Ever notice how sometimes you don’t want to get up but you have to piss and feed the cats and

face the day
keeps playin like a jagged soundtrack against the morning’s disappointment?

It’s time (again) to treat “writing” more like riding a bike. Yes, you never forget how to do it, but I mean the experience of it. Each letter merely a pebble of the gravel track. The expected reward is the ride itself. Maybe you see a white squirrel, maybe you just get a sunburn, but either way, it’s a bike ride. Period.

I’ve been forgetting this about writing lately — and this forgetting, it’s kept me away from the pigeons. My pals, the pigeons. They’re like, hey, buddy, it’s good to see you! and just like that, I know it’s not something cataclysmic, not something horrible I did or some conspiracy. They don’t hate me.

And they shake their beaks and go “humans, right?” like what are you gonna do — and then this one pigeon, this grey one with a single white swipe, over there by the fountain where my bike was stolen 30 years ago, is like, it’s not humans, it’s really just this human! — and they all have a good chuckle.

pigeon

how’s the cheese? well, it’s a little edgy around the edges....

Sometimes in English classes we’ll have a “folklore” unit, or a nod to “oral tradition” — or “Native Americans passed down stories across generations” as a speedbump on the ramp to the superhighway of exploring canonical (or trendy) texts where “exploring” often means “retreading.” Here’s what you’re supposed to read, here’s what you’re supposed to write about what you’ve read. You do know how to read and write, right? If not, you can either be special ed or degenerate. Because “oral tradition” is a thing noble savages do, you know, people who believed in “myths,” that’s not what we do here. You have to know how to read, and you have to know how to write the formulaic shibboleth for deserving to be wealthy. You don’t already know how to do it? That’s OK; we’ll give you a good enough grade to get you into community college at least, if you can supplicate enthusiastically enough. We can pretend we taught you something, you can ask us for a recommendation letter, and isn’t this fun? Like how an endless game of Monopoly is fun?

Wait, what? A cabal of techno elites have unleashed software that burns down forests in exchange for you not having to play this bullshit game? It generates the bullshit for you? Oh no, my jooooobbbb! And I guess I’m mad about the forests too. But my jooooobbbb! Those bastards! How dare they violate the sanctity of our teacher student relationship! Well, obviously we’ll all have to jump on board this new game. Teachers and administrators simply need to pay enough lucre and homage to get certified in telling you how to “properly use these tools” — yes, that’s it! Regain the creative high ground, fellow educators! We have to have something to hold over their heads! The secular priesthood is nothing without sagacious righteousness.

But let’s be real, the secular priesthood — if there is one, it isn’t us — teachers — we don’t have the kind of power the word priesthood implies. We temporarily get injected with power when it’s our turn to take responsibility for corrupting these damn kids who keep growing into young adults who keep changing the damn rules of the damn game. This power gets shot into us from time to time, to reanimate our corpses when someone needs to see a zombie dance. Nobody (almost nobody) thinks it’s really our fault what kids turn into — we really don’t have that kind of power, and none of us (almost) would even want it — 

Whatever. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just a teacher (lol).

Of course, we still have an oral tradition. I can’t see it, I can’t describe it. I can sense it but only parts of it. It’s vast, gaseous, expanding, changing. You can’t memorize it because it’s different every day, every moment, like clouds. Teachers can’t teach it, but they can participate in it, with appropriate humility. It’s dignified; it’s silly. High, low, sacred, vulgar — same as it ever was.

Oral tradition sometimes includes call and response. How are you? Fine, you? What’s up? Not much. Everyone says “morning,” “good morning,” and so on around the room or the Zoom call, and thus we can all agree on what time of day it is. These clucks and warbles are not trivial. They’re fundamental hardware handshakes; they establish and maintain connections. They can include or initiate error-correction routines.

So I wonder what all was encoded when my mom asked my cousin, “How’s the cheese?”

I mentioned my cousin before but didn’t give her a fake name yet — I’ll call her Fila. We’re almost the same age; she and her younger sister were visiting from Kansas City, and I think this was before their mom and dad got divorced so they were probably both there too. We were young, pre-teen at the oldest. Fila liked to wear my hand-me-down jeans and faded Wisconsin badger hoodie that I had been given for some reason, long before I had any inkling I would ever live in Wisconsin. If she hadn’t been my cousin I would’ve wanted her to be my friend, and if she hadn’t been my cousin or my friend, I would’ve wanted her to be my girlfriend. She was slight, a sylph, built like half a pair of parentheses, with a mind full of parentheticals, asides and sarcastic soliloquys.

“How’s the cheese?”

We were young, we wanted snacks. My mom got sliced cheddar and prefab deli meats out of the fridge. The delightful 1980s fridge of plenitude. The humming heart of eternal summer. She arranged a little platter for us, and we munched and continued babbling about whatever we were babbling about, with periodic interjections from Fila’s younger sister, usually having to do with the indignities of being left out or mistreated in some way, and then we’d have to do some on-the-job learning of social skills and empathy, the way kids do when you let them, but at least while we did that we’d have some wholesome snacks to keep our strength up.

My mom asked brightly, “How’s the cheese?”

Fila said, “Well, it’s a little edgy around the edges....”

You know how the edges of slices can get kind of dry and translucent? This was like that.

Into the infinitesimal verbal vacuum in the wake of this candid appraisal, Fila’s mom — my aunt, my mom’s youngest sister, no longer with us, but that’s a gaggle of pigeons to sit on a park bench and good-naturedly feed another time — leapt.

“Fila! That’s rude! Your auntie served you food, you don’t respond to her that way!” Her disapproval was sharp, sudden. It commandeered the focus of the room.

“What?” Fila spread her palms. “She asked me how the cheese was, and I answered. Do you not want me to be honest?”

My mom said it’s OK, it’s OK, it probably has been in there a little too long, we can just trim the edges off! There you go. All taken care of.

I’m quite sure she was not the least bit offended. I’m trying to think what I (now, not as a kid) might actually mean if I said “how’s the cheese” or “how’s the chili” or “how’s the salmon” or anything like that. In addition to an actual request for feedback or quality control, it might be something along the lines of “I enjoyed the work and privilege of providing this basic thing, both necessity and luxury, for you; please let me know it was well received, as your happiness is my compensation.” Or “Your appreciation of the food I gave you completes the circle, glowing out into the impenetrable void, on which we are both small bright lights.” Or “I love you, and I am sustained by hearing evidence that you exist. Here. Now. In this kitchen with me in this house with people in it.”

Call and response.

“It’s OK but the edges are a little dry” = “I love you too.”

The message may be sacred, unfathomably glorious in its cloak of linguistic mundanity. The words aren’t sacred. The words are the playthings of the message. We make mistakes on purpose. Tiny rude surprises enrich the oral tradition. Let’s keep it going. Ride it out, roll with it. It’s more fun than Monopoly.