for the winners of the Pull-ups, Sit-ups, Curl-ups, up chucks (well, perhaps not that), the sprint, and the Mile Run. The prizes never interested me in the slightest because I couldn’t win one if my life depended one it. What did interest me was the reality of taking the test. We had Gym class three times a week, and the events would be pared off. Sprint and Pull-ups. Sit-ups and Curl-ups. And, on the last day, the Mile Run. Every fall, the entire fitness test was taken to ‘practice’ for the challenge in the spring that might earn you a shiny medal. Or maybe it was an ‘attaboy’ certificate. I never won one so it never mattered. The winning standards were set for each grade so that it got harder each year. That way, if I could do 38 Sit-ups in 3^rd grade and lose, I could do 48 in 5^th grade and still lose. It was like Tantalus and the fruit – just out of reach. Anyway, the morning of Mile Run day was the worst. The mile we would run was five times around a soccer field in back of the school. It seems quite easy now. In fact, I probably run more than that every day in sports now. For an elementary school student, though, it was a hugely daunting task. Every morning walking into school, I walked right by that field, but on Mile Run morning I would always stop and pay it extra attention. I would imagine myself running around that field five times, and then I would slowly walk inside, resigning myself to the inevitability of the upcoming run. Usually I had Gym second or third period, so my first two classes were a wreck. I would sit in them and daydream about ‘if’. If the run were cancelled, if I were to suddenly get sick, if it would start to rain. If it would start to snow. Once, I left class and said I had to use the bathroom. I walked to the end of the second floor hallway, and stared off the edge of the landing. Directly below were the doors to the gym that I would be passing through far too shortly. Beyond that was the soccer field. I sighed, and slowly walked back to class.

The actual run was never as bad as the buildup. I would start out jogging along, and would get winded by the time I made one circuit, calling out “Lap One!” to my gym teacher on the way around. “Only four more laps to go!” I would tell myself. I was huffing and puffing really good by “Lap Two!”, and I stopped talking to myself to conserve energy. For all I could tell, the fast kids had already finished, gotten a drink of water, jogged home, and finished their homework. By “Lap Three!”, breathing began to really hurt. I began thinking again, along to the rhythm of my panting. At “Lap Four!” I figured I could walk faster than my pant-jog, but I feared the wrath of my gym teacher. Dark-haired and athletic, she wasn’t someone to be messed with. She would always let you know exactly how she felt about you at any given moment, and it was never anything pleasant. At long last, I would chug in at “Lap Five!” and collapse into a heap on the sideline. I would get a time barked at me, always something 6 or 8 minutes longer than the 7 I needed to win the prize. The fast people were already heading in, and still on the field were those who refused to run completely and would hear hell from the teacher later on. I was hot and sweaty, but I didn’t care. The torture was over; not to be thought about for a few more months. If any good came of the Mile Run, it was the knowledge that although things may look bleak, and you may be full of dread, it just makes the completion that much sweeter.

It's funny how life turns out-
The odds of faith in the face of doubt.
Camera One closes in,
the soundtrack starts,
the scene begins-

~ Josh Joplin

It was the summer between Fifth and Sixth grade that I first discovered movie making. These circumstances came around, oddly enough, because of a very bizarre neighbor of mine. Down the road about three miles, there was a family of four names the Hobbs’. The patriarch, Randy, was from the Midwest and he still lived there in his mind. He had brown hair with some dirty red mixed in and a bushy redneck beard. He stood just over 6 feet tall and was stocky, but not fat. His wife, Renee, was a little shorter and wider than he. She had brown hair and a condescending attitude. Their two children, Roger and Rachel, weren’t quite all there. Roger, the eldest, was two years younger than me. He stuttered and had a lisp, and his thought process was even slower than that Rachel, who was two years his junior and no genius herself. She too had a rather huge lisp and a rather interesting idea about what kinds of things were fun, such as playing lots and lots of charades. For about half a summer our two families were the best of friends. How this unlikely union came to be still eludes me. My sister and Rachel were the best of friends, and my Dad is easy going enough hanging out with anyone. Randy was just fine with him. For some reason, my mom and Renee became friends, and, well, I was stuck with Roger. And you know what? I enjoyed it. I had never before known the sense of community of a block party, or of close neighbors, because we had none. It was a slice of American culture I had heard of, but never experienced, and for about two months it was great.

Of course, there were downsides as well. Renee had this abhorrent dinner game where every person was supposed to share their highlights and lowlights of the day with everyone else. I bet she read about it in a child psychology book. Anyway, the real point I was trying to make was about Randy. Randy kept chickens in a chicken coop next to his house so that he could have fresh eggs in the morning. He also kept a rooster around to attack curious people like me. I thought that keeping chickens was, albeit smelly, a fine thing. That was, until I found out that after the chickens got too old Randy would chop off their heads one at a time with an axe. Perhaps if I knew more about farming, I would just smile and accept it. However, I didn’t, and I was appalled. What upset me the most was how nonchalantly he described this decapitation process. What made matters worse happened a week or so after I found out about the chickens. I was with Roger, Rachel, and my sister and walking by Randy’s garage when he came out with a long metal rod with a curved point at one end. When I asked him what it was for, he told me it was for ‘Frogging’. Apparently frogging involves sneaking up on frogs at night and stabbing them with a pointy stick. Between this and the chickens, Randy became a serial killer in our eyes equal to Dahmer and Manson. A homicidal maniac. When my Mom and Renee stopped being close friends meaning the end of our family barbeques together, we didn’t see Randy as much. That just led to the legend growing even larger. Randy, the homicidal maniac, was living in the woods with a shotgun waiting to kill us ere midnight.

Sam, of course, knew the legends of Randy all too well. When he visited that summer, the family relationship was just ending. He knew the chickens, and he knew about Frogging. Sam, always the daring one, proposed the plan initially.

“You know, I think I saw a shotgun in that chicken coop last time we were over at Randy’s.”

“Really? I replied. “I never saw one there.” In reality, I had never really looked around the interior of the chicken coop all that carefully. It never dawned on me Randy the homicidal maniac would have a real live gun, but now that the idea had been planted I figured that he probably did. “Yeah, he probably does have a gun.” I said.

“Well, what are we going to do about it?”

“Hmm? I don’t get what you mean….’do about it’?”

“Well, imagine all of the things that Randy could do with a gun. Do you want him doing any of those things?”

“Not Really.” I said.

“Well, then what are we going to do about it? He asked again, just as nonchalantly. “We can’t just let him have it.”

“I suppose we could hide it.” I offered.

“Or we could…bury it!” Sam said, with an impish grin. It seems this was his idea all along. He just wanted it to seem more spontaneous.

“Well…” I said, knowing that his mind was set and arguing would be pointless. “I’m supposed to feed the chickens tomorrow.” (Randy would hire me for this from time to time when he was busy or out of town) “We can go then.”

So we did, and we buried the shotgun under about a foot of dirt behind the chicken coop. As this was near the end of our families’ closeness, I didn’t see Randy much after that. I never knew if he found the gun. It never came up again.

Of course, this story is supposed to be about my discovering filmmaking About two hours after the novelty of having buried the gun wore off for Sam, which wasn’t terribly long, he suggested to me that we make a movie about Randy. I had never made a movie before, but it looked easy enough. We decided to call the movie “Dial ‘R’ For Randy” after Hitchcock’s “Dial ‘M’ For Murder” which Sam knew at the time and I did not. However, I did know that making a murder story about Randy would be fun.

We took over my Dad’s basement studio for the shoot. After spending a whole morning writing the script, we begged my dad to lend us his camcorder. When he did, we set it up on a tripod and turned the studio into ‘Randy’s lair’. We had a frog refrigerator and “Psycho of the Month” award papers hanging on the walls. Sam made a fake cigarette out of paper and decided he was perfect to play Randy. I invited Brooks, one of my friends from my new school over, and had him play both the victim and police officer. It wasn’t a very good movie. In fact, we never finished it primarily because my mom wouldn’t let us blockade a road as part of a roadblock scene. The thing was, we didn’t give the camcorder back when we gave up. We kept shooting. Something about the surrealism of creating our own stories, characters, and worlds was a powerful feeling. I don’t suppose I’ve stopped shooting yet.

You can't resist her

She's in your bones

She is your marrow

And your ride home

You can't avoid her

She's in the air

In between molecules

Of oxygen and carbon dioxide…

~Weezer

I don’t know quite how it happened, but after I had been outside of California long enough to forget most of it, I began letting it back into my life little by little. During the summer between fifth and sixth grade, my dad had a business trip in the Bay Area. Since Sam had visited us for a while that summer already, it was decided that I would pay him a visit. For a few days, I would stay with him while my dad worked, and then my dad and I would drive across the state to the Sierra Mountains where we would go camping for a week in the wilderness. Staying at the Mlynecs was relatively uneventful, albeit shocking to be back at their house for the first time in years. I was excited to show Sam the movies I had made since he had left, but we weren’t able to make any more. My dad made me leave the camera home, afraid it would get damaged on the trip. After a few days, my dad came back and we began preparing for our camping trip. We had looked on a map before we left, and settled on a small overlooked place east of Fresno called Lake Edison. The lake was named after the power company that damned it up in the 1920’s to generate power for the San Joaquin Valley. It is about five or six hours from the Bay Area, and over a ten thousand foot pass in the Sierra Mountains. I had never gone on anything resembling a road trip before, save a drive made to Los Angeles when I was five or six, so the idea of it fascinated me. We borrowed some CDs from the Mlynecs, and hit the road.

My feeling toward music as a small child was quite unusual. I know that when I was a baby I enjoyed songs; usually ones that wind up stuffed animals would play over and over. I know that throughout my kindergarten years, my mom would constantly have on her “Best of the Manhattan Transfer” tape in the car, and I enjoyed those songs more than I admitted. The only song I truly liked, though, was a simple tune that my first computer could play in a piano synthesis program. More than once, people asked me what kind of music I liked and I casually answered, “I don’t like music” to the surprise and disbelief of those who asked. I eventually made up a few standard answers so that I could shut them up. While I was a bit beyond that when this trip began, I only owned two CDs: The Beach Boys ‘Greatest Hits’, a birthday gift, and The Who’s ‘Tommy’, borrowed from my dad. I didn’t really listen to either anymore, and I never turned on the radio. For this trip, though, my dad borrowed four CDs from the Mlynecs: A Gypsy Kings CD, The Beatles’ ‘White Album’, and ‘Gaucho’ and ‘Countdown to Ecstasy’ by Steely Dan. I grabbed Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’, promising to show my dad was “real music” was like, but I couldn’t name a single Nirvana song outside of what I had heard at school, and I didn’t really know what they sounded like. I just knew that they were supposed to be ‘cool’. With CDs in hand and camping gear in the rental car, we started driving toward the central valley of California.

While the Bay Area is lush, at least comparatively, the central valley is more like a dessert than the farmland it pretends to be. Summer days are always ninety degrees or higher, and vegetation besides the crops usually are a part of the scrub grass family. When you first come down from the hills dividing Silicon Valley with the central valley, the first thing you see is a giant reservoir that seems to stretch to the horizon like a vast inland sea. When you get a bit closer, you notice that at one point about a third of the way out, the water ends and the valley begins. On a clear day, you can see the Sierra Mountains looming in the distance like Tolkein’s Mountains of Mordor; just close enough to seem real. The temperature by the reservoir is still only about seventy, but by the time you reach the valley floor. It is blistering hot. You also realize that the mammoth reservoir is only a footnote of the immense valley, not a third of it. The dusty plain seems endless and the mountains never seem to get closer until they sneak up on you by surprise, swallowing you into their immensity.

Cruising through the foothills into the central valley for the first time, we had the windows down and the Gypsy Kings on the stereo. The tops of the hills were windmill-riddled as the pass we were traveling through was extremely windy. By the time the crystalline sea was in sight, the Beatles were singing and we were zooming down into the valley at ninety. This was my first trip away from my mom, and whether it was that, or the entrancing grasp that California never ceased to have with me, I never felt more free. When the sun began to scorch our skin, we rolled up the windows and stopped for lunch in the town of Los Bańos. (It means ‘the bathroom’ in Spanish and I had to stop there for the humor value alone) I wasn’t too hungry, but I wanted to go to the bathroom just to say I had done it. It’s one of those things everyone should do once in their life. When we left the restaurant with a stomachful of rice and beans, we started the drive toward the mountains. My dad put on ‘Gaucho’, and for the first time in my life I became truly captivated by music. Something about Becker and Fagan’s wild but mellow guitar and cryptic vocals seemed to capture the trip aurally. We listened to that forty-minute album over and over again as the terrain began to get more and more hilly. Once the Sierra foothills start, the temperature plummets again. On this particular day, it was sunny and bright as we climbed into the arms of the mountains. At one point, we climbed over three thousand feet in just over five minutes. That’s taller than anything in Massachusetts. After winding through the foothills, we finally started climbing into the High Sierra. We climbed up the ten thousand foot pass, and at the top I saw a sight that I hadn’t expected to see in the middle of August: Snow! We stopped the car next to an alpine meadow, and got out just to appreciate the scenery. I threw a snowball at my dad, and then felt bad about using up all the snow. I felt like after making it all the way to August, it should have had a better fate. The meadow was beautiful, too. It was full of miniature alpine flowers, and a small brook of snowmelt water flowed through it. Inspired and ready to continue along the ever-narrowing road, we got back in the car. Steel Dan jammed as we wound down into the Vermillion Valley. Before Lake Edison, the Vermillion Valley had a flat bottom with a small, lazy stream running through it. The Vermillion cliffs rose majestically a thousand feet above the valley floor. Now, you can take a flat bottom boat across the man made lake to the untamed wilderness of the John Muir trail on the other side. We spent the night in a campground on the civilized side of the lake, and took the boat over early in the morning. We hiked a few miles of the trail, which runs the whole span of the Sierra-Nevada mountain chain, from Canada to Mexico. When it began to get dark, we took the boat back to the campground, and when I dad realized that I had never been, set off for Yosemite the next morning. While the scenery was breathtaking, it lacked the magic that the relatively unspoiled beauty of Lake Edison had. With halfdome rising above us, we ate dinner in the valley’s hotel, vowing to return and take a backpacking trip out of the Vermillion Valley to Yosemite, perhaps all the way to the top of halfdome. After dinner, we drove out of the mountains and back toward the Bay Area. The trip didn’t seem to take half as long as we sped through the darkened desert. Steely Dan was still spinning, and I was captivated. For the first time in my life, I truly associated music with memory. I still think of that trip every time I listen to that album, and I was never the same after that trip. I have been looking ever since for that feeling I first had while listening to the Beatles cruising down into the valley, the whole world spread out ahead of me. It was a feeling of pure happiness and freedom; feeling like you’re part of everything and nothing at the same time. It was on this trip that I discovered it was possible to live life for myself. It’s a lesson I’ve kept in the front of my mind ever since.

When we got back to the Mlynecs at one in the morning, we dropped off to sleep almost instantly. The next morning, we began cleaning out the car and preparing for our return to New England. While going through the glove compartment, my Dad found the never-played Nirvana CD.

“I thought you were going to play your generations good music for me?” My dad asked.

“Darn.” I said, unconvincingly. “It just slipped my mind.”

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