tributaries: June 2007

Tis the season for outdoor eating - I've been wanting to build a table for the backyard. So when I passed a pile of wood and a FREE sign driving down Rainier, it definitely caught my eye. I got some good wood, and noticed there was more out back. It turned out to be a contractors shop, closing after 60 years. The man in charge said I should look inside, but It was late already. I stopped by the next day on my way down to the Georgetown festival. The door was closed. I knocked - and the door opened. That's how I met Kaz.

The space was filled with sixty years worth of accumulations, and so was Kaz. My intention, to find material for a kitchen remodel, was soon subverted as my gears shifted to shuffling around with Kaz as the flow of history emanated from both the surrounding objects and Kaz alike. It had been his and his father's business. The personal tactility of tools spiraled outwards into larger histories. Kaz told me how this place came to be in 1947 when he got out of the army. He came back with $300 in his pocket and found that all his tools, that he'd put in storage five years before being locked up by the U.S. government in a japanese internment camp, had disappeared. He and his father had been running the business out of the house, but they were told that you couldn't have a business in a residential district. I asked "residential? you couldn't work in a residential district?" And Kaz says, "Oh lots of people had businesses in residential areas. It was quite common..." "right, but they came down on you?" "yeah... it wasn't easy being a minority..." that became a refrain. That and his bad back. The family pooled together all their money and got the shop down on Rainier.

Kaz, and many others, were, after being wrongfully imprisoned, immediately drafted into the U.S. Army after being released from the internment camps... Uncle Sam, what a pal. Kaz luckily wasn't sent to fight, but trained others in orthopaedic emergency procedures.

I kept trying to place myself in that sort of a framework, to fathom the resilience and perseverance in the face of such gross inequities. Beyond that, I was simply enjoying Kaz's charm and caginess. When I first asked him how old he was he said 39. "Every year, over and over and over again," he'd smile. I somehow knew, even before I asked, that he wasn't going to tell me by way of such a direct and lazy question. So I offered that my dad was 78. He reflected - but not for long - 1929, he shot back. Yep. And that's how old he was too.

After two hours or so, he asked if I wanted some coffee. I remembered I had my camera, so I asked if I could take some pictures. Kaz wanted to get in on it too. So here's me. Then he told me to stop wasting film. I told him it didn't have film, that it was digital. He'd never heard of that.

It seems as we get older the past remains lucid while the here and now blends back into that unstructured and delicious primordial sense of time that we last tasted as children. After a lifetime of structured time, it seems it may be hard to let go, but Kaz rolled with it admirably well.

Here Kaz remembered he was supposed to be somewhere today - - out on Vashon Island... he takes it all in stride like I imagine those who know him well do too.

I made it down to Georgetown before the sun set. It was a beautiful evening.

Such a great place for a festival, it felt like an urban version of a twisting canyon. I was indulging in some nostalgia too - this was home from 91-95.

I felt my heart warm at the sight of Kosmo. True to form he was working away in his scrap metal yard. G-town has changed so much in the last ten years, populated with scrappy hipsters and proletariat pretensions (condos coming soon...). It was good to see the real thing. I asked him if he remembered that day he pulled a gun on us. A frisbee or a ball we had been playing with hit the side of his shack and he came out brandishing a substantial snub nosed revolver and a mean look in his eye. I've never seen him smile and he wasn't smiling now. As for my question, he just got defensive about the necessities of owning a gun.