YANKEE REDUX — HEM AN' ME

When I first met up with Hemingway, I was eleven-and-a-half years old. I didn’t actually meet him. He had already been dead for a couple of weeks or so by then. But you could say that was when he first came to life for me.

I was visiting my Grandma Myrt. It was summer and I had ridden my bike over to her house. Just to visit. I did that frequently, rode over to the house of one of my grandmothers or the other when I didn’t have anything else to do and it was still too early to go to the public swimming pool or to tool around town on our bikes with one of my neighborhood friends or with my cousin Greg. Other kids slept in on summer mornings when there was no school to worry about. But I liked to get up and see that new day stretching in front of me, full of possibilities and promise.

Me with little brother Dennis at Grandma Myrt's

Grandma Myrt was an early riser, like her daughter, my mother, Reba Mae, and I had inherited that trait. My dad Whitie and two of his brothers had a restaurant called the Teddy Bear and Whitie opened at 6 a.m. for the breakfast crowd. Grandpa Vern was superintendent at Greenlawn, the town’s main cemetery and started work at seven. Mom and Grandma always got up around five to see them off and to start the day’s chores. They seemed optimistic about it always, the women, I mean—the men always seemed grim—with their cups of black coffee right there handy on the kitchen counter and their radios on low, tuned to the local AM channels from Dayton and Lima, or to WOWO, the big voice of the big Midwest, out of Fort Wayne, across the West Ohio line in Indiana. And I never wanted to miss that magical time when working people rose to meet the dawning of a new day. In fact, on summer mornings, I took finding out what the day had to offer almost like an occupation, getting up, having my breakfast and getting out into the world like a man with a mission.

On this particular morning, a beautiful July summer morning, with a spanking new blue sky and some sparkling dew still on the grass, I decided to pedal on over to Grandma Myrt’s to hang out and talk to her for a while, “but don’t make a nuisance of yourself,” Reba Mae warned, “because Grandma’s busy”. It probably wasn’t much later than nine when I arrived, but for a woman that got up with the chickens, that was mid-morning, and when I rapped on the back screen door and then strode across the enclosed back porch and into the kitchen, she was just pouring herself a second cup of coffee. Two in four hours might seem like slow coffee-drinking to some country folk but Grandma Myrt had this habit of making it last. She called it “letting it rot”. It involved pouring a big mugful of black coffee for herself at about a quarter to six when Grandpa Vern got up and setting it on the shelf in the cupboard. And as she took care of her morning duties, she would go from time to time to the cupboard and take a sip of java from the cup. Obviously, the longer she took between sips the cooler the coffee got, until, finally, it would be stone cold. But she didn’t seem to mind drinking cold coffee, as long as it was piping hot to start with. That too, I inherited from her—not from Reba Mae, who always drank hers hot enough to skin hogs—and I can still make a mug of coffee last hours while I’m working at my desk.

Anyway, what immediately grasped my attention on this morning, after Grandma had said, “Why hullo, honey!” and given me a hug and offered me a glass of milk and one of the sugar cookies she had made, was a magazine that was lying on the kitchen table, and which she had apparently been perusing. I recognized the masthead. It was Life and in those days, when television was a relatively new medium—if wildly popular—and print media still reigned supreme, it was hard to go into a Midwestern home that didn’t have a copy of the major “picture book” magazines like Life or Look, with their captivating, artful photography, on coffee tables, or in the living room magazine rack, or on a “library shelf” in the bathroom. But at Grandma Myrt’s it was odd to see a magazine—or anything else, for that matter—out of place and that’s probably what drew my eyes to it.

Although the house was on the edge of town, it was a big country barn of a place, with all of the inviting simplicity of country life and all of the clean, tidy look of the old German farms in the area. There was no big library of any kind in the house. Books cost money and my grandparents didn’t have much of it. What books there were, were Grandma’s and she kept them tucked away upstairs in her room. Grandpa had learned to read as a grown-up and liked cowboy novels but I suspect that once he had read them he passed them on to Grandma’s younger brother Jessie, who was way poorer than her but had scores of adventure novels and magazines, kept in neat stacks along with his arrowhead collection and other paraphernalia on a big table in the living room of the tidy but tumbledown house he shared with my great-grandmother. Grandma Myrt, on the other hand, had a really good education for a rural woman born in 1900, having graduated eighth grade with a vocational certificate. She had a love of learning and reading, which she passed on to my mother and Reba Mae to my older sister and me. And she was always looking up where any of her grandchildren was at any given time—in the United States or in the world—in her geography books, or reading to us from books of tales by Andersen or Aesop or the Brothers Grimm. And then too, we had a good public library in town. But there was a magazine rack in the living room and both she and Grandpa were partial to “looking at” magazines, as they said. It’s just that you were never going to find either books or magazines strewn around there. A place for everything and everything in its place: Their house was an illustration of that adage.

The cover of the magazine lying on the linoleum table top showed a huge head shot of an aging man with a still powerful face, big-boned, grey-bearded, uncommonly intelligent-looking, sensitive, yet every bit as intimidating as my own Grandpa Vern's face—and, believe me, Grandpa could look a hole right through you. It was a cover I would see many times after that, a classic, a collector’s item, the famous cover story of July 14, 1961, that Life published to honor perhaps it's most famed contributor ever.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Ernest Hemingway, honey,” Grandma said.

“Who's he?”

“Oh, a very famous American writer.”

And then she told me a little about him, about The Old Man and the Sea, about some other books. But mostly she told me about his being bigger than life, an American icon. Although she didn’t say he was an icon because people didn’t call other people icons back then. She said he was a hero, an adventurer, like somebody out of a storybook. I asked if she knew him and she laughed and said no but that he was so famous that it was as if just about everybody knew him. It was really sad, she said, a big strong man like that taking his own life.

And, of course, that launched us on a discussion of a grave we had seen once in a cemetery in some other town—we sometimes "looked up" old relatives in west central Ohio cemeteries when she and Reba Mae and we kids would go on a Sunday afternoon drive—that had a wrought-iron fence around it and of how she had told me that in some places they did that, fenced off the graves of suicides, because they didn’t figure a person that took his own life was fit to lie in hallowed ground with the rest of the Christians.

But when she said she had to get busy with her chores, I asked her if I could have a look at the magazine and she gave me permission “if I was very careful with it”. And I sat quietly on the back steps of the house studying the pictures and reading the text, understanding what I could of it and trying to get as deep into the scenes as I could. So that when Grandma Myrt finally said, “Your Mom just called and said you’d best be getting home for lunch,” I was already hooked on Hemingway and was feeling a distinct loss, sad that I had missed out on knowing him, sorry I never would, that there would be no chance, even if, someday, I too became a famous writer.

That was the point at which I decided I really wanted to be a writer, stopped playing around pretending to be one and started trying my hand at writing little stories and puttering around with plotlines and reading more and more. I had done a lot of reading when I first learned how and now I returned strongly to the habit, going to the library with my studious sister, Darla, and asking her to recommend books that she had read when she was my age.

The following year or the year after, I really can’t recall exactly, I saw Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, the 1962 film directed by Martin Ritt. It was based on Hemingway’s famous Nick Adams series. This was a collection of short stories that he wrote over the years whose main character was an adventurous young man called Nick Adams, who was obviously the writer’s surrogate. The screenplay was put together by Hemingway’s long-time friend and biographer, A.E. Hotchner (Papa Hemingway), and the cast included Richard Beymer (of West Side Story fame, as Nick), Paul Newman (as the punch-drunk fighter from Hemmingway’s The Battler), Diane Baker (as Carolyn), Corinne Calvet (as la Contessa), Ricardo Montalban (as Major Padula) and Jessica Tandy (as Mrs. Adams). The cast also included such heavyweights as Eli Wallach, Dan Daily and Susan Strassberg.

The film got badly panned by the most elite of critics, despite its five Golden Globe nominations. It was a time of growing interest in the psychological novel and in the film thriller, and critics who were busy learning psycho-babble probably found it naïve. But those stories were “boy’s life” tales at their finest and that picture brought them to life in my early-adolescent mind. I wanted to do exactly what Nick Adams had done: run away from home and go off to see the world. Following the lines of the short stories, the film has Nick riding the rails until a mean-spirited railroad agent heaves him off of a freight train. He then meets up with a has-been fighter (Newman) and a booze-sodden advance man for a traveling burlesque show during his journey in search of a job as a newspaper reporter. But after getting laughed out of a newsroom he finally ends up volunteering for duty as an ambulance driver in the Italian medical corps during the First World War, where he is severely wounded. While recovering, he falls in love and has his first real romance with a Red Cross Nurse (the part played by Diane Baker), before returning home a hero and bent on pursuing his writing career now that he has something to write about — all based, of course, on the real earliest adventures of Hemingway himself.

It was the summer after seeing that picture that a friend and I started climbing an apple tree onto the roof of the shelter house in the picnic grounds at Harmon Field, our town park. We would sit there after dark talking and smoking filched cigarettes, while listening to the freight trains that rattled and blew through town at practically all hours of the day and night, imagining the exciting places they were going and dreaming of riding along. That was also the year that I started gradually working my way through every one of Hemingway's books, buying them with money I earned selling papers and cookbooks, cutting lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow or working as an usher at the local movie theater. And by the following year, when I had turned fourteen, I was not only writing short stories but had started working on a novel, a cross between Moby Dick and the Nick Adams series, about an irascible retired sea captain and a young man who becomes his only friend. I would work on that book in fits and starts clear through high school, before promptly ripping it up and throwing it into the trash after showing it to my English 101 professor in my freshman (and only) year at Ohio State and reading her comments.

The point is that I cut my teeth on Hemingway and although hundreds of other authors came after him in my life, my real, first, deep and serious interest in writing grew out of not only reading him, but also reading about him. And that, I think, is how it should have been, because Hemingway made a difference in American literature, marked a before and after, set a standard for concise, stark, yet beautiful writing that has influenced the writing of just about every American male author who has come since and a lot of foreign authors as well.

Hemingway matters, and later I’ll talk about some more reasons why. But as far as I myself go, although I have developed a natural style of my own over the years, Hem an' me are bonded for life.

 

TELL ME YOUR DREAMS

Brilliantly breaking a long-held unwritten rule that claims dream sequences in novels are tough to bring off at best and should probably be avoided entirely, author Cormac McCarthy ends No Country for Old Men with one. And it’s one of the most perfect endings ever. There also couldn’t have been a better actor in the film version to play the part of the dreamer, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, than an aging Tommy Lee Jones.

The images Sheriff Bell describes matter-of-factly to his significant other, Loretta (Tess Harper), while sitting at the breakfast table, are nothing short of compelling. The sheriff, who has just decided to retire, after a very dangerous and utterly failed case, in which he admits feeling “outmatched”, describes how, in the dream, he and his father are making their way through a mountain pass on horseback in the snow. He says it’s “peculiar”.

 “I'm older now'n he ever was by twenty years,” says Sheriff Bell, “so in a sense, he's the younger man.”

He describes what he saw, as if it were perfectly recorded in his mind.

“It was cold and snowin', hard ridin'. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down. And when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead.”

Then Sheriff Bell pauses, as if still seeing the images in his mind, before he says, “And then I woke up.”

But the part of that excellent final scene that I most identified with was that quiet morning portrait of Ed Tom and Loretta sitting there at the kitchen table, where she has just poured them each a cup of coffee.

“How'd you sleep?” Loretta asks.

“I don't know. Had dreams,” says the laconic sheriff.

“Well you got time for 'em now,” says Loretta. “Anything interesting?”

“Well they always is to the party concerned,” says Ed Tom.

“Ed Tom,” says Loretta patiently, “I'll be polite.”

The reason I identified was because, up until that moment, the scene could have been taking place in my own kitchen. Except that, re-written for Virginia and Dan, it would have gone like this.

“How'd you sleep?”

“I don't know. Had dreams.”

“Which you’re not going to tell me about!”

“But they were really interesting.”

“Maybe, to the party concerned.”

“But not to anyone else?”

“Exactly!”

And there the conversation would have ended.

Virginia’s right, of course. Dreams are most often one of those “you’d have to have been there” propositions.  They seem so brilliant and revealing when you’re in the midst of them, but in the clear light of day, when you try to articulate them, they can become a really amorphous hash.

But hey, you’re my readers, a captive audience, so today, boys and girls, we’re going to talk a little about dreams.

I used to not think of my dreams as dreams. I tended to think of them more as a sort of separate reality. A world I lived in beyond the material world. A place where things might look familiar, might even imitate reality effectively, but a world where none of the rules of everyday life applied. In dreams, anything was possible if you could learn to focus and place yourself at their disposal. They were important to me, a kind of twilight zone where, I fancied, I could resolve things that vexed and escaped me in the waking world, in which I was, all too often, powerless.

I was reading a lot of Carlos Castaneda back then. And that led me to read a number of Native American writers as well. They all only underscored my suspicion that dreams weren’t nothing. They were something, I sought to convince myself. A real place, a real world that inhabited a separate reality.

One of the things I discovered in reading Castaneda was his quandary about the advantages and disadvantages of disembodiment in the dream world. One of the major problems with our flights of fancy in the real world is how our necessarily physical state fails to accompany them. In this earthly world, everything takes tremendous physical effort. A simple example is the very real physical difficulty and stress involved in traveling long distances. Cars, buses, trains, boats and planes, to say nothing of ports, stations, airports and terminals, as well as security, immigration, customs and so on and so forth, are factors that tend to dampen dreams of all travel, foreign and domestic. If you want to see something, first you’ve got to get there.  And that’s complicated. In fact, it quite often becomes the deciding factor in not entertaining any such desires.

Dreams simplify that. For those lucky enough to learn to fly—I, for instance, don’t possess that dream-world art and have never gotten off the ground in any of my dreams—it’s just a matter of spreading your “wings” and soaring to wherever you like. And since time, as Einstein suggests, is an invention of the conscious world, dream-flying from place to place can often take no time at all. My wife and I haven’t talked about dreaming in a very long time, but I recall that she used to be a “frequent flier”. She indicated that she could usually just leap into the air and soar off over whatever destination she wished.

Indeed, she couldn’t understand why I didn’t fly. For her it was like, “But it’s so easy. You just let yourself go and you fly!” Well, I never knew how and never learned. Perhaps, better said, what I never learned to do was “let myself go.” The best I could sometimes manage was to take very long, elastic, gliding strides that helped me to cover ground quickly.

But in my dream world, I eventually opted, as on earth, for conveyances. Big American sedans from the fifties and sixties that were so versatile they could take me from one season to another, from Europe or South America “back home” to Ohio, and from my remote mountain home to the avenues and dark bowels of a major metropolis. And those fabulous cars could do it in the blink of an eye. Or sometimes I would “fall asleep” at the wheel and wake up again in a brand new dream-world location. In other dreams I traveled by train, either on the surface of a world the tracks knitted according to their (or my) whimsy, or else I might take a subway that would plumb depths beyond the normal underground routes and wend its way into perilous caverns with sulfurous air and steaming pools, where the stations were caves in which passengers hurried on, but no one got off. I occasionally was on horseback in landscapes I’d seen before, or simply on foot but finding that my walks no longer took me to the places I knew but to what they were “now” in some dystopian future where nothing remained of how it used to be.

As I say, back when my dreams were of far more interest to me than they are now, I started taking Castaneda’s advice (or better said, the advice of the Yaqui mentor, Don Juan, that he claims to have had) and, when a dream began to overwhelm me and make me feel powerless to change its outcome, I would try to look at my hands. That’s right. That, according to Don Juan, was how to gain a measure of control over the action. If you could see your hands, you weren’t some virginal and disembodied spirit completely at the mercy of ancient powers much stronger than you were. If you could see your hands, you were you and could command reason and self-control, avoiding immobilizing panic.

Now, looking at your hands sounds easy-peasy in the waking world, but it is exceedingly hard in sleep. Or at least it is for the non-flying dodo likes of me. It took me a long time to be able to do it. The first thing was to remember, while still conscious, that once you fell asleep and started dreaming, you were going to have to attempt to see your hands. After consciously working on that unsuccessfully for, perhaps, months, I finally, in the midst of a terrifying dream in which I was paralyzed with fear, heard a little voice say, “Look at your hands!”  And suddenly, there they were, my hands, completely recognizable. Incredibly, once I could see them, I was able to take charge of the situation and either cope with whatever fearsome enemy I was facing, or run and manage to get away.

It wasn’t a perfect method, of course, but it worked more often than not. And overachiever that I tend to be, I figured if looking at your hands in the dream world could imbue you with a certain amount of power, how much more so if you could see your face. So I started working on that, with the ultimate goal being to look into my own eyes. With a great deal of practice, I got so I could see parts of my face in a dream-world mirror—my jaw, an ear, my lips and chin, a piece of my forehead, my hairline. And those things gave me an added measure of control over the action. But I was never able to look into my own eyes. I assumed, for a time, that no one could. But I later found out there are indeed people who can…just not anybody I’ve ever talked to.

Ignoring, like Cormac McCarthy—well, not exactly like McCarthy, but in the (lesser) style of him—I’ve included dream sequences in at least one unpublished novel of mine. Indeed, I did that long before I’d ever read Cormac McCarthy. That novel has been lying around in my desk drawer for a spell (like, say, twenty years or so).

Anyway, two friends got me in touch with two different Manhattan literary agents who agreed to have a look at the manuscript and see if they wanted to represent me.

The first one read it (or at least part of it) and said she, “hadn’t fallen in love with it”. And right away I figured the dream sequences were part of what she didn’t fall in love with. But then again, maybe she thought the whole thing stank, who knows?

The other one said it was “quite well written,” but wasn’t the sort of writing he represented. When I asked why, he said, “It’s just not the sort of thing that, say, my friend John Updike would write.”

Now, I’ve read a lot of Updike and my impression has always been that he is an incredibly good writer, but with just as incredibly little of importance to write about. So I couldn’t help but respond to the agent and “Updike friend” by saying, “Yes, indeed, I agree. It’s not. Thank you and good-bye.”

Even now, re-reading it, I wouldn’t take the dream sequences out of the book. Don’t tell Virginia I’m doing this, but if anybody’s still here reading this essay and has not yet dozed off, here are a few excerpts from one of the dreams, which wasn’t fiction at all, but a real dream of my own that I incorporated into the manuscript. Perhaps you’ll tell me what you think…or not.  Here goes…

…As I turn onto this road, I know that I have seen all of this before, but I can't recall where or when. I only know it is poignantly familiar, something more than déjà vu. It is the absolute knowledge that I have been in this place at another time, and that on the other side of the next rise there is a destination that fills me with apprehension, yet attracts me like a magnet, irresistibly, inexorably toward it.

I continue over the rise, almost beyond my own volition, and a church suddenly looms before me—a huge, cathedral-like church, a European-style cross-shaped colossus, complete with soaring towers bedecked with fearsome gargoyles and stern, immutable saints. It stands alone and monstrous amid the sterile-green hills, imposing and awesome, a terrifying intrusion on the otherwise uneventful landscape.

I fight my relentless compulsion to continue, knowing full well that the cathedral is my unyielding destiny, that I have been here before, driven to it like now, unable to help myself…

The chilling monotony of muffled Gregorian chants mesmerizes me, drags me forward, even while filling me with almost uncontrollable dread. Now inside the building without passing through any portal, without the slightest idea of how I have arrived, I am nearly overwhelmed by the certain knowledge that this is not what it appears to be, not a sanctuary, not a haven of peace and tranquility. The cathedral seems shrouded in a force-field of foreboding, cloaked in darkness, a place where details are frighteningly unclear, where twilight, candlelight and dusty, stained glass-filtered daylight anemically permeate the dense atmosphere...

…The chanting remains muffled—a droning, constant background from somewhere behind the dense stone walls. It is almost not a sound, but a monotonous, maddening hum inside my head. Despite the incantations, the silence in the nave is such that I can actually hear the hot drippings of the sputtering red candles as they spill from their gutters and spatter the altar stones, beneath which, I am suddenly aware, lie blood-filled chalices, teeth, bones and hair, relics of ancient, nameless martyrs.

 Abruptly, the chanting is absorbed through the normally impenetrable walls and becomes an undeniable presence all around me in the desolation of the nave. I turn in a cautious circle to see the owners of the advancing voices but find myself totally alone…

My feet itch to run, but I am riveted on the course my captive brain is setting. The chanting is now as loud as if I were in the midst of the chorus of hooded, faceless singers and yet they are nowhere to be seen. They chant to the deafening pounding of my own heart that throbs painfully in my head and ears, as my feet carry me involuntarily toward the main altar, where I can now clearly see an ornate burial casket on a sumptuous brass and hardwood bier. I am still beneath the raised altar and can only see the coffin — fine, burnished mahogany trimmed in gold so soft and pure that it glints instead of shining and clearly contrasts with the brass of the bier. I focus on details, the smoky gloss of the waxed wood in the unsteady candlelight, the delicate filigree designs of the gold trim, the solid weightiness of the hardware and carrying rails attached to the sides of the casket.

Hypnotized, my brain pulls me forward with morbid curiosity. I suddenly have an urgent need to see inside the coffin. But at the same time, my mind is split and one half is trying to pull back, stop my feet, turn me around, make me reverse my course. But the morbid side is stronger, involuntary, impossible to quell. And as it draws me forward, I can hear the other side of my brain whimpering and protesting to no avail… Again I wonder too if, in fact, God, whatever God might be, has anything to do with this place, because what I feel here is nothing like goodness.

 I am now standing beside the casket on its bier. But for some reason the sides of the coffin are still incredibly high— too high for me to see over, high as a garden wall that must be climbed to satisfy one's curiosity about the mysterious world on the other side. I stretch my hands high over my head and barely grip the slick-waxed edge of the casket. As I start to heave myself upward, I have a sudden twinge of apprehension, the same pit-of-the-stomach, scrotum-tightening chill I used to feel as a child, when I would leap into bed from a yard away to make sure the ax-murderer who lurked beneath my berth would be unable to grab my ankles, draw my child's body effortlessly under, and cleave my head from shoulders with one smooth, razor-honed stroke…

Chinned up over the "wall", elbows straining as I hang from the seemingly ever-taller side of the coffin, I can now see its contents. In this position, my face is only a few inches from the waxy-yellow countenance of the deceased—a bishop, I discover, laid out in royal purple regalia, ebony crucifix and rosary wound between the death-stiffened fingers of his inter-laced hands. At a distance, the cadaver would look impeccable, wax-figure-like in the absolute stillness of death. But at such close-quarters, my view of the body is practically microscopic.

Though I try to ignore it, though I make an effort to retrieve my vision from the spot, I cannot turn my eyes away from the bishop's miter. It is not the liturgical headdress itself that interests me. I am, instead, inescapably, morbidly drawn to the constant, evil trickle of yellowish-brown fluid that escapes from the golden and white headband and is channeled down behind the stiff, dry ear of the corpse, to soak, almost (but not quite) out of sight, into the purple head cushion of the casket, just above the dead cleric's shoulder.

A large, hairy blow-fly buzzes past, banks a hundred and eighty degrees and returns to perch on the deceased's cheek. It crawls over the cool-dead flesh, toys with an eyelid, then makes a brief flight to my lip, where it comes to rest an instant until I feel its tickly legs and sputter in desperate disgust to make it fly away. It returns to the corpse, sits on the miter, studies the fluid that my obsessive eyes refuse to abandon and crawls blithely down behind the shell of the dead bishop's dehydrated ear. I try to shut my eyes to the horrific sight but can't, as if it were an act beyond my will.

Just behind my left ear, a hoarse, unnerving whisper advises me, as if I were blind and couldn't see the truth for myself, that "the bishop is rotting" ("El obispo se pudre," the voice advises almost gleefully) and my face is involuntarily drawn nearer the sick-colored liquid coursing slowly but steadily from under the episcopal miter. I hold my breath. I struggle. I try to let loose of the box and drop to the altar, but I can't. Nor can I shut my eyelids, no matter how hard I try. I grit my teeth, hear myself groan, strain until my neck feels as if it will break, but I am inescapably locked on the image of the dead cleric.

Then, just when I think I might die of panic, a clear, calm, reassuring voice, this time close behind my right ear, says simply, "Come with me." I suddenly go limp and let go of the coffin, only to find that I am not hanging from a steep wall as I had been so sure I was. My feet are on the ground, and I am looking into the casket at the bishop's body, which, even perched on the bier, is only about chest high to me. Then, I turn effortlessly and walk away as commanded by the disembodied right-side voice...

Things grow even more horrific after that, but you get the idea.

In short, maybe my wife is right. Maybe dreams are nonsense, all chemistry, electrical short circuits in the brain, too much food and drink too late at night, mental flatulence, as it were. Who knows? Or perhaps it’s more like Castaneda suggests, and there are dreams and dreams. “Power dreams”, as he calls them. The mystery is, what—on earth—are we supposed to do with them?

Pleasant dreams!

 

REBA MAE DAYS

Two days from now will be my mother, Reba Mae’s, one-hundredth birthday. I have no idea where she’ll be spending it, but clearly someplace where I can’t send her flowers and chocolates or take her out for lunch. Wherever it is, I hope, this Mother’s Day and birthday, that she’s footloose and fancy free, because her life here was anything but a walk in the park.

Reba Mae at sixty-nine

That said, she was always looking for a silver lining. But at the same time, there was nothing silly or naïve about her. She was quick with a smile and a funny line. She had a sharp wit and a great sense of humor, and she expressed that humor in her ever-mordant observations of the world around her.

She joyfully embraced middleclass life and availed herself and her home of every luxury the crocodile that inhabited Whitie’s hip pocket would tolerate. But she nevertheless had a lot of pleasant memories to share about her rural childhood, despite its unfolding against a background of subsistence-level tenant farming in the years of the Great Depression. Her childhood and early youth were spent on three successive tenant farms in Auglaize and Shelby Counties in Ohio.  None of them had electricity, indoor plumbing or running water except for a pump in the kitchen sink. But her family lived with a stubborn pride and dignity that formed part of her personality for life.

Although she never wanted anything more to do with farm living after she moved to town in her high school years, her upbringing left her with a deep love and understanding of nature which she passed on to me. She found solace in her plants and flowers and never ceased to find inexplicable beauty and wonder in the sunrise and sunset.

Reba Mae with older brother Gene and younger
brother Kenny, on the farm in the twenties.

Her life can best be described as one of hard work, sacrifice and worry. She started out waitressing as a teen on her own. During World War II, a nineteen-year-old newlywed left on her own while Whitie, my father, went off to war for nearly three years, she took a job in a nearby defense plant helping build tanks and amphibious vehicles. She remained there throughout the war and eventually became an inspector.

The early years following the war she spent as a busy homemaker with a growing family. Despite that, she worked part-time in the Teddy Bear Restaurant that Whitie and two of his brothers opened following the war. And once all three of her children reached school age, she also took a job working as part of the kitchen staff in the town’s school cafeterias.

As if that weren’t enough to keep her occupied, Whitie had the first of a series of nervous breakdowns that would occur repeatedly throughout his life when I was five, my sister going on eight and our little brother not yet one. That would be the start of decades of variously diagnosed bipolar and obsessive-compulsive disorders that he suffered, and that would wreak various and sundry collateral damages on the entire family. It would also mean that, during these many crises, in which Whitie was either too depressed to work or was hospitalized in search of treatment, Reba Mae would, first, take up the slack at the family restaurant while my father’s two brothers were still his partners. And then later, when they both went their separate ways, it would be Reba Mae who would step up and very effectively run the business whenever Whitie couldn’t. Whenever he was well enough, they ran the place together.

There were good times as well, of course—as with all manic depressives. Times when Whitie was flying high and had the intelligence, will and strength to whip the world. But those were never times one could count on as permanent or lasting. Reba Mae learned to take them when she could get them, but always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Modern pharmaceuticals eventually helped Whitie cope for longer periods of time. Often years at a time. The longest of which were the sixteen years he spent as a highly successful route salesman for a local cheese-maker. During those years, Reba Mae herself found considerable personal satisfaction in the two successive jobs she held as a highly capable office manager, first for an insurance broker and then for a law office.

But when Reba Mae and Whitie decided to retire, those years would bring new bouts of mental illness that, as any family who has experienced it knows, never affects the victim alone. There is always collateral damage.

I didn’t realize fully how all-pervading that illness had been for Reba Mae until Whitie lost a four-year battle with cancer in January of 2003, a couple months short of his eighty-first birthday. I spent some very high-quality time with Reba Mae after that and tried my best to convince her that her life was now completely hers and hers alone. She was free to travel, to move, to spend time with old friends and make new ones, to take up a new hobby or resume old ones. It was all about her now, after all this time.

She listened. She nodded. She even sometimes said, “I guess I can, can’t I?” But she clearly wasn’t convinced. At one point she turned to me and said, “The thing is, I’ve been with your dad—been him—for so long now, I can’t find me anymore! I just don’t know where Reba is!”

When I said good-bye to her at the end of that visit, I could see it in her eyes. She was saying good-bye permanently. That in-person visit would be our last. She would die a few months later, at age eighty, just six months after Whitie, in 2003.

One way or another, however, she’s with me every day. Her memory, I mean. I make no fantastic claim of my mother’s watching over me from heaven or any of that other nonsense. I truly hope that, if there’s anything beyond this, the dead go on to bigger and better things, schooled by their trials and tribulations in this life. I’d hate to think they stayed hanging around seeing what sort of mundane inanities we’re all up to.  I envision them flying off like a bat out of hell and never, ever, looking back.

As for my constant hope for Reba Mae, it is that, wherever and whomever she might be now, wherever the life-force she unleashed has ventured, the world she lives in is a happy one, one in which she’s all about being herself and getting the most out of every moment. I sometimes fantasize that she’s twenty now, as beautiful as she was at that age here, with her whole life lying ahead of her. And in that fantasy, the only thing she plans to hitch her wagon to is a star.

Happy Mother’s Day and happy birthday, Reba Mae. And may you be footloose and fancy free forever.