LIONEL'S DAUGHTER
February 01, 2009
It's been a quiet week on the Island, our hometown set here on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. The weather finally set its hat and decided on winter at last, bringing in a set of dockwalloper storms to drench the area and chill the nights properly so that one did not need to set the basin of fruit back in the fridge, but could leave it out all night on the counter with no fear.
Each day has started with heavy skies and a steady fall of precipitation throughout the day. The evenings have been chill, but not to freezing, as that would be taking things a bit too far. Let Minnesota have the ice and snow. If we need any, we will get a grand Zamboni.
Meanwhile the tulips and glads have started sending up little red and green spikes as if to defy the season properly as Californians will tend to do.
The Sierra reported balmy temperatures dipping to 28 during the day, but often staying above 32 on the slopes, which means that we are not out of the woods yet with the drought.
Lionel put up the Pampered Pup hotdog shop on Park Street and headed on over to pick up his daughter as part of the Settlement of 2005. As part of this settlement, Lionel got to enjoy his daughter's company every other week for about three days and not pay some $1000 in alimony per month, so the lack of his daughter on the off days sort of made up for it by the lack of having to deal with Leticia on the others.
In California it is said that the normal man has been married and divorced some four to five times and any exception is seen as a deviant with something against liking people, but Lionel had found one marriage and one divorce to be sufficient to put him off of his feed for the duration, which just might be for the term of his natural life, so acrimonious did that Leticia turn out to be, both as wife and as ex-spouse.
It was bad enough that Lionel would turn to reading Plato once again for consolation and had moved on to the Stoic known as Epectitus. The hunger for knowledge is a drive on which no one can put a cap. It is said that Nat Turner knew the contents of his owner's entire library better than the owner himself before Turner's execution.
Its a little known fact that many of those folks you might think were indigent, ignorant and illiterate were in fact highly well-read individuals who had spent their time of supposed idleness reading Shakespeare and the Classics instead of drinking. Or maybe drinking while reading Shakespeare, which maybe is precisely what the Bard intended and which is precisely the way people should read the Classics. With a bit of wine and headiness to add fuel to the fire.
Now you may know that reading and writing was actively discouraged among the "Negroes" for a long time, but that did not stop a great many individuals from becoming far more learned and well-read than the schooled and formally educated Whites. A man who is desperately looking for answers from the Great Books is naturally going to be more informed than someone who has had the Great Books tossed on his head with an order from his elders like so much salad dressing.
From such a father and grandfather came Lionel. Men who grew up under terrible oppression, looking for answers in the Great Books. Looking for a way to explain this strange world where the Biblical Egyptians seemed to have perpetuated an eternal captivity of God's children. And so behind the counter, where the casual observer saw only a griddle and a deep-fat fryer and rows of condiments, Lionel might have the open pages of "The Republic" or "The Wretched of the Earth". No telling what might be behind the counter with the baseball bat and the shotgun.
All this beside. Lionel, a man of his time, needs to pick-up his daughter, a girl of her time, as part of a "settlement", a legal arrangement, typical of its time.
When he gets there, the pre-arranged trade-off zone at the high school gymnasium, Jasmine is there talking to a White boy, one of the Abodanza kids.
Something kicks inside Lionel, despite all the changes and the stuff he knows. You don't just talk to THEM in public like that. Something bad sure to happen.
But then Lionel's folks hailed from Louisiana during the war years and different rules applied. Back then.
So there he stood, owner of the Pampered Pup, a hot dog stand on Park Street on the non-descript Island, a scholar of Plato and some things about Life, while the Jewel of his life sat there chatting as if nothing ever had ever happened in the history of the world with a boy. As if this was really what it was all about. A boy and a girl.
He turned his eyes and they fell on the outraged headlines concerning the Middle East and the seemingly irreconcilable problems there.
According to the news a delegation from Northern Ireland was being sent to help create a cease-fire.
He looked back and eventually collected Jasmine to take her home in the ancient Toyota.
So, you like this boy.
Oh, he's okay. We both got matching profiles on Facebook
That's the newfangled internet social thing.
Oh dad. Everybody does it now.
And so on. Those Dads out there may share some sympathy with Lionel. Facebook has become the new teen Interaction, entirely removing the telephone. Or adding to it, since most phones these days have cameras, wireless internet, text messaging, twitter, and the kitchen sink besides, Heck, most of the girls now have Blackberries, blueberries, Apples, iPods, and god knows what else, wherein they text message, twitter, google and facebook to the n'th degree every minute. Every once in a great while they actually hold a human conversation face to face.
Yet there she is, a glowing princess in his eyes. How is he to say, honey, the world is full of darkness and dark men and you must always be on your guard. How can he utter such pronouncements in this New Age? He is a man who keeps a shotgun and a baseball bat under the counter of his business. Beside a dogeared copy of The Republic.
There is no answer. You always must make it yourself time after time, age after age. And the Youth of today will be crotchety old men and women soon enough if Time allows.
You can always place a photograph on the dashboard so that each streetlight reveals a picture, earnest in desire that two shall orbit the ferris-wheel sun, but each image will turn out to be only the ghost of the unreachable and untouchable Past, forever beyond recall and no one can remake was was done, only make what is now and to come with the shattered pieces left in our hands, as best we may.
And now, the sound of the midnight train comes ululating across the water, wavering and yet insistent as history itself, as it winds its way though the Jack London Waterfront, headed from the forest of cranes in the Port of Oakland to places unknown. Its the train of History chugging on to the new Age of Hope.
That's the way it is on the Island. Have a great week.