Once Upon a Time
or
Long Ago and Far Away
Born in Anchorage, Alaska, April of 1965, the youngest of three children. I used to joke that I was born at my two favorite times: Saturday and lunch time. My parents were fairly young, having had all three children by the time my father was twenty-four and my mother was twenty-two. I know I couldn’t have done that. If I’d been at the helm at least one person would have ended up crazy (or dead), if not all five. Those two did a remarkable job.
Pop was in the Air Force and Mom was mostly a stay-at-home mother/wife. She took the occasional outside job, but she could have stayed busy just packing us up and unpacking us every couple years as we moved.
At about eighteen months we moved to a place that’s always sounded alternately magical or like an invented name for some clever product, like Thermos: Rantoul, Illinois. It’s at about this time that I truly entered the world, since it’s of around this time that I have my earliest memories. Before that I just have to take it as a given that I was hanging around causing mischief.
Somewhere in here, at about age three or four, I did in fact stumble across my first loom. The story has a vaguely sinister fairytale feel about it. That first loom pricks the finger of my imagination, as it were, an effect which lies dormant for the next twenty-five years. Anyway, for more on that you can read my essay Welcome to Weaving.
There is another move at about age four to somewhere in Maryland. I’m sure it must have had a name, but I don’t remember it and don’t care to lift the shadow of this mystery. It was some place close enough so that my father could work in Washington D.C. We rented the downstairs half of a large house on a horse ranch. I highly recommend huge green spaces and large friendly animals for any person’s development. Oh, also dragonflies and lightening bugs, those are essential too.
In the summer of my seventh year the family moved to Germany. Hahn Airforce Base, to be more precise. Actually, when we got there, base housing was full, so we enjoyed a significant amount of time living off base--on the economy, as it was called. We lived in this great house in Four Corners. I have no idea if this was the real name of the place. Along with where we lived in Maryland, this too can remain a mystery. I highly recommend living in a place where people do things differently than what you’re used to, preferably where the language is also different from your primary language. By all means, live close to a train track at least once. Let pastures and streams also become essential. Unshared language is not a barrier to children. Adults are the only people who live in that fantasy world.
Mom, who as a teenager spent some years in Germany, knew what a great opportunity it was for us children. She made sure that whenever we had a chance the family would travel and see as much as we could see. I have vivid memories of walking around Paris, and Amsterdam and Pisa--walking up the Leaning Tower when you were still allowed to do that. The place closest to my heart in all the world is Switzerland. The lush green mountains; the cool wet. I was so taken with all the waterfalls that on one drive through I decided to count them. One hundred twenty-seven, in case you were wondering, in a country the size of a postage stamp.
The summer of 1976, my eleventh year, we moved back to the States. This was strange for me in many ways. Even though we schooled with other American children while in Germany, I somehow no longer felt American. This move also put me firmly in high desert: Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the ten and a half years I was there, I would learn to appreciate the place aesthetically, but I would never learn to love it. The dreaded, monotonous onslaught of sun. The average is something ridiculous like 360 days of sun a year. But for a real thrill in the vastly different colors of earth, I highly recommend a flight into Albuquerque. You won’t find the monotone of most deserts here. I could list the colors, describe them, but there’s no better way than to see it. And rain in the high desert is one of the fiercest, most beautiful things on this planet.
Junior high and high school don't seem to warrant much comment. I had only ever really liked school because it tested things I was good at--well, that and recess. When recess disappeared so did a lot of my love for school. Only unhappy adults could think of a way to make recess into drudgery--by making sport compulsory and calling it PE. The rest of it was, I felt, just taking up my very important time. For more on my feelings about compulsory schooling you can check out the essay Changing the Message.
I was eager to go to college, thinking it would be somehow different, even though I had no idea what my major would be. Well, that's not quite true; my first selected studies were for a double major in psychology and math, but that was just the first five minutes. (I'm still what is usually termed a recreational mathematician.) But I ended up just putting in time at the University of New Mexico as well. So many requirements that made no sense. By the end of my sophomore year I decided the best thing was to add up all my credits to see which direction they pointed. Sadly they pointed to not one but two useless degrees: English and French. Fine for a personal pursuit, not so much for a professional one, was my thinking.
My brother-in-law at the time was trying to find a new job. He had been trying to take a screening test for air traffic control. The agency that conducted the test was supposed to offer it monthly, but they kept postponing due to low registration. Finally my brother-in-law went to everyone he knew and asked them to sign up to take the test. I so admired this clever little way to play the system against itself that I gladly signed up. None of us who signed up for him ever intended to take the test.
On the day of the test my brother-in-law was sick. While I, without any direction for a possible way to earn money, and knowing that I test well, headed down on a saturday for a four hour test. My score was high enough to earn me an invitation to attend the three-month long training academy in Oklahoma City. They allowed you to delay the invitation at the time and tell them when you could start. Knowing I could finish my degree if I took a full load of classes for the entire time, I gave them a date a year away. Clever people at the back of the classroom can already see where this is headed. At one point a critical class wasn't offered. And at another, I dropped a class because they switched from my favorite professor to a professor with whom I'd already locked horns twice before. When the date for the training academy came, I had to take the spot or lose it. So on 13 January 1988, I became a student at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center, two classes shy of a double major. Heaven forfend, I know. Looking for something essential to life in these last three paragraphs, the best I can come up with is. . . .doughnuts: food of the gods. What? Not mentioned at all in the last three paragraphs? They are, when it comes to me, always implied. And really, they are essential. (We can cut that part out later, right?)
Before attending the training school, students picked the region they would go to (this country is broken into twenty-two regions if memory serves). I picked the region that included California, having visited there enough times to think I would enjoy it. After passing the training school, some unhappy man from the region came and assigned you to your facility. The genius who placed my group took one person from the Bay area and moved him to LA; to another person he did just the opposite. I was sent to Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center.
Los Angeles Center is not in LA, it's in Palmdale, the Antelope Valley, the Mojave desert; still in LA County, but about an hour's drive to LA. And the best minds at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) decided that we only needed a weekend to get to our respective assignments. That's right, a weekend. Though we found out on a Wednesday afternoon whether or not we had the job, their plan was to keep us at the academy through Friday and expect us at our new locations ready to work on Monday morning. Don't get me wrong, there was glee in their voices when we had to call up our new locales and ask for a couple of days leave, . . . so we could get there.
A friend from high school drove out with me, seven hundred seventy-seven miles from Albuquerque. At the end of this long day of driving we were approaching some lights, what we hoped was Palmdale, my new home. We drove into the scraggly outer rim of the city and kept driving; 'any minute now we'll hit the city proper,' we thought. We drove all the way through town thinking that. Then we turned back and got a hotel room for the evening. All I wanted to do was cry.
The next day we drove all over Palmdale and the neighboring Lancaster until I found an apartment to rent. Then we had a day of rest and fun. Taking him to the airport the following day was hard. It was official, I was living in a new place, with a new job and no friends. About a week later I would have my twenty-third birthday.
In May of 1993 a friend suggested a week-long vacation in Seattle, a place neither of us had been before. As the flight approached the city I looked out at all the islands and green and water. I started to cry. When my friend noticed my tears he asked what they were for. "I'm home," I said. It was very much how I felt--and still is. 1993 was also the year I taught myself to weave; something must have been in the air that year to wake me up into my life. This, I'm sure, goes without saying, but I'll say it all the same: you must find or make home at least once in your life.
After I got back from that vacation I spent two years trying to keep the job and transfer to Seattle. LA is always under-staffed and the Pacific Northwest is always over-staffed; I was never able to make the right connections even though I pulled some big strings. So I spent the following two years paying off all my debts and saving up enough money to allow myself to quit. All the while I was traveling to Seattle as often as possible, drinking in the cool wet of my future. On 16 August 1997 I said goodbye to the Antelope Valley.
A very good friend drove with me to Seattle (in all fairness, he did easily 90% of the driving)--a trip best left undescribed; let's just call it hard. (Thank you with all my heart for ushering me into my new life, Mike.) But what a relief to exit my various deserts after twenty years. Before leaving I had sent out dozens of resumés and gotten a couple of immediate replies. Now clearly my brain was still addled because, I kid you not, my initial response was that I would start a new job two weeks after getting to Seattle. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that in my entire life I had never had any time to myself--school to college to work. What would it be like to give myself a month off? What about until the end of the year? And then it became a sort of game: maybe I could give myself a whole year off. Hey, just how far would this money go that I'd saved up? I decided to make the money last for three years.
In this course of self-discovery, step one was writing. I had always been a writer, it seemed. Mostly for myself and friends, but a writer none-the-less. It was an ironic choice to move away from LA and then pursue screenwriting, but there you have it. The form of a screenplay is very like poetry; you have to fit as much as possible into as few words as possible. But three screenplays later, what I discovered is that writing is really only about 40% of writing. It's more about who you know, or getting to know the people to know--more about selling yourself than about writing. I let myself be pleased that I had conquered the form; it's no villanelle, but it definitely has its intricacies. Perhaps one of these days I'll convert the screenplays to downloadable pdf's for the site.
Luckily I wasn't otherwise sitting on my ass in the world outside screenplays. I had time to take up rowing, something I had wanted to do since high school (remember the awful deserts?). What a joy and surprise being introduced to my body at the age of thirty-three. There was also time to meet a lovely man who would become my halfside for a while. Halfside is a Lakota term that is a gender-nonspecific way to refer to one's romantic mate. I much prefer it to terms like partner, which sounds like business or law--or lover, which seems to reduce the relationship to just sex; and I refuse to use the term husband, as a visceral reminder that gays are still reviled as second class citizens. Anyway, he would be the way that I would find myself back at the loom.
Because my halfside had a desire to learn to weave, we took a beginning class together. I was finally able to sample weaving on a half dozen floor looms and decide which one I wanted to buy. The yarn store where we took the class also became a sort of tree house for me. It was a comfortable place to spend time; and I liked a lot of the people working there. When I found out they were looking for help, I decided to hire on. I was beginning to suspect that whatever it was that I was going to be when I grew up might have something to do with yarn--so why not be around the substance of my dreams.
While working at the yarn shop I would often find myself dreaming of the simple, easy, halcyon days of the FAA. Pitiful. So this retail establishment was good for inexpensively building my yarn stash into unmanageable mounds, but it still didn't feed my soul. It was really too bad that I could clearly see all the reasons why weaving couldn't possibly be a life or a living. But one day I woke up and realized that no matter what kind of day it was, no matter how I felt, I would always trundle over to the loom and weave for a while. I get up from my time at the loom and I actually felt better--it's like meditation. It feeds me.
In December of 2003 I quit working at the yarn shop. For the next two years I, more or less accidentally, supported myself with the curiously simple trade of weaving. As sales started slowing down, I was able to concentrate on making things for juried shows and competitions--another exciting angle to work. I take the occasional odd job to supplement my income, but I always think of it as a way to support my real work. Recently, in early June of 2007, I became the managing editor of The Polishing Stone magazine; so writing entered my life again. Until the nonprofit foundation lost funding. For most of my life I tried to make one outlet work for me, knowing all along that I've never been that guy. So now life has finally demanded that I show my true colors and express myself in as many ways as possible. Now I see that regardless of what you do that that's how you give back to the world.
I've been thinking about all the animals I've had the pleasure to know, especially the ones with whom I've shared living space. Always live with at least one other living creature. This is in no way arbitrary or elective; it is one of the few basic requirements that makes a person a human. If it can't be an animal, you must find at least one plant. So what are you waiting for; go now, do my bidding. Oh, well, I suppose you're right, the other living creature might also be human. . . .
Be well.
--Khris
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