tucker

I was born in a small apartment above a restaurant on a river estuary in southern Maine. If in the summer of 1988 you were standing at the window on the riverside of the apartment you might have seen me out on the dock, laying on my belly, hanging smashed periwinkles from a string, slowly drawing clinging crabs to the surface, peering intently into my own shadow. The restaurant, my father’s, and the apartment burned down in 1989, I was 5.

 

For the next decade I lived with my mother in a farmhouse built in the early part of the 19^th century. I often pictured the first people to live there, before the busy road, before the neighbors, before plastic spoons. They would sit in woolen overcoats in front of the hearth, black soot shadowing the bricks around the fire, the windows completely overcome with mounds of snow, as they often were, everyone in one room, the children asleep, the cold-weather worn adults silent, listening to the crackle. These kinds of people were the ancestors of the people I grew up around, living down the road from my ancestors. I still feel they are part of me. When we took out the newspaper insulation to replace it the headlines were from the 1920s. What had been between the walls for the first hundred years I can’t say, maybe nothing. When we sold the house they tore up the floor and found corn cobs, each with the meat eaten off, lined up in the bays to keep the cold air from blowing up from the dirt cellar.

 

Late in high school I went to a well founded New England preparatory school. The school was very expensive, but I didn’t pay because we were poor, not too poor, some years more than others. It was like Hogwarts, but no magic, although my memories of that time all have a magical feeling about them. After I went to a liberal arts school on the west coast, Reed College, if you know about these kinds of places you might have heard of it. That was the most productive time in my life. Since then I have only forgotten what I once knew, my brain getting slowly looser, like an aging body builders biceps. I studied engineering in New York City for a few years after Reed. That time felt like a separate life, a parallel life that started when I moved there and ended when I left. We didn’t have a car during those years, we never left the city. I miss that life if I ever think about it.

 

In 2010 we moved to San Francisco. I often say that New York was the American city of the last century, and San Francisco is the city for the next. The first few months I lived on the peninsula I worked as a handyman. I would call up people from wanted ads and ride my bike over to their house to fix their shower, or build some shelves. I spent my last few hundred dollars on tools, a nice hammer, a circular saw, a portable drill. I thought about converting my bike into a mobile workshop with drop down compartments in the main triangle and drill bits in the seat tube. I never did any of that though.

 

Eventually I got a real job at a company called Otherlab, you can probably find some reference to it on the Internet. I was there at the beginning, people like to say that, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s a convenience for telling a story. So much happened during that time, I don’t know which details are expressions of my character and which expressions of my self worth. I built machine shops, and worked as a fabricator, I ran small design projects that no one ever cared about, I spent 5 million dollars trying to build a new kind of pressure vessel. I ran a company. I hired people, and eventually I hired someone to run it instead of me, eventually I decided to leave a life that was good. I tell people when they ask that I left because I want life to be full of many things, that I want life to be many fold. I’m not sure if that is happening or not, maybe when I am old I will know which decisions were the right ones and which were stories I told myself.