Then she asked me if I liked skiing. I answered honestly. I love skiing, although I’m not great at it and I haven’t been on the hill since I annihilated my knees a few years back. I’d love to get back into it, though, but haven’t so far because I hate doing things alone.

I knew as I hit the send button that I’d never hear from her again.

I’ve been a Match member on and off for maybe a year and a half and have very little nothing to show for it. I tried to play it straight, using my profile to tell the wonderful women of the 5280 who I was as best I could – what I do for a living, what I do for fun, what my interests are, and so forth. But no results to speak of past a few coffee first dates. Whatever I served up, nobody was buying.

I don’t mind admitting that it’s been frustrating. And yes, it strikes at your self-esteem. I have historically hit periods when, as a result of where I lived or the structure of my daily life, I had a hard time meeting women, but I’ve never had trouble getting dates when I was actually around eligible women. My Match.com experience, though, has begun to make me feel like an untouchable.

I’ve had plenty of time to think about what the problem might be, and a good deal of that energy focused on the perfectly valid question of “what’s wrong with me?” Back when I was more successful on the relationship scene I was, after all, a bit younger, and I’ve had to entertain the uncomfortable possibility that 50 year-old Sam is simply less marketable than 30 year-old Sam.

I concluded that the problem is multi-faceted. For one thing, I’m just not Outdoorsy Guy, but I live in the middle of Outdoorsy Nation. Also, I’m picky as hell (when you’re educated to the doctoral level, for instance, you’re going to be looking for someone with significant intelligence). And there are plenty of things about me guaranteed to cause daily match surfers to lunge for the “next” button – as in, we know that a substantial percentage of American women don’t find bald guys attractive, period. I get it. Since there’s nothing I can do about some of these things (short of leaving Denver and joining Hair Club), I decided to go straight at the issue as best I could. So about three weeks ago I changed my profile. Here’s how I began:

The great thing about Match is the chance to meet women I might never encounter otherwise. The bad thing is that somehow the place encourages us to define ourselves as a checklist of things we like to do. Shared interests and compatibility are nice, but I’ve always felt like relationships thrive on a chemistry that has very little to do with activities.

The working theory for businesses like Match and eHarmony, I suppose, is that true love is best predicted by that checklist of activities. (eHarmony may not be as bad about this as Match – I have no experience with them past filling out the application form.) You like live music? You’re the oldest child, too? We’re soulmates!

Then, yesterday, I tripped across an interesting new study headed up by Dr. Eli Finkel, a Social Psych professor at Northwestern. Finkel’s team agrees that online dating is a great way to discover people you might not meet otherwise. However:

One of the weaknesses of online dating is an overreliance on “profiles,” the researchers say. Although most dating websites feature photos and detailed, searchable profiles covering everything from personality traits to likes and dislikes, this information isn’t necessarily useful in identifying a partner, Finkel and his coauthors write.

The study suggests something that I think most of us know, even if we’ve never stopped to think about it. To wit, love is often about serendipity.

…daters don’t always know what they want in a mate—even though they generally think they do. Studies suggest that people often lack insight into what attracts them to others (and why), and therefore the characteristics they seek out in an online profile may be very different from those that will create a connection in person, the review notes.

Fight it if you like, but Marshall McLuhan’s adage applies to online dating: the medium is the message. In a format that emphasizes “things I like to do” and sorts according to activities, your viability is going to hinge on how well you conform your life to those dictates. Is the “shared interests” assumption valid? Well, it’s obviously nice if the person you’re interested in likes some of the things you do. If you have nothing in common the relationship probably has a short shelf life. But let’s be honest. There are probably lots of people out there who share nearly all my interests that I’d think are barking assholes. Some of the most compelling women I have ever met, on the other hand, had very little in common with me….at first.

See, if the click is there, people find things to do. They grow together. They shape their world to fit the emotional, spiritual and physical connection instead of robotically sorting themselves according to somebody else’s preconceived generic categories. She grows to enjoy watching games with him. He realizes how much he likes watching movies with her, even movies he wouldn’t have been caught dead watching before. She’s never had any interest in going to New Mexico until she spends a weekend in Taos with him but now she can’t wait to go back. He always thought of sushi as bait until she took him to the Sushi Den and eased him into it with a California Roll. Now he’s badgering her to go check out this new place called “Sasa” he heard about up in LoHi.

When you interpret who you are and what you have to offer another human being according to a mass market dating corporation’s categorization schemes, you place significant limitations on what you can be and on who you can discover. Homogeneity is bound to be the result.

My friends have heard me complain about this templating tendency and about the seeming sameness of the single women in town. If you believe what you see on Match 99% of single females here fall into one of two or three categories (if that). I joke that between the time they spend camping, hiking, skiing, climbing 14ers, mountain biking, laying on the beach in Mexico and volunteering with poor children in either Africa or Chile there’s simply no time left for them to actually be in Denver. They’re all in love with their careers and have great friends. Family is incredibly important to them and if they don’t have children of their own they’re okay with it if you do because they love children. At least two pictures of their dog(s). And so on.

I was deep into this rant with my buddy Mike a few months back and he was laughing at me, so I logged in and called up my daily matches to prove it. The first profile was a little off. The second was word for word, picture for picture what I just described.

I noted above that I feel a lot of frustration with the process. I try to be honest about myself. I’m 51, which means that statistically speaking I’m playing the back nine of life. I’m not a runway model. I have no hair. Like just about everybody who has lived past the age of 12 I’m broken down in some ways, both physically and emotionally. Yes, I have baggage.

That said, talk to my female friends. I’m a pretty good guy. I’m not David Beckham, no, but I’m okay looking. If you saw pictures of all the beautiful women who have been a part of my life through the years you’d have to conclude that I must got something going on. I’m smart. I’m creative. Strong and sensitive in fairly equal measures. Funny, thoughtful. As for the baggage, most of it fits in the overhead bin.

In other words, I’m not a bad catch.

But: all those gorgeous women who loved me? Almost none of them loved me on sight. Some of them disliked me at first, in fact, and others didn’t warm up to me for quite some time. I understand all this. The things that are best about me simply aren’t evident at a glance. And there is no way to communicate this dynamic in a Match.com profile. (Or speed dating environments, either, for that matter.) In an online dating context you can’t make me look terribly desirable to the female window shopper without lying.

I have no doubt in my mind that dozens of women who might like me a great deal if they knew me have zipped past my profile without a second thought.

If I sound narcissistic or self-indulgent here, stick with me for a second, because this is a sword that cuts both ways. In short, I’m guilty, too. Here’s how the story on the Finkel study concludes:

The abundance of profiles online also may make daters too picky and judgmental, the authors say. The sheer number of options can be overwhelming, and the ease with which people can sift through profiles—and click on to the next one—may lead them to “objectify” potential partners and compare them like so many pairs of shoes.

“Online dating creates a shopping mentality, and that is probably not a particularly good way to go about choosing a mate,” says Harry Reis, Ph.D., one of the review’s authors and a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in Rochester, N.Y.

The shopping mindset may be efficient online, but when carried into face-to-face interactions it can make daters overly critical and discourage “fluid, spontaneous interaction” in what is already a charged and potentially awkward situation, Reis and his coauthors write.

How often do I find myself in that shopping mode? How often does it become about reflexively saying no instead finding a reason to say yes? I just took a quick break to review my daily matches, which refreshed as I was writing. Seven women, and I cleared the list in less than 30 seconds.

How many times in the past six months have I looked at a picture of a woman who would make me insanely happy for the rest of my life and clicked no? No telling. I do know, from personal experience, that there are women I don’t think are attractive or interesting when I first encounter them, only to later conclude that they’re stunningly compelling. (I have a friend like that in my life right now.) I’d be stupid to assume that doesn’t happen routinely on Match, wouldn’t I?

Thanks for the memories, online dating, but I’m signing off as soon as my current subscription expires. Your system may work great for some folks, but the more I think about it the more I realize how perfectly it’s engineered to fail for me. My perfect match and I are going to walk right past each other without even noticing 100 times out of 100.

And I just don’t want to be that guy. You know, the one who bitches because women don’t give him a chance while he’s not giving them a chance? You’re making me a worse person. Or rather, I’m using you to make myself a worse person, and it has to stop.

I may not find anyone at all. Who knows? But at least I can stop shelling out $30 a month for the privilege of deluding myself.

#22

It isn’t often that I get to read someone else’s love letters. But read Rachel Carson’s work and you’ll see that’s just what she’s writing. She writes of the sea with a profound, abiding love.

When I spent time with Carson along the edge of the sea a few weeks ago in Maine, I came across references to a Carson book I’d not heard of before. I had already added one extra Carson book to my reading list, and worried about the possible tangent a second might take me on, but in the end, her work resonated with me too strongly to pass it up. The title was too alluring to pass up: The Sense of Wonder.

A sense of wonder, I tell my students, is the first step in exploring the world and finding worthwhile stories to tell. Be curious. Ask questions. Engage in wonder.

“Wisdom begins in wonder,” Socrates said.

Carson’s book, The Sense of Wonder, could very well be a primer for all freshman writing students.

The premise behind the book is deceptively simple: Teach children to appreciate nature. Don’t overwhelm them with species names but, rather, unlock their sense of wonder. “[I]t is not half so important to know as to feel,” she says. “Once the emotions have been aroused—a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love—then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning.”

Exploring nature is largely a matter of becoming receptive to what lies around you, Carson says.

[W]herever you are and whatever your resources, you can still look up at the sky—its dawn and twilight beauties, its moving clouds, its stars by night. You can listen to the wind, whether it blows with majestic voice through a forest or sings a many-voiced chorus around the eaves of your house…and in the listening, you can gain magical release for your thoughts. You can still feel the rain on your face and think of its long journey, its many transmutations, from sea to air to earth.

Such things might be so commonplace that we take them for granted. We literally lose sight of the wonder right in front of us. “[B]ecause they could see it almost any night perhaps they will never see it,” she laments.

Originally written in July 1956 as an essay for Woman’s Home Companion, Carson dreamed of expanding the essay into a longer piece. “I want very much to do that Wonder book,” she said. “That would be Heaven to achieve.” She died—at age 56—before she was able to complete the project.

In 1998, photographer Nick Kelsh resurrected Carson’s dream. The result is gorgeous. Carson’s essay, artfully laid out with generous leading and wide margins on high-gloss, parchment-colored pages, is interspersed with pages of Kelsh’s nature photography. The photographs loosely illustrate the settings and landscapes Carson mines for wonder. Kelsh’s work enhances Carson’s while remaining respectful of it, too. Carson’s writing, and her love of nature, remain at the heart of the book.

It’s easy to reveal in her language. Take, for instance, a sentence like this, capturing an image like this: “Out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us.” Carson makes me feel like I’m there with all the emotional richness of the moment. I want to close my eyes, cross my arms, and smile at the breath of sea spray misting my cheeks.

While I found great delight in Carson’s writing, it’s her vision that I found most remarkable, most alluring.  “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children,” she says, “I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Carson’s unabashed love of the natural world represents a way of seeing that we could all benefit from. The world would benefit from it, too. How could we rape and pillage the land if we treated it with reverence, respect, and awe.

What an amazing gift we could pass on to future generations if only we awakened their sense of wonder. What amazing power that wonder would hold.

#11:

“[W]ithout a mother,” writes Terry Tempest Williams in her book Refuge, “one no longer has the luxury of being a child.”

I am at my own mother’s, thinking about Williams’ words, thinking about Williams’ book. I was first introduced to Refuge last year during a Creative Nonfiction class I was taking, but I didn’t have the time then to read it. Months later, at the start of my “25 Books in 30 Days” challenge, it is one of the first books I turn to. I’ve not been able to write about it yet, though. I’ve had to wait until I’ve come here to my mother’s house in Ashtabula, Ohio, before I could fully process the nature of Williams’ loss.

Refuge is a quiet, private book about loss and recovery. Williams weaves her experiences at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, under assault from the rising water levels of the Great Salt Lake, together with her attempts to deal with the fact that her mother and grandmother are both losing battles with cancer.

“The losses I encountered at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as Great Salt Lake was rising helped me to face the losses within my family,” Williams says. “Our attachment to the land was our attachment to each other.

Memory is the only way home, Williams says. “I have been in retreat,” she explains. “This story is my return.”

As a naturalist-in-residence for the Utah Museum of Natural History, Williams was “in the business of waking people up to their surroundings,” she says. As in her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World (published almost two decades after Refuge), Williams demonstrates a spiritual connection to the world that very much reminded me of the same connections Linda Hogan was suggesting in Dwellings.

“Wilderness courts our souls,” Williams says.

If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide, and so we are found.

“In the severity of a salt desert, I am brought down to my knees by its beauty,” she writes. “My imagination is fired. My heart opens and my skin burns in the passion of these moments.”

Williams recognizes that we are part of, not removed from, the natural world. Refuge, in part, traces her struggle to understand those cycles and rhythms in the context of her mother’s deteriorating condition, although she grasps them intuitively as a naturalist. She talks in the language of data when she explains the rising and falling levels of the Great Salt Lake over time, and how water levels affect the freshwater habitat of the bird sanctuary. She has a knack for explaining natural history—whether it be geology or ornithology—in approachable terms. It becomes personal.

But knowing the rhythms and understanding the rhythms—let alone accepting the rhythms—poses a significant challenge. “I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, or even the birds of Bear River,” she says. “My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.”

“Dying doesn’t cause suffering,” she comes to realize. “Resistance to dying does.”

My mother, thankfully, isn’t dying. She’s had some significant health issues in the last year, though, the result of some rather insidious chronic health problems. Doctors have had to crack open her chest and do bypass surgery. She’s been hospitalized for breathing problems. She has near-constant vertigo.

Her incessant good spirit tends to downplay her discomfort, but on bad days, she’ll let slip in confidence just how poorly she feels. On those days, she just hopes tomorrow will be better.

“How can hope be denied,” Williams asks, “when there is always the possibility of an American flamingo or a roseate spoonbill floating down from the sky like pink rose petals?” She has seen such birds at the refuge, out of their traditional range, alone, there for reasons no one is able to explain.

But she concedes that “hope can be more powerful and deceptive than love,” and therein lies the crux of Williams’ struggle.

Williams’ mother and grandmother both come to accept their illnesses and make the best life they can while they’re dying. “Trust life,” both of her grandmothers tell her. “Understanding is love.”

That’s why Refuge has such deep resonance for me here. My mother, too, has come to an acceptance about her own illness. Her good spirit will not be suppressed; her optimism will not be denied. I worry about her nonetheless, and wonder what it would be like, in my early forties, to be without a mother. We all sort of just take for granted that we’ll still have our mothers at this age, don’t we?

My stepfather doesn’t always understand my mom’s health problems. He’s a good guy, but he comes from a family where, when you don’t feel well, you take two aspirin and call it good. So, with my mother he is, by turns, sympathetic and impatient. Part of my own challenge is to try to understand his and to help him understand hers.

I cling to something else Williams says as she talks about hope and love and understanding, too. She talks of faith. “Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires,” she says. “Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.”

My mother and I are not connected by place the way Williams and her mother and grandmother are connected by the bird refuge. (I do share such a connection with my father and the Maine woods.) Rather, the refuge I share with my mother lies in the past, in my childhood in Hershey, Pa. She was a young single mother with two little boys. She was healthy and beautiful.

Ohio seems like a tired old joke in comparison: What’s round on the ends and “hi” in the middle? We can look back and laugh and reminisce and find our refuge through nostalgia, and through the grace of her good spirits, I can still revel in the luxury of being a child.

Fortunately, Wired comes to the rescue. Specifically, good old GeekDad, who reviews toys and all sorts of other stuff for Wired. And he’s got a list of the five best toys of all time. You might have a quibble here and there, but you can’t deny he’s on to something. Your only problem now is gussying them up as Christmas presents for kids who expect something either (a) glowing, (b) electronic, or (C) alive. But that’s what wrapping paper is for, isn’t it?

“And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion. I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.”
         - Henry V, Act II, Scene 2

King Henry V was addressing Lord Scroop, a childhood friend who had sold him out to the French just before the English invasion. If the King couldn’t trust Lord Scroop, who could he trust?

These are tough times for a smartass like me. I want to mock the Kardashians and Newt Gingrich and whatever Twilight movie is about to be released (2 parts? Really? Does she need 2 parts to decide on a crib?). But all I can think about is Joe Paterno.

If we can’t count on people like Coach Paterno to do the right thing, whom can we trust? Coach Paterno occupied a high place in the pantheon of Hargrovian idols. He was the coach who ran his program the right way. He had the undying loyalty of former players and coaches. I would have wanted my son to play football for Coach Paterno.

No more. Because, while Coach Paterno now suffers “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” he could have dodged those arrows by doing the right thing. He could have called the police. But he didn’t.

Coach Paterno isn’t the victim in all this. We may want him to be but he isn’t. Kids are the victims. In Act IV, Scene 7 of Henry V, French soldiers fleeing the Agincourt battlefield killed the English boys in the luggage train. The most innocent were the target. King Henry’s reaction to the murder of the boys was to order his men to cut the throats of all the prisoners. The most helpless were the victims. Death for death, and abomination for abomination.

People who think Paterno must go in order to create some ideal of justice miss the point. Justice can’t be served in this case. Innocence has been irrevocably lost. The accused is in custody. Now all that’s left is trying to deal with those who knew and didn’t do enough. Coach Paterno is on the list. He might not be at the top, but he’s on the list.

If only this would be the last list. If only we would have a guarantee that such a horrible case of abuse would not happen again. If only Coach Paterno was the last personal deity to fall from grace. But who can we trust now? In a sane world, we would bend all our energies to help the children, and less on those who stood silent while the devil danced in a college shower. But we don’t live in a sane world.

There is a sickness here. It infects far more than a single athletic department in Pennsylvania, a department that felt it should look away when a monstrous thing occurred, or asked the monster to take his victims someplace else. Take them away to protect the team and the team’s image and the team’s coaches. Sports in America has too much sway over me and us. We equate excellence in sports with excellence in life, and we have forgotten that the men we worship are still only men, capable of reaching great heights and spectacular falls, and some of them, in spite of the good they did, have black hearts and corrupted natures. They fail, and we fail when we’re shocked at their failures. In our obsession with sports we have each neglected our immediate world, and now we reap the rotten fruits of watching young men maim themselves for our enjoyment. We aren’t watching our kids anymore. We’re watching sports. I have it on right now. We are a country without men, having lost them to sports as surely as France lost the flower of her youth to war. What happens when a country loses its men?

“And as our vineyards,fallows, meads and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country;
But grow like savages,—as soldiers will
That nothing do but meditate on blood,—
To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire
And every thing that seems unnatural.”
         Henry V, Act V, Scene 1

And to me, that’s where we are. The world seems unnatural. Nine young men abused, and we’re worrying about a coach’s legacy. I told you. This is a hard time for smartasses like me.

“He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes.” (Proverbs 13:24)

“Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell.” (Proverbs 23:13-14)

By now, you’ve probably heard about the video of Texas judge William Adams beating his disabled, then-16 year-old daughter, Hillary, with a belt. You may even have seen the video. If not, a caution: it’s every bit as disturbing as reports would lead you to believe. We’re not used to seeing this kind of domestic brutality on YouTube, especially when it’s punctuated by lines like ”lay down or I’ll spank you in your fucking face.”

I initially ignored this story. I heard the headlines, made the same assumptions as a lot of people probably did and moved along. But today the story hooked me back in when I saw that Adams, in the process of blaming the victim (she only released the tape because he was cutting her off and taking away her Mercedes, he says), suggesting that the footage looked “worse than it was.”

What we see on the tape is prima facie evidence of a crime. It’s either child abuse or assault, depending on the victim’s age, and it sounds like the facts in this case are that she was old enough to make it assault, but the statute of limitations has run out. I would say lucky him, but I suspect that the worst the law could possibly do to him pales to what YouTube has in store.

I don’t know Adams. I don’t his daughter. I have no first-hand evidence whatsoever of the internal dynamics of the family, of whether or not she’s acting out of concern or spite. There’s one thing I’m pretty sure I do know, however: no, Judge, it’s worse than it looked.

I have some experience with what Hillary suffered that night, because it’s similar to what I endured growing up. I was routinely subjected to whippings, either with a belt or a hickory switch, that if they happened to a child today would result in the child’s immediate removal from the home by protective services and the arrest of the offending parent. On multiple occasions I was beaten as badly, or worse than, Hillary Adams.

But – and here’s the sticky part – it wasn’t child abuse. Not by the standards of the day, and not by the standards of nearly all of human history. I was taken in by my paternal grandparents when I was three. My parents split and, well, I’ll spare you that part. It was deemed best for me if I went to live with them. In many respects this was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.

My grandparents, though, were old school Southern working class Baptist, born and bred to the wisdom of the Old Testament. To the modern ear, the idea of beating a child because you love him sounds counter-intuitive, but to people of their generation (born in 1913 and 1914, respectively) you had to administer corporal punishment if you loved a child. Failing to do so was to fail as a parent and to literally risk the child’s eternal soul. The swats with their hands were no big deal. Call those attention-getters, if you like. But when I’d do something they deemed serious, the results could leave welts for days.

There is no question that they loved me. Totally and unconditionally. And I loved them just as completely. I have published poetry honoring my grandfather and in 1989 I took the step of changing my name to his legally (I was not born Samuel) because he was the only real father I had ever had. And just the other day, I described my grandmother as the single most important person in my entire life. I have said many times, and I mean it, that without them I have no idea where I’d be today, but it’s not likely I’d ever have amounted to much. A big part of me feels like I’m betraying their memories in writing this, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that if I can say something that helps, then it’s worth it. I also do not blame them. I’m 100% convinced that my grandparents were purely the products of their context, and that if they were young parents today they’d die before they’d hurt their children.

All that said, violent physical discipline leaves psychic and emotional scars that may never heal. For starters, one comes to accept that love and pain are inextricably connected. One also can’t help seeing violence as a logical and normal solution to problems. Rationally speaking, I know that violence is sometimes necessary and perhaps even appropriate, but if you grew up like I did there’s the uncomfortable tendency to see it as a first resort instead of the last resort.

Those who know me the best probably wonder where this streak of mine comes from. I’m not a violent man, but I suppose you might say there is a great deal of turbulence in my soul. To the consternation of many of my more enlightened friends (and in truth, most of my friends are more enlightened than I am) I have no issue with the death penalty in principle. I have been known to find satisfaction when brutal justice catches up to genuinely bad human beings. I’ve never said this before, but I’m disturbed when I reflect on the kinds of fate I wish for people like Michael Vick. There’s an irony in it, I suppose: in my mind, the worst criminals are those who abuse the helpless. The retribution: render them helpless and visit upon them the same abuse they inflicted.

I hate abusers and always will, but I cannot stand the feelings they arouse in me. Even in pondering justice, the abuse I suffered as a boy fosters an enduring rage that thrives at a deep, inescapable emotional level.

Of course, it isn’t just me. How many millions of people across this country and beyond would read this and understand exactly what I’m saying? How many people think, as did one friend of mine some years ago, that he owes who he is as a human being to the fact that his father beat the hell out of him? And what implications does this have for his children?

I don’t have anything to say here that a legion of child psychologists haven’t said more compellingly, I suppose, but I find myself wishing I could talk to Judge Adams. While those watching the video linked above are absolutely seeing what they’re seeing and I’m hardly absolving the man, I find it perfectly plausible that he loves his daughter and that he was genuinely, honestly doing what he thought was best for her. He doesn’t act like it’s hurting him more than it is her (that line may well have been my earliest education in the art of irony), but part of me suspects that you simply have to slam the door on the part of you that empathizes with your loved one in order to “do what’s best for them.”

It’s pathological in the extreme, but maybe his generation, and some of mine, and certainly every generation that came before suffers from a sort of collective post-traumatic stress disorder. To note that this particular beast is self-replicating seems almost too obvious to mention.

William Adams says his daughter released the video to get even with him. Hillary Adams says she did it so that he would get help. I don’t think the rest of us have any way of knowing who’s right. Regardless, my advice to Judge Adams is to get help. Also, I hope Hillary Adams gets help, because the beast is alive in her. Probably always will be.

This is an ugly case that nobody would ever have known about before the advent of social media. And as banal and pointless as channels like YouTube can be, today it presents millions of American families with an opportunity to learn and heal, and most importantly, to begin putting the wisdom of the Old Testament behind us for good.

Shortly after finishing his three-month, 3,312-mile run from the coast of Oregon to the Rhode Island shore, Glenn Caffery visited his physician and complained that his feet were numb.

“What’d you expect?” the doctor replied.

Caffery, a 49-year-old data management teacher at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, lives in Leyden, a small town in the Connecticut River Valley that borders Vermont. His cross-country pilgrimage was to raise awareness about the Alzheimer’s disease that killed his father at age 68.

“He was diagnosed at 55,” said Caffery, “but it was symptomatic at least two years prior to that.”

On May 19, Caffery stuck his foot into the Pacific Ocean and began his long, arduous journey across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Minnesota on toward the Northeast and into New England. On Aug. 17, surrounded by friends and family, he splashed into the Atlantic Ocean at Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island.

Along the way he had jogged through towns named Mud Butte and Faith and avoided roads with rumble strips that rattled the three-wheeled stroller he kept packed with supplies and camping gear. “It was kind of comfortable to have it with me. I never gave it a name. I’m glad it never came to that.”

His wife, Colleen, shipped Asics DS running shoes and multivitamins to designated truck stops every 350 miles. Truckers learned of his cause and gave him leeway on the highway. Railroad engineers leaned on train whistles for encouragement.

South Dakota was the most grueling part of the journey, a daunting 560-mile trek in 100-degree weather through desolate territory where the state mammal is the coyote.

“It got discouraging,” said Caffery. “There was no shelter. There were no trees. I was by myself and totally dependent on the people around me.”

He was grateful for people like the owners of the Ace Motel in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, who gave him a roof over his head and a fresh bar of soap in the shower stall. “Ceramic tile, toilet, shower … Compared to sleeping on the side of the highway, it couldn’t have been better.”

A nasty case of shin splints set him back a week, but his arthritic hip never barked and he was able to average 50 miles a day while burning 600 calories an hour.

“I was amazed with my body’s ability to bounce back every morning,” he said. “My left hip was pain free and my right arm wasn’t sore from pushing the stroller, but my left shoulder bothered me. It did nothing, but a person’s body responds to work.”

Most weight-conscious people try to maintain a caloric intake under 2,000, but Caffery needed 7,000 calories day to keep up his energy level.

“Food was the single hardest part of the trip,” he said. “The problem was, I had no appetite and the stuff I ate was high calorie and not particularly healthy. Mostly I got sick of things. They had really gross ice cream (in South Dakota) called Blue Bunny, and another problem was I was a vegetarian in one thousand miles of beef country. But I did eat a lot of eggs and drink a lot of chocolate milk.”

Jogging on thoroughfares built for fast-moving vehicles provided a shocking, near slow-motion perspective of death on the highway.

“Dead things were horrible, so many dead things in the road,” he said. “The stench was a constant companion. Cars are so disruptive, and I saw so much killing…. Two Canada geese crossing the road with their offspring and I thought how beautiful, and a car went smashing through them, just a swirl of feathers. The car never slowed. That was hard.”

At night in the West, snakes came to bask on the warm roads.

“I had to be careful. The really big snakes were the bull snakes and they camouflaged well on the road,” said Caffery. “When I saw my first prairie rattler I knew I had to keep getting fresh batteries for my head lamp.”

In Ohio his father-in-law died. He rented a car and drove to the memorial service in Easton, Pa., then returned to where he’d left off.

“It made me wonder whether my run was truly separate from my life or really just the same,” he said. “I don’t think it was as separate as it seemed.”

The country’s diverse geography didn’t affect him so much as the people he met.

“They have forever changed me,” he said. “I feel really blessed they brought me into their world. I came to learn that the U.S. is a big community and I’d never thought of it that way. I was given two flags along the way. I’ve never had a flag in front of my house but I cherish these two flags.”

Life has returned to normal for Caffery. He’s back teaching at UMass and on Oct. 18 he spoke at an Alzheimer’s symposium in Boston. Although he’s raised $25,000, he said, “Alzheimer’s been a part of my life but I don’t consider myself an activist, surprising as that sounds.”

His feet still hurt and his weight is down and he’s quick to admit, “I’m in pretty bad shape right now.”

Yet he’ll recover physically and keep the memory.

“It was the classic step-a-time and big things happen,” he said. “It’s changed my attitude about life and adversity, and I’m a better person for having done this.”

Monies raised by Caffery’s effort go to the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund in Wellesley, Mass. “They’re a lean and mean operation and have the top Alzheimer’s scientists,” said Caffery. “Every dollar goes to research and it’s a very efficient operation with a very deliberate roadmap. They redirect every single dollar. If they donate $100,000 to a university researcher, they won’t allow the university to take any overhead.”

Contributors can donate by going to alzrun.org or curealz.org or by calling the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund at 781-237-3800.

Photos from Glenn Caffery’s website, http://alzrun.org/.

by Andrea Breemer Frantz

A semester isn’t a lifetime.

But it is enough time to change a life.

***

I put my only child on a plane this morning—the first of three flights that will take her to Kigali, Rwanda, where she plans to study community building and social justice issues for a semester.

Hannah is 20, an English major at a small, liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, and among the more mature, independent women of her age I’ve known. And yes, I readily admit I’m not objective on that issue.

Nonetheless, my equilibrium felt decidedly off when I watched her disappear into the crowd beyond airport security this morning. Because for me it’s really not only ‘beyond airport security’ I’m grappling with.

Moments before airport security we faced “Betty-by-the-book,” an airline official who clearly loved mornings.

Betty: Do you have a Visa?

Hannah: The program officials told us we don’t need one.

Betty: Well, you do.

Hannah: [Produces a letter from the program to this end] I was told to show this if there was a question.

Betty: It’s a copy. It needs to be an original. I’m going to have to make a call.

Hannah: Will this make me late for my flight?

Betty: Let’s hope it doesn’t take them 20 minutes to answer.

Hannah: [Looks at me with worried eyes].

Me: It’ll be fine, honey. [Wondering if I sound convincing]

Betty: [Returns from phone call] Well, your bag is overweight. That’s going to cost $200 extra for an international flight.

And so it began.

***

Despite what they tell us about the magic of Labor Day weekend, this last week in August marks the end of summer for anyone with a child in school. I’m a professor at a small university near Pittsburgh, and yesterday I offered smiles and reassurances to parents and freshmen students alike as they unloaded cars and wandered the halls of my building looking for the bookstore.

“Are you leaving a son or a daughter here?” I asked a set of parents who shared my elevator late in the day.

“Our son,” the mother responded.

I nodded. “Well, I hope he has a great experience here,” I said.

There really isn’t anything to say to parents jettisoning their children into a world away from them that doesn’t sound trite. This is what parenting is. It’s about raising a human to adulthood–instilling ethics, independence, a sense of purpose, an ability to play well in the sandbox with others.

And when you’ve done that, you watch them walk away. Not forever, of course. But as I stood with my husband on the other side of security, watching Hannah move out of sight, I wondered why it was me who felt so much less secure.

So I understood those parents in the elevator and the way they sort of blankly nodded at me, knowing there wasn’t really much more to say. You’ll see our son more than we will even if it’s just in the cafeteria. The ball’s in your court, and you damned well better not drop it.

***

 As a teacher, I’m acutely aware of my responsibilities. Yes, I coach students to the next level of professionalism. My journalism students need to know how to track, verify, and communicate a story to a variety of audiences and most of them do when they’re finished with one of my classes.

But I commit to being part of a young person’s development—the whole package—during their four formative years between 18 and 22. That means pushing them out of the comfort zone, but holding their hands through the discomfort. It means listening when the roommate invites a stranger home to the dorm room and locks my student out for the night. It means helping to define boundaries, both personal and otherwise. It means being aware of a whole lot of things their parents may never know.

I’m secure in the notion that I have a responsibility to those men and women in my classes. They’re adults, but not yet independent. Smart, even sometimes savvy, but naïve and narrow in their experiences of the world and people.

To those parents I spoke with while they watched nervously as RAs unloaded their daughter’s happy purple laundry basket and plastic milk crates filled with CDs from the packed minivan, a semester may well feel like a lifetime, despite the fact that we both know it’s not. We will blink and the fatigue of December will be on us.

But I also know that a lifetime can happen in the ensuing months before then. And I’m part of that. The ball’s in my court.

***

As I write, my daughter is three hours into the second leg of her journey. She’ll land in Brussels before venturing on to a country that in 1994 saw unspeakable misery.

When she was three years old she looked up and paid attention for a few key moments during the nightly news on television that she had mostly tuned out in favor of the toy she’d been playing with. “Mommy, what are those people doing?” she asked about the images of bodies floating down a river at the height of the Rwandan genocide.

The teacher in me would have used the opportunity to educate about the atrocities and human cost of hate. The mother in me couldn’t. I told her the people were swimming, and even at three, I’m pretty sure she knew I was lying.

***

I wonder about the teachers Hannah will have in Rwanda this semester. I feel confident they know that the semester is not a lifetime.

But I hope they also know it’s enough time to change her life.

And I’ll just wait here, this side of security.

First, some background. Not too long ago I wrote a post in which I observed that pudgy Southern teen girls often grow up to be pudgy women. I expected some reaction, but I didn’t expect the reaction I got, which was to get pelted from every angle. The right and the left. Men and women. Old and young.  It was as if I spit into the ocean and caused a tsunami.

OK, at the bottom of the page before you post a blog there is a small box that says “Check to allow comments.” If you check that box, as I do, and write about controversial topics in provocative ways, as I do, then you shouldn’t whine (even though I do.)

But as is usually the case, from pain comes insight, or at least insightful questions. In this case: Why the extraordinary sensitivity to comments about overweight young Christian women? If I’d written a line critical of skinny adolescent male Muslim pot smokers, do you think people would have leaped to their defense? I don’t.

What was it about this group that drew this reaction? Was it because they were young? Women? Christian? Overweight?  I think it was because they are overweight.

90% of my blogs are humorous. This is one of the other 10%.  I am profoundly serious about what I am about to say. Many people believe it is unfair or cruel to call out people for their weight. They are dead wrong, and here’s why. 

There is a general trend in our society to be less judgmental. Since you have no choice whether you are born white or black, male or female, smart or dumb, or gay or straight, we have agreed as a society not to judge based on those inherent characteristics. We use public approbation to try to enforce those rules on everyone in our society. Good for us. But our society has simultaneously decided that it is still OK to discriminate on the basis of the choices people make.

We discriminate against some choices for good and obvious reasons, like pedophilia and wife beating. Some for less obvious and less good reasons, like practicing a religion other than Christianity. Some choices we discriminate against more aggressively  than others, like smoking. As a society, we have decided it is OK to be openly mean to smokers. In part, that is because we believe it to be a choice that affects all of us negatively, through second hand smoke, birth defects and health costs. In part, it is also because we believe by being mean to them we are helping them.

I don’t smoke. I have never smoked. I hate smoking. Most people agree with me. A few years ago in Berkeley, I saw a young professional woman cross the sidewalk to get as close as possible to two smokers, and when she got next to them wave her hand in front of her face, cough theatrically and mumble something. That same young woman would never, ever walk across the street towards two fat people drinking milkshakes, puff out her cheeks and mumble, “Oink! Oink!” The very idea horrifies most us.

Because unlike smoking, where most of us feel free to openly criticize our friends who smoke, we all give the obese a free pass.  Perhaps it’s because so many of us carry extra pounds ourselves and we sympathize. Or perhaps it’s because it seems too personal. Or perhaps it’s because we view obesity as a condition rather than a choice.

If it’s the last reason, we are simply wrong. Less than 1% of all people have a medical reason for obesity like thyroidism or Cushin’s syndrome. That means that for 99% of people who are overweight, obesity is a choice, or accumulation of choices. The choices are subtle. It’s hard to see saying yes to whipped cream and caramel on your frappucino as  deliberate decisions to be fat, but they are.  Semi-medical reasons like “slow metabolism” are not legitimate and sufficient excuses for being overweight, any more than chemicals in the brain are excuses for smoking, drinking, or gambling. If you have pale skin, use more sunscreen. If you tend toward gaining weight, eat less or exercise more.

There are good arguments for being mean to fat people. Like smoking and riding a motorcycle without a helmet, obesity is a choice that drives up health costs for all of us. And there’s an even better argument: Because it works. In 1950, roughly half the population smoked. It’s now fallen below 20%. Why? Because of a panoply of mean-spirited anti-smoking measures, from taxation to advertising to social stigmatization to good old fashioned scolding. Humans are social creatures. We can’t help it. We care what others think. Make something uncool enough and we will stop doing it. Currently 2/3 of adult Americans are overweight and 1/3 are obese. If we are mean to fat people as we are to smokers, could we get that down below 20% as we have smoking?

Instead though, not only are we not mean to them, but we bend over backwards not to be critical, particularly young overweight women. It’s well intended, but foolish. We seem to think that nagging them about their weight will either cause them to get an eating disorder or erode their self esteem. 1000 people die each year from anorexia, 300,000 die from obesity. Eating disorders are a tragic problem. Obesity is a pandemic. And no, we don’t want to erode young women’s self-esteem. But do we really think scolding them for being fat is going to erode their self-esteem more than being fat itself?

Why weren’t we this considerate for smokers? We never worried about their self-esteem.

Most of us have been fat at one time or another in our lives. We all have fat relatives. We all have fat friends. If we love them, we will nag them continuously. We will make it uncool. We will tax frappucinos  just as we did cigarettes.

A few years ago, a seriously obese relative invited us to a party. My wife and I, each of whom could stand to lose  ten pounds or so, were by far the thinnest people there. The tables were loaded with the least healthy assortment of food I’ve ever seen. Her friends ate from paper plates stacked high with cheese and fried chicken wings dripping with sweet sauce. One chubby six year-old stood at the table with a deviled egg stuffed in each cheek and one in each hand. If I was at a party where the host allowed her six year-old to smoke, or do cocaine, or even drink a beer, I probably would have said something. But I said nothing to this kid or to the parents. Instead I was polite. Or lazy. Or cowardly. Take your pick.

For some reason, we are reluctant to call out fat people and the behaviors that cause obesity. But our silence isn’t kindness, it’s enabling.

“It is one thing to adore a painting…but it is quite another thing to learn from a painted narrative what to adore.” - Clifford Geertz, cultural anthropologist, Local Knowledge

For most of my childhood, my mother’s father was primarily two things to me: 1) a magician with uncanny ability to conjure quarters from my ears and candy from nearly anywhere; and 2) a poet whose artful word craftsmanship I did not inherit.

My grandfather was well known in town for meandering across streets to the grocery store, head in the clouds, pipe in his mouth, oblivious to all oncoming traffic. Were it anyone else, the pedestrian might have caught an earful from the startled driver he’d forced to a screeching halt. But somehow my grandfather’s comportment engendered forgiveness, a certain understanding. People just didn’t yell or gesture rudely at the old Irishman; he was simply too dignified.

When he was quiet in his chair, smelling of clove and Lucky Tiger tobacco, eyes elsewhere, the assumption was that he was observing and composing. But when he spoke, it was in narrative and often of magic. Not the sleight of hand he performed for us with the props from his magician’s chest, but the kind of magic in which trees could speak, fairies danced at midnight, and spider’s webs were actually complex puzzles.

It wasn’t until I was an adult and long after his death that I added another word to describe him that I now understand explains, at least in part, the first two: Irish.

Prior to this spring, my only experience with Ireland was two day-long layovers in Dublin on my way to and from Germany. I did the American tourist thing and wandered the cobbled streets in and out of Irish kitsch shops and bars with signs that proclaimed, “Guinness is good for you!” It may have been the lack of sleep I had on the flight across the Pond, but I was nonplussed. Ireland didn’t whisper my name in Dublin.

That all changed when I took a group of journalism and photography students to rural, southwest Ireland in May. In the tiny village of Sneem in the Ring of Kerry I came face to face with my grandfather’s spirit and for the first time understood how his poetry and magic stemmed from his Irish roots.

In our back woods community of approximately 400, we studied at the knee of one of Ireland’s most celebrated seanchaithe (keeper of local lore/storyteller); traversed various legs of the Kerry Way, a 200km walking trail dotted with rocky farmland, pastures, and more sheep than people; and interviewed, among others, farmer Michael Sheehan, who, after a full day of working the land and fishing the sea stands at the cliff’s edge and whistles for the seals to come into the bay—and they come to him.

Here, a well is not just a well, but a place of pilgrimage as locals learned the story of its waters healing a woman’s blindness. Here, a rocky outcropping is not just a natural formation from years of battering winds and salt water, but a cave where a single, homeless mother raised seven children on nettle soup and mussels. Here, a solitary tree at the water’s edge is not just a tree, but the home of the “wee folk,” something to be respected and maybe feared. Here, a clump of grass is not just the rare vegetation that valiantly sprouts between rocks, but the age-old cure for stomach ailments. Here, a pub is not just a local watering hole, but a business that has been owned by the same family for five generations.

Story for the Irish is simultaneously a community experience and a fiercely personal thing. To tell it is to share yourself, but it is also about preserving that which was for the entire community. It is rooted in place, but just as often in other-worldliness. Even for the native, rural Irish, the countryside is as much a place of mystery as it is the real, lived history of so many ancestors, whom they speak of as old friends. And story is as much poetry and song as it is traditional narrative. Whether we heard them in homes, walking a craggy path, or sitting at the pub, we learned what to adore by listening to the language.

A little over two weeks couldn’t transform our small American group into community members, though we were on a first-name basis with “Dr. Don,” Sneem’s lone chemist/pharmacist. But through our interviews and photos we scratched the surface and whet our appetites for more. These photos are a sampling of Ireland’s visual stories—the poetry and magic of its rural south.

Andrea Breemer Frantz teaches journalism at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, PA, though often still ponders what she wants to be when she grows up. She still has hopes NASA will come knocking, looking for middle-aged, female astronauts who don’t fully comprehend the science, but still want to walk in space and discover new frontiers. Until then, writing, photography, challenging students to know and understand the implications of the First Amendment, and pampering her high-maintenance mutt, Jennie, pretty much dominate her life.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday it’s unconstitutional to ban the sale of violent video games to children, striking a severe blow to lazy parents across the nation.

In a 7-2 decision that cast aside typical alliances of the court, the court ruled that video games as a medium are protected under the First Amendment as free speech. The decision struck down a 2005 California law that forbid the sale of games “that depicts ‘killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being’ in a way that appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors” to anyone under the age of 18.

The Supreme Court’s decision isn’t just a matter of child’s play. Along with addressing the ever-important matter of free speech, the case focuses on one of the most popular mediums in the country for the first time. Americans spend more than $10 billion a year on computer and video games, and 67 percent of U.S. households play such games, according to the Entertainment Software Association. Last year, for the first time ever, video games sold more units than music or movies last year. The top selling game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, sold 270,000 more units than Avatar, James Cameron’s top selling movie. That list is this close only because just console games were included; the top-selling mobile phone game Angry Birds sold about 9 million more units than Avatar.

California’s attorneys argued that video games pose a greater risk to children because they are an interactive medium. It’s one thing for a child to read a Superman comic book or watch a violent movie like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That’s a passive experience – the child isn’t doing anything more than observing a masked maniac butcher some sexed up teenagers. In games like Grand Theft Auto 4, the player is the one directing the character to shoot people, commit crimes and sleep with hookers to recover health. Some games, like Splatterhouse, actually use gore as a mechanic to level the character up. If Little Johnny isn’t protected from violent video games, he’s just not watching something violent. He’s the one doing the slaughtering.

Ultimately, the majority of the court came down on the side of industry lobbyists and game designers. Justice Antonin Scalia noted children have been subjected to violent tales since times untold. Some of Grimm’s Fairy Tales aren’t exactly warm and fuzzy. “As her just desserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers ’till she fell dead on the floor, a sad example of envy and jealousy,’” Scalia wrote in the majority. Furthermore, no legal precedent exists for allowing censorship of a medium because of violence, Scalia said.

While I can understand the urge to shelter our children from needlessly violent images, the argument in favor of the ban is ignoring simple economics. A video game console costs about $300, and it requires a television to hook it up to. The proud owner of the game console will then need to spend about $65 to have a game to play on their expensive piece of electronic equipment. Perhaps I’m revealing too much of my own humble beginnings, but I doubt your average 12 year-old has that kind of cash flow.

The only way most kids can get their hands on a $65 game is A) they steal it, either directly from a store or by getting the credit card out of Mom’s purse and going online B) an adult buys it for them or C) an adult drives them to the toy store, hands them a Benjamin and tells them to go nuts without actually paying attention to what the child does with it.

The California law would only prevent scenario C from occurring, and honestly, states have bigger fish to fry with those same adults. I suspect if a parent who’s too lazy to see if their child is carrying home a copy of the horrific RapeLay game, they’re most likely neglecting their kid’s social and academic lives as well. If I’m right, then the only way to truly protect kids is by preventing some people from reproducing.

Tom Shortell is a New Jersey expatriate working as a reporter in Pennsylvania. He will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

I’m hardly the first guy to get a divorce. My guess is that a lot of other guys in my situation will recognize the sensation of emptiness that consumes the first year (or perhaps longer) after you leave. Once you had a house. Once you had someone to share meals with. Maybe you had a yard and grass that needed mowing and even a small garden to weed. You may have been unhappy and unfulfilled, but you had a life.

Once you separate you find yourself in an empty living space. In my case, in an okay little apartment downtown, but it was always just a place to crash for a year while I reflected and tried to get my bearings. But it lacked much in the way of character. I was surrounded by nameless faces whose lives were absolutely nothing like mine and once you said hello, pretty day, I like your dog, there just wasn’t anything else to talk about. A lot of the things I associated with home went with my wife, so my little apartment (which I couldn’t even paint, obviously) was incredibly sterile. Empty place, empty life.

One person I know said I should get a dining room set. Why, I asked – nobody here but me, nobody going to be here but me. I have a couch, a TV, a tray table, and I eat out most nights anyway. What’s the point? The point, I was told, was to begin living a life again.

Maybe, but I just couldn’t get there. My apartment from April 2010 until just last month was a place to recuperate, a place for the shock to wear off. Some days it felt like triage – a place to lay, to be sorted out, to ponder mid-life existentialia, to see if I was going to make it. I know, I know – a lot of drama in that sentence – I’m just telling you how it felt sometimes, because you go through a painful divorce and there’s going to be pain and drama, whether you like it, whether you admit it to yourself, or not.

The point is, life, such as it was, had been replaced by a great big emptiness, and while I’m not big on things, I was aware of the fact that my daily existence lacked much in the way of material symbols suggesting that a thriving human being dwelt nearby. I walked into a sterile apartment and it remained sterile despite my presence. I did nothing to fill it with life because I had no life to fill it with.

Divorced guys, am I making sense?

A month ago I moved to the Denver Highlands neighborhood, into a mixed use/new urban development they built on the site of the old Elitch Gardens amusement park. The Highlands are maybe the coolest neighborhood in the 5280, and if events leave psychic residue then imagine how much fun, how much rampant joy must have spilled and soaked into the ground from 1890 to 1994. It just feels like a happy place. And the developers did something special, too – my new ‘hood is really, really pretty. All kinds of great restaurants and shops nearby. I had been trying to get up here for years but never seemed to be able to make it happen.

I’m nowhere near to having the kind of life I want yet, but for the first time in awhile I’m feeling alive enough to start trying. To that end, I went out this morning and engaged in an act of symbolism – I bought a flower pot, I bought a couple of plants, and spent a few minutes doing a little repotting. It isn’t much, but the celosia and the gazania are alive. They’re pretty (not that my flower arrangement skills did them any justice, and as you’ll see in a second, my photography skills didn’t, either), they’re thriving, and they’re on display in front of my little … well, porch is way too grandiose a word for it … for all the world to see.

So please accept this modest testament to the fact that the person who lives here, after a long time of simply existing, is now trying. Wish me luck.

Happy Saturday.

The doctors told us that he would go quickly without his support meds–they were wrong. A few hours later, just before noon, my dad woke up and looked around at all of us with a rather surprised expression on his face. “What’s taking so long?” he asked. My mother looked thunderstruck (I know understand what that expression looks like), “Well! What kind of a question is that?” My brother-in-law tried to be philosophical, “These things aren’t in our hands.” Me? I burst out laughing, “Well, you’re the math guy.” He seemed to think about that and slept again. Aside from answering nurses’ questions, he didn’t speak again.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I’ve learned from him, one way or another. And what I didn’t.

My dad taught me all kinds of great stuff. How to ride a two-wheel bike (he taught my mom, too, after he gave her her first bike when she was 16). How to shoot pictures with his Kodak 35mm camera from the 1950s (I used that camera until I graduated from high school in 1980, when he bought me my first 35mm camera). How to change my oil and my tires and my motherboard. How to run a new electrical outlet and connect it to a new breaker. How to bleed brake lines.

That the only race is “human.” I tested him on that and he passed.

But I might have learned the most from what he tried–so hard–to teach me that I had a hard time with. When I was 12 or 13, I really struggled with math. Specifically algebra. Letters are NOT numbers. Math is done with numbers. And what’s this business with the minus signs? I just did not get it. So he tried to teach me. Every evening. To no avail. But I did cry a lot. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, but was probably only a few weeks of torture, he got out his big American Heritage Dictionary and told me to look up “perseverance.”

I, of course, refused. I knew it had to be some sort of synonym for “stupid.” We went round and round and I finally gave in. Of course I learned that it meant to not give up. That was his greatest lesson to me. It turned out to be everywhere.

To complicate this weekend, my parents would have celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on this past Friday the 17th. Talk about perseverance. I always wanted to talk to him about how they did it–because I know it was not easy. Both of my parents had health issues from early in their marriage: Hodgkin’s Disease, depression, backs that ended up in traction, and a lot more. The most serious crisis was my dad’s heart attack when he was 49. My current goal is to make it to the end of 2011 without a major health incident.

There is a lesson that I did not learn directly–how to stay with someone for over 50 years (they made it, if you count their courtship and engagement). How to be truly self-sacrificing, giving, loving, and faithful through the thin and REALLY thick. Through the hospitals, doctors, children’s marriages (OK, so mostly mine), children’s divorces (OK, so mostly mine again), and all the moves. They had a record I hope never to tie or break: four moves in one year (I think it was when I was five). But they did teach me how to hang in there with the right person (who I finally found). To hold hands for 50 years. To still kiss hello and goodbye. To say “I love you.”

He never taught me all the intricacies of electronics–but he tried. On the heels of the math tutoring he started me on “electronic lessons.” Spiral notebooks full of equations (it was like algebra all over again!!) that I did not get. More tears. And finally he gave up. But, decades later, he and I talked at length about science. Theories, discoveries, ideas–no equations. Some of the times in the past 10 months when I have missed him the most have been when I heard about some new scientific development that I know would have really tickled or intrigued him. And I could not talk about it with him.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that, after rejecting his suggestion when I was a freshman in college that I “do something practical, like computers or business,” I took over managing the IT department at my school, two months after my dad passed away. He would have loved knowing that.

He taught me to appreciate and study current events. To love documentaries and non-fiction. To follow politics, be skeptical, but vote like it means something. To be able to read, understand, and follow directions. After he passed away, I took photos of his books. My favorite is the grease-fingerprinted Chilton’s manual, repaired with duct tape.

In the end, I wish I had learned how to have the Hard Conversation. The one that starts out, “Dad, you don’t seem to be doing so well. Do you want to talk about your death?” I never did that. I really wish I had. I wish I had known, at the end, what he wanted as a memorial (for the record, I want to be a Reef Ball). I didn’t know how. We did the best we could, but we didn’t really know.

Part of it gets back to the perseverance thing. He was so fixed on living that it seemed to be inappropriate to discuss his dying–even in the midst of it. For 25 years, he taught me about perseverance by living it. That may be what kept him hanging around a lot longer at the end–his body refused to give up.

So, along with all of the lessons that he actively taught, I take away the ones he taught inadvertently: Show affection to those you love. Have the difficult conversations. Acknowledge your mortality and prepare for it. Live every day you are given. Appreciate the mysteries of life and share them with others. Keep learning.

So this Father’s Day, the first without a father to give a card to, I try to give him his due anyway.

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy. I’d like to think you are hanging out with Einstein, getting all those answers you always wanted.

November 1962

“Go call your daddy and Uncle Kenneth,” Papa says, taking his big thermometer from the scalding trough.  “This water’s near hot enough.  We need to get to killing these hogs.”

He gestures toward the pen some thirty feet away.  The hogs grunt and start away as if they understand him.

“Yes sir.”  I rise from my crouch.  I have been tending the fire, making the water hot enough for scalding the hair off the hogs after they are slaughtered.  I trot up the hill to the house and stick my head in the back door.

“Water hot?” asks my uncle.  I nod.  He gets to his feet and pulls on his jacket.  Daddy puts down his coffee mug and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

I lead the way as he and Uncle Kenneth follow me down to the hog pen.  As he reaches our truck, parked near the scalding trough, Daddy opens the door and takes out his single shot .22-caliber rifle from behind the seat.  He slips it free of its cloth case, then takes a box of bullets from the glove compartment. He shakes three or four into his hand and closes the box, tossing it back onto the truck seat and shutting the truck door with a bang.  “Where’s Papa?” he says, looking around.

Uncle Kenneth is busy working the scraping table nearer to the scalding trough.  I run and help him.  Just as we get it situated, we hear the clank of metal.  Papa comes down from the smoke house carrying a tin wash pan full of butcher knives and hog scrapers.  These are rounded pieces of steel, slightly conical, with handles attached to their outer centers that make them look rather like shallow hand bells except that their edges are sharp.

I go to Papa and take the pan.  He selects a particularly wicked looking knife and tests its edge with his thumb.  He smiles and winks at me.  “Razor sharp,” he says conspiratorially.

I smile back uncertainly.  Papa goes to the hog pen as I take the scrapers and other knives to the scraping table.  I hear the crisp snap of the bolt as Daddy loads his rifle.

Papa is already in the hog pen.  Daddy hands his rifle to Uncle Kenneth and climbs in carefully.  He takes the gun again.  “You want to kill all three or just the two?” he asks Papa.

Pap stands and surveys the hogs for a long moment.  “Just the two,” he says deliberately.  “We’ll wait on the big boar.  I’ll get him castrated next week.  Then we’ll fatten him up and kill him to sell for sausage after Christmas.  Make a little money.”

Daddy and Uncle Kenneth look at each other.  Though all three have invested in the hogs about equally, Daddy has said several times before that the only person who ever makes money turning hogs into sausage is Papa.

Uncle Kenneth shakes his head, then lightly vaults over the fence into the pen.  His action disturbs the hogs and they begin to stump about the square circle of the pen like boxers maneuvering for an opening.  One comes over to Daddy and noses the barrel of his gun.  In a smooth motion Daddy swings the gun barrel up to the hog’s forehead and fires a bullet into its brain.  It immediately falls to its knees.  Papa is beside it immediately.  He grabs it by its right ear and pulls it over onto its left side.  Kneeling on its right shoulder he plunges his butcher knife into its throat.  Long experience helps him find the jugular vein, and blood spurts in a long stream, some spattering next to Daddy’s boots.  He deftly steps away.

The other two hogs smell death now, so they move warily around the far end of the lot.  Daddy coolly reloads his rifle.  The click of the bolt as the bullet goes into place makes the hogs jump and trot first toward one side of the pen, then toward the other.

“Don’t let them run,” says Papa, rising laboriously from the dead hog.  “Can’t kill that one if she gets heated.”  Uncle Kenneth stands still.  Daddy has walked nonchalantly to the side of the pen opposite his brother.  Uncle Kenneth takes a step toward the hogs and they turn and start for the other side, stopping short when they see Daddy.  Papa has moved toward the hogs trying to prevent them from running toward the front of the pen, away from both Daddy and Uncle Kenneth.

Papa gestures to me.  “Charlie, come here and help us hem in this hog.”

I put down the scraper I have been fingering.  Papa has never asked me to help with the killing, even though I am ten now and this is my third hog killing.  My eyes are on the hog already dead.  It lies on its side, its back toward me, the ground around its head dark with blood stain.  I move timidly toward the pen.

“Come on, son.  These hogs are getting restless.”  Daddy’s tone makes me hurry and I catch my jacket on the hog wire as I tumble over the fence, nearly falling onto the frozen ground except that my jacket keeps me suspended.  After gaining my footing and freeing the buttons of my jacket from the wire, I turn to face the hogs.

They eye me curiously, their heads turned to one side as if they were dogs.  The hog on my right snorts philosophically and turns to my daddy.  He shoots it.  Uncle Kenneth grabs its ear and turns it on its side.  In a moment Papa has slit its jugular and its blood spills on the ground.  Its legs move as if it would run away, find safety.  Suddenly I wish that it could.

Papa senses my confusion.  “Go to the smoke house, Charlie, and bring two big wash tubs.”  I stare at him a moment, his hands covered in blood, his butcher knife smoking.  Then I turn and run to the fence, vault over it, and race up the hill to the smoke house as fast as I can.  It seems essential to escape the sight and smell of the killing.  I fumble with the latch on the smoke house door.  It swings open after a small struggle.

The still cold inside the smoke house is penetrating; it chills me quickly.  The two large washtubs are too heavy for me to carry.  I put one inside the other and drag them down the hill toward the hog pen.

Daddy meets me at the scraping table.  He takes the tubs apart. One he puts aside; the other he slides under a singletree hung from a limb on a big oak tree near the scalding trough.  Then he goes to help Papa and Uncle Kenneth with the first hog.  It is dead and they are ready to begin scalding it.  For a few minutes I stand dumbly as they maneuver around the hog trying to figure out the best way to lift it.  Then I am in the hog pen with them taking a firm hold on the right foreleg.  The four of us carry the hog to the gate of the pen. “Let it down,” Uncle Kenneth tells me.   I open the gate after we have put the hog down.  When we have carried the carcass through, Daddy shuts the gate with his foot.

“Charlie, go latch that gate. Kenneth can hold your leg.”  At Papa’s words my uncle takes the leg I have been straining to hold.  As I lock the gate, I look across the pen at the other downed hog.  It has stopped moving.  The big boar who is to be killed later for sausage stands on the unbloodied dorsal side his late companion.  He puts his snout down and nudges the back of the dead animal as if to wake it.  Then something, the smell of death maybe, frightens him and he turns sharply away.  His gaze fixes on me. He grunts low and mournful. Then one, high pitched like a shriek, that startles me and stops the others from their work.

“The dead hogs have upset him.  He’ll be all right once we get the other one out of there.  By tomorrow he’ll have forgotten that they were ever there with him,” Papa says.

His words seem all wrong. How can the boar forget so easily?

I watch the boar. He grunts once more, then turns and goes to the far end of the pen.  There he lies down in the same posture as his dead friend.  He looks around awkwardly once or twice to see if the dead hog has moved, then settles down, his breath rising steamily in the chilly air.

“See.  He’s over it already,” Daddy tries to reassure me.

The clanking of chains, then a splash, tells me the first hog is in the scalding trough.  I turn back to Papa and the others.  With the help of two chains, held on each side of the trough by Daddy and Uncle Kenneth, they turn the hog from side to side so that the scalding water loosen its hair.  “Lift her up,” says Papa.  He plucks at hair along the hindquarter, the side, and the neck of the hog.

“She’s about right on this side,” he says.  “Turn her over.”  Daddy lowers his chains as Uncle Kenneth lifts his and the hog rolls splashily to its other side.  “Not quite ready on this side,” Papa says, plucking at hair. ”Turn her back over.” Uncle Kenneth and Daddy reverse their chain movements and the hog sloshes back to its original position.

“Charlie, stoke that fire a little bit.” Uncle Kenneth waves an elbow at the end of the trough under which the fire burns.  I kneel by the fire hole and chunk the coals with a tobacco stick, then add two more pieces of wood.

That’s good,” Daddy gestures with his head for me to stop feeding the fire. “We don’t want to overheat the water.  Just keep it right for scalding.”

Papa checks the other side of the hog again.  “She’s ready.  Pitch her out on the table.”  Uncle Kenneth and Daddy lift the hog with the chains and it rolls toward Uncle Kenneth who stands in the narrow space between the trough and the scraping table.  He grabs the hog’s legs and hangs on.  Daddy drops his chains and rushes around the trough to grab hold of the hog.  I want to help but there is no room.

Uncle Kenneth sits back on the table and lifts his legs, resting his behind and heels on the table.  He tugs at the hog as he scoots backward.  Daddy and Papa shove mightily from the other side and the hog comes to rest on the table.  Somehow Uncle Kenneth keeps from being knocked off the table and swings around to land on his feet.

Papa grins.  “Kenneth, you and that hog can’t lay there together on that table.” I hand around the “bell scrapers.”

The hair comes cleanly off the side of the hog.  It gathers in large clots that I must pull free from my scraper.  Daddy and Uncle Kenneth do the same.  We fling hair on the ground until soon there are pile around the table like those around a barber’s chair.

Some parts are harder to clean than others. Papa works on the face and chin of the hog with a butcher knife scarping off hair, then rinsing off the blade in a small pan of water taken from the scalding trough, much as Daddy rinses his razor as he shaves.  As I watch him working I remember something my Grandmother Lea told me. Dead men have to be shaved by undertakers because their beards continue to grow after they’re dead.

Daddy nudges me and I step back so that he and Uncle Kenneth can turn the hog over. We move to the other side of the table, hemmed in from behind by the trough, and scrape off the rest of the hair.

Uncle Kenneth and Daddy have stopped scraping now and use knives to clean the hair from the hog’s feet.  Papa finishes with the other side of the snout.

“Let’s hoist her up and get the insides out,” Papa says, straightening, his task done.  The four of us carry the hog over to the block and tackle.  Papa uses his knife to make a hole through the hog’s back legs, about where the ankles would be on a human.  Uncle Kenneth and Daddy slip hooks through the hog’s ankles, then attach the hooks to the singletree that is fastened to the chain pulley.  In this way the hog can be hoisted into the air with its legs apart making its middle easier.

When the hog is swinging, gently suspended from the singletree, Papa slides the large washtub under its head.  Blood drops slowly from both the hog’s nostrils.  The drops make a hollow ring as they land in the empty tub.

I have seen this before.  On a television show.  Except people were hung up like this hog.  In Germany.  During World War II.  This is the same.

I shiver.

Suddenly Papa plunges a gleaming butcher knife between the hog’s haunches.  As the knife moves down the middle of the hog’s stomach and chest it makes a ripping sound like tearing cloth, stopping occasionally as Papa tries to guide the fall of the hog’s innards into the tub.  First the intestines, then the liver, then the heart and lungs droop, slither, and finally drop into the tub, all with a whooshing and splattering of blood, some bright red, some dark purplish black.

Daddy and Uncle Kenneth have just pulled the second hog from the scalding tank where they had put it without any of my ten-year-old help.  I go to it and begin furiously scraping its shoulder trying to forget the image in my mind.  I get my left hand out of the way of my right too slowly and the edge of the scraper cuts across my knuckles.  It stings, so I jerk my hand away and shake it.  When I look at it, blood trickles down two fingers.

“Whoa, there.”  Daddy stops his scraping and takes my hand.  He gets out his handkerchief and wipes away the blood.  “Go up to the house and get some iodine and a band-aid on that first finger.”

Suddenly I hear a sound somewhere between a thump and a crack.  I look around at the suspended hog.  Papa is cutting it in two with an ax.  He has already decapitated it.  He chops straight down the hog’s backbone.  He puts down the ax, takes up a saw, and begins again with that.  I watch woozily, feeling my own blood trickle, feeling the saw’s rasping in my own bone.

“Run on to the house and tell Granny what you need,” Daddy tells me.  I go.  I run.  The rasping of Papa’s saw gets fainter with each step.

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

I dawdle, talking to Granny, watching a little of the Macy’s parade on TV.  It is Thanksgiving Day.  When I get back to the hog pen, the second hog has already been gutted and split into halves.  Washtubs full of internal organs sit on the scraping table.  The two heads rest on feed sacks at one end.

Papa asks, “Did you get a band-aid on that finger?”  I hold up my hand to show him.  He nods.  “Good.  Go look in the back of your daddy’s truck.”  He gestures with a blood-stained hand.

I stand on the truck’s running board and look into the truck bed.  Half a hog rests on feed sacks.  It is easier to look at now, more like meat in the grocery store.

“When I get the jowls cut up, I’ll save some out for you,” Papa is saying.  “You can get them tomorrow or Saturday.  We still going to hunt tomorrow?”

“All right with me.”  Uncle Kenneth lights a cigarette.

Daddy leans against the side of the scraping table.  “What time ya’ll want to start?”

“Be here at six o’clock and we’ll get into the woods at first light.”  Papa dips his hands into the scalding trough.  The fire is out now and the water has cooled some.  He rubs his hands to remove the caked blood, then dries them on a feed sack.

Uncle Kenneth winks at Daddy.  “I’ll be here about seven-thirty.  We can get started by eight.”

“That sounds about right.”  Daddy puts his hand on my shoulder as I stand by him.  “You about ready to go home?  We’ve got to get that hog to the frozen food locker place to get it cut and wrapped.”

“Yes sir.”  I shiver again.   The cold is still strong.

“Ya’ll run on, then,” Papa tells us.  “Kenneth can help me take this to the house.  We’ll see you in the morning.”  Papa holds out his arms and I go to him.  He hugs me roughly, fondly.  “You have a happy Thanksgiving at your Grandmother Lea’s.  You’ve been a good helper.  Don’t eat too much Thanksgiving dinner.”

“I won’t.  You have a happy Thanksgiving, too, Papa.”

Daddy and Uncle Kenneth have already walked over to our truck.  “You gonna let Charlie hunt tomorrow?” I hear my uncle say.

“I reckon so.  If he can help kill hogs, he’s old enough to hunt with us.”

Daddy ruffles my hair as we sit in our pickup waiting for Uncle Kenneth to move his so we can back out to the road.  I have unbuttoned my coat and taken off my toboggan.  We wave to Kenneth as we drive away.  I look down the hill toward the hog pen.  Papa has the two hog heads, one in each hand, holding them by the ears.  He hoists one in a gesture of farewell as we wave goodbye.

Just as we turn from the unsurfaced road Papa lives onto the paved Draper Road, Daddy asks me, ‘Did some of that today bother you?”

“A little bit,” I answer, tentative.  I do not know how to tell him that I hated it, that I do not want to hunt, that I want no more of killing.

“Well, don’t worry about it,” he says lightly, patting my knee.  “You’ll get used to it.”

“Yes sir.” I say no more.

A few moments later he says, “We had to do what we did.”  He shrugs uncomfortably.  “People have to do things to live.  You understand, boy?”

“Yes sir.”

That night in my dreams Papa uses his ax to hack men suspended from singletrees into gushing, bloody halves.

Jim Booth

Scenic Loop Road is no longer as scenic or as looped as it was, widened and straightened as much as the terrain will permit. Still I could drive it by feel alone. This rural road was the lifeline of my not-so-rural life as a child and teen, a two-lane escape route from home life to schools and malls and friends. Our own tiny residential street was pure dirt and still is; our house was stacked rock on one floor, wood above, no central air, about a hundred years old and not unique in the neighborhood. Quaint. Or primitive, according to the whims of the plumbing and the weather.

A mile and a bit down: a dead man’s curve where the biggest local creek runs under the road. To the right, the rippled limestone wall carved out by the water is now a historical site.  Once upon a time a local jokester spray-painted a mouth and eyes around the largest stone protuberance. The paint appears to be gone at last, but the greeny-brown pool beneath looks the same, opaque and still.

The night my father drove the Grey Ghost off the bridge into that water, the surface was black and red and blue, bouncing back police car lights and a tow truck’s flashers. I couldn’t see much else from the window of my mother’s car. Jason was asleep in his pajamas beside me; my faith in my mother was so absolute that when she leaned over the back seat to tell me everything was okay, I fell asleep too. Did we wake up again that night? Do I remember my father’s pearl-snapped shirt dark around the neck and shoulders or the fat bandage over his eye? Maybe. Maybe that was another time.

Around two more curves. I am pleased beyond belief to see the trees still arching and meeting over the road, a gallery of untouched live oaks. The road widening crews haven’t reached this stretch and I don’t want to see it when they do. A buff caliche road slants sharply up and away to the left. The cinderblock City Hall directly opposite gleams with new white paint, although it appears deserted, just as it was every time I pushed my way up that dusty hill on my first yellow and brown three speed. Every now and then a lonely fire truck would be out in front. The volunteer fire department appears to have its own building now, just across the road.

The night my father hit the street sign at that intersection and flattened it into the municipal building lawn, he arrived home to find one of the license plates had come off his Trans-Am. As he told it, he returned to the scene in the predawn hours to find the evidence wedged into the soft dirt beneath the dead sign. He picked up the plate and left, still unobserved. Still drunk, however, he scrawled an obscene message on the concrete stoop, cleverly leaving it unsigned. In his version of the story, the trickster hero had once again outsmarted the forces of authority. I was proud of him.

Now a turn at the tiny city’s one business, a landmark restaurant built of the same limestone as our house. These are the dirt roads, pitted by runoff and graded once or twice a year, that I walked to and from the bus stop every day. A left turn through the remains of some long-ago stone gate. Over another creek, this one my playground in the years before boys and cars. Keep to the left at the fork.

Pass the house with the railroad ties, where as kids we got the idea that it was strange that two women lived together and raised small dogs, but had no idea exactly why that might be.

Pass the incongruous bamboo wilderness, meant as a privacy screen but long since turned jungle.

Pass the leaning pin oak in front of a neighbor’s house, marked now with a reflector, marked one night twenty-three years ago with most of the red paint from the passenger door of my father’s Ford truck. His friend Jerry owned a garage; the door was repainted before the tree’s owners could search out the offender. In the rain, the bark glinted red long after the actual paint had peeled away. I knew not to talk about the paint.

At last, the long pebbled driveway into which I do not pull. The window of what used to be my room still looks directly out onto the terminus of that drive which was the prime parking space reserved always for my father, requiring only a straight forward motion and a timely brake. The bed my grandfather built especially for me was set high over storage drawers and rose to the level of that front window’s sill: to this day, headlights through a window in the dark will wake me at once. At night, all the nights of childhood, I inhabited an involuntary lookout post.

Not the lights that particular night, but the horn. For some reason, my father had pulled much too close to the house and was blowing his Continental’s horn in steady long blasts at short intervals. This was new and therefore even more dangerous, so I eased back the blind by millimeters, uncertain how far he might be able to see into the house. A momentary silence. I looked out. The driver’s door was wide open, the interior light on, and my father’s head swayed slightly before he collapsed onto the steering wheel, blasting the horn again, which woke him just long enough to lift his head and cease the sound for a moment. The quiet lasted just long enough for him to pass out again and set off the horn.

I had to get my mother, who hadn’t wakened yet. Carefully, stealthily, I slid off the bed and went crouching from my room, terrified that my father might somehow see me seeing him. Afraid above all else of hurting his pride, afraid that my father might feel ashamed or embarrassed, there in the driveway, having made it only almost far enough this time.

At the same time, and in the contrary spirit that often typifies what we do around here, I’d like to be the one who acknowledges that our relationships with our fathers are often less than we’d hope for. Frankly, some dads are complete bastards, and in many cases they’re probably at least a complex mixed bag. And why not – being a parent is hard, I’m told. This basic reality makes the guys who get it right even more worthy of our love and respect.

It’s no worse than fair to say that my own father lived his life out between Mixed Bagville and the untamed Bastardlands, and truth be told I have a hard time remembering him as more good than bad. Whatever salvation he may or may not have reached at the end, I’ll never have a chance to make peace with the man any more than he was able to make peace with the demands and obligations of fatherhood.

So this is dedicated to everybody out there today honoring the institution of fatherhood under protest, and in particular it goes out to my little sisters, Marty and Cindy, who shared the experience of Norris G. Smith with me. I laugh as best I can, and I try to be honest about the ambivalence of it all.

_____

Originally posted April 10, 2008.

It’s around 9 a.m. May 1, 1994. My stepmother, Kathie, has spent the night at Forsyth Memorial Hospital with my father, Larry, who will die late this afternoon. Their next-door neighbor, Wayne, is driving her home so she can shower and maybe get an hour or two of sleep. She hasn’t slept much in the six weeks since Daddy was admitted to the hospital with massive liver failure. Wayne has been a constant and salving presence during his friend’s illness.

Ten miles, maybe, down Silas Creek Parkway, through the south side of Winston-Salem, then on out Highway 109′s low, pine-strewn roll of hills to where Gumtree Road cuts across, demarcating the northern boundary of Wallburg, NC. This is where Daddy and Kathie live, and it’s where I grew up. These are the cultural outlands of the sprawling new metropolitan South. Our neighborhood straddles the Davidson and Forsyth County lines, and stands too far out into the country to be properly called suburban. But it’s also way too close to Winston to be considered rural. In some senses it’s a border town, possessing neither the urban sophistication of the city nor the kind of “agrarian virtue” my college Politics professor liked to attribute to country living. Antebellum mystique is dead elsewhere, and it never happened here.

Daddy’s place is one of the neighborhood’s older houses, built up in the late 1950s just as the baby boom was starting to lose its steam. But since they converted the carport into a den, added a new covered garage on the side, and painted everything a nice shade of sunshiny yellow, it’s one of the nicer places on the street, offering a welcome visual alternative to the predominant red-brick rancherscape. This is especially true since some of the more recent additions to the neighborhood have involved “prefabricated homes” and double-wides. Longstanding “real house”-owners like my father stand in their gravel driveways and talk about these things amongst themselves sometimes, arms crossed, eyes squinting as the sun slips behind the pines.

Wayne and Kathie turn into the driveway. The house key is hidden inside Daddy’s big smoker grill around back. Kathie cuts through the carport and turns the corner in time to look up and see Randy Wilson, my best buddy from childhood, crawling out through her bedroom window. The Wilsons live down the street a couple of houses, and our families have been friends for over 30 years. Daddy and Greer, Randy’s father, are men whose children grew up together, played baseball together. Although they aren’t intimate friends, exactly, they are men with much in common, men who relate to one another easily. Neighbors. Men who are comfortable trading tales over the occasional beer.

Kathie screams. Randy topples to the ground, more or less head first, rolls and comes up hauling ass for the woods. He’s busted, but due to the stress of the moment he hasn’t quite figured it out yet.

By now Kathie has made it back out front, hysterical, so Wayne retrieves the key. They go in the house and once he gets Kathie calm enough to explain what happened, they call the Sheriff’s department. Or rather, they’re trying to call the Sheriff’s department, but are distracted by Randy, who has evidently come to understand the nature of the pickle vat in which he now finds himself soaking. He slinks out of the woods like a cur dog, circles through the scrubby side yard between Daddy and Kathie’s house and the Weaver’s trailer, eases around the corner, and, as nonchalantly as possible, wanders in the front door. At some point during the past couple of minutes, Wayne has made his way into the bedroom and retrieved one of Daddy’s pistols, which somehow Randy missed during the burglary.

Randy begs them not to call the law. He’s currently out of prison on parole and out of jail on bail. It’s unclear what he was in prison for, but three weeks ago he got a call from his little sister, Tammy, who was stranded up in Winston-Salem somewhere and needed a ride home. Randy doesn’t have a car, so he walked up to the Baptista’s house – they live directly across the street from Daddy and Kathie – and appropriated theirs.

Apparently car thieving doesn’t constitute a parole violation in Davidson County. Then again, even a bad-ass television DA might have trouble convincing a jury that boosting the Baptista’s car, a rusting monument to the genius of coathangers, baling twine, and duct tape, merits a grand theft charge. Regardless, Randy somehow made bail, and this is how, three weeks later, he found himself rummaging through the drawers in my father’s bedroom.

For her part, Kathie has experienced nothing in her life which prepares her for this moment. She calls Randy names he’s never heard before, which is something of an accomplishment given that, in his pre-incarceration days, Randy was a Marine. Wayne tells Randy to leave while he still can and Kathie goes back to calling the law. Randy walks out the door. A moment later he’s back, doing his best to look penitent.

“Please don’t call the law Kathie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he pleads. The dialing continues. He walks out the door, pauses on the cement porch, then comes back in again. Evidently trying to lighten the mood with small talk, he asks, “So, has Larry died yet?”

Wayne, in the passion of the moment forgetting that he’s outsized by a couple of inches and at least 40 pounds of hard, prison-yard muscle, whips around, grabs Randy by the front of his shirt, and pounds him hard up against the wall by the front door. For the first time he brings the pistol, a nondescript .45 automatic, to bear, laying it against Randy’s jaw.

“Motherfucker, you’re closer to being dead than Larry is. If you don’t get the hell out of here I’m going to blow your goddamned head off.”

Wayne lets go of Randy’s shirt, cautiously, allowing him to edge toward the door. Randy shrugs and smiles kind of vacantly at Wayne, who’s all of a sudden very aware of the odd weight of the gun in his hand. He’s never pointed a gun at anybody before, but he figures Randy probably has.

Randy holds his hands up in front of him and backs into the doorway, where he stops and bows his head for a second. “All right, all right.” He turns, walks out the door, through the front yard, and heads off down the street.

* * * * *

Larry “Chugger” Mulraney led what might charitably be called an imperfect life. He liked Cadillacs and diamond rings and junkets to Vegas. He liked women way too much to suit my mother and my first stepmother, who it turns out was originally one of the women Daddy liked too much to suit my mother. And the wheel goes around. Kathie, the third and final significant woman in his life, was the only one he didn’t run around on. That we know of.

Larry was not enlightened on questions of racial and gender equality. He wasn’t in favor of equal rights for gays and lesbians. And he absolutely, positively, had no time whatsoever for anybody who believed that smoking ought to be restricted in public places due to the hazards of second-hand smoke. Your lungs and my lungs were beside the point. Empirical research showing nicotine in the blood of fetuses whose mothers were non-smokers was beside the point. At stake was a more fundamental consideration: his Constitutional right to smoke wherever and whenever he pleased. When I once suggested that the Constitution didn’t explicitly articulate such a provision, it merely reinforced his long-held opinions regarding the relative merits of book learnin’.

Chugger was a shrewd trader of horses and cars and motorcycles and anything else you could turn a quick buck on. So shrewd, in fact, that his own family was reluctant to do business with him. I have no idea just how much I got took for in the two or three deals we transacted, and frankly I don’t want to know.

But even as he picked people clean to the bone, he did so according to an inflexible, if not necessarily noble, code of honor. My youngest sister, Carla, and her husband Bo are still scratching their heads over a deal they struck with Daddy a few months before he died. They were having financial problems (new babies can be expensive, they were learning) and were looking to unload their pickup. Daddy was quick to pay them the first amount they mentioned, even though it eventually proved to be significantly less than they could have gotten elsewhere. “I gave ‘em what they asked for it, didn’t I?”

Daddy just had a gift for dealing with the dumb and trusting. He’d always give people precisely what they thought they wanted. If they were witless enough to ask a fraction of what he knew the merchandise would fetch, well, that was hardly his fault, was it? That’s why I don’t want to know how badly I got skinned when we traded my Dodge Omni for his 1976 Caddy Sedan de Ville back in 1987.

I remember one Saturday morning back in the late ’70s he paid a guy up in Winston $100 for a piece-of-trash old Dodge truck that was missing fourth gear. By sundown he sold it to some enterprising halfwit for $1,100 cash without so much as taking it to the car wash. It’s a shame that Daddy went to work for Piedmont Airlines when he graduated from high school. Had he gone into the car business I’d have had a rich father. Mind you, my sisters and I wouldn’t have been rich, just him.

Larry Mulraney wasn’t always the most indulgent of neighbors, either, and as fate would have it, the two craziest families in Davidson County live next to him. Next door you have the Weavers. If you’ve heard comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s “you might be a redneck if….” routine, you have an introductory idea of what they were like. One of my favorites lines is, “you might be a redneck if you have a house that’s mobile and three cars that aren’t.” And there’s another one which goes, “you might be a redneck if your wife leaves the Marlboro in her mouth while telling the State Trooper to kiss her ass.”
The Weavers could have posed for the poster. Their tin-sided mobile home looked to be on the verge of collapse 35 years ago, but somehow or another it’s still standing. The three junkers clogging the driveway have been there since the Eisenhower administration. This next one I made up: you might be a redneck if people who keep livestock indoors complain that you’re dragging down their property values.

Directly across the street from Daddy’s place you had the Baptistas, who were a whole ‘nother case. Whereas the Weavers were your garden-variety, inbred, white trash kind of crazy, the Baptistas had this exotic, dark-eyed, inbred, Eastern European gypsy mojo working, and folks in the neighborhood were pretty much unanimous that they were loopy even by Jehovah’s Witness standards. Daddy would sit in his living room trying to watch the evening news, but he’d wind up transfixed as the various Baptista daughters took turns pushing their 300-pound mother up and down the street in her wheelchair. The sheer visual unattractiveness of the spectacle he could have endured – he’d grown up in Forsyth County, and as such, he’d seen his share of ugly. No, the part that vexed him to oratory was the fact that Mrs. Baptista didn’t need a wheelchair.

I always thought she was actually handicapped, but I was over at Daddy’s one day when the Baptista girls were pushing the “vegetable cart” around, as Daddy put it, when he told me how he found out she could walk.

“Remember the other week when that storm blew up all of a sudden? Well, they were out rolling her up and down the street like they always do when I’m trying to watch the news. They were up in front of Fuzzy’s place when a big old lightning bolt hit somewhere close by. Thunder damn near rattled the windows out of the house. And you shoulda seen her. Came up out of that wheelchair like she had a rocket up her ass, and she didn’t walk down the street, she ran. Full-tilt boogie. You wouldn’t think something that big could move that fast, but I couldn’t have caught her on my motorcycle. Ran her fat ass all the way down the street and nearly ripped the front door out of the frame trying to claw her way into the house. Crazy goddamned bitch – I swear, sometimes I almost feel sorry for her husband.” Daddy leaned back in the recliner and drew a long gulp off his Schlitz. “Course, he’s damned near as crazy as she is.”

For awhile there was talk that Puddin’, the Weaver boy, was sneaking around with Magdalena, the eldest Baptista daughter, who was probably ten years his senior. The very thought of a Weaver-Baptista spawn running wild in the neighborhood probably kept Daddy awake at night, although he wasn’t a man to show outward signs of fear. “Let me tell you something, boy. Inbreeding is nature’s way of containing defective genes. Over there,” he waved his Schlitz at the Baptista house, “and over there,” indicating the Weaver place, “are two sets of genes that you don’t want to see getting loose. Especially with each other.”

I never thought to ask where he learned so much about genetics, but underneath all the ignorance and seething ill will was a good point. Puddin’ and Magdalena copulating was a sure-fire recipe for an ubercarny, and in this case, a policy of genetic confinement seemed reasonable.

All this talk of Puddin’ bonking a Baptista was peripheral, though. Daddy’s primary beef with the Weavers had to do with the dog they kept chained up in back. And had always kept chained up in back. It’s probably not the same dog they had in 1960, but you can’t really tell for all the weeds and trash in the yard. It’s not like you ever actually see the dog. They never walk it or play with it or let it run around. They just kind of have it. But the dog had this bad habit of barking in the middle of the night when Daddy was trying to sleep.

Every so often Daddy would get fed up with the barking. The situation would unfold something like this. Daddy’s been drinking and shooting pool at Shade’s, a cinder-block watering hole about three miles up the road toward Winston. He and Kathie get home around 2:00 a.m., get in bed around 2:30, and at 3:00 Bosco hears a squirrel snoring and commences to yapping, waking up every dog within a mile radius in the process. At 3:05 Daddy’s had all he can stand. He gets up, grabs his shotgun, walks out into the yard wearing nothing but his boxers. He aims the gun straight up in the air and cuts loose.

“I was shooting ducks,” he once explained. “There was a whole flock of ‘em up there.” This sort of thing happened often enough that the details run together, but one time the Baptistas called the Sheriff. Daddy answered the door in his underwear and told the deputy he had no idea what those crazy bastards across the street were talking about. He hadn’t heard a damned thing. Didn’t mention anything about the ducks. The deputies just nodded, thanked him, and left.

A couple of years before Daddy died I was at a gun show down in Randolph County (not too far from the home of the King, Richard Petty) and found some 12-gauge shells that fired flares instead of shot. It seemed like just the sort of thing Daddy might like for his nocturnal duck hunts. I figured if he could illuminate his targets a bit it might improve his chances of actually bagging one, so I bought him a box – three white ones and three green ones. He never got around to using them.

Larry just loved beer. Loved it to death, you might say. I never checked but I assume that, commencing in mid-March of 1994 when he first went into the hospital, Schlitz sales dropped precipitously. I had pondered for years what might happen in the first meeting of Coors executives after my father’s death. Some VP of Sales and Distribution in Golden, Colorado, would note an inexplicable plummet in sales of their Schlitz brand 16 oz. tallboys. He’d see his entire career flash before his eyes, and would frantically dispatch some hapless toady to find out why in the hell the public had suddenly lost its thirst for the beer that made Milwaukee famous. Then, several years later, the grizzled modern-day Parsifal would arrive one rainy winter evening at the marble grail marking Daddy’s final repose, and there he’d kneel, praying and weeping that he never knew the man. He’d return to report his story to the corporate directors, and they would erect a monument to Larry “Chugger” Mulraney, understanding at last that it was he who had made Milwaukee famous.

My best guess goes like this. Daddy probably downed eight to 10 beers, on average, every day for 37 years or so. More on days when he was off work, but this is a good working estimate. That comes to roughly 135,050 beers. Which is 2,160,800 fluid ounces. And this was just his everyday beer routine. We’re not even talking wine with dinner and the several varieties of hard liquor associated with special occasions. Which means that, while my father only went around once in his 56 years, he sure as hell grabbed all the gusto he could lay his hands on.

The doctors didn’t waste a lot of Latin on Daddy’s case. His liver just quit. I’m not sure how much gusto the average human kidney can take, but I’m guessing that the red line on the gauge falls somewhere to the left of two million ounces.

“What people don’t understand is that he didn’t really drink that much beer,” Kathie explained. “They’d always see him with a beer in his hand, but a beer would last him an hour or so. He just liked the taste of beer.”

I remember one time on vacation he found this shop that made fake newspapers, inserting your name into one of their prefabricated headlines. He came back with one reading, in 72-point bold type: Larry Mulraney Quits Drinking; Schlitz Goes Out of Business.

* * * * *

All this isn’t to say that Daddy was a bad man. On the contrary. He was one of the most loved and respected people who ever drew breath. He wasn’t formally educated beyond high school, but there was no mistaking his innate intelligence. His sense of humor ran to the earthy, but laughter followed him everywhere he went socially, and nobody he knew ever threw a party without inviting him. And in spite of all his faults, he was in many ways one of the most honest men I ever knew (car dealing notwithstanding). His marriage to my Mom was short and ugly, lasting only long enough to produce my sister, Jeri, and me. A marriage made in hell, it was, but he was always straight with me about his failings as a husband and a father. Mom wasn’t blameless, I knew, but he never demeaned her in front of me. He actually defended her several times during periods when I was hacking through some emotional trauma and blaming her.

“Nina did the best she could, Junior,” he said. “I was out running around and she was stuck at home with two kids. You ought not blame her. She did what she thought was best for you.” He wasn’t exactly good at these sorts of talks, but he did have the guts to own up to his drinking, his infidelity, and his immaturity. Not that there would have been much point in denying it – there were simply too many witnesses. A lesser man might have been overcome by the fear of how he might look in the eyes of his only son. The only concern Daddy had, though, was that his boy knew his father would shoot straight with him.

Co-workers, friends, trading partners – pretty much everybody except the Baptistas and the Weavers – agreed that Larry was one hell of a guy. And I think even the Baptistas and Weavers had a soft spot for him somewhere. Probably. Deep down. Maybe.

Given Daddy’s immense popularity, when we had his surprise retirement party you could hardly get in the place. The house was full. The carport was full. The yard was full. Daddy had worked for Piedmont Airlines, then the Great Satan, USAir, for 33 years. When USAir bought out Piedmont it was, to Daddy’s way of thinking, the moral equivalent of having your mother raped by Yankees. But that’s another story. Everybody who ever worked with him, for him, or near him was at the party. For a while I wondered if everybody who had ever flown on Piedmont Airlines was going to show up. The party was a huge success, to say the very least.

And many of the faces from the party came around again during his six weeks in intensive care first at Forsyth Memorial, then at the UNC Medical Center down in Chapel Hill, then at Forsyth again when the doctors finally threw in the towel and sent him back to his hometown to die.

* * * * *

After the cops are called and Randy leaves, Kathie does a quick inventory and realizes that some of their stuff is AWOL. The most prominent piece of missing property is Daddy’s prized nickel-plated .38. We’re the sort of family for whom firearms often have sentimental value.

Randy has ambled on down the street to his house, presumably to wait for the deputies. Kathie storms out the front door and heads down to the Wilsons’ to personally expedite the recovery of her stolen property. Kathie is a slight woman, and she has endured a long history of poor health. Some of us have wondered among ourselves whether Daddy’s illness might not kill her before it does him. As such, she does not cut a terribly imposing figure, in spite of the fact that she possesses one of these faces in which every nuance of her emotional state is clearly readable. At this moment, she is very obviously on the edge.

Kathie bangs on the Wilsons’ storm door and demands, in no uncertain terms, that her property be returned to her right now. Randy plays dumb, tells her she’s crazy. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Then Randy’s mother, Carol, pokes her head out and says that Randy saw some people going in to Larry’ house and he went in to chase them away. “He was trying to help you, Kathie. Randy was trying to help.”

Carol’s slant on the events of the past half-hour might be forgiven, I suppose. Life has not blessed her with model children, and it’s no wonder she wants to put the best face on a rapidly deteriorating situation. In fact, many of us who grew up with Joanie and Randy and Tammy Wilson would argue that Randy isn’t even the black sheep in the family. That distinction goes to Tammy, who displayed abnormal hellcat potential even as a preschooler. And this was in a neighborhood overrun with all manner of aspiring delinquents. I don’t know how many of my childhood friends finally wound up in jail, but off the top of my head I can think of seven or eight the gendarmes would do well to keep an eye on.

In shock and disbelief, Kathie retreats to her house to wait for the authorities. They finally arrive around 10:00, arrest Randy, haul him up to Kathie’s to be identified, and then cart him off to the county jail in Lexington.

By sundown he’s made bail and is back at home, and Wayne wonders out loud why, exactly, the Davidson County Sheriff even needs a jail. “The cop shows on TV always make out like breaking parole is a big deal.” Of course, as I pointed out later, law enforcement in Davidson County bears a lot closer resemblance to The Dukes of Hazzard than it does NYPD Blue, so you have to lower your expectations a bit when you dial 911.

Later that night one of Randy’s acquaintances, a man the Sheriff’s deputies say is a known drug dealer, calls Kathie and offers to sell Daddy’s .38 back to her for $500. All this information – locations, descriptions, serial numbers – is handed over to the deputies.

“We’re on our way over there to bust him right now,” they say, as they hustle out the door. It’s the last she hears from them for five months.

Five months – that would make it early October of an election year, and the Sheriff’s bid for another term was on tenuous footing. The last thing Davidson County’s highest-ranking peace officer wants to see at this point is the meticulously detailed letter which arrives from Kathie via registered mail, a correspondence which is conspicuously cc’ed to all five daily newspapers serving Davidson County. Her late husband’s property had never been recovered. She had not been kept apprized of the disposition of the investigation or Randy’s trial. Her calls had not been returned. Etc.

This is the only victory Kathie wins during the whole debacle. Less than 24 hours after the letter was mailed, her doorstep was littered with public servants. That night the cherished .38 was recovered.

Six weeks later the Sheriff was looking for work.

* * * * *

Not with a bang, but a whimper. Such was Daddy’s death. The whole thing just stank of injustice. Not that he didn’t bring it all on himself – he did. Larry Mulraney abused his body mightily for nearly four decades, and several months earlier the doctors had given him a rather unambiguous ultimatum: stop drinking completely or die. And since they had just drained a gallon of fluid out of his gut, there was ample reason to expect they might be taken at their word.

And he did stop for a while. But the weekend before his liver finally checked out for good, according to Kathie, he had killed a gallon bottle of vodka. The vodka didn’t go down without a fight, and a couple nights later he was, for all intents and purposes, history.

“It was the liquor that killed him,” Kathie says. “He knew he couldn’t go back to drinking beer because he liked it too much, and there towards the end he was trying to drink liquor like he did beer.”

It doesn’t quite set that a man whose life presented him with so many chances to die dramatically should, in the end, waste into silence on the wrong end of a respirator. When he totaled his car so spectacularly back in his teens, it didn’t kill him. In 1965 he lost control of a motorcycle at 90 m.p.h. up on the expressway and slid, rolled, flipped, tumbled, and generally Evel Knieveled several hundred feet on the concrete, and somehow that didn’t kill him, either. I was four, I guess, and saw him the next morning. There was no two-by-two inch patch of skin on his body that wasn’t lacerated, abrased, bruised, or scarred, but he hated hospitals, so he had a buddy sneak him out.

And that pack of liquored-up South Davidson County dropouts didn’t kill him that night a few years back on Highway 109, just north of Denton, when they tried to run him and Kathie off the road as they were driving home from dinner at this barbecue place Daddy really liked down there. Of course, his survival that time probably had a lot to do with the other driver’s reaction when, looking over, he realized that Daddy was no longer paying the least bit of attention to his steering wheel. Instead, he was leaning out the window with the aforementioned revolver leveled at the driver’s earhole. The road simply wasn’t big enough for the both of ‘em, the little thug must have figured, so he opted for a quick and cinematic detour through the cornfield paralleling the highway.

None of the bulls Daddy rode on his way to winning the very first Love Valley Rodeo Bullriding Championship killed him, either. I was maybe eight or nine the first time my grandparents told me that Daddy used to ride bulls. Grandmother backhanded me for being impudent when I laughed in her face, but I couldn’t help it. I genuinely thought they were pulling my leg. My daddy was the consummate pretty boy – 6’4″, with thin, high cheekbones tracing back several generations to a full Indian grandmother, never a strand of that immaculate jet-black hair out of place, never a bead of sweat, never even the suggestion of exertion. The very thought of my father on anything as rough and dirty and smelly as a Brahma bull – I couldn’t help but laugh. I’d never seen him brave so much as a riding lawn mower.

But once they showed me photos I had to believe them, so I asked him about it one day. Some of his stories about being chased around the ring and over the fence by a rampaging ton of torqued-off ribeye, well, to this day I prefer my rodeos with three clowns, a high fence, and eight or nine rows packed with spectator between me and the mayhem erupting out of chute five.

All of this excitement was such a far cry from the bland desperation of the Intensive Care Unit at Forsyth Memorial. That day in mid-March when they first called me they said he probably wouldn’t last the night. I’d heard that crap before – that’s what they said when Grandmother first went into the hospital five years earlier, and she lasted another year or two before officially clocking out. So I wasn’t too surprised when a few days passed and he was still hanging on. I was in Boulder, in my first year of grad school at CU, and the family told me to just sit tight until they knew more. A month later they called and said it looked grave, and that I should come home right away.

In spite of all I knew about the situation, there was a big part of me that still revered the myth of Daddy’s immortality. I knew the odds – my friend Alex is an internal medicine specialist at Presbyterian Hospital in Atlanta, and he had pretty much acquainted me with the realities of the situation, given the facts as he understood them. But the head and the heart were not quite reconciled. And when I walked back into the ICU the first time, I wished on the spot that he’d died that first night, like the doctors promised, as quickly and painlessly as possible. I wished he had died in that car wreck, or on the expressway, or on the rodeo floor. Anywhere, anyway except this. It was exactly like when I flew home from Iowa in 1989 to see my grandmother. That husk, that improbable assemblage of flesh and fluid lying inert and incognizant on coarse, institutional sheets in a dank, gray institutional room. I’ve never quite known what it was, but it wasn’t Grandmother.

Likewise, there was precious little left of my father. I had been there three days before I had any notion that he had recognized me. He was drugged pretty heavily, thankfully, and I suspect that when he was conscious he played possum on us. Ignored us. Kind of like when you’ve kenneled the family cat for your vacation and you come home and the damned thing won’t acknowledge you for a week because it’s mad that you put it in that place. Daddy would rather have been dead at home than alive in the best hospital in the world.

The hospital had him hooked up to a stunning array of life-enhancing technology. You could have taken a picture of Daddy and all these machines and used it in a medical technology brochure. Hire an artist to doctor the photo a bit, maybe make the patient look a bit more lifelike, insert little numbers on each gizmo with lines leading off into the margins, where you’d have the make and model and a brief description. Add an 800 number and a price list and you’d have yourself a damned fine sales tool.

One of the things my thoughtful side wanted to ask him then, but couldn’t, was whether he had reconsidered his decision regarding Grandmother and the feeding tube. He couldn’t bring himself to have it removed. He couldn’t “play God.”

“I can’t make that decision. Can you?” he’d yelled. Well, yeah, actually I can, I said. I wanted to ask him if he’d changed his mind in light of what was happening to him now, but I couldn’t, because even when he finally woke up he couldn’t talk. The respirator makes that pretty much impossible.

There was one moment on the last night I was there. He had attained consciousness and seemed alert for the first time since I had arrived three or four days earlier. Several of us were back in his little room in ICU – Kathie and Wayne, as well as Chester and Donna, a couple of Daddy and Kathie’s closest friends. Daddy and Donna had some sort of private running joke going which I never got fully explained to me, but which everybody insisted was really a hoot. Her part in the joke involved asking Daddy if he wanted her to fetch him a Pepsi. We were all trying to be up for him the way people are when they’re around somebody who’s going to die. We smiled a lot, joked, told him how good he looked. Or rather the others did. I’ve never had much of a bedside manner.

Donna looked down at Daddy and recited her end in the long-running joke – “Chugger, you want me to get you a Pepsi?” And she laughed, I suppose the way she always did at this point in the gag.

Daddy, of course, couldn’t speak his line. But I was watching his eyes. YES! God yes, please bring me a Pepsi, the thought as clear as any words he ever spoke. He even strained upward like he wanted to climb out of the bed. He was on the respirator, though, and couldn’t have anything to drink – hadn’t had moisture in his mouth in a month – I know Donna didn’t mean to torment him, and I don’t even know if anybody besides me noticed.

I flew back to Colorado the next day, slightly encouraged by the fact that he had shown some improvement during my visit. If we could just get him stabilized. If the doctors could keep him alive and functioning and if Kathie could keep him on the wagon for six months, then maybe UNC would consider him for a liver transplant. Maybe. Maybe.
Two weeks later the phone rang.

* * * * *

It’s May 1, 1994, around 5 p.m. Larry Mulraney has just been pronounced dead. At roughly the same time, down the street at the Wilson house, Randy is back home after making bail. Tammy comes in. She’s heard what happened this morning. Whatever faults she might have, Tammy Wilson does understand something of the respect one accords to people who have been friends and neighbors for three decades. Especially when one of those people lies upon his deathbed.

An argument erupts between the two of them, and like most of the arguments I remember them having as children, this one rapidly escalates into a full-tilt flamethrower. Tammy simply cannot believe her brother could have done what he allegedly did. Not wanting things to deteriorate further, Greer attempts to intervene and halt the argument between his kids, which is kind of like a housecat trying to pull two pit bulls apart.

At about 5:15 p.m., a few scant minutes after Daddy died, Greer Wilson’s heart goes the way of Daddy’s liver – it just quits – and he drops at his children’s feet and dies.

* * * * *

I imagine Greer and Daddy boarding the train together. Hopefully there’s a lounge car, and maybe a pool table, so they can shoot a few games, enjoy a beer or two, and shoot the bull as the celestial engine chugs their souls off into eternity. Greer has a High Life and Daddy’s got a Schlitz, and since I’m not there to jinx him, Daddy’s probably whipping all comers in eight-ball. “Goddamn kids,” Greer says, hands on his hips. “I swear, Chugger, I don’t know what the hell I did wrong.” Daddy grunts, sizing up his next shot.

He runs the eight ball down the rail to win another one. Good karma early in the next life. It’s a positive sign for a man who was raised with Jesus, strayed as a young man, then, according to Kathie, came home to the Lord in the final weeks of his life.

Still, Larry Mulraney never was much for harp music. I can’t help hoping that Daddy and Greer are sitting in the lounge car of the Big Black Train, talking, drinking, comparing notes on the day’s events, and laughing their asses off.