The Gaul of them!

I took a year-long sabbatical, now Mark's on one. I think he needed it more than I did, in the first place.

Mark Brown connoisseur of life's simple goodness, Mark Brown the quintessential drinking companion, Mark Brown eagle-eyed artistic designer – he has flown the coop. Whereas I took a sabbatical on fellowship, with a fine and firm safety net beneath me, Mark and his wife Kelly saved up, quit their jobs and moved to the south of France in November, not to return – if they return, and the bets waver – until that time this year. I mean, they're young, free of children and mortgages for now, so why the hell not, eh? They have friends there, Mark's a gourmand (if not a gourmet), Kelly speaks a little French. It all adds up to life-changing adventure.

Daniel and I at least have a small insurance policy that we'll see their faces once more. We have a lot of their stuff. Mark and Kelly kept some furniture for us while we were in New York, and we've got some of their furniture while they're in France. So if you come over: no, we're not this hip.

And I know they'll be back, someday, somewhere. It's just no fun saying goodbye to a friend for what could be a long, long time. Happy as we all were for their adventure, it still sucked to know my days would be Markless. No doubt he needs the vacation from me – pestering him with music news and my endless stream of trivial announcements each day – but our evening drinking circle, the Drinklings (see below), already suffers the void of his witicisms and conversational challenges. Before they left, Daniel and I had one final evening at their place, with Mark whipping up an impromptu pasta concoction and all of us finishing off a bottle of grappa, then lying on the floor listening to Mogwai's "Christmas Steps." I knew he would fit squarely into the messy European landscape; he was already complaining about the Thanksgiving holiday with his folks – the football, the Chevy commercials, the meal over in 30 minutes. "It was just so American," he said. Yep, get this boy on the boat.

We heard from them just after the year turned, an email from Mark saying, simply, " 'sup bro?" Even a couple of phone calls now. They're fine, in a drafty, ancient house with four levels in Herault, France. The street address: 13 rue de l'Amour – 13 Love Street. How beautiful is that? They go to the local market each day and buy fascinating, fresh treats, washing it all down with wine from the local coop that's about 75 cents a bottle and absolutely divine. We love them dearly, but we envy them just a little, too. But I raise my glass to them quite frequently, and we can't wait to read the book.

Non voyage

From my journal, during a week of vacation I had in December, during which I explored new frontiers of laziness at home:

IDLE BUT MIGHTY, dizzy and caffienated, able to leap onto queen-sized beds in a single, Tigger-like bound. I am a middle-class American male on vacation at home. I am lazy. I am in my pajamas, or my version of them (T-shirt, drawstring pants). I stink, and I revel in the stink. My tea kettle will sing all day long. The heels of my feet ache from resting on the bed. Outside my window: the browns, tans, beiges of wooden fences, of bare trees, of electric poles, of grass finally dead and littered with brittle leaves, of a faintly smoggy sky east of the refineries – but that tree, that Scotch pine, an evergreen, scraggly but defiant, a horde of chlorophyll in a world of dried and desicated cellulose, life hanging on in a season of death, in view as if to comfort especially me, me in my borrowed chair, me with my obsessively compiled George Harrison mix CD, me with my skank and dirty clothes on the floor and cats licking their privates on the other side of the overheated room. Me in the dry heat, like a newborn spider, like the old man in The Big Sleep, and yet I shall enjoy my brandy tonight, not by proxy but in gulps. I shall drink sherry in the evening, cook my meal, my paella, and drink a good syrah, or maybe it’s actually a shiraz (same grape, different nomenclature, mate), then "feel the brandy warming pleasantly ..." I have no duties tomorrow, no responsibilities; thus my might, my Tigger-like spring. It is not a joy in sloth or avoidance, it is the empowerment of idleness, the bliss of vacancy, the human spirit’s abhorrence of a vacuum. I make my own merriment, I move along the ice of time with or without my skates. I have leisure, and I know how to use it. I have already solved the mystery of Dan Rather’s 1986 attackers. I have a longing Lawnboy in my afternoon. I have so much music, and my critical faculties are put away in a drawer for the week. I am a middle-class American on vacation at home. I am not to be trifled with.

Welcome home, faggot

We didn't expect a red carpet, but neither did we expect hostility. The third day home, we discovered in a parking lot that someone had hawked an impressive loogie on the side of the Civic. (A random act, surely. Who of that mentality would recognize the Human Rights Campaign sticker?) The following night, Daniel and a (straight) friend were eating at an east Tulsa restaurant, discussing our trip to Ogunquit, when a surly brute from the next table came over and told them to shut their "faggotty mouths," that he was getting sick listening to their "fuckin' fag talk." He actually tried to goad them into "taking it outside" so he could beat the tar out of them. No violence occurred, thank God, just hapless intervention by a very confused Mexican staff.

An isolated incident, surely – duh, east Tulsa – but it hung over us for weeks as a crummy omen. Are our defenses simply down after several months in an open, liberal city? Is this the George W. effect? Are even the most minor advancements in human rights so easily and quickly eroded when political power shifts? Will we ever conquer our collective fears?

Missed thangs

Some things I'm glad to have back now that I'm in Tulsa again:

• Right on red. They don't allow that in New York because of all the pedestrian traffic.
• Supermarkets. Those Indian boys at the Apple Tree Market around the corner from our apartment were sure nice folks, but that didn't give them any volume buying power. You buy the last box of cereal bars there and it's a few weeks before they show up again. Plus, while you're looking for them, you're pressed up against your neighbors squeezing through the tiny aisles. Thank God for the excess of Midwestern America, its sprawling warehouse aisles and especially its 24-hour convenience (which, surprisingly, you don't get in Manhattan).
• Riverside Drive. Nothing calms me down or lifts me spirits quite like a motor along Riverside Drive. I've been running it up and down aimlessly late at night for weeks.
• Storms, of course, but also: real weathermen. Meteorologists in Oklahoma are just what that word implies – scientists who know what the hell they're talking about. Everywhere else, esp. in New York, they're pretty imbiciles who read teleprompters and wouldn't know a wall cloud if they hit it with their Land Rovers.
• Yoga. Most of the yoga centers in New York were a bit too, um, cultish about the practice. Yoga is not a way of life, it's a way for life. I'm glad to be back in Richard's twice-weekly sessions, where I can stretch out and face the day.

The ol' asphalt trail

The Midland Valley Trail is not an historic path trod by settlers pioneering the rugged West. It is a paved path retracing approximately one mile of old railroad right-of-way, and its main travelers these days are spandex-bound bicyclists and waddling power-walkers. It also runs approximately 30 feet outside my front door.

Our home upon returning to Tulsa was a townhouse, one in a block of eight, behind two fourplexes called Riverpath Apartments. They are so named because they adjoin the Midland Valley Trail, which is the cartographer's designation for one of the walking and biking trails leading down to Tulsa's ever-growing River Parks along the surprisingly scenic Arkansas River.

I have reveled in this slice of wildlife, particularly because I like how New York streets shaped my legs, so I'm walking almost every day. The trail runs from Maple Park near the Broken Arrow Expressway between Boston and Cincinnati avenues to 21st Street, where it crosses, runs in front of our townhouse, then begins a long, easy arc to the south and west until it becomes the pedestrian bridge crossing the river due west. This being the leafy, old midtown neighborhood, the trail is shady and green as it runs behind fancy Maple Ridge homes. Foxes are a common sight, dashing into the foliage along the slopes behind the houses. Last week I saw a fat, fluffy owl – stood and watched it watching me not 20 feet from my nose, its head craning too far around, its sharp black eyes framing me and scanning for rodents in the undergrowth. A lone bunny often dines at dusk near our pad, in the same grass where pairs of dusty doves pace most of the day, sometimes twittering their way to a branch in the shade.

Of course, all this nature is in the heart of an urban area. The path sports some colorful gang grafitti, too. A little reminder that we are part of nature, not separate from it.

The best part of this townhouse and its relationship to this peaceful thoroughfare is the deck: a sizeable second-floor balcony overlooking the Midland Valley route and halfway shaded by a healthy sweetgum tree. I've spent a good chunk of the summer out there, reading as the sun falls, sipping rum in the evenings, meditating on the blinking red beacon atop the University Apartments tower at night (just like those TV towers outside my bedroom window growing up, blinking lazily, standing tall and true – focal points for developing brains). Earlier in the summer, the trail below and the trees all around were Christmased with fireflies floating on the humid dusk. Our squirrelly neighbor walks his two giant boxers down the trail a ways every couple of hours. Exercisers stroll, roll or pant their way past, sometimes sending up curious snatches of conversation and always dazzling us with the newest fitness apparel and gear (a bicycle for three one day!). If we could get a bed and some mosquito netting out there, we'd sleep under the stars. Someday.

Foyiled again

It gets pretty Norman Rockwell, though by evening the rosy cheeks are the result of sun and beer instead of impossible innocence. Each year my colleague John Wooley hosts a Fourth of July hootenanny at his home, a veritable ranch almost an hour east of Tulsa on the outskirts of a made-up town called Foyil. He and his family have got a simple brick house on a decent chunk of land that includes a lily-padded pond and a low hill perfect for baseball and sunsets, both of which are enjoyed to their fullest on this occasion.

Folks drift in during the afternoon, setting up chairs and coolers under the shade trees next to the trampoline, which is already buoyant with youngsters. The baseball game starts around four in the hayfield. Outfielders have been known to plow into the hay rolls as if it were the wall at Shea. Skill, fortunately, is not a requirement for either team, usually the adults vs. the kids. It was a hot one this year, and who can remember who won.

Then it's burgers, beer (if you've waited), tall tales and firecrackers. The kids take the hill, and no one challenges them for their superior firepower. No one has lost a finger yet. We keep trying.

When the arsenal is spent, we retire to the house for John's movies, a vast array of 16mm prints from TV, commercials and film. The drive home is an exhilerating hour – tired but thrilled, hung but happy, windows down and a long ribbon cutting through the darkness that's mine all mine. A fine tradition.

The roundtable

Most of the friendships that have meant the most to me in my life have been informally ritualized in some manner. In high school, David Z. and I drew up the Strangeways Treaty just before graduation, a mock-official assurance to stay in touch, maintain a few select vices (these provisions were curtailed in a later amendment once both parties, hacking and hungover, realized this was not sound policy) and to live well. At Rhodes, Stinson L. and I formed our own fraternity based on our nightly nightcap sessions. We called it Nu Nu Kappa, and somewhere around here I still have the Twain-esque charter we drew up. In Norman, it was the Mystical Krewe of King Pookie, a secret Mardi Gras society established for Susan, Jocelyn, Matthew, Jennifer and others who joined us for our debaucherous semi-annual treks to the Big Easy. This crew still exists, staying in touch via its own online blog; the collective jaunts to NOLA, alas, have ceased.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before some similar sense of officialdom was bestowed upon my homeboys here. Shortly after my return to Tulsa, the mostly Tulsa World gang with whom I drink regularly after hours informed me that I would be presented with something special at the next gathering. Mark, who had defected to the Living section but remained a core member of this inebriated intellectual elite, printed up cards for us stating our membership in The Drinklings. Mine even says "charter member" and features a perfect quotation from James Joyce's Ulysses: "'Tis the hour, methinks, when the winejug, metaphorically speaking, is most grateful in Ye ancient hostelry." The name is derived from a similar group of writers that spoke about like-minded subjects over like-minded ales; the Inklings was an informal but regular pub gathering of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton and some others. (I wonder if Lewis repeated the same stories as often as Wooley does?) Most of the writers I admire – and I'm thinking here of folks like Thoreau and Emerson – scorned titles and memberships, but these are the ones that matter, the ones I claim with pride.

Of course, with Mark now absent and Jonathan Dylen run off to Florida, I suppose we should have a membership drive.

1,2,3 – what was who fighting for?

I finally burned my draft card.

I didn't even know I had one until recently. You see, I inherit my pack-rat habits from my father. From kindergarten through early college, he kept a "school" file for me and each of my sisters. In this folder went any document relating to our educational experience. Dad retired recently – well, he moved his office home, at any rate; he'll never quit completely (another habit I inherited, no doubt) – and decided he needed the file space. So he mailed each of us our school files, and told us to do with the material what we would. Mine was a bizarre pack of stuff: grades, teachers comments all the way back to primary school (the phrase "class clown" appears seven times), Heritage Hall tuition bills (gulp!), presidential fitness awards (yes, I actually earned one), plus a few odds and ends that really tripped me out, such as a vicious attack note to a junior-high ex-girlfriend (how did my parents end up with that, and yegods why did they file it away?) and, somehow, my draft card.

I remember Dad – a retired Air Force officer – impressing upon me not only the requirement but the importance of registration when I turned 18. Having grown up in peacetime, save the brutal and perilous liberation of Grenada, I found the requirement a tad fascist but nonetheless trivial. I don't remember actually signing up, but I do remember fretting over having done it three years later when George Sr. went to war on behalf of the oil companies. Indeed, every conversation about "this stupid war" – at least among young men – ended with speculation about the war's length and its draft possibilities. Absurd, surely, but when you're in college and not on scholarships, these scenarios become worthy of intense panic.

So, after sifting through the debris during my last weeks in New York – and after nine months of studying the Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma, the socialist 1930s, the anti-Vietnam movement and such – I sat ceremoniously on my couch and torched my draft card. So there. Big whoop.

Ain't gonna fight no rich man's war...