Slowly I turned...

So, the theme for this summer was to going be Around Walaka in 80 Days. You see, I was going to have eighty days off between graduation and when I had to start teaching pre-fall classes, and that sounded like a clever label for the self-improvement goals that I had set out for my first summer off in a long time. As it turns out, I will be teaching a class over the summer after all, albeit an online class, so the purity of the concept has been lost, but the intention remains.

The goals for the summer are manifold, and both physical and mental, involving art, exercise, writing, and music, but I have discovered in the eleven days that have passed so far a commonality among them: none of them will be accomplished without steadfast attention and incremental advances.

I have been walking and running more and more, even before summer began, and summer will allow me to be much more consistent. No one four-mile circuit around Green Lake makes any  discernable difference, but seventy-five or eighty over the summer might mean a marathon down the road.


I have adopted the exercise program recently mentioned in the NY Times. Just a few minutes every morning, but a killer few minutes - I was dripping with sweat today, and not just from the humidity. No one session makes any discernable difference, but seventy-five or eighty over the summer might mean an improvement in my overall fitness by my birthday.


I am still just struggling with moving through a set of chords on the ukulele; I hope to move up to an actual song sometime soon. No one evening's practice makes any discernable difference, but seventy-five or eighty over the summer might mean an actual performance at a Labor Day picnic.

I have taken up the challenge of learning to longboard, and went for my first mile-long ride yesterday. It was tough going, although there were moments that I had a hint of what it might feel like to get good at this. No one ride makes any discernable difference, but seventy-five or eighty over the summer might mean a longboard commute in the fall.

And drawing. Sheesh. I have decided to try my hand a bit of cartooning again. Alas. This seems the steepest hill. I make a picture and it doesn't seem any better than anything else I have ever done. No one drawing makes any discernable difference, but seventy-five or eighty over the summer might mean I can look at one without wincing.

If I want to accomplish anything toward any of these goals, I am going to have to do it Niagara Falls style: step by step, inch by inch. I'm not sure why this is hard for me. Part of it, I know, is just the Gap Effect. Part of it, I know, is that the past two-plus years of deaning have not left me a lot of time to focus on my own projects anyway. Maybe after years of teaching stuff I know well I have forgotten how to learn stuff I don't know well.  Maybe it is just that the pace of life is now geared toward instant gratification and drag-and-drop simplicity and I have just gotten out of the habit of actually working at things to get good at them. Maybe, if I were honest, I would say that in the past I have only accepted those challenges for things that came easy to me, and that this summer is going to be good for my character as well as my skillsets.

Whatever it is, I just have to get over it. Eighty days is a long time, but it's not forever.

A whiff of the past

So, as I was walking past the big retirement community on the way home from a turn around the lake, I caught the smell of a cigar. The earthy tang was coming from a codger leaning on a fence taking the summery air with a stogie all fired up and burning. The smell took me back forty years or more, and put me in mind of uncles and family friends and strangers on the street in what seemed like a simpler time and which must have been a much more aromatic one.

My father had smoked cigars in his younger days; one of my favorite pictures of him was taken before I was born: a vital, dark-haired young man in fancy dress is seated at a table with a bunch of cronies at the end of what appeared to have been a sumptuous meal, a big cigar clutched in his hand and a sly, almost feral smile on his face. I never knew what occasion might have put this working-class meat-cutter, card-player, and fan of the trotters into such luxurious surroundings, but he sure had the cigar to match.

When I knew him, though, he was a pipe man. When I was a child, the aroma of pipe tobacco filled our home. My older sisters and their men smoked cigarettes: Pall Mall, Lucky Strike, and Chesterfield.  Pop hung with Prince Albert. He would sit and smoke, reading his bowling books, and the air would become redolent of the "most delightful and wholesome" tobacco. I would watch him manipulate all the accoutrement of pipe smoking and play with the stuff while he was gone: the cans of tobacco, the tamping tool, the cleaning spike, the racks, and, of course, the pipes themselves. He had several, some with curved stems and some with straight, one with a really large bowl, all of them acrid and bitter-tasting when I put them in my mouth in imitation, the taste not at all like the smell they had when they were burning.  And the beautiful racks, the curved dark wood stands that held these tools of his habit. When I encountered some racks at a local thrift store, they had held onto their aroma and it only took a little imagining to fill the empty spaces with the artifacts of my remembered father.

Somewhere along the line, Pop quit smoking. I don't remember exactly when it happened, or even that it was ever marked as a Thing, but while I was still small, I noticed the pipes just remained in their racks and the gear went unused until eventually my mother removed it all from the little table next to the big chair in the living room. When we moved to a new apartment, there was no trace of this - what, hobby? Habit? Pastime? - to be found anywhere, and another age was gone as the present became the past and we all slipped into a future that held many things, but no jetpacks and no smoking.

My father died when I was twenty-six, almost thirty years ago, and I am sure he had quit smoking fifteen years before that. But all it takes is a little tobacco smoke to bring him into the room again.