Exercise #6 (just the start of something)

The Forest of Arden

The old man palms the ridged soil. He measures the harvest along the imperfections of his fingers. “Every piece of this land,” he murmurs to himself, “every piece.” He repeats the phrase and rests the timbre on the wet dirt like a divine shout meant to invigorate the soil. He remembers moving beyond his family of farmers and acquiring that old lime kiln in Lafayette, Nebraska and how at 26 he would know what it was like to own and be able to say that every piece, every piece of this belongs to me. And when that piece wasn’t enough, when Lafayette was no longer enough, when the prospect of the many pieces of gold became the siren call pulling at the places of his body where hunger was not supposed to live. He left.
6 months it took him to find his way to San Francisco: down the Wabash river to the Ohio… a side wheeled steamer called the Hiram Powers brought them to New Orleans… the long trudge through Texas… cholera, small pox… the day he nearly drowned in the Rio Grande… every piece of this land he moved over, through, or around, all of this to find his way to San Francisco. All of this, to find his journey to be wholly insignificant in a city of men who looked like him— with nothing but the same stories to tell.
The true riches of this land though, were to be found in agriculture. Farming, for the man, was nothing more than an old family trope. The apricots, cauliflower, corn— this is where the prosperity of these men and the prosperity of this new state would be built upon. And the old man, surveys the richness of his land and remembers when it was only the meager space his home has grown much too big for. And the trees, for years he has listened to the winds scuff the tree leaves and learned them into prayer. All of this now his. “Every piece,” he tells himself, “every piece of this land.”
Every piece of what was once only 2 acres of land, is now every piece of 6000. His young wife, only 22 years of age and their only commonalty shared is a love of Shakespeare. He remembers how the other day they read to each other, as they often do, this time from “As You Like It”. It was the scene in which Orlando professes his love to Rosalind, and he was caught upon the moment when Rosalind responds to Orlando’s query as to whether she will have him, by saying, “Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?” Can one desire too much of a good thing. He let the line deliberate itself upon his hum, until he caught his young wife giggling.
“Why are you laughing?” he would ask her.
“It’s the thing. Too much of a good, thing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s talking about his…” she would fill the end pause by pointing at her husband’s crotch.
“Funny. I never read it like that.”
On this day, the old man recalls the scene again. “Hmm,” he muses, “I think she might be right.” He looks over the tops of the trees and notices, it is the time of the day when they start to bruise the skyline. His wife keeps telling him, they should name this place of theirs. And he recalls the story of Rosalind and Orlando and the Forest of Arden. How the word Arden catches his tongue. How it sounds a lot like Eden.

The Rabbit Hole

Before they built an elementary school by my house, all of what was there, was a long field of dirt mounds and distended branches. We use to chase jackrabbits here, stomping across the wild brush— little stumps of boys running around in this unending useless pursuit that only ever ended in scraped knees and small cuts across the body that made the skin swell into cross hatches that had our bodies look like they were pulled out of a sketchbook. One day while we chased one around the field, it crawled into a mound so carefully adorned by roots and torn branches it looked like a gate, an entry way to some story a mother tells to her kids. I remember asking my cousins what they thought was down there. They laughed and joked that it was the Easter Bunny that lived there before conceding to not knowing. “Maybe it takes you somewhere away from here,” my cousin told me, and then dared me to go in and find out. I approached the mound, my legs began to numb to the point where the sound of each step rang a hollow below my waist. I stood there and did nothing as my cousins soon became bored with their game of me and we all left together. Sometime after, I remember going back to that mound by myself. I remember pulling at the roots, at the torn branches, only to find there was nothing more, than more of the same. Nothing but the dirt, and the scattered remains of everything that was there before me.

Cardboard

The day after we watched the movie, “Beat Street” my brother and I showed up at our cousins house with a packing box that our parents had meant to use to ship goods back to the Philippines. My cousin had an older brother who was a DJ, so he brought a recording of UTFO’s “Roxanne Roxanne”. However none of us owned a radio, but my other cousin, he had a tape recorder, which at first we used only because there was such an odd experience that came with being able to hear the sound of your own voice. Then we used it to make crank calls using bits we recorded from the movie “Airplane”. I couldn’t even begin to count how many people we annoyed that summer with the sound of Leave it to Beaver’s mom” saying “Just hang loose blood, we about to catch up on the rebound with the medisyne.” For days break dance practice consisted of constantly having to rewind “Roxanne Roxanne” and seeing who can pull off the backspin the longest. We couldn’t remember much from the movie and the only thing we could refer to for moves was a copy of “Flashdance”. When the tape recorder ate our only source of music, my cousin rummaged through his sister’s cassette tape collection. Our initiation into hip-hop, for now, was to be ushered in by European men with bad hair and a predilection towards bending the general populace’s idea of gender.

The Damn Lizard

Walking away from the train tracks we chased a lizard down the bike trail. My brother who hawkishly spotted the creature running out the brush hurried himself down the hill with nothing but a poking stick in his right hand. The lizard ran up the partition wall that separated our homes from the mobile community, and into a crack slit near to where the wall wedges itself into the hill. My brother swore he could see the lizard in the crack and began to poke at it furiously with his stick. He hit nothing, could barely reach the enclosed space where the lizard had crouched into. If it was even there anymore. If it hadn’t already found another opening to slip into. We told my brother, that’s enough, let’s go. He just stood there, poking around that hole, banging against it as if it owed him that lizard, responding to us only in aggravated grunts and twitched shrugs of his open shoulder. We waited there for an hour. Until my brother, out of steam and impetus threw the stick against the wall. “Forget it,” he told us, “it’s just a stupid lizard.”

The Creek

Under a bridge laid out for freight trains we’d sit right underneath, where it begins to break from the surface and bound over the ravine. We’d lay out on the rocks, listen to the sound of all that weight rumbling over our heads. The tracks bridged a narrow creek. For a while we’d climb down the ravine and walk around there to catch crawdads. Until one day a kid in my class stopped showing up. This smelly kid, who wore the same Oakland A’s hat every day to the point where the sweat stains had encroached upon the letter A. He had been walking around the creek, tripped and hit his head on a rock somewhere in the shallow waters. That creek swallowed him up and for days my parents had demanded our assurances that we would not make our way down to that creek again. The story of that kid with the Oakland A’s hat was told and retold around the school, in an alternate version he’s wading through the water, something catches hold of his foot and drags him down, drowning him in the water. In another, he is kidnapped by a stranger who strangles him and dumps his body there— they find him days later, bloated and pale as unfamiliar places. Every time I came back to the train tracks I could do nothing more than stand at the edge of the ravine; could hardly bear to even take a step into the decline. Some days, especially after a hard rain, there was something in the way the water would wash through— the way it would build into froth; the white of it’s rushing like a static pulse, like bared teeth.