Early Photo of Outsmarted Son Sulking Next to Carolyn
Time and time again, Carolyn has proven—thirty years beyond the death of her spouse, through a stroke, day in and day out after the onset of dementia, right up to last evening—that now no matter how many times the disease shaves off another thin slice of her mind, all it succeeds in doing is to expose another vein of precious ore that it might shimmer in the light.
I have followed the Chicago Bulls since Jerry Sloan, Chet Walker, Bob Love, Tom Boerwinkle, and Norm “Stormin’ Norman” Van Lier were starters in the early seventies. I have seen the Bulls put together many entertaining teams, yet the team has never been more charming than in this 2021-2022 NBA season. We’ve had characters and “greats” but never a team so inspired by love.
With this team, the shop-worn metaphor of chemistry catalyzes into magic. The players do not always succeed in hiding the joy and delight that wells up inside them from the chance to exercise and display their God-given talents, believing in the brotherhood of their team, and seizing on the potential for love in what—as former Bull player and current Bull announcer, Stacey King, routinely asserts on air—is “a simple game”. It seems like when they’re out on the floor they’re always smiling.
Carolyn played ball in high school and college. She coached ball in her first years of teaching in Scales Mound, Illinois, after graduating across the Big River in Dubuque.
At ninety-two, Carolyn enjoys watching the sport not a little but a lot, almost too much. Her eyesight is preternaturally acute. To this day, I believe, she could count the veins on a dragonfly’s wing. I imagine it makes it extra tiresome to see things that keenly. And people who know my mother, knows she does not get half-way involved in anything.
Earlier this year, DeMar DeRozan, the Bulls’ leading scorer, treated Carolyn, me, and other fans to two back-to-back buzzer beaters where he won both games in dramatic fashion in the closing seconds. Two of them! Each behind the three-point arc! Fully engaging in the drama from tipoff to dramatic or disappointing finale, as Carolyn does, no matter how old you are, is going to wear you down. That she has the stamina and is even eager to watch—after four high scoring quarters, half-time, and 1,400 Geico commercials—the post-game show amazes me. Sure, the analysts, Kendall Gill and Will Perdue, have stepped up their game but, they could walk on balls while juggling bowling pins, it’s still a post-game show. I don’t get it. Maybe Carolyn needs it as a diver needs a hyperbaric chamber to decompress and stave off the bends.
And this happens regularly even after her sons and her caregivers cruelly, surreptitiously like cowardly thieves switched the grounds used to brew her late-night cup from regular to decaffeinated.
Last night I dialed to ask her permission to visit and watch the game. Usually, I don’t dial. I just drop in, often bringing soup from Panera or rice and fish from home. I take my laundry with me and then I attempt to inveigle Carolyn into watching a game.
(should have looked this up years ago)
“Inveigle” is mom’s word, not mine. The word amuses or charms her in some way that I don’t completely understand though I have observed its effect on her many times. It is perfectly apt for my purpose. To say, “Mom, can I inveigle you into watching a Bulls game with me?” is the quickest way to “yes” or “sure that would be fine”.
Most doting mothers, I imagine, don’t need inducement or any inveigling. Whatever the reason when I called, I didn’t resort to using the mantra word, inveigle. Maybe I thought unleashing it between mother and son was dirty pool, in violation of the Geneva Convention, or merely a sad example of unsportsmanlike conduct.
I asked her meekly instead “if it would be alright to come over and watch the game”.
“Oh, son, it cheers my heart to hear your voice and receive your call. Nothing in the world makes me happier to be with you and my other son, Jim. And I’ll look forward to hearing from you again tomorrow when you call,” she said.
“Yes, mom. I love you too,” I said.
“Oh, how I love you!” she said.
“Good night, mom,” I said.
“Bye,” she said cheerfully on a rising Southern note.
That’s how Carolyn Poplett blows off her son. She’s been doing it for decades.
Returning from a road-trip that kept me away for two weeks, I knew to expect that my mother, Carolyn, who is fast approaching her 92nd birthday, would impress me with how dementia had robbed another tiny piece of her mind. It’s hard to go away without some dread of the return, knowing how she depends on the society of her two sons.
If nothing else, our company and a steady stream of visits retard somewhat her decline. My brother, Jim, and I will swap turns watching Gunsmoke with her, the longest running show in television history, co-created by John Meston, a screenwriter who authored 379 Gunsmoke episodes himself some time after riding broncos in Colorado and attending Dartmouth, Harvard, and the Sorbonne in Paris. If you want to know why that show is deep, John Meston and an envious liberal arts education had something to do with it. It’s a good thing since Carolyn has undoubtedly looped through 379 episodes more than once, while the rest of us, her caregivers, Mariya and Lyn, and two sons could only claim the half.
I’ve watched all six interviews of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers, a TV series called The Power of Myth (which you can buy on Amazon Prime for the princely sum of twelve bucks). Campbell was caught up with mythology early as a boy when he saw a live performance of Buffalo Bill at Madison Square Garden. It sealed his fate. He dove into Native American mythology, rites, and religious customs and didn’t stop until he had canvased the globe.
Carolyn and I have viewed each episode in that series together at least once, some two or three times. Even when she can’t remember my name, a narrative as profound and abstruse as Campbell’s survey of world cultures, religions, and archetypes and myth which, he argues, ground all of human experience, inching us closer to the edge of what is humanly knowable and therefore to God, and Moyer’s dogged persistence in fully animating Campbell’s explanations and replies, grips her mind and reaches deep down inside her to find a place where her intellect remains vibrant and intact. I’ve seen this reawakening many times. To experience it feels akin to a miracle like a flower unfolding before your eyes with the trick of time lapse photography.
Emerging from the bathroom one evening at the one of these episodes, after a change into her pajamas, adorable in her stockinged feet planted on the foot rests of a wheelchair, Mariya paused briefly to give Carolyn a chance to bid me good night.
“You know that man on the show we were watching?”
“I sure do, mom.”
“What he’s been saying is important. You need to tell other people about him.”
“Yes, mom. I agree. Believe me. I’m trying.”
I needed to make that trip though. I had friends to visit and the honor of an all-expenses-paid artist residency at Wildacres in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. My fears of how I might find my mother were soon realized.
I gave her the briefest of rundowns on where I had been and a few of the places I had visited. It was difficult for her to understand what her Yankee son was doing galumphing about her beloved childhood state. It must have been confusing. Why was I there and not her?
Carolyn no matter how much difficulty she’s having in the moment with her memory, refuses to come up short in conversation. I am utterly charmed by her strength of will. This time she decided to co-opt my story and turn it into her own.
I explained how, on the way down, I passed through the area around Boone, NC and saw some friends in Deep Gap.
“Guess where I went on the return trip?”
“Burnsville?” [Burnsville is one of the many towns in Western North Carolina where Carolyn and her siblings shared a home as children.]
“Not this time, mom. But I do go there a lot. I grabbed a bite of dinner next to The Boone Tavern Inn and Berea College where your sister Ginny went to school. I always like to go there. It feels like I am saluting your sisters. Didn’t Aunt Mary Lib and Sally go there too? You always liked to talk about how Ginny had one of her paintings on display for years in one of the campus buildings.”
[And here’s where the conversation went slightly off the rails.]
“Well, I think your mother would be proud of you,” she said.
“You do? Mom, I thought you were my mother. Who do you think I am?”
“Well, I think you live in a lot of people’s minds.”
“I see. I love that thought, mom. I love that idea. I believe it is true and I have similar thoughts all the time. [And here again was yet another time where I got a hard glimpse into how much she had informed my being. It was like opening a closet and seeing a ghost.].
“How about if we talk about going out for a little supper?”
“Well, I just got back from… uhm, Boone and then I went to Berea after that,” she said.
“Mom, we don’t have to talk about our travels. What I’m trying to talk about is super banal. We’re just discussing where we should go to get some supper.”
[Hell will freeze over two or three times before she will concede her part in a conversation or come up short without a repartee.]
“Oh, well, I think that’s very important. I like that idea. Let’s think about that instead. I don’t know any of the places around here like you do, George,” she said. [George was one of Carolyn’s beloved brothers].”
Then, with hilarious cunning, “Where would you like to go?”
[Leaving me to wonder, how many times she had pulled a like ruse on me before, a Southern gal trumping her dim-witted Yankee son, feigning to graciously relinquish the prerogative to me, in this case, the choice of restaurant, though at this stage I could see clear through her deception: that she couldn’t think of a dining spot, not even her long-running favorites, Citrine or Hemmingways, in our hometown of Oak Park, to save her soul.]
“Well, we we could go to Citrines. You might not remember. We went there the week they first opened. You liked it so much you wanted to go back the next night.”
“Did I really?”
“Yes, I reminded you, at the time, that we had just gone there but we decided to go back anyway. That’s how much you like it there. And we always share the beet salad.”
“Mom, I want to watch a baseball game when we get back from dinner but I don’t want to watch it if you don’t want to watch it. All I can tell you is that playoff baseball is like nothing else. It’s operatic. A slow-paced drama only there are charges of dynamite hidden all over the field. You never know when one of those charges is going to go off. A game can lull you while the pitchers engage in a subtle duel for innings and then, out of nowhere, kaboom! One of them goes off. It could be a play at the plate, a double play, a home run, a stupendous catch to keep the ball from going over the fence, stolen bases. Playoff baseball is unpredictable in every way except that it is predictably amazing. And the camerawork nowadays is better than ever.”
“How do you know so much?”
“Mom, I don’t. My knowledge is about half a centimeter deep. It’s your other son, Jim, who knows baseball. How could he not? He’s a Cubs fan.”
“Is he really?”
“Yes, trust me, mom. When we watch a game with Jim, you’ll see. It’s a lot of fun. Wait till he mimics Harry Caray and Steven Stone. You know what a good mimic he is.”
“Is he?”
“Yes, mom.”
“Can I pay the check now?”
“It’s already paid. You can hold your head up high. You don’t have to worry about your son going home malnourished or fainting on his way to the car.”
“Oh, that’s good. We wouldn’t want that.”
“Right, mom.”
At home, that evening, Carolyn had a conniption, a series of rapid fire angry, almost rageful outbursts of an intensity that hasn’t visited her in years, maybe even since she faced the humiliation of having to use a walker for the first time (it’s a wonder she didn’t hurl that thing through one or many walls). She refused to join my brother and me in the den (highly unusual) and instead inexplicably insisted on returning to the bathroom. Popping out of the bathroom a little later, there was nothing left for her to do in there, she avoided the den, more strangely than the first dodge, going to the kitchen to avoid us. She was—to use her own expression—”so mad she could spit bullets”; those that she did spit were aimed at Mariya.
I went in to back her up. “Mom, this is not like you. What’s the matter? This isn’t you. What’s bothering you, mom? Do you know?”
She didn’t. I couldn’t figure it out either1Jim later figured out that a reduction in strength of a medication triggered the upset. She’s back on a full-dose now.. I didn’t expect her to. I just wanted to jog her out of her upset. She calmed down. People who know her know her know that she cannot stray to far from grace. The instant she started to recover. She apologized to Mariya, the ease and naturalness of it utterly familiar and yet at the same time a display of character to excite wonder. It happens quite often—albeit with less drama—and I’m always quite amazed. A moment or two later, after Mariya moved away, she looked at me and said, “I love you and Jim more than anything in the world. You mean so much to me.”. It was sweet and sincere but also was here apology and way of saying “I know I kind of lost it; please don’t runaway.”
As if, my brother or I could ever entertain such a thought.
1
Jim later figured out that a reduction in strength of a medication triggered the upset. She’s back on a full-dose now.
Routinely in the sixties and early seventies my parents would load me up with my kid brother in a borrowed station wagon and buzz down from Chicago to Asheville, NC as fast as centrifugal force and the likelihood of sliding sideways over the edge of a mountainous road would allow.
Dad always drove and he always seemed to be in a hurry, my guess, now with the benefit of hindsight, is that vacation didn’t quite begin for him until he had dumped his offspring off with his parents-in-law so that he might slake his thirst for alone time with his young and pretty bride.
He was not a hover parent. Hover parents had not yet been invented. Nor for that matter was there such a phrase as free-range parents though that expression retroactively comes much closer to describing our parents’ parenting style. Nor were they overconcerned with the quality of the quality time we might be having with the grandparents in their absence.
I don’t recall mom and dad dallying long enough to take the grandparents out to supper. They didn’t linger, not even briefly to pause on the front porch. It was magnanimous of them really to slow down and stop the car long enough for us to step out onto the curb with our belongings.
Canonical Stuckey’s Billboard
The trip down in consequence was a blur. Dad didn’t believe in stopping anywhere. Certainly not at Stuckey’s to get one of their pecan logs made famous to my brother and me by their billboards which popped up every fifty feet or so along the side of the road for the whole trip south.
A Brick of Black Cat Firecrackers
He didn’t believe in stopping at trading posts either where one could purchase a leather jacket with fringe just like the one Tonto wore, sparklers, black cat firecrackers, cherry bombs and M-80s, in case you had an urge to see if they were as potent as your cousins had bragged about and you really could blow up a porcelain toilet. We didn’t stop for arrowheads, rubber tomahawks, bow and arrows, postcards of virgin Indian maidens, beads, moccasins, bears in cages, any of that cool stuff.
These roadside attractions were “tourist traps” according to our father. We always passed by the Gap and only heard of a mythical location where three states converged to a point. Even as young children, we understood that a point was a mathematical concept, an abstraction more than a location, but we wanted to see it anyway.
So, the myth of the three states converging to a point survived those many trips down south. Survived my childhood, survived my grandparents.
As an adult, while on my own pilgrimages to Western North Carolina, I sometimes took a side excursion to Cumberland Gap just because I could, to enjoy the cozy nestled-in feel of the place, a tiny hollow snug with the mountains with a population that dares not exceed 500 persons and a tiny white clapboard chapel which for decades has wed elopers darting in from neighboring states.
This year I was zooming past on my return from the 2021 edition of the Wildacres Writer’s retreat, it was a fabulous and productive time (if you’re a writer you need to check it out), when my eye caught a sign for the Gap, I gave a whimsical flick of the wheel and steered my van in the indicated direction. Only I forgot that it begins with the apprehension that you are traversing the parking lot of a coin-operated laundromat before the road starts looking like a proper road with a lane in each direction for traffic.
Once the road starts looking like a road, it is a charming little descent into town. I had a sandwich at a pub before driving to a trailhead, remembering that while I had been to that spot before I had no recollection of hiking the trails. The only way to remedy that was to hike up one and settle it for all time.
Cap Creek Coffeehouse
I left the lot briefly to tank up on coffee at the Gap Creek Coffeehouse, two blocks into town before returning, parking again, and starting my ascent.
If you travel the U.S. a lot on roads, you will pass by dozens and dozens of small towns with “historical” downtowns and districts. You will rapidly conclude that we, as a nation, are historically addled. I wonder how Europeans might take it if they ever toured the states by motorcar. Three burgs into it and they would be convulsing with laughter if not peeing in their pants.
It would be ironic enough for a person coming from Paris or Prague, imagine instead a resident of Athens who can look out a window to see soaring above the fence in his backyard, the Parthenon. Yet, despite the relative youth of our nation, we have our sites that can inspire awe. (If you have any doubts, plan your next trip to the civil-war battlefield of Antietam in Maryland.
A historic marker with a AAA rating
On the trail, I quickly came to a sign explaining that Daniel Boone and some others had pioneered the gap as a passageway that broke through the Appalachian Mountain range permitting settlers to reach deeper into the interior of a vast, untamed wilderness in search of a new life. Their feet tread where might feet tread. They brought their families, the more privileged of them might have a horse to share. They came over in the gap in the winter DELIBERATELY so they could be ready to plant at the first sign of spring. You quickly formed the idea that these people were desperate in a way we’ve lost a knack for grasping, who must have had stories of hardship like the people who brave the Rio Grande and at great risk come over the border from Mexico.
When it staked the all-too-familiar “historical” claim, I was all in. The legend had already convinced me that I was on hallowed ground.
I turned to the fork that put me on the trail to the three-states peak, which immediately took me past the ruins of an early iron foundry that looked more like a grain than a steel mill. The remaining structure could have been part of a Mayan ruin.
The trail turned sharply up hill. A signed promised me it was 1.2 miles to the peak. Peak makes me think of a bald surface with a crown of snow around it like the head of a monk. It also makes me think that there was a bit of a climb in store.
I greeted a young couple coming down the path toward me with the question, “was it worth it?” only aiming to tease out a little encouragement, an old, usually reliable trick. The girl assured me it was a challenge and gave me a winded look to back it up. This put her guy friend in a quandary. How could he encourage me but not encourage me at the same time? What if I had a heart attack half-way to the top—in part due to his dubious advice—that would saddle his conscience for the rest of his breathing days? I could see the gears turning inside of his skull. Then, he said if I was in good hiking shape it shouldn’t be too much of a struggle.
It made me wonder, did I look that old and fragile? And then I thought that I had just come from a few moderately strenuous hikes in North Carolina, a pair of them along the length of the Deer Lick Trail, all uphill up until the turning point, a scenic overlook by the side of the Blue Ridge Parkway, with friends Art, Tucker, and Jane, and that people tended to underrate me anyway. I left them feeling freshly emboldened.
The next couple was more encouraging but left me with the ominous warning, “when you see a bench along the side of the trail, use it.”
It took me what seemed like a long time to reach the bench and when I did, I didn’t feel like stopping. I pressed on with the immediate effect of wondering what level of bone headedness caused me to ignore well-meaning advice and pass up on a chance to collect myself.
For most of the climb, I enjoyed the foreboding rumble of thunder from distant mountains. Now somewhere past the half-way mark, it started to drizzle. The trees on the side of the mountain mostly protected me from the rain even as it picked up tempo. Instead of moisture, doubt started to seep in. I had visions of breaking out into the clearing of the mountain peak in time to get skewered by a bolt of lightning.
Triumph!
I pressed on. My interior monologue of braggadocio alone would not permit me to slink down the mountain now. The rain picked up, turned into a downpour. I didn’t exactly see the point of running out to expose myself. I could see light from a break in the trees ahead indicating I might be coming toward the peak. Then I saw a gazebo roof! What was a gazebo doing way up here? I broke for it. If need be, I could weather the storm under cover. Then, I realized the gazebo crowned the peak. I had made it.
Looking down at my feet, there was a marker put there by the United States Geographical Service marking the exact spot where the three states came together, a casual affirmation of a boyhood fantasy. Woohoo! Sometimes dumb luck is the cleverest thing going.
U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey Triangulation Station, the (formerly) mythical point where Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee converge
Inaugural East Coast Cascade Campers Owners Convention
I was among the privileged few, there were ten of us in all, to bring my Cascade Camper campervan to Western Virginia to convene for a few days of birds-of-a-feather style camaraderie combined with interludes of revelry. It was—to be precise—a “hoot”.
The Cascade Camper van is a modernized reimagining of a Westfalia camper, sporting damn near identical features—birchwood paneling, a stove, a sink with running water, and on-board “house” power—combined with features VW microbus owners could only dream of—passing power, anti-lock brakes, A/C, seat belts with shoulder straps!, .etc.
In the last few miles before reaching the meeting place for our shindig just outside of Glenville, WV., I got lost. It wasn’t the first time I had invested too much trust in my GPS in a rural setting. In fact on both occasions, the GPS tried to guide me down roads which narrowed to a point so fine it would make a tight squeeze for a salamander. Only this time I came upon a private property / no trespassing sign. I stopped immediately, taking it as an omen. I was starting to turn back when two men in a short bed pickup truck with a lift kit pulled up in front of me. I put down my window to exchange a friendly greeting. Instead the driver, whom in retrospect, I think, either suffers from paranoid delusions or was trying to hide a meth lab, or both, told me I was on a private road. I explained that I was lost and apologized. When I attempted to drive off, he feigned to back up his truck to block me and barked thunderously, “No!”. My friend forced me to explain every detail of how I got lost, frequently stopping to editorialize and let me know how stupid I sounded. For example, I told him my destination was Little Bull Run Road. He asked me if I saw the sign at the start of the road we were on. I said, “Yes”. He said, “Did the sign say Little Bull Run Road?” I acknowledged it did not. It was a hollow or a holler, depending on your pronunciation, something like Bloody Possum Holler, though I forget now. This pattern of interrogation dragged on for quite a while. If it was only intended to make me feel like a jackass, I’d deem it a wild success.
I’d also deem it a nasty way for one fellow to treat another fellow.
I yearned to say to him that, if he was Christian, this must be an off-day. Instead, with the tiny bit of good sense God blessed me with, I reeled it in. I simply repeated that I was lost and told him he wasn’t being nice. He took down my name, my number, the name of my host, and his number too. He claimed to know everyone in the region but didn’t recognize the name of my host, the the family has been there for generations. It was every kind of awful. He was so angry and pissed off, I felt he could turn to violence. When he threatened to call the police, I said I told him everything there was to know and he would be just wasting his time. He said he had all the time in the world.
He seemed so intent on detaining me I was surprised when he let me pass. Even now, I get a pretty big shot of adrenaline describing this.
Free, I shot off in a new direction and prayed that the GPS would find a different way this time. It did. I met the host coming out to look for me just short of the camp site. Seeing friendly faces around a bonfire under the stars with a bottle of bourbon to pass around was such a relief and blessing, it made my moment of terror, believe it or not, seem worth my while.
From that point onward, I met scads of West Virginians who met my expectation for Southern manners and hospitality, and confirmed what I wanted to believe that my first acquaintance was an anomaly, a sad person who did not represent much if anything of the Mountaineer state.
This is not to say that my encounter didn’t continue to disturb me. It still does. Not for how he behaved but because I didn’t want to pin it all on him. I don’t want to judge him. I don’t want others to judge him because I tell this story. I have Scotch-Irish blood. I’m part hillbilly, descendants of a clan loyal to William of Orange (where the “billy” comes from). I don’t want this to go down as a story about stereotypes.
Today I read this quote from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.
A man’s character is his fate.
Now there’s something. A man’s character determines what will happen to him next and where it all leads to. The Greeks were all amped up on this idea. Sophocle’s Oedipus Rex is a story about a king who has a premonition that he’s going to sleep with his mother. He goes way the heck out of his way to avoid his fate, but winds up sleeping with her anyway. Only that SO never happened. It’s a myth after all, a fiction, and more powerful for it. But, brother, does it drive home the idea that our character is our fate.
It’s a deliriously curious thought. Normally, we’re used to assuming that “[certain] things happen to us”. Yet Heraclitus is saying that certain things happen to us because of who we are. That’s a very different idea. We attract events that match our personalities. That’s just wild.
As I drove home from the Inaugural East Coast Cascade Camper Owners convention, it struck me clearly: I’m adventure prone. Yes, it’s punning on the phrase “accident prone” but it really is it’s own thing.
I started looking back on it and it is something I simply “do”.
It is part of the reason I own a van. I don’t like threats but I’m okay with challenging circumstances. I think they breathe life into me. I guarantee just anybody who owns a Cascade Camper is adventure prone. Bully for them. It’s a marvelous thing.
Below are a few typical adventures that came while traveling in my van, Atma, excerpted from the current draft of the The Unofficial Cascade Camper Campers Owner’s Manual, which add credence, I feel, to the adventure-prone hypothesis.
The quad on the college campus where my friend teaches English literature was eerily pristine. The grass was uniformly clipped, uniformly green, uniformly void of thatch, dandelions, brown patches, or weeds of any kind. It was kempt. Nobody walked across it. Nobody played Frisbee or Hacky Sack upon it. Its prissiness was a warning sign like the skull and crossbones on a jar of arsenic.
I took my hat and shirt off discreetly at the foot of an array of pillars, tall, fluted marble columns rescued from a failed regional bank, repurposed to symbolize the schools ten most cherished principals. Pillars as “pillars”, get it?
The concrete stairs at the base of the pillars dropped down onto the grassy edge of the quad. I slunk down toward the grass and rested my head—with my book bag for a pillow—on the bottommost stair. Short of freckles and a straw of grass to suck on, I was Huck Finn.
I had barely relaxed when a menacing shadow passed over me, my own personal eclipse of the sun, provided by the burliest of three, armed campus security officers. Uncomfortably supine and vulnerable, I scrambled to get on my feet.
Scene of the “Incident”
The burly officer with practiced calm ordered me to move slowly and keep my hands fully in view. The officers had snapped into positions relative to each other at odd distances from my body: the burly one, closest to me, another a short distance behind his back while the third, a female cop, hovered a longer distance away from me, perhaps ten feet on the opposite side.
Somewhere there was a chart in cadet school that defined this formation, its exact angles and officer-to-perp distances.
I was aware at a level just beneath articulate thought that they were enacting a protocol for handling armed and dangerous individuals and obligated to treat me as an agent of death. The officers all packed heat on their hips whereas I did not possess anything capable of generating deadly force, not even a peashooter. I was the only person in this ad-hoc congregation who had a statistically significant chance of getting shot, tazered, or thrown to the ground with my chin grinding in the dirt. It seemed like an extreme response for a guy whose most egregious act on that day was pulling off his shirt.
The female cop in the backup position explained that, once somebody on campus had “phoned me in”, regulations required them to investigate and file a report. She asked me if I could understand how a person might be alarmed to see a half-naked man on the campus.
I sympathized. It sounded bad to me too until I realized she was lumping me in with all those half-naked people who remove their clothes from the waist down.
Perspective mattered. I was tempted to ask her if I was half-naked or half-clothed. But Wisenheimers are always the first to wind up with their chins in the grass.
They wanted an alibi. I fumbled for a long time with my phone dreading what might happen if I failed to find the number.
When my professor friend picked up, I was relieved to hear her tell the officer, ‘Tell John to put his shirt back on.’ Maybe now they would not handcuff me to a hot water return pipe in the boiler room.
The next day I had a peek at a million-dollar painting in the campus fine arts museum right next to the quad and the scene of the crime.
John the Baptist, more than half-naked
It is a rare painting, I am told, of John the Baptist, a fantastic prize for a Christian university. Only this John is buff, slender but ripped, looking like a New Testament Adonis in a robe that is teasingly about to slide off his hips. He is not half-naked, more like three-quarters going on full. If there’s a parable there, I’ll be damned if I know what it is.
On Atma’s maiden voyage, after stops in the Sonoran Desert and the painted rock national monument and the Carlsbad Caverns in southern New Mexico, I took a short detour outside of Austin, Tx to visit the Longhorn Cavern State Park on my way to my destination in Houston.
On the approach, I made note of a turn-out to a scenic view, vowing to investigate it out on the way back. The entrance to the cave itself was shrine like and spectacular, a nature-made atrium of boulders weathered smooth over millennia, some vast period of time. I shrank from the opportunity to go into the cave. I wanted an excuse to come back and bring a friend.
I drove back to the turn-out that had promised a scenic view. The best spot to access the view was in the fat center of an elliptical loop at the end of a short drive, past a stand of brush and trees. It was desolate with an air of abandonment and neglect. On the return side of the loop was a car pulled completely off the road into rough grass. I thought whoever came along with that car was up to no good. The view stretched out over a valley to distant hills with an easy, self-satisfied bucolic splendor. Hill country.
I spent some time getting Atma parked off of the road so the passenger side sliding door would open up over the vista. As I circled around the van to get to a steel garbage can and its chained lid, a disembodied voice rose out from the vicinity of that car. It was a man’s voice and he was saying that he couldn’t move and needed help.
I decided immediately that there was a fifty percent chance that this guy really needed help and the other fifty percent was that this was a setup and the guy or a few of his buddies lurking nearby were armed with guns.
Still, it seemed like bad form to refuse a person help when he asked for it so plainly.
I decided to circle around his car so I would come up on him from behind and get a look inside the car on my approach.
“I’ve got a bad back and I need my paints from the back seat,” he said, flicking his head towards the back. It was a four door. I was going to have to open the rear driver’s side door to fetch him his paints.
“I’m Tommy. I come up here every day. I drove all the way out here from Myrtle Beach, Florida to be with my husband. He’s the only man I trust. It’s a long way to go in a condition like this. See that tree over there. I come up here every day to paint that tree. I talk to that tree. And you know what? The tree talks back. I know I’m crazy. Don’t let me scare you because I’m crazy. I’m a painter. I paint signs and sometimes take along a helper to carry my supplies. One time a man come up to me outside a little place I had where I kept my supplies and hit me over the head with a pipe. That’s the reason I’m all bent up like this. He destroyed the nerves. It’s why I can barely walk. It took a lot of surgeries to put me back together. And you know what? I knew that man. A long time after I got out of the hospital, I remembered his face and knew who he was.”
“Did you confront your attacker?” I asked him. I felt like I already knew Tommy well enough to guess the answer.
“Yes, I did. I asked him why he did it. And you know what he told me? He said he needed $500 to pay a gambling date. And I said, ’man, you should have told me. You know, I would have given you the $500. You didn’t have to do that. He said he was sorry.”
Then, I asked him if he forgave him. I felt like I knew the answer to that too.
“Yes, I did.”
Tommy (Atma in the background)
I marveled at Tommy for having no hint of resentment in his story, neither in the words he chose or the timbre of his voice, even though the guy who attacked him had left him unconscious and crippled for life. Tommy could still walk but just barely. It was a courageous feat for him to stand-up just so he could take a few paces to keep from getting stiff.
I still didn’t know what he meant when he declared himself a painter. I knew he came out to paint this one particular tree and the result was a bit like a Van Gogh with the shape of the tree described in vertical lines made luminescent and wavy by a mysterious internal source of electricity. It wasn’t a mighty oak or a redwood. Its trunk was no bigger than a man’s thigh. It stood in among a stand of others. Yet, it was the tree that spoke to Tommy.
I guessed Tommy painted houses in his spare time to fund his artistic study of this tree. Then, he got me to pull out a portfolio of his paintings from the passenger footwell in the back of his car. They were amazing.
Notes on the Ken Burns / Lynn Novick 6-hour documentary on Hemingway
The documentary aired over three days from April 6 – April 8, 2021 on PBS.
Moral of the story: don’t drink alcohol (straight or in any of its diluted forms), a tendency for ideation and alcohol don’t mix. It is—at the very least—a cautionary tale for male American writers and anybody who might wish to date or marry one.
Papa was a war profiteer. He used war far too much as a way to generate fodder for his stories. He didn’t write strenuously against it as did O’Brien, Vonnegut, or Heller. Instead, his mannish example seduced J.D. Salinger to volunteer. In his tour of duty, J.D. permanently and severely scrambled his brains. It was no doubt part of the reason he was unkind and such a creep to so many women. That’s part of Papa’s heritage too.
Papa created innumerable “echo” traumas like this.
The persons (more particularly, male writers) who profit from Hemingway’s example—either as a man or as a writer—and come out of it unscathed are scant in number. Tim O’Brien could be one. Salinger, most definitely, not. Elmore Leonard, for sure. Elmore Leonard copped Hemingway’s telegraphic writing style but recognized and avoided the deadly humorlessness in Hemingway’s writing. The emphasis here goes on “deadly”.
Hemingway did not die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound as has generally been reported; he died of conjunctivitis. (Ha-ha.)
Elmore Leonard, as a writer, is a stunning omission from the Burns / Novick series as is the impact of his example on other writers who drew inspiration from him or attempted to emulate any aspect of his persona. Mostly, he is a pathetic sot, boorish and abusive. It doesn’t look like he knew how to do anything with his hands other than work a fishing reel, fire a gun, clean a fish, lift a highball glass, or run his hand up a woman’s skirt. Could he cook, hang a painting, mow the lawn, change out a set of spark plugs, or unclog a sink? Naw.
If the series seems too quick and too laden with adulation, sympathy, and praise, it is also—it seems— part of a profiteering enterprise: the Hemingway industry. I know. I live in its midst. My apartment is on the same street, just a few short blocks away from his childhood home. His birthplace and a museum in his name are equally close at hand. Last night, in the early evening, I went to Hemmingway’s [sic] Bistro with my mother, Carolyn, to sneak in a meal before the final episode in the three-part, six hour series aired. The owners, Chris and Lucia, old friends of the family, dropped by to say hello. It was our first time back since the pandemic scared us off over a year ago. The bistro is an oasis in Oak Park, one of its finest eateries. We had escargot and whitefish. For a long time it has served as my—to borrow one of Papa’s titles—”clean well-lighted place”. Chris (who is also Hemmingway’s chef) reminded me how he was forced to bung an extra “m” into his restaurant’s name to evade further lawsuits emanating from “the estate” which owns the trademark for Papa’s surname. As the boxing promoter once said, “Only in America”.
Tobias Wolff’s rearranged the furniture metaphor, evoked to emphasize just how extensive Ernest Hemingway’s influence is on American arts and letters, doesn’t get the job done. It is far too gentile. Hemingway re-arranged the furniture, sure. But he busted up a lot of it, left a lot of broken glass on the floor, and a fornicating brood of six-toed, Lucifer worshiping cats overrunning his little hacienda.
Fighting, fishing, and fucking, the 3Fs, a couple of my college chums liked to call them. It’s too bad that “wallowing in self pity” doesn’t start with an “F”. Then we would have the 4Fs.
So, in addition to rearranged furniture, there is the broken glass, the devil’s brood of six-toed cats, the compromised or destroyed lives of his many wives and children and generations of poor dumb male writers who were seduced into adopting his idea of self-destructive “manhood”. (Man-hoodwinked is more like it.)
It is astounding—watching this series—how infrequently the word “pathetic” is used. Astounding how little misogyny—as a profound piece of his legacy—is dug into. Astonishing that the question is not even raised why, if we want an equanimous cancel culture (and I’m not saying that we do), his books aren’t getting chucked out of public libraries at a rate that does not equal or exceed the rate we are pitching out copies of The Cat in the Hat. Theodore Geisel mostly trafficked in unseemly imagery. The Hemster trafficked in, as the series reveals, liberal unironic use of the “N” word. Hell, we have trouble keeping copies of Papa’s beloved Huckleberry Finn in libraries, in which Mark Twain solely used the “N” word in an essential, historic context and in the interest of illuminating racial injustice and social hypocrisy. Why Hemingway should get off so lightly, the documentary never explains.
My father went to Oak Park River Forest High School where he took classes with the same teacher who taught English to Ernest. Dad liked to repeat the story of the day when his teacher pointed to the desk where Ernest Hemingway had sat, it was in a room called “the English room”, and boast that Hemingway “didn’t get any of those words from him”. After watching the documentary, I realize Dad’s old teacher could have been referring to Hemingway’s use of the “N” word.
It’s astonishing to see an image of Ernest Hemingway unfold over three days and six hours as a war profiteer, a person whose personal gain is so grossly tied to pain, suffering and death. The documentary makes it clear how much he reveled in the image of a hero but how little he lived up to the mark. It is difficult to associate his courage with sacrifice, the essential stuff that makes heroes.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so” is still a great line. “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” is still a brilliant line of dialogue. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is still my favorite Ernest Hemingway short story.
