If This Isn't Nice, What is?

“I urge you all to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’” - Kurt Vonnnegut

One day my then teen-aged daughter asked me if there were anything she could do to make me hate her? I thought about it - went through a whole list of professions like bank robber, hooker, hit person, politician, Fox news host, Alex Jones' fan, mugger of the lame and elderly - discarded them all - and said, finally, with conviction, “You could become a nazi.”

As many of you know, both our son and our daughter were adopted from Medellin, Colombia, my son at three months, my daughter at four. We went south of the border two separate years for a couple of weeks apiece to bring them back. My son’s was two weeks of bureaucratic adventure but no big deal unless you consider a soldier with a combat rifle stationed at every street corner a big deal, however, when we went to get our daughter, there was an actual war going on. I think the word was, kinetic. The day I had to get to the embassy to receive her papers, our guide stopped four blocks away and pointed out the traffic barriers and armed soldiers. Halt. I had to walk. So, I’m walking to the embassy in downtown Bogota on empty, silent streets heavily guarded by soldiers locked and loaded. A machine gun nest covered an intersection. Snipers were up there, too. So, yeah, I’m walking and I get to thinking, “What the hell do I do if they start shooting?” “Well,” I said to myself, taking in the parked cars, still the Marine, “You can hit and roll. Get under that car.”

Think about that for a minute:

I’m forty-nine years old. Hit and roll. I did. I thought about it, and recognized in seconds that “solution” would break every bone in my body. Foreman, boychik, just breathe deeply and keep walking. Every nerve was alive for four very long blocks, eight, given the way back.

As for my daughter asking me if there were anything that could make me hate her, here’s what an adoption counselor told us thirty-six years ago. The woman was over six feet tall, dour, baggily dressed, legally blind, scrupulous, and might well have been hung as a witch by the Puritans. Her walls had hundreds of pictures of children tacked to them. She left the office for a minute and Jamie said, “Stephen, look at those pictures. They’re all so beautiful.” Just then our counselor returned and said, quite sternly, “Look again. They’re not all so beautiful, but you must be able to say I will love this child forever.” Such is the answer to that nazi question. I will love this child forever. Once this old cowboy and I were talking about our kids, and his take on it was, “Wouldn’t give ya a nickel for ‘em. Wouldn’t take a million.” There isn’t much my children could do to lose me. You don’t back out of that kind of pledge.

Our creek is dry, so Madden, my daughter, our dear family friend, Sidikibah from Guinea, and I went down to cut some dried out driftwood for firewood before the water flowed again. Her favorite new toy is our 16” chainsaw which she handles like a butter knife. The chain was too loose and came off. I watched her calmly assess the situation and make the repair. I thought to myself, “How many guys in the world are as happy as I am right this minute?” A daughter who is not only a registered nurse but can wield a chainsaw like a jack. Oddly enough, I get the same feeling of awe when I hear my son play his guitar compositions or talk coding or when he assays his theories of the universe. Who are these somethings? Both originals. Where did they learn this stuff? When and How? The memories they’ve provided. 

My son wasn’t five years old when we took him to a very posh birthday party in Santa Monica. Starched dresses. Bow ties. Shiny shoes. Nannies. A dozen or more kids. Industry parents. Assistants set out a row of tiny white kids’ chairs for each child to watch the hired entertainment - a magician, a magician who, in retrospect, resembled Steve Bannon in a frayed tuxedo. I’m pretty sure the fellow nicked the vanilla extract from the kitchen. Anyway, he goes through his bag of tricks, obviously bored, obviously anxious to finish the extract. With fanfare blown on a penny whistle, the magician announced his Big Trick. He prepared his Magic Table, and, alikazamshazam, a pigeon appeared, excuse me, a dove. Our magician waxed triumphant. Hands above head in triumph. A large, weary smile. Sevi, my son, raised his hand. “Whoops,” I thought. My wife and I exchanged "Uh, Oh" looks. The magician called on him. “Yes, young man?” said the magician. “Can I please have another piece of pizza?”, asked my kid. Politely. Go ahead. Accuse me of being a bad influence. You’re probably right, but I couldn’t have been more delighted than I was at that moment.

Of course, there have been problems. Who gets through life unscathed? My daughter is a powerhouse. Still, she's had demons to conquer. My son carries a certain sadness. Some wounds never quite heal - the nature of his demon. Others are salved by a family ready to welcome you home. Robert Frost said, “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Resonant and true, but not my definition. “Home is where, when you want to go there, they are happy to take you in.” Not as pungent but I like it better.

 

Fall - 8/17/2022

FALL - Wednesday, 8/17/2022

        There’s no stopping it.  Prepare for it ‘cause it’s gonna happen. Gonna? It’s happening right now. A quick breeze from the west is heading up our valley only to carom off the eastern end to head west again. If we were out west in, say, New Mexico, our valley would be a box canyon. Most of America would murder for such a breeze, but not around here. This breeze has an edge to it, a slight, barely perceptible chill, like a whisper in your ear that you’d rather not hear. Ready or not, here I come. Actually, we began getting ready last May when we put in a load of green firewood knowing it’ll age by the time we need it. The breeze whispers, “You’ll need it soon.”

This morning a young buck, still in velvet, was seen nibbling at my new peach tree. I wrapped the slender trunk with burlap, fenced it in, and doused both wrap and the ground around it with deer repellent to keep him at a distance. The bear raided our garbage bin the other night, bit it, clawed it, dragged it away. Countless creatures are out there hunting for something to eat. The green is not the green it was two weeks ago, no longer vibrant but kind of lackluster and dull, faded, some already yellowed, enough now on the ground. But, it's still August, guys! Of course, we’ve had a drought, so things are drier than normal. The grass crackles under one’s feet. Herdman Brook is barely there.Where did the rainbows go? The peach trees are bearing, though not yet ready to pick, as are the apple and pear trees. More moths. Less butterflies. Blue Jays foray down the mountain from their forest fastness to plunder the valley. Grouse thunder from hiding. Different songbirds. Different songs. Black Eyed Susans are back. The squash patch is on its way. The woodchuck can be a scourge, all right, but this season he's kept his distance, and, now that the chickens are gone, the skunks are gone, too.

It’s mid August, and we are closing in on September like a Derby winner in the stretch. The other day I saw a beautiful little fawn, still spotted, spindly legs, a dainty thing. Its mother must have been close by, but I never saw her. That night the coyotes howled for hours. I wondered. 

Has it been a year? It astonishes me that we so quickly return to where we began.

Taylor Pork Roll On Challah Toast addendum

 As for Lizzie - Remember? Her street name? Elizabeth Hermanson Foreman? Lizzie. Mom. Taylor pork roll. My last blog? An old friend, Al Forman, no relation, wrote and reminded me of an incident at my mother's funeral. We were standing next to each other. As the coffin was lowered into the grave, a chilly breeze came up, blew the rabbi’s eulogy out of his hands and into the grave under her coffin as it settled on the ground. I turned to Al and said, “She’s dead, and she’s still doing this to us.” Al said it was the funniest funeral he’d ever been to.

He also told me he frequents a diner in Timonium that features challah French toast. You can get it with a side of ham, sausage or bacon. It was in a Jewish neighborhood. No mention of Taylor Pork Roll. 

Taylor Pork Roll On Chalah Toast, Please, With Mayo - 8/12/2022

         Fried Taylor Pork Roll on challah toast with mayo, sauerkraut, tomato, thinly sliced,  sweet pickle - Good Eatin’? Not really. Not to mention, blasphemous. It’s what happens when you’re Jewish married to an Irish Catholic for forty two years, forty four if living in sin counts for anything these days. Blasphemy becomes compromise. After all these years the lines blur. Get this. I visit her family for the first time. Her grandparents were Madden, McFadden, Flaherty, and Donnelly. An Irish law firm look-a-like. Lovely folks. Long flight. Ham sandwich on WonderBread upon arrival with artificially flavored bar-b-q chips. Slight headache. Got any excedrin, tylenol, percodan, loose joints? Check the medicine chest. Empty except for two things: a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of holy water. The aspirin bottle was full, seal intact. Had not been broken. Contents untouched. The bottle of holy water was nearly empty, just a couple of teardrops left.

I gotta tell ya, it’s been a trip - 42 years married to an Irish-Catholic “person with a vagina” of a certain age (I know. Truly stupid). Deep down I am still Shlomochaim from the shtetl. Deep down, she is a nun from New Jersey, although, by the two of us, you couldn’t tell. She makes a great Passover brisket, and, while it did take some time, I’ve gotten used to a Xmas tree.  Creches are out. Menorahs, in.  We managed to work it out with little or no bloodshed. Of course, we've thrown a little leather on occasion - anybody out there who hasn't? - but 41 years of grace out of 42 ain't bad.

     And speaking of bloodshed, Enter Mother. Like a shark on a blood trail, Elizabeth Hermanson Foreman surged into play with the promise of serious carnage. But, the way Jamie diffused more than one potential bloodbath convinced me I'd found a true comrade in arms.

        

    Listen up: the tale of a very charming, very gentile woman, the apotheosis of shiksa, versus a mother-in-law to be who could juggle grenades.

    Elizabeth Hermanson Foreman, street name, Lizzie, was not an easy human to get along with. She was as affectionate as a hornet. Her favorite expression was, "I'm gonna take my fist and punch that son of a bitch right in his nose." You think I'm kidding? A Jew from West Virginia, delivered, so goes family legend, by Dr. Hatfield of the Hatfields and the McCoys. Perfect. Four foot, eleven. Ninety-six pounds. Never blinked. Tough as roofing nails. Not for nothing was she known as Der Shtetl Assassin.

   So, my mother comes to Los Angeles to visit me. It would be the first time she'd met Jamie. Long story short. Jamie and I hop in the car to pick my mother up. I open the passenger side door and help her in. Jamie has graciously gotten into the back seat. OK. By the time I got around the car and back behind the wheel, I hear my mother's voice in her Baltimore/West Virginia accent, "Out with the old. In with the new. He leaves 'em all sick. The only reason Jewish men like gentile girls is because of the sex." to which Jamie demurely, calmly and politely replies, "I know that's important to Stephen."

        My instinct told me to duck, but the look on Lizzie's face went from shock to the stare of a puma. Elizabeth Hermanson Foreman had met her match and was assessing the enemy.        

        We were living in Montana when it turned out I needed a gall bladder operation - a bigger deal back then than now. I still carry a six inch scar from that one. Jamie said the local hospital looked like a Thrifty Six, and, in fact, there were only two patients in the whole joint: me and a guy named, Hoppy. I swear. We became good friends. Me 'n' Hoppy. No kidding. So, the night before the operation I'm talking to my mother on the phone when she asks me to call her after the operation.

            "Mom, they're gonna cut me open. No phone. No way."

            "How will I know you're all right?"

            "You'll talk to Jamie."

            "I'm not talking to Jamie."

            "Swell. Then you won't know, will you?"

        So, we do the operation. When they wheel me back into my room I can barely talk but I manage to scratch out, "Call my mother, J, Call my mother." So, Jamie does and says, "Elizabeth, I want to tell you the two things you've been waiting to hear. The operation was a success, and Stephen's in a lot of pain." I wasn't there, but those who were reported that Lizzie went down for the count on that one. Like they say in boxing circles, it's the one you don't see. Right then and there, I knew dead certain I'd found my soul mate.

        Happy Anniversary, Juice!!!!!!!!

St. Vincent, or How I Saved Jamie's Life

True Story
Not That The Other Ones Aren't
St. Vincent, Spring, 1980

 

I actually saved Jamie’s life once, for real, the week she asked me to marry her. Jump cut to Back Story.

 

1980

I was attending a conference on wildlife trafficking on St. Lucia and Jamie flew from New York to meet me there. I’d been bugging her to marry me for months, so she had concocted a counter plan to meet me in the tropics and ask me herself. After the conference we were to fly to St. Vincent to visit some folks I knew there. I was outside watching frigate birds with the wing spans of sailing ships coast from one ocean to another, east to west, west to east, Pacific to Atlantic, Atlantic to Pacific, one ocean to another, when she appeared at the patio door…looking deathly ill! She’d contracted something back in the States and flown, anyway. Now, her throat had swollen shut, and she had difficulty breathing. We flew to St. Vincent and a diagnosis of ‘quinsies’, basically, swollen tonsils (a "peritonsillar abcess" - a pus filled pocket - alleged to have killed George Washington in less than twenty-four hours). St. Vincent’s medical capabilities were just about a single pay grade above your old camp counselor's medicine chest. It was determined that, if the swelling did not go down by morning, they’d sterilize a pvc pipe and stick it down her throat. That’s all “J” had to hear. The next morning the swelling had gone down considerably, and a couple of days later it was gone completely. Cured, right? As far as “J” was concerned, it was party time. Take it easy? Nah. We’re young, strong, and insisted we celebrate by going to a black sand beach that was basically deserted. For good reason, although we didn't know that yet. By this time, she’d asked me to marry her, and I’d said sure, why not? 

So, we get to this black sand beach in a stunning cove with no one but us anywhere around, and Jamie, fresh from a very sick bed, plunges into the water and heads for the horizon wearing, by the way, a very small, white bikini. So, of course, I plunge in after her in my black Speedo until we are both a good hundred yards from shore. We’re bobbing like apples in gentle waves and warm water, bouncing up and down, laughing, waving at each other, blowing kisses. I growled I was Black Beard coming to confiscate her goodies. She faked Pearl Pureheart. What could be wrong?

Then, “J” signals she’s going back to shore, and sets out. Except she can’t. She doesn’t have the strength to buck the suddenly pitiless cross currents. And I see that she can’t. I see that she’s in trouble. Adrenalin pumps through my body like an oil strike. My heart swings into high gear. She can’t get in! I crawled as hard as I could, leapt the last yard, and managed to make it to her. I remember that moment. No alternative. She was losing strength. I had to get to her. She could not get in. Get to her! I looked and saw this enormous wave building towards us. As it crested, I took “J” by the butt and tossed her up in the air to the peak of the wave. It carried her forward then slingshot her to shore. 

My turn.

I suddenly found I could not battle the current, either. I felt a nano-second’s worth of panic then decided that wouldn’t do. How the hell do I get out of this mess? I did my best and got nowhere. Jesus Christ, am I gonna drown out here? That was the instant I suddenly felt calm. In that instant I’d decided that if I didn’t break free after one more stroke I’d relax, turn on my back, float, and let the sea carry me to the next cove. Stay on my back, swim when I can, stay calm, enjoy the ride, and hope nothing eats me. I may well have been deluded, but that was the instant I broke free and made it to shore. 

You have to know when to stop fighting. Sometimes you just have to lay back and let the waves take you. Trust them because you know the ways of currents. They take you away; they bring you back. But, you have to let them do it. Hope is not action. It is desire. The desire but not the muscle. Faith? The surety you are in good hands? The best hands I am in are my own. As the Quakers say, way opens, and it did open, and the possibility brought me calm.

Jamie and I celebrate 42 years this week.

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.