My Father's Chair

 MY FATHER’S CHAIR

A stuffed armchair given to him for his birthday. I don’t remember which, but I’ve been dragging the thing around for sixty years. Damn near everywhere I’ve lived in this country - Montana, West Virginia, Nueva Yorca, Connecticut, City of Angels - I’m there; It’s there. If I could have packed it I’d have taken it to Italy, Honduras, London, Prague, Budapest, anywhere I went that they’d let me lug this thing across the border. When I need to sit, it’s where I sit. He died. I took it. Since then I’ve seen him in it once. We’d moved it from his bedroom to the living room. I came in late one night and saw him sitting there. I’m not saying it was real. I’m not saying it was supernatural. I’m just saying I came home and, for some second or two, saw him sitting there. 

His World War 1 naval uniform sits in my closet still in its dry cleaner bag. My sister recently gave me a robe of my father’s that she’d salvaged. Satin with red lapels, rich burgundy but a bit gaudy for 2022. Patch said I looked like Hugh Hefner. Patch is my brother-in-law and a very funny guy. Somewhere in a drawer I have a brand new shirt of his that never left its wrapper, Polo, robin's egg blue, $1.95. Somewhere else a few tie ‘em yourself bow ties. A wooden index card file box sits on my ancient, oak file cabinet. Remnants of addresses on streets that no longer exist. That’s what’s left of my father. Oh, yes, his bamboo cane and a pair of silver cufflinks. He was a dandy. Pictures of him as a young man show him wearing spats, white trousers, starched shirt, bowtie, and cutaway tails, sporting a smile, flanked by two blondes. Shiksas. Goyim. Oh, my.

My father then was not the father I knew. Glimpses, maybe, but nowhere near. He was too sick. There was no cure. Paget’s disease is a chronic bone condition whereby new bone is created too quickly and therefore misshapen, prone to fracture and osteoporosis. He must've been forty when I was born, which is when his disease, which really presented at seventeen with a growth on his leg bone, began to manifest itself. We were told that when my father walked it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. His body had become so deformed his clothing needed to be custom made, so, for my Bar Mitzvah, he commissioned a new suit - Jake the Tailor, needle and thread, cross legged in the window, I swear - a suit with a vest, dark blue, pin striped, hand sewn, elegant. Reuben Henry Foreman was The Man!...Except one day I caught him looking at himself in the mirror. He’d left his bedroom door open enough so I could see him staring sadly at what he had become. His body was in the process of caving in on itself. He’d been five-ten but was now five-six. His weakened legs bowed out under the weight of his body. He needed two metal crutches to walk. It was the saddest I’d ever seen him look. 

‘What have I become?’ 

By the time he died at 63 there was little left of him. We buried him in that suit. But, do you know something? We never heard him complain, never heard him say a word about his condition, never was the word “cripple” even uttered in our house. It wasn’t banned. It didn’t exist. It just wasn’t. How could he not have been in pain? How could he have been in pain and the family not have known it? Two months before he died he had nineteen feet of lower intestine removed and went back to work a twelve hour day with a hole still healing in his stomach. Never heard a word. He must have suffered. How could we not know? Pain medicine? Here’s what I remember: a single shot of Four Roses mid morning; a single shot of Four Roses late afternoon.

Why am I talking about this? I don’t know. It just came up.

My father in the chair.

There was one other time I saw him, rather, heard him, to be exact, decades after his death. I had a desk at the Los Angeles Library’s main location in downtown LA where I was doing some research. I faded out and put my head down for a little snooze. At some point, I heard my father walking by and lurched awake. In reality, it was an old lady passing my cubicle but she was using two metal canes to do so, as he had. The metal canes clanked exactly like my father’s years before, like keys on a ring, only sharper, more sonorous, a jailer’s keys, perhaps. It obliterated my consciousness. That’s all I heard - the clanking of those canes. Dad?

Oh.

Nearly forty years after his death I’m in a true survival situation in Alaska. I’ve written about this before. I was seventeen miles from Eagle Village on the Yukon River, however my feet had been so badly injured I had to walk a good piece of those miles in a mountain creek to freeze them. To say the least, it was extremely unpleasant. To say the worst, well, worsts do come to mind but not the worst. Singular. There wasn’t any one worst. It was all worst. At some point I asked myself, “Why?” My father’s doctor’s words came back to me, struck me with wonder. “When your father walks it’s like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back.” My father never complained, never said a word. He did what he had to do and didn’t say squat about it. I’m thinking this and here I am trudging along, step by gruesome step, pack on my back, refusing to quit. It hit me like a jackhammer. Holy shit, I am his son after all!

July 23, 2022

It was 88 degrees in our valley today, although, given that we are a valley of forest overhangs and microclimes every couple of miles or so, it varied by a degree or two. The Fiesingers, a family 2.7 miles east of us, are always calling to ask about the weather. They could have rain while we have sunny skies. Most of the rest of the world was in the nineties or even the hundreds. Unbearable, except for here. Here, however, it is still somewhat unnerving. Leaves are already falling to the ground. These are not the leaves of Fall, just Spring leaves that didn’t take. Some do have color, clues of things to come.

It’s only mid July, and we just put in our third cord of firewood. It's green now, however, by the time we need it - late January, early February - it'll be cured enough to burn. My daughter and I plan to take another cord off the property ourselves, mostly ash. A lethal beetle has infested the ash trees - literally, a death sentence - so we’re going to put the dead ones to good use as firewood. It’s a very hard wood and burns slowly. Babe Ruth’s baseball bat was cut from ash. (Remember the old 'Louisville Slugger'?) A brand new chainsaw has become the latest family treasure. Fuel oil is the problem, and I don’t know how the people up here who mostly depend on oil for heat are going to manage. Four cords of ash, oak, and maple ought to get us through the winter, but oil is our back-up, so we’ll feel it as well. Silk long johns are washed, folded, and stored where we can nab them quickly when needed. Goose down and fleece are readily available for when the temperature drops to near zero or below.

Winter! It’s mid-July, nearly ninety degrees, and we’re already thinking Winter. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Evolution has played us a dirty trick. When we’re young, time seems eternal. When we’re older, time thunders around the speedway, and, the older we get, the more records we break. "Wait a minute. What? What happened? Where’d it go? Weren’t we just…? Didn’t we just…?" Time flies whether you’re having fun or not.

The rhubarb and daffodils are long since gone as are the lilacs and rhododendrons, but the lilies are blooming as are Queen Anne’s Lace, columbine, goldenrod, daisies, wild grape…Next time you see Queen Anne’s Lace pull it out by the roots, scratch the roots with your fingernail, and sniff. Smells like…Carrot! That’s what it is. A primitive carrot, not yet cultivated. What is cultivated is growing nicely in this year’s garden - the usual suspects - lettuce and tomatoes, of course, kale, peppers, peas, radishes, squash, sunflowers…My daughter and a close family friend have taken over most of the grunt work, but I’m in it for the fine tuning. 

The Druids used to consider groves of trees as holy places. I have a grove I’ve been planting for years now. Each tree represents someone in our family - a macoun apple for my son, planted 34 years ago on his first birthday; an exotic crab apple with bordeaux-colored leaves and dark red berries for my daughter with auburn hair; an oak tree first planted for my grandson on his birthday is now branching out into the giant it will become; a pear tree for me and Jamie because we’re the Pair that engendered all this. We also planted three new trees - two young peach in the grove, one weeping cherry behind the house, visible from the dining room. The cherry will weep curtains of pink-white blossoms for years and years, a hundred, maybe, more. I read somewhere that one who plants a tree is an optimist. Guilty. I think of the pleasure those trees will give season after season to folks I will never know and who will never know me. But, they will know my trees, and I know now what they will know then. Another apple, a weeping peaseblossom, and a white birch as gateway complete the grove. We’ve had to wrap the new trees in burlap because soon the deer, now still in velvet, will start to itch and use the delicate trunks of the peach trees to scrape the velvet off.  

Last year the crop was bountiful. Not so much this year as the bounty alternates from year to year. We’ll preserve what we can with the new fruit dehydrator we just bought, and, while I certainly don’t wish the summer away, I look forward to eating an apple just plucked from my son’s tree. The pear tree will bear first. None of these fruits have supermarket aesthetics. They are not perfectly shaped, certainly not blemish free, but to bite into fruit fresh plucked is to blast one million taste buds into orbit. We can walk through the fields and pick wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and, soon, blueberries. 

There is still a pattern to all this. 

We know what’s coming next, but “When” varies with the weather. Yes, of course, Fall still follows Summer; Winter still follows Fall; Spring, Winter; Summer, Spring, but there’s give and take all the way through, a temperature change either way, on time, more or less. It’s exciting to simply open the door. It could be seventy in January and fifty in July instead of the usual ten and eighty. We had a huge moon a few nights ago, the largest of the month. I stood in the middle of our garden and watched it looming over us. I swear I could hear the plants growing. Come dawn, you could see that they did. 

The Seer of Fairmount 7/17/2022

     She was a little old lady in a housecoat wearing blue Cookie Monster slippers and a fruit'n'berry hat - indoors. When she opened the door I smelled cookies baking in the oven and figured them for a church bake sale. Not at all what I'd expected. No eye make-up. No lipstick. No long fingernails. No piercing gaze. Sparse gray hair. I'd heard she'd been born with a caul over her face. Actually, I was surprised she seemed so shy. She smiled and said, "Hello. Come in."

      Let's back up. I taught in the drama department at West Virginia University from 1968-1970 at which point they didn't renew my contract because I'd cast a Black coed to play Sarah Brown in Guys & Dolls, and refused to recast. Nobody said that was why, but that was why. Anyway, while I was there word circulated among the faculty that there was a clairvoyant about fifty miles south in Fairmount - mountain blood; legit. Apparently, unassuming as she was, her powers of clairvoyance, her ability to predict your future, were astonishing. I, of course, scoffed at this for months until a colleague I really trusted - a proto-feminist, cutting edge liberal, lit professor - crackerjack smart - very tuchas auf dem tisch - proposed to give it a try.

    Let's back up a little more. At that time, I was a playwright and poet, pure and simple. No thought of film or TV at all - that I knew of. However, just to relax, every night after dinner I'd watch a rerun of the Dick Van Dyke show. Since I was teaching playwriting, I was interested in the structure and analyzed it so.  Not really consciously. Oh, that's how it's made. I get it. Cronkite's next. Tomorrow, Chekhov. Ionesco, maybe. Brecht?

        "Hello. Come in."

    I'd caved in to my professor friend and made an appointment, made it, mind you, without even telling the lady my name. No personal info whatsoever. Name, rank, and serial number? Forget it. Time and place. Period. I never even knew her name.

        "Hello. Come in."

    Nothing unusual about her place. Neat but not overly. Kitschy. Porcelain figurines. Roy rogers and Dale Evans salt and pepper shakers. A  portrait of Jesus in a distressed wooden frame was unobtrusive. Its eyes did not follow you around the room.

        "Have a seat, Mr...?"

        "No names, ma'am."

    We sat down at a kitchen table where she stared at me for a very long time. A bell dinged. She rose to take a tray of cookies from the oven. She set them down on top of the stove and came back to the table, sat, stared at me and told me stuff that was a cinch, e.g., I wasn't from these parts; I taught at the university; married with no children. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Come on, lady, surprise me. 

    She seemed to go away for awhile then jolted back to the present, held my eyes, announced,

        "I see a television screen with a dollar sign in front of it," she said.  

        Mind you at this point I'd had no conscious thought of writing for the screen, any screen. My first play was being produced by the Chelsea Theatre Center. Another play was being mentored by the poet, Robert Lowell. In that world, it doesn't get any better. I had no eyes for anything else. I remember well my last year at Yale when all the playwrights were running to take a seminar on film. They were crossing the street to the seminar, all ten of them. I was crossing in the opposite direction to meet with Lowell. Literally. Just me.

        "I see a television screen with a dollar sign in front of it."

    Yeah. Right.

    Still in West Virginia, out of what felt like the blue, came an offer from WQED, Mr. Roger's station in Pittsburgh, ninety miles north, to write a ninety minute drama on the welfare system underwritten by the Department of Health and Human Services to be broadcast nationwide, every PBS station in America. A friend of mine on the faculty knew the director there, had read the script championed by Robert Lowell, and passed it on. It was Bob Walsh, the director of all of Mr. Rogers, who directed my script, "The Resolution of Mossie Wax," 1973. From Robert Lowell to West Virginia to Mr. Rogers. Go figure.

        "The Resolution of Mossie Wax" was about an old woman who moved from West Virginia to Pittsburgh with her husband to find some kind of work, any kind, any way to survive. He dies, and Mossie is left alone to battle a hostile system.

     "I see a television screen with a dollar sign in front of it."

       It wasn't much of a dollar sign, but there she was, Mossie fighting just to live, all over the country, on screens everywhere.  

     The Resolution of Mossie Wax.

      We never ever know, do we?

    Now, if you will permit me a spot of ego. Maybe more. You tell me. I only recently discovered Mossie Wax on line - I thought she had disappeared decades ago - along with some letters and reviews from way back then.  

     The following review from IMDB was written in June, 2021, forty-seven years after Mossie first aired.

        "I saw this movie on PBS with my mother when I was ten. I wept and wept at how sad this was, and have never forgotten this movie..."

    Another said, "One of the most profound flicks I've ever seen."

    Yet, another said, "I've never had a film follow me the way this one has. It's riveting, disturbing, and stays with you forever...The look into Mossie's dilemma is the most poignant story of this situation I have ever seen. I keep going back to this movie because a better one has yet to be made."

   One thinks for  years, for a life time, who knows? Who cares? Who remembers? Why bother? One writes stuff and puts it out there. Then what? Mostly nothing until you realize you're mostly doing this for yourself, anyway. And then, if you are lucky, you find out that all these years it really has mattered. You just didn't know it. Which is where faith comes in.

     

WILDERNESS 6-10-2022

 WILDERNESS

My earliest visions of wilderness were Biblical ones. Israeli tribes trekking through unforgiving rock and searing sands for decades in sandals and bare feet. Saints retreating to the driest, prickliest places on Earth to do penance, wilderness that always seemed to be the desert. So, wilderness was a barren, inhospitable, waterless waste where wanderers went thirsty, ate an unleavened concoction with no known ingredients, and locusts - a place you really did not want to go unless you had the fervent desire to emaciate yourself into sainthood. Years later an old desert rat’s description of the desert was right on when he told me, “It’ll either sting ya, stick ya, or bite ya.” Tru’ dat. 

Speaking of which, let’s digress and talk about that rat for a minute. Actually, he was an old prospector. My theory was his brain had been baked from too many years under that brutal desert sun. However, that’s where the gold was, and he was sure he could find it. I can’t remember his name, but he knew damn well the Lost Dutchman gold mine was out there in the Superstition wilderness, and he knew just as damn well that he was gonna find it. Right this second, as I type, I’m looking at a piece of genuine gold ore he gave me. We’re not talking about a polished ingot here or a shiny nugget the size of your fingernail but a piece of craggy, nondescript rock with the girth of a grapefruit and a dirty, yellow-ish tinge. Still, holding such a thing is a rush. Wow. Shoots right up your arm.

He had a tendency to rant.

“My old lady, she said I was crazy. You ain’t gonna find jackshit. I told her I know what I know, and she said I know what I know, too. You ain’t gonna find jackshit. Like I said, I know what I know, and I kept at it tunnelin’ like a Goddamn mole. And you know what? Do you know what? Well, I’m gonna tell you what. One day I come home, and I says to her, 'Honey, hold out your right hand.' She did, and I counted one hundred one thousand dollar bills into the palm of that hand. After I said “one hundred” I looked at her and said, 'Honey, we're officially retired, and you can shut your big, wide open mouth.' I rest my case."

By the time I was Bar Mitzvah I knew there was more to the wilderness than the Bible’s version. There was and is nothing barren about it. Hebrew school was not having the influence on me that my parents had hoped. I have never come to think of the wilderness as a place of penance or a place of evil or danger, danger, yes, maybe, but not that much. I’d say I left the Biblical version behind, but it crops up yet again in the psalms wherein the psalmist says, “I lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help….” It ends with, “The sun will not harm you by day nor the moon by night.” Mind you, I’m not looking for anything supernatural. For me, the mountains have become my wilderness, but my idea of wilderness is Eden, just the opposite of barren and dangerous. It's a place of abundance. If you know what to look for it’s all there. To know how to look for what’s there and why it’s there is damn near impossible, but y’gotta try because that’s where the answers are. A droplet sits in the crease of a leaf by design. Trees communicate through their roots underground. Leaves twist specific ways to catch the wind. I think of what I’ve learned in my search - so much to add to my miscellaneous collection of random facts. It takes microscopic and telescopic observation to fully capture the entire creation. For millennia humans have learned how to live with what’s around them, but I’m not just talking of material things like food and shelter, clothing, tools. For me - for me - there is an abundance of peace, of belonging, a stripping away of time. Alert and relaxed are one and the same. I understand that I don’t need to understand. I’m not at all like Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown who goes into the forest only to discover all his neighbors are in league with the devil, the place where he loses his innocence. I don’t think of forests and woods as places filled with evil although so many people do, yet I am not such a romantic on this subject as to believe in absolute goodness. Of course, there are risks: you can break an ankle, get bitten by a rabid fox, catch poison ivy, get stuck in the mud - I know a guy who was bitten on the hand by a copperhead as he hopped over a log - but, like Shakespeare’s forest, I’d rather think of them as fanciful. Dragon flies as sprites and beetles as toy tanks. I once saw a kangaroo rat hop on two legs across my garden, and they’re not even supposed to be here. Still, fanciful or not, you don’t want to cross a moose or a bear. I don’t think of forests as grooming transgender wolves pretending to be grannies or witches who eat children. Bountiful is what they are. They are not awesome because they’re awesome (like the Rockies) but because they are so beautiful and dense with life, both body and soul. 

My mountains have a certain mystery. Rip Van Winkle roamed them. Ichabod Crane made his home here, and the headless horseman terrorized the place. Johnny Appleseed transformed pies into patriotism. These are the Catskills, not the Rockies, and there is a big difference. The Rockies have been thrust out of the depths of the earth by tectonic forces. The Catskills were carved out and molded by glacial melt, rampaging water that sliced through tons of earth for millions of years. There is danger and excitement in the Rockies, that’s for sure - the wildlife, the geothermal activity, the musculature of the mountains, the breadth of it all - but there is no mystery there. Not for me. Problems to be solved are not mysteries. Excitement titillates but it is not mystery. Muscles are awesome, but they do not hold secrets. A ghost ship is mystery. Little men who get an addled fellow drunk and bowl ten pins in the mountains are mystery.  A horseman without a head is mystery. When the mists rise from the pockets of these mountains I stand and wonder what if this were ten thousand years ago, and I were standing here, what would I be thinking? That there are trolls out there roasting rabbits for snacks? That demons are leaping free? That nameless little men in strange hats are dancing around a fire? Or would I simply look out over my valley and be happy I lived in such a place?