Camp Papa

Such men are lonely in a merchant’s world

Camp Papa

Bedheaded she’s back to clambering up on my knee at breakfast after an 8 month hiatus. I’m not sure where she went in those 5 year old emotions and if Pink knows she doesn’t say or doesn’t yet have the linguistic poise, at such a tender green age, to tell me. The general sweep is that our routine changed dramatically, no more breakfasts on Papa’s knee and sharing a cup of gyokoro and then the capricious 2-4 outfit changes writhing on the living room carpet to get the clothes off like they burn her, the ferocious fight against the hairbrush, the thin lipped forgetting of the toothbrush, only to be carried down the steps of 148 under one arm horizontally, satchel on my other shoulder, guitar on my back, kicking like she’s swimming through the air, a vaguely hilarious and entirely hysterical kidnapping.

Into my driveway-rotting 12 year old Nissan Leaf, silvering into a retirement loop of a few minutes to her hippy forest school and then my work, maybe even on time. I can still see the clutter on the floorboards and still can ponder the mysterious smell of three kids leaving bits of food smeared, caked, breaded and trashed on the canvas of the budget friendly cloth rear seats. Rearing them was and is messy. Ask my Nissan.

All that sold and left to the hellscape of the boomer nation’s Orange Jesus and his ketamine addicted banker, who knows where that’s going. I hope someone takes Kendrick Lamar’s cue and turns off his tv, starves the beast. I pray of a night it works out, and feel a creeping, choking guilt that I am not there to suffer along with the friends of family, bruising under his infantile tv remote grip.

Now we have different routines. Rocket, his glacier blue eyes making contact with mine, says he still feels like he’s on vacation. That this is still an Airbnb. I can understand that, his tender green is a few shades darker than Pink’s. We spent months waiting for our place, here, there, somewhere. Traveling. And like that feeling you still have after a boat ride that rocks you to sleep at night on land, we still feel like we might not be in our home but rather cleaving the open water. Or even, in a flourish, anxiously thinking of things lost or to be lost, “of dangerous rocks, touching but my gentle vessel’s side/ would scatter her spices on the stream, enrobe the roaring waters with my silks.”

~

Up up, it’s time to get up, make the tea, stuff bread into the toaster (a dualit six burner, bought referb’d from eBay, a Cadillac of crust thank-you very much), eggs, maybe bacon on the griddle; enrobing sleepy children and their spicy grumpy attitudes, then running the electric bike loop to and from school. It’d be easy if it weren’t so hard. I can’t explain the physicality of the job to those that haven’t done it. Athleticism in self checkout, this time without a Nissan to pile the groceries into a whirl away, smelling funky.

New routines, similar burn and burnout. A panic to be places and when I’m back at my place the tea is stone cold in the stoneware cup. And it’s stone silent except for the city groaning like metal below, shifting weight in the failing dark, people moving moving moving. This time of year the watery light spreading thinly, greyly, late. I feel my heart tighten not from the caffeine but for the big hurry to the sad hush. I’m at the edges of admitting I’m lonely in a merchant’s world.

But to mix the Bard’s plays up, I’m a man that “hath no drowning mark upon him. His complexion is perfect gallows.” I’ll be ok even if I always feel the weight of the stay at home most in the winter, a season I can hardly brook. Thin blooded I’ve learned to trade the thin cotton shirts, bacon collared some of them from use, for knits and the essential wool cardigan. Thick jeans and slippers. Finally out of Africa and dressed for it.

And so winter makes spring sweet I tell myself. Just a little longer. But really, I can smell the Mediterranean and hear the gulls. Already the Yoshimo cherry trees on the Plaça del Pou de la Figuera have got their white petals like fingernails sunk into the warming and thickening air of spring, pulling themselves up up and drawing the tender red leaves behind them. A pelota dribbles endlessly, obligatorily, on the parterre giving shape to the air. The mossos esquadra, like actors on a set playing cops, laze by to harass the iron collectors pushing their shopping carts. Everyone has their role, so do I. It’s all so beautiful and it could all be so much worse. I need to get over it. Don’t I have it made, albeit in an exhausting, leave it all on the playground sense? Years ago I read Kavenaugh and it stuck:

There are men too gentle for a savage world
Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween
And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.

~

So it’s another winter/spring break and anyone who is in the stay at home profession, dudded out in yoga clothes and sporty shoes, worn and comfy, Vans are my preference, knows those breaks can happen at anytime, for any reason. Religious, patriotic, convenient, you name it, the break will detonate into the thin veneer of control the routine might give. A bunker buster for an eggshell. The women, and it’s 99% women, who are battle hardened enough to manage classrooms of careening children are gone, poof, long long gone like figments of imagination, like Peps the lampista’s cat, out like the filaments of a lightbulb. I hope they’re asleep somewhere more comfortable than a glass counter in a sleepy tienda.

To fete the scheduled cataclysm of free time, and prepare for next week’s sleep away school trip, Bounce is having a sleepover exchange, one night there, one here. Good kid that knows more than he says. Respectful too, and he offered to clear the table and then wiped the table down which nearly made my knees buckle and my hands shake. For now I’ve faded away to waitstaff, nearly feathered out of the picture. They’ve got chemistry and I’ve got Bounce double dribbling now, he’s in stereo, to torture the metaphors. The discussion is almost entirely on video games and it could be in Ancient Greek for all that I understand of it. But it’s important. It’s essential. And I’m Cassandra screaming about water serpents: these screens do no good! Go outside! There cherry trees are blooming goddamnit, enjoy it! Where’s the fucking pelota.

~

There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves (by James Kavanaugh)

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who prey upon them with IBM eyes
And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon.
There are men too gentle for a savage world
Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween
And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who anoint them for burial with greedy claws
And murder them for a merchant’s profit and gain.
There are men too gentle for a corporate world
Who dream instead of candied apples and ferris wheels
And pause to hear the distant whistle of a train.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who devour them with eager appetite and search
For other men to prey upon and suck their childhood dry.
There are men too gentle for an accountant’s world
Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass
And search for beauty in the mystery of the sky.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who toss them like a lost and wounded dove.
Such gentle men are lonely in a merchant’s world,
Unless they have a gentle one to love

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