Tough to Get Your Tongue Around

tough to get your tongue around

One of my kids gave me the Flip mini for Christmas and on hearing me enthuse about it a few weeks later cautioned me not to be ‘one of those sad people making videos of themselves and posting them on YouTube’.

Silly boy. I’m one of those ridiculously merry people making videos of themselves and posting them on YouTube.

And here today, a video report card for Mel Gibson on how he did with that tricky old Boston accent in his new revenge film Edge of Darkness. His poster boy looks are gone now – with the deep naso-labial folds he now has he looks a little like the old guy in Disney-Pixar’s Up, with enough cross-hatching under his eyes to make a chain-link fence of – and don’t get me started on what’s going on inside the man’s head these days – but by Gosh he nailed the accent. Check out these sample phrases and see if you don’t agree:

 

The Hunger Moon

Nineteen degrees again today and the ground is bare and the birds are hungry. This minute-and-a-half of silence brought to you by the spirit of the word ‘glean’, which means to go back over land planted to grain  in search of what the reapers may have missed.

 

What Kids See

The day before last you’d have had to tunnel under your house to feel as low as I did: The dead and the little children of the dead and babies cradled in their coffined mothers’ arms, gad!  If you missed that post it’s right here. But today, with Nature shining an  innocent sun down on us here in Boston even as She kicks the states to the south square in the pants, I feel hopeful – maybe because of this great picture I found yesterday.

These are the children whose young mother died when the little one was still in her high chair. That’s Julia, in the middle there, who turned out to be about the funniest person who ever lived. And look how happy Robert and James seem. Only my mom still looks sad who was the world’s second funniest person and always said she photographed badly anyway with what she called her ‘rotten-down-turning mouth.’

But look at the mischief in little Julia’s face!  And I know James ‘came back’ pretty quick because the Christmas after the death he gaily signed his letter to Santa, “James Sullivan, a fat six-year-old boy,”  (this in an era when it was considered safer to have some extra flesh. )

So I ask you: what can children see that the rest of us can’t? And how can we acquire vision like theirs?

 

Not Gone

On a summer morning in 1910, a young father rode the train with a heavy heart. His young wife  was two weeks dead and he could not imagine how he would comfort their four small children. At the time of her death, Carrie was at her childhood home with the babies,  which is why Michael found himself on the train each week, out from the city on Friday and back again on Monday. They were all together on the Fourth of July weekend when she took sick so suddenly and died within hours, calling their names.

Now, on this Monday morning train, he was trying to write his little ones a cheerful letter which his dead wife’s sisters would have to read aloud to them young as they were. The boys were four and six and to them he wrote,  “You are such good little fellows to write your papa every night. I will be up again next weekend and we’ll play and play!” The girls were two-and-a-half and 17 months and to the older, called Callie, he said “Be kind to your little sister Julia and teach her how to walk and talk.”

I know because this man Michael saved every single piece of correspondence from those days. I know it because he did not die young but lived into a wise old age as the grandfather in whose peaceful home I passed my earliest years. But mostly I know it because in my family we tell all the stories, and the sad ones especially, because doing so helps us make sense of what has befallen us.

Now, a century later, I visit the place where Carrie is buried. I stand over her grave peering so intently I sometimes think I can almost see her down there, still so young at 31, together with something tucked into the crook of her arm just before the lid of her coffin was nailed down  tight: her stillborn child, unnamed and unmentioned in all six newspapers that carried the news of her passing.

I have long understood that my two girls find this story moving but I did not realize until recently that my son might find it moving too.  I discovered as much when I saw the five large charcoals he made as part of his Honors thesis in his final semester of college.

They are immense and highly detailed drawings, all based on tiny photographs taken by that same train-riding Michael. My son maintains that they’re mostly studies in form and texture but I can’t believe they are only that to him. Especially I can’t believe it when I look at the life-sized drawing above, which all but stops my heart every time I come upon it. For these are the four little children themselves, only months before fate rendered them motherless. They’re standing on tiptoe to peer out an open window and looking more real and alive than any mere photo ever could ever reveal: bald Julia in her high chair; the toddler Callie, who would one day grow up to become my mother; Little James and littler Robert, both squinting manfully into a lowering sun. Their father Michael is taking the picture which I know because I recognize the shadow of his hatted head. It lies across the house’s lower left hand corner, just as ominous thin shadows of a large tree darken the whole other side of the drawing.

Their young mum does not show in this picture, but anyone looking at it can sense her there. Having gathered her little ones at the open window and pulled aside the curtain, she has leaned back and away from children and camera both, as she would all too soon do forever, until her face, and scent, and touch would be forgotten by them entirely, even by the former six-year-old James who, during his final hospitalization, told me he could remember her from the back only, as with silver brushes, in a bedroom in 1910, she combed and dressed her long brown hair.

Some say the dead are dead and we should let them go and live life forward. For me though it is another way, because if they are truly gone, then why can we so sharply sense them at times, as if behind the thinnest of curtains? Why can we can feel them right here, only shrinking shyly from our sight, as if in respect for our busy living?

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I post this piece for my grandfather, Michael, who died February 3, 1958. and also for young Carrie,  great-grandmother to my girl Carrie who I like to think is now living out some of her dreams.

Born here as a first generation American, Michael went back to Ireland in 1899 to look up relatives. This is he on shipboard.

…and this is a picture of Carrie on her wedding day, taken by her groom. I love it for that human squint and because it’s one of only two photos I have of her smiling so big that her teeth show. They are just like the teeth of my mother who I still  miss so much.

 

Coming Clean

I distorted the facts to decorate the walls of that pity party I threw myself the other day when I whined about how I haven’t met with the kind of commercial success Joyce Maynard has seen. I’m re-reading that post this morning and see that I made it also sound like I’m some unselfish Mother Teresa who, rather than crassly selling her books, simply gives them away. As if I didn’t have a website devoted to marketing my own books never mind that its shopping cart is kind of cobwebby these days…

I’ve been looking back to 2005 over the last hour in search of the column I wrote about my day  teaching in that Brooklyn middle school and though I haven’t yet managed to unearth it I did come upon a letter that reached me that year. It came from a deployed soldier who received some of those books I sent out into the world via Operation Paperback and reading it again just now makes me wonder why I am not grateful 110% of the time for the privilege of writing every days, whoever sees it on whatever battlefield of life. This from one James Burt, rank unknown to me, who at the time was embedded with an Afghan Army unit: “Thank you so so dearly for donating these books to our library here in Kabul, Afghanistan.  They are both books that I would not have fully appreciated while I was younger, but they are truly awe-inspiring in their poignant insight and humanity to me now.”

This is he, sometime during that mission. I’m going to try to find him and get back later.

 

The Seller in the Rye

When I heard about Salinger’s death the first person I thought of was Joyce Maynard who left Yale during her freshman year and went to live with him. Because he asked her to. Because he wrote her a bunch of letters after he saw that famous essay she did for the New York Times Magazine “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life” and became infatuated. He was 53 at the time and with his raw-grain diet I imagine he looked like a haggard old guy in baggy pants. She looked like a ten-year-old who hadn’t eaten in a month as you can see here. The love match lasted just eight months before he sent her packing under cruel circumstances but 30 years later she sold the tale in book form. She had already sold another book that got made into a movie with Nicole Kidman; and last year she sold a third one. Now she sells herself, meaning her experience and her personality, by offering hopeful would-be writers a week in her company in the tropical venue she keep for this purpose. All this I learned about on her website.

I, meanwhile, seem never to have gotten the hang of all this selling. Sixteen years ago when I began to think I’d like to pull together a collection of short pieces, I pitched the idea to a couple dozen publishers and received as many rejections. Then instead of trying to figure out what these people DID want and  giving it to them I formed my own imprint and made the book myself. A few years later I did it again with another book. Then I figured out how to get on TV and radio and did about 60 shows which in case you didn’t know nobody pays you for. Then I made two more books, audio books, using a back bedroom empty at the time. I gave 200 copies of Vacationing in My Driveway to our deployed soldiers overseas, 100 copies of I Thought He Was a Speed Bump to a public middle school in Brooklyn and another hundred of both to some places around here and still I have almost 2,000 books in the cellar. My mate of many years said the other day, “Why don’t we just throw them away, T?”  It stabbed me in my heart to hear it– which shows there’s some kind of lesson in here somewhere though I’m darned if I know what it is.

 

My Boy is Wicked Smart

Howard Zinn died 24 hours ago. I’ll let others mark the death of J.D. Salinger. The author of “A People’s History of the United States” is the man I admire. In his memory today these two great scene from Good Will Hunting, the second of which grows right out of Zinn’s work.

And then this one, the real killer, where he takes aim at the government types trying to exploit his genius:

 

Yes I Said Yes I Said Yes

A Day in the Life: Meet deadline for column. Three hours later see it popping up in papers all over, done for the week wo-hoo! Change sheets on bed, pop in Netflix DVD I don’t remember ordering. 30 minutes later still sitting on edge of bed, stunned into a state of pathos over tale of Michael Caine warehoused in home for old folks with death-obsessed child.

Wash the blanket specially bought for this endless winter. Goes into washing machine so big it barely fits. Comes out like a Shrinky-Dink, like one of those loopy potholders kids used to make at summer camp. Pray for  miracle in drier but when I pull it from there out comes a wildly swirling cloud of fluff: what used to be the rest of the blanket. Find label and read “Dry Cleaning Recommended.” Oops.

Pitch a story idea called “Just Say Yes” to a magazine, smiling at thought of Nancy Reagan in final chapter of Ulysses.

Answer 40 emails. Experience head pain. Also neck pain, lower back pain, hip pain. “No spine ONLY buckles; it buckles and twists!” said my chiropractor gaily the other day so where’s my witches hat, I’m melting….

To cheer up read catalog from Purveyor of Tiny Bikinis, a few of which I bought the summer I weighed 120. Only thing in whole catalog without a plunging neckline is babydoll-type dress to wear OVER Tiny Bikini. “Cute!” I think. Put it in online shopping cart and who cares if it’s no more suitable for me than it would be for an 8-year-old boy? At least no plunging neckline.  How could I have guessed in my younger days that what would most embarrass me looking back would be what a pathetic self-displaying show-off I was? But what’re ya gonna do as Tony Soprano used or say. Live and learn. Smile again at frilly frock. Press “Submit order” and go back to the goddam emails.

 

Freud Called!

Ohhhh! NOW I get what that dream meant the other night! It meant the past is out of sight, forgotten very nearly, the repository of lost things that live just above us there, untouched by time, relying on virtual sources of nourishment (and, to hear the cat tell it, episodic benders.)

The walls down where we live grow suddenly wet and sometimes water runs clear across the floor because …well, because that’s how those Snow’s of Yesteryear are: they sometimes melt and trickle down and catch us all by surprise in the little Chamber of Forgetting that is the present moment.

My slaughtered cat is up there living along as if coyotes were never created, and the ugly red curtains I made when we were too poor for real curtains, and all these big standing houseplants I bought to disguise the fact that we had no furniture….. Ah but it’s all there, our memories of the lovely young Sophia Loren below, and Linda Hamilton above with her killer muscles, oh and the young Jack Kennedy before steroids squirreled his cheeks out and of course, of course, of course Jayne Mansfield, seen here with Sophia who had scant reason to look enviously at anyone before Jayne came along: Resplendent Jayne before Death came and took her in that car wreck.

 

I Dream

I dream water is suddenly pooling on my kitchen floor and the wall to the dining room is soaked with it.  Dashing up the stairs to look for the source, I enter a room I’ve forgotten about altogether, with curtains from decades ago and the houseplants I favored then. In here the water damage is so great the plaster is peeling away from the timbers beneath. “What happened here?” is all I can think – until I suddenly spot her stretched out atop a moldy chest of drawers: my long-mourned cat Charlotte, (as a baby above) last seen lying on the warm stones just outside my back door and gone for good an hour later.

“Oh where have you BEEN, Charlotte?” I cry, reaching to cup her small triangular chin in my hands. “In fields and meadows,” she anwsers.  “Alcohol came into it too.”

I laugh in the dream, not at the fact that she could talk but at the frank admission in what she has said and am just about to yell the happy news of her return to the other family members now tiptoeing in when my attention goes instead to the houseplants. They look like they need water but can it be that they’re alive at all in a room not entered for decades? Charlotte looks like she could use some water, yet she too is down but not out. She is only smaller, flatter, merely diminished, like those promotional sponges that sometimes come in the mail with realtors’ names on them, flat as postcards on dry land but swelling into lovely fat things once you put them in water.

And so there it is: a dream of a forgotten chamber with both too much water and too little, where things that should have perished live on. New Orleans 2005 was under this dream I think. Also Haiti 2010. Also all our yearning for those now gone from the shaky old house we call Earth, leaky as it, and imperiled.