Thanks

I am glad to be able to say that my essay "Reading the Water," was accepted by The Sun earlier this week.

When I was in college, the older sister of my girlfriend at the time bought me a subscription to The Sun for Christmas, and renewed it each December for the next four years I was in that relationship, and so The Sun was the first literary magazine that I ever subscribed to or read regularly. That experience may have spoiled me in many ways, especially in the quality of their nonfiction-- reading many of the nation's leading literary magazines now is too often a disappointment, rote competence and popular subject-matter too often rewarded over risk-taking and honesty. The Sun has always sought work that defies easy expectations, privileging the felt over the cerebral, the unflinching and difficult over the glib and comforting. I am honored to be able to come full circle and place a piece with so fine a venue.

In a few days, it will be Thanksgiving; Literary Arts, which awarded me a fellowship in Literary Nonfiction in 2009, wrote a few days ago to solicit a few lines describing what I was thankful for, and I found myself thinking of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving some three years ago, when one of my best friends was in town. We went to a party celebrating the bottling of the latest vintage of a local winery, and it was some fellow's fortieth birthday, and somehow my friend and I ended up taking the guy to a strip club along with a number of girls who worked at the winery. There is no sadder place than a strip club on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving in a sleepy and provincial little town, the club a squat, windowless warehouse way West where the town gets gritty and industrial, smokestacks for the last lumber and paper mills in the town still spitting clouds of steam and smoke. The birthday fellow was drunk and clearly a little lonely, and the over-made up girls in their tall plastic heels, tanned orange and not precisely chubby but really not women you'd look twice at in their clothes in normal light immediately had him hooked, his eyes following them with a look of such abject longing that it was all I could do not to avert my eyes. My friend, who had had a hard couple years, his hopes for a record dashed and his relationship of four years recently ended, had a hard smug look of satisfaction on his face from the moment we arrived, as if this bleak and tawdry club was final proof of the ugliness of the world.

Soon, we put the drunk birthday fellow into a taxi and left with a couple of the girl's from the party, including a girl who was the younger sister of a friend from high school who I'd become friends with being back in town, and who I'd always liked for her unapologetic optimism. We went to Shari's to sober up, a group of late twenty-somethings in peacoats and cocktail dresses stumbling through the diner door at two am, the girl's weaving in heels they now regretted, my friend even more pleased now to see our group in the overlit booth, voices loud and slurring as we struggled to order. When I met his eyes, he raised his eyebrows conspiratorially, and I smiled-- he had indeed had a hard run of years, and if anything, I understood how he felt, that the world was too small in its joys and too frequent in its disappointments. There was no way to speak of the nuance he missed his judgment, how it was no-one's fault that life had disappointed, especially not these kind punch-drunk girls. The food came, and was as greasy and bland as could be expected, and we choked it down anyway, all except my friend, who took a bite and pushed back his plate in disgust, perhaps his fault for attempting Eggs Benedict at a place known for the frequency of food poisoning. And that was when it happened: my high school buddy's sister tapped her fork to her glass, and said: "So, everybody. What are you thankful for?"

My friend snorted, choked a little, and on seeing that the girl was earnest, eyed her with a barely restrained sneer. "You're-- thankful?" he finally said. "Thankful? For-- this?"

The girl smiled serenely, looking on my friend with a tenderness that might have been pity were she less well-meaning; she was the driver in the group of girls, and so was now speaking clearly:

"I am thankful to have a job I like, and a car to drive, and a house to go back to with a warm bed to sleep in, and friends and co-workers to celebrate with. I am thankful my parents are both still living, and did the best they could to raise me, and I am thankful I have an older brother who calls every couple of weeks to see how I am. I am thankful I was born in this community to middle-class and not poor parents, and I am thankful I was born in this country and not in the third-world or in a country where many people, and especially women, are not allowed basic freedoms and rights. I am thankful I'll get up tomorrow and know my day will include a fire in the fireplace, and turkey and gravy and stuffing and even mashed potatoes and likely, luckily, apple pie. Yeah. I am thankful."

My friend opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it-- he knew when he was done. And I think about that night each imminent Thanksgiving, which has at its root the whole troubled question of how 'thankful' those early Indians were given all that would be done to them, and which has surely become as commercialized and commodified a holiday as any other American tradition. It is true: injustice and suffering are common, and sometimes there does not seem to be enough to sustain happiness. Yet Thanksgiving remains a day when you gather with family and friends, and eat until overcome with tryptophan and cranberry sauce, and if we are honest with ourselves, it ought to be a day when we remember that most of us have something to be thankful for. Today my friend has a smart, beautiful girlfriend, owns a recording studio in New York, and tours in London, Shanghai, and Tokyo playing his music before sold-out houses, and though his life is not simple or easy, he is lucky for what he has. And though I often lament the small failures and sorrows of my own life, I am fortunate too, if I pay attention to the gifts I often take for granted. And so I wrote back to the folks at Literary Arts:

"I'm thankful for the privilege of teaching writing to bright and deserving students, who fill a cold classroom with the clamor and energy of their opinions, well-considered and ill-considered alike, and for having Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B," to teach them the proper spirit with which to turn in a paper: Teacher, this essay will change you. And I'm thankful for my two nephews, silly, wild-haired boys of six and four, who called me in the third quarter of the Oregon-Stanford game to tell me that the Ducks were the best, while the "Cardinal" (my alma mater) have a mascot that "does no push-ups, and doesn't make any sense."

And I'm thankful too for much more still; for all that my friend's sister so wisely said, for the delight of being in The Sun, for the leisure of this afternoon to think and write.

I spend my evenings in all the wrong places. Too frequently, I walk downtown to my favorite bar to be for a few hours a part of the life of night with its open riot and vigor, rising voices, brayed laughter and staggering hope, all the immediate intimations of something good being bound to happen soon, now, whether realized lust or the temporary invincibility of being beyond one’s own doubts and awkwardness, the sweet liquor freeing the heart’s sorrows and longing and need so that for a time there is, only, just, that which is heard and wanted, felt in rising. And many nights, the music stops for a moment, and the clink of glasses and the conversation resolves to dissonant voices, banal conversations, and me blurry and lost and displaced, at a bar in a small town where nothing particularly good ever happened to anyone. Some nights I stay through that moment of clarity, when the spell has been broken, and other nights I finish my drink and leave even as the music starts again, the charm broken and the small and tawdry moment too much to bear. Another night at the bar; they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same ways and expecting a different result. Yet I would rather be out in the world than at home in my apartment watching cable or wandering the infinite internet, even if the bar is all but empty and bartender is sullen and the only music playing is a song for the broken-hearted. At least I’ve sought—life?—and in finding its absence on a weekday night ensures the imminence of bodies and voices come Friday night.

I am not a drunk, and never drink to incoherence, though I can hold my liquor; mostly I play bar pool, a game which has honor and requires skill but favors luck, and I love the sound of cue to ball, of balls striking and the welcoming thud of the back of the pocket. I have friends who also play, graduate students in German and Physics, barbacks who like to speak of mixed-martial arts, acquaintances from the climbing gym, and too there always the regulars who have come in early afternoon and are still there at ten, unsteady on their feet but still swinging the cue, and I play, drink, watch the unwinding from the vantage of the partially involved but uncommitted. And I pretend I am different from the men red-faced and uncertain on their feet, their voices overloud as they approach the girls who perch on barstools in groups, pretending to talk and mostly casting about for the right drunken fellow, and truly I am just as lonely as anyone else; it is only my carefulness that sets me apart, for though sometimes I do talk to a debutante who approaches or get drawn into a group of women whose eye I have caught, and though sometimes I am even attracted, I don’t take girls home from the bar. Sometimes I think of love, its absence or loss or my longing for it, but I know better than to seek it in a place so simultaneously irreal and unrestrained. I am patient. Or perhaps it is really that I want too much and am not so foolish as to imagine the answer is at the bottom of the glass or in the pants of nearest girl who has applied make-up and perfume and gone out grasping desperately. And those rare nights when the liquor burns too bright and the longing gets too acute, I am fortunately a prisoner of habit—the beautiful girl does not go to the quiet fellow who carries himself with such concentrated calm, and that too is for the best: I am too old to commit again to hot and mean, or hot and selfish, or hot and crazy, let alone the terrible triumvirate all in one.

No, give me a game of straight eight, gentleman’s rules, and a stiff Beam and soda so too many don’t need to be bought, and turn the music loud and let the voices rise to a roar while the balls drop as if each were meant so that for a moment the night seems so large that small sorrows recede! And maybe still in that moment some woman sidles up, and shatters all my assumptions of the possible. If not, well, the evening will end like any other, just as another night it all will begin anew, an infinite imminence, the universe realized in a dim and well-appointed watering hole. And one night I will not go to the bar, having sought solace elsewhere, and if you seek there you will not find me; perhaps you will see me some other place, and we will nod in passing, and put our heads down and walk on.