My car is hot and the weeds at home hang heavy on my shoulders. It’s like that Fischer Price toy: you hit one plastic gopher with a mallet and another pops up a different hole. The weeds have conquered the yard while I frantically put out forest fires at work and home and work and home. My mind hasn’t worked well in a long time. Did it ever? Maybe this is normal. I tell myself to man up. These are just the pedestrian vicissitudes of a father-lawyer-husband. But the weeds mock my pep talk. Like that character in a book who cheats death and then death finds him. “Your days are numbered. You pretend to control it all, but the weeds don’t lie.” And why can’t I concentrate anymore? I put my client files in the back of my car, its AC long since failed, and head back to the office from court, weeds hanging heavy on my shoulders.
December. I rip the duct tape off the Mr. T bank my sister Heather gave me in 1983. Forget about chronology. The pennies spill out in a rush, a pile of ill-preserved copper and zinc. Some have vinegar spots where I tried, unsuccessfully, to clean them. A heaping handful for each son, but I make sure most years are mixed in. Nothing from a catalog here; just a halcyon childhood in Wisconsin. I can’t recreate those days, but I can give you the pennies I collected.
Unlike most drought-tolerant grasses, Zoysia is not coarse-bladed. It feels good on little feet, and we have two, soon three, sets of those at home. So sign us up. We installed a sprinkler system, and now we can grow anything we want. That guy on Youtube says that Zoysia grown from seed comes in thicker. It’s pricey, but we spread a big bag of seed and water the heck out of it.
I’m a senior in high school, asleep in Gillespie’s AP Government class. A golden opportunity for Alan Bailey, one of my two best friends. He pushes my desk-chair combo and I’m careening into traffic. I jump up, panicked. The class laughs, and so do I, eventually. Everyone dreams that quickly, right? My sleepiness is just my breakfast or lack thereof or lack of sleep or some conspiracy of the foregoing. Right?
Another hot summer. In Osceola, Wisconsin, a nine-year-old can ride his bike to the bank, plunk a dollar on the counter, and get two rolls of pennies. Mom delivers the Pioneer Press by car at 4:00am, and if I can get up in time, she’ll give me $3 for stuffing papers in some of the boxes along her route. That’s six rolls.
I have him pegged, and then I don’t. The sunburnt leather face, the huge pack, sitting right by the 5th Street on-ramp to I-40. Where’s the cardboard sign? Surely I missed it. My car is hot and the weeds hang heavy on my shoulders. I pull over.
Junior year, AP French. Love this language. Charlotte Touati is my teacher. We translate Le Mendiant 1:
In the frost, in the gale, a poor man was going past. . .
He lives, this old man, in some humble dog’s retreat
At the foot of the hill, quite alone, hoping
For a cold sunbeam from heaven, or half a farthing from earth,
With hands spread out to man or clasped to God.
‘Come and warm up’, I bellowed; ‘what is your name?’
He said, ‘I am the
Poor.’ I took his hand. ‘Come in, sir’, I told him.
[1] English translation from http://999poems.blogspot.com/2011/04/beggar-by-victor-hugo.html (last accessed May 18, 2020). French version available at https://www.bacdefrancais.net/mendiant.php#texte (last accessed May 18, 2020).
. . . I never fall asleep in French.
I type furiously while the weeds hold a victory celebration. The kingpin thanks his benefactors, Nephi and Melinda Hardman, for their generous watering over the last two months. A roar of laughter. “And if they ever get to weeding, take heart, take heart”—at this, a lull from the audience—“because the Cubs have won the World Series, the Lobos have dominated the PAC-12, and the end of the world is gonna kill us all anyway.” At this, the weeds are rolling on the ground. For me: deadlines, diapers, and fix-it projects (why did we get a fixer-upper again?).
How I’d love to punch that obstreperous weed in the face. Why don’t weeds have faces? And why can’t I concentrate? Must be what I had for breakfast…
He objects to “homeless.” “I’m a drifter,” he says. “Where you coming from?” “Washington State.” “Where you headed?” “Louisiana, to work on a fishing boat.” Family? “Never knew my mom. Dad did 40 years and just got out not long ago. Grandma and Grandpa raised me till I was 12.” A wanderer, he couldn’t stay in one place if he tried. His huge pack bounces next to the files on the back seat of my car, thousands of miles of windswept highway cross-pollinating my legal documents. We’re headed to the truck stop on the east side of Albuquerque where he’s more likely to get a long ride, but then I ask him: “Would you like to pull some weeds?”
Senior year. Mr. Tomsik’s AP Physics class this time. I come in late, sit on the back row for a while, and then capitulate to the floor. Lots of students do this, right? But I’m not a pothead or a drinker. I’m just a normal kid who didn’t get enough sleep. And I’m a train wreck. We should be studying the physics of train wrecks; maybe I’d pass this class.
Christmas day. My boys hold the identical packages uncertainly. A thin hardcover book? Open it. See? It’s a penny collector’s book, one punch-out per mint per year. And here are some pennies to get you started. Maybe they’ll be better collectors than I ever was. Should’ve gotten one of those books myself.
Stanley is only eleven years my senior, but his drifting gives him another eleven. He’s tall and lanky and works like a machine. Remember those guys we hired off Craigslist to help dig trenches for our sprinkler system?, Melinda and I ask each other. One guy took fifty bucks at lunch and never came back (left his shovel). The second guy was okay. Stanley surpasses everyone. Worth every penny.
I’m twenty-something and a collegiate train wreck in slow motion. Logic, Linear Algebra, Theoretical Syntax—all casualties. I have to retake those and a dozen others for which a D or Unauthorized Withdrawal is as good as an F. I’m the sparrow trapped with exotic birds. Everyone else has good study habits. That has to be it—study habits. Don’t say you have a disability, because that’s admitting defeat. Just to be sure, I am tested for ADHD. Negative. See? Just man up and get to work. And stop falling asleep in classes.
He rolls his own cigarettes with rice paper. “Don’t worry, it disintegrates in the rain.” After two days, the weeds are gone. After two days, we are not living a lie after all. You can be a father-lawyer-husband and plant Zoysia for your boys and not cheat the grim reaper. I drop Stanley off at the truck stop and give him my number. Then he’s just a memory. I almost wish he had left some cigarette butts; I never found a single one.
Two years after Stanley. The Zoysia established, I’m losing another war. “Come now the Debtors, by and through undersigned counsellllllllllllllllllllllllll.” For the tenth time that week I slip into dreams. I hear footsteps or great whacks of an axe against a tree or someone shouting indistinct words. I jerk awake and plod on, deleting the extra l’s. It comes by email, an auto-generated notice from the Bankruptcy Court. Results of preliminary hearing: “Counsel for Debtor did not appear.” Like that, I’m in the Mariana Trench. Weight, so much weight on my chest; a tightening of my throat. My breathing stops while my heart races. You fool. You imposter. You can’t fake it any longer.
Same day, same millstone. The light at the surface is a faint fairy tale. It’s not really there; it never was. I’ve just been pretending I can do this. I’m in a dark place. My phone rings. I don’t recognize the number; probably the Disciplinary Board. “Hello?” A faint connection: “Nephi, it’s Stanley. I just wanted to call and ask how you’re doing and tell you I’m thinking about you.” Proof, if I needed it, that there is a God in Heaven.
We finish Le Mendiant in Madame Touati’s French class:
I got him a bowl of milk.
He was shivering with cold, the old fellow; he talked and
I answered without hearing, my thoughts elsewhere.
‘Your clothes are all wet’, I said; ‘you should hang them in front of
The fireplace.’ He moved closer to the fire.
His cloak, moth-eaten, and formerly blue,
Slung right across the warm blaze,
Riddled with thousands of holes by the light of the flames,
Shrouded the hearth, and looked like a black starry sky.
Then, while he dried those wretched tatters
Dripping with rain and ditch water,
I thought how this man was utterly steeped in prayer;
Deaf to what we were saying, I
Gazed at the cloth, in which I could see constellations.
I never fall asleep in French.
* * *
Stanley’s hiking from Tennessee to Vegas where he hopes to turn fifty. One day left and thirty miles to go, and the cops tell him to get off the highway. He texts: “Mission. Fail.” Back to Tennessee, he crosses the road. What was the song he talked about? Something about no one knowing you till you’re down and out.
Another Christmas. Joseph, the oldest at 8 and my only brown-eyed boy, opens a tiny present.
He’s been stranded for two days at the on-ramp. Of course I’ll come. The west side of Albuquerque is not the place to catch a ride going east. I meet him at the Flying J, then drive to the shoulder where his stash is. Nothing here but broken bottles and sagebrush. And something else, I realize: this atmosphere is charged. Someone sat here for two days considering these rejected lilies of the field. I put Stanley up in a cheap motel and in the morning, I drive him to an on-ramp thirty miles east of Albuquerque. “Don’t know why I’ve been keeping these. Just what I’ve collected in the last ten years of hiking.” A little sandwich bag full of pennies. He hands it to me.
Joseph holds it up. “A 1941 Philadelphia!” It’s his oldest penny. He presses it into his collection book, impressed.
* * *
When Joseph handles his 1941 penny, I hope he will think of his dad and maybe even tell my story. But if you tell it, Joseph, don’t tie it up too nicely. Remember that some stories just aren’t tied up in a bow. Some memories take turns; others come in a mad rush, elbowing for prominence. Some penny collections defy ordering. I suppose you can share how I was finally diagnosed with narcolepsy and got good medicine and turned my practice around. But don’t answer other questions: What would have happened if I had seen a doctor in high school? Would I have come out on top, rather than in the middle, of my class at law school? Would I have come to New Mexico or would I have steered myself to a more cosmopolitan legal market? Would I have adopted a little baby with beautiful brown eyes, born here in New Mexico, after seven years of marriage with no children? And what if I had just planted sod like everyone else? Would I have pulled onto the shoulder by the 5th Street I-40 on-ramp on a hot summer day? Only a good Storyteller knows. I give you permission to say only that I saw myself in Stanley, and in a 1941 penny I saw a cloak, “Riddled with thousands of holes by the light of the flames . . . in which I could see constellations.”