a haze of light brown smoke

a haze of light brown smoke

from some car fire over there

on the other side of I-5

turns out to be something completely different,

yet mundane, when I do a double-take

toward the dull freight train-like array

of strip malls that limn lakewood, washington,

and realize it’s just a wall of rain,

shot through with the western sun,

looming toward me like a depiction of half dome crumbling

that bierstadt might have done,

the oil painting equivalent

of a sandcastle’s façade cracking and tottering

from the weight of absorbed water,

then―succumbing to the tide’s suction―sloughing off

and floating in one sublime chunk across the moat.

on an impulse, I’m driving from olympia to tacoma

in the middle of a weekday in december,

while my kids are in school,

to shop for christmas presents on antique row.

I’ve tried my usual shopping haunts at home

and found them wanting, so I’m indulging my perfectionist itch

by searching farther afield.

after a few more miles, I-5 curves east

and I’m driving under clear skies as far as I can see.

I have to veer north again, when I switch to 705

to get to downtown tacoma, but this day is still

looking nothing like a stereotype of the northwest,

much less of a winter’s day anywhere.

it’s as if I’m heading towards more than just

exotic shopping opportunities; there’s adventure

all around me, but also safety, like the metal shell

of my prius, which I’ve slowed to the low 50’s

as I look for the right exit.

somehow I miss it, though, and suddenly

I’m on a fast city street that’s showing me

nothing but the tacoma waterfront:

quick glimpses of a bridge, and then another one,

ships close in, with the incomprehensible garble

of industrial businesses in the distance

on what is either an island or a peninsula

that I’ll never have a reason to visit, smokestacks,

a morse code of trains on layered tracks,

and then nothing but a swath of green water to my right

and, to my left, an ivy-covered wall

that stubbornly refuses to produce any cross streets

like an epically bad uno hand.

I can tell you now that this was north schuster parkway

and, as I’m driving it, even though I don’t catch the name,

I feel comfortable because I know I’ve been on it before.

a hulk of a black freighter in quasi-dry dock yaws into view

and, rather than feeling ominous, it breaks like a taste

of proust’s madeline across the tongue of my mind.

year’s ago, when dave and I took city buses up

to take in the woody guthrie exhibit

at the state history museum in downtown tacoma,

the convoluted route we found ourselves on

passed this way, and it seems this old useless ship

has been marking that spot on the shore ever since.

more recently, last year maybe, I drove the kids

to the tacoma zoo one saturday while dawn was at school,

and, despite the fact that I’ve been there many times,

I got lost not once but twice, at one point unintentionally

veering away from my destination deep within

north tacoma’s point defiance park

and finding myself shunted along ruston way,

which turns into north schuster parkway

at exactly the point where I pull over and turn around today.

I see the sign “chinese reconciliation project”―which I later learn

refers to an early settlement there, at the edge of commencement bay,

that was burned to the ground

when that ethnic group was being expelled―and, while

its cryptic meaning intrigues me,

I only have eyes for the shallow parking lot

where I do a three point turn and speed back towards downtown tacoma.

I’m in a hurry to make the most of my time up here, sure,

but I’m also eating up what I see: that maritime monolith again, of course,

now with the western sun dabbing a layup to its hull

leading me to briefly see the fighting temeraire, turner’s proto-impressionist painting,

as reworked from tarkovsky’s beautiful-ruins cinematic angle;

the ticker-tape parade of ivy and other vegetation

that reminds me of certain nameless streets in portland

and throughout the nooks and crannies of oakland;

the backside of the iconic, castle-like stadium high school

with its titular playing field separated from the road I’m on

by a location that google maps shows as “old womens gulch”;

and finally a side street that allows me access

to the tony―by tacoma standards―stadium shopping district

and, thence, to ninth, the city’s main water-to-hilltop arterial,

and then the block of broadway with all the antique shops

that I could have sworn I could have found with my eyes closed.

maybe, though, I’ve been too distracted by busily cataloguing

incipient associations―artists overlapping with artists,

memories overlapping with memories, and all of it

pinned together like a badly broken leg―as if all it would take

to make a good poem out of this experience

would be some kind of connective glue or sutures

that I trust myself to come up with by the last couple lines.

the meat of the poem I’d begun to plan, however,

could very well have been this, my original destination,

which, right away, begins to corroborate the exotic feeling

that had begun with my freeway double-take.

here, unlike in olympia, the street parking

is all done on the diagonal,

and, instead of the traditional coin meters I’m used to,

machines spit out two-piece time stamp stickers

whose accumulation on the inside of my driver’s side window,

by the end of my time in tacoma, looks like a spray

of post-its on a business office’s brainstorming board.

then there is the first place I go into―inauspiciously named

What? Shoppe, like something out of a douglas adams book―

that, while full of film and television show posters

and matted, on-set stills, somehow coughs up

a jigsaw puzzle of a painted california landscape

(I don’t note it then, but maybe it’s even

a bierstadt yosemite scene!), which I purchase

to give to my sister, who studied that genre

when getting her undergraduate degree in art history.

soon I’m finding success in the place next door too,

broadway’s best antiques, a store that actually

doesn’t have any musty old chairs or stacks of national geographics,

but, rather, specializes in beer and motoring memorabilia,

sort of the rockabilly gamut that runs from jukeboxes

to kitschy, framed drag racing paintings

and old oil cans and fruit-themed, faux-stained-glass

poker table chandeliers.

in a section full of beer steins, something my brother-in-law collects,

I find one for him depicting, in colored bas relief,

the california basketball team the golden state warriors,

which seems perfect for me to give to him,

not because we’re both fans of them

or even because he’s into professional sports in general,

which he’s not, but because I feel like our relationship

could use a dash of non sequitur humor.

before I buy that, though, I forge deeper into this place,

following a hunch that it will yield at least one more perfect present,

and, sure enough, on a wall in a back room I find

something completely unexpected: a trio of framed posters

for the pickle family circus.

my parents took my sister and me to see this

heartwarming, ragtag production

several times when we were kids;

in fact, I still have a photograph in an album

of one of their non-threatening clowns

loping by us in a berkeley park.

I lift down the one that shows a ‘70s-style silkscreen print

of a lady seated on a trapeze swing,

body pulled taut as she reaches the pendulum’s apex

in a kind of subtle erotic ecstasy.

after weighing that questionable aspect

against the unappealing imagery in the other two prints,

I decide to go ahead and get it for my dad

to remind him that he did produce

good memories in our childhoods.

at the front counter―which is actually more amidships,

fortified by dark dangling things and greasy doo-dads,

like the control room in a submarine―I manage,

after gushing chitchat about how cool the place is,

to talk the lady into knocking ten dollars off the price of the circus print

because it’s so warped that it’s barely held in by the frame.

I dump the loot I’ve accumulated in the trunk of my car,

then head across the street, where several stores

vie for my attention.

I choose the one called sanford & son,

not so much due to the shout-out to the old tv show

that I have vague memories of from saturday afternoon channel flipping,

nor due to the much more relevant, though smaller words

“30 Dealers – 3 Floors,” whose implication doesn’t sink in

until I’m well past the first room―no, it’s the mustard yellow paint job

that does it, up and down and around the four multi-mullioned glass rectangles

that probably, decades ago, replaced a garage or auto showroom’s entry points,

plus the evenly-spaced castle’s rampart flourishes to the façade,

every other one of which supports an empty beige planter,

except for the last, upon which a blue and white sculpture of humpty dumpty sits.

school marm-ish exhortations notwithstanding, I’ve found that,

for better or for worse, I and the rest of society

more often than not do “judge books by their covers,”

and, while this place’s gaudy exterior

did the trick of getting me in the door, it does in fact contain

a cornucopia of old stuff, a multiverse of antiques and otherwise

that I take in at a measured pace

so as to spy any diamonds in the rough,

and, while I don’t end up buying anything here,

the experience of browsing its labyrinthine layout

feels like a gift in itself.

by the time I descend the ramp to the lowest floor,

whose windows face a completely different street,

I’ve entered a kind of architectural and commercial nether world:

one doorway reveals a man talking in an unfamiliar language

hawking fresh oil paintings with a pathetically bad aesthetic;

another room that is too big to qualify for that term―

a compressed great hall would maybe be better, but so would

delayed foyer and set design for sartre’s “no exit”―

reveals nothing, after a series of squat obstructing columns,

except for a single, sparsely-filled bookcase

in front of a large, white, filled-in fireplace;

and then, all the sudden, I open a door into a modern café.

well, it’s actually of a piece with the rest of sanford & son,

with it’s black-and-white checkerboard floor,

weird angles, and creepy chef caricature that looms over the top

of the chalkboard that has the menu written on it.

while they make me a sandwich to-go and a fancy espresso drink,

I delve back into the cavernous interior,

successfully following multi-step directions,

to get to a suitably funky bathroom.

writing this out, I fear it’s coming across as a house of horrors,

but what you’re forgetting is that I’d come up to tacoma

for precisely this sense of the exotic.

as a master gift hunter, I know that the whiff of the weird

is the smoke that leads to the fire of the great find.

thus, as I circle the block back to broadway,

empty-handed except for my lunch,

I’m excited to dive into the remaining, less flashy shops,

for, just by proximity, I’ve imbued them with

kaleidoscopic eye-catching potential.

the first place, though, turns out to be the one, token

actual high-priced-lamps-and-end-tables venue,

so I spend more time at the next, its polar opposite,

a hoarder’s paradise laid out like a dusty, barely-navigable

race track’s oval, with precariously-stacked magazines

and vhs tapes standing in for the fan-filled bleachers.

despite picking up and considering a few kitchen curios,

I leave there empty-handed too, and it’s the same

at the last place I enter, lily pad antiques across the street,

a toy and comic book memorabilia crucible

where I test my mettle by chiming in on the conversation

the owner is having with a bar fly-type regular

about nouveau riche dilettante collectors

who come down from seattle

and―do what? I can’t remember, except that

I hold my own, while sidling around glass display cases

and back toward the door, where maybe I say something like

“well, I’ve got to head back to olympia

and get my kids from school,” because it’s true,

my time is up and my christmas shopping field trip to tacoma is through

and, while I didn’t buy as much as I would have liked,

as I peel all the parking stickers off my window

and feel that rain I’d seen in the distance earlier begin to fall,

I still feel pretty proud of how well I’ve made use of my time up here.

what that means begins its months-long spring forward

through my brain, like a kind of cicada-paced spiral stitching,

as I return to I-5 and speed as fast as I can through the rain.

I eat the sandwich from the café with one groping hand,

while the other steers and thumbs up the volume

of the podcast I’m bluetoothing from my phone.

I arrive at the school just in time to get the kids

and we return home with a tiny window of time

to let the dogs out, eat snacks, and squabble

before I have to load them back in the car

to take robin to his aikido class at the dojo downtown.

luckily dawn’s gotten there in the truck

pretty much simultaneously,

because maggie’s pushing a wave of fussiness on us

that just won’t break, so I pull her crying away from dawn

and back across the parking lot to the prius.

as I drive toward home, I succeed in tempering her emotions enough

that I deem it feasible to stop first at orca books,

where I buy her what she wants, plus a surprise for robin.

she and I end up having a good time putzing around the house

for the next hour, then dawn and robin arrive

with vic’s pizza, and soon we’re in that compressed time

between eating the last bite and saying “good night” to the kids.

so it’s quite a while before dawn and I

have some quiet time alone to have a drink

and tell each other about our days.

I’m only just beginning the windup

to pitch my epic tacoma adventure at her,

when dawn says something that stops me in my tracks.

in my preamble, I point out that I’d missed the right exit

and been forced to go on a detour along the waterfront

and, in a throwaway line, dawn says “that’s perfect for you!”

I pivot from my narrative flow to ask what she means

and she says, “you like getting pulled off track like that.”

and there you have it, folks: I’ve married someone

who knows me so well, she knows how my poems will end

before I’ve even begun them.