The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen: Chapters 1–3

It’s the official start of tenth grade, and everyone is texting and talking at the same time, even though the person they’re texting is probably less than ten feet away. But if you can do both, and do them well, your coolness quotient is obviously very high. Mine, I’m afraid, is in the negative digits, but then again it probably always has been.

Too expensive, Too expensive, my father says whenever I ask for one, and besides which this whole texting insanity is destroying what little there is left of the English language, not to mention the destruction of face to face social discourse, whatever that is.

But for now, more than anything I just want my piece of paper telling me where to be the Tuesday after Labor Day, the first day of school, what my locker combination is, what teachers I’ll have to endure five days a week for the next nine months.

There is a lot to worry about—milk prices (more often down than up); the takeover by the “big guys” (farmers who sat behind desks as if they were the president of IBM and who let the Vet Science grads from Iowa State or the U of Minnesota in color- coordinated overalls milk the 350 head herd); money, and a lot of it, borrowed to keep us going...

And just to make the story a little more grim, besides chores there’s my three-year-old little sister to take care of, and since my mother died I have to spend a lot more time with my father since he’s the only parent I have left.

I can’t wait for the day when I can get away and start my real life, but then again, if I think too hard about it, leaving the cows seems unbearable.

But when I think about the cows and that moment of my going, whenever that will be, it takes my breath away. I can’t explain why. The classic definition of a conundrum, my father would say.

So that was it in a nutshell (one of my father’s most hated clichés, but it was true): his life, my life, our life...one big conundrum.

So that was it in a nutshell (one of my father’s most hated clichés, but it was true): his life, my life, our life...one big conundrum.

I decide against going into my whole spiel about how this isn’t really registration because you’re not really registering for anything, it’s already been decided, it’s just a ploy to get everybody in one place before the semester begins, but why exactly is beyond me.

I decide against going into my whole spiel about how this isn’t really registration because you’re not really registering for anything, it’s already been decided, it’s just a ploy to get everybody in one place before the semester begins, but why exactly is beyond me.

Sure, I’d seen guys in school doing high fives or elaborate fist bump routines that you needed a five-page diagram to learn how to figure out, but hardly ever a straightforward, no-frills grown-up handshake.

Wearing cowboy boots for the coolness factor, rather than for practicality—typical town kid move.

Body type: about the same height as me and slender like me, but more... wiry. Probably a lot stronger than he looked.

I seem to get skinnier as I get older, when it should be the other way around. It was a combination of metabolism and worry, my mother said.

When I look at him again, I try to gauge what he thinks about that, if it totally repulses him or is just okay, but it’s just more squinting, which doesn’t tell me anything.

And I’m back to how to hang on to this moment, on to him, because once we’re all back and into the routine and people see him and meet him, he’ll have moved way beyond me into the upper echelon.

Though never mind that my mother wouldn’t care what we wore, she’d understand the comfort of stained T-shirts, jeans, the scuffed summer tennis shoes I wore from April to November.

Falling milk prices have apparently prevented dairyman and former English teacher Paulsen, rumored to be in dire financial straits, from making necessary clothing purchases for his son, as the younger Paulsen’s arms stuck out from the suit like a monkey’s.

Falling milk prices have apparently prevented dairyman and former English teacher Paulsen, rumored to be in dire financial straits, from making necessary clothing purchases for his son, as the younger Paulsen’s arms stuck out from the suit like a monkey’s.

Instead of being angry he grins at me, as if we’re sharing a little joke, and the two of us finish the psalm together. I like the low rumbling of our voices when we get to Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and it’s hard for me to distinguish whose voice is whose.

And what was the point of corn, really? Picked and then ground up and fed to hogs to make ham and bacon. There wasn’t anything wrong with that—God knows we ate enough of those things—but in my mind it wasn’t, well...noble, like what we did.

Milk, cheese, and ice cream were just more...refined, not to mention the cows themselves. Living, breathing things, with faces, eyes, and personalities.

When I sneak a look out the window a few minutes later, my father is ambling back through the corn, up the ditch to the pickup.

He looks shocked at first, but being a loving, liberal, educated, with-it sort of father he says, That's okay, son, I still love you no matter what, it doesn't change anything, all those things that the books tell parents to say.

To be honest, I’ve skimmed it more than I’ve actually read it, because I’m not really the target audience, but its step-by-step approach (step one: “listen and avoid the urge to overreact”; step two: “assure your child that you love him/her no matter what”) should appeal to my father’s sense of order, just as he likes supper and chores at the same time every day and reading formal poetry.

It’s the Tuesday after Labor Day, the first hour of the first day of the start of the new school year, and another year of gym, another year with Kent Neustad. Thankfully it’s my last one, but that only makes it all the worse, because I have a feeling that Kent is going to make sure it’s a doozy.

Something that would require a little bit of planning and sophistication, like posting embarrassing pictures of someone on Facebook or Instagram...let’s just say that’s a little bit beyond Kent’s capabilities.

Then he glares at me over his newspaper and shakes his head, as if Kent’s obsession with splitting my backside open with red welts is somehow my fault.

And just to make it worse, there’s no getting around the fact that Kent has grown from a skinny and delicate boy into a good-looking young man, with curly brown hair, blue eyes, perfect skin, thick upper arms and chest.

It’s a dilemma when your body tells you one thing and your mind something else.

Anybody else would be playing games on their laptop or phone, but I don’t have a computer for pretty much the same reasons that I don’t have a cell phone: my father and his whole anti-technology crusade.

If I needed to write something, the old IBM Selectric typewriter that my mother used for the farm business stuff was more than adequate.

My mother loved old catalogs and could spend hours with them, poring over the clothes, the sheets and towels, pots and pans, even though she couldn’t buy them anymore, but sometimes she just liked to look and make comments about the models.

The last article I kept was about something that had happened in Minneapolis: a bunch of men in a car pulled over and started beating up some other men standing outside a gay bar, calling them derogatory names while they were doing it.