Home Alone

In my blog writing, from now until eternity, I will refer to my wife as the Deke. The Deke is out of town this weekend. She is teaching a ukulele workshop in Seattle. She'll be home this afternoon and my weekend home alone will end. Damn. I mean, I enjoy my wife's company and all, but it's peaceful, sitting here at the kitchen counter, dishes piled up in the sink, having drunk a whole pot of coffee and having gone to Starbuck's for a venti house with room on top of that, having put the dogs in their crates for a rest, and having no one to answer to, no one to talk to, no one even moving in the house. It's rare.

My Oregon State University stepson is in town, but spent the night at a Halloween party in Portland and is conked out elsewhere. My Eugene stepdaughter has moved out of our house. She's working this morning. The phone has rung twice, but no big deal. I have only spoken face to face with two human beings this weekend: one was an election canvasser who I got rid of by saying right away I was voting for his candidate. I would have said that no matter whose button he was wearing. The second human I talked to was my stepdaughter, working at Starbuck's.

This is a perfect weekend. I can write, read blogs, lie down and nap, run to the window and see which group of loud-mouthed, disaffected youth is walking by the house this time, watch my next-door neighbor in his head to toe camaflogue hunting outfit and rifle case return home from the hunt, and no one asks me what I'm looking at or what I'm doing.

I'm not a misanthrope. I enjoy people. In small doses. Anymore, my mind is so occupied with poems, stories, memories, teaching ideas, the state of my marriage, my health, finances, songs, more memories, well, I just want to be alone and let my mental stew simmer.

Right now the dogs are quiet. The cat is at peace. The refrigerator runs quietly. The fan in my laptop kicks up every so often. I can hear the water on the street whining under under tires as cars pass.

I think about Kellogg and how quiet it has become. I visit my mother. I sit in her back yard, overwhelmed by the variety of flowers and vegetables in her SmelterSmoke-free garden. And it's quiet.

Growing up, it wasn't quiet in Kellogg. Prosperity is noisy. Trains clanged in and out of Kellogg at all hours, straining under the weight of ore, their arrival and departure announced with a horn sound like a ferry boat, the rails squealing as the trains stopped and started. The Lead Smelter, Zinc Plant, and mine mill operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Going down West McKinley Avenue in Kellogg, to where City Hall and the police station have now moved, the silence is almost eerie. I used to ride my bicycle out there and listen to the mine mill dynamos pound pound pound like the heart beat of a whale and that sound echoed throughout town, depending on the wind.

Walking through town now is eerily quiet, too. Miners with money drink. When Kellogg was booming, the sounds of juke box music, some live music, underground card games, laughter, arguments, clinking glasses, beer bottles being popped open, and back slapping comraderie poured out of the bars. Pay day was Friday. Fridays were festive. Bars had beer busts. The Sunshine Inn had a Friday night Fish Feed. Card games thrived.

No wonder I long for quiet. The first day I went to work in the Zinc Plant, the din shocked me. Men beating zinc-covered cathodes with chisels to strip the zinc. Fork lifts honking, dragging their forks along the cement floor, picking up pallettes of zinc. Men pounding crooked cathodes with mallets to straighten them out. Men yelling conversations. Huge firey furnaces whooshed with heat, ravenously eating the zinc the strippers had stripped and stacked.

I know that Kellogg was economically much better off when it was a noisy town. I relish how quiet it is now, maybe selfishly. And maybe it's selfish when the Deke goes away to teach the ukulele that I relish the quiet of being home alone. The fact is: I enjoy being home alone. I like people. But, in small doses.