DUDLEY NICHOLS—LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD

If you’ve ever heard of Wapakoneta, my home town, you’re probably a “moon freak” who knows the story of Neil Armstrong by heart, you stopped off at the Wapakoneta-Bellefontaine (which we say like bell-fountain) Street exit on I-75 to go to the Bob Evans and discovered that there’s an aerospace museum next door—can’t not have one of those in the town where the First Man on the Moon was born—somebody told you about Jim Bowsher’s incredible Temple of Tolerance and, even though you’re not an Ohioan, you decided to go see it for yourself (Johnny Depp did, and so did a number of other notables over the years), or you are a reader of this blog.

Dudley Nichols

But unless you were a real Hollywood connoisseur, you probably wouldn’t make a pilgrimage to Wapakoneta to walk the same streets that saw Dudley Nichols grow to manhood, or to try and get a selfie in front of his family’s home. (If you did, you would be, as my father, the inimitable Whitie, used to say, “shit outa luck”). That house, where Dudley’s stepmother, Kittie, lived until her death, and that used to stand at the corner of Blackhoof and Main, has long since been torn down. Despite the good work of the Auglaize County Historical Society, Wapak (as we natives lovingly call it) has often been less than sensitive to historical value. Not long ago, for instance, what had once been the main station for the late-nineteenth-century Interurban Streetcar Line was purchased and torn down to provide more parking space to the pizzeria next door. But, c’est la vie.

Whether you’ve heard of him or not, Dudley was once a highly renowned personality—one of Hollywood’s most influential writers and a film director and producer in his own right. Born in 1895, the son of a Wapakoneta doctor, Grant Nichols, and his wife, Mary, Dudley got in on the ground floor of the golden age of cinema, the early years of “talking movies”, and earned a place for himself as a true Hollywood icon. He is credited by some film experts with having elevated the status of the Hollywood screenplay to a level of literary excellence, and with having almost single-handedly elicited a whole new realm of respect for the American screenwriter.

The pizza place that I mentioned earlier is in the same building that my grandfather, Murel Newland, built in 1945-46 so that three of his sons, who had gone off to service “for the duration” during World War II, would have a place of business to come back to. And it was there, shortly after the war, that Whitie, his big brother Red and their younger brother Chuck opened the Teddy Bear soda fountain and sandwich shop, which, over the years, would morph into a family restaurant. The Nichols home was just a couple of doors away at the corner of Blackhoof and Main, and Dudley’s widowed stepmother Kittie lived there alone but rented part of the house to a single schoolteacher named Jessie Crawford. Kittie was a "stepmother" in name only, since she and Dudley’s were only eight years apart in age. Dr. Nichols, her husband and Dudley's father, died in 1944 at the age of eighty-two and Kittie never remarried. Curiously enough, she and Dudley both died in 1960, Dudley aged sixty-four and Kittie seventy-two. 

Kittie became a Teddy Bear regular from the outset. She mostly liked the coffee and the pie, but would now and then eat a meal as well. I was only a little boy when Kittie used to come into the Teddy Bear daily, but I remember her well. She seemed somehow regal and a little intimidating if you didn’t know her. I thought she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, elegant with her long silver hair pulled back tight and tied in a kind of ponytail with a velvet ribbon, her makeup ever perfect. I loved her full, pleated, ankle-length skirts and starchy white blouses, her slender hands with their red-painted nails, the long fingers that held her cigarettes the way female-lead movie stars did, up close to her scarlet lips, her elbow propped on the table.

Kittie liked Whitie and he liked her. She often came in between rush hours, and when he had time, Whitie would sometimes pour both of them a cup of fragrant, steaming Continental coffee and sit down with her to chat for a while. She never sat in a booth, always at a table, usually a square table for four right at the end of the counter.

Kittie wasn’t much for small talk. She could be, in fact, a bit cantankerous, so her conversations with Whitie usually verged on serious. Whitie, who was obsessive-compulsive to a fault, often tried to steer the conversation toward religion, or at least toward “belief”. My father had been brought up to be a devout Methodist and it was inconceivable to him that anyone could be an atheist, which Kittie was, and didn’t care who knew it.

This bothered Whitie. It bothered him for her, he said, because he liked her a lot, and he felt that anyone who believed in “nothing” was damned from the get-go. So he tried, as subtly as he knew how (which, if you knew Whitie, was anything but subtle) to convert her. Or at least to get her to say, unequivocally, that she believed in something.

One day, Whitie came home crestfallen. He said that he had suggested that Kittie must believe in something. He just couldn’t believe that she believed in nothing. So after he had badgered her into a state of acute ill-humor, it seems Kittie snapped, “I didn’t say I didn’t believe in anything, Norman. I said I didn’t believe in God. I do believe in something. I believe in money!”

Although few people I’ve ever met were more interested in money than my father—perhaps because he never was able to figure out how to make a ton of it and had to make do with being just “comfortable”—this statement of Kittie’s shocked him. “How could she say that?” he wanted to know. “Money couldn’t buy happiness, could it?”

“It will buy a hell of a lot more of it than poverty will,” Kittie Nichols responded. “The more money you have, the more insulated you are from hardship, and therefore, the happier you’ll be. Money is the solution to almost everything.”

Despite this answer that was very apparently designed to get Whitie to put a sock in it, however, he persisted, for as long as he knew Kittie, in trying and get her to admit she was a believer at heart. He felt that he should know. He’d been through several years of combat during the war and he’d seen it time and again. When shit started flying, even the most ardent non-believers started praying. But he never managed to convince her, even though they remained friends for years.

There was lots of talk over the years about Dudley and Kittie. Some said that they didn’t get along at all, that there was a lot of resentment over his father’s having married a much younger woman. Others said they got along very well indeed. Too well for some of the worst tongue-waggers around town. Still others said they had practically no relationship at all, since Dudley left home quite young and, basically, never went back. But it was through Kittie, via my father, that I knew that Dudley was a famous writer, and since I was in awe of writers and, more than anything in the world, wanted to be one myself, I always fantasized that Dudley might drop by for a visit and come to the Teddy Bear, where I might meet him while he was having coffee and pie. But, no such luck.

Already at age eighteen, Dudley was getting his first communications experience as a radio operator aboard a ship on the Great Lakes. From 1914 through 1917, he furthered his education at the University of Michigan. There, one of his activities was working as a student assistant in the university’s radio laboratory.

This experience both on the Great Lakes and at the university, served him well during the two years that he spent in the Navy, right at the end of World War I. Such was his expertise that, while in service, he created two highly useful inventions. One was a new kind of electronic discharger that would find application in commercial radio following the war, and the other was a new method of electronic protection for naval minesweepers. The new Nichols Method was successfully used in the sweep-up of some fifty thousand mines in the North Sea after the war. It was because of these inventions that Dudley was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1920. And it was during this period that he honed technological skills that he would later be able to apply to movie-making.

After his discharge from the Navy, Dudley went straight to the Big Apple to start accumulating the skills that he would need to become a successful writer. Hollywood was nowhere in his plans at the time. Like many writers before him, he believed that the best place to learn writing skills was in journalism, and there was no better place to do it than in New York City.

The World Building

His first writing job was at the New York Evening Post in 1920. Before long, however, he sought and got a job at New York World, which operated out of New York’s World Building. The paper, which was founded in the 1860s, and had featured the likes of Mark Twain, among other renowned writers, was owned by the Pulitzer family. Joseph Pulitzer himself commissioned construction of the World Building, located at 99 Park Row, specifically to house the paper. Built in the 1890s, it was one of New York’s early skyscrapers, a “towering” twenty floors, designed by famed architect George Browne Post. If you’re planning a trip to New York, however, you won’t be able to visit it, since it was razed, unfortunately, in 1955.

At New York World, Dudley not only met, but worked alongside such writing legends as Dorothy Parker—the brilliant satirist and short story writer who would also later turn to screenwriting, only to be blacklisted for her left-wing politics during the McCarthy Era—and Heywood Broun, founder of the American Newspaper Guild. Dudley would spend the next decade in New York City, working as a court reporter and theater critic for the World, and eventually as one of its columnists. He also free-lanced for other publications during that time.

In 1929, Dudley was scouted by Hollywood film companies as a screenwriter. He made it clear that he knew nothing about cinema, but the scouts insisted that what they were seeking were professionals with sound writing skills to create quality scripts for the growing “talking movie” market. So, in 1929, he accepted an invitation to move to Hollywood. He moved there a newlywed, with his bride, Esther “Esta” Varez, to whom he would remain married for the next thirty years, until his death in 1960.

Dudley in Hollywood

Dudley fit beautifully into the glimmering world of Hollywood. He was over six feet tall, a handsome, slender man who wore a suit well. And his elegance and intellect, combined with his superior writing skills, made him an almost overnight success. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood.

Despite his enormous success, Dudley remained a highly principled man, a democratic liberal with a strong sense of solidarity. I never tire of saying that Wapakoneta has had two major firsts: the first man to walk on the moon, and the first person ever to refuse an Academy Award.

This last happened in 1936, when Dudley Nichols was granted the Academy Award for best-written screenplay, for the 1935 hit, The Informer. The movie, directed by iconic film-maker John Ford—with whom Dudley would work on another dozen pictures—is set in 1920s Ireland and is about a former Irish rebel named Gypo Nolan. The plot finds Gypo recently ousted from the rebel movement and on the point of starving. When he finds out that his destitute lover Katie has turned to prostitution in order to make ends meet, Gypo decides to accept a twenty-pound bribe from the British authorities to rat out a former fellow rebel and the tense storyline recounts the consequences of that decision.

At the time, film companies were involved in a stand-off with screen writers and other unions in the industry. For obvious reasons, the Academy opposed independent unions, claiming that the Academy itself was the sole representative of all people working in the motion picture industry. If the Academy refused to recognize his guild, Dudley reasoned, he would refuse to recognize the Academy by turning down its award and boycotting the Academy Awards ceremony.

Twice the Academy tried to mail the Oscar to Dudley, as a de facto means of forcing acceptance, since his unprecedented snub was a slap in the face to film industry leaders. But both times, Dudley mailed it back.

His stubbornly ethical stance paid off, and, in 1938, two years after the boycott, the Academy finally certified the Screen Writers Guild as a bona fide and representative labor organization, and Dudley finally accepted his Oscar for The Informer. By that time, Dudley had been elected president of the guild, a post he held in 1937 and 1938.

Over the course of his career, Dudley Nichols garnered numerous honors. The same year that he won the Academy Award, he also won the Venice Film Festival Prize for best-written screenplay, also for The Informer. In 1940, he was nominated for an Oscar for best-written screenplay for The Long Voyage Home. He was nominated again in 1943 in the category of Best Original Screenplay for Air Force. He received the Writers Guild Laurel Award in 1953 for his contribution to screen writing, and was nominated again for an Oscar in 1957, for Best Writing and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. It was for his original story, The Tin Star, which became an Anthony Mann movie starring Henry Fonda, Anthony Perkins and Betsy Palmer.

He had one spectacular flop—the 1947 screen adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play, Mourning Becomes Electra, for which Dudley wrote the screenplay as well as directing the picture, for RKO. It starred Rosalind Russell, Michael Redgrave, Kirk Douglas and Raymond Massey. Despite the fact that it was critically acclaimed and that Michael Redgrave was awarded Best Actor for his role, the picture was a box-office disaster on which RKO lost 2.3 million dollars—at the time, the most money a film company had ever lost on a movie. But he bounced back in the fifties with new hits including not only The Tin Star, but also films like Rawhide, Return of the Texan, The Big Sky, Prince Valiant, Run for the Sun, The Hangman and Heller in Pink Tights.

A letter from Chaplin

In all, Dudley Nichols—Wapakoneta boy made good—wrote, directed and/or produced over sixty motion pictures, including some like Bringing Up Baby, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Stagecoach and The Bells of St. Mary’s that were destined to become film classics. But he never forgot his activism for democratic and humanitarian causes. In 1947, at the outset of the so-called “Red Scare” and its attendant “McCarthy Era” of persecution, paranoia and anti-democratic witch-hunts that wrecked numerous lives and careers—nowhere more than in Hollywood—all-time emblematic silent film star Charles Chaplin wrote a letter to Dudley praising him for his independent stance. On meeting Dudley at a mutual friend’s house, the British-born Chaplin, who, himself, would be persecuted and deported for his socialist political stance, seemed to recognize a kindred spirit, and wrote in part: “It is deeply gratifying to know that in these reactionary times of hate and conspiracy, there are still voices of protest and sympathy for what is being done to individuals by the so-called ‘free press,’ which is so violent and crude that intelligent criticism is inadequate to cope with it.”

Small-town people, like those of us from Wapakoneta, all too often think that “nothing ever happens here.” But it’s not true. Quite often, stars are born among us and we fail to see them until they wander elsewhere and then streak through a different sky with blinding light.   

STELLAR

There’s an old grandfather clock in one corner of the room. It’s large, but is one of those models that hang on the wall, not free-standing. It ticks with a low hollow sound. More like a slow, solemn klok-klok-klok than a tick-tock. It truly marks the passage of time in real time in the quiet of the small-town neighborhood on the edge of the city limits and in the uncomfortable silence of this living room. Klok-klok-klok-klok...another minute passes—but who’s counting? On the hour and the half-hour, the clock makes a mechanical, whirring, gear sound, seems to hold its breath for an instant and then goes thonk, its chimes having been muted to keep them from being a half-hourly nuisance.

There’s a big Admiral console black and white TV in another corner. It’s off. Usually at this time of day, Sunday afternoon, it would be blaring away and the regular occupants of the house, my great-grandmother, Mary Landis Cavinder, and my Great-Uncle Jesse, would have turned their straight-backed wooden kitchen chairs toward the screen to watch it. Each would have been wearing a pair of the dark glasses that are in their cases on a wooden kitchen table in the middle of the room, because there have been some rumors that too much unfiltered TV-watching can make you go blind.

But TV has been foregone today because there’s company. We’re the company. I would vote for switching the TV on if anyone were to ask me, but no one does. And my mother, Reba Mae, has forewarned me to behave, to keep my mouth shut, not to ask for anything, and to speak only when spoken to. I’m six, so I’m obliged to obey, because, if not, there will be consequences.

The clock and the TV are the only things in the room that, by any stretch of the imagination, could be considered “luxury items.” Everything else here is characterized by its utilitarian simplicity and by obvious poverty—the straight chairs (three), a couple of other wooden chairs with arms on which the upholstery long ago wore out and which are now neatly wrapped in several thicknesses of disused towels, cut to size and held on with wide strips of elastic, a very carefully preserved davenport that takes up most of the wall on the opposite side of the room and that is reserved for company, an oil-burning stove for heat in the middle of the far end of the room, a small end-table strategically placed under the single sash-window, between the two wooden armchairs and loaded with the kind of magazines Uncle Jesse reads (National Geographic, Argosy, Field and Stream, and, on a small under-shelf, a several-seasons-old Sears & Roebuck catalog). And then there’s the kitchen table in the middle of the room, which is not a retro version of a country kitchen table, but the genuine article, marred and worn with decades of rural service.

Seated, my great-grandfather Job Cavinder and

my great-grandmother, Mary (Landis). 

Standing, my great-aunts Ruth and Edith.

It is all neatly ordered and impeccably clean. Even the well-trodden linoleum floor-covering is so spic and span that it shines like a mirror, except in the places here and there where it has worn through to the black backing.

This is the only room of this house that I really know. I can’t recall ever having asked for the bathroom. I don’t even know where it is, although, I assume, somewhere off of the kitchen. There’s a master bedroom off of the living room but the door is always shut. There’s a door out of the room that leads into a hallway that goes to the front door, and to the foot of a staircase that leads to a second floor, where, I assume, there are probably a couple more bedrooms. But I wouldn’t know for sure because I have never been up there. And I’ve never come in or come out of the front door because, according to country-people rules, family comes in the backdoor. The door between the living room and hall is usually open and I can see a hat-tree there that holds a couple of coats—one is obviously Grandma Cavinder’s and the other Jesse’s—as well as several hats and caps.

I have been in the downstairs bedroom, but only once, and a long time ago, when I was three. I barely remember it. My Great-Grandpa Job Cavinder had had a heart attack after a day of raking leaves. He took to his bed and never recovered. All I remember about that visit or about Grandpa Cavinder, for that matter, is how my mother took me into the twilight of the bedroom, where Grandpa Cavinder lay gaunt and pale in his bed, his ever-dark mane of hair and thick black moustache in sharp contrast with his pallor. I recall Reba Mae picking me up and holding me down close to her dying maternal grandfather so that I could kiss his brow.

The only other room I’ve ever had a glimpse of is the kitchen. Sometimes when we’ve come on one of our rare visits, the door to the kitchen, which is across a small backdoor entry hall from the living room, has been open and I’ve sneaked a peek before Grandma Cavinder shuts it. She always does. She wouldn’t want “company” seeing her “messy kitchen”, where you could literally eat off of the floor.

Job and Mary with Myrtle, who is holding my sister, Darla.

It’s a much cheerier room than the living room, with sash windows that look west and north and a lot of natural light. There are home-made, carefully painted cupboards, a sink with a hand-pump in it, a gas range, a woodstove, an antique refrigerator that dates back to the barely post-icebox era and another big square country-kitchen table, this one topped with linoleum—the perfect surface on which to roll out pie dough, egg-noodles or pot-pie.

This wasn’t always the Cavinder home. My great-grandparents moved here after their children were mostly grown—my Grandma Myrtle, my great-aunts Flossie, Ruth and Edith, my Great-Uncle Ivan and Jesse. There were a couple more children, I believe, but they died. No one talks about them. Back before they came to town, they farmed. And then, later on, Grandpa Cavinder had a job with the railroad. Perhaps it was then that they moved to town.

Jesse moved with his parents. He remained with them all their lives. And would take his own life another six years from now after his mother died. He had had spinal meningitis as a boy and was small and twisted. I was fascinated by his shoes, one a normal, lace-up, black ankle boot, and the other one, identical to the first but sitting atop an always shiny black platform that was a good four inches tall. Jesse still limped, obviously, but a lot less than he would have without that special shoe. This was, now that I think about it, the only other “luxury item” in the house. Thanks to the orthopedic shoe, he never used a cane or a crutch, and out on the farm, although I don’t know how, he used to carry out many of the hard tasks of family farming in those days, including walking behind the horse-drawn plow.

I never know how to act on these visits. It’s mostly a matter of sitting on a chair and being seen but not heard. So I notice things. One sight that I find fascinating is how my great-grandmother has pieces of wooden toothpicks stuck through her earlobes. I can’t take my eyes off of them—fascinating and a little horrifying at the same time. Later, my mother explains that her grandmother has pierced ears. I’ve never known anyone with pierced ears. The women in my family at this time wear either clamp and screw-on earrings. Piercing won’t be popular until I’m a teen. Reba Mae explains that Grandma Cavinder only has one pair of earrings, good ones, silver with tiny diamond sets. She only wears them when she goes out. If she doesn’t keep her piercings open, my mother explains, they’ll heal shut. So she cuts off the two business ends of a round toothpick and sticks one through each earlobe. It seems barbaric to me. But what do I know? Later, I’ll have one of those earrings which my grandmother has had a local jeweler convert into a tie-tack—a legacy from her mother to me.

My great-grandmother and 

grandmother with my mother,

Reba Mae, between them, and my 
sister, Darla, beside them.

The restroom used to be outside. It was in an unobtrusive place in the garden. Once while Grandma Cavinder was in the hospital for a few days, Jesse and my mother’s younger brother Kenny decided to give her a surprise. They installed an indoor running-water bathroom and they also installed a gas range in the kitchen, where previously there was only a woodstove. They did it all in record time, and then removed both the woodstove and the outhouse because, Uncle Kenny reasoned, she’d no longer have any use for them.

When my great-grandmother gets back home, she is more incensed than surprised. Who the devil did they think they were? What made them think she wanted them to change anything? She had never understood indoor plumbing.

“Why on earth would anybody do those things inside the house?” she demanded. “There’s a reason bathrooms are outdoors,” she said.

As for the gas range, if she’d wanted one, she’d have gotten it. Things baked in a gas oven couldn’t compare to those made in a woodstove.

Uncle Kenny would later say that the reason she had been so upset by the removal of the woodstove was because she always had a fire going in it, and it was where she spit her tobacco juice. She’d just lift up one of the burners and let fly.

“Tobacco juice?” I asked incredulously.

“Sure,” Kenny said. “Didn’t you ever notice how she didn’t talk much and always held her mouth shut real tight? Well, that was because she always had the space between her gums and her cheeks full of Mail Pouch.”

“I want my outhouse and my woodstove put back right now,” she told my uncles, “and no ifs, ands or buts about it.”

Kenny and Jesse obeyed. When Grandma Cavinder spoke, that’s what you did, if you knew what was good for you.

But they also left the new bathroom and the gas range in place. And little by little, Grandma Cavinder began to use them. Turning on the gas was a lot quicker than building a fire. And, although as Uncle Kenny described it, her outhouse was neat as a pin, it was a lot more comfortable to bathe in a bathroom than in a tub in the kitchen, and a blessing not to have to sprint across the backyard to the outhouse in winter. But both men knew better than to mention this capitulation on her part. Doing so would be a sure way to guarantee that she never used either the range or the bathroom again.

Grandma Cavinder was little—barely over five feet tall—but she made up for her size in feistiness and obstinacy. She seldom smiled. In fact, I don’t ever recall seeing her smile, but then I only really got to know her after she was widowed.

She seldom if ever had anything to say to children, beyond a cursory hello and a hug. But I remember once when I was twelve, shortly before my great-grandmother died, seeing her for Christmas at the home of my Grandma Myrtle, her daughter. I was full of joy and Christmas spirit and when Grandma Cavinder and Jesse arrived after we did, I took her by surprise by rushing to give her a big hug and to wish her a merry Christmas. I had spurted up in height that year and now wore the same shoe-size as my father. My soaring new stature was taking a lot of getting used to and now, seeing how I towered over my great-grandma, I blurted out, “Grandma Cavinder’s so tiny that I could just pick her right up.”

“You do,” she said, “and it’ll be the last thing you ever pick up.”

I believed her.

My mother said that although her grandma had never exactly been the life of the party, she’d gotten a lot sterner and sadder after Grandpa Job died. She and my great-grandfather had shared a quiet contentment that was uncommon, my mother said. Even with the hard work of the farm, they had always found a quiet time for each other that didn’t include children or grandchildren or anyone else but them.

“She was never much of a talker,” my mother said, “and Grandpa Cavinder was so soft-spoken that you sometimes only realized he was talking when you saw his moustache moving.

“But I’ll never forget this one time when I was a young girl,” Reba Mae said, “when I was visiting them on their farm and I heard them get up and go out early to do the milking. Since I helped Mom with the milking at home, I decided to go out and see if I could give them a hand.

“It was still dark and kind of chilly. I could see the light of the coal-oil lantern coming from the barn. For some reason I knew better than to just burst in. And what I saw made me stop and just stand there in the dark watching. I saw their two milking stools a few feet apart. Grandma was sitting on hers and Grandpa was standing next to her as she gently milked a sweet-looking Guernsey. He took his pouch of tobacco out of his barn coat pocket and offered her a chew. She accepted, stuffing the leaves into her mouth, and he served himself. Then he pulled his stool over next to hers and as the milk from the Guernsey pinged into the metal bucket, they just sat there chewing and chatting in that quiet, quiet tone of theirs.

“I still remember it as something very beautiful to watch.”  

Jesse

Why I remember this particular Sunday, though, is because of Uncle Jesse and something very special he gave me that day. Jesse’s illness had made him shy and withdrawn. But it had also left him with a childlike quality that was endearing to me. I liked it during these infrequent visits when, although quiet at first, he would grow almost as bored as I was and would discreetly motion me over to the table to show me something while my mother made mostly one-sided conversation with her grandmother.

He had an entire collection of treasures that he had discovered in the furrows of his plow as a boy. He had kept them all and consulted books, magazines and local historians to learn more about them.

“Know what this is?” he would ask. And when I shook my head, he would say, “This here’s a real injun tomahawk head. Some was sharper than others. Depended whether they was a-choppin’ trees or people. You had your work tomahawks and your war tomahawks.”

Then he’d rifle around in the shoeboxes where he kept these precious objects and come up with another collector’s item. “This here’s a scraper,” he’d say. “They used these to scrape the meat loose from the leather of the deer they killed. They never wasted nothin’. They ate the meat and innards and used the skins for their shelters and clothes. They was real smart people, the Shawnees here abouts.”

But today, on this particular Sunday, he leaves the room and then comes back with something extra-special.

“Know what this is?” he asks. I shake my head. But my eyes are already trained on the strange object. He puts it on the table for me to ponder over and then takes his time, taking out his pouch and paper, rolling himself a smoke and lighting up. He takes a big draw on his cigarette and says, “Go ahead, pick it up.”

I oblige. It’s very strange. It fits neatly in my two hands but is very heavy for its size. “Heavy, ain’t it?” Jesse asks, watching the wonder on my face.

It looks almost man-made. Perfect in shape. Like a globe that has been evenly pressed in the middle to make it into a thick, well-rounded disk shape. Its surface is covered with small, evenly distributed, nearly uniform craters. The words impeccable and pristine come to mind.

“Is it like some grinding stone the Indians made?”  I ask.

Jesse grins, shakes his head and says, “Nope, that there used to be a star. A star maybe bigger than the earth. And then it fell out of the sky and burned and burned and burned until this here’s all that’s left of it. And for some reason, it picked my dad’s cornfield to fall into. And I just happened to hit it with my plow.”

I turn the meteorite over and over in my hands, enjoying its uniform roughness. In my mind, I try to imagine it as a star. A star bigger than the earth. And the thought intrigues and amazes me. Jesse has uncovered a star with his plow, and now I’m holding it in my hands.

“What do you think?” Jesse asks me.

“I think it’s amazing. I love it!”

“Well, you can take it home with you, if you like.”

“You mean it? You’re giving it to me?”

“Well, lending it to you at least. If I ever need it back, I’ll let you know. But if you like it, you can have it.”

That day, I took a piece of another world home with me. It was an alien world, but it also formed part of Jesse’s lonesome but rich and special world. And he’d given it to me. He’d given me something more precious than I’d ever had before. My very own star.   

A TIMELESS MOMENT OR A MOMENT IN TIME

Sometimes in dreams I will go back to a particular moment in time when the world seemed so perfect and beautiful that it brought a smile to my lips and tears to my eyes. These might be actual dreams, from which I awaken sad to have come out of the trance and desperately wanting to close my eyes and go back. Or they might simply be waking daydreams, where, for a moment I lose track of current reality and time-travel back to that exact instant and place.

What’s important about this is that the moment itself isn’t a dream. It is very real. It existed in real life, and exists still, if only in my mind. I consider myself fortunate that there have been more than one. Although, at the same time, it makes me sad that I haven’t been able to maintain a level of self-awareness that might have provided me with many more of these special moments, which are the only real definition of complete happiness.

These were times when I was momentarily blind to the crime, violence and dirt of the streets, and to the major problems of the world. They were moments in which all I was aware of was myself and my commitment to the path that I was choosing. It still happened to me, very occasionally, in my early years as a journalist, despite my job’s leading me to witness harsh, often even brutal realities on a daily basis. Perhaps back then I was more able to compartmentalize, to keep the reality that I was reporting separate from my own. Maybe it was even a survival mechanism. Who knows?

That’s probably why as I’ve gotten older and, hopefully, world-wiser, these moments have become, sadly, ever more rare. It’s that I no longer seem able to separate myself from the world I live in. And, search for them though I might, those moments of pure joy and self-realization are rendered practically unattainable, or at least they are no longer unadulterated.

I recall these special moments as timeless instances in which there came a sensation that everything around me was mere scenery that could be just as beautiful as I wanted to make it, and that, just beyond it, in a place I couldn’t quite touch or see, only sense, there was something else. Something more.   

Epiphany. I think that’s probably the word for it. A moment of lightning-bolt realization. An instant stripped of doubt, sorrow, regret, rage or cynicism. A moment of simply being, and knowing that that, in itself, is enough. That it’s a miracle. Life is. Being alive, breathing in and out, seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, loving, that it’s all cause for indescribable joy. For a fleeting moment in time, you might capture it. You hold it in your heart and mind and it fills you. And then it’s gone. But not forgotten. It is branded on your heart and brain and, if you’re lucky, from time to time, it will come back and let you recall it as if it were a snapshot or a video that plays over in your mind, but one that includes more than image. Emotion, feeling, state of mind, all just like they were right then. It’s primitive, unbridled, so simple

Henry Miller -- literary epiphany

and pure that it’s an enigma.

For author Henry Miller, for instance, that sort of moment was eminently literary. In Black Spring, Miller writes:

“And then one day, as if suddenly the flesh came undone and  the blood beneath the flesh had coalesced with the air, suddenly the whole world roars again and the very skeleton of the body melts like wax. Such a day it may be when first you encounter Dostoievski. You remember the smell of the tablecloth on which the book rests; you look at the clock and it is only five minutes from eternity, you count the objects on the mantelpiece because the sound of numbers is a totally new sound in your mouth, because everything new and old, or touched and forgotten, is a fire and a mesmerism. Now every door of the cage is open and whichever way you walk is a straight line toward infinity...It was exactly five minutes past seven, at the corner of Broadway and Kosciusko Street, when Dostoievski first flashed across my horizon...”

Harper Lee -- a new angle

For Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, that moment of epiphany is experiencing something that causes you to view a world you’ve known all your life from a different angle, and as if seeing it for the first time. She paints that instant through the words of her child protagonist, Scout Finch, when the little girl, as narrator, says, “I turned to go home. Street lights winked down the street all the way to town. I had never seen our neighborhood from this angle. There were Miss Maudie's, Miss Stephanie's—there was our house, I could see the porch swing—Miss Rachel's house was beyond us, plainly visible. I could even see Mrs. Dubose's... Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.”

Scout --the world from the Radley porch

My moments of wonder have been much more pedestrian, if just as epiphanous. The first one I can recall happened when I was still a boy, an adolescent of sixteen. It was Christmas-time. I was from Wapakoneta, but nearby Lima, Ohio, had become “my town”. In our rural area, Lima was what passed for “the city”, a big industrial town back then, with an urban feel to it.

No one could have told me even a few months earlier that I would be where I was right then. I had been a drummer in a couple of “kid bands” that played in teen centers for a small cut of the meager cover charge. But then I got a part-time job working in Lima’s biggest music store and my whole life changed. Suddenly, I was in daily contact with all of the professional jazz musicians in the area and at sixteen, was playing as a relief drummer every Friday and Saturday night for at least union scale. It was a dream come true to still be in high school and to be working as a professional musician, a percussion instructor and a respected member of the staff at the music store. I knew every bar and nightclub with live music in the area. And I knew all of the best area musicians by name and was treated like one of them. I had my own car. I had my own money. I had my own life, even though I was still in high school.

The Lima Square by night

It was around Christmas-time of that first wonderful year of dreams come true. The changes had opened up a whole new view of the year ahead. I was inspired to not only play every gig I could but also to give free rein to my other artistic endeavor by starting to take my writing seriously. And, therefore, to also take my reading seriously.  By the end of that year, the future I foresaw was as writer by day, musician by night, in a dream world that couldn’t get any better.

The special moment in time came one night when I was working at the store until nine. I had just been on my supper break. I had walked up Main across the Lima square and half a block up to Gregg’s Department Store, where they had a restaurant I liked on the upper floor. I’d had the ham steak with mashed potatoes with sides of green beans and slaw, washed down with iced tea. And while I ate, I finished reading, for the first time, what was to become one of my favorite short stories of all time—J.D. Salinger’s For Esmé With Love and Squalor.

When I came out, with Salinger’s words still ringing in my ears, the cold had turned sharp as a knife and the sky was mostly clear. Still, snow flurries were falling from some unseen cloud, since, overhead, the sky was infinity-black and dotted with glittering stars. The square was dressed for the holidays, with twinkling colored lights, wreaths, fantasy candy canes and bright red, green and gold ribbons everywhere. And in the middle there was a huge tree with magical lights, silver icicles and oversized ornaments to delight shoppers. Woolworth’s, Penney’s,  Sears, The Leader, Gregg’s and other downtown department stores glistened with holiday cheer, and on the corner, out in front of George Anthony’s Sweetland candy store, coffee shop and restaurant, a group of my newfound colleagues had formed a brass choir and were playing Christmas carols with that sweet, clear, harmonic brass sound that is like no other.

Between tunes they were passing a flask to keep warm and as I went by, one of them called out, “Hey kid!” and held up the flask offering me a snort. I laughed, thanked them and politely refused. And then, as I reached the other side of the square and headed south toward the store, I suddenly felt tears well up in my eyes and the thought that came to me was, “This might well be the happiest moment of my life.”  

As an adult, I remember a New Year’s in Buenos Aires. Virginia and I had invited a number of people to our Mid-town apartment to ring in the New Year. We’d held the celebration at home. I was off from the paper, since the next day was one of only a handful of non-publishing days each year, so I was completely relaxed. Lots of friends and some of Virginia’s relatives showed up, many after they had started bidding the old year farewell elsewhere. There was a surfeit of food and drink and good music on the stereo, and it had been a really fun time, capped by all of us standing together on our eighth-floor terrace, watching a plethora of fireworks burst in dazzling colors above the rooftops.

Then about two or three in the morning, people started peeling off a person or a couple at a time and heading for home. At last, it was just us with a couple with whom we had become intimate friends. They lived upstairs then, and we saw each other several times a week, sometimes daily, and dined together and went out together and took vacations together. We had become like family. Or like something more than family. We truly loved each other.

When everyone else had gone, our friends suggested we go downtown and get a nightcap—champagne, he was buying. So I got my car out of the parking lot around the corner and off we went, east toward the river and downtown along Avenida Corrientes. Partying was still underway in a lot of private homes, but from Mid-town to Downtown, traffic was sparse and many places were already closed, closing or had never opened. It was a rare thing, something almost magical to see the city so abandoned on a warm South American summer’s night.

New Year's fireworks in Buenos Aires...a few hours later the

streets were deserted.

Stranger still was to see the ever busy Avenida Nueve de Julio, the city’s main north-south downtown thoroughfare, practically bereft of traffic. There along that main drag, we found a place that was still open. The refuse of year-end revelers was everywhere, but the fireworks were over with. The place looked jaded and its weary owners less than happy to see us. A little way down the street, a couple were sitting on the pavement, their backs to the front wall of a building, a liter bottle of beer on the sidewalk between them. She was leaning against his shoulder, looking a little the worse for wear, but he was still going strong, strumming the hell out of a box guitar and bellowing out the lyrics of every folk tune he could remember, his voice echoing in the deep canyon of Nueve de Julio where it cleaved a broad swath through the midst of towering buildings. There was no traffic to drown the singer out and he was making the most of this improvised amphitheater.

Inside the bar they were already cleaning up, but our friend talked the owner into letting us sit at one of the tables outside on the sidewalk, and into sending out a bottle of chilled champagne. Suddenly, what might have been the sordid scene of celebration’s end seemed mystical. As if the city were ours alone, with only the scraping guitar and rasping voice to entertain us, as we sipped ice-cold champagne under cones of light from the street lamps, in the grey glint of a sultry summer’s dawn. For perhaps an hour, the four of us sat there joking and laughing and just enjoying being together, putting aside our individual and collective worries and letting trust, love and cold champagne set the mood. By the time we drove back to Mid-town, we had the shimmering streets of Buenos Aires practically to ourselves.

Back home again, I dropped Virginia and our friends at the door of our building. I left the motor running and got out of the car with them. We all hugged and truly meant and felt it, warm as only love can be. Then I went alone to take the car back to the parking lot. It was as I was coming out of the lot that the sun suddenly broke above the horizon and flooded the street around me with the golden-orange first light of a summer day.

I turned to face it, closed my eyes and felt its warmth on my eyelids. My breath caught and a knot formed in my throat. I was completely, unequivocally grateful. It was a new year. I was writing daily for a living, I was married to the woman I loved, I was in the company of friends with whom we shared an almost passionate relationship, and a whole future of promise seemed to be stretching before me. A future that was mine for the taking.

It was a moment of almost uncontainable joy, and one that I would remember forever, even in the hardest of times.

THE EXPATRIATE’S COMPLAINT—OUT OF PLACE AND OUT OF TIME

The expatriate lives in a world of dichotomy. You’re always torn between the land of your birth and the country or countries where you live by choice or by destiny. Your heart tells you to see things from the perspective of the place that will always be your birth right and the culture that you suckled at your mother’s breast. But cold observation and logic will teach you to also see the world and your native country from a neutral, objective viewpoint and to understand how others see you and yours. And depending on your personality, you’ll either be humbly apologetic or obnoxiously arrogant about it. 

You’ll never feel completely at home in either world. No matter how long you live where you live abroad, no matter how many decades, you will always be a foreigner to the natives, but more importantly, to yourself. You may congratulate yourself on how well you’ve adapted, how well you speak the language, how well you fit in. But it will always be that—fitting in, adapting, camouflaging yourself as something you’re not. And no matter how good you get at it, it won’t take long in a conversation, with those who are born and bred, for you to be found out and fingered as a stranger, even if as a warmly welcomed one.

Unless you consistently seek to keep abreast of the evolution or decline of the place from which you came, you will see your original home in a picture that is frozen in time. It becomes a museum piece. Especially after your most referential figures have faded away and you become the generation that your parents and grandparents were before you. And every time you return “home”, you won’t try to find out what has changed but will seek to confirm what has remained the same, because that’s what makes you feel “at home”.

You’ll bristle when others tell you that you’re being naïve, that things are nothing like they used to be. And are they ever better? Not likely. It seems they never are. You will want them to be, though, because they are a big part of who you were before you became who you are today. You’ll look, as in a dream, for glimpses of your past, for fragments that tend to reaffirm “who you are.”  You’ll walk once familiar streets trying to remember what used to be there, attempting to see in your mind’s eye the building that once stood where there is now a parking lot, the department store that’s now a thrift shop, the tavern that’s now a set of law office, the rambling old house where your grandparents lived and that, for the past forty years or so, only continues to exist in your memory and in your heart.

You’ll yearn to bump into people who are long since dead but who live on in your mind, just as they were. Or to meet up with classmates whose adolescent images have remained timeless in your memory so that you probably wouldn’t recognized them if they passed you on the street—just as you no longer recognize the reflection that stares back at you in the mirror while you shave.

No matter how long you live abroad, you will have moments of terrible longing to be “back home”. But when you go there for a visit, you’ll find that you no longer fit in completely, that you’re treated as “a guest”, that your vision is another one, at once familiar yet foreign. And should you decide to go back and stay for a time, you’ll find that it feels more like a holiday than a homecoming and that you can no longer be in one place without missing the other.

You’ll also have regrets. You’ll be grateful for the time spent with parents and siblings and life-long friends when you were back on always too short visits. But you’ll mourn the times you weren’t there, the life-events you missed, the comfort you failed to give, the always thinking there would be more time, another visit, a new homecoming, when those reunions were never to be.

Expats are destined, then, never to be quite satisfied, never to be quite happy, always to be out of place and time.

That sensation of “not belonging” is heightened when you journey from one hemisphere to another, because even the seasons are opposite. I was thinking about that on this blustery spring morning in Patagonia. I was remembering that October was the month that my mother, Reba Mae, loved best, because she loved the autumn. And in Ohio, September can still be somewhat summery and winter can come early in November. But October is the quintessential month of autumn.

Reba Mae talked in October about “sweater weather”, and about “bright blue October skies”. She loved the sweet, tobacco-like smell of the fallen leaves on the damp ground, and she missed the incense smell of the dead leaves burning along the curbs in town before burning was banned and people started having to bag or mulch what they raked.

But mostly, she loved the fall colors of October, the fiery reds and yellows, as if the maples were aflame, the soft yellow hue of the cottonwoods, the rich red-brown of the oaks. “No matter how good you were,” she used to say, “you couldn’t paint this. A camera can’t even do it justice. It’s just breathtaking!”

Sometimes we would take a ride out in the country on an October Sunday, gasping, ooing and aahing at the flaming colors of the woodlots, while Whitie, my dad, stayed home, snoozing on the couch and pretending to watch the ballgame. Reba Mae’s voice would tremble when she would say, “I feel so sorry for your father. He just doesn’t seem to see any beauty in anything. I think he would feel so much less depressed if he could just learn to love nature, to stop and look at all this, to let it into his heart.”

Later in life, after a great deal of psychiatry, anti-depression drugs and help with what doctors call his “chemical imbalance”, Whitie got so that he would go on walks or go places now and then with Reba Mae, where nature was particularly prevalent. By then he had learned that being able to see your surroundings and be awed by them and grateful was a sign of sanity and that failure to perceive beauty was a symptom of mental illness. He was nothing if not smart in this way. And so he might stand watching a sunset briefly and then say, “Boy, that’s pretty!” And if this failed to elicit a response from Reba Mae, Whitie would nudge her with his elbow and say, “Ain’t it, ‘Mau’? Ain’t it?”

It was as if to say, “See how I’m seeing it? See how I notice things now?”

And Reba Mae would stand there with a lump in her throat watching the sun go down, fighting back tears, and thinking that she’d give anything for him to believe what he was saying and to feel it the way she did.

Over the years I’ve learned to celebrate Christmas in eighty-five-degree heat with a cold buffet and chilled cider and champagne. Or not to celebrate it at all.  I’ve learned that we can have one of the worst snowfalls of the year on July Fourth. I know that the first day of spring is September 21^st and although the secretaries in Buenos Aires are anxious to wear their new spring outfits, as the day ends you can usually see them carrying a spray of flowers that they’ve received at work to celebrate the onset of the season of love while they shiver at the bus stop in the persistent winter chill.

But October will always be autumn for me, no matter where I am in time and space. And it will always belong to Reba Mae.