NURSERY RHYME HORROR SHOW

 My sister Darla and I had special little cups for our morning cocoa when we were very small. I think a lot of infants of my generation did in my home town of Wapakoneta. They were made of milk-glass and were engraved with decorations—my sister’s in red, mine in blue—that included little scenes of children sitting at a table and playing outdoors. Around the outer rim of each cup was the brief children’s prayer that we recited each time we were called upon to “say grace” before a meal: God is great/God is good/And we thank him for our food…

This was the only part of the prayer engraved on the cup, but when we said grace, we were required to recite the rest as well:

By His hand we shall be fed/Give us Lord our daily bread/Amen.

We liked those tiny cups and never tired of looking at the little scenes on them. They were comforting and homey and made us feel somehow warm and protected.

But the same was not true of the bed-time prayer we, and millions of other children, were required to learn: Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep/If I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take/Amen.

This was a frightening enough image that if you were a worrier as I always was as a child, it was hard to go to sleep if those words kept resounding in your head. In fact, it was because of that prayer that the thought dawned on me for the first time that adults weren’t the only people who died. Kids could die as well.

I recall a trip to the cemetery with my mother and my grandmother when they would engage in that strangest of all smalltown pastimes: visiting the family dead. As we picked our wending way through the myriad tombstones and monuments, we happened on several with child-like images—granite markers topped with delicate child angels, Jesus with tiny tots on his knees, a child’s statue with smiling face and arms thrown tight around a beloved dog’s neck. Clearly these were different from the other solemn stones.

I asked my mother about these child-images, and she told me that they were the graves of little kids whose souls were now in Heaven with Jesus. She smiled, admittedly a bit sadly, as she said it, and the thought seemed to be that even though these precious little tykes were dead, they were actually quite lucky because now they were in Heaven, a much better place than Earth, at least for good little Christians.

But the cost-benefit didn’t seem all that clear to me. And it appeared, furthermore, to be an absolute crapshoot. If the Lord decided “your soul to take,” while you lay asleep, your goose was basically cooked, because it would simply be the will of God, and there was apparently no arguing with that.

The idea plagued me. From the outset in my life, words mattered. I was sensitive to them and when the scary words entered my head, there was no erasing them.

I was at least lucky not to have been subjected to a similarly worded lullaby that some English-speaking children in the world were given to think about at bedtime, if their mothers happened to have a musical bent: If you die before you wake/Do not cry and do not ache/Nothing’s ever yours to keep/So close your eyes and go to sleep. How any even remotely sensitive child was expected to get to sleep after having those almost accursed words sung to them is really hard to say.

As if these lugubrious prayers and lyrics weren’t enough to scare the bejesus out of us, we were also treated to the macabre scenes served up by long-traditional nursery rhymes and children’s verses. I suppose many kids who heard these read to them again and again mainly just liked their iambic bounce and learned them by rote without paying any great attention to the words. But words in my mind always formed immediate and searing images, and the images that many of these traditional verses conjured up weren’t, to say the least, pretty.

For instance: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall/Humpty Dumpty had a great fall/All the King’s Horses and all the King’s men/Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

I was aided in imagining this tragic scene by vintage storybook illustrations. A large top-heavy-egg­­-shaped humanoid, dressed like a boy falls from a high wall and, it seems, shatters, making such a mess of himself that he can’t be mended.

I would come to find out many years later that, although our mothers, and their mothers, and their mother’s mothers would mindlessly read these rhymes to us as if they were truly meant for children—most of them could have done with at least a PG rating—they had, in most cases, originally been clever verses comprising codes for the lower classes that told stories involving those in power, and whose absolutist rule precluded open criticism.

The story of poor Humpty, for instance, dates back to 1648, a time of civil war in England. Humpty was actually not a person, but an extra-powerful cannon that Royalist defenders had mounted on a high tower-like wall next to St. Mary’s Church, above the strategic town of Colchester. It was a vantage point from which royal artillerymen could do some real mischief by firing directly down on Parliamentarian forces seeking to take the town—where, truth be told, the absolutist monarchy no longer was at all popular.

Parliamentarians eventually rolled in all of the firepower they could muster and hammered the wall, particularly its artillery emplacement, with withering cannon and mortar fire, until they finally were able to bring both wall and cannon tumbling down. In the end, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” couldn’t piece that big gun back together again and hoist it back up onto the wall. The town fell to the Parliamentarians, who took the “officers and gentlemen” prisoner, and set the common soldiers free to return to their homes once they had sworn an oath never to take up arms against the Parliament again.

Another rather disturbingly nonsensical rhyme, Ring Around the Rosie, is from just a bit later than Humpty in the seventeenth century, and is even more tetric than it may sound: Ring around the Rosie/A pocketful of posies/“Ashes, Ashes”/We all fall down!

It was less than two decades after the English Civil War that London was gripped for about a year by The Great Plague, otherwise known as bubonic plague. Despite its place of historical significance—it’s hard to find a world history course that doesn’t include it—The Great Plague is estimated to have killed about seventy-five thousand people. In our times of yet another great pandemic, most American politicians would consider “so few” plague fatalities to be a positive trend, considering that COVID has killed more than a million Americans, despite the early discovery of some of the most effective vaccines in history. But in all fairness, the entire population of London at that time was probably not more than four hundred thousand, so seventy-five thousand would have been about eighteen percent of the total.

Anyway, the Ring Around The Rosie verse that we were taught to sing in kindergarten as a cheerful little ditty—performed while standing in a circle, holding hands, turning like a human merry-go-round, and “all falling down” at the end of the last line—was actually all about the bubonic plague. Symptoms of the dread disease included the formation of a bright rosy-red-ringed rash on the skin of the victim. Although the infectious illness—also known as the black plague—was caused by a bacterium prevalent in rats and transmitted to the fleas that bit the rats and then bit people, many Londoners at the time associated the disease with bad odors. They carried flowers and herbs (posies) in their pockets to ward off the plague. And finally, the bodies of the mounting dead (all those who had “fallen down”) were incinerated.

What a delightful little rhyme! Don’t you think?

Another lovely illustration in one of the storybooks my mother read to us when we were small is of “Mistress Mary” the “contrary” little girl with her rake and watering can, tending the flowers in her perfect garden. This one didn’t seem scary at all, but it was indeed enigmatic. Mary, Mary quite contrary/How does your garden grow?/With silver bells and cockle shells/And pretty maids all in a row. The adjective “contrary” made me think of some snooty Little Miss Perfect who was only interested in her impeccable garden and would never think of playing with another child. But the most unfathomable part of that verse was the last line. Who were those “pretty maids” and why were they all in a row? Were they the flowers in Mary’s garden, the blooms of which might look a bit like the pretty faces of young women standing side by side?

Turns out, nothing so innocent. Seems the Mary in the sixteenth-century rhyme was none other than Queen Mary I of England. The eldest daughter and eldest child of King Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, she was passed over for queen in deference to her half-brother Edward VI, Henry’s first and only son (this time with Queen Consort Lady Jane Seymour, whom he married after having his second wife, Anne Boleyn beheaded). Edward was the first British monarch to be brought up a Protestant after his father broke with the Roman Catholic Church, which refused to grant him a divorce from Mary’s mother, Catherine.

The almost inadvertent religious reformation that gave birth to the Church of England—a basically Catholic religion but with the British monarch as its head—was jealously defended and expanded during Edward the Protestant king’s reign, in which he was assisted by a royal regency, since he was only nine when he succeeded Henry to the throne and fifteen when he died, probably of tuberculosis. Fearing that Mary, a staunch Roman Catholic like her mother, might succeed her stepbrother and reverse the Anglican reform, King Edward’s handlers helped him, during his long illness, to devise an exception to direct succession and had him name his cousin, Lady Jane Grey to assume the throne upon his death. But Mary wasn’t having any of this and managed to have the new queen executed when Lady Jane had only been sitting on the throne for nine days.

"Bloody Mary"

Starting with this act and continuing to fight the Protestant reform throughout a sort of English inquisition of her invention, in which Anglicans were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and beheaded, she appropriately gained the moniker “Bloody Mary.”  So the lovely sounding “silver bells and cockle shells” are thought to have represented the instruments of torture used on Protestant captives to try and persuade them to return to the Roman Catholic fold, while those mysterious “maids all in a row” would have been a line of brand-new guillotines used to behead those who remained unconvinced.

Even older than Mistress Mary is the verse contained in the children’s song Baa, Baa, Black Sheep. We sang that tune in kindergarten and first grade, and it seemed to encompass such a sweet and pastoral image: Baa, baa, black sheep/Have you any wool?/Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full!/One for the master, one for the dame/And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.

But there was nothing really sweet originally about this image. It was a satirical reference to the consequences of a cruel tax imposed on the peasants in 1275, under the reign of King Edward I. And it seems too, that the cheery last line that we sang was reformed for later audiences, because the original words to that final line went: And none for the little boy who cries in the lane.

In Medieval England, wool was a major source of commerce and wealth. This was also the time of the Crusades, and Edward I was in dire need of extra revenue to finance his armies, over and above what he was already bleeding from his vassals, and so too, their serfs. The rhyme, then, signifies that with still another tax being applied to the already heavily taxed wool trade, a bag of  wool would go to the king (the master) and his landholding vassals, another to the Church (the dame), and nothing would be leftover for the young shepherds (the little boy who cries in the lane), who actually did the hard work of caring for the flock.

A few of the nursery rhymes we kids in the US recited, however, were actually home grown. For instance: Rock-a-bye, baby/In the tree top/When the wind blows/The cradle will rock/When the bough breaks/The cradle will fall/And down will come baby/Cradle and all.

This strangely disturbing verse dates back to the time of the Pilgrims. The arriving immigrants were fascinated by a custom of the Native American women, who, it seems, took advantage of the wind to rock their babies to sleep. They would do this by tying a makeshift cradle between two branches with their crying baby in it, and allow the rocking motion of the breeze to gently lull their child to sleep.

Some of the Pilgrim settlers found this disturbing. What happened, they wondered, if the weight of the cradle and child swinging from a tree was sufficient to snap a branch in two? Didn’t these women see how dangerous it could be?

Hmm, white people…always stressin’!

Another American addition to the nursery rhyme repertoire is, already on first glance, quite obviously politically incorrect: Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater/Had a wife and couldn’t keep her/He put her in a pumpkin shell/ And there he kept her very well.

The meaning seems pretty clear. It is a deadly if iambic warning to young women to not even think about infidelity. Peter’s wife liked a little something on the side, and just look what happened to her! He killed her and hid her body in a giant pumpkin shell. End of problem.

Okay, obviously no women’s lib or MeToo back then.

A much more modern nursery rhyme that is utterly terrifying is the haunting and most famous (infamous?) poem penned by Hugh Mearns (1905-1965), a dark if lilting verse entitled Antigonish. Besides being a poet, Mearns was also a Harvard-educated pedagogy professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The thrust of his research focused on stimulating creativity in children ages three to eight. He joined, rather like a fly on the wall, the conversations of kids in this age group and recorded his findings for later application to his pedagogical studies. 

Those who knew Professor Mearns observed that when he was with children, he tried his best to fade into the background and get them to forget there was an adult in the room. He never asked the kids questions or showed surprise at any of the crazy things they extemporaneously did or said. He merely observed and later typed up what he had seen and heard in his notes.

What Mearns observed in kids that prompted him to write Antigonish is hard to say, but whatever it was, this particular “children’s verse” is singularly chilling:

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...

I can remember that in the huge vintage house where we lived on West Auglaize Street, old Wapakoneta’s most traditional and iconic residential street, the downstairs connected to the three bedrooms upstairs solely by means of a windowless, narrow staircase that was only accessible through a dark back corner of the kitchen. My parents slept in the master bedroom downstairs, while my sister, brother and I slept upstairs. I had no fear of that staircase during daylight hours, but when I had to mount its steps alone at night for bed, there was always an instinctive terror that something or someone awful lay waiting for me there in the darkness.

Earlier, in the previous house where we’d lived on South Pine Street from the time I was about five until I was eight, an evening pastime had been listening to radio shows, even though, by this time, we already had TV. One that we listened to was The Shadow, and before the story even started, I was always already chilled by the standing introduction in which a creepy, beyond-the-grave voice would say, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" And then there would be an insane, ominous laugh. It was on that show that I heard a few of the lines from the Mearns poem for the first time. And what stuck in my mind as I would sneak into the back corner of the kitchen and rush as fast as I could up those steep and narrow steps were the words, on the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.

This image combined nicely with the demented axe murderer/strangler/slasher who, my older sister had informed me, might be waiting beneath my bed, just to grab me by the ankles and jerk me under. So the route to bed was always a mad race up the steps and into my room. Once there, I would leap from a safe distance into my bed and cover my head under the blankets to ward off any evil that might still be lurking there.

Which leads me to think that perhaps Antigonish wasn’t meant at all to be a nursery rhyme. Maybe it was simply a compelling and disturbing description of the poet’s own nocturnal delusions, or of the irrational fear that he shared with children, of “things that go bump in the night.”

 

 

MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part Six – Final Chapter

 

Continued from - 

https://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2022/02/itseems-to-me-that-in-orbit-of-our.html

“He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations.”

-Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again- 

Although I still entertained bigger ambitions in some larger city once the job situation improved, for now, the agency in Lima was a nice fit. I had never worked in a quieter job. No newsroom pressures, no clattering teletypes, no people in and out all the time asking questions. I worked alone in a quiet little office. It was on the second floor under one of the gables of the sumptuous old Victorian house, with a window that looked onto the broad green front yard and beyond to Market Street. I had all the time I needed to think and create.

Leslie’s tastefully decorated office was just across the hall, and she occasionally stopped in to see how it was going, or I would go across the hall to run some ideas past her. Other times, I would go down to the ground floor to Denny’s art department and talk over ideas for images and layout. It was all very relaxed.

There were hours during the day when Aunt Marilyn and I were the only ones in the building. If she wasn’t busy, she would call me to come down and have a cup of coffee with her. She was less than fifteen years my senior and we had always gotten along well. But now, we got to know each other a lot better, and would chat about our family and its idiosyncrasies. It was strange, since, as she said, we had always been “a bunch of tight-lipped krauts,” who tended to equate openness with weakness. As we loosened up, we found that we had a lot in common, despite being very different personalities.

We especially talked about her father, my grandfather, about what a hard, violent man he had been, and about how different her reaction to his treatment had been from my mother’s. She said she pretty much figured Reba was courageous and “walked on water,” but she couldn’t understand how she had consistently tried to avoid doing anything that would spark Grandpa Vern’s wrath. “I, on the other hand,” she said, “more often than not ended up getting backhanded into a kitchen corner and lying there with a bloody nose.”

Back "home" in Wapakoneta

We also talked a lot about Whitie. She had always considered him her big brother, but she said there were times she could just have smacked him for how he treated Reba Mae. If Grandpa Vern was physically abusive, my father could be psychologically abusive. I knew this all too well from my own experience. Marilyn felt that, just as she had with her father, Reba Mae too often placated him in order to keep the peace, and allowed Whitie to get away with way more self-indulgence than he should have.

I tended to agree, but felt it was more six of one and half a dozen of the other. More, I thought, like a kind of almost pathological symbiosis in which Whitie fulfilled—saturated—completely a nurturing side to my mother’s personality, while she turned out to be the slavishly loyal acolyte that he so seemed to need and that all three of his children had flatly refused to be. They were, in the end, almost entirely and inextricably wrapped up in each other. And we three kids had to search out some small nook on the outer fringe of that principal relationship in which to make a home for ourselves.

Virginia, meanwhile, found free-lance work as a copy editor for a major US textbook publisher that specialized in teaching Spanish, and in English as a second language. The materials would arrive by FedEx, she would edit them, and then she would send them back by the same means. She was a good editor, enjoyed it, and was particularly relieved not to have to work for anyone else.

Even though we had little money left and none had started coming in from work yet, I wanted us to have two vehicles, because, more than anything else, I wanted Virginia to feel free to come and go and for her to live the smalltown American experience to the full extent. Despite still being miffed at me—that wasn’t going away anytime soon—Whitie couldn’t stand the thought of me dealing for a car on my own. So one night after supper, he accompanied me to a used car dealership he knew of in nearby St. Marys.

I had decided since I’d mostly be driving alone back and forth to work in Lima, I wanted a small, efficient, single-cab pickup rather than a car. There were two “possibles”, a nineteen-eighties Chevy S-10 and a first-generation Ford Ranger. We took a spin in the S-10 and I rejected it after a very short drive. It was impeccably clean inside and out, but felt a little shot mechanically. I took out the Ranger and immediately fell in love with it. Those early models were the Ranger that looked like a miniature F100, except only a little over half the weight and size and with a small 2.3 four-cylinder engine and five-speed standard transmission. It seemed perfect.

So we went back to the dealer and, like I had in Florida, I just stood back, acted like an idiot, and let Whitie work his horse-trading magic. They started out at twenty-nine-ninety-nine, but after a grueling hour with Whitie, we walked out of there with the Ranger for eighteen hundred ninety. I was really grateful and Whitie was really proud of himself. It was the first time I’d seen him smile in days. Until then, after the stockbroker fiasco, he had looked away in disgust each time I approached.

I fell in love with the Ranger. Whitie worked his magic.

Even as I worked daily at the agency in Lima, I kept trying contacts and sending out resumés. I wanted to make this move back to the States work. It wasn’t like I’d completely burned my bridges. I’d had the better part of a lifetime in Buenos Aires. But I now wanted to make my life work in the US as well. And my end game didn’t stop in Lima.

That said, however, I threw myself into the work. In the early stages, it was a matter of reaching an agreement as to what sort of publication we wanted to create and then going from there. In terms of content, it was obvious that the idea was to promote rather than criticize local industry and business. As a consultant, I wasn’t tied to a policy to the point of receiving assignments I couldn’t refuse. It was a matter of molding the content for the first issues to what I was comfortable with morally and ethically.

I decided to employ a modified version of the editorial policy that I had followed for the bimonthly business magazine I had edited during the nearly five years that I was media chief for the American Chamber of Commerce in Buenos Aires: in-depth stories about how companies were built, statistics on their business dealings, information on their labor and trade policies, etc. As well as general breaking business news and feature interviews with the “captains of industry”.

For the moment—for the early, experimental issues—I would pick and choose my subjects. I could worry about how to handle policy in the future if I ended up staying on for a while as the publication’s editor.

Since most of the ten counties we were covering were imminently rural, I started out interviewing county extension agents. It wasn’t until I started researching the topic that I actually learned what an extension agent did. Basically, they were county advisers, usually linked to university departments, who created and imparted educational programs to assist people in economic and community development, leadership, family issues, agriculture and environment. Most of the ones in West Central Ohio worked with farmers to help them improve production and farming techniques.

At the time the novel technology that they were disseminating was zero tillage. This led to a whole other article about the advantages of “drilling” seeds into the ground instead of plowing, disking and seeding as farmers had been doing forever in the region. Rightly taking me for the complete rural innocent that I was, several county agents took the time to patiently explain to me how traditional planting methods tended to plow under the best soil nutrients and how heavy machinery like traditional tractors crushed the soil and squeezed the oxygen and nitrogen out of it. The new method could rely on lightweight four-tracks to pull seeding machines and to spread fertilizer, etc. Clearly this all made for an interesting and controversial article that local people from rural backgrounds were likely to read and comment on.

Another story that came my way was on a family industry in a small rural town that had grown beyond all expectations thanks to the unique potato and pork rind snacks that it produced. The patriarch owner, who was probably in his seventies at the time, told me about how it had all begun and then told me interesting anecdotes about how famous his smalltown family firm had become. Among other stories, he told me that he had read somewhere that then-President George H.W. Bush was one of the biggest fans of his pork rind snacks. So when Bush was passing through Ohio, he made sure he got on a guest list for a presidential reception. At the reception, he pressed a big bag of his pork rinds on the president and said, “I hear you like these, Mr. President.” Bush was surprised and then delighted.

“Like ‘em?” Bush said. “I eat the hell out of these things!”
“Well,” he told the president, “I’m the guy who makes them!”

I decided, as I had when I was a newspaper editor, that the human-interest angle was always a good one if you wanted people to actually read a publication. It was important to find unusual angles and combine them with smart and lively writing in order to prompt people to have a look at each new issue. Promotional articles alone were counterproductive. They only served to stroke the egos of advertisers, but if a publication devoted itself entirely to that, it would be one of those that would lie untouched on coffee-tables in waiting rooms and company offices.

Another story I covered was on a Japanese car-marker that had decided to drop anchor in Ohio. The first place they had tried was my own home town. But one man alone, the then mayor, had kept them out. His reason: He’d “fought the Japs” in World War II and wasn’t about to invite them into his home. The story made People Magazine. So the firm went on down the road less than ten miles and set up a plant that provided employment to people from all over the area and prosperity to the town itself.

What made the story particularly interesting to me was that the company’s environmental standards were so high that their cars fell easily within US regulations for consumption and emissions without their having to install catalytic converters and other environmental safeguards commonly required of US manufacturers. They had also managed to keep unions out of their plants, not by resisting them or by breaking regulations meant to protect unionization, but by offering higher than union pay, excellent working conditions and all sorts of perks, such as on-campus gyms and spas, childcare, full health benefits and continuing education programs. I was permitted to freely interview employees and recount their experiences working with the firm.

These were just a few of the pieces I was putting together for the first issues and Leslie seemed to share my enthusiasm with the results. Like every other job I’d had in journalism, I was putting the best of myself into this one. It was the only way I knew how to work.

At home, things were going less well. On returning after so many years, I was more than happy to be spending so much time with my parents. Naïvely, I thought they would be happy too. I was spending a lot of time chatting with Reba Mae whenever we were home alone together. We both had always enjoyed collecting the “little histories” of our town and we could sit for hours with a coffee pot between us sharing anecdotes about the more colorful characters in our community.

Whitie and I, meanwhile, were doing things we’d never done before, like taking a walk together, just the two of us, some evenings after supper. We had also started working out together at the local spa. I had done weight-training pretty seriously for more than a decade and a half by then back in Buenos Aires. When Whitie had retired six years earlier, Reba Mae had been worried that he had become completely inactive and mostly sat around watching TV and snacking all day. When I had been home for a visit, I had talked him into joining the gym and doing weights, since I knew that if he once started, it was the sort of activity he would become obsessive about, which was a lot healthier than obsessing over the TV schedule and making sure he never missed “his stories”.

Whitie and me.

I hadn’t been wrong. In the last six years he had several times been named “Man of the Week” and once “Man of the Year” at the New Life Spa as a result of his incredible progress in bodybuilding. And he was admired by the younger guys who worked out with him because of the strength and stamina he showed for a man of sixty-eight. It was clearly a source of pride for him to go work out with his son, and it was the only time in my life that I saw anything from him like pride in me for my athletic prowess, since if I’d never been a fan of organized sports, I was indeed a meticulous weight-training enthusiast.

It was, I felt, nice to be home again for awhile. I didn’t plan to stay forever, but I didn’t feel rushed to leave until Virginia and I were surer of what the future held for us.

Whitie, however, had other ideas. I had forgotten, or perhaps had not, in my youth, realized how petty, resentful and un-generous he could be. And I would later realize that my mother had been working hard to keep these traits of his in check while we were living with them. I mean, it wasn’t like there wasn’t room in the house for us, and we weren’t particularly difficult guests. Both Virginia and I were discreet, well-mannered, helpful and accommodating when we were off of our own turf. But perhaps I was concentrating so much on my job that I wasn’t keeping my eye on the ball at home.

The other problem was, if Reba Mae had done her best throughout my childhood and that of my siblings to withstand the brunt of Whitie’s obsessive-compulsive pathology, after the three of us kids had left home at an early age, that strange symbiosis between my parents had become much more pronounced. Whitie’s mental illness loomed large and became the center of their relationship.

If as children my sister, brother and I had always been discouraged from talking about the times my father had undergone intensive psychiatric treatment or been admitted to psychiatry wards in different Ohio hospitals, and were not permitted to have friends sleep over or even hang around the house much, the secretive nature of their home-life had only been underscored in our absence. And now, their children were pretty much excluded from their secret life as well. It was as if their later lives were unfolding behind shuttered windows.

It became, then, a stressful situation, especially for Reba Mae, who was constantly trying to keep Whitie in check. I was either too self-absorbed to understand this, or perhaps just misjudged the depth of Whitie’s obsessive-compulsive disorder. Maybe I was simply ignorant of just how impossible it was for him to deal with his most obsessive and paranoid thoughts. Perhaps I just wanted to think of my dad as “normal” and caring in this new stage of our relationship, even though throughout my childhood and youth I’d realized there was something off. But back then, it had all been impossible for me to comprehend and I had grown up thinking that the problem was mine, that I was a son whom it was simply impossible for him to love.

In short, I should have known that Whitie would never see his prodigal son’s coming to stay with him for a time as a blessing, which was how I felt about this time we were spending together. Once it was beyond a mere “vacation” together, he was bound to start feeling that he was being used. Not that he was helping his long-absent son to pull a new life together after twenty years away from home, but rather, that I was freeloading off of him. What I considered the “home” I’d left behind, he considered his house, bought and paid for with the sweat off of his brow, and where I had no business being.

On top of that, the situation fed his pettiest obsessions as well. One that came quickly to a head was the fact that, thanks to me, his suppertime had changed. He wanted his supper on the table at five sharp. Reba Mae made it clear she planned to hold supper until I got home from work. I seldom was done at the office before five or five-thirty. Sometimes even later if I had a late-afternoon interview somewhere. And then there was the drive back to Wapakoneta from Lima which took the better part of half an hour, even if I broke the speed limit. So by the time we sat down at the table, it was always at least six or so.

Whitie was incensed. His house, his rules. Supper was at five, goddamnit.

Even though Reba Mae had obviously forbidden him to bring the subject of suppertime up with me or Virginia, it became obvious to both of us that it was a bone of contention. As I walked through the door, he would make a big deal of quickly sitting down at the head of the table without greetings or preamble and saying things like, “Okay, Reba, let’s get the show on the road, here. I’m so hungry I could eat the asshole out of a skunk!”

I discreetly encouraged my mother to forget about waiting for me to get home. She, Whitie and Virginia should simply eat whenever their normal suppertime was, and I’d have a sandwich or something whenever I got home.

“No, no,” she said, “It’s not going to hurt your dad not to be so rigid and structured. We’ll eat as a family.” But Whitie didn’t do non-structured. Obsessive structure, doing everything the way it had always been done, was the absolute essence of his impossibly complex psychological pathology.

Since my mother continued to restrain him from stating his complaint to Virginia and me, he found other, less than subtle ways of bringing pressure on me. His focal point became Virginia. It was no coincidence that they got along fine during the day, but as suppertime approached, he would find ways to get under her skin. He was good at that in any case, but he seemed to particularly delight in irritating Virginia. The idea seemed to be for me to get home and find things in an uproar. The underlying thought seemed to be that if I would get the hell home for supper at “a decent hour” these things wouldn’t happen.

He and I eventually had it out one evening. I arrived home to find my mother quiet and sullen and my wife apparently furious and barely speaking to me. As she was putting the finishing touches on the dinner that was sure to stick in our collective craw, I heard Reba Mae sigh and say under her breath, “I can’t take this shit anymore.”

I was particularly late that night because I’d had a late afternoon interview two counties away. It seemed from what I was able to piece together that, as if he might speed up my return by harassing Virginia even more than usual, Whitie had gone completely off the reservation. He had tried every way to get under Virginia’s skin, and finally hit the jackpot by sparking her jealousy.

“Wonder why Dan’s so late,” he’d wanted to know. “I mean, what’s keeping him? It’s probably that boss lady of his. Have you met her yet? No? Hmm. Well, you know, I don’t know her or anything, but boy. From what I hear, she’s really something. Just hope she’s not ‘keeping him after school’, if you know what I mean.”

Virginia had gotten furious and told him to just shut up and leave her alone, but you could still cut the tension with a knife among her, my mother and my father by the time I got home. We all ate our dinner in morose silence. All except Whitie who, oddly enough, seemed to be manically high and couldn’t figure out why nobody else wanted to talk.

After supper I invited him for a walk. As soon as we were out of earshot of the house, I stopped. For a few seconds, talking a mile a minute as usual when he wasn’t in the throes of depression, he didn’t realize and walked on. Finally, he saw that I wasn’t beside him. He stopped and turned. I glared at him.

“What’s the matter, Dan?” he said innocently.

“As if you didn’t know!” I said.

“Well, what do you mean?”

“Don’t play innocent with me. What in the hell is wrong with you?”

“What?” he said, shrugging his shoulders and grinning sheepishly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Bullshit!”

He laughed nervously, “No really, it beats the hell outa me what you’re on about.”

“What I’m on about? What kind of father purposely tries to sow discord between his son and daughter-in-law? Who does that?”

“Oh well, now, Dan, don’t go getting all pissy! Christ, it was a joke! Can’t Virginia take a joke?”

“Joke my ass! You knew exactly what you were doing. You always know exactly what you’re doing! You purposely try to drive people nuts to get what you want. You’re willing to stir up trouble between a man and his wife just because you’re pissed off that your goddamn supper’s late. Well, eat your goddamn supper whenever you want, and I hope you don’t choke on it, but leave us the hell alone.”

“Well it’s my goddamned house, Dan.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “You’ve made sure I was fully aware of that right from the start.”

I turned then and headed back toward the house.

“Hey Dan. Dan! Come on, let’s go for a walk and talk,” he coaxed.

 “Too damn late for that,” I said, and walked on home.

It was perhaps three days later that he again suggested a walk after supper. We weren’t a hundred yards down the road from home when he said, “Y’know, Dan, I don’t think this is workin’ out.”

“Yeah well…” I said, but I couldn’t say any more, because the words stuck in my throat and made my voice quaver.

“I just wouldn’t want it to turn into something ugly.”

I kept silent and kept walking without looking his way.

“I was thinking maybe, you know, you might want to look for a place.”

“Already working on it,” I said. And then we walked on in unusual silence for a mile or so around my ever so familiar home town before heading back home, looking for all the world, to anyone who didn’t know better, as if we might have been the best of friends. I felt devastated. I couldn’t help feeling like a fool for being happy to be “home” for the few weeks we’d spent together. It had taken less than a month for me to wear out my welcome in my own parents’ house—in the home I’d grown up in. How could I have been so blind and stupid?

The Laurelwood Apartments, our new home

Things turned very civilized after that. We fell into a routine. Within a few days after the little talk Whitie and I’d had, Virginia and I had rented a small apartment in a relatively new addition on the north edge of town. The modern efficiency building was built on erstwhile farmland that had been developed by a family of well-known local dairy farmers who decided that real estate development was more profitable that continuing to try and run a family farming operation.

The place was clean and new, and we could afford it. It was on the ground floor, had a nice living room, a small bedroom, a kitchenette and a small but modern bathroom. We bought a comfortable couch with a hideaway bed, an ample end-table and a pole lamp. We slept in the living room and used the bedroom for work. We furnished it with a sturdy table, desk lamp and a comfy chair, all of which we bought at a thrift store, and these became our workstation, where Virginia could do her editing during the day and I could write at night. For that purpose I went to the same local dealer from whom I’d purchased two manual typewriters while I was in high school and college, and this time let him sell me my first electric. I loved manuals, but the electric was quieter, and I didn’t want the neighbors complaining about my clattering away at night.

We ate at the low counter that divided the kitchenette from the living room and bought a heavy-duty clothes rack and a small chest of drawers en lieu of a closet. We purchased a melamine dinner service for four, a set of plastic-handled flatware, four water glasses, a couple of whiskey glasses, a teakettle and a couple pots and pans. We decided we had no use for a TV, but bought a portable stereo radio and cassette-player because neither of us could live without music and I couldn’t live without the news. A couple of sets of sheets and pillowcases, pillows and a nice blanket, and with these simple things, we set up housekeeping for as long as our stay here would last.   

The place was surrounded on two sides by fields and there was a little artificial pond out back. The air was clean, and the neighborhood was peaceful.

Once a week, when I could break away from work early, we went to dinner at some restaurant or other with Whitie and Reba Mae—sometimes the Olive Garden in St. Marys, other times the local Pizza Hut, and still others at a smorgasbord place called The Old Barn Out Back in Lima. On these last occasions, we were usually joined by Whitie’s older brother, my Uncle Red, and Aunt Betty. It was always on the insistence of Red and me, since Whitie thought of The Old Barn as “higher than hell.”
“Go where you want,” Red would tell him with a jolly laugh. “Dan’el and I are going to The Old Barn, where we can get a brownie appetizer.” The conversation with my parents was always polite and avoided controversy.

Sometimes we were invited to Sunday brunch with my mother’s brothers and sister and their respective spouses at a lovely place called Flannigan’s in Lima. (How Reba Mae got Whitie to go there, I have no idea because by his standards, the sumptuous hot and cold breakfast bar for seven-ninety-nine was “highway robbery”, but go he did).

Other times, we were invited to Sunday lunch at my parents’ house. On those occasions we were all pleasant and neutral. Whitie joked and we laughed. We ate the wonderful meal my mother prepared, lingered awhile over pie or cake and coffee, but made sure we left before suppertime and before we wore out our welcome.

Reba Mae always said, “Well, you kids don’t have to be in a hurry,” when we made ready to leave, but I’d learned by now that, at least in Whitie’s mind, that wasn’t true. The durability of our welcome in his house was paper thin.

Virginia and I with Darla and Tom at Clevland's Galleria

Virginia and I made a couple of trips to Cleveland to see my sister and her family, and she and her kids and husband Tom came down occasionally to visit us and Whitie and Reba Mae. Darla was busy raising her kids and building her career as a respected Cleveland sociologist, but the time we were able to hollow out in our schedules was important. Darla and I had been very close as children and teens. But time and distance had made us strangers and it was good to be close enough to get to know each other again.

My brother had recently moved to St. Louis, where he was a district manager for Camelot Music. His work was hectic and involved a lot of travel, but we made an effort to keep in touch by phone and he made several trips a year back to Wapakoneta to see Whitie and Reba Mae, and for his second wife, Val, to see her family in Lima. The get-togethers between him and me always involved a lot of hanging out drinking and talking together and it felt good to be able to renew ties with the kid brother I’d shared a room with growing up and who was now a successful mid-level executive.

At my brother Jim's home in St. Louis

With Whitie and Reba Mae, Virginia and I also made the eight-hour drive to St. Louis to visit him there. It was nice to see him in his element. I was proud of him, and he enjoyed showing me around. The day we arrived, he took me out for a drive in his new BMW. He made me laugh, because when I said, “Nice wheels!” He told me a Whitie anecdote.

“I drove to Wapak right after I bought it,” he said. “So the first thing I do, I invite Whitie out for a ride. I take him out in the country on the curviest roads I can remember and put the Beemer through its paces, to show him how it handles before running it up to a hundred and twenty on a straightaway to give him a thrill. So we get back to town and he hasn’t said a word about the car. As I turn onto Kelley Drive to go back to his house, I say, ‘Well, Dad, so what do you think.’ He shrugs and says, ‘Sumbitch rides harder than hell.”

A walk in the countryside.

I still worked out with Whitie at the spa whenever I could, but I had also, after a hiatus of a couple of years, taken up jogging again. It wasn’t long before I could jog for an hour or more. I did it in the morning when I first got up. Then I would shower, dress for work and have breakfast with Virginia before heading to the office in Lima. Sometimes on my jog, my mother and I would cross paths while she was out for her morning constitutional. It was poignant for me to be able to bump into Reba Mae like that after so many years of being so far away.

But it was always brief. As I jogged toward her, I’d smile and say, “Hi Mommie!” She’d smile back and answer, “Hi Danny!” and we’d continue on our separate ways.

Most evenings Virginia and I spent alone. We’d sit on the carpet near the sliding patio doors and have a beer together while listening to music on the little portable stereo. Then we’d have a bite to eat and go on an evening walk.

We sometimes walked to the Dairy Bar for a soft-ice-cream cone or went the other way, out into the surrounding countryside to watch the sunset on the fields. But more often than not, we would gravitate to a little plaza that almost no one ever used behind town near the river. There was a stone bench and table, and we would just sit there chatting for awhile.

Sometimes, we would see Whitie, out on his evening walk, as he crossed the Blackhoof Street Bridge. It always made Virginia smile to see him, such a unique character, straight and strong despite his years, carrying himself with almost military swagger, powerful, Popeye forearms swinging to the rhythm of his stride. I never could see him like that without a knot forming in my throat. He was my dad. I loved him and only wished I could have made him happier, been the son he'd expected me to be.

I continued to search for a real journalism job. In Columbus, Cincinnati, or in some other nearby city and state. But the situation remained fluid, a transitional period between print and digital when American papers were still trying to cope.

I don’t know precisely when I realized it wasn’t going to happen for me here. At least not anytime soon. Perhaps it was when I’d finished the first couple of issues of West Central Business, and they were being distributed in the ten-county region. That was when the prospect of remaining indefinitely in Lima as the editor of a largely promotional publication loomed before me.

One evening as Virginia and I sat in the little plaza by the river, I was deep into these thoughts. We were just sitting there in silence, each with our own inner voice. Whitie crossed the bridge as we sat there. Virginia said, “There’s goes your dad.”

I looked down at my hands in my lap and didn’t say anything.

She said, “Hey.” I turned at looked at her. “Are we about done here?”

I turned my eyes toward the bridge and saw Whitie from the back as he crossed. I didn’t say anything except, “Come on, let’s go.” But it would dawn on me soon enough that we were, indeed, done.

It happened one day when I was off from work. We had gone to the Lima Mall on the west side of the city. The Lima branch of the traditional Ohio department store, Lazarus, which was one of the main anchor stores for the shopping center, had put in a tiny pub, off to the side of its large and luminous upstairs restaurant. It was a classy little place, like everything else at Lazarus—the Macy’s that replaced the defunct local department store some years later paled by comparison. And it prided itself on having liquid refreshment that was far more interesting than the usual Bud and Miller.

Virginia was off shopping and was going to meet me there. While I waited—at that hour, the only customer in the hidden little watering-hole—I ordered a Yorkshire Stingo, a strong English Ale brewed by the Samuel Smith Old Brewery in Tadcaster, UK. It was a delightful, dark draft that went straight to your head, and served, in proper English style, cool but not cold. It went down smooth, and I was halfway through a pint, when the usually unobtrusive elevator music, canned in some central system, suddenly caught my attention. The tune sounded familiar, but not US familiar. What was it? Oh my god! It was a tango…sort of. Kind of like Tango Meets Muzak!

This bastardized instrumental made it hard to recognize at first, but then, I started hearing snatches of the lyrics in my head. The voice of the incomparable Carlos Gardel soaring above the ta-ching-ta-ching of the Muzak, the wheeze and vibrant drone and squall of the bandoneón and the cry of the violins drowning it out in my mind.

 

I see the flickering lights that in the distance
Are marking my return
They are the same ones whose pale reflections
Lighted hours of deep sorrow

And although I didn’t really want to come back
One always returns to one’s first love…

…Return
With withered brow

The snows of time turned silver my temples

Feel
That life is but a breath
That twenty years is nothing
How feverish the look in your eyes

Wandering in the shadows

It searches for you and calls your name

Live
With soul clinging
To a sweet memory

That I weep for once more

I’m afraid to encounter a past

That brings me face to face with my life

Afraid of nights full of memories

That enchain my dreams…

But the traveler who flees
Sooner or later stops walking

And despite the forgetfulness

That destroys it all

My erstwhile faith now dead

I still hold a meager secret hope

That is my heart’s only fortune

…Return
With withered brow

The snows of time turned silver my temples

Feel
That life is but a breath
That twenty years is nothing…

But that wasn’t true, was it? Twenty years weren’t nothing. Twenty years was a very long time. A lifetime. The lifetime that I had spent in Buenos Aires, where I had lived through some of the very best times of my life, if also through a scant few of the worst. It was a huge city that I, an immigrant, had made my own—a place where I had forged a very real measure of success. A city that had known my name, where I perhaps wasn’t famous, but where I hadn’t gone entirely unnoticed, where I’d had a reputation. A place where I had lived a life-long dream.

I had allowed a misstep to lay waste to all of that. I had decided that there was nothing left for me there. I had blamed a city and a country for my own bad calls. I had lain down to die, but since it hadn’t been my time, I had reluctantly stood up again and decided that what I needed was a new venue. Or rather, an old one. I had decided to try and “go home again,” failing to realize that, just maybe, I was already home, and had just given up, instead of getting up, dusting myself off and moving on. I had forgotten the wise old adage that, no matter where you go, there you are. 

I had come home to try and find solace. But instead, I had ended up coming back to hide myself away, to shelter in the memories of a naïve and dream-filled past and in the recent wreckage of my dashed illusions. As the tango ended and I sat there with visions of my salad days in Buenos Aires glowing in my head, my eyes filled with tears, so that I had to recover quickly and shake it off as I saw Virginia coming and ordered a Stingo for her and another one for me.

By the time we left the Mall, I knew that this chapter was over.

Over the next few weeks, I exchanged several conference calls with Griffa at Apertura. I told him I was coming back to Buenos Aires and that I’d really like to go to work full-time at the magazine. First, he said to let him think about it, but, of course, I was welcome to work free-lance for him. I made it clear I was looking for something full-time. We kicked this topic around a few more times and finally, during our last call, he said, “Dan, I’ve thought about it. For a long time, I've wanted to start a special projects department. The idea would be to create special editions of Apertura, some in English and some in Spanish. These would be single-theme issues featuring numerous writers, and interviews with experts in whatever fields we choose to cover. I can’t pay you much because until we start building advertising, I won’t have the money to, but if you want it, it’s yours.”

I asked him how much wasn’t much. The money, which he said was non-negotiable and the best he could do, was twenty percent more than I was earning as a consultant at the media firm where I was working in Ohio. I closed the deal then and there and gave thirty days’ notice at work.  

Nearly a year after I had attempted to go home again, this was the first time in a very long time that I felt as if I knew precisely what I was doing and felt very real hope for the future. I wasn’t sure what that future would hold, but I was pretty certain that this was a clean slate and a propitious beginning to the rest of my life.

As our plane took off from Dayton’s Cox Municipal Airport and flew south toward Miami, where we would catch our non-stop flight to Buenos Aires, I watched the Ohio landscape fade. As we entered the clouds and then the clear sky above, Thomas Wolfe’s words seemed prophetic:

“He saw now that you can't go home again—not ever. There was no road back.”