MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part Five

 

"It seems to me that in the orbit of our world you are the North Pole, I the South—so much in balance, in agreement—and yet... the whole world lies between."
— Thomas Wolfe — You Can’t Go Home Again

 

Continued from

https://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2022/01/maybe-thomas-wolfe-was-rightmaybe-you_30.html

 

Being an expatriate is not an easy matter. Unless you truly have the soul of a nomadic vagabond, you are always torn between where you’re from and where you are. And being an expat for an extended period of time complicates this matter still further, because you are always a foreigner where you make your new home, no matter how integrated into that society you might become. But when you return “home”, you find that you are seen as a foreigner there too, or at least as a sort of prodigal son, who no longer has a right to call that birthplace your home.

So many times I’ve had people say to me, you left so you have no right to an opinion. Or, you’ve been gone so long that you no longer think like us. Or, you don’t even live here, so what the hell do you care about this or that. Little do they know that no matter how accustomed and “at home” you might become in your chosen environment, the “homing instinct” that reminds you constantly of “where you came from” never goes away.

But then again, while the place you’ve adopted becomes the place you are familiar with on an everyday basis, your place of origin becomes an image frozen in your mind and heart. It isn’t, then, a daily recording of reality as it happens, but a sepia snapshot of how it used to be, in an era that now only comes alive in your mind, but that no longer exists as it was. It’s only through daily contact—whether virtually or in person—that you can hope to have a clear vision of “home” as it is now, and not, as the song goes, just “visions of what used to be.”

This is all heightened when you are from a small town where, when you were growing up, everybody knew everybody else and the history of each other’s families. In big cities, you can come and go as you please and no one will notice, and the changes that take place are almost imperceptible within the short and medium terms. But when you’re of smalltown origin, and you come back twenty years after, you might go through a kind of “jet lag”, in which you are astonished that things are not precisely as you left them. That the warm and friendly saloon where you misspent large blocks of your youth shooting pool is now attorneys’ offices. That the old savings and loan is now a private residence and that the two imposing banks that were locally owned and operated have been “modernized” and now carry the names of regional and national chains. That what used to be family farms on the edge of town are now upscale housing projects. That you no longer recognize the majority of the businesses on the main drag. That what was once the restaurant where people went when they wanted to “go someplace nice” has vanished and been replaced by a standard Bob Evans. That the old steel-girder bridges that fascinated you as a child have been replaced by concrete abutment spans that hardly look like bridges at all. That the big old barn of a house that will always in your heart and mind be present as the home where your grandparents lived and where you spent every Christmas and Thanksgiving with all of your aunts and uncles and cousins is now a factory parking lot and only exists in your memory.

The cast of characters has changed as well. Twenty years is a long time. People graduate, go off to college, and, like you, find new lives in new places. People grow old and retire. People die. People move to Florida or Arizona. The population changes by generation and by attrition. You no longer recognize a single face in any of the stores or offices, and they don’t recognize yours. And when you catch a glimpse of yourself in a store window, you realize why. While you’re walking down the street reconnoitering your old stomping grounds, the eyes you’re seeing through are those of the boy and youth that you were. But the face reflected in the store window you’re perusing is that of a forty-year-old. When you finally bump into somebody you actually know, it’s a relief that borders on celebration.

But then, as you get acclimatized, you start being content with the things that haven’t changed: the post office, the movie theater, the old firehouse, the nineteenth-century courthouse, the three downtown churches—one Catholic, one Lutheran and one Church of Christ—are still there and look very much the same as they did when you were a boy. The big old house-turned-lawyers’ offices where your mother was the office manager, is there as well and now belongs to an attorney who, back then, was just starting out as a new member of an established law office. And these become the reference points from which you can piece back together how town used to be and where everything was in it. You reconstruct from that sepia print in your mind and are content simply to recall those memories and the nostalgic feelings that accompany them. You also start remembering why you first felt you had to leave.

February was bitter cold and snowy that year, so we mostly hunkered down at my parent’ home while I sent out resumes and called more newspaper contacts. The story remained the same. Not a good time.

March came in like a lamb and Virginia and I took the opportunity to take a few daytrips in our van. Among other places that we visited was Amish country in both Ohio and Pennsylvania. It was like stepping back in time and into a simpler lifestyle. We wandered freely along the picturesque roads where the Amish had their farms, and when we saw a crowd at one farmhouse, we stopped, to discover that it was a livestock auction.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania near the Ohio line

We simply wandered into the barnyard. We were the only non-Amish people there. We got some strange looks from some of the people, but no one asked us to leave. When we arrived, one of the men was acting as auctioneer and was in the process of selling a draft horse. It was clearly a big event for them, and the men were celebrating with some Amish-country wine. They were smiling and red-faced, joking among themselves when not actively taking part in the bidding. I say “the men” because the only woman outside watching the proceedings was Virginia.

It was a lovely, luminous day, and we had a wonderful time in which we both forgot entirely about the challenges still facing us. There would be time enough to start worrying again tomorrow.

That was a weekend, and the following day, I started executing Plan B. The idea was to try and find something to do locally until the situation improved and then go back to seeking work in a bigger city, be it in Ohio or in other places where I had contacts.

Amish country

The first place I tried was Toledo. I had written a number of op-eds from Buenos Aires for the Toledo Blade’s editorial section and was hoping they might have something for me locally. They didn’t. Like other papers, they were struggling.

I can’t recall where I got the tip, but I heard that the Fostoria Review Times was looking for a news editor and decided to check it out. I got a resume to Mr. Pennington, the managing editor at the time, and he set up an appointment with me. Fostoria is a town of about thirteen thousand, located forty miles south of Toledo in northwestern Ohio. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where I would want to spend the rest of my career, or where Virginia would be particularly happy living, but the paper had an excellent reputation and had won an award for defense of freedom of expression.

So Virginia and I made the trip of an hour or so from Wapakoneta to Fostoria and I met with the editor and the paper’s administrator. Both men were impressed with my resume and with the interview and offered me the job on the spot. But when we talked about pay, it was so abysmally low that I had to tell them I’d have to think about it. I knew what a general news editor’s job was, even in a small paper, because I had done it for many years before I became a managing editor. If the job was hard and stressful and the pay sucked, it was hard to see how I could be happy at it.

Mr. Pennington hoped I would decide soon because he needed to fill the slot as soon as possible. I said I would check out other options and asked that, in the meantime, he try to improve on their offer. He said that he would but that there was not much wiggle room.

Downtown Wapakoneta

Back home, I sniffed out another tip. WIMA, the local TV and radio station in Lima, Ohio, just fifteen miles north of Wapakoneta, was losing its news editor. I applied immediately, had a meeting with the station managers, and was offered the job. The pay was a couple of thousand dollars more a year than the Review Times’s offer, but still not encouraging.

But just when I was about to say the hell with it and take the WIMA job, my Aunt Marilyn—my mother’s younger sister—contacted me and told me that the Lima ad and publicity agency where she was office manager needed a consultant for a news project they had. She didn’t want to meddle but would love to have me working with her, and if I was interested, she would make an appointment with the boss.

The boss, Leslie—known by some of her collaborators behind her back as “The Queen Bee”—was vibrant, flamboyant, ambitious and highly intelligent. She had set up her agency in one of the gorgeous old Victorian houses that graced the opulent traditional residential end of Lima’s West Market Street. The art director, Denny, was her business partner, and, as it turned out, had gone to school with me in Wapakoneta. He was a really extraordinary commercial artist. While they sometimes brought in other “voices”, most of the announcing, recorded in their own small studio, was handled by Leslie as the female voice and by former radio announcer Tom, who, it also turned out, was the WIMA veteran newsman whose job I had just been offered. That, and Aunt Marilyn, who held the whole thing together like superglue, was more or less the in-house staff.

Leslie explained to me that the whole idea of the agency was to offer something Lima had never really had before: a publicity agency with a small but highly effective staff that was capable of providing topnotch content at local prices. They needed somebody with the kind of experience I had to not only write and edit copy, but also to oversee an ambitious pet project of hers—namely, a ten-county business news publication in tabloid format that would be known as West-Central Business. She wanted me to take point on that project since she couldn’t find anyone local with my very broad skill set. Somebody with the knowledge to create, write and edit, and to take such a project from the drawing board to the printing press.

Downtown Lima

I could do that. I had skills. Who knew? For five years in the seventies, I had run the news desk on an old-school daily, where I was not only responsible for news selection, but also for laying out all but the sports section of the paper nightly. I had also been media chief for the American Chamber of Commerce in Buenos Aires, where part of my job was story assignment, news selection, layout and shop coordination for a bi-monthly business magazine. It would be a challenge to create a publication from scratch and I couldn’t wait to get started.

In the meantime, however, Whitie and Reba Mae arrived home from Florida. Only a couple of days earlier, they had sent us a beautiful flower arrangement for our twentieth wedding anniversary. I was touched that they remembered and were thinking of us.

When I called to thank them, Whitie said he wanted to talk to me about something when he got back, that he thought maybe he could solve my employment problem. “And maybe get you into something where you can make some real money for a change, now that you’re through with your hunting and gathering down in South America.” That’s what he called being a newspaper and magazine editor in one of the world’s largest cities, but by now I was pretty used to the disdain with which he talked about just about everything I ever did.

But now, as soon as he got home, he sat me down. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve been talking to my broker,” he was referring to the local representative of Edward D. Jones Investments, “and he thinks you’d make a hell of a broker. He says if you want him to, he'll get you into the program. It’s something I’d really like to see you do, Dan. I already made an appointment for you to see him.”

It was Little League and junior high basketball all over again. Whitie pushing me to do something he wanted me to do while completely ignoring who I was and what my own ambitions were. Being a professional writer and being a stockbroker were about as far apart as you could get. But for Whitie, writing might be okay as a hobby (although, what the hell was the point?), but business was the only place where you could achieve something “to be proud of”.

I found myself plagued by a frustrated childhood desire for my father’s approval, the desire to please him and perhaps “make him like me better.” But then, at age forty, why was I still trying to impress Whitie? It had never worked before. It was as if he had always seen me as the ultimate screw-up.

“That’s about the last thing I ever had in mind for my life plan,” I said.

“Geezus, I thought maybe you’d be grateful that I was looking out for you!”

“Oh, and I am, Dad, but I can’t see myself spending my life moving money around and being responsible for my clients’ success or failure. In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t have a lot of talent for money.”

“That’s just because you never focused on it. Look Dan, in this little nothing town, making investments for rich farmers, and with his wife doing the same thing in Lima, between the two of them, they’re pulling down like four hundred grand a year. Maybe it’s worth thinking about, right?”

It seemed like a complete non sequitur when I then said, “I have a solid job offer from the owner of the agency where Marilyn works. She wants me to create a new business publication…”

“And what’s that gonna pay you, twenty, thirty grand a year? Geezus, Dan! Think about your future. You won’t have a pot to piss in.”

So I went and saw the guy. I said I didn’t really know what I was doing there. I was terrible at math, had no talent for money and more than anything, I just wanted to keep writing for a living. He looked at me with a wry grin, as if he felt really sorry for me.

“Well,” he said, “your dad seems to think you’d make a hell of a broker and from the little I know you, so do I. It’s more about personality and salesmanship than it is about numbers—although I’ve always been a whiz at math, if I do say so myself. But all that you’ll learn, and the company is always there for you. You don’t really make any final investment decisions. The guys on the desk in New York do that. All you have to do is work with the company to see what’s best to suit the needs of your different clients. You’re never alone. And as time goes on, you’ll get more and more savvy. Best decision I ever made, I know that. I didn’t want to end up like my dad, a steel riveter. We were always barely making ends meet and driving other people’s junk. That’s not for me.”

I had to bite my tongue not to say what I was thinking, that steel-riveting sounded like honest work to me. Whereas, stockbroker? Not so much.

He was my age. Somewhat younger, in fact. But I had that feeling I often got when talking to financially successful guys my age, as if I were a schoolboy dunce and they were the adult in the room. What the hell was wrong with me that I never seemed able to focus on money as my main interest? That I was so much more interested in people, ethics, politics, social injustice, critical thought and my craft. Was I simply flawed somehow, as if I’d been dropped on my head at birth?

I tried to make up for my misgivings by attempting to sound upbeat, confident, full of proverbial beans. It was a gargantuan effort because, in fact, I was anxious and scared spitless.

At length, after we’d talked for about an hour and he had told me how the whole process worked—him recommending me to headquarters in St. Louis, me studying for and passing the licensing exam, taking a look at some of the towns where the firm didn’t have an office yet, deciding what the best fit might be for me, and then going to the home office for training before setting up an office somewhere—he said, “Dan, I know this is a big step for you, but it’s a lot like getting into a pool full of cold water. It’s better just to dive in head-first without overthinking it. I can assure you it’ll all work out. You’re a smart guy and you’ve got people skills. You’ll be good at this.”

I wasn’t. Although I enjoyed learning about the history of the stock exchange and about its inner workings, the nitty-gritty of puts, calls bonds, annuities, mutual funds, bears and bulls, and the mathematics involved in the actual work, bored me stiff. And although I played the game for, perhaps, ten days, put in the hours studying, took the mock exams, and traveled to a few towns, one of which might potentially be our new home, I just couldn’t seem to build any enthusiasm for a life spent thinking twenty-four-seven about money.

The final straw was when Whitie’s friend asked me how it was going and if I was getting about ready to take the licensing exam. I told him honestly that I couldn’t see myself doing what he did. I kept thinking I was going to miss the writing.

“But then again,” I said, “maybe once I get set up, I can do some free-lancing to keep my hand in.”

“No you can’t, I’m afraid, Dan. As a broker, you won’t be allowed to make public statements or write under your own name—or at all, if it has anything to do with economy and finance. You can’t put your name on anything. You won’t even be able to have email in your office because the company prohibits it.”

Right then, I thought to myself, “What the hell am I doing? There’s no way I can do this job!”

But it took me a few days to make the final decision. I kept thinking about what Whitie's face would look like when I told him I was quitting…again. But then too, I grew angry with myself for being so self-deprecating. I hadn’t quit everything. Just the things Whitie had tried to get me to do. I had to face the fact that I wasn’t at all who he wanted me to be. That in his eyes, I was a disappointment. But why should I give a damn? In what I’d chosen to do in my life, I had accomplished some great achievements. In music, in writing, as a reporter and editor, I had been well-respected and considered a consummate professional. Why should I care whether I “made Whitie proud?” If he wasn’t proud of me, it wasn’t my fault. It was that he was trying to make me fit the profile he wanted me to have, with no regard for who I was.

Once I’d made my decision, I didn’t give it another thought. I took the study materials back to the broker, thanked him for the opportunity, but told him it just wasn’t me. “Well, I’m sorry, Dan,” he said, “because I think you would have made a hell of a broker. But you’ve got to do what’s going to make you happy in life. I love this job, but I know it’s not for everybody. Good luck in whatever you decide to do.”

Right afterward, I called Leslie and told her I would take the job. She was offering almost ten thousand dollars a year more than the Fostoria paper and about six more that the radio and TV station. It wasn’t a hard choice.

I didn’t tell Whitie right away. I figured I’d wait for “the right moment.” But I knew there wouldn’t be a right moment. I kept wondering to myself how, at age forty, I could still be letting Whitie hold sway over me like this. But still, I demurred. Then, problem solved: Whitie had an appointment I wasn’t aware of with his broker.

I was out when he got back. So when I got home, he was sitting in the living room alone, watching the news while my mother busied herself in the kitchen with supper. When I walked into the living room, said, “Hi Dad!” and sat down on the couch opposite his recliner, he didn’t answer, but pointed the remote control at the TV set and lowered the sound. Then he turned and look at me with a face even worse than the one I had kept imagining, and said, “What the hell, Dan?”

“Uh, sorry?” I said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The hell you don’t!” he said. I held my tongue…and my breath. “I had an appointment with my broker. He told me you quit.”

“Oh, uh, yeah. I decided I couldn’t do it. I’m taking the job at the ad agency.”

“That’s not what he said. He said you’d been doing real well and then all the sudden you just waltzed in and gave him back the study materials and quit.”

“Um, yeah,” I said, my voice so low even I could barely hear it. “That was more or less the sequence.”

“So when the hell were you planning to tell me about it? I felt like a damn fool!”

“I was kind of waiting for the right opportunity,” I said.

“Well guess what,” he said. “You missed it.” Then he turned up the news and looked away from me. We were finished.

To be continued…