My road trip to Indiana and back provided me with another forty hours of Old Time Radio listening pleasure. Add the forty for my previous trip and all those working hours spent with my portable CD player plugged into my head, and I’d say I’ve become a quasi-authority on the subject.

Here (6 MB, playing time about thirty minutes) is my first radio show post. “Dixie Gilian” from the Pat Novak for Hire series starring Jack Webb. Some shows have good dialogue, others superior sound effects, most have implausible story lines. For me, this one has the best dialogue. I’ve listened to it six times and I’m still not bored. I might cut my own CD: a song from Devils and Dust, Dixie Gilian, another song, Dixie again, you can see where I’m going.

A few snippets from the show.

“…down here a lot of people figure it’s better to be a fat guy in a graveyard than a thin guy in a stew, that way you can be sure of a tight fit.”

“She sauntered in moving slowly like a hundred and eighteen pounds of warm smoke.”

*******************
“Good evening”

“Yeah, thanks for knocking.”

“I don’t think you mind me coming in without warning.”

“No, I get the cabbage smell from next door the same way.”

*******************

“When you are finished you’ve been in a lot of tight spots, like a piece of bubble gum in a set of dentures. ”

“Like trying to find a grain of rice in a Shanghai suburb.”

“When I walked in, I knew someone was on the floor. Either that, or they varnished the floor with bourbon.”

*******************
“He couldn’t be moving around with a (bullet) hole in his back.”

“Oh, I don’t know Hellman, you’ve been doing it with one in your head. Don’t sell the guy short.”

*******************

“They fished Hellman out of an oil slick a little while later. It was the first time his hair looked good.”

*******************

“The door was open, wasn’t it?”

“So are a lot of graves, but I’ve never been tempted.”

View image

Easy Riders
A birthday wish

The deepest being being a longing to satisfy a longing for a solitude of two.

Lawerence Joseph

While I was in Evansville a friend emailed this account of a recent night spent enjoying a thunderstorm. Ever-hungry for effortless posts, I cajoled them into letting me post it (actually, for true effortlessness, I emailed it to Adam and asked him to post it for me while I drive). Besides, I loved the story.

Anonymous

The finally-summerlike weather offered quite the thunderstorm show last night, some of it quite impressive, with occasional torrential downpours. We spent almost the entire evening with all our lights turned off, watching the lightning through the windows and skylights and listening to the visceral thunder through the open screens. Laying about in the night heat, with clothes open and emotions dialed up from the storm’s energy and the rain’s sounds and smells, we soon found ourselves enjoying each other in the lightning-strobed darkness, for quite a delicious while. Struck by a whim in the sweaty aftermath, I ran outside naked in the rain to cool off, and stood there feeling quite exposed, but amazing. Shortly after drying off, I was tempted by a particularly dense downpour to immediately reindulge that caprice, and inspired by my persistence my Naked Maja of a wife followed, though more fleetingly. Which led to a celebratory shot of tequila (you’d’a thunk that had come earlier), which prompted an encore of standing outside in the rain, shivering together in our birthday suits. That in turn led to an even more protracted and varied recurrence of the pleasures of the flesh, and finally more laying about lightning-watching. All of which kept us up with the rain and thunder pretty late, and finally to bed quite delightfully exhausted. A wonderful night — we’re never too old to be young.

It’s 4 AM and I’m on the road again.

No subtitles. There are photos of Holiday Retirement Village, some with Helen’s good friend, Ruth Hetzel, and a few of yesterday’s thunderstorm, and one of the bath tech Winnie’s truck, behind my truck.

Gallery

Life After Death

May 1994

My great journalistic contribution to my family is that I write obituaries. First my mother’s, twenty-two years ago, listing her accomplishments: two daughters, three sons. Then that of my father’s second wife, dead of the same disease that killed his first one.

Last week it was my sister-in-law. “Sherry Quindlen, 41,” I tapped out on the keyboard, and then it was real, like a last breath. “When you write about me,” she said one day in the hospital, “be nice.”

For the obit I could only be accurate. The limitations of the form eliminate the more subjective truths: a good heart, a generous soul, who made her living taking care of other people’s children. My brother’s wife, the mother of a teenager and a toddler, who went from a bad cough to what was mistakenly said to be pneumonia to what was correctly diagnosed as lung and liver cancer, from fall to spring, from the day she threw a surprise fortieth birthday party for her husband to the day he chose her casket.

Only days after the funeral her two daughters were shopping together when a saleswoman looked at them and said admiringly, “Your mother must have beautiful hair.”

“Yes she does,” said the elder, who had learned quickly what is expected of survivors.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the cold and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.

Maybe we do not speak of it because death will mark all of us. Sooner. Or later. Or maybe it is unspoken because grief is only the first part of it. After a time it becomes something less sharp but larger, too, a more enduring thing called loss.

Perhaps that is why this is the least explored passage: because it has no end. The world loves closure, loves a thing that can, as they say, be gotten through. This is why it comes as a great surprise to find that loss is forever, that two decades after the event there are those occasions when something in you cries out at the continuous presence of an absence. “An awful leisure,” Emily Dickinson once called what the living have after death.

Sherwin Nuland, a doctor and professor at Yale, has become an unlikely bestselling author with a straightforward, unsparing yet deeply human description of the end of life entitled How We Die, In the introduction he explains that he has written the book “to demythologize the process of dying.”

But I wondered, reading on, if he was doing something else as well. He wrote: “My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death.”

Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life. When the president talks of moving some days to the phone to call his mother, who died in January, he is breaking a silence about what so many have felt. “The hard part is for those of us who’ve kept silent for decades to start talking about our losses,” Hope Edelman writes in her new book, Motherless Daughters. Yet how second nature the silence becomes, so much a rule of etiquette that a fifteen-year-old knows, when her loss is as raw as a freshly dug grave, not to discomfit a stranger by revealing it in passing.

All that she and her sister will become, and much they will not, will be traced later on to a time when spring had finally passed over the threshold of winter and the cemetery drives were edged with pink tulips, shivering slightly in a chill April rain. My brother and I know too much about their future, both teenagers when our mother died; we know that if the girls were to ask us, “When does it stop hurting?” we would have to answer, in all candor, “If it ever does, we will let you know.”

The landscapes of all our lives become as full of craters as the surface of the moon. My brother is a young widower with young children, as his father was before him. And I write obituaries carefully and think about how little the facts suffice, not only to describe the dead but to tell what they mean to the living all the rest of our lives. We are defined by who we have lost. “Don’t let them forget me,” Sherry said. Oh, hon, piece of cake.

The above, the second of three Anna Quindlen articles sent to me by Chris. As I read the last sentence, tears welled up in my mother’s eyes.

“What’s the last one?” Helen asked.

“It’s called Anniversary. Let’s read it out on the porch.”

“No, let’s read it now.”

We’d just finished our oatmeal, coffee and the morning’s crossword puzzle while, as usual, my father scoured his Wall Street Journal.

Anniversary is much longer and I thought it more appropriate to read it in a controlled, comfortable setting. Outside where the storm clouds were a brewin’ . Bundled in the same manila envelope, it arrived with the loudest warning: “’Anniversary’ spoke to me so much it was unbearable to read the first, second and twentieth timeÖ .”

The short story begins, “I needed my mother again the other dayÖ “ and goes on to describe what it means when a mother dies. Pitiful summary, sorry.

I read the whole thing, start to finish, and we both cried throughout. Or I should say Helen cried. I could see the road hazards and knew enough to pause until I could safely pass by. I was okay as long as I kept my eyes glued to the text and didn’t look up at the tears streaming down my mother’s cheeks. I might add I’ve seen her cry maybe three or four times.

Again, this is excerpted from the book “Loud and Clear”. I couldn’t find it on the internet, and it’s too long to type up, but here are three of our stopping points.

“Certainly it is true to say that my father was nearly as lost without his wife as we were without our mother. The difference was that for the widower there is an antidote called marriage.” Helen finished the sentence before I did.

“When I can see myself refracted through the rosy lens of my mother’s love, it melts the self-doubt and brings to life the tiny sanctuary lamp of confidence.”

“And it would never in a million years have occurred to me that twenty-five years later I would be sitting here writing about all this, the dishwasher and the dryer running, my three wonderful children at school, with tears running down onto my sweater as I realize that I would trade all I’ve learned for what I lost so long ago.”

Chris
Here is little Dash in his new home.

Last night, due to thunder and lightening all night, we were up quite a bit. He kept barking in his crate, so I’d take him outside or come downstairs with him. Finally Mark said, at 3AM when I brought the dog in our room and that little thing growled at my cat, “just let him bark”. ( Brought back memories of when Matthew was 7 months old and we were transitioning him to a crib. “just let him cry” said Mark then too) And so we put him back in his crate and he finally stopped barking after a half hour. No accidents at all in the house. He is quite a snuggle bunny with such an expressive face. I was singing to him today and he got the same look humans get when I sing…a very judgemental please stop as he cocked his head back and forth. He knows the word “no” and will stop doing whatever he’s doing when he hears it.

He and Belle are getting along but my poor Midnight. The cat has been under furniture all day today hiding from all of us. He’s disgusted with this new addition. I think the puppy has never seen a cat before as this is the only being that has induced a growl from him. It’s such a girly growl compared to Belle, but it’s enough to get the cat’s back up. There are noises coming from my cat I’ve never heard. He growls too. I don’t know how to make this better and am hoping the vet has some good suggestions. We didn’t let the cat out today because we were afraid he wouldn’t come back. And it’s so damn hot to boot.

I hope tonight brings a more restful sleep. Mark likes the puppy, but he likes his cat better and doesn’t appreciate having to look under furniture for him.

Hobson’s choice is said to have had its origin in the name of one Thomas Hobson (ca. 1544-1631), at Cambridge, England, who kept a livery stable and required every customer to take either the horse nearest the stable door or none at all.

Chris mailed me three Anna Quindlen articles, two of which are included in Quindlenís new book “Loud and Clear.” I read the first “Oh, Godot” to Helen this morning. It reminds me of the speech Malcolm Clarke gave to Charlie’s graduating Deerfield class, because it, too, is a commencement speech. Clarke’s much longer narrative might be summed up as – follow your passion. Quindlen’s might be – find you, be you.

The last two paragraphs:

“Vladimir and Estragon: they just wait and wait for some formless enormous something. And sadly enough, that’s what some of us wind up doing in our lives: waiting for the promotion, or the mate, or the bonus, or the honor, or the children, that will somehow make us real to our own selves. “You see me, didn’t you?” Vladimir asks Godot’s messenger, as though he doesn’t exist unless he registers in other eyes, as though his soul is made of smoke instead of steel.

That is his despair. That is his torment. Learn from him. You are only real if you can see yourself, see yourself clear and true in the mirror of your soul and smile upon the reflection. Samuel Butler once said, “Life is like playing a violin solo in public, and learning the instrument as one goes on.” That sounds terrifying, doesn’t it, and difficult, too. But that way lies music. Look in the mirror. Who is that man? Who is that woman? She is the work of your life; he is its greatest glory, too. Do not dare to dis them by dressing them up in someone’s else’s spiritual clothing. Pick up your violin. Lift your bow. And play. Play your heart out.”

Chris suggested I post the entire article, but I canít find it online and I’m not home to scan it. Plus, scanning sucks compared to typed text. Iííve decided to post a couple more lines that Helen oohed over:

“…too unformed, too fantastic to understand that you were supposed to take on the protective coloration of the expectations of those around you.”

“Whether you are twenty-four or fifty-four, begin today to say no to the Greek chorus that thinks it knows the parameters of a happy life when all it knows is the homogenization of human experience.”

‘We parents have forgotten our way sometimes, too. When you were first born, each of you, our great glory was in thinking you absolutely distinct from every baby who had ever been born before. You were a miracle of singularity, and we knew it in every fiber of our being. You shouted “Dog.” You lurched across the playground. You put a scrawl of red paint next to a squiggle of green and we put it on the fridge and said, “Ohmigod, ohmigod, you are a painter a poet a prodigy a genius,”

To which Helen said, “My parents did the same thing – went ga ga over the most trivial accomplishment. My grandmother would say to my mother, ‘What did you expect? A moron?”

If you look down the long slope of Locust Hill Cemetery, past the ordered grave stones, you’ll see Holiday Retirement Village. On the outside it pales in comparison to the “posh hotel” which is Concord Park. However, once you walk in the door, you feel like you’re back in West Concord. The reception area is a bit larger and more formal, but the dining room is just as elegant with linen table cloths and a view, not to woodsy paths, but to a man-made pond. Water tinted blue for some reason. The piano room, instead of being part of the main sitting area, is a space all to itself. There is also a library, a fitness room, and a meeting room where bible classes are held. That is where the inside similarity ends.

The apartments are far superior. Each has a separate bedroom, a full working kitchen and a living room. The bathroom is just as spacious with a sit down shower-although, get this, eight of the units have bathtubs! (I can’t wait to tell Flo.**) Susan, imagine Flo’s apartment after you cleaned it and Matt’s friends were finished painting. Oh, and add new appliances, and even an above and below washer and dryer. I’m not sure this arrangement would have settled Flo entirely, but the move would have been far more seamless. And, with assisted and independent folk living together, she would have more people to talk to.

** Note to Diane and Susan. I am joking.

I’ll post photos later when Chris’s image editing gift arrives. My Retirement Village gallery looks like I was standing on my head or drunk.

I drove down by the river, past Ellis Park where they race horses, and then under both bridges which cross into Kentucky. I wanted to see in the daylight, what I could only vaguely see in the dark, last year, when I missed my right turn onto Bellemeade. Less mysterious in the light of day, but also people barren, except for an occasional car driving into or away from the closed Park.

After a fashion, I drove to Pennylane , the down-the-street coffee cafe. Pennylane is much like The Continental Cafe in West Acton. Walls with photos for sale; coffee, pastry and a bit more. While I was writing this entry, my mother called me on my cell phone to warn me of an impending thunderstorm. Two of the worst storms to hit the area had both arrived on the 8th of June. The first in 1982 and the second in 1995. She wanted me to come home where I’d be safe.

“Did you think I just talked the tree into that shape?”


I’d helped my father trim the lower branches of the Persian Locust in his front yard and we were returning his long handled limb pruner to the garage. This tree is in the corner of the backyard. Behind it , in another yard, is a similar tree, but one which was never trimmed.

“It’s eighteen feet tall. How do you get up that high?”

“I use a ten or twelve foot tall step ladder”

Add seven feet , the length of the pruner, limit the distance he can hold the pruner’s weight, and you fall well short of the top of the tree. Let’s not even factor his ninety years, his height which used to be six feet but whose head I can now look over. But that has always been my father – doing the unimaginable. Incidentally, he planted the tree in the front yard twenty-one years ago.

Cutting the neighbors lawn in ninety-three degree heat. He pauses ever few feet, scratches his head, looks like he’ll never start up again, but then continues. As his son, it is sad to watch.

Yesterday, Jeffrey and I stopped by The Shoe Carnival after we failed to find RAM for his iMac at Best Buy. I mean, failed to find it at a reasonable price. He’d been running his G3 350 on the original 128 MB’s – running Panther too. I thought that was impossible, and after his description of typing in Word where heíd have to wait for the letters to appear, I suggested we add some. Last night I ordered 512 from Crucial.com.

Anyway, I knew I needed walking around shoes and that’s why I browsed the aisles. I don’t believe Jeff had any intention of buying shoes, but after thirty minutes we had three pairs between us. Every time I picked up a pair, tried them on and said, “This’ll do,” he’d say, “You’re easy.” Then he’d drag me to another aisle and Iíd test another pair and he’d say, “You’re easy.” Before we shuffled over to checkout, Jeff walked up to the manager and said, “We came in here for a single pair of shoes but we’re walking out with three. Is there something you can do for us?” That got us another ten bucks off.

“Mike, let me make you a decent drink. I told Peter when you were here last you’d stumble in, make something awful then stumble out.”

“How about a rain check, Jeff. I need a day to dry out.”

Helen, Mack and I returned six items, mostly books on tape, to the downtown library. It’s brand new, and unlike so many buildings you see in our area,it blended in so well you could hardly tell it was new. Before we settled up, I picked up a movie ( to continue Peter’s spirit) and another book on tape. The first movie I grabbed, with Anthony Hopkins, Helen had seen. What were the chances? The second, a movie I thought I might watch with her, the tragic opera, Dido and Aeneas. However, those six items were only half of what was due, including a book by Nora Roberts that has been missing for a month. They won’t give up Dido until we give them Nora.

Before my father cut the neighbor’s grass, I changed the oil in my truck. I dropped the heavy metal skid plate that prevents access to the oil filter onto the pavement near the front of the truck. When it came time to replace it, it was too hot to touch. Ah, I thought, I’m back in Evansville.

Tomorrow: My visit to Concord Park West.

Captain, Captive

Captain, captive
Of your fate
Fast asleep
On the bed you made
Dream away
Wake up late.

Samuel Menashe

I don’t have a photo editing program so for once I have to post exactly what I’ve snapped, and without an editor, I have to post what I write, and without anything dramatic happening …well, you know where I’m going.

My bed

Out back

The review of The Letters of Robert Lowell is compelling read. I was drawn in by the length of this sentence in the opening paragraph.
“The publication two years ago of Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s massive edition of the Collected Poems did much to restore his work to public and critical view, but even now Lowell’s poems are, I would guess, less widely read, taught, and anthologized than those of his two friends and contemporaries Elizabeth Bishop and John Berrymanóa judgment, if that is what it is, that would have astonished serious readers of poetry between the 1950s and the 1970s.”