Scheherazade
Scheherazade
The twinkling ephemera of my childhood and first family.
Chapter I — Ali Baba
Ali, a Persian wood monger, gathered branches from the deserted cliffside and sang out into the desert night. His meager inheritance long exhausted, Ali spent his evenings laboring to support a wife and young daughter through the sale of kindling scraps at market.
Despite his poverty and modest trade, Ali was a man both wise and clever, and he sang out as much for the elevation of his own spirits as to bring his donkeys uplift from their master’s good cheer.
But now, in an instant, in the blue-green flash of a moonlit scimitar blade, everything changed. Ali found himself taking refuge, wild-eyed, on the straining upper limb of an olive tree. Desperate to remain undetected, he drowned his panicked breathing into the crook of his arm.
*
I am five.
And because I am five, I am facing the same peril in the same olive tree as Ali Baba. I adjust myself from my prone position on the corner of my bed so that I can maneuver upright and drown my own panicked breath into the crook of my arm.
My mother looks up from her reading at the commotion at the foot of the bed. My bedtime story reader never settles into a book without first covering herself in a geological pile of blankets. She carefully sets the broken sections of her tattered childhood copy of The Arabian Nights onto the uppermost quilt. So as not to disturb the mood or the text, she silently demonstrates how to “drown your panicked breath into the crook of your arm.” I try a second time, watching her response closely. She nods with silent, but serious approval. We are of one mind on this detail and its significance.
My mother looks back down from over her glasses. She reassembles the various pieces of our storybook world. We return to the tree, situated over Ali’s shoulder to the right of the white roll of his turban. A slivery fraction of terrified eye flashes as he casts his glance back-and-forth at the scene unfolding below. The rough bark of the olive tree cuts into our palms and legs.
The thieves are forty in number.
We count them, torch by torch, as their horses round the crumbling precipice of a cliff wall, and they come to a restive halt, dismounting below the olive tree. Flaming black wads of oilcloth at the end of their torches rend and roil the air beneath us. We feel the flashing heat of the flames on our faces. These highwaymen gather below us, scheming, drawing their dark cloaks tight around themselves, but not before flashing golden buckles, tendon-slicing knives, and drawstring purses of red rubies.
My mother monitors my response and continues.
*
Why if a brigand was distracted from his dark machinations and looked up to the soft beauty of Allah’s starry firmament, that brigand would witness the sharp crescent moon slide out from the milky desert clouds as surely as the deathly poniard slides from its sheath!
Were he to look to the heavens in a moment of tender-hearted weakness, he would catch sight of the three of us in our perch as exposed and helpless as newborn sparrows. Surely that brigand would laugh and spill our blood! But they will not look! These men do not hunger for the comfort and solace of a starry night!
Nor do they think on the besieged caravan that evening, nor the cries of its maidens, nor the frantic wild-eyed stallions. They think not on the wasting tent embers that lie smoldering yet beneath these selfsame heavens.
These men think of treasure and spoils!
*
My mother clears her throat and adjusts her blankets. She is not suitably comfortable for the section we both know approaches. She adjusts her angle from window-facing to door-facing, shifting from a reddening, sore elbow to a freshly recycled one. Her movements trigger a chain reaction, and I, too, must find a new position on my corner plot.
The bed is in full uproar. Blanket-kneed mountains rise and fall, sedimentary shifts give way, books and glass cases slide, pillows topple and compress. Entire literary geologic ages pass as the two of us find a comfortable reading position as quickly as possible.
My new angle on the bed places me within reach of my mother’s outstretched hand. Her long fingers search for a tender spot at the nape of my neck. She fiddles with my hair and lightly draws her nails against my skin. My head flops to the bed. My mouth parts and my eyes close. Glittery chills race along my back.
*
The captain, carrying burlap saddlebags laden with the ravaged caravan’s gold and silver, approaches the mute granite face of the cliffside.
“Open Sesame,” the swarthy, hawk-eyed captain cries out.
And the great wall of rock opens of itself.
*
“The rock opens of itself,” says my mother with significance. I’m aware there is a lesson here: she is reading with the reflective, reverential cadence of a pastor approaching his main point, his holy ground.
“The rock opens of itself,” she says again.
She parcels out each syllable this time. She is not honoring the story now, but its language, and through my mother’s repetition and my own submission, I am vulnerable to the love of words, of her words, of the sound of her words, of their curious mixture. I am as supple as a tiger cub in its mother’s mouth.
My mother releases her fingertips from my neck. Her hand retreats to the pages of the storybook. She adopts a fresh cadence and tone, shifting from aria to recitativo.
The tigress releases her cub and turns away. The cub must follow the fine trail of language on its own.
*
The thieves have departed. Ali Baba descends from his fugitive’s perch and lands on the ground in a crouch. His knees bulge out from his thin legs. He flicks shocks of coal-black hair out of his eyes and tucks them beneath his white, moonlit turban.
Wringing his hands before him, he utters the incantation of Open Sesame, and once again the stone door rumbles free. Ali Baba makes his way into the cave and hands-to-head falls on his knees marveling at the blessings shining upon him and upon his descendants.
*
The two of us look down on righteous Ali Baba from our storybook summit, and then we follow him. We watch our poor wood monger fling open chest after golden chest in his cave of treasures. His hands tremble before him as he races from end to end, his heart bursting from the sight of camel loads of silk and brocades, Persian carpets, jewels of red and blue and green, earthen vessels of ashrafis, and all manners of sparkling wealth from soil to ceiling.
We watch Ali Baba tear away bundles of dry sticks from his donkeys and replace their meager load with gold and silver bullion. We hear the solitary joy of his song in the night and the eruption of his laughter. He looks to the starry firmament and closes his eyes.
His starlit treasure is ours.
It is mine.
It is mine still.
*
With his donkeys fully loaded and daybreak approaching swiftly, Ali turns to look back at the cave entrance. He holds his torch high. He takes a last look at the magnificence of his improbable fortune, and through the channel of my mother’s voice, a voice crackling with adventure and the confidence of a king, Ali Baba cries out, “Close Sesame!”
My mother’s arm waves through the air over the bed to demonstrate Ali’s last gesture, a faraway goodbye, but her eyes remain fixed on the page. Ali’s incantation echos back from the empty cave as the great stone door rumbles shut, and a final eclipsed slice of torchlight races across the cave walls.
The following night, and the night after, and again and again and again, the tales of Scheherazade unspool, endlessly it would seem: tales of Ali’s shrewd wife, her clever maidservant, the wax that traps a golden coin, the thieves thwarted, boiled alive in vessels of cunning.
*
I look directly at my mother, and she looks directly at me.
And the door closes of itself.
And the treasure is gone.
And Ali Baba is gone.
And now my mother is Gone.
Chapter II — My Father
My father’s desire to leave an inheritance to his sons was a torment of Greek proportions. He was a book editor by profession, first in academic presses at the University of Chicago and Cambridge University and later for various trade publishing houses in Manhattan.
But the non-fiction publishing for which he was so intellectually suited was a poor fit for the scale of his financial ambitions. He was no more likely to make his fortune through the modest library of ideas he was shepherding into existence than find a book worth reading in the hard treasure of Ali Baba’s cave. As a result, his professional life was punctuated by destructive and wasting entrepreneurial fevers – fevers that wreaked havoc on his psyche and his family and disturbed the larger trajectory of his otherwise competent and honorable career. The Sirens had him, and my father was swept back and forth across their cruel promontory, crying “open sesame” into mouthfuls of seawater.
In the late 1960’s Barry Ralph Nathan was the publisher of a trailblazing computer periodical that smoked and sparked for a season but did not catch fire. Twelve issues of Forum ’69 turned into, at most, two or three issues of Forum ’70. He pursued the vision of realizing a multi-volume Encyclopedia of Biomedical Ethics, an idea of staggering scale and ambition that he chased with a Renaissance encyclopedist’s vision and tenacity – all leading to frustrating dead ends.
More modestly, he later gathered a desktop full of college application essays for a how-to guidebook he would publish under his own imprint. Years after his death, I came across a reflection of that book wandering through a major book retailer as I was heading towards the parking lot. With my young son pulling at my arm to get home, I read the shiny back cover blurb and skimmed the essays and the helpful tips lit up in yellow starburst page call-outs. I stood there, tugged by generational forces visible and invisible, and I let the sharp pain bloom of my father’s vision realized by someone else’s hand.
In a latter day entrepreneurial outbreak there were do-it-yourself ElectroniKit books that nearly found their way to bookstore shelves, coming closer to a verdict from an actual consumer than anything he’d piloted for years. The four handsomely designed ElectroniKit books had appealing covers with arcs of narrowing-in-the-center titles. The graphic design recalled the 19th century big-top. Beneath the bold Benefit of Mr. Kite circus-poster lettering there was a cutaway circle visible through the shrink wrap where a single integrated chip was visible, center-stage, out on the wires of an embedded circuit board.
With the purchase of supplemental parts from Radio Shack, the do-it-yourselfer could follow the instructions on the enclosed schematics, painstakingly tested by my father, and the armchair engineer could build himself one of a series of kits, including an “electronic butler” clap-on clap-off switch, a wireless microphone, a guitar “fuzz box,” and a multi-effect sound synthesizer. Through the death of his business partner and then one interpersonal breakdown or another, the kits never made it stores; the books instead accumulated in cardboard boxes in the corner of his apartment, their blue packing popcorn spilling onto the vacated circus grounds.
*
My father never owned a home or carried a credit card. He didn’t have a retirement plan. He had little interest in the world of quotidian financial tools. The middle-class Money Magazine vision of “best buys,” “editors’ top mutual funds” and carefully squirreled assets both bored and unsettled him.
But for the arcane systems and instruments of capitalism he held a deep reverence, even awe. He knew – and had seen among friends, up close – the magic those tools could render in the right hands. He loved the wizardry of the securities markets, auction strategies, options, and arbitrage. He loved the tiny margins set aside for the House and the mansions those set-asides could build.
Long before the advent of Excel and Lotus 1-2-3, he loved the ordered precision and authority of spreadsheets, green and quadrille-gridded. Chesterfield in hand he would set sail, standing over those sheets arrayed on his table and spilling onto his chair, the financial captain on his quarterdeck. He would check course, make adjustments in entrepreneurial navigation, sequestering the worlds of the known from the unknown in his charts of accounts and forecasts. With his index finger twitching thoughtfully against his lips, he would look down at his financial maps, colored the soft green of currency, and therein divine the scale and arrival dates of his coming fortune. There was a tantalizing world looming in those penciled figures, a New World, a world of turquoise waters, golden sands, and awe-struck children emerging from the trees like Indians.
You could rest when you got there.
You could slow.
Or stop completely.
Terra Firma.
*
In the interim, he labored over his financial maps, reshaping estimations in his careful, architectural block letters, carrying, rounding, erasing figures and blowing clear their crumpled corpses, correcting calculations, transporting his entrepreneurial vision into the reality of ciphers, getting it all on paper where it could be real. On weekends when his boys visited he would share those spreadsheets, looking down at the calculations from his summit, showing the dream coming together in promising subtotals, the numbers reflecting back the soft moonlight that he himself radiated onto the page.
The company name that housed his entrepreneurial visions for the last two decades of his life was Christopher/Adam, Inc. This corporation made flesh in the names of his beloved sons was the vehicle through which he would leave his achievement. But the execution of each Christopher/Adam effort had a trajectory that became terribly and tragically predictable for his investors, for his family, and for him. The dream ship descended the boat launch in mad, stop-motion Kinetoscope, and tipped nose-first into the harbor. The hot air balloon snarled on its moorings and ignited the rigging. The six-winged plane crashed off its rickety wooden tower and scattered the spectators. And always my father in top hat and waist coat circled the wreckage, herky-jerky, pulling his hair out at 14 frames per second.
The stakes were terrifying for him. My father wasn’t a hobbyist. He wasn’t a dabbler. He wasn’t toying with the pursuit of wealth; his identity was caught up in it. All expressions of elegance, of manners, of breeding, of class – considerations of the deepest importance for him – could only be legitimized by wealth. Wealth was the red blood that would run through his wax figure and make him real. In the absence of that lifeblood, all style, grace and intellect were a poor man’s theater – even if you were actually elegant, well-bred and classy which my father unquestionably was – both by breeding and instinct.
You can play a king and you can mount the stage in costume ermine and wave your broom-handle scepter and dismiss your fool and divide your kingdom among the players, but theater is theater if you don’t believe in it. No matter how the crowd weeps and roars, if you go home to an actor’s tiny apartment with a dollhouse kitchenette it’s all so much sound and fury. And you cannot fool the Self who makes the rules, our one true and terrible Lord, and you cannot touch your weightless finger to His scales. Your loved ones can’t either.
The stakes were terrifying for all of us.
When there was no active dream to keep things at equilibrium, or when the failure of a project was unfolding inexorably, there would be a violent fever, and it would vault him skyward like a rag doll. His North Star would spin wildly about him, his world all heads and heels and the open webbing of fingertips. At sickening apogee, he would slow into speechless confusion, his head hanging limply, listless, upside-down tears floating in his eyes.
Far below, the hard, flat world of failure with its imagined whispers and recrimination would steel itself to rush back at him. There was no reaching him there. There were just two boys on joint-custody weekends waiting for the fever to break, exchanging covert glances, offering their dad tentative, child-like encouragements. And there was their dad, stumbling and scratched, pursued by the echo of his wandering barks.
*
As the years cycled through, his possibilities gradually diminished, winking out like a magnificent Gothic cathedral being put to sleep for the night, its thousand candles snuffed by a steady, solitary priest shuffling the stone transept.
In the end there was no bandstand by the lake. There were no swans. There were no summer waltzes or floating Chinese lanterns or champagne toasts where other men’s beautiful wives held his gaze overlong. There were no giggling, barefoot girls in white dresses running across his July lawn. The midnight laughter of tuxedoed bachelors did not carry out from the upstairs library. There were no parents making sure their sleepy children thanked Barry before the drive home.
No law firm manning the will, no working through the weekend, no team of razor-sharp attorneys. There were no doctors stationed at the house holding calls. There was no dying in a vast bed with French lace pillows and thick, spiraling four-poster columns. There was no inheritance to fight or contest. There were no disappointments at the reading.
There was no drama.
*
My father died on Christmas Day.
There was snow outside the frosty upstairs bedroom window. There was cold blue light on a Minnesota lake. A month or so before, his children’s mother and his ex-wife of twenty years drove halfway across the country to move in with him and be by his side. She ran fairy lights over the windows to cheer things, and the two sat together on that bed for hours and, as they always had, read and joked and laughed and then, having accidentally stumbled over some ancient bit of mischief, they fought, storming in and out of the room. Then, with neither apology nor explanation, they’d find some excuse to get along again and off they’d go.
A dance of sorts.
My father’s bedside table was cluttered with plastic syringes and saline bottles. There was a medical device with a respiratory ping pong ball that hurt him to blow into, but whose toy-like quality, even in his cancer-ridden pain, amused him. There was Vaseline for his dry lips and crumpled tissues and modest turrets of pocket change that my father stacked by denomination. There was his bulky yellow Casio diver’s watch. There were old National Reviews. There was a plaster cast of his hand entwined with my brother’s that his sister had molded during her farewell visit. There were piles of cards from grieving friends trying to get something down before goodbye. There were New York Times book review sections haphazardly folded. Pairs of glasses. His things.
Real things.
Arriving from New York the day before he died, Melanie and I kept vigil, steady sextons wafting our thuribles, relaying morphine to the altar, saying the evening prayers, stroking his brow, holding his hand, washing him with carefully warmed cloths. I lay next to him on the bed, first pillow to pillow then head to temple. From a far away somewhere he heard himself addressed by his younger son as “Poppy” for the first time in his life. It was the endearment with which he always signed his letters, and even though I stubbornly resisted its soft edge, it was the word that perfectly expressed who he wanted to be for his sons, and I returned it to him.
We kept him cool, then we kept him warm, ministering to him like a beloved child. We let him know it would be okay to let go when he was ready, and we assured him in tearful whispers that we’d all be okay, moving ourselves and our father through the instinctual liturgy of surrender. A priest on call that Christmas evening led my father through his Last Rites as the rich draught of morphine gradually filled the last recesses of the cathedral and the final candles were extinguished.
And with that, my father – my intellectually terrifying, fierce, visionary, frustrating, elegant, and griffin-hearted father – slipped down and backwards.
Evensong fading into the Great Silence.
The Book of Hours closing.
Mary in the dark.
*
That same night in some other infirmary room of the heart Christopher/Adam Inc. expired unmourned and forgotten, its balance sheet, for all intents and purposes, dead even.
Chapter III — Maine
It’s a three hour pilgrimage from Boston’s Logan Airport up to my mother’s summer place on the coast of Maine, a journey I can’t make without being dragged along by currents of near narcotic nostalgia.
For over thirty years, in ever-evolving family configurations, I’ve now made this trip up the Central Coast towards our farmhouse on the water, swept along with hundreds of thousands of others on surging tourist tides.
Change up here is glacial. I can’t remember when there wasn’t a Taste of Maine restaurant or winding lines running up the side of Red’s Eats. There have always been the same long, sad marshes, the same clean strips of road cut through dynamite-scarred granite, the same life-size natural history dioramas of duck ponds kitted out roadside with model-perfect cattails, and always Wiscasset’s dignified colonial homes and the angry ghosts of her tall ships dragged from their burial grounds.
Flashing by are the minor gauge railway museums, the happy rent-your-basket, child-labor blueberry farms, the regurgitated table jetsam of roadside flea markets, the stranded Route 1 army of skeletal brass beds, the ugly explosion of signage for Boothbay Harbor, the countless minor turnoffs for the pine-tree crannies and salt water nooks that finger and fan along Maine’s coastline like beached seaweed.
Then, tiring from the drive but much, much closer now, there’s the make-sure-you-don’t-miss-it Damariscotta Exit, the parking lot speed-limit crawl through town avoiding this year’s minor construction flare-ups, the runaway strollers piloted by siblings, the Beer-Bellied, Big-Bearded, Bristol-Boys (“try that five times fast, kids”), and the inching past the been-out-on-video-for-a-month movies but still showing this Friday night at the Lincoln County Movie Theater.
Then I’m past the turn off by the high-steepled church, and the long, dragging, tired, cramped leg of never-ending Route 129 stretching out to New Harbor, and there, just past “the baseball field where I used to play, kids” my Maine pilgrimage completes, and I turn past some lobsterman’s mailbox near the last bend of the road, its thick, welded-chain post fixed so solidly into the ground it will outlast the postal system, then down the gravel drive and, finally, I roll softly onto the driveway grass of our old summer house, the spiritual museum of my childhood and adolescence.
I cut the rental car’s engine and take a moment to survey: The stone steps to the kitchen. The chipped exterior paint. My mother’s lilies. The ancient clothesline hook. The sparkling harbor. The quiet boats.
As always, I have been away too long, foolishly too long, but now I am home.
*
The Maine tourist surge crests around “the fawth” when the “summah people” and the “city slickahs” explode into and back out of cavernous restaurant sound holes, spraying lobster parts, wooden mallets, draft beer and torn plastic bibs across the greasy varnish of outdoor picnic tables. The summer visitors unfold visitor’s bureau maps and swamp onto ribbed, sandpaper boat ramp walkways for sunset pirate ship harbor tours.
On small plots of lighthouse lawn the elderly bob up against the shoulders of seascape painters who they hope might turn and acknowledge them and, in doing so, indelibly color themselves into the spiritual life of the painting. Out of sight, untended children splash and scramble the granite coastal rocks that have elbowed their way up from the center of the Earth to feel a few weeks of sunshine each summer and the tickle of small fingers grappling their necks.
Families retrieve ice cream cones from voices behind sliding screen windows and get yet another mosquito bite on a knuckle and, sleepy from the sun, come to rest for a few blissful minutes at the apex of noon under a blue blanket of sky and fleecy clouds, their holiday inertia pooling out slowly to the distant buzz of the gift shop owner’s lawnmower. They nestle into the hard granite somehow and nod off in the sizzling brine of the afternoon, footsteps of complete strangers stepping delicately past their heads.
Then they’re awake again and back at it!
They holler for their children and stagger up from the afternoon rocks and into town, dragged along in the undertow of hot dog, watermelon and potato chip grocery lists, smashing against the brittle sandcastle gift shops and outlet stores, commerce chasing them across her beaches like skittish sandpipers, the lighthouse postcard markets in uproar, old sailor ceramics flying past checkout stands, and diet all-blown-to-hell grey netted bags of clams and fingers tearing dirty black socks off their feet and plunging their bare toes into hot butter baths, and the lobster pot low-boil feud of locals and summer people breaking out in ugly supermarket parking lot skirmishes, and broken masted ships navigating horrific nor’easters in “genuine oil paintings” at 50% off through this weekend only, and seagull keychain gifts that will never find a Christmas tree, and jam jars with miniature sashes of Scottish ribbon, and Mosquito “State Bird” t-shirts, and sentimental placards about footsteps stepping softly through the sand and Jesus carrying you when you didn’t even know and, just one shelf over, only barely out of His sight, ceramic coffee mugs with two-inch tall fuck-you fingers hiding on the cup’s seabed below the high tide coffee-line, and bored minimum wage college girls, eyes practically rolling back in their heads, sweating it out over square-cut plats of peanut fudge, hypnotic swirling lollipops the size of balloons, oversized freak lobster claws in frames behind the glass at the register, the Red Sox sticking it to the Yankees, miniature wooden fishing vignettes with marionette rigging that makes fish jump out of buckets or, from the same novelty house, refrigerator magnet hardy-har-hars about skinny wives with little breasts and lazy husbands with big breasts, and wicked goowud bear’s paw ice cream, and crushed 16 ounce “Pee Bee Aaah” Pabst Blue Ribbon cans, and six-packs of Moxie, that infidel root beer, and the Yankees sticking it to the Red Sox now, and dramatic thunderstorms that explode onto the car radio frightening the classic rock ghosts on every other FM station.
Ayuh.
Maine in the summah.
*
Just after Labor Day, the inevitable tide sweeps back out, filtering the summer people from the barnacled natives who ain’t up tuh goin’ anywah futhah owtah town than the graveyaaaad.
But in the wake of that sweeping tidal retreat up and down the coast, remain the accretions of shadow-box tidal-pool worlds, one marvelous emotional ecosystem after another, thousands of trapped, starfish family museums supplemented and nurtured one summer-at-a-time, memory by memory, barnacle by barnacle, stranded in the attics and basements and bedrooms and kitchen cabinets and thick round wood pull-knob, second-hand pine drawers stocked with boat memorabilia, summer camp totems, victorious fishing lures, rusting pocked knives, half-torn Dark Side of the Moon posters rolled together with prints of Christina in her World, Down East magazines waiting exposed in lonely off-season windows slowly bleaching themselves to death, and cheap, laminated placemats of anonymous tall ships and nautical knots and coastal bird varieties, Polaroid photos of tiny fairy houses fashioned from fir trees and moss built on deserted coastal islands, fiery, abandoned summer diaries, old darkroom equipment from the week you were going to become a photographer, galvanized steel crab buckets, 47-card decks and board games with makeshift replacement pieces fashioned from shells, beach-combing harvests strung up on fishing line over the kitchen window where my late mother hung them a thousand summers ago, the flotsam castoff of relaxed, summery emotional lives, and a little tale preserved in each and every object like, for example, these Endless Love movie stubs from the night the beautiful girl unbuttoned my shirt and kissed my bare shoulder in the back of her father’s car, and slid her prayer-answering lips across my face and tingling neck, landmark by landmark, and nibbled down on my earlobe and cut free the buoy and orphaned the lobster trap, and forever stranded my adolescence in the deep, cool currents off the Central Coast of Maine.
Chapter IV — The Westgate Place
Old Maine farmhouses get their names from prior owners and prior generations, and the homes themselves are inextricably wound up in their previous owner’s identity.
My mother’s home stubbornly remained the Macomber Place in local hearts and minds even though she owned it for thirty years. We were constantly hearing about the destruction of the Macomber’s barn or the beauty parlor run out of the back room or this-that-and-the-other-thing regarding the Macomber family that once lived there.
There’s a delayed symmetry to these things, and it’s not out of the question that another generation from now the old farmhouse will become the Westgate Place, and the new owners will hear about my mother from elderly neighbors shuffling out of their houses in slippers carrying dog-eared folders of newspaper clippings and photos about our family. They’ll flip through the photographs of my mother standing way out on the scary, far-end ledge of the razed barn’s exposed rock foundation. She’ll be flashing the easy daring of a thirteen-year-old girl, looking across the expanse of her property at the harbor below.
The photos will show a woman in her mid-fifties with her big round glasses, holding one of her University of Chicago mugs of tea, smiling her tight, tooth-hiding photograph smile, wearing loose jeans and baggy sweaters to cover her too-skinny frame, her health already a deep concern for friends and coworkers even then, a decade in advance.
The neighborhood historians in the kitchen doorway will do their best fumbling with their manila envelope clippings and scattered half-memories to capture the old owner for them. The new owners will look with strained, nodding attentiveness at the elderly neighbor and try to think of something appropriate to say while keeping the dog from jumping all over their visitor and shushing the children who wanted to be at the beach an hour ago and wondering whether they’re supposed to want to keep the photograph or hand it back or what.
*
No.
They’re supposed to realize that they’re in this woman’s home, and it will always be her home no matter who owns it, and the deck they built out on one side of the house killed the cluster of day lilies she planted there. Those were her favorite flowers, and they shouldn’t have done that for a bunch of deck chairs and a grill. And they’re supposed to listen when they’re told she tried painting the house herself one side and summer at a time. She didn’t have two pennies to rub together, and then the kids went and sold it.
And there was that one time you could hear her laughing all the way over at the Gilbert place with that big loud laugh of hers. You should have heard her, and everyone at the barbecue looked up, and it made them all laugh too, and they’ll never forget that. Oh, she was loud.
They’re supposed to understand she always had a million friends coming and going. She must have scheduled them like clockwork months in advance, and they wound through here on trips to Damariscotta and the Point and the Fort and out to Monhegan, and there was a quartet of classical musicians who’d come to stay at the place every summer and play their music right out on the big front lawn, and the people coming up from the Hardy Boat rides headed to the parking lot would stop right out on the road, stand right there by the monument, and listen for a minute.
They’re supposed to understand that the woman who owned this house drove out here on her own every year from California in a car you wouldn’t be seen in driving up to Reilly’s grocery store, and then she drove all the way back to Oakland so she could spend a single month here and look out her big cathedral attic windows towards Monhegan. No husband either.
And when everyone else gets old they winter in Florida, but she talked about moving up here year-round, the opposite, in a house with no insulation. She was a crazy old lady, a teacher, and she was going to wait out the winters so she could see her grandchildren play on her lawn in the summer and, and, and – the old neighbors trailing off into their private thoughts about the woman who missed out on getting to watch her children’s children, and who might have for maybe a few years, anyway, and these new people will never, ever, ever love this place as much as she did no matter how much they sink into it.
What they’re saying, polite but New England indirect, is that this is the Westgate Place, and if you understand what you were supposed to understand you would know that no, of course you’re not supposed to keep the photo.
Chapter V — The Cathedral Windows
I have traveled to our Maine summer home from Seattle to divide up the family pictures and letters and get them out of there before the place burns down.
The drive up here is full of reverie and miniature dramaturgy related to my late mother, to the home, to my adolescence, especially when traveling alone as I am today. These fantasies are broken up by the practical relief of coming around the last road bend and seeing the chimney standing straight, the attic windows whole, the big oak upright, the porch horizontal.
I fuss in the basement to get the power and water back on, stepping over basement puddles on floppy plywood stepping stones and ducking low-hanging pipes that very possibly run septic direct into the harbor. I’m careful to avoid the not-to-code, knob-and-tube wiring and, as always, I feel the relief of not electrocuting myself getting the house resuscitated yet one more time.
I let myself into the foyer through the chipped green front-door and marvel, as always, at the time-capsule quality of her home. Everything remains stubbornly where it’s always been. The summer and winter guests play a half-hearted game of red light green light, but nothing ever strays far – not the pencils and pens, the pots and pans, the old fridge and its magnets, the strict warning instructions on the cork board about what order to light the home up and shut her down, the damp musk of the house, the boxes of ancient spaghetti, the water stains on the kitchen ceiling, the penciled phone numbers on exposed plaster where the wallpaper peeled away, the long, late afternoon shadows, the timeless lobster boats in the harbor visible through the living room windows.
I open the blinds, flush the anti-freeze out of the downstairs toilet, listen to shoe squeaks and luggage wheels on the linoleum fill up the quiet old house. I catch myself stopping for a second because I think I hear something upstairs, a whisper maybe, somebody hiding or held at knifepoint, trapped unexpectedly in the vacant summer home by a surprise visitor. A victim shifting terrified from one leg to the other, exchanging frightened glances with their captor.
I pretend to ignore these anxieties in my face and movements as if the ghosts and robbers were monitoring me for visual clues of weakness as intently as the rest of the world. Or so I imagine, imagine, imagine, because imagining is what I do.
It’s childish to spook myself like this, but I’m tired from traveling, and without the fresh energy of my wife and children charging around the home and their simple thrill of being here again, the home has an uneasy edge, and I busy myself in a flurry of activity to keep the nostalgia and mental spooks at bay.
I move from doorway to doorway inventorying the place haphazardly. I take in the familiar views and rooms, look in closets I know are empty to eliminate them as hiding places for criminals, poke softly at the crumbling plaster wall decay in my old bedroom, wonder if the neighbors will notice the lights on. I imagine their conversations...
Jesus, the place is falling apart.
I’m genetically predisposed to fantasizing on the systematic deterioration of things, and the home presents a marvelous, meditative prototype for a high-speed, time-lapse study in the Last Days, of the world coming apart writ small.
The giant oak tree tumbles onto the roof. The stained glass in the attic windows blows out, the rain melts the cardboard storage boxes down through their honeycomb sidewall. The chimney tears free in a storm on one side and a slight, but ever-widening gash lets water seep in, continent shaped chunks of plaster crash off the lathing. The wind and water find inroads and pool into the fireplace hearth, ash floats and bobs on the surface and then spills out indifferently onto the living room floor, spreading soot and bird nests from the chimney. Hard clusters of mouse scat harden and soften in the cyclical washout, soulless, high-speed, time-lapse photography shake-shake-shaking everything. Jittery buried things rise to the surface, occasional visitors flit about in spectral high speed and disappear.
I imagine my mother’s home becoming a not-so-secret high school hangout. Local kids sneak in and get high in the kitchen, sit on the dead, electric stove with their boots on the countertops, flick cigarette ashes into my mother’s pencil jars and her mother’s crystal. Some stoner comedian finds my Louisville Slugger in the storage room and makes the group laugh doing a madman impression and taking out a wall.
Everyone’s mortified, and “you’re totally crazy, dude,” but they still feed it with their laughter because it is funny, and the joker continues smashing. A drunk girl urinates in the upstairs bathroom sink reading my mother’s letters out loud and says “oh, that’s so sweet” before chucking the letters and cards into the bathtub moments later, bored. They steal records that they like from attic milk boxes and Frisbee the ones they don’t.
Some teenager warring with his miserable parents starts squatting there, pulling power off the city. His cigarettes accumulate in the toilets. Strangers screw on the mattresses, spray paint the stairwell, wipe semen into our linen and towels. It’s everything my father believed money could help us avoid.
Aie-yai-yai.
It crosses my mind yet again that I really shouldn’t come here without the kids.
*
But I haven’t finished my arrival walkabout because I haven’t been to the attic.
Regardless of season it is uninhabitable up here. It is a sweat lodge in the summer, and bitterly cold in winter. Its bare boards wobble dangerously about the floor framing like see-saws. Everything smells sharply of dusty barn wood. Vicious roofing nails poke haphazardly through the uninsulated ceiling. Some ancient pie plate thingamajig blocks off a chimney port. On its colorful illustrated face, a fairy-winged 1930’s White Rock girl, a lovely, but helpless icon, watches over our attic possessions and clings to her rock so she doesn’t, God help her, accidentally slide into the family tragedy.
I see the windows have towels stuffed in holes where leaks have sprung. When I pulled up, I noticed that you can see the towels from the street, another add-it-to-the-list problem to deal with. This house didn’t miss a beat – it picked up where my mother’s health left off, a seamless transition, an old age deterioration that would not be denied by a premature death in the family.
Depletion has taken up residence here.
*
Like all harsh environments, the attic has its beauty, and there’s no denying that looking out from the attic’s giant cathedral windows. The attic view ranges out past our long expanse of lawn and a majestic oak; it winds along the harbor’s edge and then opens out towards Monhegan, past nameless islands and the cold curvature of open sea.
On a rainy Thanksgiving weekend long, long ago my mother stood in front of these eight-foot triangle-peaked cathedral windows – the wild, triptych fancy of the Boston architect who owned the home immediately before her – and seeing all the Heaven she was ever going to want or believe in, she invested the last of her father’s inheritance in the land, water and sky framed here.
My mother looked out these windows and saw the Future widening out to her children’s children. But these days there’s a reverse telescoping of time in this attic. If you could look back in today you’d see the Past all compressed together, piled up in storage boxes and buried beneath sprawling protective blue tarps. Old bed linen with faded 1960’s sunflower explosions cover our family things and the residual sum of what’s left of my parent’s lives and their children’s childhoods, the toys and hobbies and books and drawings and graded schoolwork – the abandoned, torn-down scaffolding of childhood.
Other than the weary Diaspora of memories and letters still tucked away or carried about by aging or dying friends, the evidence that my parents worked and loved and married and divorced and fought wars and concluded peace and drank and sobered and laughed and cried and did everything at full human volume only remains here now, in this attic, under the blue burial tarps.
If there is proof that our childhoods had train sets or model rockets or report cards or chemistry sets, then it’s here. And if you want to learn anything about our unsung Indian tribe or the dying language of her people, well, then you’ve come to the right place.
It crosses my mind standing here that no matter how long I spend downstairs messing about on arrival poking here and there, or inspecting the latest structural wounds, I haven’t come home until I’ve stood in this attic on these see-saw floorboards and looked out my mother’s windows and felt the family ghosts spinning about me in this filial vortex.
This attic is our family’s ground zero, our last chance reservation, my mother’s Gethsemane, and everything that had a little spiritual gravity left in it rolled here before the End or soon after in the wake.
Chapter VI — The Sandbox
Alright, class. Let’s settle down.
To understand the geologic processes that brought the Blue Tarp Attic Mountains into existence, we need to look at the various layers that comprise them and consider the surrounding topology. It is only through careful investigation of both surroundings and structure that we can gain a true understanding of this site’s rich and varied content.
We’ll begin with the vast Boxed Book Desert that surrounds the Blue Tarp Mountains. This great flood plain of variegated reading material was deposited here at the close of the Barry Nathan Gastric Carcinomic Era. A Diluvian wash carried roughly a hundred of these granite heavy boxes from the Midwestern Plains to the Eastern seaboard on a river of father-son glacial liquefaction. The alluvial plain that resulted spread out in even, gently undulating, symmetric box rows in every direction as far as the attic horizon, a view from the top of the attic steps that remains awe-inspiring.
If you chip carefully into the plain exteriors of the boxed rock formations you will find highly compacted sedimentary build-up of both personal and professional reading materials. Miniature libraries on art, science, mathematics, politics, management strategy, human relations, engineering, and religion. Although they remain unmined, high-value quarries of symphonic music and early show tunes are believed to be embedded as well. While the natural mining rights to these lands have now been divided equally among two smaller enterprises, scant site development has occurred at present. The difficulties of extracting and transporting the high-value deposits from the site has largely preserved the area’s original beauty.
The geologic foundation of the Blue Tarp range at the center of this flood plain is our primary interest because of its rich familial narrative value, but to access this core layer, we must first dig down into the Blue Tarp hillsides to work our way through the bulky, more recent outer depositary layer. The loosely compacted outer layer was transported here by tsunami and pyroclastic surges after the eruption of Mt. Gail on Valentine’s Day, 2003, an unexpected blast some 1,500 miles away that left these deposits and destroyed that once lush volcanic island, submerging it below ocean after its 68-year ocean-surface existence.
Fraying jeans, scarred rubber spatulas, microwavable dish sets, magazine clippings, rubber-banded stacks of museum guides, theater programs covered in both jaded and ecstatic handwritten margin critiques, shoeboxes of tangled silver-chained necklaces, Mahler Symphonies frozen in a CD player at the time of the volcanic upheaval, an upholstered garage sale footstool, broken staplers and desk implements, expired saline bottles, crescent-shaped beige plastic boxes with false teeth, hastily folded Exxon road maps and other practical but geologically unremarkable objects – these are now what remains of the collapsed volcanic island. While this superficial geological layer contains some noteworthy features for further academic study – most importantly post-millennium diaries and “Please, Please Get Well, Ms. Westgate” cards from concerned schoolchildren – we are primarily interested in the earlier familial and ancestral history collected beneath this outer layer.
I need your attention, people. I’ll wait.
We can do this on my time, or we can do this on your time.
It’s your choice.
Thank you.
*
The geologic subsurface at the base of the Blue Tarps can be traced to major events at the close of the Great Montessori Era. Gail Nathan (Latin: Gail Yvonne Westgate) led the school she founded through touch-and-go early years in the late 1960’s into a newly constructed campus in the mid 1980’s serving grades K-8. Its remains can be seen to this day outside Princeton, New Jersey. This new campus came into being on structural plates pressuring their way upward on the strength, vision, and tenacity of the mantle-tough Westgate plate. This tectonic uplift was driven by deeper tomological revelations of love and a deep respect for children. We still do not have delicate enough instrumentation to analyze or source the underlying forces – but their impact is unequivocal.
In isolating critical geologic features at the close of the Great Montessori Era, Geomorphologists place great emphasis on actual diary entries, extant school board minutes, miscellaneous letters and documentation found in the Blue Tarps themselves together with useful, but less reliable contemporaneous supporting histories. Together these various sources establish a reliable and consistent overall geologic narrative. As early board meeting minutes reflect and peer reviewed studies have confirmed, nobody wanted the head of school job for those first 18 years when the school was still located in the substrata of an unglamorous convent basement and the head of school role amounted largely to lifting large igneous emotional burdens and transporting backbreaking mantle from classroom to classroom on weekends.
This pattern shifts in the mid-1980’s, and it is here the geology gets particularly interesting. Coincident with this period of steady growth and seismic professional stability, larger geologic masses began to exhibit stress fractures in the Westgate tectonic bedding. While focused on financing and developing the construction of a new campus for the school, Westgate relinquished her day-to-day administrative post. Soon after, a chunk of the school’s operation broke off from the main plate as well, creating a critical shift in internal management tectonics.
This shift was profound in two key respects. The first is that the stress of bringing the new campus into being took its physical toll on the Westgate torso, a mid-strata composed largely of weak and un-concretized sedimentary rock and brittle shale. Stress fractures erupting from the core flared outward in these marks evidenced here in these hospitalization invoices for intestinal tremors. As a result of the extreme stresses, critical load-bearing rock liquefied under the enormous underground pressures, and the Westgate plate lost mass rapidly and precipitously.
In the health and managerial turbulence that followed, a previously stable, dormant plate was suddenly able to slide freely into the Crone’s and Delegation Ruptures. This new geologically unremarkable, but solid load-bearing granite broke through with unexpected force on an upsurge of magma-pressured ambition. Prior to this event the load-bearing granite was incorrectly believed to be moving in concert with, or even attached to, the larger Westgate Plate. Whether it was ever actually attached or simply broke-free is a matter of speculation, but it powered into the exposed breach along these iron pyrite fault lines seen both here and here [Note: the instructor indicates the Administration Office and a “Head of School Only” parking spot].
In so doing, an underling teacher who could hear no music and an et tu Brute? secretary ground down over the weakened Westgate Plate driving it out of the parking lot and towards the Western United States – but not before leaving evidence of a) managerial crust turmoil b) fascinating metamorphic internal changes we may examine later and c) the subducting undertow of the School Board. The staggering scale of the era’s subduction can best be understood as the predictable geologic response of an environment favoring seismic stability over all other competing forces in a time of massive upheaval and transition.
Geomorphologists tend to remain indifferent to outcomes in mass structural movements, but here there is near universal academic agreement an unprecedented geologic structural opportunity was lost or, in vernacular terms, the “wrong plate won.” It should be noted that certain academics in other disciplines, namely political science, have noted their disagreement with this thesis. While their concerns are largely outside the interest and scope of our own examination, you may wish to consult “Educational Studies in Early Montessori Realpolitik,” Marsha Stencel & Anthea Spencer, 1986 (out of print).
The dramatic migration and redeposit of the entire contents of the Westgate Hopewell household up the Eastern seaboard involved two additional noteworthy forces. The first is the diverging sinistral plate movement attributable to Westgate’s college-age children leaving home. The second is the continental shelf collapse of a planned matrimonial confluence. The best predictive computer modeling of the early 1980’s indicated the creation of a joint ridge pushing up into a mountainous rock formation not unlike an equilateral cathedral arch, but an internal fault gave way unexpectedly and the arch-like formation collapsed catastrophically. The fiancé’s oceanic crust rolled beneath the Westgate plate, driving its glacier-cold feet deep into the earth from where it could no longer be reached by explanation, argument, or telephone. In the structural collapse large chunks of the Westgate plate were torn off and remained exposed and visible through the close of the Gastric Carcinomic Era.
While there is ongoing disagreement about the relative impact of the various seismic discontinuities, there is a growing consensus that any one of these forces on its own might have carried the New Jersey furniture, wedding presents, mirrors, heirlooms, family letters and photos, salvaged Montessori materials, record collection, and the boys’ things up the Atlantic seaboard, and deposited them in the Blue Tarps during this period, leaving the major bulk of what we think of as the range today. This is at least partially attributable to the small storage space of the California bound Toyota Corolla that was swept along on top of the greater Westgate Plate, a vehicle barely retained in the legal washout with the school board.
The impact of these various forces is staggering, the evidence of which is all here beneath the Blue Tarps. When you can get your mind around these forces and grasp the geologic story hidden here, then you can better spot the unseen forces that may be gathering in your personal or familial transition regions.
Imagine, by way of example, forces in your own life so powerful that the only evidence after eighteen years of work and the realization of your crowning professional achievement is a pro forma “thank you” plaque buried strategically at the bottom of a playground sandbox. Nobody has the slightest idea what your name was or who really built the Princeton Montessori School.
There’s not a trace of you.
*
Please take your #2 pencils out and pass the blue books to your neighbors behind you. Face forward, eyes to the front, please.
1. Compare the geologic developments in your own family with the development of the Blue Tarp Mountains. If favorable geologic conditions have so far enabled your family to avoid the circumstances described in the Blue Tarp formation, then provide a predictive timeline and sequence for how and when everything will eventually blow apart.
2. In what ways might the instructor’s observations about the Sandbox and the Princeton Montessori School change the underlying geology of the Blue Tarps? In what ways might these observations create seismic disturbances in other ranges?
You may begin.
Chapter VII — Forgotten Green Soldiers
Morning
To get to the photos and letters I have to pull back the blue tarp and mine my claim, opening boxes, unstacking them, restacking them, picking through their contents, and sliding everything back and forth to make room for the next box. I fill up the available floor space about me so that I find myself literally boxed into corners, and I hop and I stumble about trying to find my footing when I need to get downstairs for food or a long-delayed bathroom break.
I started out with the smug, just-give-me-that confidence of somebody attacking a Rubik’s cube for the first time – a clear breadcrumb vision to restoring everything as I found it – but four or five hours pass and I’ve got piles everywhere and no real idea where anything started out or which things are married to which boxes. But I’ve surrendered to the chaos, and now it’s a regular Christmas morning up here.
Sadly, there’s no one to share my nostalgic discoveries with, but I let out enough internal mental leash to hear myself ooh-ing and aah-ing out loud into the attic on happy finds. I’m also kept company by a particular Interior Narrator, a distinct mental voice and attitude, a happy mental genie who floats around my thoughts from time to time, wryly and good-naturedly commenting on things and whose occasional fortuitous company I have welcomed from childhood.
I have never been able to will his voice or presence into making an appearance – and frankly I can’t even recall him properly when he’s not there – but when he drops by I remember him pitch perfect and welcome my inner genie like an old friend. He only visits when I’m in the solitude of some deep mental exercise and he’s here with me this morning helping me make a happy mess of things.
The photo and letters search is slow going, but gradually a stack of boxes is culled and moved to the side. Every box has the concentrated memories of a home or a grade or the season of an adolescent love affair. There are elementary school Valentine’s Day cards with petrified candy taped to them, Little League team photos, local newspapers with homeroom assignments, Webelos merit badges, a spherical rock decades old that may turn out to be an actual geode when I get around to smashing it someday, an old NSV Bible underlined with my red felt-tip pen, MAD magazines and baseball cards that “could be worth something.”
There are Wacky Package stickers, ElectroniKits, 19th century school primers, school papers with teacher comments that still hurt my feelings, sickly, suppurating “D” batteries, N-scale model railroad engines and built-out railroad dioramas on salvaged plywood. Glued into the fake grass powder are the round bases of green plastic soldiers who still lie in wait thirty years on, hunkered down faithfully behind miniature moss trees like Japanese WWII soldiers that have no idea childhood is over.
Afternoon
I’ve turned into a wild-eyed miner, day one on his virgin claim. I’m knee-deep in my river of memorabilia, panning for gold, stumbling and splashing and slipping about, throwing sand and river pebbles over my shoulder and onto my own back, yelling “yee-haw” and “Eureka”, creating a ruckus and scaring the wild-life.
I imagine an eagle soaring high above me, wings barely twitching, watching the white commotion far below. From time to time, I pull myself out of my feverish, sentimental stream and look up and around me. The room falls eerily silent, my splashing is swallowed up, and the slow, still river of time can be felt moving through the attic, past the White Rock girl, past the bare light bulb, before my narrator genie who has fallen momentarily silent and past the middle-aged miner, far, far below, who can no longer be seen by the eagle because, for a moment now, he has stopped moving.
Evening
I find a box that looks like the hastily emptied out contents of my father’s desk. There is a book-shaped thingamajig executive desk toy with a window looking onto an acrobat. The acrobat spins around a little wire in front of a painted circus crowd, powered by some hidden hourglass engine on a backstage waterfall of sand.
You have to spin the box clockwise to get the sands into position (my dad left a humorous indicator on top with the direction for rotation) and the acrobat strains and struggles and pulls himself up and flops around his trapeze for a few minutes as the last sands discharge. This diligent acrobat lived on my dad’s desk and on occasion a bump in the room or a raised voice would break up some internal sand clump and the acrobat would make an unexpected, agonizing encore, straining himself over the bar.
The “everything must go” desk box also has Xerox copies of articles or ideas that had caught his fancy and a small micro-cassette in a miniature plastic case used to record business notes and dictation. I carefully put the cassette in my shirt pocket because it holds the prospect of my father’s lost voice – but it also holds the uneasy possibility of some ugly family drama captured there, ghosts that might be better left unspirited.
Wrapped up more carefully is a build-it-yourself Heathkit stereo tuner and amplifier that my dad assembled from a step-by-step instruction manual, its directions as thick as the Manhattan Yellow Pages. I unpack the tuner from its protective bubble wrap, find a Phillips head in a children’s beach bucket and open the back. I turn the large tuning dial and see the backstage rubber loops and pulleys guide the tuner’s tapered red needle across the AM/FM dial. There is a satisfying weight and resistance to the tuning knob that controls this movement. This “hi-fi” kit was “solid state” – back when the instruments to make and reproduce music were thought to be a little more attractive on the plump and heavy side.
I look at the green lawn of circuit board my dad assembled, potting and planting, day by day, resistor by resistor, until the evening he plugged in that lush electronic garden, and in front of the audience of his family set the needle on the LP of his choice. From that little garden exploded the wild discord of Stravinsky and the sad, erotic flight of a Firebird. It was one of those fatherly feats that to a young child has the hint of the magical and fills that child forever with an irreversible respect and awe.
Night
I find Christmas ornaments, the hand-made Advent calendars with their plastic gum ball machine surprises, and a silver cardboard box that holds the nativity players. Annually we assembled that cast of twenty-five into their bookshelf crèche. My mother would gather us at her side, and we’d be allowed to light the candles that spun the bell-tinkling brass angels. In a solemn, occasionally tearful voice, she would introduce that particular day’s cast member. She would read each night’s entry with a deep reverence, be it an angel or an ass, and her voice would fill the room with a spiritual promise that had the electric, ozone buzz of air before a lightning storm.
My brother and I would take turns picking a single cut-out paper king or a guiding star or a shepherd boy and adding it to the expanding vignette. The ritual would continue in nightly increments until Christmas Eve when – in alternate Decembers – it would be my turn to place Jesus’ swaddled frame into his crooked-legged paper crib, unsticking him from the tack of my sweaty fingers, ever so careful not to bump the other characters, navigating him into his Mother’s care.
Verily, verily, I say unto you that on some of those nights God the Father Himself was in the house. Our little troupe may not have been able to see Him from the bookshelf stage, but we could feel the front-row presence of the First, Last and Eternal Patron of the Dramatic Arts.
But now the cast is thrown together in an unholy boxed jumble, serrated Scotch tape squares peeling off their backs, their corporal bodies flattening to dimensionless cut-outs. I delicately pick through the box and pluck out the simple paper tube that made up Jesus’ swaddled body and note the sharp, haloed circle that was his head. I’m still touched years later – as I was as a small child – by His simple, delicate figure, the simplest of the figures in the crèche, the only one fashioned from holy paper.
Truly, I loved Jesus best when he was This Jesus and I was That Believer. That was our pure and uncoerced Intersection. There was a simple and innocent communion in those early years, me, blue-eyed, peering fondly over his crèche crib and tucking him under his paper straw, offering a speedy child’s kiss into the air over his paper head.
Now all these patient saints wait for their silver cardboard tomb to reopen and their paper stone to roll away. Like the forgotten green soldiers, they comfort each other in the dark and pray for their show to reopen, wait for another run, for a second coming, teased by the flickering light of the small, prodigal boy come home.
Chapter VIII — The Family Songbook
I truck my father’s Heathkit hi-fi and speakers downstairs from the attic along with a plastic, bubble-domed, multi-stack record changing, cassette playing, AM/FM receiving, 8-track playing, primary colored, mood-detecting light show face plate marvel of do-it-all late seventies sound technology. I also lug two ancient but durable speakers downstairs, their wires clattering and trailing twenty or thirty feet behind me like dragon tails as they wind down behind me in the tight attic stairway, through my mom’s library, around the upstairs stairwell banister, and into my bedroom where I draw their tails in like deep-sea anchor chain.
These eighty pound speakers have suffered through thirty Maine attic winters and may no longer work, but they have seniority and deserve first crack at the stereo team.
It turns out the Old Mastiffs have life in them. They are throaty and hoarse. Their tired woofers have lost much of their growl, but they wail out in their fashion, can still wake the neighbors, and above all they know the family songbook.
*
There are about ten milk crates of family records in the attic, and I head there to raid them, looking for a soundtrack to help me sort the pictures and letters. I am not looking for favorites from a vast teenage collection – a vintage that, in places anyway, has been replaced on CD, but even if it hadn’t and I was still looking for Some Girls or American Beauty or Blow Your Face Out or The Last Waltz there is actually nothing left to play. My old records are physically here, stored separately off to the side in moving boxes, but they are segmented from the milk crates for another reason entirely: they’re literally unplayable.
There was a religious purge my Junior year in high school, and only a lily-pure handful survived a record-scratching Sunday afternoon. With the various carving, cutting and decapitation instruments available on a Swiss army knife, I destroyed nearly every record I owned, ripping horrible radial scars against their grain to render them unplayable.
A few times over the years I’ve come across the boxes in the attic that still hold the destroyed collection, and I’ve thought with a rising hope that maybe this box contains records that I might have bought after the Purge, but then I open a record, roll it out from its inner sleeve and see that, no, these are the same ones and the whole business comes back to me, even at me.
Religious unrest had been brewing for some time.
I had read a story weeks earlier in Rolling Stone about a Baptist minister that had his entire youth congregation set fire to their rock and roll collections in a photo-op, church-front conflagration. Everybody at Rolling Stone right on up to Jan Wenner’s office was beside themselves, aghast at the sacrilege, but the crystal-eyed teenage faithful reportedly feeling cleaner and closer to God.
Back in Central New Jersey, their superior Southern conviction unsettled me, and I was not easily to be outdone in spiritual rigor. By their fruit – and mine – you will know them! So, in a grisly Kasey Kasem Sunday countdown, one hit record at a time, I considered the fruits of my collection and made terrible judgments with my swift little sword. I sat alone in the house, knife out, dispatching the congregation, easing larger tensions for a season.
Not surprisingly there were few sheep and many, many goats. At a monthly bible study later on, there was a sympathetic, but mostly disapproving consensus among evangelical fellow-travelers. It concluded with solemn, head nodding and lip-pursing solicitude (not to mention a prayer circle that ran well into overtime.)
A brother had gotten carried away. He should have spoken with somebody or other first. We all felt sorry for each other, but I didn’t take the bait, knowing they were either kidding themselves or secretly suffered the same fundamental discomfort.
In any event they lacked my true apostolic nature.
*
“And sex and sex and sex and sex and look at me! I’m in tatters!” Mick brayed.
Well, of course you’re in tatters! Cut, slash, gouge. Bad, evil lyrics. Cut, cut, scrape all the way to the edge. Don’t let any songs on that album get away. Bad, bad people. Bad Mick Jagger. Even looks like the Devil. “Day in New York and Back in LA.” No, he isn’t saying that at all, a friend had explained; he’s saying “Gay in New York and Fag in L.A.” Jesus Christ! And “I would suck a duck!” What???!!!? Cut. Slash. Cut. A mockery of everything I would truly love in my fleecy white Christian heart if I could just get that heart to open, but I can’t because I’m still friends with These People. I had no mammon, but I knew that I could not serve God and Rock and Roll. The Holy Spirit can’t get in. When the whip comes down! When the shit hits the fan, sitting on the can! Cut, cut, slash, cut! Heads up, everybody! Whip coming down!
As prophesied! You have said so!
The Grateful Dead! The Dead! Better believe it. And Cheap Trick! Turning tricks. Prostitution right in the name. In their name like a taunt at God! Who was I fooling? How could I imagine I could hear God with ears that could hear this? “I want You to want Me.” How they screamed! They should want God like that. Listen to the idolatry! You can’t make this up! In a movie you wouldn’t believe it. They know not what they do, but God will not be mocked! Galatians 6:7. The only verse in the entire Bible that ends in an exclamation point.
Look at this record liner photo! That guitar player probably doesn’t even like girls. Look how he dresses. And the little boy hat? What’s that about? But you can bet that old drummer likes girls, little ones probably, and not in a righteous, God-fearing, only-when-you’re-married, try-not-to-enjoy-your-orgasm way. Death to Budokan! Death to J. Geils! More! More! More! Onward Christian Soldier! Give me the yoke! I know what God wants. He wants oxygen… I need the mask… oxygen…Dennis Hopper… hyperventilating... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
Meanwhile over in Bo-Peep Meadow: the sad choral bleat of “Godspell” with the Original Broadway Cast, all by their lonesome, singing Day by Day at the top of their lungs, hoping I wouldn’t recall the second act Mary Magdalene nudity scene and knife out their vocal cords. To follow thee more nearly, know thee more clearly, love thee more dearly.
Tra-la-la-la-la. Tra-la-la-la-la.
Oh, what a slippery pile of carnage and conviction spread out before me! The records were sprayed out at all angles ten feet wide on the killing floor. My cat sat on a far edge of the pile, looking offstage sleepily, away from the Inquisitor – like Charlie Watts, casually bored, even contemptuous of the front man, keeping the beat but not wanting anything more to do with it.
Oh, somewhere the devil must have laughed hysterically that afternoon, blood spraying out of his nose onto his cocaine mirror, his ashtray of cigarette butts and his trembling red hands.
As for Jesus, predictably he said nothing, but that’s just the kind of heavenly father he was. I always needed too much attention. It was just one scene after another, and he was bored of it. Sometimes it was like we weren’t even related.
*
My mother came home and was white with fury.
“I didn’t cut your records, “ I said. “I cut my records. I paid for them and I can cut them if I want. They’re mine to do what I want with,” I yelled in a righteous, temple-clearing rage, italicizing all the pronouns, yelling at the Pharisee who needed to hear the Truth for once, just once, spoken like it was, that nobody ever dared to do but me. Me!
“You are not allowed to throw those records out. You will keep those records forever. Forever!” my mom yelled, getting dangerously close to tears, signaling the end of the exchange.
*
There are plenty of artists in my mom’s collection to whom I’m indifferent. I certainly didn’t like all her friends.
I flick, flick, flick past Leadbelly and Bessie Smith and Joan Sutherland and Bennie Goodman and gloomy Wagner. I’m flat on Bel Canto, 45’s that need swirly plastic inserts, anything in mono even if it is good, Liza Minnelli bugging out, off-label flute and recorder music played by her personal friends, half-hour adagio crucifixions by Brahms, Helen Reddy roaring, repetitive minor third Philip Glass A-E-I-O-U Guantanamo tortures. But my mom had friends – and a lot of them – that I grew to know and love, artists I took for granted at the time, thinking they were a foretaste of the sprawling musical feast of my life, when, in fact, they were the feast.
Mine was a childhood in a kind of musical brothel, in the company of sad romantics, drunks and easy women. My mother brought home anybody that moved her with a song. They’d show up in the living room on weekend evenings or in the car suddenly as we half-slept in the backseat: loud and wild, over-the-top, self-absorbed and self-pitying, vain and weak, always needing your full attention. Sometimes you’d wake up from an afternoon nap, and they’d be right there in the house, in the next room, singing along with my mother like old friends.
Sometimes the girls would find you on their own when my mom wasn’t around. They’d pull you aside and teach you a song or two. They’d smell of booze. They’d share their cigarettes if you asked a second time. They’d let a little tit flash or let their leg touch your leg, telling you about their shitty boyfriends and their personal crap, dressing it all up in pretty words, showing you a new chord on the guitar, leaning in, laughing at you, teasing, telling you how handsome you’d be when you grew up and all their “if only’s” and “maybe somedays.”
So you’d always want girls who could lean into your orbit like that and whirl you around like they did, women who could spin rose and lavender moons about you and then draw them back away again, eyes laughing. You felt their coy, centrifugal force, but you could feel the opposite, too: that they needed you back. They needed you because you felt their gravity all the way into your bones, and it made their whole thing work, while it worked.
Aaah! My mother’s friends! Janis. Joni. Aretha. Bette. Nina. Shirley. Dionne. Roberta. Joan from the West Indies. Judy of the blue eyes. Carly of the heart-breaking smile. My childhood women of wine and song. My ladies of the barrelhouse, beautiful and sad.
And the men she brought home were a whole other thing. One tall country dude came over in his cowboy fringes and his rattlesnake hat, and right in the middle of the living room announced that the only two things in life that make it worth livin’ are guitars tuned good and firm feelin’ women. And my mom laughed out loud! It was like having another woman hidden in your mother!
The guys were always scary talented but casual about it like they never practiced. They could cast a spell, make you laugh, make you cry, but still ignore you the whole time. Five steps ahead of you. No matter what else fucked up was going on in their lives, and something was always fucked up, they could flat out sing and play. Cocker. Cash. Jennings. Nelson. Brel. Presley. Waits. Stevens. Croce. Sinatra.
*
And Bob Dylan.
My mother heard Lay, Lady, Lay at a friend’s house and, completely smitten, bought two Greatest Hits albums for her boys, one for each of them. She might have held the sublimated hope that her handsome young sons would know someday how to love women with words the way he did, that they would be able to show women the colors in their minds, to let them have their cake and eat it too, to lead them down the winding stairwell of some A-C#-G-B bass line and unbutton them onto brass beds, their lovely bodies surrendering to language, to a skein of words unspooling, to diamond-hard, blue-eyed desire, to the promise of escalating seductions – to worlds beginning.
In the absence of any real-world romantic models, Bob Dylan became the gold standard for the poet lover with his easy flow of words: his wild, Semitic hair; his wary, sharp glare cast out at the world from behind his harmonica rampart. He was our Byron. That my mother gave this elusive vagabond such a clear nod of approval raised the stakes on what it would mean to become a man in full.
You would have to be a poet, too.
*
I start pulling records. Some of the ladies. Some of the men.
In another bin I spot and pluck out the music to Born Free sung by an uncelebrated English children’s choir. This forgotten LP can tear your heart in two, can wow and flutter you, winding its warped vinyl magic carpet circles around the changer. On its record cover atop illustrations of rowed up cartoon lions it reads “Adam Nathan,” written in my mother’s hand.
It was my first record.
Yes, kind old lions that wouldn’t eat people, you’re coming downstairs, too.
And behind Born Free another record catches my eye.
Yes, this one.
Oh, absolutely this one.
Hey, everybody's talkin' about the good old days, right?
Everybody, the good old days, the good old days…
Well, let's talk about the good old days.Come to think of it as, as bad as we think they are
these will become the good old days for our children...Why don't we try to remember that kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow. Hmmm…
Try to remember, and if you remember then…… follow
No matter where I am in the world, I can find my way home on the A-side of Gladys Knight’s 1975 album I Feel a Song. In the seconds it takes the mechanical arm of a record changer to clatter and clack beneath a chock-a-block record platter, lock into a 33 1/3 orbit, and drop abruptly into its echoing vinyl canyon, I can bring you my mother.
She will come in from the kitchen, her reflection on the harbor windows, the dinner cleared, the dishes done. She’ll dance a little walk into the living room, safe and at peace in her body and her home, maybe holding a glass of wine. She will pick up the album cover from the glass coffee table, lean over to nudge the stereo volume higher, and she’ll sing out the lyrics on the record sleeve, the ones that she underlined in some earlier summer and starred in red and wrote “so so beautiful” in the margin. She will kiss the top of your head as you read your book without looking up, pausing just long enough to let you feel her taking your presence in. You’ll never truly know how happy she is that her son is visiting and home again.
(Well, you will, but later.)
I don’t know if you have ever closed your eyes during the finale of a fireworks show and just felt life explode in your chest, but that’s what can be done with an old-fashioned turntable and the five exquisite tracks on the A-Side of I Feel a Song. You give me that album with Gladys Knight at the height of her artistic powers and I will give you my mother in the prime of her life. I will give you her romantic heart, her femininity, her laugh, her love of song, her open-hearted love of people and the curling twelve foot Hawaiian wave of spiritual energy that moved through her, that moves through her children and grandchildren, that moves through her friends, that moves out through this sentence and into any open heart that will receive her even now that she is Gone.
Chapter IX — Twinkling Ephemera
There’s a photograph of me that week I spent in the Maine house dividing up the family photos into two piles, a week spent working my way through our vast collection, trying to be fair in my brother’s absence, to be a good umpire, an honest judge, a wise Solomon splitting our pictorial inheritance down the middle, one nice picture for this pile, one nice picture for that pile.
After a few years of worrying about it at 3AM I finally got myself out to the East Coast to split everything up – like Voldemort distributing his soul into horcruxes, backing everything up for the Apocalypse. My thinking on the split was that there’s no way both our houses are going to burn down the same day and, counting on the reasonable interval between inevitable disasters, my brother and I could always just keep dividing and photocopying what we’ve got, cutting our past lives in half and letting the memories grow back like cemetery earthworms.
This nightmare of a New England barn fire consuming our family photographs would keep me up at night. I would imagine the flames burning the dime-store photo album covers and the plastic liner sheets, then licking at the photos, curling them up on the tongue like red fortune telling fish. I would prop myself up on my pillows, wide-awake now, and I’d picture the volunteer firefighters standing on our front lawn watching the “Macomber” blaze burn itself out. I’d check the 3AM clock radio and imagine the firemen shaking their heads about the faulty alarm and the overgrown access road that blocked the trucks and them mumbling “waan’t to code,” watching the old tinderbox incinerate. “Droy as a matchstick.” I’d see their faces all orange and aglow, their chins raised like firefighters in cautionary insurance advertisements. They’d try to mask their excitement by harping on the out-of-towner’s dereliction.
“Waan’t to code. Blocked the road. Waan’t to code...”
Obviously you can’t tell all that from a photo of a guy in a room sorting pictures but you can imagine it sort of, now that you know the back-story anyway. You certainly can’t see the great school of red fish funneling out of the attic roof into the night sky, sailing off like souls at the end of a weepy science fiction movie, but I could, and the dread got me out there from Seattle to do all the splitting and dividing.
In the picture I’m caught mid-curation in the overcast afternoon light. It’s dark enough that table lamps are on and modestly haloing out in the exposure. Rubber-banded stacks of photos, albums, broken topped shoeboxes, steel boxes for slides, yellow one-hour photo sleeves holding 35mm negatives and framed memorabilia cover every available surface of my bedroom – the nightstand, the carpeted floor, the quilted bedding, the wooden strips of window sills. Golden speaker wire is draped over my bed. An extension cord winds out of the room and into the hallway past the orange toaster-wire glow of the rusty space heater and the plastic-dome record changer.
You can see the crap, overcast, rainy weather through the window behind me. I’ve got one hand on a hip, the other is scratching the back my head in the posture of near cartoon puzzlement, maybe overwhelm from the staggering quantity of scenes and faces, relatives, and friends arrayed and stacked in front of me on every available surface. I’m not sure it’s really all that great a picture compositionally and all the rest (it was taken on a timer), but it’s a keeper because truthfully they’re all keepers.
In my family we are inveterate collectors of images and in a consistent but patternless way have accumulated a staggering amphitheater of faces – faces that I don’t even always remember or recognize, faces in postcards, paper-clipped faces scissored from National Geographic, faces of family friends whose names elude me, faces ordered in Rexall discount sets of ten, faces from journeys to China, to Cairo, to the Statue of Liberty, from somebody or other’s dad at a school picnic.
Other than Time there are no natural predators in the Maine house for life captured in photography and the wardens will tell you point blank that no picture has ever been discarded here, a policy that has led to this staggering abundance of photographic wildlife. We are graspers and hoarders of the first order; we are not pruners. Every picture must be saved, every visual artifact a treasure for some possible future. The tree that spawned these moments may have withered away long ago, but its petals remain fixed on the ground, frozen in the Autumn that gave birth to them, scentless, perfectly distributed, Gaussian, Zen-like, trapped in a glass bulb.
The crush of detail in the picture of me sorting invites closer inspection: there’s a record arm caught in flight, mid-song, an album cover with a watercolor flower against a lamp, what must be the big speakers mentioned earlier. There’s a chunk of missing plaster on the wall by the queen size bed where crusty wall lathing is visible. There’s a glass of wine, a brick of convenience store cheese, a blue and red box of Stoned Wheat Thins, a Burgundy shaped bottle of red wine on the night table and a cork and a corkscrew beside it. You can see the cork is still in the corkscrew. You can make out a cluster of wood knots in the window frame, the slight bluing of veins on my visible hand, the shadows of my hand’s tendons, and the features of total strangers in the photos on the floor. A sea of impersonal detail.
The whole scene, the crowded world of its composition, the near and far of it, all of it is perfectly focused, the even-handed neutrality of the wide-angle lens. I look at it now and imagine the oily, blue-green optics of the lens that took it, that orbited coolly, that glistened in the dark for a flash, its polished lens glass curved as smoothly as the arc of a planet, that rendered details upon details on every hair of light, that painted worlds upon worlds, stories and feelings appearing wherever attention is cast, visions flowering out from the tiniest of pinpricks like the nested dreams of Indian deities.
And far below the camera’s eye, eclipsed, a neighboring world-in-miniature creates the photograph’s illusion of life, a vast soulless desert where the light-swept sands of silver salts shift and flicker in the bitstream, indifferently rendering an image of a man and his things – his precious, precious things – an image viewable only at a great distance, from some vast outer space of feeling, from the vacuum of gain and loss, from the breathtaking cosmos of memory and all of its twinkling stars of ephemera.
Chapter X — The Disney Log Flume
I confess to an almost religious affection for my own image as a child and then, more broadly, to pictures of my brother and my parents as children, and their parents and their parents’ parents as children all the way back, up and around the banks of the river and somewhere back in time well out of sight.
It’s not bewildered infancy I’m thinking of with its fat cheeks, its neck wobbling, its dazed perch on the shoulder. But it’s before the scrunched slugger-face pose on Phillies “Bat Day,” before the handstand skateboard trick, before the model rocket held forward and brandished like a sword. Before the stain and strain of approval, before turning my shoulder angrily from camera to tend the smoky little fire of my adolescence, before the cool tilt of the head and the calculated squint. Before the endless mastering and becoming.
Before all of that.
I’m thinking of the sweet-spot in childhood, something in the interval of the two, and pictures taken in that period never fail to move me. The physical beauty of a child – any child – before seven years or so plays a part, but there is something else too, something easy in the photographic moment, soft in the eyes visible through the screen door, in my hand resting on my own shoulder, my fingers as limp and delicate as an Old Master cherub, or in the softness around my brother’s mouth blowing out a dandelion, or my father in his suspenders standing over the tickle of a little white dog, his arms out sideways in delight, my mother by a picnic basket, belly on the grass, feet crossed behind her in the air.
Something in that age interval challenges all current life strategies. There’s some essential and beautiful quality in those years whose only defense appears to be its lovability – the Fontanel Defense – surrounding young life as delicately as an eggshell, if surrounding it at all. Just for a moment there, a season of pure and exposed beauty.
*
Picking through the family photographs allows me to imagine myself sailing back up on this ancestral river trying to find the faces that connect to me, that tell my story now. It is a fast running river merging Norwegians, Germans, Polish and Ukrainian Jews, Salem puritans, French trappers, Native Americans, and all joining and flowing together and merging and roiling and then racing quickly downstream together.
I’m always trying to see who’s come before, fighting my way through brambles by the shoreline, my boat grounded in the mud, but still trying to make my way upstream, negotiating under tree limbs jutting into the river, hungering for the start of the river, my source, but only marginally improving my view, searching for lost children and other signs of photographic life on the up-river headlands.
But it’s not long before I don’t even know who’s who anymore in these pictures, and these days there is barely anyone left to ask, just images of weary photographed great grandparents at the river’s edge, grim and serious by their old-fashioned prams; they are now as lifeless as movie theater lobby actor cutouts propped up on the bank, waiting to be unhanded by the grasping present, their children buried long ago in the river woods behind them. They gaze back at their descendant bobbing about to find something he’s lost, some flesh and bone to hold on to, the descendant playing at visual riddles and finding a familiar brow or a cheek, no answers at all really, just ancestors murmuring in their sleep, the odd word muttered clearly here and there.
Life, even photographic life, is so fish-eyed on the present. Time compresses the boundary players into the wings, swaps out the cast, moves yesterday’s stars into bit roles — or, from a high enough angle, its opposite, making the river of time look like a tiny canal connecting two giant, fathomless oceans.
So put down your cameras and just take a good look around you, kids. Most of this ancestral coastline will be gone by the time you’re grown.
*
A final wide-angle photograph:
This one from the banks of a Disney log flume river cruise where half-filled passenger bumper boats navigate lazily through the dark – but moving steadily, with purpose, on a timetable. It almost never happens in pictures because either mom or dad always has the camera, but in this Disney Polaroid all four of us are in the boat together, embarking shoulder-to-shoulder, the silhouette of a perfect family, boy-girl, boy-girl.
You can see the exit trail of a brief white-water rush behind us. Colorful mechanical parrots squawk over a bridge. Pirates wag their swords and cackle every 46 seconds. (We timed it that day and laughed at the proof.) Ruddy-cheeked ladies of the night gather about sailors sitting athwart TNT kegs, lifting their white dresses in herky-jerky dances. Cheerful children’s music plays in existential loops, let’s remember it as, say, the soundtrack to Born Free.
*
Born free, as free as the wind blows As free as the grass grows Born free to follow your heart Live free, and beauty surrounds you The world still astounds you Each time you look at a star
*
Someday my children will find this picture along with the one of me sorting in my old bedroom and the thousands of others. I imagine them in a rainy afternoon solo groove of their own, dividing up their parents’ pictures, sailing their way back in time, their future families receding for a moment, the years falling away against the bow. They head towards their childhood land of Wild Things, towards the mythical Greek islands where they came into being and the deserted, overcast ruins of childhood that they now only make time to visit in the rain.
They will open the same old photograph albums for the hundredth time, race around and around through the amusement park rain to get back in line, to get back on the same false tour, the delight of projected ghosts appearing on their shoulders, making them laugh, their mechanical boat bumping and wiggling them through the dark.
Around and around and around we go, all things about us beautiful and stirring – like these lion-hearted children on the record changer singing Born Free for the millionth time, the steady changer resetting and the needle dropping, mechanically click clacking, lint accumulating on the diamond, until it’s midnight and the ride is full of empty boats, splashing softly, lapping and jostling in the darkness, ghosts appearing on the shoulders of ghosts and disappearing around the bend.
Chapter XI - The Aquarian
The family letters were not stored with the rest of the things.
They were not kept with the pictures in the attic. Our family’s words and letters were the only thing more precious to my mother than the photographs. They were stored, hidden really, under linens and old clothes, in the bottom shelves of a dresser in my mother’s bedroom, some of them bound together in ribbons and bows, sorted in batches or rubber-banded by the year they were written or by theme – like “Bergamo” or “Engagement Letters from Barry.”
There were boxes of them, letters, notes, printed emails, birthday cards, anything written in the slightest degree of heightened feeling. There were stacks of diaries, full diaries, partial diaries, diaries from her childhood, from her college years, from her final vagabond push.
And then there were her children’s diaries and letters, both to and from her, winding into early adulthood, minor epistles that she gathered up behind us, tidying and tucking them away together with her children’s drawings of smiling horses and suns and flowers, knowing we’d want them or might want them, someday, for our children possibly, saving them just in case, on a mother’s instinct. As lovingly preserved, were the thick stacks of blue airmail letters written by my father the year that I was seven and my parents separated and my mother moved us halfway across the world.
(We’ll come to them.)
There were birthday cards as well. A thick bundle for my brother. A thick bundle for me. Her birthday wishes weren’t the “Happy Birthday! Love, Mom” over and out variety. They were carefully composed and lengthy, nearly benedictions in tone. They drew a clean line around the past and completed each year as surely as they launched the next, partitioning our lives as reliably as the rings on a tree. They were essays-in-miniature, ships in a bottle, their sails hoisted aloft by the masterful tug on a tiny heartstring left exposed, the delicate rigging unfurling in our glass hearts like butterfly wings.
She filled those cards with her wishes for her children, her appreciation, encouragement and love spilling onto every patch of writable surface, the card edges roadmarked with (over) and (top) and (more). (More, more, more.) We opened them first or we reserved them for last, but we did not open them in-between. We took our time reading them, often aloud for the others present, slowly and with respect, and then we hugged and kissed her for that extra second until we were sure she could feel it. The precious soul balm of the child’s extra second hug.
Her letters were often drafted in advance on other pieces of scrap paper, brown grocery bags, the corner of maps, anything you could put a pencil to. These drafts were saved as well, and I found them tucked together with the rest. Sometimes the text was drafted in multiple copies to get it right, studies for the larger canvas.
The store-bought text of the card itself was important. As we got older, she favored the blank “No Message Inside” cards particularly when they were adorned with images of life and beauty from earlier, forgotten times – Renaissance lute players, tapestry troubadours, Aphrodite urns, Lascaux cave paintings, beautiful things she spun back into temporary life like Tibetan prayer wheels.
If the picture was perfect but the text on the card didn’t fit, she’d strike the ghost writer out with a casual slash lest there be interpretive conflict. It mattered what you said, but in particular it mattered what you wrote. The space inside a card was a canvas, her canvas, and she’d shade and paint it in her own fashion, and always with authority. Oh, as if it could be otherwise for little Gail Westgate of Lincolnwood, Illinois, the schoolgirl with a million words and the towering, talking stick!
Silence, Pharaoh!
My mother could be wild and fiery and undisciplined. She could be opinionated and loud and at times not all that lady-like. “Well, fuck ‘em.” On occasion she wore combat boots exactly like the schoolyard insult – or they looked like combat boots to me, and I complained and nagged at her about her clothing until we fought about it. She used bad language in front of our pastor to the point that he memorably referred to it as “her punctuation.” At baseball and soccer matches she stepped away from the orange-slicers and the juice pourers, that ancient wall of silent and obedient mothers, and she yelled out for her boys in a battle cry that curdled my middle-school blood and led to ugly hysterics on the drives home.
Oh, yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
In part the hurricane that was the outward expression of her personality fed on warm circling currents of financial, marital and professional anxieties, but it was also her natural temperament, her astrological predisposition. She was passionate, blunt, irreverent, outspoken, opinionated, chaotic, unbridled. She was an Aquarian ruled by Mars, and it meant that she could – and often had to – carry her water in a storm. So she did.
At her memorial service in an overflowing museum room in St. Paul, Minnesota friends from across the country came to honor her. I was struck, even awed, by the deep attraction that this wild side of her personality had for so many of her friends. The speakers kept coming back to it, this side of her that I had resisted and tried to calm and settle or soothe, completely selfishly and to no avail. Her closest friends loved this irreverence and her loud, easy freedom, the wild whirl of thoughts and ideas that eddied about her, that streamed off so easily into conversations with complete strangers – the mad, high decibel rush of historical references, novels, philosophers, movies, popular music, the whole mental hurricane of her life and excitements and joie de vivre. Her mind raised the wild seas about her, scattered the gulls, and terrified young sailors for hundreds of miles in every direction.
She talked to movie screens from her seat and, yes, people around her would complain and move, indignant, across the theater. She yelled, outraged, at characters on television, art and life blurring together, the boundaries irrelevant to her. The day of the memorial service one moist-eyed friend remembered overhearing her in that very same museum talking excitedly about some painting or other with a stranger in a nearby gallery, only to enter that gallery and find my mother alone there, simply thinking out loud, conversing with herself, the inner museum of her mind expanding into the physical world, a trick of perception, a trompe d’oeil, expanding and annexing external galleries, her inner thoughts enjoying the chance to get off leash and range about in their natural habitat. The memorial crowd trembled with laughter and the delight of shared recognition and, of course, with loss.
But there was another side to this one, a counter, an opposite, an inside out.
When my mother expressed herself in writing, her hurricane focused. Her wild world stopped spinning. She found her center. The sun broke. The sky cleared. The waters stilled. And in that quiet center she surrendered to a larger calm. She slowly and thoughtfully filled her Aquarian cup.
It was there she found this alternate expression of her being. It was there the vast expanse and torque of the outer storm wound down to its core, the energy focusing steadily into the center, the eye opening, the soul awakening. And in that calm center the kaleidoscope of her heart would begin to stir in its opposite direction, lovely jewels and colored pebbles falling delicately across each other, shifting in her blue-green waters, casting pattern after pattern against the mirrors of her heart, effortless thought after effortless thought, one lovely, unexpected treasure after the next.
Chapter XII - Love Letters
If you wrote my father a letter, he would write you back.
You could count on it. Usually he’d write at length and most likely the same day. He was an utterly reliable correspondent. He showed up in correspondence in the same way he showed up for his joint-custody weekends, effortlessly and consistently. Barring business travel he was there for his sons every weekend of our childhoods, one after the other, year in and year out, dedicated until you almost stopped noticing.
When we were very young, his letters would come for us from his travels. To Master Chris. To Master Adam. They’d be penned on hotel stationery or company letterhead. Their language and tone would be calibrated for our age, letting us know what Poppy was working on so far away, whether his business plans were going to expectation, what work associates in these faraway places he admired or disliked, and what new or amazing things he had stumbled across. “ I watched men wearing kites jump from cliffs this morning!”
Of course he’d tell us when he’d be back, how much he missed us, and how much better it would be if we were there or he were here. The letters had a gentle, gracious spirit – of sacrifice and service for the beloved, of effortless adoration, of longing, and of tender expectations for homecoming.
Love letters.
As a condition of their marriage, my mother insisted, negotiated really, that she be allowed to travel to Europe and Egypt before the wedding in England. There’s some hesitancy writing “allowed to travel,” but it was 1961, and a fear around the balance of matrimonial power was at the heart of it. My mother predicted – and was beginning to read about with disturbing frequency – the collapse of a woman’s freedoms in marriage. She imagined her doors of opportunity closing, a financial and intellectual sequestration, an ominous curtaining, a wall rising. Marriage would be one long string of “I’m really not sure that would best, dear” until she was imprisoned in the basement, scratching her days of captivity into the wet concrete over the washing machine.
The two of them were never in accord on husband-wife roles, the fracture lines in evidence from the start, both of them distrustful of the other, both of them right to be wary, neither able to articulate their anxiety and neither of them up front about it. They also shared the mutual disadvantage of not being particularly good listeners. That the bride disappeared for months before the wedding should have been a clear warning shot, but my father was eager to close the deal, and he agreed to her terms. They set their London wedding date and kissed good-bye. Off she went on her travels, trekking the continents with her sister, as wild-hearted, free-wheeling and vagabond as she.
Marriage would be one long string of “I’m really not sure that would best, dear” until she was imprisoned in the basement, scratching her days of captivity into the wet concrete over the washing machine.
My mother would have spent that winter and spring checking in at the front desks of hotels across Europe and Africa inquiring after those “letters from Barry,” and she would not often have been disappointed. There are so many saved letters from the trip that it is as if he wrote them out of a personal lover’s challenge. He must have penned them nightly, or almost nightly, hunkered over the typewriter the way he did, mouth slightly ajar in concentration, tongue tip delicately scraping the upper teeth, eyes squinting in concentration, stabbing away with his two forefingers, thinking of his bride, forgotten cigarettes burning in the ashtray, the tear-away pages of a daily wall calendar peeling off behind him like in the old movies.
There were even days with multiple letters, carrying news of friends or the tea leaves on some exciting bit of publishing business. There were exact quotes of received compliments from executives he admired, not to mention tender compliments for my mother and his warm, but strategically vague, dreams for their life together.
In the movies that my mother adored, and imagined herself living in, those blue airmail letters would have flown across a map of the Atlantic on animated red trails. She would have watched postal trucks in ten languages and four different alphabets bringing those letters to her. In the rear of frame bicycle postal carriers would have passed the Coliseum, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sphinx to set the scene.
The letters would have fluttered this way and that over the entirety of Europe, my father’s charming back-of-envelope illustrations of rose bouquets tumbling through the air, floating on Parisian updrafts just over her head in the market, flipping past windowsill flower baskets, romantic postal workers in Italy topping them up with extra stamps, the letters slipping into Albanian fig baskets, smuggled across Communist checkpoints, finding their way onto Greek fishing boats, sailing off to island monasteries, fluttering in the sea breeze, pinned beneath open bottles of Metaxa.
*
A decade later, there’s a tragic reprise.
Again there are letters to Europe in droves. But now it’s different. My mother has taken the children to Italy in the fallout of a collapsed marriage. My father is back at his desk and at his blue airmail paper, writing, writing, writing, jolted into sobriety by the family exodus, looking for publishing work in earnest, rebuilding his life in a shell-shocked stupor, surviving in a small apartment on the Upper West Side. And again his lover’s communication rises up becoming almost a force of nature. Again he pens letters to a runaway bride, but now also to their children, the two boys, 7 and 9, letters to them collectively and individually, all of them so far away – and cruelly far away because they were far away on purpose.
Most nights now Juliet is missing at the balcony. Or she’s there, but she’s frowning. Or whispering offstage to her sister or to the ladies-in-waiting. There’s laughter he can’t make out, voices he doesn’t recognize, faces he can’t see. He still rehearses their future in the letters, playing both parts, sweating into his greasepaint, trying to pump life back into the wrinkling balloon of the marriage, into the resentment and disappointment at his exposed magic trick.
My father was still the lover who would always be there, drunk or sober, who would not leave you or cheat on you, who would mate you for life like the rare and exotic bird, who could still write you back every night till the end of time, or charm you and make you laugh, brilliant and funny, and he could still do it like no one’s business. He still had the magician’s patter and panache, but the magic was exhausted. And the magician was exhausted. It just wasn’t enough.
He still rehearses their future in the letters, playing both parts, sweating into his greasepaint, trying to pump life back into the wrinkling balloon of the marriage, into the resentment and disappointment at his exposed magic trick.
The letters to his children that year are charged with the weight of this sadness and loss, too much and often inappropriately for children their age, but they also brim over with love and admiration for his boys, a love that his whole life he would never direct at anyone else with the same confidence and intensity as he did with his two sons.
My father was surprised, blindsided even, by how much he loved his children. He came late to fatherhood and didn’t expect the intimacy and personal connection that he found there. He didn’t anticipate the sense of direct identity he would have with his boys. It’s as if he thought his children would be strangers he would get to know, by and by, from across some agreeable paternal divide, from over the upper edge of the New York Times, or through the rear view mirror angled cleverly into the backseat.
They would have his name and they would be “his” children, but they would be selected at random somehow, from some impersonal child lottery far away, his children arriving with arbitrary personalities and traits, apart from him, cordoned off, a certain preconfigured distance in play from the start, like his not being allowed into the delivery room. And, as it was in so much of his world, so it would be with his children as well. They would be slightly apart, behind a psychological display window. They would be lovely, but not his own – in the same way that other people’s lovely children are lovely – but not your own.
They were so familiar these children. Their intelligence. Their promise. Their wit. Their gentleness. The kind eyes. The childlike delight in the world. They were like a beautiful song he was sure he’d heard before. It was as if they were born on the tip of his tongue.
But when his children were born there was a surprise, almost from the start. He recognized them somehow, inside and out, even if he didn’t know how or from where. They weren’t strangers at all. And this sense of recognition grew and grew, the pattern becoming more apparent to him with every year, drawing smiles from him suddenly and at odd times, when he was on long walks in the city or during business dinners. They were so familiar these children. Their intelligence. Their promise. Their wit. Their gentleness. The kind eyes. The childlike delight in the world. They were like a beautiful song he was sure he’d heard before. It was as if they were born on the tip of his tongue. But from where?
From where? From where?
The answer, anyone could see, was directly before the confounded.
They were his own beautiful features and traits, the ones submerged from his view, or distorted or hidden in plain sight. They were the parts of him that he denied or was spiritually unable to acknowledge. They were parts he diminished or loathed in his own person. These parts of him were like vulnerable children who had been isolated by quarantine, or punishments in closets, or the laughing stocks. They were the parts that held his wit and his promise. They had his kind eyes, his childlike delight. These were the parts of him you couldn’t honor directly or you’d risk accessing a frustration that could rise to anger –almost as if you were mocking him.
But now his most beautiful qualities were sneaking in from behind and around and below like vines. They were flowering up, pulling on his leg, asking to be picked up, looking at him directly and without guile, Love itself moving only inches from his face, pulling off his glasses and laughing, patting his bald head, making the days beautiful with soft smiles and clever children’s thoughts. His having children was not just an opportunity for him to love his children. It was an opportunity for him to love himself. Life had, in its own time and rather effortlessly, outsmarted him.
And for the entire year of scorched earth that his children lived in Italy, in the aftermath of a failed marriage, a failed magazine, months of unemployment, alcoholism, and aching depression, my father, hanging on by a thread, sat down in the evenings after AA meetings and wrote the most beautiful and heartfelt letters of his life to his two sons. He wrote letters charged with his deep sadness but also brimming with warm adoration, with brave calls for courage and fortitude and unconditional love. And without ever knowing it, he also wrote to the quarantined, the ridiculed, and the punished.
Chapter XIII - The Matador
My father wrote to master the world, to make it obey him. He enjoyed the expression of himself in writing and particularly in writing letters – his turns of phrase, his unassailability there, his ownership of the last word, the seductive bon-bon of the put down.
The uglier, bloodier letters were often chivalry skirmishes over humiliations, responding to slights real and imagined. He could stick it back to them in words and an envelope, wind the offender in a twirl of lasso and turn his back to acknowledge the invisible crowd.
He’d make the victim stumble, stick swords in him – or her. He would imagine the brute trying to keep up the fight, its head moving slowly from paragraph to paragraph, glassy-eyed, salivating absently in long strands, tracking the executioner with difficulty because of the enormous blood loss.
My father would always be in control, a step ahead in words and ideas, or he’d change the rules or the entire narrative thread unexpectedly, his complete prerogative as writer. The paper bull was his to play with like a toreador, the pelvis forward, the shoulders back, the red cape flashing ominously just before the last paragraph, the final words delivered as crowd spectacle, tossing away the espada and killing it with a sharp pencil to the neck.
Making it pay.
Making a fool of it.
It.
*
I used to hate those letters the way some people hate bullfights. Having my father read them out loud with such obvious pride was a kind of exquisite torture. They were a spectacle I loathed in my bones, and I made myself a sullen and resentful audience. The better and more cleverly constructed, the more I detested them. I imagined the recipients a single paragraph in, scanning for cc’s to attorneys, and throwing them in the “Barry” pile, not even reading to the sharp, tippy-tip endings.
I hated their grandstanding. I hated their over-the-shoulder fuck-you-on-the-run. I hated the bulls bred to charge in a straight line. I hated the whole say-it-to-my-face problem. The toreador pride. The mincing twirl. The accomplishment of nothing.
I hated that they made me feel like a victim for witnessing. I hated them for a million and a half reasons, both adolescent and adult, fair and unfair. The truth is, I might have preferred he’d try to fistfight his opponents or simply to acknowledge that there was a difference.
Maybe just to respect that there was a difference.
*
But I am the son of a toreador.
And, without my father knowing it, and out of his direct line of sight, I too spent my days in those hot fields, left alone, practicing the father’s art, the younger son in the quiet shade of the older. I wrote my rebel newspaper editorials and my sad stories and my Andalusian songs, buttoning up my black and silver vest, admiring my steely squint in the mirror, testing my paper bulls for ferocity, waving my muleta, arching my back, exposing my vulnerabilities confident that I could protect them at the last moment.
I, too, dreamed of bulls charging down their long dark corridor into my tiny ring where I’d end their lives in an exclamation point. I may see the world through the eyes of my mother, but I write from my father’s Flamenco heart. And like my father, I write for drama and spectacle. And like my father – exactly like my father – I write for the amphitheater.
In his final days, during one of my last visits, my dad sought me out in the shade of the Primogeniture tree, carrying my loose manuscript pages in his hand, walking slowly up our ancient hill, gathering his breath and his final thoughts. Sitting beside me that day and speaking in a simple, clear voice he acknowledged my abilities.
And when he recognized the matador in his younger son, when he handed me his neatly folded red cape and his sharp pencils, well you better believe I accepted them.
On my knees.
Eyes down.
Chapter XIV - The Ending
Grandma died on Valentine’s Day and it was painful for you as for the rest of the family. At odd times you’ll say that you wish she could come back. Or that Winston (our old cat who died last year) could come back. You’re even starting to piece out the loss of a parent. We don’t steer towards or away from the issue. You kind of set the course. You remarked one day that you had cried at her memorial service and I think it came up in your class at school. You were close with her and she adored and admired you.
I’m glad she got to know your spirit and got a sense of your amazing, determined little personality. You got her, too. She was your grandma and your friend. I’m glad the two of you were close even if it will only be in the faintest memories. I can assure you that right now she is not a faint memory although I suspect eventually newer memories will crowd out the specifics and you’ll have only a general sense of her. That’s okay. Your two souls got to dance together for a little bit. She loved you and you loved her.
We had a memorial service for her in February and a funeral in August out in Wisconsin. She was buried alongside my dad in the cemetery of her sister and parents and many, many relatives. I flew out to Minnesota and drove her ashes alone in a rental car across Wisconsin all through the night. I played great music and felt like her hearse driver taking her on her last drive. My mom loved to travel and it was wonderful to take her on her last trip. I heard a Japanese guitarist play an adaptation of Bach’s cello suites, great classic rock, musicals, and a lot of other stuff. She would have had the best time on the ride spending so much time with one of her sons and getting his full attention.
When we got to Wisconsin, we had the funeral. We laid her ashes in her grave. If you’re ever in Wisconsin you should go see her (and your grandfather). They are buried next to each other. Just head to the part of the public cemetery where you hear arguing (and laughter). A bunch of local relatives showed up, along with her brother, Uncle Chris and our cousins Sean and Bruce. It wasn’t a long service. In fact it really wasn’t a service at all. We just created a circle and shared our thoughts about your grandmother. Maybe there were ten of us.
Sean brought a boom box and played a piece of music my mom had once mentioned she wanted played at her funeral. Chris and I played Richie Havens’ Follow. A few years ago I heard Follow in a movie (the exquisite A Walk on the Moon) and bought the soundtrack and shared it with your grandmother when we were in Maine, telling her about this great song I’d found. I told her it was one of my favorite songs in the world and that I couldn’t even put my finger on why I was so deeply moved by it. With a smile my mom went and found the record. She had played it endlessly it turns out for one whole summer while I was still in a crib.
When we hit play on that boom box and this beautiful summer day filled up with Richie Havens’ voice singing, I had one of the few transcendent spiritual experiences of my life. I swear to you that it was like grandma was singing the song and that she was singing about being gone and our hands “tying a knot across the table” and the song made perfect sense as a song of somebody who was gone and completely, utterly free, beyond gravity. It was the most liberated experience of my mother I’ve ever had. I can’t even explain it. It was like she was just flying and soaring to the words. Utterly free. I don’t know what to make of it except to say that it was wonderful. She was telling us (me) she was okay. May you have the same experience when I move on. You may want to play that song. I wouldn’t mind flying around to it myself.
After the funeral we all gathered for food at a nearby restaurant. Everybody got along so well. It was the closest I think I’ve ever been to my cousins. And then I drove back to Minnesota through the night.
It is going to sound strange to say this about the day of your mother’s funeral, but I think it was a perfect day. The whole night I had been so moved driving my mom out to Wisconsin on her last ride. I was completely softened up. Then there was the transporting moment at the cemetery and everyone getting along. It was very sad and yet, strangely, perfect. Heart was soft and open and any day spent soft and open is probably a good day.
*
You are my little angel asleep in the next room. For the next few years you will wake in my house, come cry to me when you are sad, and give me the magical privilege of being your father. I love you, love you, love you. Big squeeze.
I’m going to slip into your room now, stare at you over the crib railing, pull the covers up over your little body, put Curious George under your arm, and thank God for the kindness he’s shined on our life. Bless you, Little One.
Merry Christmas.
Love, Dad
*
And at the end of a thousand and one nights, Scheherazade gathered her two infant children to her side and announced to the sultan that she had no more tales to tell him.
Just like that.
Bravely and just like that.
The tale of Scheherazade is the most beautiful of framing stories. Language carrying the world forward, describing a world worth living in, a world of cunning and beauty and, yes, comeuppance, a world shaped by her education and her history, by her studies in philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments.
And with her words she softened her listener’s cruelty, tamed the beast in him, shifted something in his heart, made his life bearable, awoke a new, better hunger. Scheherazade spooled out her tales, ingratiated herself with her wisdom and her lovely words, and used language to control and shift the sultan’s heart.
And then she surrendered herself into silence to hear if her life would be spared.
(The Disney Log Flume)
What is left of my family’s pictures are contained in a light blue quilted hat box. I have no memories of my mother even wearing a hat that would require a box. A small plastic window on the outside as if someone is going to peek in to see what can be seen without committing to opening the door. Quite appropriate really. The box sat on the top shelf of my mother’s closet , above a collection of outdated dress clothes from days gone by. Like the pictures. My parents never took it down to show us our story.
“…soft in the eyes visible through the screen door…”
“…or in the softness around my brother’s mouth…”
I can continue quoting my favorites,but you know the words. Truthfully the whole piece is simply beautiful . An emotional roller coaster woven through time. Containing an entire legacy of one family’s life and I do believe it has become a part of your legacy to pass to your children. Photos taken, tucked away, archived like a body of work. A museum exhibition from days past.
According to the National Galleries of Art,
“The phrase body of work refers to the production of a single artist,writer,or composer.”
“A permanent collection”can have a span of many years , considered a part of an historical narrative.”
As the caretaker of this collection, you have added your own contribution that will be passed to each generation to come. Passionate, palpable, love.
I know, no comments. I couldn’t help myself. How about you can read my comment , or not. No response necessary.
Ah, just one of the wonderful things about living in Vt !