July 18, 2000

The sky has turned white this morning with cloud cover like a cold Wyoming morning when your breath hangs in front of you and the brown lawn crunches under your boots if you step off of the walk. It’s July in Oregon though and the fan still hums above me from last night’s heat. Later it will be warm, but now, in the early morning, my hands seek the warmth of my coffee cup and I watch the day begin. Two crows silently hop about in the pine and across the way juncos flit about the branches of a maple. Oddly the birds are quiet.

I’m not sure why I write this other than for the exercise of putting words on paper. It seems as though writing is a kind of sharing of experience, a setting down of events even if the writing is not to be shared. Words to paper seems to bring a clarity and documentation that simple observation does not. By writing I (we) set down our story and share common experience. Conversely, that is why we read, to share experience and build common bond. I was reading an essay by Gary Snyder this week in which he said that libraries are our modern grandfathers. I think he means that we don’t share our stories in the same way any more. We don’t build an identity and bond through who we are as a family as much. We don’t ask “who are your people?” any more and we don’t ask, I think, because we’re not sure. We’ve lost the trail of stories that connect us uniquely.

The sky this morning has brought to mind an image of another morning, when I was young and had an early morning paper route. My father was up before me, already in his police officers’ uniform. It had been cold for days and the snow was deep on the lawns. I rolled the newspapers in the front room as my father drank his coffee. I don’t remember the steps now, but I know that I made two or three folds and a tuck and the papers were wrapped without a rubber band, which I would have had to purchase from the distributor for 50cents a box. My father and I didn’t speak that I recall, both lost in our morning rituals, but at some point he went to work, closing the front door quietly so my mother and sisters wouldn’t hear him go. I rolled papers for another few minutes, slung the big bag over my shoulders so that I had most of the papers in the front pocket and a few in the back for balance. My hands were smudged with newsprint from the rolling but I pulled my gloves over them. (I’d wash them before I got into my school clothes after my route was done.)
It was still dark as I stepped off of the porch. We had a house on the corner and the street lamp made the snow sparkle in our yard. Beyond it was black. My cheeks stung from the cold as I began my way down the block, trying to breath through my nose to stay warm, though the weight of the papers made me begin to breath harder soon. I worked my way down the street, tossing papers on porches, crunching across lawns to put some in boxes, sliding back and forth across the empty street to cover both sides, rather than making the trek up one side and down the other.
It was cold and lonely work. I think I was feeling sorry for my self that morning, resentful that I was not still in bed like my friends and sisters. I flipped the papers a little harder, not caring if they rapped too loud on the porch or popped against a screen door. I may even have been mumbling to myself; I don’t remember. What I do remember though is that, at the end of the block, I saw, on the other side of the street, walking along the sidewalk of the park, empty and dark, my father. He was ahead of me by half a block. I could hear his boots crunching the snow as he went, stepping from the circle of a street light into the dark and back into another circle of light farther down the block. I stopped and watched. I didn’t call to him. I just watched.

Now, so many years after, on this cool July morning, I still don’t know why I didn’t say a word. Would it have upset the quiet or was it just that, somehow, I knew it would upset the ritual of going to work, facing the day and that I was like him, wanting to be warm in bed and not out in the black Wyoming morning making a way in the world? I have never spoken of that morning to my father and I do not know if I will. I think though that some day I will tell my children about it, about their Grandfather walking to work in the winter. I want them to have an idea of who their people are and, perhaps by telling them the story, I too can understand.