And the days go by...

I came home for Christmas in 2001 from Colorado; at a party, someone gave me the name and number of someone who worked for a company looking to expand its IT staff. I don't know why I called, exactly; perhaps it had something to do with a conversation with my nephew, Mickey, who was eight at the time.

"So you're a grownup, right?" I conceded that I was.

"And so you could live wherever you want to?" I concurred that yes, that's pretty much how it works.

"Then why don't you want to live near us and see us all the time?"

One way or the other, I called. I got a job as a Programmer Analyst. Truly, if I had had the faintest idea of how spectacularly unqualified for the job I was, I would not have had the nerve to apply, but I got the job; I drove home to Colorado, packed up / threw away my belongings and rented a truck.

Despite the fact that I didn't even know what I didn't know about being a Programmer Analyst, I muddled my way through. We were put up for adoption a couple of years ago and moved as a team to a new company, and what I do has changed somewhat over the years, but it is reasonable to say that I've had the same job for five years. This represents a level of stability that, frankly, surprises me.

On the other hand, calling it stability isn't really accurate. The team I joined 5 years ago was comprised of 10 people. About a year later, there were 14 people, but only two of us from the ten I started with -- me and David. Five years in, there are three of us; roughly 3 dozen people have gone -- or come and gone -- since I started. I used to keep a list, but I stopped.

Another co-worker had a group photo that had been taken about the time she started -- when we were at our peak of 14. As they left -- got fired, burnt out, whatever -- she scribbled out their faces. I found it in the top drawer of her desk after she got fired, her own face disappeared under a violent application of marker. As I stared down, David and I smiled up -- with confidence or arrogance or just because we had been told to -- into the fluorescent light of her office.

David and I have been working together, day in, day out, for five years as of yesterday. Mickey has become an adolescent, too cool to care where I live. Tim moved off of my list of co-workers and into my house. At some point, I became an adult; it didn't happen at 18, when I joined the military, or 28, when I realized that I would never be a rock star.

I have done a lot of leaving, rushing downstream past rocks and trees, cities and towns, bumping into people, moving on. I have become a rock at the edge of the river; things rush around me. I see more this way.

Some things are very clear

I'm thtuck

Until Mickey, the concept of unconditional love was incomprehensible to me. When my nephew was born -- as soon as I held him -- I got it. It's sort of horrible? One is simply bound, forever -- as he used to say, "Thtuck" -- held emotional hostage to the vagaries of someone else's life. The twists and turns of any adolescent's life are not always cockle-warming, I suppose.

My mother told me once about the horror of my adolescence for her -- climbing the stairs into the silence of the third floor every night, wondering whether she would find me there, whether I'd be alive. There is the evidence of my own memory to suggest that I hated her -- I did hate her, and I loved her, and I wanted nothing, nothing except to not have to wade through day after day of shame and yearning and anger -- the fetid neurochemical swamp that was my brain, my life, all that I knew.

Were Mickey to hate me, I would die a thousand metaphorical deaths, and I would love him still, no less. If I overheard him saying mean things about me in adolescent cool-boy tones, I would be happy to buy him ramen noodles and hot sauce, to drive my fishtailing pickup truck through the snow and ice, up the steep hill of Ravine Street in terrible traffic to make sure he was safe, to feed him eel sushi, to let him have the pickled ginger if he wants it. I love that skinny, profane, teen-aged boy.

There are complications, of course. I love him, and I think that his mother -- my beloved sister -- is a lousy mother. He lives in a half-million dollar house and has expensive shoes, but she is so very mean to him. There are reasons and rationalizations, and I understand some of them, but the net effect is that it does him harm.

I want a relationship with him. I can't have a relationship with him if I alienate her. I love her and I want a relationship with her. I can not watch this go on any longer. Over the years, I have developed this mental picture -- that every time we gather as a family, every time something happens and no one says anything to her because they don't want to risk a blow-up, we are sacrificing him on the altar of family civility.

She calls me to tell me that they would be a happy family without him, that she wants him out of her house, that her goal this year is to make the $35,000 it will cost to send him to boarding school. I can not watch this, listen to this... and I don't know what to do.

Tech support

I used to work for Lawn Doctor in Colorado Springs; at my interview, I was politely asked to demonstrate my ability to pick up a 50 pound bag of fertilizer and if I would be willing to be on the company softball team.

In the mornings, I would change out of my jeans and sparkly flip-flops into my Cintas uniform and black rubber boots, load up a half-ton of fertilizer and 48 gallons of weed spray, slather on a layer of sunscreen, fill up my water bottle, check all of my equipment, and head out in my company truck. My tan-lines were weird and I smelled awful at the end of every day; however, I loved my job and loved the people I worked for.

Sometimes, people would ask me questions about what they could do to have a nicer lawn. As this was in Colorado, where grass is not really meant to grow, the answer was almost always, "Water more."

I work in IT now. Most of what I do at work is concentrated in a small area of the computer world -- I am not a computer repair technician, or a data recovery specialist, or a network engineer. I am not technical support, dammit -- except, of course, to my mother.

My mother is a lovely woman. I love her. She is articulate; it is fair to say that the fundamental activity of her life is communication. Recently, through an unlucky series of click and clacks, she ran a program which completely fuckered up her laptop, rendering the operating system inoperable. This was described to me over the phone as, "Well, I can't get on the internet again." Perhaps I imagined the accusatory tone.

I went to her house to investigate. "There are new icons on your desktop -- did you download something or run a program you've never run before?"

"No. I didn't do anything."

After much awed wandering around, watching the computer do things I had never seen a computer do, I showed her a screen. "Have you ever seen this before?"

"Oh, yes, and I didn't understand what it meant, so I just had to pick something."

Clearly, in red letters, the computer had warned her that running this program could damage her computer irreparably, she should only proceed if she had exhausted all other possible avenues, she could lose all of her data, blah blah blah. "Did you READ this, Mom?"

"No."

Every time there is a problem, she despairs and has to be talked down from depositing the computer in the trash and going out to buy a new one.

Once, working on my father's computer -- he is less willing to ask for help, I found a laptop stuffed into a drawer. There would have been two, but he chucked that one against the wall before going out to buy its replacement. "What is this?"

"An old computer. You can have it, but I don't think it works."

There was nothing -- not a thing -- wrong with the computer.

I don't know what my point is, actually, or what this has to do with lawncare. Never mind.