Tyerra Green, BAYCAT filmmaker, taken by michaele, Yahoo! Teacher of Merit, July 2006.

The first thing you see when you walk into BAYCAT‘s loft—once Villy lets you out of a hug—are the photos. There’s a wall of signed Polaroids of everyone who has ever visited: students, instructors, preachers, clients, donors, Bill Strickland, Jeff Skoll, and our fine-looking mayor, Gavin Newsom. Names and smiles; bigwigs and smallwigs.

BAYCAT trains young people from Bayview-Hunters Point in art, design, digital media, filmmaking, and human decency. These neighborhoods have by far the highest concentration of children in San Francisco, but the rest of the city doesn’t notice that that’s where we warehouse the future. “Historically-underserved comunities” seems to be the vogue term, but however you put it, these kids have had a raw deal so far. They are poor. Their schools are chaotic and badly equipped. The houses were built next to a power plant, on landfill where decades of toxic waste have built up, and so the children get sick more often than they should—but there’s just one pediatrician in the area. Until a Farmers’ Market opened last year, fresh food was a bus ride away, though liquor stores are plentiful. The gangs are armed.

Photo by Tim, 2005

Those are the problems, but there are 33,000 solutions. Bayview-Hunters Point also has artists, musicians, leaders, dreamers, preachers, businesspeople, and teachers who have it going on, and there’s no shortage of kids who want more. That’s where BAYCAT comes in. BAYCAT shows kids that they have a voice, and gives them the skills to give voice to their community. These are also, the theory goes, the skills that San Francisco and Silicon Valley employers want: design, video production, editing, and motion graphics.

Villy is the founder and CEO. She went from the New York projects to become an equity derivatives trader, then a corporate lawyer at a fancy firm. What she wanted to do was take these skills to make kids’ lives better, so she trained as a fifth-grade teacher. She was the kind of educator who teaches the Constitution by letting her kids draw up a class constitution: pushing them to move beyond because-I-said-so rules to identify the lasting principles behind them; encouraging them to test rewards and penalties and consequences; stretching ten-year-old minds around the notion of collective responsibility.

But she couldn’t reach all of them. Ten years old is too late. Five may be too late. No matter how much work you put in, how much you dig into your paltry salary for extra supplies, food, and field trips, no matter how many nights you lie awake with racing thoughts, you can’t save every kid. No Child Left Behind is the name of the federal act that has set public education up for guaranteed failure by mandating that every single child must pass standardized reading and math tests by 2012. Its goals are admirable, but no system improves by measurement alone—especially in California, where public education is still crippled by the staggering selfishness of Proposition 13. Where the principles of No Child Left Behind really live is in the hearts of dedicated teachers, who live in a war zone between hope and discouragement.

Villy left the public schools to start BAYCAT. She found an early supporter in Bill Strickland, the Pittsburgh social entrepreneur. I met Strickland (and Villy) when my company hosted a conference that brought together innovators from Japan and the US, and he held us rapt, as he does every audience, with his slides and his story. His power comes from his insistence on the elemental. The worst thing about poverty is what it does to your spirit, he says, and the cure for this spiritual cancer is to expose people to the best of the natural world. Beauty. Light. Water. Music. Art. Good food. Flowers. In the No Child Left Behind era, where principals are forced to force their teachers to drop everything but math and “language arts” drills, this sounds like granola-dreaming. But over the course of thirty-odd years, he has succeeded.

Strickland was a 16-year-old from the Pittsburgh projects, on path to nowhere good, when an art teacher introduced him to ceramics and took him to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house. When he found his calling as a grown man, he persuaded a student of Lloyd Wright’s to build a cathedral-like training center in the middle of the projects in Pittsburgh. That’s where he trained students in the ceramics he had come to love. He loved jazz, so he built a concert hall as part of the center—and Dizzy Gillespie came to play. They started a jazz record label that has won four Grammy awards. He wanted the kids to see beauty, so he built a greenhouse to grow Japanese orchids—and now they supply the Whole Foods grocery chain with flowers and hydroponic tomatoes, grown in the projects in Steeltown. He worked with local Pittsburgh businesses, Heinz and Bayer among them, to set up facilities to train a new generation of workers in food service and lab technician skills, so they could find jobs—and eat good food every day. Sunshine, he insists, is for everybody on the planet, not just for rich people. Good food is for everybody on the planet. His Manchester Craftsman’s Guild trains students in art, not academics, but his students’ graduation rates are so high that the city of Pittsburgh recently asked him to take over a failing high school. His first action will be bring in fresh flowers. People understand those kinds of messages. We are creatures of expectations, he says, and once you put people in the light, they shine.

Villy is an artist and musician too, and the BAYCAT loft reflects their shared belief in the power of beauty and high expectations. It’s spacious, light-filled, and stylish, and designed for people to work together. Buildings have emotions, I think, and BAYCAT’s place is warm and playful. It’s in the Dogpatch neighborhood, between Bayview-Hunters Point and downtown San Francisco.

Across the street, my friend Celine has opened a wine bar, one of several new small businesses drawn to Dogpatch by the mirage of the Third Street Light Rail, which will connect Bayview-Hunters Point to the city that has ignored it. That’s where Villy and I drink Rioja and Viognier from time to time. Dogpatch reminds me of Brooklyn’s DUMBO eight years ago, with its waterfront light, beautiful old warehouses slowly converting to design studios and apartments, and mostly peaceful agreements between the artists and the crack dealers. “I talked to the crackheads and the drunks from the beginning,” said Celine, who is as matter-of-fact as you might expect of a woman who can both pass two kidney stones and open a wine bar in the last two months of her pregnancy. “I told them, I have no problem with you being here, but you just can’t piss in the doorway any more. I can’t do business if you piss in my doorway.” They are obliging. Now they piss in the bus shelter at the end of the block, and greet her warmly as she opens up.

Last July, a team from Yahoo!—my favorite clients—hired the BAYCAT students to make a documentary about a project we were working on, a weeklong summer camp to celebrate 60 local teachers and introduce them to blogging, Flickr, and other web goodies. Every day, Villy drove Tyerra and Jason from Hunters Point to Sunnyvale in her green VW Bug. They interviewed dozens of teachers and Yahoo! staff, including Terry Semel, the CEO. They filmed it, shaped the story, and edited it in two weeks, with the help of BAYCAT instructors. Tyerra’s 14. Jason is 16. That’s Tyerra speaking on the BAYCAT homepage. Yahoo! liked the results so much that they sponsored a BAYCAT “Oscars” to show off the students’ work at the end of the summer. There was plenty to celebrate: graphic design for local businesses, a new design identity for the Visitacion Valley neighborhood, documentaries made for Yahoo!, for the Mayor’s Office, and for NetDay; a film about the Alice Griffith Housing Projects; an interview series on obesity they filmed at local McDonalds. They’re learning to bear witness: by shaping stories, you can shape a future.

Villy has huge plans for BAYCAT. Every time she tells me about them over Italian wine, my brain starts fizzing with her spirit—that’s the Villy effect. She believes that change starts with personal connections, with asking open-ended questions and being willing to listen to the answers. This autumn, she’s going to let me learn how to teach writing at BAYCAT. It’s a tiny commitment—once a week, a couple of students a time—but I want to be there to watch her dreams bloom.

Why, Dario wanted to know, did Mommy want to take his drawing?
    “Because I like to have it on my desk at work,” she said.
But why?
    “Well, because when I look at it, I think about you, and I imagine you at pre-school, and it makes me think about all the fun you’re having. It’s like having a little piece of you with me when I miss you,” she said.
This was satisfying.

The next morning he waited until it was bright enough to see his Thomas the Tank Engine poster across the room. That was when he was allowed to go in to her bed. Her hair was all over her face.
    “Mommy. Mommy,” he said. He couldn’t shake her with the present in his hand, so he elbowed her instead. Gently.
She was blinky and smelled of bed. Her voice was beddy too.
    “What is it, Dario?” she said.
    “I have something for you. To take to work. Here!” He dropped it carefully into her hand. She squinted. He worried that it wasn’t morning yet after all, even though he’d waited for Thomas the Tank Engine to come out of the dark.
    “It’s a piece of me,” he said. He felt proud.
    “What…is it?” she said. She sounded sleepy.
    “It’s my scab. From my leg.” he explained.
She peered at her hand.
    “To take to your desk at work,”_he explained again, scratching the Bubblicious-pink welt left below his careful harvest. “For when you miss me!”
She crawled up onto an elbow, put the scab on her pillow and glanced from it to his leg. He’d known she would be thrilled. “I’ll get a Kleenex so you can carry it in your purse.”
Daddy rolled over. Big and hairy, groaning. The pillow moved. “For God’s sake, Jonathan, mind the scab,” said Mommy.

[Hi, readers:

This one is super-long for a blog entry. That’s because it’s a short story draft—you know, those things you skip past in the New Yorker or stopped reading after your Leaving Cert—so don’t feel you have to plough through it. YouTube is always right next door on the internet.

But if you’re interested, the story is inspired by an RTE radio documentary of the same name from 1987, and I’ve imagined it taking place in my grandparents’ hometown in Roscommon. I didn’t know them very well, so those bits are entirely made up. The awesome letter to the Catholic Herald is real, though, and so are the slogans. And one description of country life is swiped from a commenter here.

Oh, and I haven’t written a full-length story since my own Leaving Cert, so this took for-goddamn-ever. Making stuff up takes me even longer than reporting it. I’m posting a draft so’s I can see it with some distance and then patch it up.

As the phone company would say, “We know you have choices for your blog-reading needs, and we appreciate your business.” Thanks for stopping by.

-D.]

…you danced with her the best slow dancer
Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn’t there
In your arms like music she knew just how to answer
The question mark of your spine your hand in hers
The other touching that place between her shoulders
Trembling your countless feet lightfooted sure
To move as they wished wherever you might stagger
Without her she turned in time she knew where you were
In time she turned her body into yours
—David Wagoner

 

The bicycles go by in twos and threes
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
—Patrick Kavanagh

After Mass, Charlie Hanley offered Margaret Kelly a bar to the Saturday dance in Elphin. The fellas had bicycles, and the girls did not, and it was better that way. It meant a High Nelly was a ticket to ask.

The light girls were popular. They’d back up to the bicycle bar like little high jumpers, pretending to be more delicate than they were, and with a laugh and a wobble you’d be away. Margaret was middle-sized—two wobbles, maybe three—but when he reached for the handlebars on either side of her good frock, with her hair tickling his chin, he was glad of every mile of the seven from her home place to Elphin. She was cushiony enough not to complain about the iron slap from each rut in the road. Instead she gripped the bar and pointed her knees primly ahead, like a Strokestown House mistress riding sidesaddle.

They passed Billy Carmody and his donkey, bringing home the churn from evening milking. They saluted Jonjo Sharkey and his old bitch Gypsy, who even though her eyes were milky still snapped at Margaret’s dangling feet. These days the sheep obeyed Gypsy only out of habit, or pity. Jonjo would have to get the shotgun to her soon.

All day Charlie had turned turf. The sods already smelled warm and nearly meaty, as they would when stacked beside the range in winter. At the dinner hour they unwrapped their mother’s bread and drank strong tea from milk bottles. There was just him and the brother to cut their plot of bog. Margaret had a rake of brothers, but they were still young lads, and when she walked out to bring their dinners to the bog she often stayed on to work harder than they did. Though Charlie had known her since she was in High Babies and he was in Second Class at the schoolhouse, it was only in the last few years had he liked to watch her work from across the bog. She looked stronger than she was; rheumatic fever in Sixth Class had given her a bad heart.

In the evening Charlie and the brother walked back, stopping as they always did for a smoke on two flat mossy rocks in the bottom field. They shared a Sweet Afton and listened to the land. Half of life was winding down and half waking up; a change of shift, you might say. It was sweet now to stretch out on a warm rock and do nothing but draw in smoke. He thought about Margaret Kelly’s hair. As the night went on they might be dancing a rumba. Close-to-close dancing like that, it was bolder than the proximity of a bicycle ride, because there was no reason or excuse but the pure pleasure of it. The thought made him feel so alive it was barely bearable. O yes, we have no bananas…

Noel was too young for the dance, and his mind was on Under-16s hurling. Why, he wanted to know, did Father Treacy have Lennon playing centre field again tomorrow? Anyone with eyes in their head could see Lennon should be centre-forward and Noel should be midfield. Lennon was more skilful and a better scorer, and Noel was fitter, bigger, and more controlling of centre field. How else were they to beat Tulsk? Charlie agreed it was a senseless thing. Noel would puzzle it further, but Charlie was inclined to get to the dance. He stubbed the butt and rose towards home, hungry for his tea. The milk bottle rolled in his jacket pocket. Noel followed, slapping a sliotar from hand to hand, still complaining.
(more…)

Bill flipped up my visor.

“Is it not human nature to fear that which might harm us?” he said gently. “Motorbiking can harm us. Your fear is natural.”

Mute eyes say plenty, especially to teachers who stopped counting at 10,000 students. Though they could barely see our faces, and we hadn’t yet straddled the bikes, Bill and Bob had already sorted the class. They knew whose testosterone pride had to be brought low, who couldn’t follow instructions, who needed no more than mechanical guidance, and who needed encouragement, above all, to quiet the mental gabblings of failure.

I’m braver than most, but only because I’m scared of so much. My comfort zone goes from my nose to the nearest printed page, and going any further affords daily scope for courage. Like the Italian villagers who discovered new worlds (and new hotties) on their post-war Vespas, I was hoping that Class C California Motorcycle Drivers Permit would expand my range.

Bill and Bob had parked their Goldwing tourers front-wheel to front-wheel; twin monuments against the wind that shunted rolls of fog into the drained reservoir. The reservoir is a vast parking lot for City College now, and at 6.45 on a Saturday morning it stood empty except for the orange cones and rows of bikes of Bay Area Motorcycle Training. Next to the Goldwings, the students’ 250 cc Kawasakis and Hondas were rolling hairdryers (though still scarily potent compared to my bicycle). None of the borrowed bikes had mirrors—they’d break when we dropped them.

First we walked the bikes across the park, lumbering in neutral with the engines off. Then we found the friction zone and moonwalked in first gear. Finally, we planted our feet on the pegs and woozily crossed the range, like a row of bowling balls let go too soon. This was fun until I tried to stop the thing. The throttle roared; I dropped the brake and lurched at Bob, then grabbed the brake and roared and lurched again. He gave a matador’s hop.

“Stop riding the brake! Stop braking! Clutch. Clutch! CLUTCH!”

I clutched. It felt so fucking unfair. Whose idea was it to stick the throttle under the brake, ready to roar at you like a junkyard dog?

“You can’t. Ride. The brake,” said Bob. “The clutch is what?”

“Your friend,” I said sullenly. Every morning I freewheel down Bernal Hill squeezing my true buddy—the back brake. I hate not knowing what to do.

“The clutch is your friend. Don’t grab it. Don’t drop it. Squeeeeze it. And get your fingers off that brake. Head up! Head up! Look where you want to GO.” We crossed and recrossed, with laborious three-point turns, until we had established that all twelve of us could putter at lawnmower speed without damaging the parking lot. Then we lined up in two columns. Bill lectured us while Bob demonstrated our next challenge.

“Old people riding. Makes your eyes mist up, dudnit?” said Bill as we watched Bob weave through the cones. “Or could be the fog.”

Our class was relatively elderly. In the other group there were a handful of cholo kids who had boasted in the classroom sessions about not being afraid to get hurt. They did great ghetto rolls on the way to the PortaPotties, even as the day wore on and we were all near-hypothermic in the dank fog. If you’re under 21 you can’t get a California Motorcycle Licence without completing a safety course, but the wily old men must have manouevered them into the other instructors’ course.

“Five months? Aw, you’re just a puppy,” Bill said to the cute newlywed as we waited for all the students to finish the lesson. “I’ve been married 38 years. And here’s what I learned: women go to Wife School when they’re five years old. This is true. No matter where you are, 30,000 feet up in a plane, filling up your tank, sitting in a bar, whenever you get two guys together and the subject of marriage comes up—and I don’t know why it should come up with strangers, but it does—guy will tell you the same thing. “‘Yew never listen,’ she says, or ‘Yew only pay attention to the newspaper.’” That’s because they all went to Wife School and got the script, and the guys are just shambling along without a clue. A guy, see, he’s got a line in the sand. You don’t cross it, you’re fine.”

He drew an imaginary line with the gripper stick he uses to pick up the tiny cones that mark our courses. “But women, see, they got a line that goes like this.”

He broke into a little trot and drew a line that wriggled like an inchworm, the kind of path we were supposed to be able to weave by now. “You cross that line, and you’re dead. And if by some tiny chance you’re actually right for once—and this is very rare—she learned in Wife School what to do. She’ll go back twenty years if she has to, drag it all back up, mess with your head until she’s in the right again.”

“Twenty years?” sniffed Bob, “Try thirty. Try forty.”

“I just start with ‘Sorry’ now,” said Scott, who was 35. “Whatever it is, I’m sorry.” He told me earlier that he’s wanted to ride a motorbike all his life, but first his parents wouldn’t let him, and then his girlfriend wouldn’t. Now they’re married, and she’s relented, figuring he was old enough not to kill himself.

“That’s good. You’re learning. First step is, you’re always wrong. Wanna know what I do when the lectures start coming down?”

“I’m trying to teach a class here, old man,” said Bob.

“I’m passing on a lesson too,” said Bill.

“You’re cutting into my lunch break…”

“I get down on my knees.” He got down on his knees, leaning on his stick. “And then I grab her around the knees—this I won’t demonstrate with you, Scott—and I press my cheek against her thigh, and I say, ‘Please please please, don’t beat me no mo’.’ Sometimes she laughs. Sometimes she tells me to get out of her sight. Either way, it’s a win.”

He hopped on a borrowed bike and demonstrated the course for our lesson on Swerving. Then he stood ready to coach our individual runs, until we rode back to our parking range for further instruction. Engine-off-key-OFF. Dismount CORRECTLY.

“Know why I do this dog-and-pony show?” he said. “It’s not because I need the attention, or I want everyone to love me up here. I could give a shit about that. It’s because you’re going to perform better if you can relax and get out of your heads, start focusing on the skills. So I goof around to try to get you to look up, pay attention to me and your surroundings instead of to that voice in your head that says that you’re going to mess up. Bob and I rarely, rarely have a student fail.”

Bill comes from a line of Marines, though he’s retired now. Below the cod-acting he has the coiled Zen calm of Special Forces soldiers I’ve known. They’re a breed that seems more thoughtful and engaged with the world than the consumers they’re trained to defend. Bill looks a bit like Dennis Hopper. Not the young Easy Rider, but the stoned and placid grandpa in Fishing With John: ready to make fun of himself, and readier still to smack down anyone else who tries it.

When I came back from a break, he had placed my ignition key on the seat. “Understand, I do this not to humiliate you,” he said, “but to draw your attention to the practice of shutting down. Bikes like that, battery’s flat in no time flat. Get a jump from a car and you’ll destroy it. So, be mindful.”

My mind was full. I missed my bicycle. Its muscle-engine needs no choke.

By the second day we had all got more confident. Bill and Bob took turns coaching us through the exit for each activity.
“Watch me. I said, watch me. You don’t get this right, you’re not going to pass the test, and you’re going to have to come back to spend another weekend with the old people.” Bill hobbled behind an imaginary walker.

U-turns.

“DerVAla,” Bob said, mangling my name, “you’re going to have to speed up or the cars will run you over. Hell, cats will run you over. Going faster is easier. More fun.”

Accelerating into a curve.

“DerVAla. Stop riding the brake.”

Riding over an obstacle.

“DerVAla, how do you feel about yourself now?” I’d made it through a box of u-turns and bounced over a two-by-four plank, backside raised a cautious inch. I said that I felt better, with a huge grin he couldn’t see.

“Good girl,” he nodded. “You’re doing fine.” A hit of praise made me drop the clutch in excitement and cut out. He waited while I scrabbled to figure out what gear I was in. “Okay, just hit the starter and start again.”

“I don’t even call it riding,” said Bill.“I call it practice—unless I’m just going down the freeway to get somewhere. That’s commuting, which I don’t care for. It’s practice because you’re always trying to perfect your skills. And you never do. You’re never perfect, at least if you have a mind like mine.”

When I made it through the last training range, Bill flipped up my visor again and peered in. “Learning to be a good rider will change your life,” he said. “In ways that have nothing to do with motorcycles.”

For the test, we entered a box of cones and described a figure eight. Then we puttered up to a line of cones that forced us to swerve around an imaginary bus. We accelerated into a curve. Finally, we each came to an emergency stop, where Bob sat in a deckchair grading us like an skating judge. “Three. Zero. Six,” he called when I clutch-gear-down-front-brake-rear-braked to a halt.

“You went outside the box with your U-turns. You went too slowly into the turn. And your stopping distance was three feet too long. But you passed,” said Bill, when we had all finished and were lined up in front of his clipboard. “You are now qualified to ride in a parking lot. Good girl.”

I babbled thanks, telling him I didn’t even know how to drive a car.

“Listen to me,” he said seriously. “I hear your thanks, and I’m glad you feel that way, but you need to understand something. I didn’t pass that course. You did. You can do anything you want. If you want to become a good rider, you can. Has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with your own expectations.”

Over the last few years, several people have trained me in new skills: to listen actively on a crisis hotline; to sit in silence on a ten-day retreat; to scuba dive and sky dive; to fast for seven days. It’s uncomfortable to be a beginner. It’s an exercise in trust; in faith that these people know where we’ll end up even if we don’t ourselves. Usually, they’re kind and brisk, used to calming fretful beginners so that they can get their jobs done and go home. How quickly we reduce ourselves to types when distracted by an unfamiliar task.

This morning I dreamed that my motorbike class was trying to get to the Motorcycling for Dummies Training Center, somewhere in downtown Brooklyn, or maybe Dogtown. I was separated from the pack, and found myself spinning out of control in front of a biker bar, scared and embarrassed on my little hairdryer bike. I took a breath, and coached myself through the dream. FINE-C. Fuel-Ignition-Neutral-Engine-Choke/Clutch. I drove—up the hill, miraculous competence—to find my classmates painting canvases about how motorbiking made them feel.

“You can’t teach a human,” said Bill in our last lesson. “It’s been proved. You can tell them, you can show them, you can warn them, but in the end all you’re doing is putting the information in front of them so they can figure it out for themselves. That’s the only way humans learn.”

Dad signals the end of his nap with an announcement. “I’ll have a cup of tea,” he says. He doesn’t trouble to open his eyes for this request, and so his womenfolk tease him like Pegeen Mikes.

It’s hard not to delight in my parents’ delight in being on holiday, which is based on walks, treats, naps, and wine. Eleven o’clock is latte time. There are no Starbucks in Limerick yet, but there’s one at the end of my sister’s block in the Glebe, and they love it.

By going to the same place at the same time every day we deal with our most pronounced family trait: indecision. At least until we get there. Starbucks is hard for us, with its made-up sizes and milk varietals. Though Mum has taught generations of Senior Infants to sort big-bigger-biggest, she has trouble with tall-grande-venti, let alone misto-mocha-macchiato, or dry foam. We all do. We mill around the register, getting in the way, then blurting half-formed choices before our shared fear of the service industry drives us out. While the baristas quiz us, we squabble about who gets to pay. The pleasure of the coffee is always tinged by someone’s regret that they didn’t order what they really wanted. Today, we swap what we have to match coffees with hopes. Tomorrow, we’ll know exactly what to ask for…

The Glebe is full of babies and children. On weekday mornings the jog-strollers are lined up outside Starbucks, their big off-road tires signalling some kind of pediatric biker gang. These babas were born to a millennium that gives them the run of the place.

My sister’s new house is a glass-walled beauty, all Corian and cheekbones. Though it sits back discreetly from the red-brickery of the Glebe, it has caught the attention of the neighbors in the year or so it’s been going up. They stare frankly. They want to know how much it cost. They tot the price of the stained oak and brushed steel that gets carried in. They want to know what “he” does.

We know this because “he”—my sister’s guy—works alongside the contractors hired and led by his brother-in-law, George. As Glen steadies bricks or carries sheets of glass he hears and fuels the speculation. One day he’s Head of Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. The next he’s a retired hockey player from the Russian leagues. Later, he claims that it’s bought with an advance on my sister’s trust fund; a rumor that makes my schoolteacher parents beam. Mortgages are so dull, and Ottawa needs glamour.

Over the back wall lives a shirtless crank who keeps a broken-down school bus, an oven, a badly-crashed car, and a mound of tires in his yard. He scowls and sunbathes, facing the oven as if for extra spring warmth. Every six months, Glen says, he puts his heart and soul into starting that school bus. By driving it up the block and back in front of the city inspectors, he wins the right to keep it as a “working vehicle.”

A doleful, cat-sized creature paces Claire’s tiny yard, seemingly puzzled by the fence. It has a flat nose, and a band of flattened fur around its middle suggests it’s been run over by a bicycle. It peers at the fence, confused as a sleepwalker, then shuffles to another spot to peer some more. What we know of North American animals we learned from Chuck Jones cartoons, and this one we haven’t seen. Gopher? Possum? Prairie dog? We rule out porcupine, armadillo, and coyote before Glen’s father tells us it’s a groundhog, shedding its winter coat. “I thought they’d be smaller,” Dad says, “Hamster-sized.” After that, we notice groundhogs everywhere, curled up on the verges like Moscow hats discarded for the spring.

Every day we walk the length of the Rideau Canal. My parents stride ahead, discussing whether to move to the Senior Living apartment complex in the Glebe, while Claire and I trot behind as if we were still short-legged kids. I’ve never met anyone whould could match their walking pace, and now that they’re outfitted with new sneakers and windbreakers from the local running shop, there’s no catching them. We survive only because a canal march has to include “a cheeky little beer,” or another “milky coffee,” or a beaver tail. Usually all three.

In the Black Tomato café, the receipts itemize “Dalton’s Tax”—for Dalton McGinty, the Ontario premier-and “Stephen’s Tax”—Harper, the new prime minister. Mum wants to go to a Tim Horton’s, but Claire steers her away, which is a shame. You can’t understand Canada until TimBits float in your blood. I might even have taught her to ask for fifteen TimBits, just to see what would happen. Rumor has it that in certain outlets, that gets you a bag of weed with your donut holes—more Canadian a combination than poutine and Red River Cereal.

The Ottawa spring is undecided. On alternate days it tries out gray bluster, then marrow-warming sunshine. The natives are hedging—fleeces on top, and bare, pedicured toes. Even at 70 degrees, snow is still stacked along the tow-path, and Claire describes winter nights when bar buddies confiscated ice-skates from friends too drunk to glide home. Drug tests. Skate-commuting seems magical to me. I think it would make me feel like a pink-cheeked Jesus to slide down that canal.

Mum is affronted that the tulips haven’t bloomed yet. The Netherlands sends thousands of bulbs every year to thank Canada for liberating the Dutch at the end of the Second World War. Their royal family had taken refuge in Ottawa, and when Queen Margarethe was born the delivery ward was designated temporary Dutch territory so that she would be a full citizen. In the War Museum, there’s a wall-sized photo of Canadian veterans parading in Amsterdam fifty years after their first visit. They look amazed at the young girls who offer them tulips.

It’s two and a half years since I lived in Canada. Two quick April visits—to Vancouver and Ottawa—have made me miss it more, though I still can’t bear Leah McLaren, and I’ve never been able to finish an article on their parliamentary politics. Before I headed back to San Francisco, Claire handed me a bag of papers I’d left in her basement. It’s my laborious application for Canadian residency, almost complete. There are letters from the local sergeant in Patrickswell, from the FBI, and from the Metropolitan Police in London, attesting that no record of my criminal tendencies can be found. There are letter-headed notes from people who admit to having employed me. My college transcripts prove I have unsaleable skills in medieval literature. A certificate from Montreal grades my French as intermediate-advanced. (And for a slow-witted seven-year-old, maybe it is.) I’d filled out a family tree, and accounted for my whereabouts every month of my adult life.

My parents don’t much care for the idea of California, with its earthquakes, SUVs, and fool of a president. They’re pro-Canada. They think it would be a good place for me. As they ask, delicately, what I might like to do with that visa application, I think how hard it must be to go from ordaining how many peas a kid has to eat to earn dessert, to wondering how to suggest that a whole other country might suit that grown kid better. I’m grateful for their grace.

I’d make a good nun, I think, as long as they’d let me sleep with men once in a while, or at least drink a glass of wine with the best ones. There’s a convent in Arequipa, Peru where the colors alone might convince me of God, and the design patterns laid down in 400 years of domesticity would make up for hard beds. I go there sometimes, during meetings.

By night I’d be a modern Heloise; all wimpled yearning and philosophy. By day, I’d bring my San Francisco consulting chops to the hard-nosed business of contemplation. Through those efforts, and divine co-marketing, The Little Sisters of Perpetual Innovation would find fame with hand-churned chocolate body paint, and artisanal wikis.

Classic Eames lounger and ottoman – $xxx (haight ashbury)
Reply to: sale-131113385@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-02-03, 10:09PM PST
I have a classic Eames lounger and ottoman for sale. Bought it from dwr for xxx. Will take xxx for it. Was a gift but can not afford to have such luxuries. cherry finish with black leather. in perfect condition. rarely used. * This item has been posted by-owner.

• no — it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

The orange sofa was demoted to the kitchen when we moved to the new house. Although it was born in the seventies, the shade wasn’t that 1970s burnt-orange, exactly; it was more the marmalade tan of old Florida ladies. Its leathery skin had crackled, and it sagged. It was homely.

You could drape yourself across the top, and then roll-flop down onto the cushions, like a sea-lion cub. The back would support timid headstands, and while you lolled upside down you could pull fluff from its (belly)buttons. Or—and this was what I liked best—you could burrow into the left-hand corner, safely sandbagged by the wide leather arm that came up to a seven-year-old’s chest. That’s where I sat for hours with Enid Blyton for company. In spite of all the scoldings for reading in the dark, my shoulders are still rounded from those winter afternoons.

I read about The Enchanted Forest and The Wishing Chair. “Mollie and Peter have a thrilling secret. The chair in their playroom is a magic Wishing Chair. When they sit in it and wish, it grows wings and takes them on lots of exciting adventures.” When they finished their adventures, I’d turn back to the beginning and start them again—chewing strips of the pulpy paper as I went.

My grown-up sofas have not been squashy. I own two: both built for two, and neither built for lounging. Over the last year, it began to occur to me that I live alone, and that I might like to lounge once in a while. A chair arose in answer. It would have arm rests broad enough to balance notebooks and cups of tea; low enough to keep my typing elbows free; soft enough to pad my bony arms. There would be a place to drape my legs. When I sat down each evening, the chair would remember me like an old lover. From this chair, I could gaze out at Twin Peaks and the Golden Gate Bridge, or watch a whole season of Six Feet Under in a single weekend. It would grow wings and fly me to the woods to talk to pixies when things got rough.

I tried out friends’ favorite chairs: La-Z-Boys and Saarinen wombs; Jennifer Leather and IKEA. Either they looked good or they felt good. Then Keith let me sit in his vintage Eames lounger. He claimed it was the best chair for nursing, though he lacked the boobs to be convincing. Still, the old baseball mitt was a comforting cradle, and it was the first seat in years that made me want to reach for an Enid Blyton. (In chairs, as in music, my tastes are those of a middle-aged man.) I dug out Charles and Ray Eames’s exasperated letter to Henry Ford, and remembered how likeable they were.

I started to type their name into Craigslist every few days; another idle surfing tic. There was a lot of junk. Like “web 2.0,” “eames” is now a code for raising cash. Every swindler with a particle-board bookcase adds “eames herman miller midcentury” just to bump the search results. After eight months I found Truong’s ad for an Eames lounger, several days after he’d posted it. I guessed it was gone, but a few days later I got a terse reply. The first guy had flaked. He would show the chair to the next three people at 10am on Wednesday, and the first one with cash could take it. I explained that I had the cash, but had to be at work at 10. After several exchanges, he relented, and let me come early.

I thought about his post as I biked up Haight Street, lungs bursting: his frank (stern?) admission “can not afford to have such luxuries;” the chair for sprawling that was “rarely used.” Why did I think a chair was worth a month’s rent? Did I think I could sprawl more than “rarely?” I pictured a tough-minded Vietnamese accountant who would barely hide his distaste for my American self-indulgence.

But of all things, Truong was a poet. His bay-windowed apartment was stuffed with furniture that would have looked good in the modernist Reunification Palace in Saigon. He sold pieces from time to time to raise cash for poem-writing. He showed me his books. “Are you a dealer?” he asked, and was pleased when he learned the chair was for me. I wanted to ask him about Vietnam phone cards, but instead we talked about poetry. Poets always seem surprised to meet punters who read poetry—most don’t themselves, as far as I can make out.

A few weeks later, my friend Kevin helped me pick up the chair his truck, on a night when I was so frazzled that I left my bag at the office and he had to pay my taxi-driver off. He carried my chair up the stairs and then left us alone. I sat down and swung my legs up, and the cool leather unfrazzled me. I burrowed in and read Truong’s poems.

A chair should feel like home. A chair should have some history. This one does. Now I’m waiting for it to get its wings.

yes the stories are at times overwhelming but would i stop listening the answer is no for without the stories there would be no history and without the history there would be no people where then would i be if not for the acronym the oddity the visitor the native
—Truong Tran

I asked my dad what he thought about turning sixty.

“I feel fine about it,” he said, “mainly because I don’t feel one bit different inside than when I was twenty-five.”

He lived in Zambia then, with a bride of twenty he’d met at a céilí dance in Cork. He had a contract to teach in Africa, and UCC Commerce and a convent dormitory were not enough to keep her from following him. Together they walked into the Allied Irish Bank on Patrick Street to close his account. “Sixteen shillings and sixpence!” my mother mocks. “That’s all he had when I married him.” They were married on a snowy day in Silvermines not long after they met. I’m biased, of course, but they were lovely: both wide-eyed, dark-haired, and fine-boned. They got taken for brother and sister as often as not.

Zambia was newly independent, and had money from copper. Ireland, with a forty-year headstart as a republic, had just turned out the first generation of kids to go through free secondary schooling. Africa was hopeful, and so were they. Many of that first crop of Irish peasant graduates took their engineering, teaching, and nursing degrees to the bush and the mines; a paddy Peace Corps without the confident zeal of the Americans who had grown up in Eisenhower comfort.

My father was one of them. He had parlayed the first Leaving Cert in the family into a degree at University College Galway. He paid for college by working the building sites in London, mixing cement with Connemara men who spoke no English and pined for a home they rarely saw. They were not too different from his own Roscommon family. On the Kelly side, my granny was the only one to marry near home. George took his tuberculosis to Australia, and didn’t forgive Ireland for forty years. John worked in the M&M factory in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Pat and Charlie stayed bachelors, maybe for want of money, or maybe for want of brides in a part of the country where the women left young.

It was Pat and Charlie Kelly who fostered my father and his sister for a few years while his own father fought off a cancer of the nose and mouth. His mother kept the farm running and cared for the two toddlers left at home. They had given grandad up, more or less, when some quack gave him a caustic poultice to wear on his nose for nine nights. It melted the flesh away, a terrible agony, but he survived to ride his bicycle into his eighties, probably in spite of the quack. The parish priest advised granny to take up smoking to calm her nerves, and it was she who died twenty years before him.

Once the schoolteacher came up to the house. “John is bright. He should have books,” he said. My granny bought him two, and he read them in an afternoon, like a starveling. This made her decide books weren’t good value, and he didn’t get any more. Time enough for cutting turf, saving the hay, and thinning turnips, without books to bother with. (But is this a family legend, told by Mum, I’ve wondered since—a bogeyman story for a bookworm girl? Granny always seemed so kind, though I’m sure money for books was as scarce as Mercedes.)

The nearest town was Strokestown, where the grocer’s shop shared our last name, and the hotel is named for Percy French. The wide and stately main street seems to belong to Regency Bath rather than to a place where the old and the very young outnumber the breeders. Strokestown Park House is now the country’s famine museum; a small, belated restitution for the cruelty of the local landlord, Major Dennis Mahon, who evicted two-thirds of the tenants at the worst of the hunger. A few years ago, on holiday in Sicily, Dad met his English descendant, a Pakenham-Mahon who wanted to bond over memories of boyhood holidays at the family place in Roscommon. They had held onto it until 1979, and Dad remembered them, with no fondness, as leaving the gates open on his father’s land as they galloped through on their hunters.

He went to Mansa as a small farmer’s son, taught first by a drunk in a pink, two-room schoolhouse, and so perhaps he arrived at Mr. Elias’s brick secondary school as an equal rather than a missionary or a mercenary. I like to think he felt the frugal, country kinship that Dervla Murphy brings to her books, where the traveler’s eye alights on chickens scratching in the dirt and sees eggs rather than postcards.

For me, Zambia is pressed in an album. I’m there, a dusty baby with an infected vaccination scar, with my stand-in godmother who was later eaten by crocodiles. (Or did I make that up, too?) On another page, the football team my father coached hangs out of the back of a truck, hooting. They are beautiful young men in knee socks and soccer shorts; many are probably long dead. There are tigers and elephants; a snake or two; and my mother on a motorcycle. (Though not all in the same photo.) Fragments.

There’s his schoolmaster colleague, an English former public school boy, who jolted the three of us around Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe in his Volkswagen when I was six months old. He spoke only to dad, my mother complains, though from time to time he tried to teach me Latin verbs. That was the trip when they pitched camp in the path of the hippos’ watering hole, and only the rumbling approach gave them time to dive clear. Hippos were rare in Roscommon. Camping was unusual.

I have to look up the Wikipedia to see where it was they really lived. Mansa is an imaginary place that exists in the dimensions of time and stories, not space. Several friends have gone to Zambia over the years—Ranger Tim kayaked down the Zambezi, and my old college flatmate oversaw Ireland’s AIDS mission to Zim and Zam—but I’ve stayed resolutely ignorant of news outside those little square, white-bordered snapshots. Sometimes little details click,like when I read VS Naipaul’s stories of Asians in Africa and realize how it was that dad came to like saris better than miniskirts. But it’s only writing this that I study the population, the geography, the climate, and the forty years that have betrayed the hopes of independence and mineral wealth.
“Do you remember, in Zambia, the Russian engineers would drink tea out of jam jars…Do you remember, in Zambia…”

Dad taught school there for three and a half years. He read Ulysses. He helped deliver me, though that was the end of his New Man efforts for two decades. They went home when his grandmother fell ill, and thought they would soon go back. They still talk about going back. Instead, they moved to Limerick, and added more small girls to the family.

When my sisters fought in the back seat, Dad would stop the car outside a church. “Go inside and pray for each other,” he’d order, “And don’t come out until Baby Jesus knows you mean it.” We never disobeyed him, though he didn’t go to Mass, and we were fairly sure he never consulted Baby Jesus on anything. They’d slam the car door and in they’d stomp, torn between enmity and a common enemy. “It’s important to give them something to unite against,” he’d say, as we watched them march back down the gravel path, friends again but scowling at him. It took us years to realize that he kept his stash of private jokes in plain sight.

I see how good his life is these days, and that he’s made it so. He squabbles with my mother over who got more wine in the last top-up. He has taught for thirty-five years, thirty at the same school, and when we walk around Limerick together, he is greeted at every corner.
“Howrya, sorr,” say kids from 14 to 45. “How’re you keeping, Seán?”
“Jesus, I can’t put a name to that fella,” he’ll say, shaking his head, but I’m amazed at the number he does remember—and their families, life histories, and temperament, too. Those who care enough to pay attention can appraise us pretty well at fifteen, before we lacquer adult polish over our essential natures.

Even here in San Francisco, I meet people who remember him and are grateful. Though he sends me hopeful text messages about Dublin job openings at Google, it’s his work that I envy—how it has woven him into the fabric of his community, and still left him time to have a rich life beyond it. He’ll spend his birthday in Pompeii, with my mother and good friends. Now that Ryanair has opened up Europe, they go to a different city every mid-term break—Rome, Palermo, Dubrovnik, Prague… Over Christmas, he took a group of schoolkids skiing in Italy, as he does every year. For Easter, he’ll visit my sister in Ottawa. They might come here in August, though I tell them over and over that San Francisco has a summer only a toad could love. He isn’t daunted.

We bought him a birthday bicycle, a fit present for a man who doesn’t feel one bit different inside than he did when he was twenty-five. We say that he has mellowed gracefully, all the same.

Michelle banged on the triangle, ding-ding-ding, but they chatted on.
“Are we supposed to move to the left or the right?” someone asked.
“Can we stay where we are?”
“Can we talk to more than one person at once?”
“They don’t want to follow the rules,” someone hissed.

Stone Yamashita was hosting a small conference, billed as an anti-conference. There was a Broadway producer, an Eames, several designers, a sprinkling of entrepreneurs, the head of children’s TV network, and some ballsy marketers, who sold food, technology, soda pop, or education. Everyone presented, and they were engaging enough that those of us who weren’t on the project team lined up for transcription duty. By the time it came to “speed-dating,” on the third day, the participants were getting on so well that they wanted more than their allotted eight minutes with each person.

My colleagues consulted in the kitchen on the rules for keeping them moving. If any of us had taken part in real-life speed-dating, no one would admit it. Were they supposed to confide in us if they wanted to swap business plans at the end, we wondered? The problem, someone suggested, was that we had seated them at a long bench. In The Forty Year Old Virgin, our main source for this exercise, the speed-dating took place at separate tables. That way they had to get up and move.

Do you know speed-dating? We’re busy people, in this culture, and the efficiency experts have addressed themselves to our mating habits. Speed-dating companies hire a venue and gather singles; they seat half at numbered tables, and the other half shuffles from eight-minute date to eight-minute date, moving on when the organizer rings a bell. After an hour and a half—and seven dates more than I’ve ever had—each participant tells the organizer who they’d like to see again. If interest is mutual, phone numbers are released. If not, face is saved.

My New York friends keep bequeathing their San Francisco friends. Ramón told me about Dan, a friend from his college days who had recently moved to Bernal Heights. It turned out we live on the same block, and so I invited him over for a glass of wine a few nights after the conference. Dan is a professor of computational linguistics down the road at Stanford. Linguistics geeks, he says, are even geekier than computer scientists, to which a low whistle is the only reaction. I tried to get a professional diagnosis of the Dublin Four accent, which arose, with its mystery dipthongs, as soon as the country got a sniff of money, roiysh, but mean-spirited accent dissection isn’t his field. He builds computational models of human language processing, and tries to figure out how we as a species deal with syntax.

Graduate students are always looking to date, Dan said, and so they took advantage of that with a recent experiment, in which they taped a speed-dating session and noted how each pairing had turned out. Then researchers analyzed the vocal patterns, independent of content, to see if they could predict the success of a meeting. Did vocal mirroring indicate mutual interest? If someone sped up or slowed down their vocal rhythms to match their conversational partner, was it the equivalent of leaning forward? (Dan speaks so quickly it’s hard to imagine him speeding up.) The answer, it seems, is yes—our vocal patterns modulate in response to others, and tell stories independent of our words, just like body language.

Eight strangers, eight minutes each: it’s hard not to smirk at speed-dating. And yet I don’t think we need eight minutes, nor do we need much in the way of words. When there is no recognition, you may as well talk for eight years. And when you’ve met before, in some guise, you know enough in an instant. Only the facts need to be unpacked. You know what this person needs to hear; what their heart longs for; what delights them. You know enough, and because that moment is such a perfect fractal, you even know how it will turn out—the ending is contained in the beginning. It’s no wonder we shield ourselves from such clarity. It gets written, I think, to the same part of the brain as those vivid morning dreams that dissolve by the time coffee is brewed.

The physicist Richard Feynman used to walk into lectures and announce, wonderingly: “I just saw a car in the parking lot with the license plate AMX 259. What are the odds of that?” I like to think that Feynman understood that even though coincidence of feeling is more common than it seems, love lies in the wonder, not the rarity.

At a Vindigo reunion on Tuesday night, Jason gave me a fat manila package. He’s clearing house for a big trip and a new marriage. On the cab ride back to the hotel, hundreds of photos tumbled into my lap, all different sizes, some dog-eared. Spain, college parties, and a visit to see Pat. Our last night in Dublin. Group shots from a Wall Street training course—the names are long gone, but I remember their Myers-Briggs scores. A holiday in San Francisco. Drinks to celebrate quitting jobs. Visits home; visits from my parents. A wedding; our wedding; more weddings. New Orleans. My desk at Vindigo. Our little millennium party, propping up a listing Christmas tree.

My own face looks out most of them, sometimes fat from college beer, sometimes thin from New York stress, with worse or better haircuts through the years. These snapshots are artless. They tell you nothing.

I have a running joke with Keith Yamashita, who hired me through these pages, that this “Dervala” is a fabrication. That my real name is Debbie, and I was a Wal-Mart greeter from Festus, Iowa. I’d stored up years of fake smiles and silent dreams there, until one night I sneaked into a traveling production of Riverdance, and was inspired. Night after night I sat in Festus with a book of Celtic baby names and a DVD of Angela’s Ashes, planning my escape to the big city. It took months to work out the back story for this Irish yuppie-drifter, who has bounced around too often to keep track of. Maybe I overdid it. This Dervala character, she’s a little implausible, Keith says, but it works, except when the accent slips and he can hear Debbie loud and clear. I tell him I couldn’t possibly do a worse Irish accent than he does.
    “Welcome to Wal-Mart,” he sing-songs behind my desk. “Pampers? That’s Aisle 6.”

When the taxi pulled up, I slipped one photo into my pocket. J. took it on my 29th birthday, and it catches me as I’d like to look but rarely do. I was too vain to resist this one trophy for my upcoming crone years, but I stuffed the rest of the photos back in their interoffice envelope and left them on the back seat with a pat goodbye. I like the idea of my past circling New York City in a yellow taxi, waiting for the next Debbie who needs it.