whoisfenton

Tumbleweed is the long-distance runner of the plant kingdom, sprinting along in great herds toward the horizon. In arid desert areas certain plant species have devised a unique way to propagate their kind across a hostile and unrepentant landscape. The top part of the plant breaks of from the stem and forms a dry, prickly ball which can roll off in the wind. And away they go, bouncing along like army of spherical soldiers headed toward a botanical skirmish. This strategy works because the seeds of the plant are held within the branches of the tumbleweed, which are then dispersed as the plant inevitably crumbles to dust.

In parts of the western USA the tumbleweeds get trapped against man-made objects like fences, cars and houses, shoaling up like a great wave, absent the sea.

I am not sure why I am so interested in the weird and unique ways of life on earth. But I feel strangely complete knowing the tumbleweed is out there, riding the wind under the incandescent sky and gibbous moon.

Life is full of those moments that call out for a decision, but whatever way you jump danger lies. The word “conundrum” seems to have the percussive sound of finality, yet it hums a tune of heroic indecision, tossing out frantic notes plucked from a pile of random noises. Given its birth in the realm of the paradox, the word “conundrum” is still pretty cool, both in sound and deed.

“My library is an archive of longings.”
                                                                      ― Susan Sontag

From that moment long ago when our species discovered we had trouble remembering what we had seen, heard, felt and thought, the need to take notes was born and the library became inevitable.  These recordings may have begun as markings on cave walls or soaring oral histories passed down by tribal elders, but we are driven to capture it all, and in doing so provide a path for others to follow; or avoid.

I have a neighbor who has made it known of his dislike of the very idea of a public library, I guess because it smacks of some form of socialism in his mind and must therefore be inherently anti-market.  I pointed out that he could go to the public library and *read* about socialism and other forms of government, or about capitalism and other economic systems.  It is all so very interesting, I said.   That argument did not seem to go over all that well but I promise I don’t have a smarmy bone in my body.  I note in passing that “Smarmy Bones” would be a great name for a rock band.

I used to take the kids to the library every weekend, and while I perused the magazine racks they would be immersed in desperate dragons, far fables and great deeds.

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
                                                                          ― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

Our digital life gives us access to endless new possibilities and problems.  On the one hand all the knowledge of the world becomes available to us; but on the other hand we communicate in 280 character twitter-blocks, enough begin a story but not enough to complete one.  I have seen these long, continued twitter-fragments; an attempt to overcome the limitations of the medium whilst tricking our forever shrinking attention spans to hang in there for the next tweet.

As wonderful and scary as the Internet is, the public library remains, to me, one of the high points of human achievement.  Within the walls and amongst the cloistered stacks we call to one another across time and space.  We share the common stories of our lives.  The books here are meant to be checked out and read into the wee hours.  I just couldn’t put it down, we say, and I never wanted it to end.

 

“Hello I am from the Isle of Skit.  I’m skittish!”

OK, bad joke, but the word skittish seems to flit about nervously, preparing to dart off randomly at any moment.  Horses can be famously skittish, dancing left and right as they are wont to do, before suddenly charging directly at you in the pattern of the dreaded Madagascar Attack Horse, a species I invented to be part of this paragraph.  Being skittish should not be confused with insects that invade your home and skitter across the floor, although such images can make one squeamish AND skittish, or ‘squeamittish’.   You can google ‘squeamittish’ and discover that “No results containing all your search terms were found.” Yet, your life will be made whole when google asks helpfully if instead you meant to search for “squattish”, a word Ms Merriam Webster defines as “somewhat squat”.

“Hello I am from the Isle of Squat.  I’m squattish!”

 

It’s strange to think of continents drifting like great islands floating free, untethered to the earth.  For a very long time this was our way of explaining the gradual shift in the relative position of the continental land masses.  The earliest geologic record seems to indicate that the current arrangement of continents occurred as the single large super-continent split and drifted apart.  This ancient landmass was called Pangea and was made up of segments with names like Laurasia and Gondwana (and I wish Wakanda).  The oceans of the time were called Panthalassa and Palaeo-Tethys.  All I can say is that the God of Names must have had a ball.

These days you can still see how the continents fit together like puzzle pieces scattered on a brobdingnagian board.  

The principles of science require that we test our hypotheses, and when we do we find the notion of continents “drifting”, while as dramatic and fun as a great carnival ride, is not completely accurate.  Instead geologists extended the idea of drifting to include the notion that the Earth’s crust is made up of tectonic plates which are constantly moving in reaction to the stresses of the planet, and perhaps even tidal forces, although that is not certain.  The places where the plates grind together are called rift zones, which is almost as much fun to say as continental drift.

Before the advent of electronic toys, computer graphics and 3-D virtual reality games, the lowly and stalwart crayon could be found clutched in the sweaty paws of millions of kids.  These colorful waxen tools were how we translated the real world onto paper, with fish and oceans and trees and clouds.  And stick figures climbing mountains.  And  bright yellow sunflowers opening upon a green field.  Picasso’s we were not, but we made the world as we saw it and the crayons came in just the right amount of colors (120) to satisfy our nascent yet demanding palette.  The tear-off paper covering was genius, exposing the crayon without relinquishing the grip.   We used the pencil sharpener to refine the blunt instrument into a surgically precise waxen blade, designed to stay inside the lines at all costs.

Crayola began making crayons way back in 1903, and much to my surprise they are going strong, producing upward of three billion annually.   They also sell colored pencils, chalk and my personal favorite, Silly-Putty [tm].

One Christmas I remember getting the 120-crayon box with precisely one crayon for every color they had.   I flipped open the box and looked upon them, brilliantly arrayed in tiers like a church choir.   And though we didn’t have much back then, on that day I had more than I needed.

 

We travel light these days
Not to be seen;
A gray cap low
Over darkened glasses worn
Like a mask against the world.

The goal is misdirection
Hoping you look away
To distant lights
And raucous bells
Attentive and clear.

I am a nameless ghost
In a fog of uncertainty,
Gliding just beyond
Horizon’s call,
Cast adrift
On absent tides.

(This is a story I wrote some time ago, from my time in Singapore)

The old man pushes an ancient shopping cart along the street in front of my rented terrace house. His body is bent; bony shoulders stooped under the weight of time. He and his cart have seen better days.

He calls out to each home he passes in a cracked and warbling voice, asking us to bring out old newspapers. His mission today, as always, is to deliver his load of paper to the nearby recycling center. I know that given his glacial pace each trip will take more than an hour, cart by laborious cart.

He is a throwback to an earlier Singapore, a Singapore nearly forgotten in this island-state’s headlong rush to the future. Yet there he is defiantly pushing his cart of paper, showing us that he has preserved both his usefulness and his pride. As he shuffles along I can hear the gentle slap of his slippers on the pavement, the squeak and rattle of his rusty pushcart and the tremolo of his voice – a timeless chorus of renewal sung against the backdrop of our recycled history.

One fine equatorial morning I leave the flat early to catch the bus to the University. I am halfway to the bus stop when I see the old man pushing his daily burden of papers up the road in front of me, and it seems to me that he has miscalculated and stacked his cart too high. I watch in dismay as his load slides off onto the street and lands with a series of audible thuds, restoring the sovereign state of gravity.

Something seems to go out of him then, as if the whole thing – the effort, the burden, the journey – has become too great to bear. He sits down at the curb and places his head in his hands, his posture a testament to life’s cruel mercies.

A young girl of no more than 11 or 12 years rides slowly by on her bike. She is wearing a blue middle school uniform common in Singapore. She slows to a stop, dismounts and begins to pick up the scattered papers, placing them quickly and efficiently back into the shopping cart, as if performing a common chore. She gives the cart a quick shake to insure against a repeat catastrophe. She then walks respectfully to the old man, offers her hand and helps him up. He stares down at her and smiles uncertainly as if agreeing to a new and unspoken contract. She pauses to review her handiwork – cart and man – mounts her bike and pedals off to a future at least as bright as the rising sun. She does not look back.

I am the only witness to this muted single-act life play. No more than a minute has passed yet it resonates with a kind of permanence outside the sweep of time. The old man places his hands back upon the cart and resumes his circadian duties, though it seems to me that he stands a little straighter. As do we all.

I cannot say how often such events occur around the world unreported in major media outlets. We have all seen the tricksters, the charlatans, and the self-important and it is easy to assume that those people are the mainstream; that if you roll back the curtain you will discover that deep down we’re all just faking it. Maybe we have become too cynical and suspicious to remember the many little acts that play it forward. Maybe you have seen such things or done such things or been on the receiving end of such things and forgotten them.

But I have not forgotten. I do not believe they are in any way random; rather, they are full of purpose, succinct and compelling – a bunch of imperfect Earthlings trying to get along as best we can. A pebble strikes a glassy pond and ripples roll out fated to touch distant shores. On an obscure Singapore street that morning I saw such a pebble fall.

All over the world life seems to happen when we least expect it, but in actuality life is happening all around us; second by second, deed by deed. It is in these little acts that perhaps we can take a measure of grace, and understand that this thing thought lost is forever found.

Once, while playing a pickup baseball game in the park behind our house, I raced back to snare a long fly ball, turning my head to track it in flight. Unfortunately for me this particular field had some picnic tables in the “outfield”, tables I had forgotten were there. I ran smack into them, and the next thing I knew I was staring up at the sky with the other players looking down upon my lifeless body. They told me that when I hit the tables at full speed I stopped, stood up and then fell over on my back, apparently with the wind knocked out of me. This event was scary, but it didn’t lessen my obsession with baseball.

I immersed myself in the game but it wasn’t until much later that I began to appreciate the finer points, the game within the game, the subtle strategies that can make the difference between winning and losing. As a kid all this was beyond me because it was hard enough to hit a round ball with a round bat or of chase down a long fly ball to left center, picnic tables be damned.

My hero in those days was Mickey Mantle, and since the Mick played center-field, I did too. The Mick was a switch hitter so I was too. At some point the coaches realized that I didn’t have the strong throwing arm or other athletic tools needed to play the outfield, so I got put at first base, the position most favored by tall, clumsy players who can hit.

I think it was around this time that I started to move away from the game, at least as a participant. Playing the infield brings you much closer to the action and it penalizes those people who have a tendency to drift away and think about other things. In the outfield it’s possible to contemplate the workings of the universe between pitches, and you are so far away you might as well be a spectator. Oh look, a squirrel!

 

It is expensive to live in Hawaii, but the best things there are free or so the story goes.  The mountains, the sea and the ever-present volcanic earth are simply waiting to be experienced.  I lived on Oahu from 1968 – 1987 and learned to appreciate and respect the land, especially on the hiking trails balanced on knife blade ridges or meandering into deeply creased valleys.   

The Koolau is not a mountain in the classic sense.  It is the edge of an ancient volcanic caldera which has been worn away by the effects of wind and water over thousands of years.  But we are small and it is large, so it might as well be a mountain.

From the leeward side of Oahu it is possible to climb to the very top of the Koolau Mountains and look down upon the windward side and feel the power of the great gale whipping vertically up the cliffs. 

There are those brave few who will hang-glide off such places, defying gravity suspended below their brightly colored nylon kites.  I have always admired them, their bravery in taking that first step into the open air, trusting the wind and their engineering.

Climbing up the Koolau mountains is like passing through a series of open air rooms, each with its own decor.  You start by walking among the ferns and bamboo, lush, green and primordial.  Higher up will be the majestic ironwood trees with their thick trunks, dark and sturdy as a fortress wall.  The wind blows through the ironwoods with a sighing sound that is the tenor against the deep baritone calls of the humpback, singing to us in a symphony we once knew. 

Higher up still are the grasses and rough shrubs clinging to the rocky soil like barnacles.  Here in the wild wind the air is fierce with a peculiar dry scent that is so compelling as to create a memory all of its own.  I remember it to this day, all these years later.  

Now that I think on it the best things in Hawaii may defy enumeration.  The best things give back far more than than can be measured in the mathematics of memory.