JIM BOWSHER - LIFE 101

 My friend and writer colleague Jim Bowsher has the Big C.

That statement deserves a paragraph of its own. So does the next one:

It’s Stage Four. That’s usually thought of as the “ALL She Wrote” stage of that rotten scourge of a disease.

Jim Bowsher in his fabulous Rock Garden
Photo by Mary Jo Knoch - All rights reserved

I know a little bit about cancer. My father died of it. So did my mother. Both aged eighty. My father’s mother died of it at sixty-six. My father’s older brother at seventy-five, my father’s middle brother at about the same age as his mother, and their youngest brother, the reverend, who fought it with all of his grit and faith, managed to beat it until he was in his mid-eighties, when it finally took him.

One thing I’ve learned? It’s not a good death, I mean if there is such a thing.

I take after my mother’s side of the family. Despite her death by cancer, they mostly die of some sort of cardio-vascular disease. Somewhere that statement may hold out some glimmer of optimism for me—cardio-vascular is no picnic, mind you, but it’s not cancer either.

My little brother was the spitting image of the Newland clan—actually the cancer trend appears to have originated with the Henrys, my Grandma Alice Henry Newland’s family—but he flipped a giant bird to that part of the family’s cancerous medical history by dying of what appears to have been a massive stroke, in his sleep, at age fifty-one. It was exactly the sort of “bite me” thing he was famous for. But still, I think I might have been willing to give up part of the nearly two decades that I’ve survived him just to have him around a while longer. You couldn’t help but love that boy, and the world is a much less interesting place without him.

I also know something about diagnosis and prognosis. They’re not infallible. There is a great deal to be said for will, and what some of my British friends have been wont to call “sheer bloody-mindedness.”

Good example? My dad, Whitie. Bloody-mindedness got him through years of combat during World War II. And, despite having been a man who was often suicidal due to decades of chronic depression, he took on the challenge of cancer as if he were going to war. His was lung cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of only nine percent. When the diagnosis was made, and an attempt to remove one lung failed, he was told he probably had about six months. For all of his talk of suicide in earlier years, telling Whitie he couldn’t do something—like live—was a sure-fire way to get him to do it.  Result? He lived for another four years.

In that sense, Jim Bowsher reminds me a lot of Whitie.  Some time back, before I went to visit him, I called to see how he was doing. When he failed to answer the phone for a few days—in all fairness, that’s not unusual for Jim, who always has better things to do than answer the phone—I began to worry. The thing is, Jim only has a land line with an answering machine. He doesn’t own a cellphone or a computer (he still writes on a manual typewriter). He doesn’t have an email address. He isn’t on social media. In a very real way, for Jim it continues to be the sixties, when he and I were both growing up in Wapakoneta, Ohio, where he still resides, in his phenomenal museum of a house on the edge of his artistic masterpiece, the Rock Garden, which surrounds his Temple of Tolerance.  I wrote about both, and, indeed, about Jim, in a book titled The Rock Garden and Other Stories (available on Amazon, and at the Riverside Art Center in downtown Wapakoneta). As that book reveals, Jim lives in an analog world of his own making. It’s as if his entire environment were the contents of an enormous time capsule.

He does have a website, created by his friend and collaborator Scott Bruno. But other than knowing what content goes into it, Jim is completely estranged from that technological process. He’s incurably old school. But google his name and the references to him on the Web go on and on, references from Wapakoneta, from Ohio, from all over the United States and from around the world. So, Jim doesn’t really have to go to the Web. The Web comes to him.

Anyway, after three or four tries I finally get him on the phone—Jim seldom if ever calls somebody back even if they leave a message. And even though he is a dedicated writer—who is a disciplined keeper of the old rule, “Writers write every day”—he also discourages epistolary contact. Long ago I once offered to write back and forth via snail mail. “It would be a waste of your time,” he told me. “I’m a terrible correspondent. You’ll write me, I’ll read it and enjoy it, and I’ll never write you back.”

At the time, I said okay and left it at that. Now, however, when things are as finite as they’ve always been, but with my awareness of that fact heightened, I’m thinking I wish I’d written him anyway all these years, even if I’d never gotten an answer. It was selfish and lazy of me. I offered, he said don’t bother, and I didn’t. Such is life. Such is ego. 

“Jim! Finally! So glad you picked up.” I shout into the phone.

“Yeah, I heard your messages and was listening for the phone. So how are you?”

“I’m fine. I mean other than a few old-man issues. The more important question is, how are you?”

“I’m doing great. I continue to be a medical phenomenon. Nobody can understand how I’m doing so well. I mean, I’m a dead man walkin’, but I’m just fine. The thing is, I’m so busy, I keep forgetting I’m dying!”

Dead Man Walkin’—the term used for a condemned prisoner on the walk to execution—is what some of the little hoodlums that hang out in Jim’s yard will sing out when he emerges from the house. A lot of these troubled kids have been mentored by Jim. Some he has accompanied to juvenile court or visited in the reformatory. They, more than anyone else, will surely miss him when he’s gone. The dead-man-walkin’ thing is a private joke between them and Jim, which they both find amusing.

“The other day,” says Jim, “there was this really nice lady visiting here. She knew about the cancer and wanted to stop by.” So, we walk out into the yard and one of the kids goes, “Dead Man Walkin’!” really loud. Well, you should have seen that poor woman’s face!” says Jim. “She goes, ‘Oh my god, how awful!’ And I say, ‘Oh no, it’s fine. It’s just a joke between me and the guys. It doesn’t bother me, really, don’t worry.’ I’m like trying to comfort her,” Jim laughs. 

Jim's house on Wood St. in Wapakoneta

Later, he tells me about the advancement of his historical framing project. All of his energy right now appears to be going into that, and into creating a foundation to ensure the continuation of his permanent art installation (the Rock Garden) and his local historical research project after he is gone. Every stone, item, artifact, picture and clipping in Jim’s divinely and eclectically cluttered house and yard has a story behind it. He refuses any item that doesn’t. Somebody comes to Jim with some interesting and/or vintage doodad, Jim says, “What’s the story behind this?” If the person says, “I have no idea. It’s just something I picked up at a flea market,” Jim will say thanks but no thanks. “What’s important is the story. If you don’t know the story, why have the thing?”

It appears that it wasn’t until very recently that Jim began to realize he was mortal. That was when Scott Bruno began to collaborate with him, taking on the daunting job of photographing each of the tens of thousands of items in Jim’s story-artifact collection, as a means of documenting this unique historical inventory.

Out of that gargantuan task grew Jim’s “framing project”.

“So tell me more about these frames you’re doing,” I say when we’re talking on the phone (a call between Jim and me never lasts under an hour or so).

“It’s kind of hard to explain,” he says. “I’ll show some to you when you come. I’m taking pictures of everything and framing them with their stories. You’ll see. You are still coming, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it!”

“Good, it’ll be great to see you.”

“So how’s treatment going?”

“They keep telling me I shouldn’t feel this good,” he laughs. “The other day when I went in, this oncology nurse—she and I have gotten to be good friends—she goes, ‘Jim, would you like more pain medication?’ I tell her no, that I take one now and then, but I’m really not having a lot of pain. She goes, ‘But Jim, at this stage, you’ve really got to be having a lot of pain.’” Jim’s cancer started out as prostate cancer then spread first from there to his hip. “So I tell her, ‘Look, I can drag a leg if it’ll make you feel better, but I’m doing great. No real pain, see?’”  A doctor friend whom he laughingly tells about this says he’s not the typical case, not what people in oncology are used to seeing. “Yours is all a matter of will and attitude, Jim, of not giving in to the disease.”

It’s true. Clearly, Jim is refusing to give in, refusing to become the disease.  He is refusing to become Jim Bowsher Stage Four. He is striving to remain, Jim Bowsher Phenomenon, which is who he has always been. And for now, at least, it’s working! “The other day at the oncology unit, I told one of the (baffled) staff, ‘Well, at least you’ll remember me when I’m gone.’” He said the woman answered, “That’s for sure, Jim. You’re unforgettable.”

Jim says he likes to cheer up the others awaiting oncological treatment. He finds it so depressing to walk in and see all of their sad, doomed faces. He wants to help them realize that they’re not dead yet, that any day they still open their eyes is a good day, or as Whitie used to say, “a helluva lot better than the alternative.”

“As soon as I walk in, I start hitting them with one-liners,” says Jim, “and pretty soon I’ve got the whole waiting room laughing. There’s this one guy who, when I walk in goes, ‘Oh christ! Here he is again, the stand-up comic of the oncology ward.” Jim guffaws.  It’s good, says Jim. Laughing’s good. It helps them feel better. Not so down and hopeless.

Toward the end of October, after a couple of days in Miami, where my plane from Buenos Aires landed, I fly up to Dayton, and then rent a car and drive to Wapakoneta, an hour away. I could just as easily have flown into Cleveland, where my sister Darla lives and where I have my Stateside residence, but I was really anxious to see Jim right away and see for myself how he was doing. I got there the night of the twenty-fourth, had dinner with my childhood friend—a mutual friend of Jim’s—Mark Gallimore, and was supposed to see Jim the next day, and then drive on up to Cleveland on the twenty-sixth to spend a couple of weeks.

So, the next morning, a Wednesday, I had a pleasant breakfast with a few former classmates—including Mark—at a local eatery known as the Coffey Cup, and was all set to go to Jim’s in the early afternoon. Another mutual friend, who pretty regularly visits Jim on Wednesdays, sent me a text, however, saying that Jim had told her he wasn’t up to seeing anybody. She said he was too nauseous to talk to anyone but hoped I’d get in touch and be sure and see him later.

I was worried. This didn’t sound good.  I tried without luck to reach him several times, then gave up and headed for Cleveland. Two weeks later, I was back in Wapakoneta for a week-long stay. One of the first things I did was start trying to get hold of Jim. I called three times without success and had decided to just go knock on the door. I was only staying a block away at the Moonflower Inn, a lovely little cottage for one that I rent when I’m back in town. Finally, however, I got him on the phone.

“Wow, Jim!” I said. “I’ve been worried.”

“Why? I’m fine.”

“Well, when Philippa told me you were too ill to see us on the twenty-fifth, it worried the hell out of me, and then I had to go up to Cleveland for two weeks. I left you a couple of messages.”

“Yes, I heard them. I’m fine. That thing on the twenty-fifth was just some stomach thing. Nothing to do with the cancer. Just indigestion or something. I was fine the next day! Sorry I missed you. I was really hoping you’d be back”

We make plans to see each other the following day, a Saturday. We always meet at Jim’s place and there, surrounded by his inspiring chaos of stories and things, give free rein to our imaginations and talk about everything and everyone under the sun. But this time Jim says, “We can’t stay at my place. I have all the stuff for my frames spread all over the house.”

“I don’t mind. I love going to your house.”

“Yeah, but there’s no place to sit!”

He suggested we meet as Woody’s Diner, a bar and grill on Wood Street, just up the block (between Jim’s house and the Moonflower), which he and I have always favored.  But we were also supposed to be meeting our friends Mark Gallimore, Tom Shaw (who had flown in from Charleston, South Carolina), and Mary Jo Knoch. When I mentioned Woody’s to Mary Jo, she said, “No, it’ll be hard to talk there. Just come out to my place. I’ll make a barley beef soup and some cornbread.”

Mary Jo's place near the Village of Fryburg

“What should I bring?” I asked.

“Pie,” she said. So I went and bought an entire three-berry pie at Bob Evans.

When I called Tom and he asked what he should bring, I said, “Beer.”

So we were set.

When I went to pick up Jim to take him to Mary Jo’s, he wasn’t quite ready, so he invited me in. I immediately saw what he had meant about “nowhere to sit.” Everywhere there were picture frames and stacks of content to mount in them—pictures, cards, carefully-typed texts, drawings, etc.  Stuff everywhere, on tables, in chairs, on the couch, up the stairs…everywhere.

I got out my phone to take a picture.

“Don’t take any pictures,” said Jim brusquely.

“Why not?” I said. “This is great!”

“Please don’t, Dan,” Jim said tersely. This was one of those moments when Jim Bowsher would suddenly become a stranger, an enigma, even to his friends. This was when, in his own words, he was “at the service of his muse.” This was Jim Bowsher the writer, the historian, the collector. This was the Jim Bowsher who was friends with no one—Jim in Jim’s own world, a world to which no one else had passage.

I looked disappointed and said, “Come on, Jim. This is me. I can’t help myself. I’m a journalist.”

He squirmed and said, “I’d rather you didn’t. I never let anybody see the process when I was creating the Rock Garden. And I don’t want anybody to see the process while I’m creating the frames.”

I put my phone away and sulked while he went off to finish getting ready to go.

In the car, he said he was worried about his brother Walt, that he’d been calling him and Walt didn’t answer. Walt was only very recently widowed and still trying to cope with his wife Aida’s death.

I said, “Oh, don’t worry. Mary Jo said she’d invited him out to her place too, and that he said he was going.”

Jim looked relieved. “Oh, great, so he probably went out there already.”

Walt Bowsher

Sure enough, when we get there, Walt is already ensconced in the most comfortable chair in the living room, and is chatting with Gallimore and Mary Jo.

It was a beautiful autumn day—brisk, with azure sky contrasting with the last of the brightly changing foliage. Mary Jo’s place is a quarter-mile off the road, just past the Village of Fryburg, a few miles south of Wapakoneta.  It’s a little old shingled farmhouse with a good shed and a tumbledown old barn on a few acres of land, surrounded by rolling fields and a nice woodlot. It’s a lovely, peaceful place, and on this bright fall day it seemed utterly idyllic.

At first, in Mary Jo’s comfy living room, we chatted inconsequentially and took turns spoiling her three cats, Fred, Bill and the venerable old Captain Jack. Over beer, however, we entered into more controversial territory—small towns versus big cities, Israelis versus Palestinians, conservatives versus liberals. The tone rose occasionally, and Jim, far from presenting the profile of a dying man, held his own and gave as good as he got.  But in the end, it was a civilized discussion of issues among intellectually sound individuals who understood the value of different points of view and respected each other’s conclusions even if they might not agree with them.

Tom Shaw and Jim debate small towns v big cities

Walt, through all of this, sat smiling quizzically while he petted a very contented Bill. He occasionally offered some contribution, but mostly remained attentive, moving his gaze from one debater to the other, as if watching a ping-pong match. He was the first to leave, because he had a jam session with a group of other amateur musicians. But he was sure to let us all know how much he had enjoyed the afternoon, and thanked Mary Jo profusely for the invitation.  

Mary Jo’s wonderful, nutritious soup overrode debate, as did her cornbread and warm butter.  We then switched from beer to coffee and pie and later sat contently together, playing with the cats again.

Jim had brought along a few of his frames and passed them around, waiting to see our reactions. For me, it was like a light had suddenly been turned on. I got it, understood the dichotomy that Jim was seeking to project with each frame. One story on the front, the same, but another, story on the back. The frames were a stroke of genius, the projection of a voiceless debate between two opposing points of view, or between fact and legend, reality and fantasy. Once again, as in the past when I was writing about him, I was blown away by the profound yet simple messages with which Jim was striving to imbue his widely varied audience.  It was a didactic, thought-provoking idea, and nothing short of analog brilliant.

In the car, as I drove Jim back to his home in Wapakoneta, I half-expected him to revisit the issues debated. Instead, he said, “Wow, did you see Walt’s face? He was fascinated! With his friends, who are mostly of like mind, he doesn’t get a chance very often to hear this kind of debate. He really enjoyed it! I could tell.”

Jim explains one of his historical frames

Any thought of the issues had flown the coop. Jim was entirely focused on his brother, his best friend, and on the great afternoon he’d had, at a time when he was in pain. A time when it was exactly what he needed.

The next time Jim and I met, it was for breakfast.  I picked him up and we went to the Coffey Cup. The weather was accompanying me for my stay. A beautiful blue and gold morning with a light frost. I had asked Jim the day before when he wanted to go.

“You tell me,” he said.

“I can go whenever you like.”

“How about nine-thirty? Too late?”

“That’s fine,” I said.

When I arrived and knocked on door at nine-thirty sharp, it took a while for Jim to answer. When he finally came to the door, he said, “Sorry, I slept in. I’ll be right with you.” And he went off again upstairs to finish getting ready. I spent the time to once again browse among the extraordinary collection of items that cover every surface in the house—walls, tables, shelves, everything crowded with vintage pieces, but more than anything else, with countless mementos of life in Wapakoneta and its environs for the past two hundred years and beyond, clear back to the lives of its indigenous peoples before Europeans had ever heard of America.  You couldn’t get bored waiting, especially if Jim had told you the stories of some of the pieces. And in my case he had already, many times, in the past.  

By the time we reached the Coffey Cup, the place was burgeoning with the breakfast crowd. It was the kind of place where breakfast diners weren’t the type to eat and run. They had time to dawdle over eggs and meat and potatoes and pancakes while drinking hot coffee and engaging in neighborly conversation.

The Coffey Cup from the inside.

Fortunately, Jim and I found a great table by a window near the cash register where someone had just cleared out. This table wasn’t going to be much of a money-maker this morning. More than occupying it, we were taking it hostage. And Jim, who said he no longer had much of an appetite in the morning, only ordered whole wheat toast and butter, while I decided on the cinnamon French toast with maple syrup. We both ordered black coffee, but that was going to be a losing proposition for the proprietor as well, since we never said “no” to refills, every time someone passed by with a fresh pot.

 This time the meeting was one on one. We were, as we say in Argentina, “in our sauce,” talking about the things of interest to the two of us—his yard, his house, his projects (didn’t it seem astonishing that a man with stage four cancer was still awash with projects for the future?) I talked about my books and blogs. We talked about writing and writers. He recalled anecdotes about his youthful adventures when he traveled far and wide making a pest of himself until he could meet some of the writers he most admired. I couldn’t help but recall that when Beat Generation writer Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out, one of the items pinned with a magnet to the refrigerator in his kitchen where he did the deed was one of Jim’s haiku poems, in Jim’s own hand.

And we talked about his poetry—his haiku. Earlier, during one of our long-long-distance phone calls he had told me that he was finally considering publishing them. During the reorganization of his house, he had decided to see if he had enough for a book of haiku poetry. Turned out he did…more than enough, in fact: approximately ten thousand haiku by James Bowsher. He told me that he was now writing haiku about cancer. “You write what you know.”

He had tried one out on his oncology nurse friend. In the waiting room, she saw him scribbling in the notebook he carries in his hip pocket and said, “Jim, can I ask you what you’re writing?”

“Sure,” says Jim. “A poem.”

“What about?”

“Cancer.”

“Do you remember it? Can you tell it to me?”

“Sure,” Jim says. And right then and there, as if I were the nurse, he thinks for a few seconds, looks at the ceiling, and recites the little three-line poem. It compares cancer to a predator shark, swimming in his blood, waiting until the time is right to attack and rip him apart.

“It made her cry,” says Jim. For writer types like us, making somebody cry (or laugh, or think, or remember, or rejoice), well, that’s a bullseye. Says Jim, “She goes, ‘That’s exactly right Jim. That’s exactly what it’s like.’”

The breakfast crowd thins out. For a while we’re almost alone in the place, still drinking the coffee they generously keep offering us. Then, the lunch crowd starts drifting in. And still, we remain holed up in our corner under the window by the door. And soon the place is loaded with patrons again. But when we’re on a roll like this, it’s hard to break it, even though neither of us has the stamina we once had any more.

Finally, it’s Jim who suggests we call it a day. After all, we’ve confiscated this table for the past four hours. It’s the first time in any of our marathon conversations that Jim has ever been the one to suggest a pause. Whenever someone he enjoys talking to suggests ending a conversation, Jim is famous for saying, “Okay, but just one more story. You’re gonna love this one!” I figure he must be getting tired. It’s only natural. But then again, maybe he’s just anxious to get back to his frames.

Jim has always been a fanatical baseball fan. And if there was one thing that had become clear to me, it was that Jim’s philosophy on life had a lot in common with that of baseball great Yoga Berra, who once famously quipped, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

In the car on the way back to his house to drop him off, Jim says, “Thanks Dan. This was great! I’m so glad we got together.”

The week in Wapak goes by like a lightning flash. Suddenly, it’s my last day. Again, a gorgeous autumn day. Cold, but clear and windless. There’s thick frost on my rented car when I get up. I go in the morning to have breakfast with a friend and former employer, Leslie Rigali. I worked for her for a year as a consultant in nineteen-ninety, when she was the owner of Davanti Media in Lima, an industrial city twelve miles north of Wapak. We created some interesting media projects together.

Moonflower Inn, "my home back home" in Wapakoneta

We haven’t seen each other in thirty years, but when we meet at the Harding Highway Panera in Lima, it’s almost as if no time at all has passed. It’s a relaxed, newsy conversation that lasts a good hour and a half.  Toward the end, it occurs to me, as we’re talking about my books, that this is precisely the person—a crackerjack businesswoman with years of public relations and advertising work behind her—who might be able to help me improve my book circulation in the Lima area.

I self-consciously bring the subject up, explaining that I had no intention of doing so, and she is immediately all over it, with ideas and suggestions based on her long experience and impeccable contacts. She says she would be more than happy to help me. We both come away from our breakfast happy to have renewed our friendship.

It’s a great start to my last day back home in Ohio.

As the hours tick by, I try to pack as much as I can into one day. Mary Jo and I meet up for coffee in downtown Wapak. We go to Winans, a place with great coffee and even better chocolates, both of which I try. It’s still such a lovely day, if chilly. that we decide to sit at the single table that Winans has on the sidewalk. A chance for me to revisit my home town at street level. Mary Jo knows a lot of people in town and a few of them stopped to chat a while at our sidewalk table. A little later, after we had finished our coffee, we also stopped a little further up the street to talk with the two amiable ladies who run Macky’s Health and Hemp. The store is a medical cannabis dispensary. Had you told me a few years back that someone would be selling cannabis on the main drag in Wapakoneta, I would have said you were crazy. Later, one of the ladies approaches us again while I am taking some pictures and holds up my book, Visions of What Used to Be, and says, “I just realized…this is you, right?”  I nod. “Would you sign it?”

She made my day. So did seeing that my books were once again in a brick and mortar store, and right in the front window of the Riverside Art Center, a Wapakoneta cultural venue, where I had earlier left ten signed copies of each book.

Mary Jo and I walked around town some more, acting like tourists and taking pictures as if this were the first time either of us had ever set foot in downtown Wapakoneta. Eventually, however, it was time for me to go back to the Moonflower and pack. It was about four when I got back.

Meanwhile, Mary Jo arranged with Gallimore to meet her at six at La Grande Pizza, and then she arranged with Jim Bowsher to pick him up and take him as well. I was to get there as soon as I could.  My packing and straightening up of my quarters at the Moonflower finished, I arrived just after six at La Grande and met my three friends at the door. We sat, fittingly, in a place that was once occupied by what was then known as “the front table”, back when this same building was my father’s place of business for a quarter-century from the mid-forties to the late-sixties.

The Teddy Bear, with Whitie at the head of the front table

Back then, the place was called the Teddy Bear, and for many years, the “front table”, a long, Formica-topped table with eight chairs, was where some of the town’s movers and shakers met for breakfast and to exchange gossip. My grandfather, Murel Newland, had hired local contractor Walter Stinebaugh to build the building toward the end of World War II, so that his three oldest sons would have a place of business to come home to when they returned from military service. In the early years, Whitie was in business with his older brother Red and his younger brother Chuck, but they both eventually moved on to other activities and the Teddy Bear became our family’s business, which my father and mother operated.

The gang at La Grande
Jim, Mark, Dan and Mary Jo

It was only the third time I’d been in that building in more than fifty years since my father had sold it. It was greatly changed. But in my mind’s eye, I could visualize it exactly as it had been. The typical diner, all chrome, Formica, glass blocks and fifties colors. I could remember the cigarette machine beside the door, the jukebox just behind where Mark was sitting and the cigar and candy case at the far end of the counter against the kitchen wall. I could see the old kitchen too, and the backroom and storeroom, the booths along the side wall of the dining room and the tables in the middle, the wrap-around glass-block counter with two stools at the end—one of which now formed part of Jim’s eclectic collection of Wapakoneta memorabilia.

We enjoyed excellent pizza and cold draft. The conversation was more nostalgic than political, remembering people and anecdotes from the town, this town, where we had all grown up.  Eventually, however, it was time to say good-bye. Good-byes seem temporary when you’re young, but over seventy, they begin to have a permanence about them, a lack of certainty, a sense of hope without expectation.

Outside in the street, we all hugged each other and, for lack of anything better to say, said, “See you next time.”

When I hugged Jim, I couldn’t help noting how small he seemed. Light as a cat. I said, “Jim, it’s been great. Hopefully, I’ll be back in a year or so.”

Jim said, “I’ll be here.”

I believed him.