Dead Man's Honda

Falling fifteen feet and landing on a pine board didn’t hurt as badly as I expected.

“Don’t tell dad,” I said groggily pulling myself up off of the ground beneath my two younger siblings whose faces were drawn back with shock and fear.

“How are you not bleeding?” my brother asked me. I shrugged.

“How are you not dead?!” my sister added.

Probably a miracle, I thought, I’m basically invincible. “We need to do this differently,” I told them, brushing off the pieces of bark and dirt and the leaves I’d collected on my descent to the floor of our front yard. I immediately set back to work creating a flying swing from the best heights of our yard.

There was a period in my childhood when we were suicidal maniacs obsessed with ropes and pulleys and the idea of making things out of nature. With expansive imaginations, lots of free time, and very little experience with structure, we spent our afternoons turning our yard into a virtual labyrinth of (dangerous) contraptions.

“I feel like if I came to your house there’d just be kids like, swinging from the ceiling and screaming all over the place,” my dance teacher told me once when I was nine.

Uh, no, we do that OUTSIDE.

We set things on fire. We spent a great deal of time on our roof. We used ropes of every sort to make every kind of sliding system we could think of—anything to get us to fly. People would stop their cars in front of our house, get out, put their hands on their hips and huff to us:

“Does your mother know you’re up there on the roof like that?”

“Yup,” I said. And uh, excuse me, who died and left you in charge of me?

“I’m not leaving until I see you get down,” one woman demanded.

Then you're probably going to be there awhile, I thought.

But by the stringent tone in her voice I knew she meant business. I got off the roof—appalled that a stranger would tell me to do something and expect I would actually obey. Apparently the woman had read “It Takes a Village”.

But of course as soon as she drove off we got back up on the roof again—I mean, we had to attach the rope to the chimney if we were ever going to get enough leverage to make an adequate pulley system, of course.

Before I tied the rope loop up into our enormous elm tree that swayed several feet above the roof and several more feet above the ground, we thought the roof was as high as we could attach a rope. Before the rope loop snapped and I crashed to the ground, we thought the roof was as high as we could fall. And since we’d all taken turns falling off of that roof in one way or another (or jumping off of it onto our trampoline, or sliding off of it into a grove of bushes while tied to a rope) we had very little fear.

There was something comforting about the way shingles smelled after they’d soaked in the sunlight. They’re filled with shards that can give nasty splinters, yes, but the scent of warm pine or oak or whatever they were made of is still so pleasant to me in memory that in my mind, I simply close my eyes and I’m lying face down on the roof, sniffing those shingles again.

“What the hell are you doing?” a neighbor asked me once when I was ten and doing just that—lying face down smelling the shingles on the roof.

What does it look like I’m doing? Duhhh…smelling the roof.

“Checking for termites,” I lied."You never know if they're eating a really big hole in your roof." Everyone needs to check for termites, right?

Granted that’s not everyone’s “happy place”, and neither is it too particularly normal, but the thing is: it’s one of mine. It’s mine and no one can get out of their car and tell me to stop stuffing my face into the roof shingles.

I read a quote by Frederick Buechner last night where he spoke of the importance and significance of “today”. All of our yesterdays lead up to this point and all of our tomorrows extend from it, he says. At that moment I thought, “man, my yesterdays must be BUMMED OUT about where they were pointing to.”

It’s hard to imagine how my yesterdays stacked up to create what my life is now: extremely confusing, a couple tragedies lurking in the corner you can’t really talk about, ridiculously strange, and at times, awfully good and awfully bad and disappointing. At the moment it’s more of the latter.

When I was young I was pretty darn focused on those shingles and ropes and pulleys and surviving our playtimes. It wasn’t very often that I had time to think about loss, or whether I understood it, or the direction and meaning and purpose in my life.

I simply thought of it--those crooked little moments of folly that somehow didn’t land me in the hospital (which is what most of my childhood is made up of)--as a miracle.

I could use some shingles and a little more miracle-thinking these days.

We sat at the kitchen table where a pan of khatchapuri sat cold and stale.

“They got him!” our host mother said as she leaned closer to the television broadcasting the raid on a young Georgian Armenian’s apartment. Even before his arrest he was immediately tagged as the “bomber of Bush”—the individual who tossed a defunct grenade into a large crowd gathered to welcome President George W. Bush to Tbilisi.


At that moment I remembered the street brawl I’d witnessed two nights before where men attacked each other with bricks and then several bloody-faced men hid in an abandoned warehouse while the police arrived far too late, conducted a brief, flimsy, interrogation, and then left shortly after a few of the men waved them off.

“Hmf. He’s Armenian,” she said with condemnation in her voice. “I just can’t believe how this man embarrassed us,” our host mother added. My eyes narrowed. Her house looked like a reliquary of the Soviet mafia in the midst of what otherwise was an economically stifled period. Both strongly nationalistic, Georgians and Armenians don’t exactly live in complete peace.

A single mother I met in a women’s shelter earlier that day said she wanted to give her son her lover’s last name because it was Georgian. She didn’t want him to be discriminated against like many Armenians in her village, who were considered second-class citizens, she said. Pockets of animosity continue to erupt throughout Georgia because of ethnic hostility—and not just of the Armenian/Georgian type.

But this is not unique to Georgia or anywhere, obviously. I live in Los Angeles, for cryin' out loud-- a hotbed of defensive cultural communities. The difference, however, between ethnic clashes in the Caucasus and ethnic clashes in L.A. is the political and legal structures available to those involved.

Today it was reported that five individuals were arrested for the killing of Turkish Armenian writer, Hrant Dink, who was gunned down allegedly for “insulting Turkish identity”—a crime in the EU member hopeful country, Turkey. Several writers have been prosecuted under the law, including Nobel Prize author, Orhand Pamuk.

Pamuk’s book SNOW, describes the clash between Islamism and Westernism and its devastating effect on the people of Turkey – particularly on the suicides of young women on which the novel centers. Pamuk also called for free and open debate concerning the Armenian genocide. Dink, a strong critic of the Turkish national policy of categorically denying the Armenian genocide that occurred from 1915-1917, and Pamuk had both been prosecuted under laws suppressing freedom of expression.

Turkish officials claim that 17 year old Ogun Samast from the Black Sea coast confessed to gunning down Dink, and four other individuals have also confessed to inciting Samast to premeditated murder.

Western outrage over the murder and the fact that freedom of expression has been so suffocated in a country eager to join the EU has led to immediate action on the part of Turkish officials.

They needed a head to roll, and they got it in the form of what can only be presumed to be a young, idealistic, (most likely poor) boy, who, for all we know, could have been tortured to confess the murder.

The point is this: it’s ridiculous to think that in a country where you can die for speaking your mind, where women are not allowed to wear clothing expressing their faith in public places, where there is an actionable law concerning “insulting” Turkishness, where an historical event is actively denied, and where Kurds live as second-class citizens--that justice for these men (or anyone) could be achieved.

If anything it is a political maneuver to appease Europeans calling for reform for a potential member to their Union. I’m not saying all countries involved in the EU are completely politically upstanding, (or even that the U.S. is free from equal criticism) but I am saying that at least I could write this in Europe and there’s a strong possibility I wouldn’t get shot and a certainty I wouldn’t go to jail for it.

Honda proved to me this weekend that there really can be too much of a good thing. I never really thought that was possible, though I am aware grain silo-sized vats of scientific evidence could prove me wrong. Yes, too much sugar causes cavities but let’s face it—it also gives immense amounts of pleasure to your tastebuds. Too much work can make your self-definition end in “aholic” but hey, you can accomplish A LOT and that has never been a bad thing in my book. Too much coffee can make your heart race, your eyes dilate, your body start to sweat and your mind to spasm---but, (this is important), it’s legal.

But, apparently, though oil is quite helpful to your car, it can actually get too much of it.

I’d been driving for weeks without changing or adding to my oil levels, and in the past when I’d added a bit of oil to the engine it performed much, much better. So before heading to Bakersfield for a quick trip on Saturday I decided to improve Honda’s performance.

This included two quarts of oil and absolutely zero checks of the dipstick.

As I pulled out of our driveway I had a brief premonition that something wasn’t going to go right but I often have that feeling when I turn on my car. I think it just comes with the vibrations, noises and strange smells. Several minutes on to the freeway, however, I began to smell something burning. Then, in my rear-view mirror a huge white cloud burst out of nowhere and didn’t go away.

Please tell me that’s just smog. I thought for about two seconds until I realized I might actually blow up.

The free California tow-truck guy (our tax dollars at work) showed up on the side of the road where I sat asking my sisters for advice and asked if he could tow my car away.

No I'm not donating its body to science yet, thankyouverymuch.

He also informed me that yes, too much oil in the engine could cause the smoke unless I’d blown a head gasket. Please let it be the oil, I hoped since a blown head gasket means a blown vehicle. Since I still had acceleration power I drove off of the freeway and decided to cruise around the hills of La Canada to burn off the oil.

I managed to single-handedly burn another hole in the ozone layer, fill up a neighborhood with enough smoke I’m certain fire alarms were blaring off their mounts, convince cars to pull over to get out of my smoke’s fumes, and encouraged considerate people to honk and wave madly to keep me from blowing myself clean off of the map. The oil was NOT burning off. It seemed to be having babies and those too were being burned out of my tail pipe. Now smoke filled up the inside of my car so that I was choking and waving a t-shirt in front of my face to get the air to clear. This was not good.

A dear friend on the phone mentioned, (when I explained that I had turned into a biological weapon), that I should perhaps get my oil changed right away.

So I did.

Nearby there was a Test-Only Smog center located on a corner where five old men sat around smoking stumped cigars and playing some sort of card game. I needed to get smogged to get my tags, so I lumbered little Honda into the driveway where the men peered at the machine with almost pitying curiosity.

“You don’t have a gas cap,” the head man said when they’d hooked up Honda to the testing machine.

“Oh yes, I know that. My sister lost it when she borrowed my car,” I said, as if that somehow made up for the fact that I didn’t have a gas cap, or a side bar, and as if it explained why the vehicle is mashed in on each and every side. The man shook his head and with expressionless eyes and said:

“Well it won’t pass without a gas cap.”

I didn’t think it would pass anyway. I thought as I told him I was sorry about that.

“Let me see if I have one..” he said. He did have one which he gave me. Another one of the men brought me a plastic chair to sit on beside a huge pile of tires while I waited with bated breath to see if my car would pass.

Honda passed.

The next morning as I let my car warm up before heading back to L.A. to teach Sunday School (I mean, rein in the two-year-olds) I noticed that exhaust was coming out of more than just the exhaust pipe.

It was coming out of the muffler as well.

Apparently I blew a hole in my muffler.

And apparently, that might be why the thing passed.

So although I may have had the inconvenience of causing an ecological disaster, and though I may have had to run a few extra errands, in the end, the bad thing turned into something good.

Though there may be such a thing as too much of a good thing, I think that even too much of a bad thing can result in something good. If I reflect on my life, seriously even, I notice that even some of the worst events have resulted in some of the best events. Some of the greatest uglies in our lives can be used to get us to the point where we’re finally ready to listen, to learn, to change.

I once read of a man who said that he couldn’t distinguish between the “bad” and the “good” at the end of his life. He said there was no such thing when you see events as fluid. And that morphing—of something bad into something good or vice versa, is really what we, as humans despise. We’re uncomfortable with the journey.

We don’t like waiting on the side of the road until the smoke clears. It’s inconvenient, uncomfortable, confusing. It’s time-consuming. It’s seems meaningless. But is it?

The muffler makes me think….maybe not.