Sunday’s barbecue at the Finlays.

It was a cloudy, dreary, rainy day – killer conditions for my little Nikon – but here’s Charlie’s graduation in pictures and a slideshow. Though I did receive help, I take responsibility for all the captions.

Linda, Diane’s cousin, comes to town and right away springs Flo from the confines of Concord Park. First, she takes Flo to Village Video to say hi to a startled Matt, and then stops by our house and after a short visit, drives off to bingo in Maynard. Flo hasn’t looked so healthy in months.

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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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

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“The door was open, wasn’t it?”

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

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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.”

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.