I wondered why, after so many years of ever since,I was thinking about Shelly -- Shelly with the long black hair and heavily made up eyes -- Amy Winehouse eyes! Her death must have triggered this memory of the beatnik chick who worked the audiences of the coffee houses after I read my poems with a bread basket intoning "Bread for the poet. Bread for the poet." It was the beginning of my career -- I believe we made seven dollars one night -- and I thought she loved me. It actually was, I realize, the beginning of my career(nowadays seven bucks a night is looking good again), but Shelly, ah, dark-eyed, black haired sorceress, ran off to South America with a drummer. Is it a half a century now? More. Is she even alive? My guess is she's not still with that drummer in South America.
So I'm thinking about Shelly and Amy when Max comes by all pissed off and huffing in a way I've rarely seen him. Now, you'd have to search far and wide to find a guy as nice as Max. He makes a mighty effort to be fair and tolerant to all comers, but his new neighbor pushed him to the limit. You see, Max has a pot bellied pig among a variety of critters on his farm: cats, goats, horses, chickens, the pig, maybe a parrot (though I'm not sure about the parrot but wouldn't be surprised). And the pig crawled under a fence onto his neighbor's property. His neighbor is a newcomer from the city unused to the pace and ways of life here. He's also a drunk -- loud, pugnacious, intolerant, and as full of himself as he is with the whiskey -- the worst kind of urban invader who comes to these parts to drink himself blind until he needs to go back to the city on Monday morning. This is a specific breed, an invasive species in our corner of the Catskills. He arrogantly signaled for Max to come over on his property to talk, and Max said, "You wanna talk to me? Come talk to me," and plants himself in place. The guy's eyes bulged like an old cow's. He stood and stared like a slack jawed dummy, but that's all he did. If you've ever seen Max mad, you wouldn't move either. His body is hard work powerful with a low center of gravity, and he favors Harley t-shirts and tattoos. Of course, Max has a heart of cream of wheat, but you wouldn't know this by looking at him. So far, Max's neighbor has not taken him up on the offer of a pow-wow on Max's side of the fence. a good thing, too, because Max is near mad enough to..."If that guy comes over here," fumed Max, "I'm gonna kick his ass, drag him into my house, call the police and tell him the guy broke in drunk. You're a witness, right?" he said. "Gimme a call," I said. That's what neighbors are for.
Then we stopped talking about this bullshit because Max wanted to get off it. He didn't like feeling this way and insisted I follow him to a back pasture so he could show me how beautifully he had mowed it with the fallen grass arranged as if it were a hay field before bailing. Max was proud of how he had done it, and, indeed, it was as beautiful as a Brueghel painting. We stood there in silence. There was a breeze and a blue jay in the apple tree. "Well," he said after awhile, "Cheryl's gonna want me to start dinner. Burn 'er, bub," which is how Max says goodbye. "Burn 'er, bub." He walked back to his truck, and I stayed in the field. The aroma of fresh mown grass was intoxicating.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
On Being An Older Father
This past February I saw a beautiful theatre piece at the Geffen in LA produced by an old friend, Susan Rose Lafer. It was called In Mother’s Words: four electric actresses reading the words of playwrights who are also mothers, compelling words about different aspects of mothering from a purely personal point of view. So it set me to thinking: how about a few words from fathers which led me to remember a few words I’d already written when my kids were tiny and tinier. This essay was originally published in Newsweek and picked up internationally. It was years ago, like I said, tiny and tinier, but here comes Father’s Day, so I’m putting it out there again. Yo y'all!
ON BEING AN OLDER FATHER
Recently, at the wedding of the daughter of a close friend, a thought struck me: "My God," I said to my wife, "When our kid gets married, we're going to be so old we'll have to have it catered by Meals-On-Wheels!" My son, you see, is only two. When he is thirteen, I will be sixty, and the twenty-first century will be here. You can do the rest of the arithmetic yourself. I'll tell you this, however: it's a strange thing to suddenly find yourself reading the obituary section and Parents Magazine at the same time.
Sevi, my son, was a long time coming. I first began trying to have him one marriage and many lifetimes ago, and discovered myself infertile. It felt as if someone had died. That marriage died, too, but not before a harrowing assault by a battalion of fertility specialists. A man spends his entire life trying to protect his gonads then offers them up to a breed of medical practitioner equaled in cold-hearted arrogance only by Porsche mechanics. At least, a Porsche runs after a tuneup. No matter what those doctors did, my sperm count remained among the lowest on earth. So, I counterattacked with vengeance. I set about fashioning a life that took me anywhere I wanted to go. A child had no place in it. And I married a woman hell-bent as myself. She was also infertile. Children were out of the question. It was, we thought, the basis of our relationship until that night, years later, when the issue was suddenly, once again, as alive and insistent as an infant crying in the next room. I don't remember how it came up. We were driving home along rural roads in a rainstorm when my wife said, "You really do want a child, don't you?", and the thought came to me that not once in my entire life had I really felt that I would never be a father. The underlying assumption was simple: someday, somehow I would be.
"Yes," I answered, "Yes, yes, yes."
And, at that moment, I knew I would have one. It was overwhelming. My wife couldn't see or hear me in the utter darkness and driving rain, but I was crying.
The video taken when our adopted son was first handed to us shows a man with silver hair taking a baby into his arms. I don't think I look like a grandfather, yet most of my peers look like this, and their children are in college. But I'm fit and fairly certain of my powers. In some sense, I feel as if I've been in training for this all my life. What I've done is to reverse the time frame. My child rearing years will be the last third of my life instead of the middle third. I've been fortunate. While others my age were struggling with their careers and raising families, I was living a life of textbook adventure. My heroes had always been men like Gordon, explorer of the Nile, and Lawrence of Arabia. I don't mean to imply that I operated on their scale or with their skill; but, like these men, I was driven to pit myself against myself in exotic places. There is a photograph of me from this period that shows a man with a week's growth of beard leaning against a tree in a jungle. A cigarette dangles from his mouth. He wears a headband. His eyes look out at you with some amusement and more appraisal, the kind of guy, the sergeants say, you'd want beside you in a firefight. But I'm not sure I like him. The picture hides a lot. There is too much swagger. What I remember most vividly from those times, really, is the loneliness. I was attached to no one. I was building nothing to pass on. Nowadays everything I do has taken on a whole new dimension. Let me explain. Last Fall I put my son in a pack on my back and climbed the mountain behind our house to look for blackberries. Hank, our springer spaniel, who loves wild berries almost as much as he loves flushing pheasant, went with us. We saw deer and porcupine, the tracks of coon and coyote. Lightning had hit a tree I liked, and its roots had erupted from the ground, brown and tangled like a mass of wire. We found the blackberries, thousands of them, and I could not have been more happy and satisfied if the juicy berries had been the Holy Grail.
True, the adjustment to parenthood is not always easy, and, yes, being a father takes up an enormous amount of time. But who would I rather spend it with? I'm not a man who's interested in accumulating companies or commanding an army. I've served my time in the trenches of masculinity, and I don't have many illusions about these things. I fail to see where beating someone up is more satisfying than showing my son where to find the echo or suddenly hearing him speak a sentence where before he only dabbled in isolated words. He has enabled me to touch reserves of strength and love I never knew existed. Nothing is more basic. I will give my child a safe place to sleep. I will give him the food he needs. I will teach him to survive as best I can. And I will protect him with my life. There is a certain serenity in the simplicity of this formula. Sure, sometimes, it's a drag to get up so early in the morning; but, then again, I get to see his face at an hour when it is most innocent, when it is most open. To me he is a work of art, a creation as intense as the Sistine Chapel. The purity of his rage and joy astonishes me. If I can teach him to love, if I can put him into this world with the ability to handle it yet without the feeling that he must subjugate it, then, I believe, I will have done my job.
Am I a better father now than I would have been when I was younger? Yes. Would I recommend that every man wait to have children? Not necessarily. I believe it happened to me at the right time. I cannot speak for anyone else. I do worry about staying healthy and agile enough to be the parent I want to be, and I worry about what will happen when Sevi reaches his teens and begins pulling away at a time when, perhaps more than younger parents, I will want to hold him close. More than anything else, I am afraid that I might die when he needs me the most. However I have this feeling that I'm going to be around for a long time, that I might even get to be a grandfather, for God's sake. I wouldn't be surprised, but like the pitcher going into the fifth inning with a no hitter, I don't think I should talk about it.
Does there have to be more to life than this, I wonder? I guess so, because my wife and I just received word that our infant daughter is waiting for us to come and pick her up. We're told she has red hair, and I cannot wait to have her in my arms.
ON BEING AN OLDER FATHER
Recently, at the wedding of the daughter of a close friend, a thought struck me: "My God," I said to my wife, "When our kid gets married, we're going to be so old we'll have to have it catered by Meals-On-Wheels!" My son, you see, is only two. When he is thirteen, I will be sixty, and the twenty-first century will be here. You can do the rest of the arithmetic yourself. I'll tell you this, however: it's a strange thing to suddenly find yourself reading the obituary section and Parents Magazine at the same time.
Sevi, my son, was a long time coming. I first began trying to have him one marriage and many lifetimes ago, and discovered myself infertile. It felt as if someone had died. That marriage died, too, but not before a harrowing assault by a battalion of fertility specialists. A man spends his entire life trying to protect his gonads then offers them up to a breed of medical practitioner equaled in cold-hearted arrogance only by Porsche mechanics. At least, a Porsche runs after a tuneup. No matter what those doctors did, my sperm count remained among the lowest on earth. So, I counterattacked with vengeance. I set about fashioning a life that took me anywhere I wanted to go. A child had no place in it. And I married a woman hell-bent as myself. She was also infertile. Children were out of the question. It was, we thought, the basis of our relationship until that night, years later, when the issue was suddenly, once again, as alive and insistent as an infant crying in the next room. I don't remember how it came up. We were driving home along rural roads in a rainstorm when my wife said, "You really do want a child, don't you?", and the thought came to me that not once in my entire life had I really felt that I would never be a father. The underlying assumption was simple: someday, somehow I would be.
"Yes," I answered, "Yes, yes, yes."
And, at that moment, I knew I would have one. It was overwhelming. My wife couldn't see or hear me in the utter darkness and driving rain, but I was crying.
The video taken when our adopted son was first handed to us shows a man with silver hair taking a baby into his arms. I don't think I look like a grandfather, yet most of my peers look like this, and their children are in college. But I'm fit and fairly certain of my powers. In some sense, I feel as if I've been in training for this all my life. What I've done is to reverse the time frame. My child rearing years will be the last third of my life instead of the middle third. I've been fortunate. While others my age were struggling with their careers and raising families, I was living a life of textbook adventure. My heroes had always been men like Gordon, explorer of the Nile, and Lawrence of Arabia. I don't mean to imply that I operated on their scale or with their skill; but, like these men, I was driven to pit myself against myself in exotic places. There is a photograph of me from this period that shows a man with a week's growth of beard leaning against a tree in a jungle. A cigarette dangles from his mouth. He wears a headband. His eyes look out at you with some amusement and more appraisal, the kind of guy, the sergeants say, you'd want beside you in a firefight. But I'm not sure I like him. The picture hides a lot. There is too much swagger. What I remember most vividly from those times, really, is the loneliness. I was attached to no one. I was building nothing to pass on. Nowadays everything I do has taken on a whole new dimension. Let me explain. Last Fall I put my son in a pack on my back and climbed the mountain behind our house to look for blackberries. Hank, our springer spaniel, who loves wild berries almost as much as he loves flushing pheasant, went with us. We saw deer and porcupine, the tracks of coon and coyote. Lightning had hit a tree I liked, and its roots had erupted from the ground, brown and tangled like a mass of wire. We found the blackberries, thousands of them, and I could not have been more happy and satisfied if the juicy berries had been the Holy Grail.
True, the adjustment to parenthood is not always easy, and, yes, being a father takes up an enormous amount of time. But who would I rather spend it with? I'm not a man who's interested in accumulating companies or commanding an army. I've served my time in the trenches of masculinity, and I don't have many illusions about these things. I fail to see where beating someone up is more satisfying than showing my son where to find the echo or suddenly hearing him speak a sentence where before he only dabbled in isolated words. He has enabled me to touch reserves of strength and love I never knew existed. Nothing is more basic. I will give my child a safe place to sleep. I will give him the food he needs. I will teach him to survive as best I can. And I will protect him with my life. There is a certain serenity in the simplicity of this formula. Sure, sometimes, it's a drag to get up so early in the morning; but, then again, I get to see his face at an hour when it is most innocent, when it is most open. To me he is a work of art, a creation as intense as the Sistine Chapel. The purity of his rage and joy astonishes me. If I can teach him to love, if I can put him into this world with the ability to handle it yet without the feeling that he must subjugate it, then, I believe, I will have done my job.
Am I a better father now than I would have been when I was younger? Yes. Would I recommend that every man wait to have children? Not necessarily. I believe it happened to me at the right time. I cannot speak for anyone else. I do worry about staying healthy and agile enough to be the parent I want to be, and I worry about what will happen when Sevi reaches his teens and begins pulling away at a time when, perhaps more than younger parents, I will want to hold him close. More than anything else, I am afraid that I might die when he needs me the most. However I have this feeling that I'm going to be around for a long time, that I might even get to be a grandfather, for God's sake. I wouldn't be surprised, but like the pitcher going into the fifth inning with a no hitter, I don't think I should talk about it.
Does there have to be more to life than this, I wonder? I guess so, because my wife and I just received word that our infant daughter is waiting for us to come and pick her up. We're told she has red hair, and I cannot wait to have her in my arms.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
My First Fall
Actually, it wasn't. There were two priors but they were a few winters back on the ice and don't count because everybody slips on ice. Nothing unusual in that. The one I'm talking about now was a whopper, the mother of all falls, one completely unexpected, seriously designed to shatter bones and put this poor sucker in a home. One second I was up; the next second down. Here's how.
We have maple, apple, and Norwegian spruce trees behind our house, gnarled and ancient, and last winter's seven foot blizzard snapped thick limbs off those old trees as if they were cheap chopsticks. The following spring my brother, Joel, came up from Maryland to help me turn those broken limbs into firewood. We got out the chainsaw and went to work. Two guys, yo. "Ice Road Truckers", "Axe Men" -- Catch us on the Discovery channel, yo! The limbs on the ground were the easiest. Cut here. Cut there. Yo, y'all! Fireplace logs!
One piece remained: a substantial limb hanging from the trunk by a wooden hinge created when the limb snapped. We cut through the hinge but the limb hung up on a tangle of smaller branches. So I carefully worked it down to the ground where, since we were on a small rise, it began to roll. Slowly but inexorably it rolled. Either it was going to take me down at the ankles, or I'd have to jump over it. Which I did. Up and over it. Just as I was in the midst of congratulating myself for being so nimble at such an advanced age, I was suddenly airborne and hit the ground smack solid on my right hip. Full on. My brother said it looked like I'd bounced about six inches. It felt like a ten pound sledge hammered into my hip. I was certain I had broken it and about half the bones in the rest of my body, but I lay there cautiously wiggling everything I could wiggle until I convinced myself nothing was broken. Everything worked. Hold the 911. Still, it hurt, and, when my brother made to help me up,I let him. I walked around in circles for awhile trying to walk it out. Then we finished cutting up the log and went back to the house.
By this time it was painful to put my foot down. My hip sported a bruise the size of a hub cap and the color of rot. But I was absolutely certain that nothing was broken, and, to prove it, I'd walk up the seventeen steps to our second floor.
Just let me sit here a minute.
Time's up! Move it out!
And so I started up the steps determined to get to that landing way far up there higher than it had ever been before. Someone had moved it. Obviously. I do not need to belabor how awful were the next few eons of my life except to say this: pain shot through me with every step, but I could not stop. To stop would be to never again be able to take another step, and I had to get to that landing, didn't I? It didn't occur to me that this was ridiculous. It just had to be done, that's all. So, I did it, and it turned out nothing was broken after all.
But why did I do such a thing when I didn't have to? Masochism? There was no pleasure in this pain, though there was a flush of satisfaction upon reaching the second floor landing. Still, I wouldn't call it masochistic. The root of it goes deeper than that. It made me think about my father.
My father was a cripple. He suffered from a deforming condition known as Paget's. Nowadays an injection can cure it, but my father was born in 1900 when nothing could be done. He had been a straight and handsome man, but, by the time he died his legs were terribly bowed, his head was too big for his body, his shoulders dropped. He walked with the aid of two metal canes and had survived terrible internal damage brought about as his body closed in on itself. His organs, jammed into a smaller and smaller cavity, stopped working properly. Still, at the end of his life, the man remained on his feet working twelve hour days. I never once heard him complain, not about anything really, and certainly not his condition. A doctor told us that when my father walked it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. Yet, not only didn't he complain, my brother, sister, and I never thought of him as a cripple! I was truly puzzled when my wife, Jamie, held a picture of him in her hand and said, "I didn't know your father was crippled." "What're you talking about?" I asked. "Look at this," she said and made her point by getting me to look hard. My father really was a cripple. I'd never thought of him as that before. How much pain and dismay he must have felt! How hard it must have been for him to maintain his dignity! How could he not be angry? At whom? At God? He just didn't talk about it.
Many years after his death I walked across a substantial piece of Alaska with a local trapper who was preparing his line for the winter. We were a good twenty miles in when we separated for a week. He went down the line, and I roamed out from where I was. I'd bought a new pair of LL Bean hiking boots and prepared for the trip by running in them. But I came down with some kind of bronchial mess and couldn't get those boots worked in the way I would have preferred. I wore them, anyway, and, before we cleared our first stretch of these dreadful hummocks which slipped from side to side, I regretted it. There was no way to get good purchase. I never imagined the terrain would be that difficult. Mike, the trapper, moved ahead so quickly I couldn't keep up. He'd say, "I'll meet you in the saddle of that mountain", point, and disappear. By the time we reached the first line cabin twenty miles in, my feet were raw and bleeding, so I opted to stay where I was while he went ahead. I wanted to experience the solitude.
I warmed up some spruce pitch, rubbed it on my feet then bandaged them until I could barely get my boots on again. It worked well enough for me to hobble around and get a decent look at where I was, but I couldn't help but wonder how in the world I was going to hike the twenty miles back to the village? It didn't occur to me that I wouldn't do it. I just wondered how? I should have stayed off my feet while Mike was gone, but how many times would I ever be alone in the middle of Alaska? I wanted to take advantage of it to see as much of it as I could. By the time Mike came back a week later, the top layers of skin on both my feet were gone, and I could barely stand. If I could have taken off those damned boots and burned them I would have, but I couldn't do twenty miles of no trail in my stocking feet. Mike didn't think I could do it at all, and said he'd send a medevac back for me. "No, you won't," I insisted, "I'll get out." I was not about to have anyone come in and get me. "If you're not back in three days, look for the chopper," he said, took off, and disappeared around a bend in the river in less time than it took me to tie my boot laces. That river turned out to be a godsend. I walked in it as much as possible to numb my feet in the cold water. Without that water I couldn't have walked at all.Fifteen miles down, two days later, I had to leave the river and follow an old, grown over cat trail (made long ago by a Caterpillar bulldozer) the rest of the way to the village. I had never been in such pain in my life. I wore a backpack and carried a rifle which only made it more difficult. I banged my fists on my thighs and screamed at myself to keep going. If I stopped I'd never start again. Move! Move! Move! One skinless foot shuffling after the other. Move it! Move it! Your father didn't stop, and neither will you! When he walked, remember, it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. Remember? "You have a pack on your back," I said to myself. "Is that what this is all about? My father?"
Maybe. But I'm more comfortable giving you fact than conjecture.
I gasped with relief when I finally spotted chimney smoke. I'd made it, and that night Mike, his Athapaskan wife, and a couple of pick-up trucks packed with local tribesmen took me out and got me numb drunk.
I left those boots behind and haven't seen them since.
We have maple, apple, and Norwegian spruce trees behind our house, gnarled and ancient, and last winter's seven foot blizzard snapped thick limbs off those old trees as if they were cheap chopsticks. The following spring my brother, Joel, came up from Maryland to help me turn those broken limbs into firewood. We got out the chainsaw and went to work. Two guys, yo. "Ice Road Truckers", "Axe Men" -- Catch us on the Discovery channel, yo! The limbs on the ground were the easiest. Cut here. Cut there. Yo, y'all! Fireplace logs!
One piece remained: a substantial limb hanging from the trunk by a wooden hinge created when the limb snapped. We cut through the hinge but the limb hung up on a tangle of smaller branches. So I carefully worked it down to the ground where, since we were on a small rise, it began to roll. Slowly but inexorably it rolled. Either it was going to take me down at the ankles, or I'd have to jump over it. Which I did. Up and over it. Just as I was in the midst of congratulating myself for being so nimble at such an advanced age, I was suddenly airborne and hit the ground smack solid on my right hip. Full on. My brother said it looked like I'd bounced about six inches. It felt like a ten pound sledge hammered into my hip. I was certain I had broken it and about half the bones in the rest of my body, but I lay there cautiously wiggling everything I could wiggle until I convinced myself nothing was broken. Everything worked. Hold the 911. Still, it hurt, and, when my brother made to help me up,I let him. I walked around in circles for awhile trying to walk it out. Then we finished cutting up the log and went back to the house.
By this time it was painful to put my foot down. My hip sported a bruise the size of a hub cap and the color of rot. But I was absolutely certain that nothing was broken, and, to prove it, I'd walk up the seventeen steps to our second floor.
Just let me sit here a minute.
Time's up! Move it out!
And so I started up the steps determined to get to that landing way far up there higher than it had ever been before. Someone had moved it. Obviously. I do not need to belabor how awful were the next few eons of my life except to say this: pain shot through me with every step, but I could not stop. To stop would be to never again be able to take another step, and I had to get to that landing, didn't I? It didn't occur to me that this was ridiculous. It just had to be done, that's all. So, I did it, and it turned out nothing was broken after all.
But why did I do such a thing when I didn't have to? Masochism? There was no pleasure in this pain, though there was a flush of satisfaction upon reaching the second floor landing. Still, I wouldn't call it masochistic. The root of it goes deeper than that. It made me think about my father.
My father was a cripple. He suffered from a deforming condition known as Paget's. Nowadays an injection can cure it, but my father was born in 1900 when nothing could be done. He had been a straight and handsome man, but, by the time he died his legs were terribly bowed, his head was too big for his body, his shoulders dropped. He walked with the aid of two metal canes and had survived terrible internal damage brought about as his body closed in on itself. His organs, jammed into a smaller and smaller cavity, stopped working properly. Still, at the end of his life, the man remained on his feet working twelve hour days. I never once heard him complain, not about anything really, and certainly not his condition. A doctor told us that when my father walked it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. Yet, not only didn't he complain, my brother, sister, and I never thought of him as a cripple! I was truly puzzled when my wife, Jamie, held a picture of him in her hand and said, "I didn't know your father was crippled." "What're you talking about?" I asked. "Look at this," she said and made her point by getting me to look hard. My father really was a cripple. I'd never thought of him as that before. How much pain and dismay he must have felt! How hard it must have been for him to maintain his dignity! How could he not be angry? At whom? At God? He just didn't talk about it.
Many years after his death I walked across a substantial piece of Alaska with a local trapper who was preparing his line for the winter. We were a good twenty miles in when we separated for a week. He went down the line, and I roamed out from where I was. I'd bought a new pair of LL Bean hiking boots and prepared for the trip by running in them. But I came down with some kind of bronchial mess and couldn't get those boots worked in the way I would have preferred. I wore them, anyway, and, before we cleared our first stretch of these dreadful hummocks which slipped from side to side, I regretted it. There was no way to get good purchase. I never imagined the terrain would be that difficult. Mike, the trapper, moved ahead so quickly I couldn't keep up. He'd say, "I'll meet you in the saddle of that mountain", point, and disappear. By the time we reached the first line cabin twenty miles in, my feet were raw and bleeding, so I opted to stay where I was while he went ahead. I wanted to experience the solitude.
I warmed up some spruce pitch, rubbed it on my feet then bandaged them until I could barely get my boots on again. It worked well enough for me to hobble around and get a decent look at where I was, but I couldn't help but wonder how in the world I was going to hike the twenty miles back to the village? It didn't occur to me that I wouldn't do it. I just wondered how? I should have stayed off my feet while Mike was gone, but how many times would I ever be alone in the middle of Alaska? I wanted to take advantage of it to see as much of it as I could. By the time Mike came back a week later, the top layers of skin on both my feet were gone, and I could barely stand. If I could have taken off those damned boots and burned them I would have, but I couldn't do twenty miles of no trail in my stocking feet. Mike didn't think I could do it at all, and said he'd send a medevac back for me. "No, you won't," I insisted, "I'll get out." I was not about to have anyone come in and get me. "If you're not back in three days, look for the chopper," he said, took off, and disappeared around a bend in the river in less time than it took me to tie my boot laces. That river turned out to be a godsend. I walked in it as much as possible to numb my feet in the cold water. Without that water I couldn't have walked at all.Fifteen miles down, two days later, I had to leave the river and follow an old, grown over cat trail (made long ago by a Caterpillar bulldozer) the rest of the way to the village. I had never been in such pain in my life. I wore a backpack and carried a rifle which only made it more difficult. I banged my fists on my thighs and screamed at myself to keep going. If I stopped I'd never start again. Move! Move! Move! One skinless foot shuffling after the other. Move it! Move it! Your father didn't stop, and neither will you! When he walked, remember, it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. Remember? "You have a pack on your back," I said to myself. "Is that what this is all about? My father?"
Maybe. But I'm more comfortable giving you fact than conjecture.
I gasped with relief when I finally spotted chimney smoke. I'd made it, and that night Mike, his Athapaskan wife, and a couple of pick-up trucks packed with local tribesmen took me out and got me numb drunk.
I left those boots behind and haven't seen them since.
Friday, February 11, 2011
When I Became A Liberal
In 1960 I was a newly minted Marine stationed at Courthouse Bay, Camp Lejeune, undergoing intensive training as a combat engineer. As I remember the day started with a three mile run (Whether it was before or after breakfast I don't recall) and continued in the field with high explosives, mines (We were the ones who put them in and took them out), and booby traps. We were also taught to make improvised explosive devices with whatever we had at hand. I remember booby trapping a box of nails thinking joyfully how it would shred a human being. We dealt in death and destruction, and were proud of what we could do. We never considered the consequences to ourselves -- after all, we were immortal; we were Marines; we had survived Parris Island. What could be worse? We never considered what the enemy would do to us, only what we would do to him. Maim him; destroy him. We were the force even Mao feared. We were the force the Germans in WW1 cursed as "Teufel Hunden", Devil Dogs. Sir, yes,sir, we were immortal.
One day a mate of mine returned from the base library with a book he had borrowed. He was a very bright kid whose father was a physicist at Oak Ridge. "You gotta read this," he said and handed me the book. I can still see his face clearly, though I can't remember his name. The book was "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo. I do recall watching the McCarthy hearings on television, but I had no idea of the Hollywood blacklist, still less of Dalton Trumbo, a guy with a funny name. "What's it about?" I asked my friend. "Just read it," he said. So I did. And I was stunned. I'd figured the book was some kind of boy's story, something you might find in a magazine like Boy's Life or Argosy. It was about page fifty when I realized what I was reading. The voice telling the story was that of a horribly wounded soldier, WW1, who had been in an explosion that had destroyed his arms, his legs, and his face. He had been reduced to a torso, a hunk of meat with a brain, no eyes, no mouth, unable to communicate, only to think. As he gradually discovers what he has become, so does the reader, and the shock of recognition absolutely stunned me. How that book ever made it into a Marine Corps library I do not know? My guess is that whoever ordered it had no idea what it was about. Just a good old book about a good old boy. Yeah, right. What it was was a devastating story about a man turned into a piece of meat, only with a mind that still worked, still thought, still remembered, still pondered, still cried out in the silence of his soul to be as he once was. It was an agonizing read, and the image of this poor wretch has never left me. It was the dawn of my personal politics. Gradually, the notion took root that I and my buddies, guys I had grown to love and trust more than anyone on earth, were merely pawns in the games of power brokers. What was engendered was not revolt but ambivalence, some of which is with me to this day so many years later. Being a Marine meant you had become a member of the greatest fighting force on earth. There were no Green Berets, no Navy Seals; there were only the Marines. And I was one. And I was so proud of it. Even today when I hear the Marine Corps Hymn tears come to my eyes. I straighten up. Do not mess with me. I am ready for battle. Note this: every American military unit has a song: Anchors Away, the Wild Blue Yonder, the Caissons Are Marching Along. Only the Marine Corps has a hymn. A hymn! Its final lines are, "If the Army and the Navy ever look on heaven's scene, they will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines." And yet. The older I became the more entrenched the idea that young men were sent to die for old men who wanted things their way. And yet. When I was at Yale in the mid-sixties I seriously considered going back on active duty. Semper Fidelis. Go figure.
One day a mate of mine returned from the base library with a book he had borrowed. He was a very bright kid whose father was a physicist at Oak Ridge. "You gotta read this," he said and handed me the book. I can still see his face clearly, though I can't remember his name. The book was "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo. I do recall watching the McCarthy hearings on television, but I had no idea of the Hollywood blacklist, still less of Dalton Trumbo, a guy with a funny name. "What's it about?" I asked my friend. "Just read it," he said. So I did. And I was stunned. I'd figured the book was some kind of boy's story, something you might find in a magazine like Boy's Life or Argosy. It was about page fifty when I realized what I was reading. The voice telling the story was that of a horribly wounded soldier, WW1, who had been in an explosion that had destroyed his arms, his legs, and his face. He had been reduced to a torso, a hunk of meat with a brain, no eyes, no mouth, unable to communicate, only to think. As he gradually discovers what he has become, so does the reader, and the shock of recognition absolutely stunned me. How that book ever made it into a Marine Corps library I do not know? My guess is that whoever ordered it had no idea what it was about. Just a good old book about a good old boy. Yeah, right. What it was was a devastating story about a man turned into a piece of meat, only with a mind that still worked, still thought, still remembered, still pondered, still cried out in the silence of his soul to be as he once was. It was an agonizing read, and the image of this poor wretch has never left me. It was the dawn of my personal politics. Gradually, the notion took root that I and my buddies, guys I had grown to love and trust more than anyone on earth, were merely pawns in the games of power brokers. What was engendered was not revolt but ambivalence, some of which is with me to this day so many years later. Being a Marine meant you had become a member of the greatest fighting force on earth. There were no Green Berets, no Navy Seals; there were only the Marines. And I was one. And I was so proud of it. Even today when I hear the Marine Corps Hymn tears come to my eyes. I straighten up. Do not mess with me. I am ready for battle. Note this: every American military unit has a song: Anchors Away, the Wild Blue Yonder, the Caissons Are Marching Along. Only the Marine Corps has a hymn. A hymn! Its final lines are, "If the Army and the Navy ever look on heaven's scene, they will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines." And yet. The older I became the more entrenched the idea that young men were sent to die for old men who wanted things their way. And yet. When I was at Yale in the mid-sixties I seriously considered going back on active duty. Semper Fidelis. Go figure.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Codger? Curmudgeon? Choose one. Uh, no thanks.
One day early last Summer Max and I sat on the front porch theorizing about why West Kill Mountain had thus far turned green only by its bottom half. It had been a brutal winter capped by a seven-foot blizzard, and both of us were ready for fat leaves and sunshine. The daffodils had flowered. The forsythia was a thousand bursts of sunlight. Lilacs were only two or three days away, but the top half of the mountain remained drab and barren. A few years ago a plague of gypsy moths denuded these mountains, and they looked like that. We felt we had been robbed of our spring. Caterpillars seemed to hang in mid-air, their silken threads invisible in the bright sun. Folks were burning larvae sacs out of their trees. They’d use apple pickers stuffed with burning newspaper to reach them. Then billions of black flies – I mean BILLIONS AND BILLIONS AND BILLIONS -- descended in an angry cloud to search and devour every morsel remotely resembling moth. Local scuttlebutt had it that the forestry department dumped them over the Catskills to counter the moths. There are lots of rumors, none of them corroborated, about what the forestry department does from bringing in wolves and mountain lions to problem bears from other districts. But, we were talking about flies. At least, the moths kept their distance. The flies infiltrated our wrap around screen porch with the skill of trained sappers and did their best to crawl into our ears.until one morning they were no longer there, none of them, none at all, not one. They’d disappeared as suddenly as they’d come.
So, Max and I, that early summer day sitting on the porch, unanimously decided that, since there were no gypsy moths around, West Kill mountain must be slow this year due to the penetrating cold. It took us two cups of coffee each to come to that conclusion. Then Andrea came running by.
Andrea is a model who lives a couple miles down the valley and runs the road when weather permits and sometimes when it doesn’t. She’s tall, from Oklahoma, a stunning mix of Black and Native American. Usually, we simply call out to each other, and she keeps going. This time she came up to the porch – the first time she’d ever done that – and she was laughing, pointing at me and Max and bent over laughing.
“Somebody ought to videotape you two,” she laughed. “Couple of local characters, all right. Couple of codgers like those guys from the Muppets.” She thought this was a riot. “I’m serious,” she said. “Talk into a tape recorder. I just know you got tales to tell. You’re livin’ history. Spill it.”
Um, wait a minute. Back up. Past beans, past living history, past stories to tell. Back. Back. Codgers! Hold it right there. Codger. Now, someone generations my junior might mistake me for one, especially if I haven’t shaved for a few days, but they’d be wrong. And anyway Andrea was looking at me through a screen that no doubt hampered her vision. The point is: I have worked hard at not being a codger, an ugly word, by the way. Codger. It sounds like you’re trying to spit up something. I like the word “curmudgeon”, its synonym, and, consequently, “curmudgeonly”. I like it’s sound and the odd way it looks, and, I admit, at one time I deemed it something to which I sort of aspired: the notion of the crotchety but lovable old geezer. I knew a guy named Bill back in Montana who aspired to some day be like his grandfather. The old man sat in the back yard with a .22 rifle and shot the pigeons that landed on the phone wires overhead. We laughed at such a cantankerous old fart, for that he was, but there was something in me that looked at this as a possibility. A cute, old guy, you know, a crank with a heart of gold. That guy.
One day – I don’t know if we were married, yet – but one day I was regaling Jamie with the notion of an old curmudgeon, convinced there was something endearing about it. I made sure to tell her about Bill’s grandfather. She reacted as if to a really vile smell. “What’s so cute about that?” she wanted to know. “You go that route, you go it alone.” I saw her point. I’ve got a notion of what I’d like to be as I grow older, but it ain’t that. If I ever flip old codger on you, kick my butt and tell me to act my age.
So, Max and I, that early summer day sitting on the porch, unanimously decided that, since there were no gypsy moths around, West Kill mountain must be slow this year due to the penetrating cold. It took us two cups of coffee each to come to that conclusion. Then Andrea came running by.
Andrea is a model who lives a couple miles down the valley and runs the road when weather permits and sometimes when it doesn’t. She’s tall, from Oklahoma, a stunning mix of Black and Native American. Usually, we simply call out to each other, and she keeps going. This time she came up to the porch – the first time she’d ever done that – and she was laughing, pointing at me and Max and bent over laughing.
“Somebody ought to videotape you two,” she laughed. “Couple of local characters, all right. Couple of codgers like those guys from the Muppets.” She thought this was a riot. “I’m serious,” she said. “Talk into a tape recorder. I just know you got tales to tell. You’re livin’ history. Spill it.”
Um, wait a minute. Back up. Past beans, past living history, past stories to tell. Back. Back. Codgers! Hold it right there. Codger. Now, someone generations my junior might mistake me for one, especially if I haven’t shaved for a few days, but they’d be wrong. And anyway Andrea was looking at me through a screen that no doubt hampered her vision. The point is: I have worked hard at not being a codger, an ugly word, by the way. Codger. It sounds like you’re trying to spit up something. I like the word “curmudgeon”, its synonym, and, consequently, “curmudgeonly”. I like it’s sound and the odd way it looks, and, I admit, at one time I deemed it something to which I sort of aspired: the notion of the crotchety but lovable old geezer. I knew a guy named Bill back in Montana who aspired to some day be like his grandfather. The old man sat in the back yard with a .22 rifle and shot the pigeons that landed on the phone wires overhead. We laughed at such a cantankerous old fart, for that he was, but there was something in me that looked at this as a possibility. A cute, old guy, you know, a crank with a heart of gold. That guy.
One day – I don’t know if we were married, yet – but one day I was regaling Jamie with the notion of an old curmudgeon, convinced there was something endearing about it. I made sure to tell her about Bill’s grandfather. She reacted as if to a really vile smell. “What’s so cute about that?” she wanted to know. “You go that route, you go it alone.” I saw her point. I’ve got a notion of what I’d like to be as I grow older, but it ain’t that. If I ever flip old codger on you, kick my butt and tell me to act my age.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
MORGAN STATE COLLEGE, AUGUST, 1963 - MLK'S BIRTHDAY, JAN, 2011
Forty-seven years ago. Wow, what a long time! I was twenty-two, a student at Morgan State back then, so, as Morgan was a Black college and I was the only white man in matriculation at the time, there was no way I could avoid the March on Washington and ever show my face on campus again. I had been a student at Morgan long enough to begin to grasp the cancer that was racism. Is racism. Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat. Courageous students in North Carolina sat in at a whites only lunch counter. I would be on that march. Period. I was determined to make a statement.
Morgan’s campus crackled with anticipation. Busses were hired to carry students to and from D.C. I don’t remember how I got there, but I don’t think I went on a bus from Morgan. Something tells me I went to the bus station downtown and took myself over on a Greyhound. I wore a suit and tie, polished cordovan wingtips, and a fresh haircut. I realized I did not want to be part of a contingent. It wasn’t, I don’t think, the ego’s fear of getting lost in the crowd but the inability to make a statement.because I’d be invisible, and, if I were invisible, what was the point?
I’d been cautioned by my mother in Baltimore not to get involved, however, as I’d been lying to her for most of my remembered life, anyway, I had no trouble assuring her not to worry. I had to go to work; I wouldn’t be there. Don’t worry, ma.
How I got from the D.C. bus station to the march I cannot remember, but I do remember being on the march itself: a nice, naive Jewish boy without a sign in an ivy league suit and button down shirt, all by his lonesome. I felt more exposed than any time before in my life. It was hot, but I kept my tie neatly around my neck and my suit jacket buttoned with the cuffs of my shirt a proper single inch beyond the jacket sleeve, and still I wondered if this was what it felt like to be stark naked facing a pack of snarling dogs? Not that I was. Not that they were. Not yet. That would come, but I have no memory of hecklers that day. I went with the crowd as it pushed towards the Lincoln Memorial and found myself in position to see Dr. King quite well while he gave his legendary speech: “I have a dream…” His words snatched those snarling dogs and shut them up quick. I heard the words clearly and knew I had just witnessed something extraordinary.
I don’t remember going back to Baltimore, but, that evening, my mother asked me how my day was in that way she had when she knew she’d nailed you. I said, “Fine.”
“Work was…?” she asked.
“Fine,” I answered.
“You lied to me,” she said, and I knew she knew, though she remained uncharacteristically composed.
“How’d you know?”
“Your cousin, Doris, called from San Diego. Her whole family spotted you today on tv.”
“Yeah?”
“Every network.”
“What’d they say?”
“They said you looked respectable.”
“I guess so,“ I said and wagged my tie.
“Where is this going to lead?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
I wasn’t lying. I really didn’t. I still don’t.
Morgan’s campus crackled with anticipation. Busses were hired to carry students to and from D.C. I don’t remember how I got there, but I don’t think I went on a bus from Morgan. Something tells me I went to the bus station downtown and took myself over on a Greyhound. I wore a suit and tie, polished cordovan wingtips, and a fresh haircut. I realized I did not want to be part of a contingent. It wasn’t, I don’t think, the ego’s fear of getting lost in the crowd but the inability to make a statement.because I’d be invisible, and, if I were invisible, what was the point?
I’d been cautioned by my mother in Baltimore not to get involved, however, as I’d been lying to her for most of my remembered life, anyway, I had no trouble assuring her not to worry. I had to go to work; I wouldn’t be there. Don’t worry, ma.
How I got from the D.C. bus station to the march I cannot remember, but I do remember being on the march itself: a nice, naive Jewish boy without a sign in an ivy league suit and button down shirt, all by his lonesome. I felt more exposed than any time before in my life. It was hot, but I kept my tie neatly around my neck and my suit jacket buttoned with the cuffs of my shirt a proper single inch beyond the jacket sleeve, and still I wondered if this was what it felt like to be stark naked facing a pack of snarling dogs? Not that I was. Not that they were. Not yet. That would come, but I have no memory of hecklers that day. I went with the crowd as it pushed towards the Lincoln Memorial and found myself in position to see Dr. King quite well while he gave his legendary speech: “I have a dream…” His words snatched those snarling dogs and shut them up quick. I heard the words clearly and knew I had just witnessed something extraordinary.
I don’t remember going back to Baltimore, but, that evening, my mother asked me how my day was in that way she had when she knew she’d nailed you. I said, “Fine.”
“Work was…?” she asked.
“Fine,” I answered.
“You lied to me,” she said, and I knew she knew, though she remained uncharacteristically composed.
“How’d you know?”
“Your cousin, Doris, called from San Diego. Her whole family spotted you today on tv.”
“Yeah?”
“Every network.”
“What’d they say?”
“They said you looked respectable.”
“I guess so,“ I said and wagged my tie.
“Where is this going to lead?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
I wasn’t lying. I really didn’t. I still don’t.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
MORE MAX & SOME ON STONE WALLS
I’ve roamed these woods and fields for more than 27 years now, and still I come across piled stone walls in unexpected places, centuries of grunt work done by hand. Country like this can wear you down. This land grows rocks as easily as it grows spruce trees. You can’t so much as plant a sapling without clearing dozens of rocks from the hole. If there were only a way to make some money off them!
Years ago, the first Winter that we lived here, I was tromping around after a major snowfall when a red fox led me to something odd. The sight of a red fox on virgin snow is rare and very beautiful, a ruby in the rough. He saw me first, I’m sure. Wood creatures usually know you’re there before you do. The fox stood on a small rise looking back at me over its shoulder. I stopped as soon as I saw it, and, nearly the instant I did, the fox took off at a trot towards a configuration of stones I’d never seen before, dove in, and disappeared. It must have been his den. Clear sets of tracks showed his comings and goings, and the piles of stone slabs seemed to be an old foundation. But it was deep in the woods and hard to reach, and made me wonder who had lived there? I figured Max would know. He’s lived most of his 56 years up here and knows about everything there is to know including local gossip. He stopped by later in the week, and I asked him. Turns out local scuttlebutt has it that at one time the insane were housed there. It must have been a cold and miserable place. I’m not superstitious, but now, during a storm when the wind wails and moans, my mind turns to Purgatory and the misery of lost souls. Of course, I don’t believe this, however, if I’d lived a hundred years ago I might have.
One day, Max and I got to talking about these walls. We’d both heard that landscape designers were pillaging them for the owners of second homes. Rocks with lichen were especially valuable, and rocks with lichen were what we had, tons and tons of rocks with lichen. We could take apart some of these hidden stone walls that no one could see and go to market with them. Being the astute businessman that I am, this idea went nowhere. Well, almost nowhere. Max raided a wall behind the barn, trucked the stone slabs to the front of our house, and then spent innumerable days putting them together again. Max would stand there and study the stones with the concentration of a chess player until he saw how best they fit, and now an old stone wall, precisely built and balanced, borders our front lawn. It’s a beauty, impressive as any stone wall is impressive, but, if you look closely to see how perfectly it’s been put together, it’s even moreso. Max is as proud of this construction as any sculptor would be, and the sight of it never fails to give me great pleasure.
Years ago, the first Winter that we lived here, I was tromping around after a major snowfall when a red fox led me to something odd. The sight of a red fox on virgin snow is rare and very beautiful, a ruby in the rough. He saw me first, I’m sure. Wood creatures usually know you’re there before you do. The fox stood on a small rise looking back at me over its shoulder. I stopped as soon as I saw it, and, nearly the instant I did, the fox took off at a trot towards a configuration of stones I’d never seen before, dove in, and disappeared. It must have been his den. Clear sets of tracks showed his comings and goings, and the piles of stone slabs seemed to be an old foundation. But it was deep in the woods and hard to reach, and made me wonder who had lived there? I figured Max would know. He’s lived most of his 56 years up here and knows about everything there is to know including local gossip. He stopped by later in the week, and I asked him. Turns out local scuttlebutt has it that at one time the insane were housed there. It must have been a cold and miserable place. I’m not superstitious, but now, during a storm when the wind wails and moans, my mind turns to Purgatory and the misery of lost souls. Of course, I don’t believe this, however, if I’d lived a hundred years ago I might have.
One day, Max and I got to talking about these walls. We’d both heard that landscape designers were pillaging them for the owners of second homes. Rocks with lichen were especially valuable, and rocks with lichen were what we had, tons and tons of rocks with lichen. We could take apart some of these hidden stone walls that no one could see and go to market with them. Being the astute businessman that I am, this idea went nowhere. Well, almost nowhere. Max raided a wall behind the barn, trucked the stone slabs to the front of our house, and then spent innumerable days putting them together again. Max would stand there and study the stones with the concentration of a chess player until he saw how best they fit, and now an old stone wall, precisely built and balanced, borders our front lawn. It’s a beauty, impressive as any stone wall is impressive, but, if you look closely to see how perfectly it’s been put together, it’s even moreso. Max is as proud of this construction as any sculptor would be, and the sight of it never fails to give me great pleasure.
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