In The Beginning

In the beginning there was gasoline and too much stress. The weight of a thousand sorrows strapped across his back, too much for one man to bear.

That would be Grandpa Robison, my grandfather's dad, my mother's grandfather, this fatherhood being passed down through two poor hands stretched out across the garage, reaching.

How for the sheer will of not being able to endure the depression, he picked up that

can of gasoline, that rust in the garage for emergencies can of gasoline, and brought it to his despondent lips.

The sheer terror, I imagine, of feeling nothing, of feeling so much of nothing that he would swig that down like a coveted bottle of Old Crow or Jim Beam or some bootleg whiskey with the name of a man or a bird or maybe just of desperation and drink.

What then? I asked a hundred times. What then?

And how he didn't die but became an invalid, no longer able to speak or perhaps even to think.

Did he do it then? Did he divorce the depression? Did he escape?

But all that follows ever in the story is a stepfather to my grandpa Paul, a police officer who came in and took the generation to the finish line.

I begin in the garage with the rusty gasoline. I come from the drinking and the forgetting.

How there is so much life that was lived, love lost, miracles endured before I, some 50 years later, sat dangerously crunched on the floor with my face hovering over the gasoline pot in my neighbor's garage.

How he let me, at four years old, smell it.

That dark, earthy smell I still love to this day. How this has never seemed a coincidence until now.

I come from poor Kansas, Kansas without a county or a city or a town, just that poor part we call Kansas where my mother recollects single sheets of toilet paper rationed out to each one's use.

How my grandpa Paul, the fatherless father, raised his family out of poverty to become the governor of the Alaskan territories, to write the Alaskan state plank, the constitution.

This poor boy, this fatherless dad.

My mom's mom loved the poor boy from Kansas, her high school English teacher, class student, 12 years her minor.

How he courted her for years and then came back from the war a lieutenant in the army to win her favor at last.

Her submission to the improbability of it all.

I come from this. From gasoline drinking great grandfathers and vodka swilling grandpa Paul and how drink is what kills off our family men every time.

and how I am almost a man.

I come from a father who also drank, who said I'd rather live a fast 40 than a slow 80, and so he did.

And a mother who let him go when the drink stole into all the crevices of a good life, just as her mother had let her father go when two girls later in a large political career he decided a younger wife and a prettier life would be more fun.

Man, was he fun.

How at 55 he learned to ski just so he could teach his grandkids, took us on Winnebago trips all around Alaska for king salmon fishing and camping outdoors, always the rattle of a vodka on ice in the cup holder, promising nothing.

The men are always fun, both sides of the family, fun and enslaved by booze, and the fierce resistance to duty, to being tied down.

I also like how booze takes off the harness. Let me lead myself around like a chicken with her head cut off just at the pleasure nerve running, pecking, squawking.

The men leave, erase themselves. So did I.

I come from strong women who believed isolation was the closest form of communion. Women who did what may not have been right, but because they wanted to.

I come from want.

Here inside this tiny temple of mine, this citadel, I have met my great-grandfather and his grief.

I have tasted the sincere regret of my father's irretrievable, the wishing now for a slow eighty, almost forty years later.

I've been without a family of origin, connected in the reds and yellows or orange, the umbra fading of a perfect sunset inside my mind's eye, where only God and the part of me that has no name can meet.

I'm telling you, it's quiet in there.

Quiet as the reaching for the oil can. That pin drop last instant before absence gives up on itself and the whiskey bottle is tilted once again.

I've been to the place before oil and whiskey and politics, before mothers and fathers and roles, before fishing poles and long dreams cast out like so many lures.

Catch me this, if you will, a name.

I like the part of a man that has no name, a woman before her labels.

I like you before you get there.

When it's summer 1976, there's something about the never-endingness of being seven years old with no adults around.

I knew back then even that to get to the heart of a thing you had to cut it right open, fillet that curiosity on an open grill, be bold.

Then I learned to tame and tamp down that directness, make room for the person's name to be okay with you getting to the guts of it.

I come from the guts of a thing, the messy sticky beautiful guts of you and I talking without our roles, our borders, our faces.

I come from loving before knowing and feeling before seeing and the small solitary promise to trust that everything, every single iota of every single thing is connected.

And it's the connection, me digging a path with black on white, scratch on sniff that compels me, moves me forever along this Mobius strip of being closer to us.

I said I'm going to spend the next year soul sourcing when my heart like a mighty steel door had slammed open and stuck.

Not soul searching, but soul sourcing.

And I don't even know what that means, but I know it will not involve answers that are informed by liquids.

And I suspect there is no way that speaking or not speaking will get me there.

But I'm showing up because I come from pioneer men and women and you haven't heard the half of them.

And we take our pioneering seriously. This climbing up and out of every flavor of poverty you can think of.

Mine is anorexic. This poverty of starving myself of a life I've already earned.

It's curious like that, how you can hold a thing in your very hand and ask with all sincerity, how can I get this?

My feet were bare and dirty and swift. They took me places even now in their fancy shuffles Gucci, Christian Dior, Prada, rag and bone.

But my knees hurt so my feet can't run and I'm here where I came from still trying to reconcile the home I am living in.

I also come from a long whirlwind of words that open doors and tear down walls. I come from God speak, from tender heartache and from so much understanding it could have the moon.

My humanity as a dinosaur still cruising the earth. Highway 80, fast car, slow heartbeat.

About as smart as a box of hair but wouldn't hurt a fly. Wisdom chaser, bag of religious bones.

Right before he died, my therapist winked, "It's always the mother's fault."

And that made me mad. Dads with their hall passes. As if fathers could ever actually escape the enormity of such duty.

I come from hall passes in the principal's office and greed, hungry for life and understanding, and I will admit it as if my life depended on it.

I became hungry for the right words.