Farm City_ The Education Of An Urban Farmer Part 6

I walked out to the deck. The smell around the hives this time of year was both divine and fetid. Divine near the two top boxes, full of honey and pollen. The bees seal the cracks in the stacked boxes with a kind of yellow caulk called propolis-a sticky substance collected from tree sap and leaf buds-to keep out ants, drafts, and moisture. In the brood box, the deeper container through which the bees enter the hive after a day of foraging, the queen quietly lays all the eggs for the colony. In the fall, her production slows. The colony spends cold nights huddled in a ball in order to keep one another, but mostly the queen, warm. The smell from these stacked boxes is ambrosial-earthy pine, beeswax, and sweetness.

Not so sweet smelling is the quagmire of dead bees piled up outside the hive at the end of a season. During prime nectar-gathering time, up to one hundred bees a day die inside a nest, The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture told me. The corpses are "carried away from the colony in the mandibles" of a caste of bees known as the undertakers, which recognize the dead by a chemical odor. It looked as if my undertaker bees just tossed the dead over the edge of the hive. Since it was on a deck in the middle of a city, the corpses didn't gently rot into the soil or get blown away by the wind. They simply rotted on the hot roof-and the resultant reek was piercing. told me. The corpses are "carried away from the colony in the mandibles" of a caste of bees known as the undertakers, which recognize the dead by a chemical odor. It looked as if my undertaker bees just tossed the dead over the edge of the hive. Since it was on a deck in the middle of a city, the corpses didn't gently rot into the soil or get blown away by the wind. They simply rotted on the hot roof-and the resultant reek was piercing.

On a sunny October day, Bill and I stood on the deck, taking in these odors. After cracking the propolis caulk around the bee boxes, he hefted the uppermost box, or super, and I slipped the bee escape-a beekeeping tool that consists of a wooden box with a pattern of openings-underneath it.

The bees in the now-sequestered honey super could leave through the bee escape's little tunnels, but they couldn't get back up. It would take about twenty-four hours for all the bees to empty out of the hive's honey storehouse. Most commercial operations use blowers or noxious fumes to drive the bees out. The bee escape seemed less offensive, and sort of fun, like a practical joke played on the bees.

The next day, my friend Joel, an Oakland public school teacher and former Deadhead, came over with his children, Jackson, ten, and Margaret, eight. They spilled out of the car, and Joel bounded up the stairs of our apartment. Joel and kids were interested in keeping bees and wanted to get the full experience before they got their own hives.

Margaret couldn't believe how cramped our apartment was.

"There's something everywhere!" she said.

It was true that, over the year, things had gotten pretty messy. We had bee boxes stacked up against one wall. The extractor had arrived in the mail a few days earlier and dominated one corner. I had acquired various farm implements-shovels, rakes, pruners-which hung in our laundry room. The pantry was overflowing with canned tomatoes and pickles. The kitchen table was so stacked with books about building cob ovens and keeping goats that there wasn't much room for anything else. The fall crop of lettuces was germinating on the windowsills. I had acquired more fly strips to battle the increasing numbers. The two survivor ducks were living on the back stairs.

The house where Margaret lived was very neat and orderly, and there were rules about what belonged inside and what belonged outside. I gave that up when I started urban farming. There's a principle in intensive urban farming called stacking functions. I told Margaret about the concept.

"See, these extra bee supers are also our coffee table," I said as I showed her around. "And the deck is a garden and a bee yard." I felt like Pippi Long-stocking giving a tour of Villa Villekulla.

Joel and Bill lifted the honey super off the bee escape and ran into the house before the bees could figure out what had happened. The super was heavy with honey. Inside the fragrant, beeless box were ten frames, crammed in like library books. When we pulled one up, it was revealed to be a big chunk of sealed honeycomb, like a slab of gold within the frame.

We lifted out each frame, sc.r.a.ped off the wax-capped honey with a serrated knife, and spun it in our shiny new stainless-steel honey extractor. Before the invention of the extractor, in 1865 by a beekeeper named Major Hruschka, people mashed the entire honeycomb and strained the honey from the wax, which took many days and attracted pests. Hruschka realized that it would be easy to remove the honey from the st.u.r.dy frames by using centrifugal force. He concocted a spinning device in which the frames could be mounted and the honey would fly out.

We made the kids give the hand-cranked extractor a spin. Centrifugal force launched the honey out of the comb and onto the stainless-steel wall of the extractor. Then the honey dripped down and collected at the bottom, where a spigot opened to let it pour out. Commercial beekeepers use plug-in knives, automated de-cappers, and motorized extractors, and they heat and filter their honey. Instead, Joel and family steadied our extractor, which had a tendency to keel over, cranked it as hard as they could, then let the honey drizzle out into a few quart-size mason jars.

We were all sticky with honey and buzzed from licking our fingers and chewing on the leftover wax, which reminded Margaret of chewing gum. We extracted eight quarts of honey in less than an hour. When we lived in Seattle, it took days to get the honey out. Our new machine was impressive indeed.

"If you get bees, you're welcome to borrow this," I told Joel.

I could see it in his eyes. Hear it in the giddy laughter of his children. Smell it in the heady liquor splattering on the sides of the steel tank as we spun, the scent wafting up into the nostrils of the person cranking the handle. Soon, I predicted, Joel's house would be as big a disaster as mine.

He and the kids took home jars of honey. I brought one to the chubby elder monk who lived across the street in the monastery. When I handed it to him and pointed at the beehive on our deck by way of explanation, he gazed up at the hive, eyebrows furrowed. After a moment, he seemed to understand. He smiled and snuck the jar deep into his yellow robes. Without a sound, he turned back into the temple and disappeared.

After cleaning up, we returned the now-empty honey super to the hive on the deck. The bees simply went to work salvaging any remaining honey and wax and cleaned up the mostly empty frames. I felt a little niggle of guilt. Bees have never been truly domesticated-they are not tame and didn't really depend on me to live, as Harold and the chickens did. My bees, in fact, were of the same genetic stock as wild bees, bees who make their homes in trees. All we could do was offer them a home and hope it was enough to convince them to stay.

I couldn't help but relate to the bees. Their box, like our lot, was a temporary thing-a home for the moment. At any time, the bees could decide to leave, and wherever they relocated, they would make wax and store honey. I realized that that would be our fate, too: wherever we ended up going after the lot was bulldozed, we would build a garden, keep chickens, set up beehives. It's just what we do.

As for raising meat birds, Bill was still unconvinced. I was too attached to the survivor ducks to ever kill and eat them. Harold was my last chance to prove my box of poultry hadn't been a dismal failure.

Bobby started going barefoot most of the time, which is dangerous in our neighborhood, where the streets and sidewalks almost uniformly glitter with broken gla.s.s. When I told him about Jack Chan's plans, he said, "Condos?" and looked dazed. "Here?" He looked at the abandoned brick building across the street. Then he shuffled off to sweep the street, which he did nightly.

I picked my third-and presumably last-crop of tomatoes. The lettuce started to taste bitter. I expected to see bulldozers any day now. My watermelon, coveted thing, was growing despite the setback. It hadn't heard the news of the impending destruction. Worried that I might harvest it too late or, worse, too soon, I asked around for advice on how to tell if a watermelon is ripe. No one in the city could help us.

Bill and I went to see some farmer friends who live in Mendocino County, about three hours north of Oakland. They had draft horses and forty gorgeous acres of row crops, and I felt a little self-conscious when I told them I was an urban farmer. I was micro-scale compared to what they were doing. I knew that they resented having to drive into the city to sell their vegetables, but they had to go where the population center was. Growing food in the city cut out that step.

Over a dinner of their farm's roast beef and potatoes, the youngest son of our farmer friends-a strapping boy of seventeen who already knew how to build a barn and castrate a pig-told us how to tell if a watermelon is ripe. You look at the spot where the melon has been lying on the ground, he told me. If it's a pale, pale yellow, it's ready.

After a restful day, we drove back to Oakland, the watermelon on my mind. Coming back to the city from the country takes a few hours of adjustment for me. I'll wander off and not lock the car door, for instance. A farmer once said that the only time you have to lock your car in the country is during zucchini season. If you don't, you'll wind up with a pa.s.senger seat full of oversized vegetables. But if you value your car battery in the ghetto, you better lock your door.

Feeling relaxed and open, ready to apply the farmer-approved method on my melon, I walked toward the scrambling watermelon vine. It was Indian summer, still warm during the day, but the nights had become chilly, and it was getting dark sooner. I wondered why construction on the condos in the lot hadn't started. It would be rainy season soon.

I had to look under a few leaves before my brain could accept the truth: The watermelon had vanished. Wrong bed? No, there's the vine. I gingerly traced the splay of the plant, from the mound where it had first emerged to the tip where the fruit had been. Had been. Where the watermelon had been lying, its weight (five pounds?) had pressed down into the soil and made a depression. The divot was the only thing left. I crept upstairs and cried.

Motherf.u.c.kers.

There were suspects, of course. Lou, the collards harvester, being number 1. But there were so many. Some of the corn had gone missing recently, too. I wondered if people in the neighborhood could sense that the garden was doomed. That the yellow spray-painted property lines had marked the garden as weak or crippled. As when wolves take down a weak member of a herd, the garden became a target. But the callousness, to take my one and only watermelon, even if it was doomed, boggled my mind.

And I wailed when I remembered that I wouldn't be able to save the seed, pa.s.s it on to someone else's garden once mine was bulldozed. Worst of all, I would never know how the Cream of Saskatchewan tasted. I couldn't just go buy one.

I wanted to find the culprit, strap him in a chair, and ask him a few questions. Like: Did it shatter when you cut into it? Was it creamy on the inside? Sweet tasting? The best G.o.dd.a.m.n watermelon in the world? This f.u.c.ked-up neighborhood. Bobby? Did he do it? That son of a b.i.t.c.h. I looked out my window. Bobby was sitting barefoot in his lawn chair in the middle of the street.

I burst out laughing. Let them build condos here. I dare them. Lunatic Landing. Crackhead Townhouses. Broken Window Live/Work Lofts.

CHAPTER TEN.

Mindful of Thanksgiving, Lana invited Harold to live out his days in her warehouse.

I demurred. I wasn't a hobbyist with a pet. I was a farmer with a turkey on my hands whose feed-to-weight ratio had reached a plateau. I had fed, groomed, defended, loved, spoiled, named named this animal. And now it was time to harvest him. this animal. And now it was time to harvest him.

On the big day, I woke up late and filled with dread. I puttered around the kitchen. I boiled several pots of water and poured them into a large metal vat outside. Read the paper. Found the ax. Tied up my hair in braids. Finished a novel I had meant to return to the library. Sharpened the ax. Put on my dirtiest clothes. Cleaned out the fridge. Set up a chopping block. Boiled more water. Then, as the afternoon sun streaked the November sky orange, I realized that I hadn't seen Harold around.

Not in the backyard. Not on his usual perch on the stairs. Not in the neighbor's backyard. Harold was supposed to die at my hands but was nowhere to be found. I'll admit it: I was relieved.

The previous night, I had been a wreck. The facts were before me. This Thanksgiving, I was not going to be a consumer buying a free-range turkey. This year I was a producer. Against all odds, one of my turkeys had made it to harvest weight, and I better kill him now before someone else did. But first I had to figure out how to do it.

Seated at my kitchen table after dinner that night, I had flipped through The Encyclopedia of Country Living The Encyclopedia of Country Living's newsprint pages until I came to the poultry chapter. Carla Emery writes, "I don't think much of people who say they like to eat meat but go 'ick' at the sight of a bleeding animal. Doing our own killing, cleanly and humanely, teaches us humility and reminds us of our interdependence with other species." I had nodded my head and quickly turned to the section t.i.tled "Killing a Turkey."

Emery's words of wisdom: "The butchering process with a turkey is basically the same as that with a chicken except that your bird is approximately 5 times bigger."

"First, catch the bird and tie its legs."

"The turkey may then be beheaded with an ax (a 2-person job, one to hold the turkey and one to chop)."

Lying in bed, I had worried that I would botch the execution, that Harold would feel pain, that his feathers wouldn't come off, that I wouldn't be able to clean the meat properly. So I visualized, I rehea.r.s.ed. First, ax to neck, then bleeding, then defeathering, then cleaning. I mumbled a macabre lullaby before falling asleep.

But now I wouldn't get the chance to practice what I had memorized. Harold was smarter than I'd given him credit for, I thought. He knew what was afoot and simply flew away.

Bill had to work, so Joel had come over to help. Eager to teach his children about where food came from, he brought his ten-year-old son, Jackson. The three of us stood in the garden, the sound of the traffic from 980 roaring by, a vat of steaming water and a sharpened ax nearby. We wondered what to do.

Then I spotted Harold. He was perched on a low fence in the garden, a place he had never ventured before, watching us. "There he is!" I yelled. It was weird, as if he had known. Harold stood and adjusted his perch. I picked him up; at twenty-eight pounds he was quite an armful, but he liked being held and didn't struggle.

Jackson smoothed Harold's iridescent feathers and looked with wonder at the giant snood that dangled over his beak. The turkey's voluminous wattles billowed below his neck like an old man's jowls. I told Jackson about Harold's life over the past six months, his adventures, his grief over Maude, and his future: on our Thanksgiving table. Jackson's blue eyes, hidden behind a giant pair of gla.s.ses, darted around. Then he blurted out, "I don't want to see it it."

So I tucked Harold under my arm, took Jackson over to a weedy patch where the watermelon had once grown, and showed him how to pull weeds. Then I faced a task that, h.e.l.l, even I didn't want to do.

Harold and I, there in that squat lot, embodied the latest endpoint of centuries of mutual dependence. The only reason Harold existed at all was that he and his ancestors had made a Faustian bargain with humans: guaranteed food, shelter, and the opportunity to pa.s.s on their genes in exchange, eventually, for their life. Paradoxically, to be killed was a way of life for Harold.

Though Harold had become a postmodern turkey-named, citified-his death, when viewed in the context of his species, was part of being a turkey. As the naturalist Stephen Budiansky points out in The Covenant of the Wild, The Covenant of the Wild, "All of nature's strategies for the survival of a species, strategies which include domestication, include suffering and death of individual members of that species." Harold's mother, some breeding hen at Murray McMurray, lives on. In an indirect way, Harold's mother and I were cooperating so that we could both survive. "All of nature's strategies for the survival of a species, strategies which include domestication, include suffering and death of individual members of that species." Harold's mother, some breeding hen at Murray McMurray, lives on. In an indirect way, Harold's mother and I were cooperating so that we could both survive.

Of course, we meat-eating city dwellers don't have to kill something to survive. We merely go to the store with some cash in hand. How many people would eat meat if they had to kill it themselves? This was the question I had pondered for six months as I watched Harold grow from a puffy chick into a full-grown turkey. I eat meat, I like eating meat, it is part of my culture and, some might argue, my heritage as a human being. While Harold had to die, I had to kill.

At the grocery counter or farmer's market stall, the cost of the meat I bought factored in the cost of the bird's life-feed, housing, transportation to market. A small portion of that cost included a kill fee. I had been comfortable allowing someone else to be my executioner. And suddenly, all the meat I bought, even though I had considered it expensive at the time, seemed underpriced.

We burned a little tobacco in an oyster sh.e.l.l, as a new-agey friend had recommended. She said it was a Native American tradition that showed the animal's spirit which way was up. The !Kung people, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa, ask forgiveness of an animal's spirit. Budiansky tells us, "They don't pretend there is no ethical cost, or guilt even, inherent in the act of killing the animal." With this in mind, I whispered into Harold's ear my thanks and asked for forgiveness.

Although I usually call myself an atheist, a lonely universe offers little comfort to a person confronting death. I thought of my father, a voracious hunter and fisherman who, even after my mom left him, never came back from the land. He had tried, in his subtle way, from a great distance, to instill in me some of his beliefs about nature as a G.o.d of sorts. In my life as a city dweller, though, pantheism had mostly eluded me. But to hold Harold, this amazing living creature, and to know that his life force would be transferred to me in the form of food, felt sacred.

I stroked his warm, warty head. The folds of skin were soft and pliable, punctuated with small wayward hairs. I could feel his heart beating, slowly.

It's true that eating meat springs from a violent act, that in that way meat is like murder. But it is not an act filled with hate. I had murdered the opossum. But Harold I had raised in a loving, compa.s.sionate way, with good food, sunshine, and plenty of exercise. Harold had had a good life, and now he would have a good death-quick and painless-at the hands of someone he knew, in a familiar place.

"OK, Joel. Ready?" I asked.

Mrs. Nguyen, who is the only practicing Buddhist in the house, perhaps sensing our murderous plan, dropped her blinds loudly.

Joel looked nervous but steadfast; I could depend on him. After all my stalling, it was almost dark by the time we finally laid Harold's neck across the chopping block. For his part, Harold seemed resigned, bored, as if this scene had played itself out a thousand times before. I swung the ax. I swung again. Harold had a really big neck.

Muslim tradition says one must look an animal in the eye until its soul departs. I was satisfied that Harold and I had had a sufficient dialogue. He gobbled once, a warning sound that he regularly made. It made me a little sad to think that in the moment of his death he might have been scared.

It was a solemn moment. I hefted what was once Harold to a bucket in order to bleed him out. Though headless, he thrashed mightily, and the b.l.o.o.d.y neck stump pointed accusatorily toward me. I felt relieved, a little ashamed but giddy.

After his body stopped thrashing, I lowered it into a large pail of steaming hot water. His tremendous girth displaced some of the water, which flowed over the edge and into the garden. After fully submerging the body for a few seconds, I pulled it back out into the air. Joel and I sat down and plucked the feathers like a couple of old farmhands. They slipped off in clumps.

I could finally take a deep breath. I looked around the garden-only a few fall crops had been put in. Bill and I were expecting the bulldozers any day. We had become glum and unmotivated gardeners. The billboard that overlooked the lot had a public service ad warning against s.e.xual predators. BART clattered by. A few loud teenagers shuffled down the sidewalk but didn't look in. Killing Harold, we thought, was one of the last things we would do in this garden.

Joel and I made small talk, discussed how the death had gone, how beautiful Harold's skin looked beneath the feathers, how tasty this homegrown turkey would be. As the feathers flew and more and more skin was revealed Harold started to resemble a turkey you buy at a store, wrapped in plastic and defrosted in the sink.

Looks were deceiving, however, as I still had to clean out the guts. Joel and Jackson did not want to stay for that part. I waved goodbye to them and took Harold upstairs. Alone in the kitchen, a place where I had cooked innumerable meaty meals, I got out the Encyclopedia Encyclopedia again and turned to the "Cleaning the Bird" section. again and turned to the "Cleaning the Bird" section.

Harold's body was still warm when I laid the carca.s.s across a paper-lined table and made the first incision.

First I removed his crop, the baggy sac near his neck, filled with grain and greens he had eaten that morning that hadn't made it to the gizzard for digestion. I identified the trachea. Then, after a few precise cuts near the p.o.o.per, coached by Carla Emery, I eased out most of Harold's viscera with one steady pull. The curlicuing small intestine, the healthy dark liver, the pert heart and foamy lungs. The gizzard was round and covered in silvery skin. Curious, I made a slit down its tough side and examined the contents. Along the muscle walls was a green and yellow paste. It looked like wasabi but smelled like swamp. Within the goo were a few pebbles and a lot of smooth pieces of gla.s.s. Harold had been an urban turkey through and through.

I buried the inedibles in the compost. Everything else I took from Harold I used. I chopped off the feet-I knew a punk who wanted those, even though she said she wouldn't eat a bite of him. Her girlfriend wanted his wing tips, the dark-feathered ends of his three-foot-long wings. She said she'd use them for a costume. Their dog got his swampy gizzard. The enormous turkey neck was ringed with yellow fat, which boiled up into a rich gravy.

By the end of the process, The Encyclopedia of Country Living The Encyclopedia of Country Living's pages were marked with blood. And brining in the fridge was a heritage-breed turkey that I had raised from a day-old chick. The poultry package-bought with a credit card and priority-overnighted-had turned me into a farmer.

Now that my work was done, I had to trade in my straw farm hat for the paper one of a chef. G.o.d sends meat, and the devil sends cooks, as the proverb goes. As I morphed from farmer to gourmet-the fussier, sn.o.bbier element of food production-I worried about how my turkey would taste. On the advice of Carla Emery, I let him "rest" in the fridge for a couple of days so the meat would be more tender. If his flavor was off, his entire life would have been wasted. The burden felt heavy, and as Thanksgiving approached, I fretted more than usual. While this was a heavy load to carry, it was exactly what I had hoped for: meat had become a sacrifice-precious, not a casual dalliance.

On the big day, I put the turkey in the sink and trained a light on the body. I picked away all the little feathers and tweezed the wayward hairs. I made a few strategic cuts in his fatty skin and slipped in garlic cloves, herbs, and b.u.t.ter. Then I anointed his whole body with olive oil and salt. Once I placed the turkey in the oven, a wake became a dinner party.

I invited Mr. Nguyen over for dinner, but he shyly demurred. Willow arrived with a pot of stewed greens. Bill anxiously awaited the results of the meat experiment. Joel had a family engagement and couldn't make it. By dinnertime, ten guests had arrived. We toasted Harold before eating. I had snuck a sample before serving, so I already knew how good the turkey tasted. His thigh and leg meat were the color of milk chocolate. His flesh was perfectly moist, b.u.t.tery and savory. His skin crackled. Everyone agreed-each bite was special. Bill gnawed on a drumstick and closed his eyes with pleasure. It was the best turkey he had ever had.

By meal's end I was uncommonly satisfied and full. I looked at my dear friends seated around the table and felt humble and grateful to have nourished them. Then I piled a plate with dark and white meat and went downstairs. I paused at Mr. Nguyen's door, then knocked. I wanted to bring him food and proudly say, This is how it used to be done in America. The plate of turkey was a tasty piece of evidence of an earlier, very different time. I thought of my parents while I stood there, about how they had once salvaged their turkey out of the charred remains of a smokehouse. I had essentially done the same thing.

Mr. Nguyen giggled when he saw the plate in my hands, just like when we had peered into the peeping box of baby birds. "Yours?" he asked as he took it with a grin. I nodded proudly. Behind him, in his living room, I saw his family's altar. It glowed with red lights and incense.

Back upstairs, the ten guests and I polished off the rest of Harold. In the end, I was left with a carca.s.s.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Winter arrived. The hens got wet. The crops grew slowly. Bobby put a tarp over the roof of his car.

Then, in deep winter, something happened to me that made living in GhostTown suddenly seem a lot less fun. January in Oakland meant cold nights and lots of rain, so at 5:30 p.m., as I rode my bike home from work at the plant nursery, it was already dark. A light rain misted my gla.s.ses.

I saw a pack of twenty or so kids hanging out on the corner a few blocks from the park where I picked weeds for the chickens. Instead of avoiding the kids, I rode right by them. Some of them were on bikes, too. I hadn't thought much about it.

One time on this same street I had encountered a bunch of teenagers playing football. Since it had been night, I couldn't see the ball, just twelve six-foot-tall teenagers running toward me. I had nearly p.i.s.sed my pants with fear. Then the football had bounced at my feet, and I had laughed at my wildly beating heart.

This pack, unfortunately, wasn't playing a game. One of them kicked my tire. Then a circle of kids ranging in age from twelve to sixteen formed around me. The kid who had kicked my tire, a thirteen-year-old in a puffy parka, suddenly had a gun in his hand. I couldn't tell if it was real or not.

I dismounted from my bike. Lana's word, "babies," flashed through my mind. This was the exact thing I had always feared would happen. It was why I had at first been reluctant to walk around our neighborhood gathering weeds for the chickens. By now my fear had been erased, though, and I felt like I was part of this place. I liked to think I understood our 'hood's dynamic and my place in that dynamic as the resident, slightly batty, urban farmer.

"What do you think the police will do to you if they see you with a gun?" I asked the kid. I had been here long enough to know that I wasn't prey and that this kid was not a predator.

He didn't say anything, just fingered the metal thing and scowled. I put down my kickstand and began a strange oration, which at its heart was motherly. I had killed an opossum with a shovel and axed a turkey with my bare hands-did he understand what kind of crazy b.i.t.c.h he was dealing with?

"I'll tell you. The cops will kill you." A dark car eased by a few blocks away. "And if they don't, someone else will. Some other gang member. You have given them a great excuse to kill you. To just . . . execute you."

I swallowed. I was in tears, but my heart was swelling with love for this kid. "You have to be careful," I told him, thinking about the R.I.P. candle altars. "I care about you. Please be careful or you'll end up dead."

The kid made a face and walked away from me. I climbed back on my bike. The circle broke up, and the kids let me go by. A few of the group followed me and told me their friend was crazy. I pedaled slowly with them. "You have to help your friend," I said, "or he'll be dead soon."

When I got home, Bill was in the tub reading a book about Bob Dylan. The bathroom was steamed up and foggy. From the wrinkles on his wide feet, it looked as if he had been soaking for several hours.

"I just almost got mugged," I said, only realizing it then. I sat down on the toilet lid and started to shake.

Bill put his book down. "What happened?"

I told him about the kids, the gun, my strange lecture. I cried in the steamy bathroom about the stupidity and injustice in this world, the cycles of violence that seem like they will never end, and my inability to change anything.

"Do you want to move?" Bill asked, looking concerned.