The People On The Porch

This morning when the sun was still fresh in the sky, I sat on the porch and enjoyed a cup of cheap black coffee. On the street the buses passed, loaded with half asleep college kids on their way up to campus. The commuters sped by on their way to the interstate and the countless industrial parks the interstate feeds. In the trees the birds sang songs to each other and a mother sparrow fed her young in a nest in the rain gutter above me. After I finished my coffee I left the porch high on caffeine and fresh air, ready to start my day, joining the rest of the city in the daily grind. After school I headed back to the porch to share in laughter and insights with friends and neighbors also gathered there. The porch has become our refuge, a place that makes sense in a world that doesn’t.

When I arrived home I found the neighbors on the porch. Mike was smoking a cigarette and telling jokes. Beth was sitting cross legged laughing at everything Mike said. Mike and Beth live in the apartment above my brother and me. We call them our housemates although this one hundred year old house was converted into two separate apartments in the 1950’s. Mike is 29 years old, anxious about his quickly approaching thirtieth birthday and spends his nights sitting on the porch drinking locally brewed beer and reading train magazines. He will spend hours talking about environmental policy from under his Indiana Jones hat, all you have to do is ask him how his day went. Mike tells really dumb jokes he learns at work, delivered as slow as possible around our back yard camp fires.

Beth loves horses and has read the Lord of the Rings one too many times. She has been known to burst into Rohanian or Elvish song at those same urban bonfires. I enjoy her home made soups and the afternoon chats we have on the sunny porch talking about St. Francis of Assisi, or her horse Lily, or more often than not the Lord of The Rings. Beth is a talented writer who takes pride in her ability to communicate. She pronounces every word perfectly which is why I think her teeth are so clean and white. We share a garden in the back yard and every weekend in spring we are outside digging, planting, and laughing. In the late summer we have barbeques in the back yard with the neighbors: Diana, Doug, Nicole, Heather, and Justin.

Diana was lounging in the old corduroy recliner next to Beth. Her face was reddened with happiness and her short hair was pulled back into a cute pony tail. Her eyes are always shining and engaged. Diana would probably have made a good contestant on that old television show Name That Tune. I am envious of her music collection. Diana also has a place in her heart for horses. Last year my girl friend and I visited Diana at a horse ranch that she was house sitting. After cooking us steaks and eggs we followed her out to the coral and she taught me how to ride a horse. When Beth and Diana talk about horses their voices always get higher and more girly.

Next to Diana sat Doug on an orange burlap couch from the 1960’s. Doug is constantly cracking jokes that aren’t funny but he always gets a laugh because his face is so animated when he tells them. Sometimes I see a caged animal when I look at Doug. He spent two years living in the mountains of Alaska with only the clothes on his back and a hunting bow. I have no doubt that when he finally gets his college degree he will move back to the wilderness where he can stretch out and grow a long red beard. There is so much passion in Doug. Every week he starts a new project but has yet to finish one. He has attempted to build a force field, abolish carbohydrates from his diet, build a hydrogen fuel cell, make a movie, build a web site, and get rich on Wall Street. Doug is still poor but he is over flowing with ideas. Right now he is passionate about rice and beans. When I walked up to the porch Doug was shoveling rice and beans into his mouth.

The people on the porch greeted me with smiles and hellos and we continued the conversation that has gone on unbroken for two years. Our porch is like an internet chat room, the conversation never ends. People join and depart from the conversation when ever they like, comforted by the fact that it continues just outside our front door. Sometimes the conversation spills off the porch and into the mountains like it did last month when Doug, my brother, and I went hiking in the hills of Skagit county. Doug was in his element tracking deer and identifying plants and animals. The conversation in the hills was less about talking and more about sharing in the silent mossy woods together. But a physical presence isn’t required to be active in the conversation.

Heather is a friend serving in Iraq and her letters arrive on our porch once a month. We read her letters and together try and make sense of the war on terror, but mostly we just laugh at her witty commentary and write her about the exciting stuff going on in our lives. When we send letters back we are extending the porch into the middle east and to the soldiers who are fighting for us.

We were on the porch drinking nut brown beer when Andy showed up. Andy is my brother and my closest friend. Andy is going to be famous one day if he ever applies himself fully. He is an awesome artist with an intelligence and conviction that I try to emulate. He is younger than me by 18 months and I remember in our early adolescence we would brawl every afternoon. We became close after high school and have lived together in Bellingham for two years. The porch would not be the same with out Andy’s sarcastic humor and his grasp on reality. Doug and I would float off into fantasy land with out Andy keeping us grounded. Justin came out of the house and handed Andy a beer and sat down next to Doug on the scratchy couch. Justin just moved in next door.

Doug voiced his concern that rising gas prices might strain our economy to the point of collapse. I had pictures in my head of the Soviet collapse and the long bread lines the poor Russian people had to stand in. Doug prophesied anarchy, urban riots, and looting.
“I will move to Alaska if that happens. I am not going to stay in this asphalt city. We can’t subsist here. Most people can’t even grow Lima beans! They are all to busy watching plasma screen TV! I will go to Alaska when the killing starts.”

Mike calmly explained the intricacies of the global geopolitical landscape and assured Doug that doom and gloom are not on the horizon. Doug stuck by his plan to move to Alaska. I think he is just looking for an excuse to leave the confining halls of college and run free in the wilderness. I don’t blame him.

When our beers were gone we went inside and Andy, Justin, and Doug had a “jam” session. Andy beat the drums with old chewed up drum sticks, Doug slapped the strings on his bass guitar and Justin swayed back and forth with his head down while playing his pastel blue electric guitar. I laid down on the couch and listened to their music. They were communicating with each other without saying a word, speaking a language of vibration similar to speech except without the tongue and vocal cords. After each song they laughed and declared the song awesome and started again.

I left the couch eventually and ended up back on the porch. I sat on the couch with a glass of wine and watched the sun sink behind the horizon. To my surprise Brent appeared from behind an Azalea bush. He comes around periodically and then disappears for months at a time. I said hello and he sat down next to me on the couch. We sat there in silence for a moment before he nervously asked me if he could bum a cigarette. I gave him a cigarette and asked him where he had been. He told me that he had been in a mental institution for three months and had just gotten out. He tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a second story window before they committed him for treatment. Brent is struggling to overcome heroine and get his life back together. Unlike Diana’s sparkling eyes, Brent’s were dull and tired but intelligence and hope still lingered behind them. After a couple minutes of small talk Brent closed his eyes and listened to the music the guys were playing inside. He opened his eyes and self consciously began to speak, slowly, pausing after every word to gather his thoughts:

“I can’t read music but, I--I have come up with my own way to write music. I imagine the way my fingers look on the frets and the mood of the music and I draw pictures of the songs. It is hard for me because I have these thoughts in my head, I know what I am trying to say but I just can’t use the big words everybody else uses. It’s like, um you know--well, how we use our hands and body language to communicate. The natural instinct to use our hands to express ourselves has been perfected into a language--American sign language. Although I use my hands when I talk I can’t speak American sign language.” he stopped frustrated that he couldn’t say it any plainer and took a drag from his cigarette. The sun was down and it was late. Brent and I smoked another cigarette and then he went home.

Alone on the porch with a glass of wine I thought about what Brent was trying to say. It is the same thing we are all trying to say but it is buried deep inside of us under the useless statistics we memorized in school or behind the images of celebrities burned into our minds. Our instincts are displaced by rigid religious laws and our creativity is funneled through political agendas. The simplicity of life is losing ground to the complexity of modern culture. Brent is scared that the world will become so complex that he will lose his voice in the conversation of mankind.

The quietness was broken when everyone spilled out the front door talking and laughing. Doug was grinning under a scruffy beard and his eyebrows were dancing on his forehead. Beth’s teeth reflected a moon ray and almost blinded me and the others plopped down and started joking. I took a sip of wine and started talking with the people on the porch.