But it was a “good” winter:  Over eleven feet of snow, all told.  The water table has risen and the springs which the Ute Indians relied upon only a century and a half ago are flowing again, having retreated underground for a multi-year drought that has only recently shown signs of abating.

This is a visually turbulent land, rugged terrain marked by steep slopes, never-ending hills piled atop more hills, rocky crags, arroyos and slots sculpted by millennia of run-off, interspersed only rarely with flats.    Early spring and late summer downpours find little purchase on the piñon/juniper slopes; their precious lifeblood, precious in its rarity, slices sharply through ancient washes on its journey to the Arkansas river some ten miles below.

Tempestuous winds that annually mark the transition from winter to spring  have finally hushed.  Tranquility and a sweet, misty silence envelop faltering rays of daylight as dusk descends upon the forest. Transitioning from day into night, light into dark, dusk tonight is silent, interrupted only by the faint voice of water percolating up through sodden rock and sand in the ravine below my cabin.

The “voice of water” is no metaphor.  This land speaks, as do all of its inhabitants including water… if you will but listen.  Understanding what is said is, of course, another matter.  But speak it does.   Tonight it whispers long-forgotten memories of another time, another place…

I am ten years old walking naked and barefoot through freshwater springs, a secret place I have discovered behind the lake where I spent my summers as a child.  Naked why?  Only the jaded, cynical adult thinks to question something so natural, so innocent and pure.  It just feels right.  I came into this world with nothing and will leave it just the same.  Why cloak myself with barriers to All That’s Real in-between?

Pure, chilling water at my feet, streaks of sunlight punching through a dense canopy of sumac, pines and assorted hardwoods… the details escape me but the feeling remains, the purity, the connectedness.  This is my personal oasis, shelter from a world of people I just don’t understand.  And who don’t understand me.

I am different.  They are one religion, I am none.  They speak effortlessly, I struggle.  They hit balls with sticks, I stroke my fingertips over the damp, bumpy flesh of frogs.  They are together, I am one. I know that I am different, awkward, the odd duck.  I’ve learned to play the fit-in game but at what cost to my soul?   Alas, this is what we do to survive the brutal onslaught of a world built by man, subversive to all that is real and natural.  Sell your soul, conform or die.

I refuse.  I will walk away and bide my time, sheltering my true Self until I find my place, my home.  I’m sure of only one thing: that I belong here, alone, cradled in the nurturing arms of Nature.  I lay down and let pure water wash away the sins of man, baptizing myself with real, pure Life.  I care nothing for fairy tale gods who live in the sky and the angry, bitter men who pretend to speak for them.  This is my church:  the water, the air, the earth and sun.  I want only to be the boy I read about, my hero, Jean Craighead George’s “Sam,” living in harmony with the land on my own side of the mountain.

Far off in the horizon, a stab of lightning pierces the San Juans, shattering my reverie, transporting me back to the present.   I hike down to discover a seasonal spring gurgling from beneath an enormous rocky outcropping sheltering a favorite haunt of ghost-cougar, an old tom I’ve heard and whose wraith-like presence has raised the hair on my neck… whose ephemeral form I’ve yet to behold, even more elusive than my own true Self.

I step into the cold pure spring and my spirit begins to tremble, vibrating frantically between two worlds, the line between past and present blurred.  Now I am the boy and the dream.  Now I am the man and the dream fulfilled.

I’m sure of only one thing: that I belong here, alone, cradled in the nurturing arms of Nature.

Copyright 2010 by Mark M. Rostenko

The Johnson Smith Company’s gag pushers sunk their claws deep into my budding psyche with fresh musty-sweet scented newsprint catalogs beckoning me with “hours of fun!”, urging me to “fool all my friends!” and “get even with my teachers!”  Enraptured by the dulcet tones of my first whoopee cushion I tripped on paradisiacal visions of “so lifelike” severed fingers, rivers of fake vomit and dog poo, a land of milk and honey where Billy Bob hillbilly teeth grew on trees, where shy third-graders armed with hand buzzers and dribble glasses miraculously transformed themselves into “life of the party” demigods.

I needed a fix every month or two but gags are hard to come by when you’re an ungainfully unemployed grade-schooler.  Allowance?   A shiny quarter every week.  Sure, you couldn’t buy a snot off the homeless for twenty-five cents these days but back then it could keep a budding life-of-the-party in sneezing powder for weeks.  But prying a quarter out of my dad’s iron-fisted clutches was no simple task for a small boy.

We usually played the allowance game on Saturdays at the local Mr. Steak during dad’s preferred “not-quite-dinner so lunch-menu-pricing is still in effect” time of day.   Belly full and nerves steeled I’d broach the subject rather circuitously, ever wary of my dad’s suspicious sixth sense for conversations that risked thinning his wallet.  A comment like “Well what do you know about that!  There’s a quarter on that table, almost exactly like the kind my allowance is made of!” would inevitably lead to some version of  “In my day a boy would haul 400 pounds of potatoes on his back through minefields riddled with rusty East German import razor blades, sodomize a herd of water buffalo and launder grandma’s babushka over a rock in an icy cold river in the dead of winter before securing a dollop of ‘So life like!  Fool all your friends!’ fake dog poo from the Soviet Ministry of Gags & Novelties.”

My attention span would usually flee the scene half-way through the lecture, leaving me to stare longingly at the Norman Rockwell art calendar behind the cash register wishing that Santa might bring me a classic American “Fuck your quarter, boy! I’M EATING!” father.  You know, like the one in the traditional “Christmas dinner with rosy-cheeked nuclear family with two gas-guzzlers and a sleigh in the garage and oooooh look at the adorable kitten under the tree who’ll drop the ‘me’ off her ‘meow’ when the boy drooling grisly bits of canned pumpkin pie experiments on her with grandma’s heirloom salad fork collection” painting we all remember so fondly from back in the day.

My initial bout with Acute Mail-Order Withdrawal Syndrome set in shortly after our neighbor, Mrs. Murie violated the seams of my pastel-blue vinyl whoopee cushion with her gigantomatasmical Midwestern corn-fed ass.  Silent but deadly, to be sure.  I desperately required an upgrade to the 100% Virgin Rubber Whoopee Cushion Deluxe.  Or better yet, an entirely new gag.  But a week or two of allowance wouldn’t do.  “If you gimme a dollar I’ll mow the lawn,” I told my dad. “If you ever want to eat again you’ll mow the lawn for free, RIGHT NOW”, he replied.

I brainstormed amidst the eardrum-pummeling rumble and shin-assaulting barrage of shredded grass from our Montgomery Ward’s Gigantoburban Lawn Leveller.   Beating up classmates for their lunch money sounded promising, but with only two kids in my stable of easily-intimidated underlings who wouldn’t piss themselves with laughter at my threats, both of them girls, the math didn’t quite add up.  And school policy didn’t allow for much mingling with the pre-schoolers anyway.  The Special Ed class tempted me in a way that only a veritable all-you-can-eat smorgasborg of easy prey can, but extorting quid off the only kids who’d hang out with me at recess bore long-term social costs I wasn’t prepared to pay.  And most of them routinely lost their lunch money on the way to school anyway.

Mom’s old coats and handbags offered temporary respite from desperation.  In some circles stealing from one’s mother might border on morally gray territory but the worldly crowd I ran with eloquently quoted convincing legal precedent:  “Finders keepers, losers weepers.”  Not to mention that this was 1974 and most of my mom’s change had expired anyway, the bulk of it dated 1972 and earlier.  Eventually I rousted up a buck and rushed my order off to Messrs. Johnson and Smith, hardly able to sleep at night while visions of shiny new X-ray Vision glasses and Terri Williams’ (my third grade crush) underwear danced through my head.

Several eternities passed in antsy hovering about the mailbox while incessant harassment of The Mail Lady nearly caused premature unhingement of my favorite molars from their respective gums.   “Is it here yet?! When’s it coming?  How ‘bout now?  Can’t you get a faster Jeep?  My dad says you goobermint free-loaders prolly stoleded it and that he could shit a set of steel-belted Goodyear radials before you get something here on time.  How old are you, like a hunnerd and infimmity?  Old people shouldn’t wear shorts.  I’m eight.  Wanna’ see what I can do?  Look!  Is it here yet?  How ‘bout now?”

The finally delivered wafer-thin envelope felt a bit light but who was I to argue with modern science?  Perhaps the crack research and development team at the Johnson Smith Company had happened upon breakthrough X-Ray Vision glasses technology and sent me the prototype for New and Improved Ultra-Thin Super Stealth X-Ray Bifocals.  My little chicken legs quivered in their wee cotton socks with anticipation.  All this for only a dollar!

In the envelope, a single sheet of paper.  “Dear Mr. Rostenko” Why are they writing to my dad?  Am I in trouble, I thought?… “We are refunding your money due to a failure to meet our minimum order requirement of two dollars. Please note, AGAIN, that shipping and handling charges do not count toward the minimum order.“   Why is anyone handling my super-stealth prototype X-Ray Vision glasses and more importantly, where do you get off charging ME to handle MY glasses? Rifle through YOUR moms’ old coats and purses and get your own glasses, jerkoffs… “Enclosed please find a check for one dollar.”   A check? What do I look like, a fucking banker?  I’m eight years old.  What am I supposed to do with a goddam check, you greedy capitalist swine shatterers-of-childhood-dreams sonsabitches?  A pox on all your houses, merchants of misery. Which in eight-year-old-speak came out sounding remarkably akin to  “Ummmm…mmkay.”

I had to find another way.  Back in the days before any acne-pocked twenty-something dipstick skateboard punk could pull a multi-billion dollar internet company straight out of his ass, the traditional childhood route toward wage-slavedom was paved with newsprint.  Unfortunately I hit the glass ceiling immediately as the Stewart brothers held an unyielding monopoly on Detroit News delivery.  Delivering the left-leaning Detroit Free Press wasn’t an option as we routinely basted in a delicate paprika and lime juice marinade and grilled over hickory chips any stray liberal who might mistakenly venture onto our ultra-conservative block.  And everyone knows that dead liberals are notorious for under-tipping.

I struck gold in the back of Boy’s Life magazine.  The ad promised that an enterprising young man could make serious inroads to the American dream delivering “GRIT”, some sort of hillbilly newspaper for folks who canned vegetables I’d never heard of, frolicked suspiciously with sheep under the cover of darkness and hid moonshining operations from “goddam revenoooers” in remote areas devoid of monopolistic family newspaper delivery dynasties.  The perfect vehicle:  I could fund my gag habit and bankrupt the Stewart empire with good old American competition.  Who wouldn’t prefer to read You and Your Farm Animal:  12 Romantic Ways To Bring Back the Sizzle instead of Murder Rate Tops Last Year’s Record; Mayor Young Organizes Parade, or Detroit:  Not Just a Big Pile of Used Condoms and Dirty Syringes?

Alas, even the best laid plans are riddled with hurdles:  I’d have to talk.   For a kid saddled with a severe stutter and its attendant facial tics, head-bobbing and occasional foot stomping, the mere thought generally set my blue Converse sneakers afloat in a small puddle of warm urine.  I got around it with a crayon and a paper plate inscribed  “do yoo want 2 by grit?”  Eventually I tired of hearing  “Boy, did you smack your skinny head on a fat pile of retarded or sumthin’?  Why would I want to buy any more goddam dirt when I’ve already got a lawn full of it?” and decided it was time for a career change.

Selling vegetable seeds door to door: that’d be my ticket to financial independence, also courtesy of the Boy’s Life classifieds.  Mom was out of paper plates so I’d have to suck it up, open my mouth, and hope that a coherent sentence might emerge from the oral tempest of gurgles, tongue smacks, clicks and flying spittle.  I practiced a good while  in front of the mirror.  “Hello neighbor!  Could I interest you in some seeds for your vegetable garden?  Why yes, as a matter of fact we DO have okra. Several var eye ta, varayat, vatararys, um,… a buncha’ kinds.  Might you be interested in purpoosing, pursooting, poorpoot…do you wanna see the catamalog?”

Ready as I’d ever be I ventured forth.  Unfortunately ringing doorbells and hiding in the bushes with knobby knees clanking out a frantic symphony of sheer terror wasn’t yielding the sort of payday I had in mind.  Standing dumbfounded, bug-eyed and speechless until the confused furrow-browed homeowner muttered “go home, kid” was progress, but profits remained elusive.

Emerging from a thick blue cloud of spent Virginia Slims 100s, a lethargic housewife wrapped in terrycloth answered my fourteenth attempt, clinging to a telephone with yellowing, tobacco-stained fingers while Mike Douglas bored the socks off Flip Wilson with inane chatter on the idiot box.  Shortly before hyperventilating and passing out on my “He-he-he-he-he-he-um-he-he-um-gosh-he-he-um-hel-um….lo, ummm… n-n-n-n-neighbor!” I recall hearing a deep, raspy: “Can I call you back?  Some kid with wet sneakers is choking to death on my porch.” And with that, I graduated to the door-to-door agriculture early retirement plan.

Oh but I was a persistent little mama’s nightmare, let me tell you.  (Or insane, if you go by Einstein’s definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”)  Door-to-door greeting card sales:  What housewife wouldn’t kill for the opportunity to shop for slabs of overpriced cardboard in the comfort and luxury of her own meticulously sterile 1970s suburban home?  The folks at Acme Greeting Card & Plumbing Supply assured me that their cards “practically sell themselves!”  A simple wave of their “exciting full color catalog” in the window would magnetically draw Bored Housewifeus Americanus, breakfast martini in tow, across rust & avocado green Ultra-Shag carpeting, away from the imaginary clutches of The Edge of Night’s debonair Skylar Whitney and straight into my vinyl “Santa’s Village, Florida” souvenir wallet.

The catch?   Of course.  When it comes to 100% guaranteed get rich quick schemes there’s always a minor catch.  Apparently my diligent labors would not be rewarded in cash but with a choice of “fabulous and dazzling” prizes, all described in my full color official Acme Greeting Card & Plumbing Supply Junior Greeting Card Associate Sales Kit.

“Fabulous” was hardly the word a suburban Detroit eight-year old with moderately psychotic tendencies might use to describe a pamphlet devoid of BB guns, explosives, hatchets and flammable liquids.  The only prize worthy of inflicting grave bodily harm was an X-Acto knife kit consisting of a sturdy handle and twenty interchangeable razor sharp blades in a finely crafted wooden display case.  By that age I had already acquired more knives than a well-provisioned Rambo/ninja hybrid superhero but I figured I could keep the handle for mashing bugs and sell the blades to kindergartners at twenty-five cents a pop.

In practical terms that amounted to fifty sticks of foot-long Bubs Daddy chewing gum or thirty-three chocolate & caramel Marathon bars which could all be parlayed into still bigger profits on the Hatherly Elementary School black lunch market.  The idea was sheer genius compared to the previous year’s business strategy, a somewhat less than profitable attempt at selling scraps of wire, bottle caps and coils of old string out of my desk.

This was my last chance and I wasn’t going to screw it up.  I spent hours honing and polishing my sales technique.  That is to say, I spent hours in front of The Price Is Right, studying the graceful hand flourishes of the original (and still the best) Barker’s Beauty, Janice Pennington, as she “showed them what they’ve won!”  I had it down pat, the silky, graceful manner in which she’d unfurl her arms in some sort of bastardized upside-down Easy-care polyester version of a Hawaiian Hula dance.  I wouldn’t even have to speak.  I’d just ring the doorbell, pass a classic Pennington Hand Sweep over the “exciting full color catalog” and stand back while the greeting cards “practically sold themselves!”

By the end of my first day I had pretty much had enough of The Man stomping my neck down into the dirt of capitalist serfdom with his spit-polished jackboot of forced labor.  Turns out the cards didn’t sell themselves.  But my mom sure did, to both grandmas, my aunt, and Mrs. Murie.  Mom had earned enough points to qualify me for the X-Acto knife set so I scribbled out the requisite forms and sent them off.  At The Man’s request, I allowed 4-6 weeks for delivery.

Every day I sat on the stoop out front, waiting for Big Brown, muttering a quiet “poo face!” at the passing blue postal service Jeep.  That’s right, no more goobermint free-loading mail lady for me.  I was pissing in the tall weeds with the big delivery dogs now:  UPS.  Movin’ on up.  To the big time.  Perhaps even, if I played my greeting cards right, to a dee-lux apartment in the sky-y-y-y.   And then one day, 2-4 weeks earlier than anticipated, a chubby little fellow in brown polyester shorts waddled up the driveway and handed over my loot.

I tore open the box, stepped back briefly to admire the fine European craftsmanship of the display case, unwrapped the blades from their protective tissue, and carefully inserted each into its designated slot in the clear vinyl organizer pocket.  Within hours I had transformed mom’s hand-embroidered curtains to hamster cage bedding, doubled our yard’s population of earthworms (twice as many, half the size each), and developed a revolutionary new system for pruning dad’s fruit trees.

Calling it a solid day’s work I parked my Big Wheel, cracked open a cold Faygo root beer and proceeded to scan the classifieds…

Copyright 2010  Mark M. Rostenko  All rights reserved.

First light slices through the crisp pre-dawn air.  A sliver of brilliance cracks the canopy of gray-blue over an eastern mesa, the sun’s warming rays shattering the few remaining vestiges of darkness, highlighting the desert’s starkness and reminding me of my own mortality.  Light and dark, night and day, life and death.  Our time is all too short, my days are numbered.  I hardly ever miss a sunrise anymore; there are far too few in any man’s lifetime to let even one pass willingly unnoticed.

This morning is no different save for location and the slightly metallic tinge imparted from my ultra-lightweight titanium coffee mug, a loyal companion in countless backwoods jaunts.  I sip and ponder, sporadically shivering inside a wool blanket, not quite ready to face the crisp near-freezing chill of morning desert air head-on.  Where do I want to travel today?  South.  We’ll go south. Just me and the dogs, a couple of hyperactive Labs who take after dad in their passion for exploration.

I pack my usual backwoods basics and some extras:  biscuits for the ladies and a small Leatherman tool to extract the never-ending stream of cactus spines which seem to lunge forth from the soil and attack their paws at all-too-frequent intervals.   Perhaps cacti aren’t nearly as vicious as I’ve portrayed them.  More likely, the thrill of new discoveries blinds my dogs to care and caution as they tumble headlong through unfamiliar and endlessly fascinating terrain.

We hike with only general direction in mind, open to whatever the desert might serve up on this perfect, cloudless autumn morning.  Stark yes, but the desert is also a land of infinitely varying textures.  Boulders and scree pried loose from towering mesas by wind, water and gravity create an endless sea of natural sculptures in the valleys and canyons below.  Blue-green junipers twisted by hot and cold, drought and downpours, wind and sun, speak the history of desert extremes to those who care to learn the language of their shapes and textures.  Even flat patches of what appear as dirty, monotonous sand at a distance thrill the eyes with shape and texture up close.  Cryptobiotic soil, the happy, patient marriage of dirt, sun and bacteria riddles the landscape, it’s knobby black riffles and bumps teeming with life at the microscopic level.

Hours later we come to an arroyo and stop in the shade of a boulder the size of a small bus.  Beneath me, a slab of red slickrock worn smooth by millennia of spring run-off and summer rain.  I peel off my shirt and stretch out on the cool mass, inviting the sun to caress my flesh with its long, hot fingers.  Dry, craggy mesas riddled with juniper and pinon pine to either side of me, there’s nothing particularly spectacular about this area.  Yet once again I’m mesmerized, thrilled, elated.  It’s the awesome privilege of finding my tiny self cradled within millions of centuries of painstaking artistry, millennia upon millennia of Nature tirelessly working her craft, carving stone with hands of wind and water.  It’s the being here, now, with no thought for yesterday or tomorrow, fully in the moment, present to the unceasing, tireless miracle of Nature.

I ease back onto the cool rock and stare hypnotically into the cloudless blue sky.  Blue is different here in the desert.  Not the defiled smog-filtered blue of civilization, criss-crossed by foggy contrails from busy jets ferrying busy people from one busy place to another so they can engage in still more busy-ness.  This is real blue, rich, luxurious sky blue, the blue Nature left here when she put away her palette, content that she’d cloaked the sky in just the perfect shade.

A tiny, fleeting dot captures my attention.  Did I see something or didn’t I?  I flutter my eyelids a few times to sweep away the mental haze of sun-drenched tranquility and focus more intently.  There it is:  a miniscule, circling black speck, nearly invisible.   I hear the raspy, guttural caw of a raven issuing forth from somewhere over the mesa and realize that this tiny fleeting phantom of my perception is in fact another raven.  But what business has it, alone, at such extreme elevation?  No food, no mate, seemingly no purpose.  What’s the point of soaring so high?

Ah!  And what is the point of sunning one’s self on a rock in the middle of nowhere?  There isn’t one, other than the sheer joy of it, indulging the ecstatic stroke of Nature upon one’s flesh.  Could I but fly I’d be up there as well.  The raven is coasting over dizzying heights simply because he can. For the sheer joy of it.

As we put archaic, anthropocentric philosophies behind us, naturalists are discovering impressive similarities between the emotional lives of humans and animals.  While too many inhabitants of this planet still cling to the ignorant belief that man holds exclusive dominion over the Earth, that its flora and fauna are merely commodities created simply for humans to tame, mow over, feed upon and destroy for his own selfish purposes, others are waking up to the fact that we’re not the only sentient, intelligent beings on the globe.

Animals do have emotions.  They play. They seek pleasure.  Perhaps they haven’t our capacity for reason and intelligence, but anyone who’s ever cared for a pet knows that animals experience joy, elation, love, sadness and a myriad of other emotions in their own way.  If you’ve ever had the good fortune to observe falcons riding the thermals on a warm summer day, you know what I mean.  They’ll soar for hours, for the sheer joy of it, dozens of them floating effortlessly.

Had you wings, would you not propel yourself as high as possible?  Why would a raven be any less drawn to the vistas, the panoramas, the beauty of the world below as viewed from lofty heights?  Why else would he be up there?

Anthropomorphism my ass.  We’re animals, made of the same animal-stuff.  Inside a bird you’ll find lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, intestines, blood and brains.  A rotary engine is different from a piston engine but a Mazda is just as much an automobile as a Ford.  Details define the surface, appearance and even function,  but don’t alter the essence.  Life is life, its essence unvarying, its myriad physical forms merely details, projections of the unwavering eternity within.  Ravens play. Just like people.

Raven hints at something deeply meaningful to me but suffers a rather inconsistent and often morbid reputation in global culture and folklore.  Native American cultures perceived  Raven as a bringer of magic, good and evil, as a symbol of change, metamorphosis, transformation.  Raven was a shape-shifter, a trickster.  He could also be mischievous, a thief and even creator of the world.  European cultures, ever fearful of anything dark, saw the raven as a harbinger of evil, even satanic.  Psychologist Carl Jung considered it a symbol of the shadow self, our dark, hidden side.  So prevalent is our superstition that a group of ravens is called a “murder.”  In reality they’re remarkably expressive and  intelligent birds, infinitely more fascinating than cultural mythologies might belie.

To my left, over the mesa, more raven merrymaking.  A pair chase one another in first wide then narrow loops, ducking and diving, perhaps engaged in a game of tag.  Suddenly roles reverse, the pursuer now the chased.  “Tag, you’re it.  Now you chase me.”  This isn’t hunting, this isn’t food-gathering, this isn’t some “biological imperative to boost survivability and pass on adaptive genetic material blah blah blah.”  This is play. For the sheer joy of it.  (Arguably this is typical courtship behavior, but ravens mate in the spring, still half a year away.  These boys and girls are just plain having fun.)

I’m riveted to this display of aerial ballet, my own emotions swooping, diving, soaring in rhythm with their play.  Raven is the southwestern desert.  The two are inextricably linked, like a mother cradling her infant, the child as much a part of her as its own independent spark of creation, the promise of something so much more.

Throughout my backcountry sojourns I’ve observed ravens in all sorts of environment.  I’ve come upon what might well have been a hundred of them all at once, cawing, pecking, soaring, cackling, scratching, doing their raven thing at over 14,000 feet above sea level.  I’ve watched a mating pair from my window chasing off red-tailed hawks, pecking and attacking mercilessly, presumably protecting a nearby nest.  Inevitably I’m struck with a visceral sensation at these times, a lump in my gut, as though something deep inside is saying “Pay attention.  Listen.  Don’t you get it? There’s meaning for you here.  Your encounter with Raven isn’t random.”

Watching them play overhead, I sense it again.  It is a knowing;  I feel it deep inside, as yet unsurfaced.  Perhaps I’m thick.  Maybe I’m just not ready.  Perhaps Raven is speaking but my ears, debauched by the world of man, uncivilization, can no longer hear.

Good.  I like it this way.  I don’t want to know.  Part of me, the better part of me, doesn’t want to understand.  The child who believes in magic, the boy who is infatuated with the infinite mystery and  primeval, raw beauty of Life doesn’t want it defiled with explanations and facts and logic.

Sheer black.  Black feathers.  Black eyes.  Black everything.  Raven is the essence, the embodiment and the bringer of mystery.  Pure black is the absence of light and color.  Nothingness.  And in the vacant canvas of nothingness one can find everything.  But I’m not ready to find everything.  I don’t want to cut the mystery short.  I want Raven to soar overhead always, flaunting mystery, understanding just out of reach,  an undecipherable totem of the beauty of never knowing.  I want to know that I can never know, that Life will always remain a profound mystery, never revealing all of her secrets.

It dawns on me that this in fact is what Raven means to me.  From the not-knowing, from deep within the eternal mystery Life generates and regenerates the beauty of creation. Unfathomable, unpredictable, forever.  Raven is the embodiment of that which can’t be named, the earthly ambassador of Lao Tzu’s “ten thousand things.”  Deep, abiding Blackness, the absence of anything, harboring the potential for Everything.  The big bang.  Infinite nothingness weary of fucking itself, impregnated by the spark of Life, dazzling firmament exploding into brilliance, sowing the seeds of All.

Raven is the answer to questions I don’t know nor want to ask.  Raven reminds me that I am the mystery, as are all the ten thousand things.

Copyright 2009  Mark M. Rostenko  All rights reserved.

“This is it.”  My voice startles me, as though it’s not my own.  Any noise out here, any sound not native to the land seems a violence at worst, a disrespectful intrusion at best. There is a silence in the desert so profound, so deep, so far beyond an “absence of noise” that I’m certain it will swallow me whole if I let it.   So dense it’s palpable, so thick that any sound I muster is immediately enveloped by a nothingness so rich that I’m left doubting whether I had said anything at all.

I’ve come to the edge of the Great Basin desert, canyon country, to find something that first called to me two decades ago in the most unlikely of places, perched thirty-one stories above the canyon of materialism known as the “Magnificent Mile”, Chicago’s Michigan Avenue.  A young commodity trader pursuing that most elusive prey, the Big Bucks, my newfound quest for Something More, something real led me to a series of spiritual writings centered in the southwestern desert.  There was magic out there for me, I could feel it.  But it’d be another twenty years before I’d have sufficiently bled myself of the Lust for Stuff, the artificial World of Man, and deemed myself worthy to trek through its polar opposite.

I am drawn to worlds lacking safety nets.  I traded commodities because I answered to no one and there was no one to catch me when I fell.  No bosses, no pensions, no health plans, no unemployment insurance.  Sink or swim.  Find out exactly what you’re made of, blaze your own trail through this minefield or join the herd, the 95% who crawl back into the comfort of a “J-O-B” within their first year, unable to hack it in the brutal world of 100% personal responsibility, a world that revels in ferreting out your every weakness, your every flaw, a world that abides no excuses, offers no apologies and doles out no mercy.

The desert is such a world.

I’m well beyond the last stretch of road before this great expanse, which neither acknowledges nor answers to any human jurisdictions nor boundaries, ceases being Colorado and becomes Utah.  There are few signs of humanity’s encroachment here.  Autumn.  Very little water, still less game.  Even the piñon pines, prolifically dropping nuts by the bucketful only a few hours east, are barren here.  Not a cone to be found.  I spot occasional animal sign but nothing fresh.  At this time of year this area is devoid of resources necessary to support wildlife much larger than rodents.  This is the proverbial land where “no one can hear you scream.”   Make a wrong turn and it might be your last.  No cell phones, no park rangers, no nothing even vaguely resembling the World of Man for miles in any direction.  It might as well be a thousand miles for a guy packing only a knife, compass, a flint for fire-starting and a quart of water.

I was saving myself for the desert until I felt it was time.  I’ve roamed through all manner of wilderness, exploring, searching.  Inevitably, wherever I found myself was never quite “it.”  Magnificent, spectacular, awe-inspiring, to be sure:  tropical beaches, mountains, rivers, snow-capped 14,000 foot peaks, monstrous boulder fields, crystal clear alpine lakes, dense boreal forests, views that seem to transcend eternity.  But never quite it, never quite enough.  Not quite what I was looking for.

But this place, the desert, this is it.

I know silence – dead silence.  I live deep in the mountains, 8500 feet above the sea.  It’s quiet there.  But nothing like this.  This is no mere absence of sound but a virtual tonal vacuum.  Even my mind is hushed as the desiccated air sucks thoughts from my head.  There is a nothingness so absolute here that I’m suddenly gripped by an irrational fear that the entire world has died off and I’m the last man standing.

It may very well have.  How would I know?  I’ve seen no one, heard no one for days.

It is dusk now.  The moon, a sliver short of full, rises just over a dry, craggy mesa towards the east.  The sun sets over another to the west.  Its last rays paint a ribbon of shimmering flame along the slick red rim of canyon overhead as I descend into a narrower slot within.  A lone raven circles above, the only other creature stirring.  Nary the slightest breeze.  “When will you learn?  Bring the camera.  Always bring the camera.  This time will never come again.”  But there’s no way to capture this moment, regardless of how desperately  I want to save it, record it, hold on to it forever.

The raven caws.  For a moment my soul transcends, soars with the raven, above it all.  I let go.  I release the need to cling, I relinquish the fear of losing this beauty and simply be.  Here.  Now.  I am… fully immersed in one perfect collision of time and space, suddenly present to my insignificance within gargantuan canyon walls.  I could die, right now, and nothing would change here.  The vertical wind-blown slabs of towering red stone would continue to lord over this very spot, as they have for untold millennia, thoroughly unimpressed.  The coyotes would shred my carcass, strip every bone clean.

How utterly meaningless my problems occur, cradled within the immutable mass of this seemingly endless cathedral of stone.

Who I was died trading soybean futures one morning way back when, another time, another place.  I piled on contract after contract as the market surged higher, dollar signs flashing in my pupils as every minimum fluctuation, every moment added another several digits to my account.  Then it turned, in a heartbeat.  Plummeting.  Hard.  I couldn’t sell out fast enough and the wolves in the trading pit quickly caught the sweaty, musky scent of my impending demise, laced with fear.  The entire ring turned toward me, bidding under my offer, clawing for a taste of blood.  My world went silent as I gazed upon the frenzy before me with a now detached bemusement.  Numbness.  I calculated my losses:  Bankrupt.  An odd sense of peace washed over me as I flashed a half-grin at the bloodthirsty pack of opportunistic dogs.

Everything is gone, what more can you take from me?  I have nothing left to lose, I have shed the fear of loss along with the illusory digits that constituted my net worth and now simply am, stripped to the essence of whatever a man is in a world where value is judged by dollars.  In that world I am now nothing.  In reality I have found everything, all that truly matters.  I have found that at my core, stripped of man’s standards, I am still whole. Complete.  And without fear.

In the most barren of places I find Life.

It’s in a place of nothing that you discover your own something:  who you are, what you’re made of.  I stare into the abyss and there is nothing, no one staring back.  Just me and my huge fuck-up.  And a pack of hungry dogs drooling over the remnants of my financial existence.  In my acceptance the market turns again, on a dime.  Minutes, seemingly eternal minutes later I’m financially whole again, back to where I started that morning.  I puke my entire position to the first available bid and go home.  That is, someone, someone occupying this body goes home.

I descend deeper into the slot canyon, mesmerized by shards of life protruding from the most impossible of places.  Perfect “bonsai” junipers, perhaps hundreds of years old and only a foot or two high, clinging to life, suspended from the sheer face of a rock wall.  I can go no further; before me a forty-foot sheer vertical drop into an oasis of sorts.  In a land so dry, a hidden pool of water rests silently below me, encircled by yellowing cottonwoods and willows, a stray aspen, shrubs, mormon tea, animal tracks.  I’m staring into an abyss teeming with life in a place where there is so little.

I inhale deeply, immersed in the moist, crushed-apple scent of decaying aspen and willow leaves, drawing it through every fiber of my being.  Wonder and awe wash over me, something familiar, yet something long gone, something I have lost.  I am whole again, for a moment.  I am a child again, thrilled by every sumptuous fragment of existence, awestruck by the simplest of things, in love with life for no reason other than that It Is.

I find a way down, my feet probing blindly yet carefully in the fading light, backwards over the edge, searching for toe holds.   Foolish perhaps, unaided climbing in the middle of nowhere, but as there is no life without death, there’s little point to living in the absence of risk.   Tadpoles, in various stages of development including fully grown toads, most likely spadefoots, greet me near the pool’s sticky, muddy edge.  Elfin, fragile creatures arising from an ephemeral rain-formed puddle, finding their feet, their lungs, what they’re made of, crawling out of the abyss and into the light.

In the most barren of places I find Life.

I am elated.  I haven’t felt such joy, such wonder since I don’t know when.  Perhaps never?  That something so simple, so pure, so real should thrill me beyond description deals the final mortal blow to the dangling vestiges of my crumbling materialistic value system.  I’ve chased after things, I’ve chased after toys.  High-rise dwellings.  Five thousand dollar watches.  Clothes.  Women. Digits on a financial statement.  Nothing has thrilled me more than discovering bug-eyed lumps of wart-laden flesh cruising through muddy, ochre-tinged rainwater, propelled effortlessly by the rhythmic sway of sleek, satiny tails.

Perhaps it’s just the simple joy of discovery, a child gazing upon the wonders of the world,  having brought his first eyes into the light once again.   Have you ever really seen a toad, or a tree, a puddle, stripped of preconceived notions, social programming, gazed upon only what is there and only with your own eyes?  You did as a child.  But you’ve forgotten how.

The desert has reminded me, opened my eyes.  Everything is new, everything awaiting discovery.  My adult expectations, mental images of what a desert is or should be, repeatedly shattered as Nature reveals her secrets to me, bit by bit.  I thought the little boy in me had died so very long ago; the irony of his coming out to play, back to life in seemingly barren desert does not escape me.  In nothingness, you just might find your Self.  The absence of most everything has once again filled me and made me whole.

My cup runneth over.  There is magic here.

Copyright 2009 by Mark M. Rostenko  All rights reserved.

Lexi  was a tall, thin blonde with the kind of ass a fella’ doesn’t even begin to truly appreciate until he’s at that age where he can’t get one anymore. ( At least not for free.)   In the carnival funhouse mirror of her hang-ups and issues, my problems looked like a wet Maltese shivering next to Rosie O’Donnell after three weeks locked up in a cake shop.  But who was I to complain?  At least I’d found a willing and suitable lab partner for Organ-ic Chemistry 101.

Early in the relationship, it occurred to me that laying in bed and fondling a naked woman might eventually lead to intercourse.  Armed with this brilliant insight I proceeded to research all the pitfalls, problems and medical conditions I would undoubtedly face.  In a matter of days I became totally impotent, unbeknownst to my penis and my girlfriend.   The hardware worked just fine, but the software developed a few glitches.   I’d have to act quickly and decisively to cure my non-existent condition.

Lest I run into an acquaintance at a most innopportune moment, I sneaked out to an off campus bookstore one autumn evening to purchase several sexual self-help paperbacks.   After a seeming eternity of anxious browsing, I sauntered anxiously down the aisle, painfully aware of the suspicion in the clerk’s glaring eyes.  I plopped three “how to fix your wilted willy” manuals onto the counter.  As a stutterer I generally avoided talking to strangers unless it was absolutely necessary;  never had it been more necessary than at that moment.  I had to throw the neandertal behind the counter off my scent.

“D-d-d-d-d-d-d-doing some r-r-r-research for a class,” I nervously sputtered.

The clerk, clearly a sadist of the first order, took her time in making me sweat.  She peeled off her glasses to wipe off a few tiny bubbles of my saliva,  unintentional escapees from my battle to liberate the “D” sound from behind my lips,  and then cocked her head a bit forward and over the counter to give me the full up and down, head-to-toe assessment.   Returning the glasses to their reluctant perch on her greasy beak, she  pursed her lips, furrowed her protruding cro-magnon brow and with a glare fixated firmly upon my crotch, expelled an audible snicker, mockingly, bordering on contemptuous.

“N-n-n-no really.  Sssss-Psychology,” I implored.

“I care.  N-n-n-n-no really, I care.  Nineteen forty-seven with tax.  You need a bag, Ron Jeremy?  Or you gonna’ haul your loot to the P-p-p-p-playboy mansion sans sack?”

Normally, making fun of my speech was an invitation to the mostest hostilest of hostile diatribes but this time I let it pass.  I figured that my three-fold admission of impotence laying there on the counter would serve only to diminish the credibility of my wrath.  I sneered at her, grabbed my books and muttered a low-key “Fuck you, you bug-eyed caveman fuck” under my breath and exited swiftly.

I hit the books as soon as I got home.  Following instructions was never my forte so after skimming the pages I concluded that the cure for impotence was practice:  a little couch hockey for one, punchin’ the munchkin’ as it were,  only with focus, concentration and patience.  Excellent!  No significant disruption to my usual routine.  This would be a cakewalk.  Frosting and all.

The fateful day arrived and we found ourselves once again in Lexi’s dorm room.  I’m not sure if it was the plush layer of her soft Gund teddy bears under my sweaty butt or merely the fact that I was a nineteen year old boy with a firm, horny, naked eighteen year old girl straddling his midsection, but getting an erection turned out to be the least of my problems.   Rather, I found myself locked in a grueling battle with the bane of innocent boys everywhere,  the cunning, insidious beast named Prematurus Ejaculatus.

The battle ended quickly.

My more-than-willing lab partner and I experimented with various techniques and without the aid of pop psychology, I eventually stumbled upon a weapon that warded off Prematurus Ejaculatus as effectively as making an honest living repels politicians.  I discovered that a very brief mental image of my grandmother stepping out of the bathtub (a vague mental remnant of something my subconscious did me the great favor of burying deeply, but obviously not deeply enough) would launch the beast skulking back into the shadows and leave me with a few more minutes of arousal-reduced sex.

Brilliant, I know.  But genius has its dark side.   When it comes to images of naked grandmas dancing through one’s head, one traverses a wafer-thin line between postponed ejaculation and downright impotence.  Not to mention incessant worries that I might be in desperate need of prolonged psychoanalysis.  I had to find a better way, a more acceptable mental strategy that wouldn’t inadvertently, in some bizarre, twisted Skinnerian nightmare, result in unbridled lust for eighty year old women.

I practiced and toyed with various mental exercises, eventually settling on a fairly reliable technique.  When things got a little too close to bingo I imagined I was straddling the nastiest girl I’d ever known in a dumpster behind the Kroger’s.   You know, the sort of hairy-armed, heavy-browed girl whose mother gives her a boy’s name and then, realizing her error, adds an “A” to the end, hoping that this will assist his/her/its kindergarten teacher in directing his/her/it to the lavatory with the skirt-clad stick figure on the door.  This technique worked for a while, but was a huge a turn-off for my girlfriend who objected to my newly-acquired habit of throwing up in my mouth a little during sex.

Finally I found my Excalibur, the magic sword that would help me yield my not-so-very-magic sword with style, finesse and longevity:  Long division.  When the tadpoles got too close to breaching the dam I’d try to mentally divide, for example,  9,472 into 587,543.  That did the trick and aside from my girlfriend’s occasional “what the fuck are you babbling about NOW?” or “HEY! Hello?  I’m down here.  Pay attention!” when I’d mutter “carry the nine, subtract 47,320”, things went pretty well and side-effect free overall.

Through dogged persistence and diligent practice by the age of twenty I was finally able to declare myself a healthy, neuroses-free sexual being and a veritable idiot savant of long division. (Only without the savant.)  Best of all I had pulled myself up by my own jockstraps, blazed my own trail through the steamy jungle of sexual discombobulation without the advantages of public school sex education.  Confident of my skills and armed with one sizable and continually expanding notch in my bedpost, I confronted my mother about her lack of trust in my sexual enlightenment so many years ago.   Turns out mom had simply made an error, checked off the wrong box on the permission slip.  What began in error had resulted in a decade-long comedy of errors.

Bless her soul; I wouldn’t have had it, perhaps not even gotten it, any other way…

Copyright 2009 by Mark M. Rostenko

Adrian was the sophisticated out-of-towner, my mentor in coolness, my own personal Fonzie who taught me that wearing a belt with shorts was totally uncool, a lesson I mention only to highlight his obvious credibility in sexual tutelage, as though his frayed cut-offs imprinted with images of tiny hot dogs encased in tiny buns, warm apple pies, and phallic baseball bats & balls could possibly lead a perceptive human being to any other conclusion.

I  listened with rapt attention there in the cool grass by the volleyball court,  my reactions vascillating between fascination, disgust, horror and disbelief.  I soon learned that I could make a baby simply by getting together with a girl and  peeing.

I recoiled in horror at the notion that I was flushing innocent children down the toilet several times a day, not to mention all the poor babies whose lives were cut short under trees and bushes around the cottage.  Adrian settled my nerves by clarifying that babies were only created with a special kind of pee available only during an erection and that again, a girl was a critical component of the process.

I breathed a sigh of relief and muttered a silent prayer for the innocent unborn forced to dwell in my bladder.  Shortly thereafter I began to worry that I’d never have children as I found it nearly impossible to urinate with a full-on boner, but I figured I’d work it out somehow now that the important basics of the vast sexual mysteries had been revealed to me.

Nevertheless, I still hadn’t a clue why anyone would want to pee with a girl.  But clarity would soon be achieved via my first hands-on sexual experience, courtesy of a stunning older blonde woman with exemplary breasts.   Coincidentally, they were the only breasts I’d ever seen, so imagine my good fortune at having tracked down an exemplary pair so readily!

I never got her real name but she lived in our basement amongst stacks of my mother’s Cosmopolitan magazines.  What compelled me to leaf through them I don’t know, but I sensed instinctively that between their glossy pages, wonderful treasures awaited discovery.  Something deliciously forbidden beckoned from within those stacks, a calling I was powerless to resist.

I wasn’t a big fan of Cosmo, mind you,  but with research and diligent effort I discovered that on average,  every third issue contained at least one photo of real live naked two-dimensional glossy full color boobs. (I was maybe twelve at the time; two dimensions were plenty and still at least one dimension more than I was prepared to handle.)  Most of the time the boob shot would be found in the “Cosmo Tells All” section.  Armed with this revelation I quickly and efficiently sorted the magazines into “booby” and “no booby” piles.  I spent the rest of the afternoon with the booby pile, marveling at my wondrous new-found bounty of luscious half-nakedness.

And then I saw her:  My first love.  You never forget your first.  I can see her now, in the sauna, a fluffy white turkish towel wrapped around her tanned, sweaty thighs and another around her luxurious blonde locks.  And perched between, the gold mine, the pay-off for my diligence:  two glorious, perfect breasts, glistening with beads of perspiration.

I named her Donna.  No particular reason; it just struck me as a good name for a hot blonde with great tits.  The rising tension in my loins felt unfamiliar, yet oddly appealing.  I was suddenly overcome by the urge to get naked.  But not here.  Even at that innocent age I instinctively sensed that neither of my parents would be thrilled to discover their boy laying on the basement floor, pants around his ankles, perusing mom’s beauty magazines.

I came up with a plan.  Discretely,  I smuggled Donna out on our first date, wrapping her in an old sweater as she accompanied me to the upstairs bathroom.  Locking the door behind me, I proceeded to gently  spread the pages of Cosmo apart. They offered no resistance.  Donna gave herself to me fully and willingly.  She was as eager as I was.  For what,  I still didn’t know, but eager nonetheless.  I shed my pants and laid beside her on the floor.

And then it happened.  What exactly happened, I didn’t know.  But happen it did.  And I liked it.  Then it was over, almost as quickly as it had begun.   What had Donna done to me?  How to get her to do it again?  I tried willing it over and over but to no avail.  I closed the pages, I opened the pages.  I put my pants on, I took them off again.  I stared at my crotch.  I begged.  I pleaded with it.   Nothing.   I put the magazine back in the sweater, ran down to the basement and retraced my footsteps exactly, hoping to recreate the entire process.  I laid down with Donna once again, exactly as I had done the first time.  Still nothing.

I wasn’t stupid, mind you, just lacking in quality public school  sex education.  I had no explanation for what had just occurred.  But I’d learn.  Soon I’d come under the expert tutelage of Mssrs. Hefner, Guccione and Flynt, the unholy trinity of titillation, the father, the son, and the “holy shit, Batman!”

Hungry to expand my education,  I progressively ransacked the entire house in search of more study aids and eventually found an entire curicculum under my parents’ bed:  a small but adequate pile of skin mags spanning the entire educational spectrum from Playboy (the porn equivalent of grade school)  to Penthouse (junior high),  Club (high school) and right on up to the pinnacle of post-graduate sex education, the Ph. D of Porn:  Hustler.

While Professors Guccione and Flynt helped me to “fill the gaps” in my sexual education, some of their lessons were mixed blessings.  Within their texts  I learned not only of the pleasures of sex, but also the pitfalls, problems and maladies.  Somewhat of a perpetual worrier and rather neurotic as a child, I developed quite a few imagined sexual dysfunctions long before I’d ever so much as see my first real live naked woman.

My slide down the slippery slope of sexual hypochondria began upon reading a blurb about an unfortunate European fellow who held the dubious distinction of sporting the world’s longest pubic hair.  Not just bad luck but a medical condition, an affliction I was quite certain would infect me moments after the onset of puberty.  Nary a dark hair on my peach-fuzzed white butt at this point, I could already hear the ridicule on the playground as I’d inevitably trip over my too-long & curlies while running for a fly-ball.  And what girl would have a boy like that?

I wasn’t paranoid;  I had scientific evidence for my impending malady:  With his shirt off, my dad looked as though someone had stapled several mid-sized grizzly bears to his chest and upper back.  I knew that the gene for outrageous pubes must surely be lurking  somewhere deep within my DNA, just waiting for the most inopportune moment to express itself.  Oh well.  At least all that time spent mindlessly rubbing the suede of my Buster Browns from tan to brown and back again wasn’t wasted but perhaps had prepared me well for a lonely future of self-gratification.

To be continued…

Copyright 2009 by Mark M. Rostenko

In those days, time was organized into four distinct seasons:  School, Christmas break, More School and Summer Vacation.   I suspect it might have been either late School or early More School as I have a vague recollection of getting the shit kicked out of me for wearing what is now referred to in trendy “Look at me I shop at REI”  circles as a “Sherpa hat” but back then was more affectionately known as “some dumbass retarded winter hat that Stinky’s mom makes him wear so he doesn’t catch the sniffles.”

Hatherly Elementary, the setting for my forthcoming shame, was architecturally typical of the period.  A drab pentagon-shaped brick and steel structure reinforced with cinder block walls painted a sterile, bland off-white throughout its hollows, our school helped sustain the comfortable suburban delusion that direct Soviet missile strikes were survivable.  This was the Cold War era and every month or so we’d all practice hiding under our desks, shocked into cowering submission by the ear-splitting volume of the fire bell.   Apparently, crouching under a layer of thin-gauge steel and formica would protect us grade-schoolers from multi-gazillion degree thermonuclear fireballs while the rest of suburbia vaporized into oblivion.

One particular afternoon when the threat of hellish nuclear bombardment was apparently quite low, we were welcomed to remain seated above our desks, relax and enjoy our first formal lessons in human sexuality.  The festivities would begin with a film strip exploring  all the fascinating giggle-inspiring pubescent changes our budding young bodies would soon experience followed by a discussion session in which our teacher, Miss Landers (name changed to protect me from libel suits)  would nervously do her best not to belie her utter and total ignorance on the subject of sex.

(While we innocent, sheltered suburban pupils weren’t yet particularly knowledgeable about the extracurricular activities of Man & Woman, least of all our teachers, it didn’t take more than a heaping dollhouse toy teaspoon of gray matter and a quick glance at her physiognomy to accurately conclude that Miss Landers was not the kind of woman upon whom the sex fairy bestowed the most generous of her wondrous gifts.)

A “film strip”, by the way,  was the height of 1970s audio-visual technology, a short roll of film stuffed into a clunky cast iron device  vaguely reminiscent of a cannon in shape, generally used as a teaching aid.  Under dimmed lights still images were projected onto a screen while Mr. or Mrs. Educator read from a study guide and occasionally  offered his or her own brilliant wisdom to a roomful of bored children who took advantage of the dark to pick their noses, yank girls’ pony tails or engage in the timeless game of “Pssst!  Hey!  Smell my finger!”

Miss Landers, a bell-shaped woman with monstrous buck teeth that could make any species of large earth-moving equipment fear for its job security, stood before us readying herself to make a brief pre-sex education announcement.  She donned the horn-rimmed glasses which hung steadfastly from a silver chain that curved around her spectacular yet wildly assymetrical breasts,  picked off the half-dried spittle which frequently accumulated in the corners of her mouth, cleared her throat and called out three names:  Colleen, Kelly, and Mark.

My heart sank.  We three had failed to make the permission-slip cut, our parents having decided that we weren’t quite emotionally prepared for the stunning revelation that there’d soon be little sprouts of hair around our naughty bits.  I was now officially Loser of the Day, if not the week, the only boy in the entire sixth grade not worthy of being entrusted with the secrets of sex and puberty.

I followed the girls out into the adjoining library, my head hung low with shame, banished from the apparently cooler, hipper, more mature crowd, no longer certain of when these great mysteries might finally be revealed to me.  As we sat at a table just outside the classroom,  misunderstood pre-pubescent sexual tension hanging exquisitely thick in the air, I pondered the day when years earlier, I told my mom the first dirty joke I’d ever heard.

“Hey mom! Why is Peter Pan green?”

“Why honey?”, she replied in that typical suburban mom “my kid’s talking some asinine drivel again but for the sake of his fragile developing self-esteem I’ll pretend to give a shit” tone of voice.

“Well, if someone hit your peter with a pan you’d turn green too!”

I stood there grinning, eyes wide with anticipation and eyebrows cocked sharply upward awaiting approval and uproarious laughter.   Much to my surprise and confusion  I was instead scuttled out of the kitchen (this was back in the old days when moms still cooked), two palms pressed forcefully into my shoulder blades and ordered to go play in the yard.  It’d be several years before my confusion was unwound with the revelation that most, if not all moms don’t have “peters.”  At least not back in the 70s when I was growing up.

While the girls amused one another with the latest gossip about Donny Osmond and Leif Garett, I took this quiet library time to make a thorough study of my Buster Brown shoes and soon made an amazing discovery:  That by massaging the suede in alternate directions I could turn the color of my shoes from tan to brown and back again.  Kick-ass!  My way-cool mom had surreptitiously clad me with a pair of  mobile, stealth Etch-A-Sketches!

I proceeded to dazzle the girls by making the words “ass”, “dick” and “booger” appear and disappear with a few simple strokes of my fingernail. Ever the grateful audience, the girls returned the favor by promptly reporting to Miss Landers  that I had been writing “ass”, “dick” and “booger” on my shoes.  I responded with the time-tested “DID NOT!” defense, proudly displaying my clean and uniformly tan Buster Browns.  Lacking any evidence regarding what would nowadays be considered felonious sexual harassment, Miss Landers looked at me suspiciously, shook her head and escorted us back into the classroom.  Boys: 1, Girls: 0.

Feeling like a circus sideshow freak, I managed to avert everyone’s gaze while winding my  way back to my seat through the gauntlet of pitying yet newly sexually-knowledgeable gawkers.  I had been counting on my friends to enlighten me about the ways of manly men, but my queries into the mysteries of the fairer sex met with a rather cool reception.  Apparently the privileged perusal of cartoon boobs had turned all of my friends into sophisticated mature Big Men About Town who instead chastised me for treating the subject so “childishly.”  I was promptly informed that sex education was no casual nor laughing matter but in fact a badge of honor and distinction which would now serve to separate the boys from the…well, from the other boys who had gazed at cartoon boobs on a filmstrip.

Somehow I made it through the remainder of sixth grade, buoyed by the anticipation of summer at our family cottage, only an eternity away (in kid years).  Whatever I lacked in formal sex education would soon be more than made up for with my cousin’s no-holds-barred, unfit-for-public-school-consumption version of all I really needed to know.

to be continued…

Copyright 2009 Mark M. Rostenko All rights reserved.

When my father died, I inherited a veritable cornucopia of postal commemoratives to hobbies, music, and history preserved indelibly on sheets of scored, gummed paper.  (For the younger readers, “gummed paper” is a phenomenon of a more primitive age, before the overindulged MTV generation grew into whiny, self-absorbed impostors of adulthood demanding self-adhesive stamps to save the whales, horses, shoe leather or whatever it is that manually operated, saliva-activated glue comes from.)  Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, marines on Guadalcanal, scuba divers, bloated puffer fish and grinning dolphins:  if there’s a “29” in the corner, I’ve got ‘em.  A lot of ‘em.

My postmaster, a hardnosed librarian-esque overlord of all things bundled, sealed and stamped has assured me that I can’t exchange them for new stamps.  And I mean “assured” in the “if you ask me just one more fucking time I swear that as certainly as I’m cloaked in this something-vaguely-akin-to-paisley mu mu, I will call the sheriff” sense of the word.  So I’m forced to use them two at a time, which is undoubtedly all part of some sinister plot concocted in the shadowy linoleum-clad halls of Post Office Central to extract more money from simple, unsuspecting glue lickers like me.

Why so many stamps?   Maybe dad was a bit letter-happy back in 1993, but a scuba diver he was not.  Most assuredly he was no fan of “crazy god-awful noise” like blues or country which became remarkably clear about seventeen seconds after I took up the electric guitar.  Actually, I hadn’t known him to favor any particular musical genre, although the “Charlie’s Angels” theme  was a perennial favorite.   (I suspect this had more to do with Jaclyn Smith’s breasts than with musical composition.)  I can only surmise that like so many of his generation who grew up in leaner times, he had a penchant for stocking up on whatever was available, to which the nine cases of liquor in our glass-of-wine-only-on-the-holidays household stood as bold testament.

To be sure, postal preferences aren’t high on the list of things a son treasures about his father’s memory, but somehow these innocuous pieces of sticky paper served as a gateway toward profound insights about my dad as a person and a human being rather than simply a father.

I don’t mean simply in the sense of  “merely.”  Rather, as a child my dad occurred to me as the mythical ideal of a father, not simply the decent, committed, faithful man busting his hump to make a good life for his family.  Eventually every son’s fantasy of father as Hero, the stalwart invincible protector of home and family, fragments piece by fragile piece, splintered by the trivial yet incessant attacks of day-to-day life.  My fantasy began to fracture in high school.

I came home one spring afternoon to news that my grandmother had died several hours earlier.  Seated in dad’s favorite avocado green recliner, a piece that shouldn’t have survived the seventies yet had managed to drag its shredded carcass well into the eighties, I waited for him to return from work.  Dangling dad’s favorite decrepit baby-shit tan corduroy slippers off my toes, I wondered what it’d be like to lose a mother.  My own mom, an overly compassionate woman who couldn’t bear to see any living thing suffer sat on the couch close by.  Her uncharacteristic silence belied the tumult raging in her sweet-tempered heart.

The familiar low-pitched rumble of the garage door opener announced dad’s arrival, followed soon thereafter by the pop and metallic click of the lock as he entered through the kitchen.  Before he had managed to close the door behind him mom blurted out  “Grandma Anna has died,” no longer able to contain within her gentle soul the fireball of emotional demolition fate had tapped her to lob.

Seated with my back to the door, not quite ready to bear witness to my father’s pain, I felt my heart cramp up in a doughy, twisted knot as his voice cracked softly, turning upward in pitch with a slight air of confusion.  “Died?”, he repeated, obviously failing to choke back his tears.

I don’t recall what happened next.  My memory stalls, frozen in time at that fragile moment of sorrowful disbelief in his voice, the lilting sadness, a child-like whimper  bespeaking vulnerability that I had never before witnessed in this paragon of emotional control.  I remember that one short utterance and to this day my heart breaks for him all over again.  In that moment he wasn’t my father;  he was my grandmother’s son, a child who had just lost his mom.   And in that moment he became human to me.  We were both sons now.

It wasn’t until my late twenties that the seed of my father’s humanity planted that day would finally sprout into living, breathing understanding.  I was home for the holidays, taking a short respite from my usual role of unjustifiably dissatisfied, over-privileged and under-appreciative asshole.  Realizing that I knew almost nothing about the man who had done so much and asked so little, I decided it was time for a sincere father/son chat.  This wouldn’t be easy.

Not one to reveal much about himself, dad wasn’t particularly versed in heart-to-heart discussion.  He was “old school” 1930’s European, not even vaguely resembling late twentieth century mushy-spined new-age ilk, emasculated hypersensitive twits who spew forth their every precious thought and feeling like do-do birds regurgitating fishy pabulum for their young.  Dad was a practical, logical man.  No frills, no idle chit-chat and the only hair product he owned was a roll of masking tape.   He’d stick down a strip over his slicked back Elvis hairdo to keep the wind from blowing the hair into his eyes when mowing the lawn.  That is, until mom finally talked him into using far less obvious “invisible” cellophane tape, the one concession he made to her finer aesthetic sensibilities.

It was Christmas Eve with everyone settled comfortably in the living room, gifts unwrapped, coffee brewing.  Mom was laughing, most likely about nothing in particular, just laughing because, well, that’s just who she was. The consummate hostess, cloaked in a tastefully understated beige wool skirt and blouse she had embroidered herself, my mother couldn’t help but laugh, a release valve, I suppose for her overbrimming supply of good cheer and optimism.

Dad came alive at times like these, animated by the radiant glow of the woman he’d loved, adored, and cherished since the moment he set eyes upon her almost four decades earlier.  Reserved as he was most of the time, around company he could be quite lively, engaging everyone with his cornball humor.  Mom completed him, a bottomless well of lightheartedness from which he could draw to complement, or perhaps offset his rather impassive facade.  I seized the opportunity afforded by the holiday spirit and invited him for a heart-to-heart.

We shuffled hesitatingly into the front room for some privacy. Suddenly I grew terrified.  Heart pumping furiously, arteries throbbing in my neck, blood gushing through strained veins so fast I thought my eardrums might pop.  I was in uncharted territory, taking on the task of intimacy with a man I barely knew and had feared my whole life.

Dad was always good to me, but we tend to fear what we don’t understand.  A cavernous forty year generation gap had entrenched itself between us, a chasm chock-full of misunderstanding and tempers lost, the inevitable shrapnel strewn from an explosive mix of old world expectations for obedience rubbing up against the rebelliousness of a stubborn free-willed son.  I was making my first attempt to cross that chasm, woefully underequipped for the journey, armed only with the desire to communicate my feelings for him.  I wanted to give something back to the man who had given me everything.

Immediately I sensed his discomfort.  In our conservative old world Ukrainian home the air was often thick with the unspoken and this time was no exception.  “What is this about?” he must have wondered.  Was I in trouble?   Whom had I knocked up?   Had I concocted yet another hare-brained scheme  begging for the old man’s financial sponsorship?

Clad in the blue version of his two favorite polyester Sansabelt trousers and his inseparable companion, a wool-lined suede vest once tan but now worn to a slick and shiny deep chocolate brown, he plopped down in an ergonomically-devoid yet ornately carved chair my mom had displayed in the front room, her little museum of knick-knacks and family heirlooms.   I’m not sure whether he sighed from the discomfort of sitting in a chair not designed for actual sitting, or simply to brace himself for what might be coming.  I didn’t give it much thought.  At his age, my dad’s body had a tendency to casually liberate peculiar sounds that only youth and better health could more reliably restrain.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I intentionally placed myself beneath him, a token affirmation that despite his age and my taller height, I was still only half the man he was.  I started to speak, struggling, anxiety playing hell with the stutter I’d had since the age of six.  I was dancing tentatively now, scared witless out on the skinny branches, unstable, shaky, unfamiliar.  But I was looking for the fruit and out there, far from the safety and stability of the trunk, is where it grows.

I said I wanted to know more about him.  What was it like growing up in Ukraine, starved under Stalin’s diabolical rule?  What games did he play?  Who were his friends?  How did he get to America?  Who were my great grandparents?

Silence.  He looked up as though searching for something, then closed his eyes. His head drooped forward and down, as though the muscles in his neck, suddenly aware of what was coming had given up, retreating from the frighteningly unfamiliar. Then a sharp uptake of air through his nostrils and a forward thrust from his belly: A sob in the making.

Time stands still, an emotional eternity passes. Still no words. Then tears.   Not the smattering of moisture that occasionally breaks free from the rigid grasp of a man well practiced in holding back emotion, but the honest unabashed sobs of a father who could no longer contain decades of nagging, parasitic doubt about his son’s feelings.

In a flash of insight triggered by his release I realized my own failures as a son.  This was no mere insight but an abominable vision of whom I had been for him all those years, as though a thick, choking fog had suddenly engulfed my soul, upon which some angel, or demon, projected an inescapable 360 degree hologram of my ugliness. There I was going about my life, self-absorbed, taking for granted my father’s generosity, love and dedication to family, expressing no prior interest in him. Taking taking taking. Always taking.  Now I needed to give.

What is love but to take heartfelt interest in another?  To care, to pay attention, to strive for a glimpse of their soul.  Yes, I cared about my father.  I appreciated his sacrifices and his hard work.  I scribbled “I love you” in every birthday and Father’s Day card.  I bought him cologne he’d never use, gloves he’d never wear, doo-dads he’d never pull out of the box after Christmas.  But had my father ever felt my love?   Had I ever made it real for him?

On that day I did.  He’d been waiting for it all my life and in that instant the painful yearning overwhelmed his stoic facade, like tumultuous floodwaters no longer willing to tolerate the artificial restraint and puny efforts of a man made dam.  So too did his need to be heard overcome his usual silence.  He spoke freely, between tears, of childhood trials with severe asthma, of family and friends lost to Stalin’s purges, of witnessing  loved ones undeservedly carted off by the secret police in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again.  So much became clear to me now.  What I perceived as faults, what I had thus far failed to understand about him began to make sense.

My father detested sports.  Now I understood why. What small boy, crippled by severe asthma wouldn’t develop a reflexive loathing to the arena in which he was undoubtedly mercilessly shamed and taunted by children whom nature had chosen to equip more suitably?   A boy first wins confidence and wrestles into his position in the cruel pecking order of boyhood on the playground.  How could my dad compete in a game he was unfairly predisposed to lose?

Silence, emotional distance:  Traits of an unfeeling man unwilling to display vulnerability?  Hardly. To dad, silence meant survival.  He barely knew his own family.  Growing up in a place where loved ones were routinely “disappeared” for any indiscretion or cross-eyed glance at the pathetic  results of the Glorious Soviet Revolution, my father was denied routine childhood inquisitiveness.

In Stalinist Ukraine, adults spoke little and revealed still less to  children for fear that their innocent playground talk would lead to a visit from the KGB. Stalin’s thugs-in-trench coats relied upon hearsay to sniff out alleged enemies of the state, like pigs rooting for truffles, guided only by the flimsiest fleeting scent.  Spineless neighbors routinely furnished rumors in exchange for a pat on the head and favored status with the local communist henchmen.  A simple joke, a complaint about an empty belly (induced by Stalin’s forced starvation) could result in banishment to Siberian labor camps, perhaps worse.

Trust no one.  Say nothing.  The less you know, the longer you live.   In my father’s world, silence and emotional withholding translated into self-preservation and survival for friends and family.  How could he have learned any other way?  How could he have turned out any differently?

As a child I was forbidden to leave the dinner table until my plate was clean.  My obstinance and free-willed nature resulted in hours spent alone hovering over a partially-full plate, silently raging over the grave injustice of being forced to eat what I didn’t want.  But my father’s attitude was born of a time when dinner was random, unscheduled and unreliable, dependent entirely upon whether someone had managed to scrounge up a morsel of food.   Pickiness was a luxury hungry children could ill afford.  What I perceived as a tyrannical effort to break my will occurred to my father as gratitude and respect for the seemingly endless bounty available to us here in the land of plenty.

Suddenly the man who made my skin crawl when sucking the last bit of marrow out of every chicken bone was transformed into the grateful and generous provider who’d never allow his family to do without.  My father appreciated the last, miniscule fragment of food on his plate in a way that only a starving child could.  He just wanted for me to understand.

And understand I did, finally.  One short conversation inspired by love and the desire to touch another’s soul, and an entire universe of compassion had opened to me.  On that day I began to truly appreciate my father’s humanity.  In subsequent years I’d find myself solving more of the riddles that were my dad.  Many of his quirks, some of them now finding renewed expression in me, began to make sense.

I had wondered why a man of relative means would waste time and energy fixing the seemingly unfixable, forcing still more mileage out of a toaster that had long since surpassed its right to eternal rest in household appliance heaven.  I found myself doing the same.

In a disposable society where repairs, oil changes, health, most everything is outsourced to “professionals”,  my father and I found pride and confidence in self-reliance.  He came from a place where nothing was thrown out because so little was available.  Naturally predisposed to an apocalyptic mindset,  I often find myself worrying that society will soon collapse, thereby rendering new toaster acquisition unlikely.  But I’ll make it no matter what, just like dad.  I’ll have toast come hell or high water. (I like to think of this as normal behavior for children of war survivors.  I prefer not to think that I was born with several of the more important screws torqued to slightly less than optimal levels.)

Sometimes I wondered how much I’d never know about him.  And one day while licking my newfound bounty of  twenty-nine cent stamps I saw my dad. Not physically, of course.  He had died by then.  But I envisioned him at the post office buying those stamps.   Temporarily released from the shackles of habitual family interaction, (we learn our roles early and play them for life), undoubtedly he joked around with the clerk, animated and lively, the way he was around house guests.  This was his exclusive world, far from family expectations and roles to play.

In four decades it had never occurred to me until that moment that my father had lived an entire life outside of our family:  His office, his practice, his patients.  Of course I had always known this, but I’d never truly grasped its depth:  That for forty hours a week he lived in a world entirely foreign to me.

I could see him back at the office putting away the stamps and tending to business.  This place was all his.  He built it.  An immigrant on the run from World War II, he fled his homeland and arrived at Ellis Island not knowing English.  In time, neither asking nor receiving help from anyone, he put himself through school, obtaining first a degree in engineering and years later graduating top of his class from the University of Michigan Dental School while juggling a full time job, wife and child, and another on the way. He was the American Dream incarnate.

I envisioned him standing in his office, beaming, proud and strong.  This was the little empire he had built through sheer will, tenacity and hard work.  He wasn’t just my dad anymore but a man whom I admired, a man worthy of anyone’s admiration.

Actually, my dad most likely never indulged himself with pride.  He was too humble and decent for that.  Perhaps I was projecting my own pride upon his memory.  But he deserved to be proud and I wished that he had been.  And happy.  I felt so deeply for him in that moment, so sorry that he had helplessly watched the love of his life  reduced to a lifeless shell by cancer, so sorry for his lonely suffering in the two years spent without her before finally succumbing himself.  I hoped that he had harbored no regrets and that he’d known what a good man he was.  It nourished my heart and made me whole to imagine him standing there, just a decent man satisfied with his life, proud of his family, aware of his extraordinary accomplishments.

In that moment all my thoughts, questions, and memories had come full circle, wrapped up neatly within the unlikely prism of a postage stamp, projecting a complete, perfect image of the man he was. I finally understood my father as a person, a man with his own life, his own history, feelings, passions, triumphs and failures, the extraordinary ordinary man in the street.  This was my dad; a man with many stamps and so very much more.  He was human, so very human.  And my hero.

Copyright 2009 Mark M. Rostenko All rights reserved.