I’M BACK…LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY

It’s a grey, breezy, Great Lakes-type of day in Cleveland today.

I arrived here day before yesterday. As per usual, I had first spent several days in Wapakoneta, my home town. I stayed in my little “home back home”, the Moonflower Inn, a tiny house with a miniature sitting room, a comfy bedroom with almost wall to wall king-size bed, kitchenette and bath. Perfect for a family of one (or two…if you are very intimate).

I flew in from Miami, where I’d spent a couple of days on business. My friend Mary Jo was waiting for me at the Dayton airport, and drove me the hour from Dayton to Wapak, where she handed me the key to her lovely van and told me I could use it until I went back to Argentina. Mary Jo’s the best.

We made a brief stop in Troy, Ohio, just north of Dayton, for supper—early for me, late for Troy—at a nice family restaurant. There, we both had the beef Manhattan—which the restaurant menu referred to as an “open-face beef sandwich”. It was Mary Jo and I who remembered the name “beef Manhattan”. And then I recalled that it was also, back in the day, sometimes called a “beef smear”.

It was absolutely delicious, and the first one that I, at least, had eaten in more than fifty years—thin-sliced lean beef, on a bed of bread and mashed potatoes, and the whole thing with clear beef gravy ladled over it. I’ve been on  a self-imposed diet for a few months and have shed thirty-five pounds or so. So, it wasn’t exactly what I should have been eating, but I justified it by virtue of the fact that it was now after seven in the evening, and I hadn’t eaten anything since a light breakfast at my hotel in Miami twelve hours earlier. I relished it and felt no pang of guilt. It was as much a pleasant memory as a meal.

How so? As soon as I shoveled the first heaping, dripping forkful into my trap, I immediately recalled all the old places where I used to enjoy this once common dish, back in the days before high-tech, the Internet and social media. The most indelible memories were of my teen years working in Lima, Ohio. From the time I could drive, I worked for a music store that was in the first block south of the Public Square on South Main Street. It was my first contact with other professional musicians and, at the time, seemed like a dream come true. I taught percussion there, and in free hours between students, sold musical instruments and all the stuff that goes with them—reeds, mouthpieces, drumsticks and mallets, mutes, capos, ligatures, guitar and bass strings, violin, viola, cello, and acoustic bass strings, horsehair bows and rosin, picks, bridges, pick-ups, valve oil, and so on and so forth. It was through my contacts there that I also started picking up nightclub gigs. Just a few at first, and then a busier and busier schedule. By my junior year, I almost didn’t have time for high school.

A week later, already up here in Cleveland, I would find myself in a cramped little Irish pub—owned by the also-proprietor of the barbershop next door, a guy called Sean Gormley—listening to an old blues-singer-guitarist called Austin. Like I say, Gormley’s Pub is little, peopled mostly by Rocky River regulars, so the performer is right there on the floor with you. Well, Austin and I fell into an easy conversation, he sipping tequila shooters and I quaffing Guinness Stout, about the old days in music. It was great to reminisce about those days when live music was everywhere, and we all lived off of making it.

Anyway, the music store in downtown Lima was a very human place to work, and my schedule always included ample time to have lunch or supper. And the beef Manhattan was often my meal of choice—abundant, reasonably priced, and absolutely delicious. When I worked until 9pm, my restaurant of choice was the one that operated on the second floor of Greg’s department store in downtown Lima. As a rural, smalltown boy, Lima was my Manhattan, so the meal seemed appropriate. Gregg’s had a really great beef Manhattan, and to me, the restaurant seemed like a really sophisticated, grown-up place. What wasn’t to like about a beef smear? Abundant, brown and delicious. Paradise on  a plate.

And it came to me with other memories I was making. I was already a grown-up kind of musician, doing jobs grown-up musicians did, making friends among grown-up pros. And I was working on my other dream. That of becoming a writer. I understood right away that if you were going to write, you needed to read—abundantly, broadly, eclectically and regularly. So, when my composition notebook didn’t accompany me to my solitary lunch or supper, whatever I was reading did.

And a lot of that, the literature that was helping mold my future as a writer, I was buying at another eatery I frequented. It was a large old pharmacy a couple of blocks from the music store on West Market Street, the east-west main drag of Lima. It was not only an old apothecary, where remedies were still prepared behind a tall counter by the druggist, but also had a great lunch counter and soda fountain, and a huge selection of paperback books. It was there that I acquired most of my first collections of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Steinbeck and Kerouac. With my beef Manhattans and vanilla phosphates, I delved into the Spanish Civil War, the decadent society of East Egg Long Island, the joys, passions and suicidal thoughts of sensitive, artistic people and child stars, life on Cannery Row and among the migrant workers in the Salinas Valley, and the beat generation and life-on-the-road.

Another favorite spot was tucked away in the basement of what was known back then as Cook Tower, but that had actually been re-christened Chase Tower by that time. It was also, at one time, called the First National Bank and Trust Building, and is now known as 43 Public Square. While that’s its official address, it also has another entrance at 121 High Street. The name of the city’s most iconic skyscraper changed with its tenants. It was first occupied by the Cook Publishing Company (hence, Cook Tower), and for many folks in Limaland, the name stuck no matter how many times it changed later. It remains a fourteen-storey historic piece of the Lima skyline, built when Whitie, my dad, was still a tiny tyke, growing up in the city’s South End.

Cook Tower opened in 1926. My grandfather, Murel Newland, then twenty-nine and the father of two, watched the progress as Cook Tower was being built on the other side of the square from the barbershop that he and his partner ran there.

I get the feeling that the café in the basement mostly worked with the office crowd in the building, because I was often the only customer there after banking hours. It was perfect for reading and writing. They had good black coffee, all you could drink for a quarter, and simple, hot, delicious blue-plate specials, including beef Manhattans—and fried chicken, and meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and BLT plates, and so on. A different special each day. It was there that I read, for the first of many times, J.D. Salinger’s For Esmé with Love and Squalor, and realized that it was, perhaps, one of the greatest short stories in contemporary American literature. On that evening, with my coffee and beef Manhattan, I dined on the poignant awareness that, while Papa Hemingway would always be my hero, I wanted to learn to write like Salinger. He was, quite simply, the most extraordinary and most eloquent writer I’d ever-in-my-young-life read—a perception that would be underscored tenfold when, a few months later, I acquired (at the same local pharmacy) his novella, Franny and Zooey.

All that with one mouthful of delicious beef Manhattan at a family restaurant in Troy.

So, amid memories and visits with old and new friends, I’ve come back to my native Ohio with yet another new book under my arm. It’s the fourth anthology of what might loosely be referred to as “essays”, but which I’ve always preferred to think of as “non-fiction short stories”. Despite making my living for fifty years with the written word—as a journalist, commentator, translator, editor and ghostwriter—it took me long enough to get around to finally getting my most creative and personal work out of my desk drawers and onto the printed page. But hey, better late than never. And, just like that, I’ve published four books in as many years.

The first one was about a fellow Wapakoneta native son, Jim Bowsher, a guy who could only be described as “unique” or “one of a kind”, and who created one of the most eccentric and interesting permanent art installations anywhere—his fabulous Rock Garden and its centerpiece, the Temple of Tolerance. That book was an intimate portrait of Jim, his crazy, weighty art, and his eccentric personality, but also included a magical road trip he and I shared, as well as the story of an unsolved murder from another age that has become an integral part of Wapakoneta folklore. That book is entitled The Rock Garden and Other Stories.

The second and third books—Visions of What Used To Be and From a Place Called Wapakoneta—are sequential collections of anecdotes of the people and places that were part of my childhood and youth in rural Midwest America in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. As such,  they also reflect the experiences of other Midwesterners from my generation and the one before it.

This new book, Other Worlds—Destinations on the Road of Life, is something different, a memoir of experiences lived and gathered in other parts of the US, and of the world. I loved writing it and love sharing it. And as always, it will be my pleasure to present it at a book-signing event in my own home town—on November 5^th, from 6 to 8pm, at  the Riverside Art Center in downtown Wapakoneta. 

I love my home in Patagonia. I’ve been there for more than three decades. And, as a newspaperman and editor, spent another twenty years in Buenos Aires before that. But it’s always a pleasure to get back to my roots, to recall who I was and am, to walk the streets of my home town and those of the iconic Midwestern City of Cleveland, where I now have my stateside residence. To see old friends and to make new ones.

We expatriates live a strange reality. Always “leaving home” to go “back home”.

Confusing?

You have to have been there.