Puppets In The Rain– First Meeting– Milo

January 23, 2010 | Laughing Knees | 3 Comments 

I’ve been want­ing to post my fic­tion for quite a while now, but never got around to fix­ing up the blog to sep­a­rate the ma­te­r­ial. WIth this new set up fi­nally the whole nav­i­gat­ing is­sue has been sim­pli­fied and be­come more ac­ces­si­ble. I will post a num­ber of sto­ries, some of them, like this one, in a se­ries of in­stall­ments. I’ve also in­cluded pod­cast read­ings for some of them; just click on the au­dio file link be­low the narrative.

This story, “Pup­pets In The Rain”, was writ­ten for a read­ing and lis­ten­ing course I teach at my uni­ver­sity. It caters some­what to young Japan­ese women who tend to like “cute” love sto­ries. The oral read­ing, too, has been sim­pli­fied so that stu­dents might hear the vo­cab­u­lary and phrases bet­ter. Please for­give the slower read­ing and un­nat­u­rally long pauses be­tween words.

En­joy!

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1– First Meet­ing– Milo

It was rain­ing. Milo Caf­fin stood next to the store win­dow and pulled his base­ball cap lower over his eyes. The wind blew across the street with a loud hiss and made Milo shiver in his thin, jeans jacket. He rubbed his hands to­gether and blew on them to warm them up. He glanced at his watch. His friend was late.

“Come on, Jerry, where are you?” he said be­tween his teeth.

Milo pushed his hands into his pock­ets and jumped up and down, try­ing to stay warm. He turned away from the street and looked into the store win­dow, see­ing, for the first time, the faces look­ing back at him. He froze, think­ing they had seen him stand­ing there, wait­ing for Jerry. But when he looked closer, he re­al­ized that the faces weren’t real. They were pup­pets, all dif­fer­ent kinds, sit­ting on shelves in the store win­dow. Some of the faces were carved from wood and looked al­most life­like with their hu­man eyes and hair. Other pup­pets looked like an­i­mals or mon­sters. One looked like a huge lady with bright lip­stick and many frilly laces. An­other looked like a tall grasshop­per wear­ing a tuxedo and a top hat. Most of the pup­pets sat in dif­fer­ent po­si­tions on the shelves, with their strings loose and cloth­ing folded be­neath their skinny legs. Milo peered be­hind the win­dow shelf at the old store in­side. More shelves cov­ered the walls, with pup­pets placed on all them. A cur­tain hung from one wall in one cor­ner, cov­er­ing some card­board boxes. At the op­po­site side of the room stood a check­out counter made of dark wood. An old, iron cash reg­is­ter sat at one side of the check­out counter. Next to the cash reg­is­ter flick­ered a can­dle. The flame waved in the dim light, cast­ing shad­ows of two pup­pets onto the walls.

Just then there was a move­ment be­hind the counter and a fig­ure stood up and came to view in the can­dle light. Milo pressed his face against the win­dow pane and tried to make out who it was. The fig­ure seemed to be hold­ing some­thing and us­ing it on the check out counter. Ah, a duster. The fig­ure was dust­ing the fur­ni­ture. The fig­ure moved di­rectly into the can­d­light so that its face was lit by the can­d­light. A woman. A young woman. Milo held his breath. She was beautiful.

While he was star­ing at her she looked up and saw him stand­ing in the win­dow. Milo jumped back, into the street. Into the rain.

A hand touched his shoul­der and Milo gasped.

“Hey, Milo! Sorry I’m late. My scooter broke down and I had to walk…”

Milo looked back into the store win­dow, but she was gone…
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Somewhere Underground

January 17, 2010 | Laughing Knees | 9 Comments 

There have been only a hand­ful of peo­ple in my life whose words and ex­am­ples made such an im­pres­sion that my in­ner and outer life changed course in a way I could not have seen, let alone un­der­stood, un­til I was al­ready well along the path in the new di­rec­tion. I was, per­haps, very lucky to have been blessed with par­ents who were aware, dif­fer­ent, and coura­geous enough to step out of the bound­aries of their com­mu­ni­ties and go see the world, and so, ever since I can re­call, new ideas, new peo­ple, a cav­al­cade of cul­tures, re­li­gions, senses of hu­mor, lan­guages, art, lit­er­a­ture, even food, all swept through my life like a river, invit­ing me to take a breath and dive in. Peo­ple with ideas flow­ered around me like a gar­den and learn­ing was fun and sus­tain­ing. I was ripe for men­tors.¹

This my par­ents pre­pared me for, en­thu­si­as­ti­cally, al­most push­ing me along. And cer­tain peo­ple, peo­ple I read or met or heard from oth­ers speak­ing about, caught on like burrs and wouldn’t let go. Peo­ple like Miss Pa­tri­cia Burke, my high school Eng­lish teacher, who nur­tured a love of writ­ing when my painfully shy per­son­al­ity held me back from re­leas­ing any­thing I wrote into pub­lic. Or Pro­fes­sor Don Tay­lor of the Uni­ver­sity of Oregon’s Cre­ative Writ­ing Pro­gram, who took me un­der his wing and en­cour­aged me with my sto­ries in spite of my lack of con­fi­dence. Or Pro­fes­sor Ken O’Connell of the U of O Art De­part­ment, who lis­tened to my plead­ing with him to let me into his an­i­ma­tion pro­gram and let me be­come his ap­pren­tice for the next two years. Or writ­ers like Barry Lopez and Gre­tel Ehrlich and Ed­ward Abbey whose books rad­i­cally changed the way I saw the po­ten­tial of weav­ing the ex­cit­ing amal­ga­ma­tion of na­ture and sci­ence into a new kind of spir­i­tual di­a­logue with the Earth, one both prac­ti­cal and mean­ing­ful. Or poet Mary Oliver who was the voice of na­ture it­self, de­scrib­ing in spare, un­pre­ten­tious vo­cab­u­lary what we all feel and long for as liv­ing things. Or Tove Jans­son, the au­thor of the Moom­introll se­ries of children’s books, whose magic con­tin­ues to en­thrall me 39 years later, some­thing that few other writ­ers have done.

And then there was Mal­colm Wells, the “Fa­ther of Un­der­ground Ar­chi­tec­ture”. Dur­ing my ar­chi­tec­tural stud­ies I dis­cov­ered his work while brows­ing, in the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon Ar­chi­tec­ture Department’s li­brary, a copy of the mag­a­zine Pro­gres­sive Ar­chi­tec­ture. A pho­to­graph of a build­ing barely vis­i­ble un­der a car­pet of grasses and wild­flow­ers caught my eye. His build­ings lived un­der­ground, in the soil, like moles and Hob­bits. Af­ter the in­un­da­tion of all the ster­ile mod­ern de­signs, the overly heavy and nar­cis­sis­tic clas­sic 19^th cen­tury fare that peo­ple trav­eled thou­sands of miles to see, and the com­plete shun­ning of Asian ar­chi­tec­tural de­sign, with this new form of ar­chi­tec­ture, which at­tempted to erase its pres­ence and bow to the ex­u­ber­ance of liv­ing things, I felt I had fi­nally found my niche in ar­chi­tec­ture and could sally forth with a re­newed sense of the ap­pro­pri­ate­ness of this pro­fes­sion which, un­til then, seemed to me to do so much to scar the very world I revered so much.

I read every­thing I could find on Wells, search­ing the archives for ar­ti­cles on his de­signs, seek­ing any­thing he had writ­ten and said. I dis­cov­ered an out­spo­ken, but gentle-​​hearted man, whose love for the nat­ural world out­weighed his love for ar­chi­tec­ture and who spent his life try­ing to con­vince the world that the way we were go­ing about build­ing our homes and towns and cities was both de­struc­tive and deeply dis­re­spect­ful of the planet we were shar­ing with other liv­ing things, if not down­right stu­pid. His writ­ing re­minded me in a way of a good-​​natured nay-​​sayer who didn’t mind brush­ing the fur the wrong way at a din­ner party, propos­ing pre­pos­ter­ous ideas that most at the party would roll their eyes at, with­out prop­erly stop­ping to con­sider just how wise and ef­fec­tual the ideas were. Wells seemed to me an Ed­ward Abbey of the ar­chi­tec­ture world, and when I first saw his photo I re­al­ized I wasn’t far wrong; he even looked like Abbey.

Out of my hun­dreds of books one of my great­est trea­sures is Wells’, “Gen­tle Ar­chi­tec­ture”, a book I have read dozens of times and still gar­ner wis­dom from. Not only does it pro­pose new ways of build­ing and in­hab­it­ing cities,… that thirty years later would prob­a­bly still seem rad­i­cal to most peo­ple to­day… it sug­gests a com­pletely dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at na­ture and what our build­ings are sup­posed to mean to us and the land. He of­fers a way for us to re­gain our spir­i­tu­al­ity in the very act of build­ing our set­tle­ments and dwellings, one that reveres all life and the very rea­son for our births into the world. Here is the list of goals he pro­posed should be the build­ing blocks for cre­at­ing places to live:

²

1) Cre­ates pure air.
2) Crea­tures pure wa­ter.
3) Stores rain­wa­ter.
4) Pro­duces its own food.
5) Cre­ates rich soil.
6) Uses so­lar en­ergy.
7) Stores so­lar en­ergy.
8) Cre­ates si­lence.
9) Con­sumes its own waste.
10) Main­tains it­self.
11) Matches nature’s pace.
12) Pro­vides wildlife habi­tat.
13) Pro­vides hu­man habi­tat.
14) Mod­er­ates cli­mate and weather.
15) …and is beau­ti­ful.³

When I moved to Boston to try to work as an ar­chi­tect I con­tacted him to talk about his de­sign the­o­ries and ask if he might know of any leads. We cor­re­sponded, talk­ing a few times on the phone and more of­ten through hand­writ­ten let­ters. He apol­o­gized to me for not be­ing able to hire me, but ex­pressed a wish to fol­low my ca­reer. He en­cour­aged me to get my ar­chi­tec­tural li­cense, in spite of the ob­jec­tion­able method­ol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy it rep­re­sented, telling me, “If you want to be taken se­ri­ously and make a dif­fer­ence it is im­por­tant to go through the hur­dles that the pro­fes­sion re­quires.” He asked me not to give up in spite of the ob­sta­cles. “It is worth it if you love the Earth,” he said.

That was 19 years ago. My life took a long curve out of the way. I ini­tially re­turned to Japan to find work as a green ar­chi­tect, but with Japan’s bub­ble burst­ing just as I ar­rived, no firms were hir­ing non-​​Japanese ar­chi­tects. Need­ing to sur­vive I even­tu­ally gave up and took work as an Eng­lish teacher. With al­most no ex­po­sure to the kind of ar­chi­tec­ture my heart was in my pas­sion waned. I lost touch with Wells and with what was hap­pen­ing in the ar­chi­tec­tural world. But I never for­got his words and his warm encouragement.

Three days ago I learned that Wells had died last No­vem­ber, a day af­ter my 49^th birth­day. The world seemed to drop away as I read the words, as if a huge chunk of my own his­tory had sud­denly sunken into the waves. It was one of those track switch­ing mo­ments in your life when every­thing seems to shunt for­ward and what you had at­tempted to hide away in the clos­ets comes tum­bling out, stark and naked. I fell back in my chair and wept, for the pass­ing of a man who pos­sessed one of those bright souls that had seen the won­der of the world, loved it with all his heart, and wanted noth­ing but to pro­tect it, and for my­self, for hav­ing let him down and for my own lack of courage. I re­al­ized how much he had meant to me and what a big in­flu­ence he had had on my life and soul.⁴

But Wells was not a mor­bid man (his self-​​written obit­u­ary) and such mop­ing would surely not have gone over well with him. Even though his ideas never caught on, he never gave up, per­haps be­cause of his faith in the slow process of na­ture it­self. If noth­ing else, he changed at least one per­son in the world. Think how dif­fi­cult that is to do.

Please read more about him HERE.

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