The Tree on the Dock

This story ends on a downbeat, but I don't want to emphasize that. I'll say it up front first. My Grandpa killed himself when I was nine years old.

We found out on an early spring afternoon the day it happened. My brother and I were in our shared bedroom playing a little kid version of football. It resembed actual football only inasmuch as we used a football to play it. There were no rules, per se, and I don't even think we kept any sort of score. It was mainly an excuse to shove one another around on the carpet next to our bunk beds like sumo wrestlers.

The phone rang downstairs, which didn't even scratch our attention. Phonecalls were part of the adult world and utterly inconsequential to our mad, hyper, essentially tiny world of Empire Strikes Back bedspreads and Space Legos and Cleveland Browns posters. Half a minute later, we heard mom make a noise, a sort of restrained scream. I didn't know the word "woe" back then, but when I learned the word, years later, I thought of the sound that mom made that day and understood it immediately. Kev and I stopped playing football instantly and looked towards our open bedroom door, towards the half flight of stairs that led down to the living room and kitchen, ultimately toward the source of that terrible, alarming sound from mom. The conversation that had been droning on down there was eerily hushed now. Dad's voice did most of the talking. No more sounds of woe came from mom. We went back to playing football.

Kev had possession a few minutes later and we were assuming the sumo-football position again when dad came upstairs and knelt down next to us. He told us quietly and as carefully as he could that grandpa had died. I understood it but I didn't get it. I think the same was true for Kev. When dad finished telling us (grandpa had been his father; it was a very short speech), Kev moved to start the game again. Dad gently asked him if he knew what it meant that grandpa had died. We both said yes. We both went back to playing again, with that new knowledge there, working its way into our minds like a seed putting down slow, slow roots.

That night, mom and dad were gone. I didn't know then where they'd gone and I don't know now. They were evidently attending to all those terrible mundanities of arranging a funeral, helping grandma cope, figuring out how much it was all going to cost and how they were going to pay for it. The old lady that lived in the farmhouse a half mile distant from our house came and stayed with Kev and I. Her name was Mrs. Byers. She and her husband were friends of mom and dad's. We used to walk to their house on summer evenings and play shuffleboard on their long, immaculately tarred driveway. The Byers's were like secondary grandparents to Kev and I. That night, Mrs. Byers let me stay up late and watch TV with her after Kev went to bed. On the whole, it was sort of a treat, although the show (some miniseries with lots of pirhannas and vampires and stampeding rhinos and obviously wildly tangential storylines) wasn't as good as I had hoped it would be.

I cried for the first time over grandpa's death at the funeral. I was ashamed of the tears, and I couldn't go look at the body, because I knew they would be uncontrollable if I did. I sat way back in the last row of the taupe folding chairs arranged in the little, non-air-conditioned funeral home and cried feircely and quietly, staring at the casket that barely hid his body from view. The tears and the grief were totally new, and even in the throes of the emotion, I marvelled at how powerful they were. It was like watching a thunderstorm inside.

Grandpa had left only a few hundred dollars. This, both grandma and mom and dad believed, grandpa would have wanted to go to his grandkids, Kev and I and my cousin Jenny. I am sure they were right. After the funeral, mom and dad took us out to go on a little shopping spree with grandpas last couple hundred dollars. It was dizzyingly thrilling to us, and I think it was a salve to mom and dad's hearts to watch us enjoy grandpa's affections that way one last time. We went to Hill's department store. Kev and I both got new baseball mitts. I got my first wristwatch. Its face had a little picture of Snoopy wearing a headband and holding a tennis racket. His arms were the watch's hands. The second hand was a tiny tennis ball that turned perpetually around Snoopy, always just out of reach of his racket no matter what time it was. The band was made of denim. I really loved that watch and often thought of grandpa, in a sort of distant, happy way when I looked at it.

To this day I don't know a whole lot about why grandpa did it. I know there was something about some medication he was supposed to be taking but wasn't. I know that despite his monolithic, gibralter-like solidity (to my eyes, at least) he was depressed. I think it had something to do with retiring and something to do with having an illness that grandma always called "sugar". All I know for sure is that it ended with him telling grandma he was going out one day, driving his car to Mr. Wiggs, buying some garden hose, then driving somewhere else to park and use the hose to pipe the exhaust into the car. It was, evidently, a pretty painless way to go.

When I was growing up, grandpa was the biggest man I knew. He worked at a factory that made chains, which was somehow mythical to me. His forearms were gigantic slabs, like rawhide stretched over steel cables. His belly was huge but incredibly tough, like a medicine ball under the fabric of his light blue short sleeve button-down shirt, through which could always be seen the ghost of a strappy tee-shirt. He always wore a black leather pocket-protector His hands were like grapples, bigger than my head. He had a perpetual crew cut, steely gray with a hint of black lingering above his ears. His face was like something made from granite, but not because it was hard; because it was so solid-looking, so essentially kind but immovable.

Grandma and grandpa lived in a small two story house with a little front porch and a larger, enclosed side porch. Unlike us, they lived in a neighborhood with very close neighbors, some of whom were their best friends, some of whom they had ongoing, petty squabbles with. The polotics of the neightborhood intrigued and amused me, partly because we lived in the country with very little by way of neighbors ourselves (apart from the Byers), and partly because the neighborhood was so essentially old and close that it was like an extended family with little alliances and fueds and ongoing inherited histories. Grandma and grandpa's house was on a corner lot one row of house removed from the Sandusky bay. The enclosed side porch, a tiny glassed-in room with very incongruous rainbow-striped carpeting (something bought on deep-discount, I am sure) and the pull-out sofabed completely filling one end, looked down a short length of dead end street and straight out over the bay.

The bay was, and is, magical to me. It was moody. Sometimes it was blue-green and laughing, throwing up confetti bits of spray around the dock. Other times it was mean and cold, gray as slate and choppy. On those days, reflecting the marching clouds that looked so low and busy over its flat horizon, the bay looked hungry and full of mystery. On those days I'd believe that the bay had grisly secrets: sunken ghost ships that arose at night and prowled the mists, seaweed choked skeletons that crawled blindly in the depths, seeking shore and long-lost loved ones. Like most boys , I wanted to believe those terrible things. I loved them and was terrified of them.

Grandpa loved the bay, too. Or so it seemed. Now I don't know if it was love or something else.

Kev and I would take turns spending a week with grandma and grandpa every year. I remember it was the highlight of my summer. I'd spend the days being fed grandma and grandpa's unique diet of TV dinners, Cup 'o Soup, greasy "hamburgs" covered in onion powder, and bowls of sugary cereal for bedtime snacks. We invariably ate off of folding trays in front of the television watching Hee Haw or westerns. Afternoons were spent playing with Marty and Chris, two kids from across the street, in their sandbox, or swimming off the tiny crescent of rocky beach next to the dock. There was virtually no sand at the beach, but there was a lot of gravel and scree, as well as the occasional interestingly rotting carp. What made the beach particularly magical though, despite the smell and the peasoup green water sucking at the rocks, was the gems. I knew they weren't real gems, but what did I care? They were sparkly and multicolored and myriad, dotting the beach in their hundreds and thousands. The story dad told me to explain the phenomenon was this:

Once, many years ago, when dad himself had been little, there had been a factory further along the shore of the bay. The factory made glassware: bottles, glasses, jars, cups and saucers, all sorts of different colored glass containers. A glass factory produced quite a lot of broken glass bits which the factory dumped very economically into the bay. Over the years, the smaller glass bits were carried by the tide, coming slowly back ashore all along the edge of the bay. Interestingly, the scouring of the water had left all the bits softened and dulled, essentially harmless to little naked feet and fingers. The results were the gems of the beach: curved traingles, irregular prisms, shallow broken concaves and lenses. The colors were myriad: shell pinks and dark bottle greens and midnight blues that were only a few shades from black until you held them up to the sun. There were even occasional bits with vine patterns or runic letterings stamped into them. Every now and then I'd collect some of the more interesting pieces, but never for long. There were too many to collect. And besides, the beach wasn't going anywhere. The gems would always be right there, no matter what.

The dock was actually a tiny man-made peninsula. It was formed by an outline of old creosote-soaked railroad ties, stacked and pegged together with iron bars, and then filled in with dirt and large, jagged white rocks. The dock stretched about forty yards out into the bay. It was maybe ten yards wide and had a dogleg to the left at the end. I didn't know who had built it, but it had to have been long, long ago, because a tree had grown on the dock. It grew a little further than half-way out, and it was huge. It was a weeping willow, its trunk fat and curved, deeply scored with ancient bark. It looked prehistoric to me, especially standing all alone out there among the spider-infested, bone-white rocks, enormous, draping its trailing whip leaves out over and into the water on both sides. There was only ever one boat tied to the dock during my time there, and it was a neighbor's little white rowboat, the oars tucked neatly inside and fishing tackle stored under the seats. The dock jutted out into the water to the left of the little shingle of beach. When we'd swim out into the bay from the beach, I never got very close to the slick, seaweedy black walls of the dock. I had explored the dock from the top, but for some reason I hated being near it from the water. There was something deeply awful to me about the trailing willow branches, bobbing limply on the water. Worse was the sound the waves made as they lapped against the stacked railroad ties: a sort of mushy sucking and smacking. It made me think of the secrets of the bay, the leaden, hungry look of the waves on windy days just before a storm.

I slept on the enclosed sunporch, in the big pull-out sofabed. Grandma and grandpa always let me stay up until they went to bed, promptly after the weather forecast on the eleven o'clock news. Then, I'd pull the cushions off the couch and grandma would help me unfold the bed. She'd put a sheet and a blanket on it and a couple of huge pillows and then she'd tuck me in. By that time of night, the porch's many windows were covered with brown slatterned shades that unrolled down on complicated string riggings that were completely incomprehensible to me. Grandma would give me an old Philco transistor pocket radio to sleep with, and I would tune it to WJR, the AM talk station out of Detroit. I'd play it very softly under my pillow. At midnight on weeknights, for years, the same radio show would come on. It was called Night Flight, and it was a sort of musical variety show. The host played soothing songs all night long, interspersed with his own melodic banter and the occasional odd non-musical recording of a comedy routine or a speech. The thing I loved most about the show was that it was presented as a journey, an all night flight to a different location every night. The show started like this:

Announcer, accompanied by sound effect of an airliner advancing down a runway, lifting off: "Night Flight 760, now departing Detroit International Airport..."

Host, with continued airliner sounds, diminishing to a gentle, distant roar: "Good evening, and welcome aboard Night Flight 760. I'm your captain, Jay Roberts, and tonight our destination is Phoenix Arizona, home of Heard Museum's excellent Native American displays, and Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture studio at Taliesin West. Our flight time tonight will be approximately six hours, so feel free to sit back and relax. There are pillows and blankets in the overhead bins if you'd like to sleep some of the way. Or, if you prefer, there are magazines in the seatback ahead of you. Either way, I'll be playing some music as we travel and keeping you company throughout the flight. For now, let's set the mood for the initial portion of our flight with this melody from the great Mel Torme and his enduring classic, 'California Suite'."

And so on. I'd go to sleep to such, and awaken occasionally throughout the night enough to listen to more, drifting in and out to songs like "Send in the the Clowns" (which, hearing for the first time, I found heartbreaking in the leaden depths of the night) and "In the Mood". I became faintly acquainted with bygone musicians like Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. Once I woke up in the predawn hours to hear a recording of an old comedy routine by Bob Newhart. I lay there, mummified in the blankets on the sunporch, the corner streetlight filtering through the shades in tiny stripes, and laughing into my pillow. It was hilarious, and I fell back asleep thinking all about it.

Grandpa almost always got up and left for work long before I ever woke up. The few times I was up and around with him in the morning made strong, nearly graphical impressions on me. The kitchen and dining area of their house was one tiny room just inside the front door. There was a formica topped table pushed against the wall under the single window. It had three matching chairs and a retractable lamp hanging over it. Grandpa would sit there in the dim pink dawnlight from the window and drink a coffee kind of drink called Pero. Grandma would invariably be at the sink or the stove. There was very little talk. I remember grandpa's lunchbox and his Thermos, the classic mottled green cylinder with the silvery screw off cap that you could drink out of. Years later, I asked for and received an identical Thermos from my wife for Christmas, and it was only after I unwrapped it and held it that I knew I had wanted it because grandpa had had one.

Memories of grandpa are like home movies with no sound. I don't even remember what his voice sounded like or the kind of things he'd say. He was the classical quiet type, I guess.

I remember watching him as he cleaned some perch he'd caught in the bay. He did it down in the basement, in a nook under the stairway. He used some electric tool to clean the scales off. I remember the sound of it, slightly harsher than an electric razor, but otherwise the same. I remember the smell of the fish, and my fascination with the way he'd cut them open, gut them, filet them for Grandma to fry up later that night. The basement was small but tidy, with work benches against two walls and what seemed like hundreds of tools hung neatly and categorically on brown pegboard.

I remember him walking home from work. The factory, Union Chain, was only a couple of blocks away, across a tree scattered grass lot with a baseball diamond on one corner. I'd walk down to the corner to meet him at the lot at twenty after three in the afternoon. The factory loomed over the park, all sooty, dust-choked banks of windows swivelled open, meandering ductwork, vents, smokestacks and blank metal doors. Noises came from the windows, distant voices, clangs, machinery. I never knew what it looked like inside, but I had this mental picture of something like an industrial version of Dante's Inferno: mostly shadows clogged with monumental chugging machines, lit only by the glow of molten metal in giant vats, glinting dully off anvil shapes and sweating, grimy, gritty men with hammers and strange, huge tools.

Grandpa would appear with thirty or forty other men as they all emerged slowly from the factory like ants leaving an anthill. They all looked happy enough, but weary. They scattered over the park in twos and threes, all of them walking home, slipping into the dense web of residential streets all around the factory. Grandpa would walk with two or three other men. He'd see me from far off, sitting on the corner waiting. He'd smile, but he wouldn't wave. As they got to where I waited and then joined them, the other men made a bigger fuss over me than grandpa did, but that never bothered me. They'd ruffle my hair and talk about how big I was, but Grandpa just guided me with a huge hand on the back of my head, or took my hand in his huge, calloused, meaty grapple. I knew he was always happy to see me, happy in a way that went completely through the loud, jovial happiness of the other men and out the other side, into something unspoken and somehow gigantic. But sad. Always sad.

My biggest and most substantial memory of grandpa, though, is the one I saw the most. Evenings at grandma and grandpas were almost indistinguishable from one to the other. Grandma made dinner early. We were usually done by five-thirty or so. And while she cleaned up, grandpa and I would go to the sun porch together. I'd play on the floor with my Legos or draw on scraps of cut apart paper bags and grandpa would just sit. He'd usually have something to drink in his huge, rocklike hand, and it was usually a glass of Cherokee Redpop with a pile of icecubes ticking inside. I would play on the floor by him, on that crazy rainbow striped carpeting, and he would just sit, his head turned toward the strip of bay we could see just past the dead end, watching the sun dip down into the water, laying its reflection out on the waves in a mad, glittering stripe. He'd sit that way for an hour or two, until the sky was a fading red ember and the glass in his hand was empty, beaded with ice cube sweat. Then he'd heave himself out of his big easy chair and go into the adjoining living room and turn on the TV for the night. And I'd follow.

That's all.

These are good memories. These are the things that made me, that still make me. I am, practically speaking, nothing like my grandpa. He was huge and quiet, a laborer, smiling but always, somehow, sad. I am huge as well, but goofy, never without something to say, a digital artist making a living on my butt in front of a computer. The only manual work I do, I do at the gym, on purpose, to avoid becoming a complete sloth. And yet, I have grandpa's blood in me, making me. I am formed by him, marginally because his genes define me, but mostly because I looked at him when I was growing up, studied him intently, and I said "this is what a man is." He was far from a perfect man-- I know that more now than I want to. But he was perfect to me then. Perfect enough, at least. He was Manhood. Even today, I climb that granite mountain that he still is in my memory, and I strive to be that sort of Man, too. To pick up where he left off. Ultimately, to get it right where he, eventually, couldn't.

And today I see my son look at me with those eyes. God, oh God it is so eerie, so humbling, so haunting. It's as if time laps back on itself and I am the one in the chair with the Cherokee Redpop sweating in my enormous hand. I am the one being watched by this little man that is so very, very much like me. What will I make Manhood to be for him? What mountain am I carving in his little heart, that will grow with him and become the mountain he climbs to be a Man? I hope it is a good mountain, an even better mountain. I hope so.

But I am grateful for my own mountain, the silent, solid granite mountain of my grandpa, and the distant, lost world he represents to me.

I hope I represent it well.

My Letter to Brad Pitt

(Some of you know that I am good friends with Brad Pitt. The following, with permission, is a copy of an email I sent him yesterday. More to come, perhaps, later.)

Hey Bradster, how's it goin?

I was looking at the Yahoo homepage section about celebrity goings-on and I happened to find a little article about you doing some kind of speech or something in New Orleans telling the people there that they had to be environmentally friendly in how they rebuild the city. You know I love ya, brother, but I gotta tell you that made me wonder if you and Angelina and all those kids of yours have been spending a little too much time over in Guatemala under that hot, hot foriegn sun they have. I mean, you know I am as environmentally conscious aware as the next famous actor type, but I am just not sure this most recent approach is as carefully thought out as your speeches against homeless people having their toothbrushes confiscated by Republicans and your hunger strike against "odorless" garlic capsules, all of which you know I was totally on-board with and would have been right by your side with were it not for the fact that Angelina has that thing for me and I know it makes you all uncomfortable, which I totally understand, so don't feel bad. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah.

So I didn't really read the article or anything, but this whole thing about environmentally friendly rebuilding in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, are you sure that's a good idea? Here's my thinking: Say all those people down there go ahead and use, you know, like real wood and bark and, I don't know, like native dirt and grass to rebuild the city, and it becomes rather a bit of an environmentalist victory, and they open a theme park called something like Brad-land where they can show off all the ways they learned how to make concrete out of mulch and seaweed and a little cajun pepper or something so it not only makes great parking lots but actually smells and tastes pretty good, too. And then, the next year, it being New Orleans, some new hurricane comes along and flattens everything all over again and washes most of the city down into the ocean again. What then? Start all over again and rebuild again in an environmentally friendly way?

Listen, for the sake of the planet, Bradster: After a few more hurricanes, this whole approach could become an environmental catastrophe of really, like truly epic proportions. The entire area would be completely stripped of all those environmental bits and pieces that the people kept on using to rebuild the city; it'd turn into a desert wasteland! A tombstone to the overuse of the environment by unfeeling stupid people who keep on building in the geological equivalent of a bathtub!

I know what you're thinking. Here's how we could salvage this: environmentally friendly building in New Orleans equals, are you ready? Building everything out of chemically mass-produced heavy-polymer styrofoam!! That means no environmental resources are used up at all, AND, come the next hurricane, the entire city will simply float on top of the water, tethered to their foundations by retractable chains made of teflon fiber! Brilliant, right? It actually becomes a sort of tourist attraction. I mean, people would flood (ha! ha!) to New Orleans on the brink of a hurricane to stand on a balcony on Bourbon Street while every building in town bobs around like so many bits of pink styrofoam driftwood!

Anyway, have your people call my people and I'll help you put together a press release. This could be big, buddy!

Anyway, no, I advise against doing Fight Club 2. Sequels are out. What's in is the blockbuster icon-meets-icon flick. Maybe Batman versus the Lone Ranger? I'd see you as LR, but I don't know what Angelina would say. Tell her I said "hi" in a purely platonic way, OK?

Later!

George

Supermodels and Shrink-Wrapped Skeletons...

This will be uncharacteristically short and pithy, I promise.

Sherah (my sis-in-law) and I were flipping around on TV a night or so ago and came across some inane show (that's rather an oxymoron, isn't it?) in which some fashion designers were sitting around judging a gaggle of models based on how well they would showcase the designer's wares. The models were all about 18 and, for the most part, morose-looking. The designers sat in lowback chairs talking about the models, who were arranged on the floor in front of them, in a way that inescapably reminded me of old-south plantation owners judging slaves at auction. They critiqued body parts and weight, curves and posture, face structure, hair, eye-shape. None of them actually got up and inspected any of the models' teeth, but it seemed about to happen at any point. The models, for their part, stood turning vaguely back and forth, keeping their expressions blank, apparently trying very hard not to look like their self-images were being systematically carved up by the brutally "objective" observations of their languidly lolling judges.

And then one of the judges referred to one of the models, a particularly dessicated-looking girl with a surprisingly plain, though not unattractive, face, and informed the other designers that the model had lost 15 pounds in two weeks in order to fit the ideal of the panel. She said it as if she expected the others to applaud politely. The model she had referred to looked, to put it bluntly, like a shrink-wrapped skeleton. She looked literally emaciated. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes were sunken and vaguely empty, and her body looked like something some enterprising survivalist would use to start a fire. And there she stood, having starved herself for two weeks to waste-off what precious little shape she'd had, probably listening to a hated voice in her head telling her "I'm FAT, I'm FAT, I'm FAT!", and believing every word of it.

Do I need to mention that this is just out-and-out sick?

Wind the years back to about 1999. I was living in Napoleon Ohio and working at a pizza joint whilst attending college. A waitress at this establishment, let's call her Emily, was a very attractive girl with a sweet disposition and an air of innocent naivete that was heartbreakingly endearing. She was, however, painfully thin.

It was typical, as the restaurant closed for the evening, for employees to have free dibs on leftover pizza from the buffet. We'd take home a few slices or even a whole pizza as a perk, since otherwise it'd simply go to the Dumpster out back. On one evening when there happened to be quite a bounty of leftovers, I mentioned to Emily that she should stock up a box for herself, as she occasionally did. "No," She said reluctantly, "I can't. I'm trying to lose some weight."

I am sure I blinked with speechless bewilderment. "Where?" I demanded. "From your hair?!"

She gave an embarrassed I've-said-too-much-already look and attempted to dismiss the subject. I persisted. I told her that, despite what the media implies, most men do not believe that skinnier is better. Only women believe that. To prove my point, I called the manager and two delivery drivers, all men, out of the kitchen area. With no preamble, I asked them if they preferred very thin women or women with a little more weight on them than Madison Avenue would deem appropriate. They all instantly answered that they preferred women with more "meat on their bones", as one of them put it. The equasion is simple, they explained (though not in these words): men are attracted to those details that make women different from men. Specifically, curves and "soft parts". The thinner a woman is, the less curves and, err, soft parts.

Of course, that is only true to a point. Too much weight tends to make the woman entirely "soft part", and the lack of any contrast tends to be less attractive.

All three men agreed with me (to Emily's hopefully instructive blushing) that she was, if anything, a might too thin and needn't be the least bit worried about partaking of some extra pizza.

I don't know whatever happened to Emily, but it is terribly apparent that she is not alone in the perception that men like girls skinny, and the skinnier the better. Almost without exception, I think any woman who actually asks the men she knows will find that, up to a point, the reverse is true. Skinny is the iron-clad mandate of the cannibalistic media and, indirectly, women themselves, who have determined that what the media says is beauty must be true.

So give yourselves a break, my beloved female friends. Eat a little more pizza. Ask the men you know what they actually think is beautiful and attractive. And believe them. There are far too many beautiful women going around sucked dry of all their confidence and physical self-respect because they've swallowed the impossible and ridiculous dream of freakish emaciation.

Can I hear from the men out there? Am I right? And women, what do you think?

Things my Kids Will Never Experience III: Life Before the Internet (or) How Pornography Became my Coworker

This one is the biggie.

Have any of you realized that we adults living today are the last generation in the history of the planet to know what life was like before the Internet? Further, we are the only generation to have intimate knowledge of life both before and after the advent of the World Wide Web. Our experience is unique in the entire scope of history. Our parents were the last generation to live their lives looking things up in phonebooks instead of on Yahoo. Our kids will be the first generation to not know how to use an encyclopedia or the Dewey Decimal System. We are the generation right in the middle, who grew up thinking that "www" was a miss-spelling of the World Wrestling Federation, but who now use email and web-surfing for everything from work to entertainment.

Kinda makes you feel special, don't it?

Remember what it was like to write a report for school? My first written report was on Crazy Horse the indian. We didn't live anywhere near a library (my parents were notorious lovers of "country living", which was a prison sentence for me) and so I did all my research via good old Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Actually, I don't think our encyclopedias were Brittanicas. I don't remember what brand they were, but they were probably something my parents (or even my grandparents) bought from a door-to-door salesman. They had bright red hardcover bindings, with gold embossed titles on the spines. Near the top of each spine was a black bar with gold edging and a large gold letter in the center. In my case, I reached for the volume with the letter "C" on it, lay down on the fat carpeting of the living room floor rather hopefully with my spiral bound notebook and a couple of sharpened no. 2 pencils, and began my "research".

When you opened the encyclopedia, there was a smell. It was, I assumed, the smell of learning, of intelligence, of knowledge. In reality, it was the smell of large, heavy books that have occasionally spent months at a time in slightly damp cardboard boxes, forgotten after a move until someone pulls back a flap and says, "Hey, it's the encyclopedias! I s'pose we should put these on the shelf in the den or something." To me, the smell that wafted out of the "C" encyclopedia when I cracked it open seemed to raise my IQ ten or twenty points, and I completely ignored the waterspots and the slightly green patch on the title page. To me, those were signs of high-learning, like ivy on a university wall or a pocket protecter.

The pages were thick and heavy, as if the dense words and invariably black and white pictures that crammed the volume added their own weight to the paper. The encyclopedia was short- attention-span heaven. Every page was a deep-sea dive into something completely different and intriguing. In the years to come, when I was bored, I'd pull down a random volume and leaf through it, learning about the Doppler Effect, and Eisenhower, and how pigs are butchered, and the history or the automobile (up to 1965 or so). In the "A" volume, there was a ten page section of transparent pages displaying, in full color, all the layers of human anatomy, from the skeleton out. This was one I returned to over and over, relishing the creepy, ghastly skinless man that was so prosaically represented.

Writing a report was a grammatical and linguistic challenge, rather than a compositional effort. With only one source for facts, one simply had to re-arrange what the encyclopedia said so as to avoid the high crime of plaigerism (which, if it were to be found in my report, would quite likely have resulted in my breaking rocks on a chain gang in Georgia, according to my parents and teachers). Thus, where the encyclopedia stated "Even as a young man, Crazy Horse was a legendary warrior," I would turn aside and write (with many sideways glances), "While he was still a non-grown adult, Crazy-Horse was a fighting guy that was, um, legendary." Whew, that was close. Althought I probably didn't actually include the "um".

Going to the library was much different in the epoch before the Internet. Nowadays, if one wants a book on the subject of, say, spelunking in Wyoming, one merely goes to a station on a bank of computers and types "spelunking and wyoming". The library computer will immediately return a list of dozens of books, including travel guides, cave maps, spelunking technique handbooks, and quite possible connect you to a free online service that'll plan your complete Wyoming spelunking package including airfare, equipment rental, and a local native American guide complete with subterranean Wisdom of the Ancients. (it's important to conduct this search on a library computer, and not your home PC, since a standard Internet search will likely contain several pages of references to spelunking as some sort of acrobatic sex act with a porn star named Wyoming.)

In the days prior the Internet, one entered the library and approached, with the sort of low-grade dread that usually befits an unscheduled visit to the Principal's office, the stonehenge rows of card catalogues that was the Dewey Decimal System. Your information was in there somewhere, without a doubt. Dewey was extremely thorough. It would be there, information about a book about spelunking in Wyoming, typewritten (with an actual typewriter, including the subscript 'e's and the occasional bit of painted on White-out) on a thick, yellowed 3x5 card with dog-eared corners and a few pencilled addendums. That card was buried in the center of a two-foot-long horizontal stack of nearly identical cards, that stack laid out like a corpse in a narrow wooden drawer on well-oiled casters. The drawer had a metal name-plate on the front of it, displaying an even smaller card with something like "556.097 - 556.202" on it. Above and below this door, and on both sides, were more drawers, absolutely identical except for tiny incremental variations in the numbers on the nameplates. These stretched into their tens and dozens, occupying a gigantic block of wooden cabinetry ten feet wide and five feet tall. Next to the cabinet was another, identical cabinet. And another. And more and more. The eye couldn't contain it all. It was like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where the Arc of the Covenant is wheeled in a wooden crate into an endless maze of similar wooden crates stretching, as far as we can tell, into dark, catalogued infinity.

When you finally found the card referring to the book you wanted, you couldn't take the card with you to find the book. God help you if you removed a card from it's place in the System. Invariably, on the tops of the cabinets, were stacks of tiny, roughly cut squares of paper (usually with bits of bake sale flyers and Weekly Readers on the backsides) and very dull, tiny pencils. There were only two places on the planet that these tiny pencils were ever found: libraries and miniature golf courses. They were inevitably dull, greasy and so short that one instinctively felt he should be holding it with a pair of tweezers. In this manner, you scrabbled down the information for where to find your book, slid the drawer containing the appropriate card shut, and went off into the canyons of books to search out your tome on Wyoming spelunking.

When you got there, your book, without fail, was checked-out, leaving a tell-tale empty slot on the shelf. Next to it, however, would be a miss-filed book on spelunking as an acrobatic sex act with a hooker named Wyoming. The end result was that I, at least, usually left the library more knowledgeable than when I entered, but rarely about anything I had intended to learn.

Now, in the age of the Internet, who even needs to go to the library anymore? Many of the classics of great literature are actually available royalty-free to be downloaded and read right off your computer. And really, who needs books as reference anymore? If you want to know about spelunking in Wyoming (especially if you DO mean acrobatic sex with geographically-named prostitutes) or hiking in the outback, or refinishing your deck, or repairing your antique watch, or wooing your wife, or becoming an astro-physicist, you can find pages and pages of information regarding it instantly on your own home computer. Granted, the information may not be entirely accurate. It may, in fact, be entirely and fantastically false. When it comes to verifiable, reliable truth, the Internet is a bit like the Wild, Wild West. You may get shot down at high noon by a scam artist or a bit of surprise pop-up porn or a few made-up factoids, but you know that's a distinct possibility whenever you set foot on the dusty main street of the information superhighway. If one is careful, shrewd, and a little teeny bit cynical, it's possible to get what you want to know out of the Internet and make it out whole. It's easy. It's a little TOO easy.

Which brings me to porn on the Internet.

In one Simpson's episode, Homer's website is praised by Lenny as being "The number one non-porn related website on the Internet! Which," He adds, "makes it the five-hundred-thousandth favorite site overall." In an episode of Futurama, typical American schlub Phillip Fry tells us with glib finality, "Well, thanks to the Internet, now I'm bored with sex." Wow. So I am going to avoid getting preachy about the evils of Internet porn. What would be the point? The people who agree with me know it already, and the people who don't agree with me are probably so hopelessly jaded as to be beyond convincing. I will simply say this:

Back in MY day if one wanted to look at pictures of naked women brazenly showing off their girl parts, it was hard. It was (if you had even the remotest sense of shame) embarrassing. You had to go out in public and peruse the rack in the back corner of the drug store with all the metal faceplates hiding the covers of the magazines. Nobody believed (then or now) that you were reading Penthouse for the articles. When you stood in line at the cash register and laid your copy of Hustler on the counter, nobody assumed you were doing research for a paper on Crazy Horse. Buying porn was like buying condoms: there was only one purpose for it. And at least when you were buying condoms you were implying the luxury of a partner. When the clerk rang up your porn and asked you if you wanted a bag, you might as well have just answered in an overloud stage-whisper, "No, I'm gonna go use it now. Where's your bathroom? I'm gonna go MASTERBATE."

The first time I saw porn I was about twelve. Really! I was staying overnight at a friend's house. He took me out to a fort he had assembled from spare planks and construction debris, and there he produced, from the dirt beneath a slab of plywood, an issue of Playboy. The magazine was grungy and old and well-riffled. The pages were damp and moldy. On the cover was a frankly alluring image of a beautiful woman holding a white parasol and wearing a white, spring dress. The wind had caught her skirts and had blown them up, showing the fine curve of her bottom and the tops of her white stockings. She was looking at the camera with that look of vapid, idiotic surprise that men seem to like to think women will exhibit when something mortally embarrassing happens to them. It was intriguing and sexy. Until my friend opened the magazine and flopped out the centerfold.

I had never seen, or even dreamt of, what might be hidden under all the many layers of the demure female mystery. The closest I had come to exploring the hidden world of feminine delights was the lingerie section of the Sears catalogue. I liked the secrecy and suspense of it, the pure, unaulterated enigma of the female shape, and the untold delights I knew, instinctively, it represented to me, a boy who was going to be a Man.

Until that moment, I probably thought I wanted to know. I didn't. And I learned it a half a second too late. Shock does not begin to explain what I felt when I found myself staring at the proferred centerfold. It filled my vision, shoved the entire world aside in one clumsy, rash gesture. It was terrible. It was cold and horrid and creepy and threatening. It crushed all my burgeoning dreams of the mystery and beauty of women, of the delightful suspense of romance and intimacy, under that ten-ton image of naked reproductive anatomy. It spun a Kleig light onto my hazy, candle-lit fantasies of girls and romance and revealed only SEX, biological as a trip to the bathroom and raw as an anvil.

My brushes with porn from then on were as rare as I could make them. I am an unusual male specimen (or so it would seem) in that the raw blatancy of porn completely repelled me, and still does. When a group of guy friends produced a porno movie or a copy of Hustler for us all to ogle over, I'd sample it fleetingly and move on, sorry I had even glanced at it. Still, it wasn't difficult to avoid. After all, and this is the point, porn was hard to get! It was rare. It was shameful and forbidden. The guys I knew had to steal it from their fathers or grandfathers. Kids like us weren't allowed to buy it. We weren't even allowed to look surreptitiously at it in that back corner of the drugstore. It trickled into our lives irregularly and rarely, and was hoarded for exactly that reason.

And now, in one generation, thanks to the Internet, porn is more than easy. It is ubiquitous. In one generation, my generation, it has gone from a rare tittilation for the boldest of adults to something that shows up freely and without provocation in my own home. A completely innocent Internet search produces references to sexual jollies of all kinds and shapes. And God help you if you are doing an image search. As a digital animator, I search images on a daily basis looking for texture and reference materials. I have come to simply accept, as part of my dairly routine, that searches for anything so apparently prosaic as "antique doorknob" or "muscle-car hubcap" will produce the most random and absurd (and thankfully tiny) images of pornographic inanity. Today, porn is insistent. It doesn't hide in the corner of the drugstore behind metal faceplates. It jumps out at you, flashes it's worst like a deranged man in a trenchcoat.

Now, inquisitive boys don't have to wait to find a cast-off copy of Penthouse in the dumpster to hasten their knowledge of women's barest secrets. They don't have to slink off to the fort in the woods to peruse a lone, moldy centerfold, hidden under the floorboards. At the slightest whim, any boy or girl can simply type a word into a search engine and be bombarded. And the least of what he or she will discover is simply images of naked girlies. They may end up learning about things that make "spelunking with Wyoming" look like a day at the library.

But I don't think the Internet is evil. It isn't evil anymore than guns are evil or TV is evil. Well, OK, TV is a little evil. The Internet is just a thing, and humans use it, and humans are, well, confused at best about their own mental health and that of those around them. The Internet changes everything, irrevocably. It is without a doubt the greatest difference between the world of my kids and my world growing up. I am sad, for some odd reason, that they will never know what it's like to look something up in the encyclopedia, like I did. I am sad that I will have to be, quite possibly, fanatically vigilant about what they do online and even what their friends do online. I am sad that it has become so seemingly hopelessly difficult to protect their innocence in the face of the blindingly perverse hurricane of the Internet.

But I am no Luddite. I use the Internet, and generally I like it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the Internet is nearly essential to me and my occupation.

Still, isn't it funny that I live in an age when it'd be a relief to catch my son someday learning about sex from an old, musty copy of Playboy?