YANKEE REDUX — GREENLAWN: BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS

The main cemetery in Wapakoneta, my hometown, is called Greenlawn. Like cemeteries in other towns, for most people it's "a sad place". But for me, Greenlawn was never sad. Growing up I had registered it as a venue for beginnings rather than endings.

Until he was middle-aged, my maternal grandfather, Vernon Leroy Weber, known to me as Grandpa Vern, was a tenant farmer. He worked his youth away on the Herbst Farms, which belonged to a large landowner of that surname whose holdings were mostly in Shelby and Auglaize counties. Grandpa Vern moved his family consecutively to three of those farms, that I know of, as my mother and her two brothers and her sister were growing up. One was in the middle of the country off of the South Dixie Highway (Old US Route 25) in Shelby County. Another was near the village of Botkins in Auglaize County on that same route. The last one on the Middle Pike just east of Wapakoneta, roughly where Interstate-75 now scars the gently rolling farmland.

Greenlawn Cemetery, Wapakoneta

There was never any danger of Grandpa Vern's earning enough to save up, buy land and start a farm of his own. Mr. Herbst culled skilled farmers from people he could trust, immigrants from the old country, other Germans like himself, and their first-generation American-born children—the case of my great-grandparents, and their American-born son, Vern. Wherever they put him, my grandfather worked the land as if it were his own, making roughly the same monthly wage paid to cattle drovers at the time (of which he had been one in his youth), about thirty dollars a month. Of course the advantage the tenant farmer had over a drover was that, if he and his wife could find the time, they could have their own vegetable garden, chickens for eggs and poultry, and a few other perks. They got one hog a year to slaughter, could keep enough milk from the dairy cows for their own table, even buy and board some livestock of their own. There was always a woodlot for fuel and usually good pheasant, rabbit and squirrel hunting, in and around it. It wasn't poverty by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, life, if hard, was often good. But economically, it was never enough to do more than get by.

Until they moved to the Middle Pike, my mother, Reba Mae, never lived in a house with running water or electric lights. There was a hand pump in the kitchen and the bathroom was out back. In winter, homework was done by the light of a coal oil lamp, and the milking was done before school (Reba Mae and Grandma Myrt's job) by the light of a barn lantern. School was a one-room country schoolhouse a mile and a half away from home, where at least six grades were taught simultaneously. Reba Mae walked or rode her Shetland pony, depending on the weather. But the education she got was amazingly complete. When she went to high school in town—highly applied student and avid reader that she was—she not only had no problem keeping up with the new curriculum but was also often ahead of it.

My grandmother, Myrtle (née) Cavinder instilled the love of reading in her. Grandma had an excellent education for a woman of her times (she was born in 1899), having finished the equivalent of eighth grade. Had she not married a farmer, her schooling would probably have permitted her to work in a mercantile business or office as a clerk or secretary. Grandpa Vern, for his part, had only had three years of formal schooling, which he got largely by accident. As soon as he was old enough to do farm work, he was needed on the land. Reba Mae once told me that the only reason he even got the three years of school that he did was because, at the time, there were sometimes bears in the woods that his sister Clara had to cross to get to the one-room schoolhouse she attended. Until she was considered old enough to walk alone, he accompanied her.

He managed, however, to learn to read and write quite well with my grandmother's help. Before the advent of television in our neck of the woods, long after Vern moved the family to town, he entertained himself reading the dime store cowboy novels that were popular at the time. He also entertained himself and his family (including us grandchildren later on) by sometimes grabbing a scratch pad and the stub of a pencil and sketching out comic drawings of lanky cowboys, sway-backed horses and busty ornery-looking country women. Sometimes the cowboys and their mounts both wore the same perverse toothy grins and I remember that when my little brother was about four years old, Grandpa Vern tried to make him a gift of one of these drawings, but was turned down. "I don't want that horsey, Grandpa," my little brother said cowering from the pencil drawing. "He will bite me!"

Hard as a tenant farmer's life was, however, you never heard complaints from any of them. Not my grandparents, or my mother, or her siblings. That was just the way country life was and it had a lot of joyous and beautiful aspects to it. There was a communion with nature and the weather, a love of the countryside. Things my mother inherited from hers, both of them gentle intelligent women who had a special love for all things natural.

As for Grandpa Vern, he was a force of nature all his own. He was an active man with the strength of an ox, the obstinacy of a mule, the grit and endurance of a marathon runner and the ever-seething violence of a tornado. As it affected him personally, he ignored the weather. As it affected the farm, he worked around it. He neither loved nor hated it. He accepted and reacted to it, period, an attitude quite different from that of Myrt and Reba Mae, who were practically instinctive meteorologists. They could forecast what was coming just by watching the animals, the plants, the sky and the trees, by smelling the air, by the feel of the wind.

The knowledge that Grandpa Vern had of all things practical was astonishing. He was a capable if not particularly sophisticated carpenter (he built the first bungalow he and my grandmother lived in on his father's farm, for instance), an able mechanic and a consummate farmer. He knew a great deal about animal husbandry and was an excellent judge of horse flesh.

Vern on the tractor he built.

For much of the early part of his farming days, the work was done with draft horses and hand plows that he followed on foot, a job that called for the man to have almost as much strength as the beast that preceded him. But when it became hard to compete with the first tractors in terms of time and crop yield, he boned up on farm equipment mechanics and built his own tractor. He was nothing if not inventive and a living example of the adage that claimed necessity was the mother of invention.

I don't know what the circumstances were surrounding their moving to town—perhaps the belated effects of the Great Depression, perhaps a desire to see their children properly educated—but sometime between the time my mother and her older brother Eugene started and finished high school, the family moved to the big barn of a house on Van Horn Street, where my grandparents would live until their deaths. Grandpa Vern landed a job on a State Highway Department crew building, improving and repairing Ohio roads. Eventually, however, perhaps through the influence of the Herbst family, he ended up working at and later being in charge of Greenlawn Cemetery.

Cemetery work was hard in those days. The six-foot-deep graves were dug by hand and people were inconsiderate enough to die in all kinds of weather—from the blistering heat of Ohio summers to the Arctic chill of northern winters and from the torrential rains and mud of spring to the golden days of autumn. But the only recognition of the seasons that my grandfather ever demonstrated were changes of headgear and outerwear—a broad-brimmed hat for rain and sun, a wide-billed canvas cap for mid-seasons and a lined cap with ear-flaps for the winter, accompanied by various and sundry combinations of woolen jackets, rain slickers, flannel or tropical twill work shirts and khaki or woolen work pants, always with the same heavy work shoes, sometimes covered with buckle-up, shin-high rubber snow-boots for the most inclement weather.

Vernon Leroy Weber, cemetery boss

So for me, the cemetery was always a place of solace, where, on any given day, I could find my much-admired grandfather hard at work. It was a comfort to know he was there. There was even an underlying feeling that since he was in charge of burying the dead, his mission was so important that perhaps he himself might never die.

When I reached an age at which I had certain autonomy (perhaps ten years old), I was allowed to ride my bicycle pretty much any place in town. So, I would sometimes ride all the way out to the city limits where the cemetery was located and hang out for a while. It wasn't as if you could make a nuisance of yourself. My grandfather was stern and had little patience with children. But as long as I just watched and didn't get into the way, I think he found it flattering that I should want to spend time out there with him. Besides, whenever he got tired of my being under foot, he would simply say, "You best get on outa here now," and I knew better than to ask why.

When he was in the mood, however, he taught me a great deal. By the time I was twelve, I knew the common name of every tree and plant in the cemetery. He wouldn't give me master classes or anything, but if he saw me looking at some particular species, he might say something like, "Know what that is, Dan'el?" And If I shook my head, he would say, "That there's a star gum," or "that'n over there's a dogwood," or "that there's a juniper pine."

But this kind of intermittent communion wasn't limited to the cemetery, although Greenlawn was, nevertheless, where most adventures began. From the time I was old enough to walk all day without becoming a burden, he started taking me with him when he went hunting. Not always, but whenever the spirit moved him. He first tested me on hikes he took each fall with my older sister, Darla, so that she could add new species to her leaf collection.

Greenlawn, dominated by the Herbst monument

Leaf collecting probably sounds like a strange pastime to children of today who might have trouble understanding why anyone would go to the trouble of collecting and leaves when there's sure to be someplace that you can see gorgeous full-color photos of them on the Internet with all of the data that you could ever hope to find right there for the asking. But back then, computers were hideous business machines that only scientists understood and that shot out information on unintelligible punch cards, and our mindset was so different that we never would have been able to comprehend why anybody would settle for a picture of a leaf when you could hold the real thing in your hand, press it with a steam iron and waxed paper to preserve it and paste it into a scrapbook. Especially when you had your very own grandfather to tell you what it was and to which tree it belonged, which fruit the trees bore and roughly the age of the specimen you were looking at.

Anyway, the first hike we took, the three of together, was when I was still quite small, perhaps eight or so, and I was only permitted to go because I bawled and hollered and carried on until, at her wits' end, my mother told my sister that if she were going with Grandpa she would have to take me too or she wouldn’t be allowed to go.

Clearly, Darla wasn't at all happy with the arrangement, so she did little or nothing to help me keep up. On the contrary, she was probably secretly hoping I would simply get lost. She had been on a couple of such expeditions before with our grandfather and knew that he was not some kindly old granddad who would make allowances for the weak or faint of heart. You kept pace or became buzzard bait.

I was, then, shocked at the apparent irresponsibility and lack of understanding of both of them, when Grandpa parked his Hudson at the back of the cemetery, negotiated a seven-strand barbed wire fence, dropped lithely into a cornfield on the other side and said over his shoulder, "Ready, Dard?" To which my sister said yes, gleefully scrambled over the fence and took off after him as he made his way down a corn row with incredible haste, while I was still meticulously seeking to get over the fence without scratching myself on its threatening barbs, since, my mother had warned me, if I were to hurt myself on rusty barbed wire, I was going to have to have a tetanus shot.

Grandpa Vern was very close to six feet tall, slim as a birch sapling and with unusually long legs that, sure-footed as he was, allowed him to cover rough terrain at astonishing speeds. He would move down the corn rows with a kind of violent grace, elbowing the shoulder-high plants out of his way and snapping off or trampling down any that had the audacity to try and block his path. And my naturally strong and agile sister managed to dog him so closely that she was often in danger of stepping on his heels—a very real danger, since if you were to step on Grandpa Vern's heels, you could pretty much expect to get elbowed in the nose. I lagged behind at a trot in mortal fear of losing sight of them. And even after we broke out of the dense, stifling corn-row hell into open pasture and woodlots, the pattern remained pretty much the same. My day ended up being mostly about keeping up.

But I must have done a pretty good job of it because my reward was that many times after that I was invited to go along, without my sister, when the mission was a more important one than mere leaf-collecting— namely, hunting for pheasant and rabbit. When I was still small, he put my inexpert awkwardness to good use, utilizing my dubious talents as a surrogate hunting dog by sending me off to the left and right of him to inadvertently crash around in the thicket and scare the game over his way. But I eventually became enough of a woodsman to no longer be of any use to him in these endeavors and was allowed to join the hunt proper.

The rules were simple enough: Don't be runnin' you mouth all the damn time; it scares the game. When you get to a fence, get the hell over the goddamn thing some time t'day. When you do, break down and unload your shotgun first. Make sure your muzzle is always pointed away for the other hunters. And don't ever get in front of another hunter, no matter what. Any and all of these were offenses for which you could expect an immediate response, which usually consisted of a rap on the skull with Grandpa's hard, boney knuckles, or a good swift kick in the seat of the pants—one that was pretty much sound enough to make your nose bleed.

This is not to say that, when pressed, Vern could not be innovative with his punishments. Once when I had been dilly-dallying around, in seeking to negotiate a particularly rickety barbed wire fence for what, to him, must have seemed an inordinate amount of time, he shimmied and twisted a rotting fencepost out of the ground and with a movement not unlike shaking crumbs from a large tablecloth, undulated the entire fence in such a way that I was heaved on my head and shoulders onto the ground on the other side, as if thrown from a bucking bronco. And with that he picked up his shotgun, reloaded it and moved off in search of game. I knew it was useless—even dangerous—to protest, so I simply picked myself up, dusted myself off and moved off quickly behind him. After that I was a miraculously agile fence-climber.

Anyway, the point is, Greenlawn was, until I was old enough to have lost some loved ones, always a place where new adventures began. Depending on your religious views, that might be true for just about everyone who goes there. But then, who knows?

When my grandfather himself died in 1976 at the age of 79, and when my grandmother followed him two years later at about the same age, they were laid to rest in the shadow of a monument to the very man whose farms they had kept for him in the early half of their lives.

The back of the chair

The Herbst monument is a veritable landmark at Greenlawn. It is a huge steeple-topped monstrosity, made of deep-grey polished granite. The base is a heavy rectangular monolith perhaps four or five feet wide on each side with the name HERBST inscribe on it in huge block letter. Just above that, there is a larger-than-life armchair—an empty armchair, as if to signify that its owner has taken leave—surrounded by four classic Greco-Roman columns. Continuing above the chair is the steeple, a pyramidal spire that ends in a kind of amphora. The whole thing rises some fifteen feet or more into the air.

I've talked to my cousins, and they’d heard the same urban legend as I did. It’s the now-traditional story about how, when our parents were in high school, as a prank, some youngsters grabbed a boy they had always liked to bully and, somehow, managed to haul him up to the armchair, where they hogtied him fast to it. Nobody heard the boy's shouts for help. When workers found him the next morning, after he had spent the entire night bound to that tomb in the cemetery, his hair, legend has it, had turned white from fear and he had gone mad.

The ironic thing about our family plot—where my grandparents, and now, also, my own parents and brother have all been laid to rest— isn't just that it lies in the shadow of that ostentatious monument, but also that Mr. Herbst's empty armchair is oriented so that it gives its back to my grandfather and his family. Fitting, it would seem, if, in all likelihood, wholly accidental.

 

Tour of Homes 4 – Back in Town

When I went back to Wapakoneta alone, it welcomed me with the same icy February breath that I recalled from my childhood. The weatherman had been gabbing about “lake effect” snow for several days in Cleveland but there was already more snow on the ground down here than up by Lake Erie and it was drifting in winds gusting to 35 miles an hour. The temperature was minus 10ºF – cold enough – but the wind chill made it feel like twenty below. I didn’t mind, though. It was Wapak winter, just as I remembered it. The Midwestern version of northern exposure.

• Caption: A freezing day in downtown Wapak.
  

I checked back in at the Comfort Inn on the edge of town by I-75, where the wind whistled through the large, open, black-topped parking area unimpeded. This was now my second stay at the place in as many weeks and I had gotten to know Rodney, the manager. He was a good guy, knew I was a native son, knew I spent a lot of time in my room writing and translating, and wanted me to be comfortable.

“If I’m ever not here when you check in, just tell whoever’s on that I said to upgrade you to a suite,” he said.

The suites were nice, with a luxurious queen-size bed, a fridge, a microwave and a coffeemaker, a full-size, comfortable desk to work at, a couch and coffee-table, a dresser, a lazy-boy easy chair with reading lamp and a breakfast table and two chairs. It was much more inviting than a generic motel room and made me feel more at home and not so strange about staying in a motel in my own town. In fact, it almost gave me the feeling of living there again.

• Caption: When I checked in this time the manager gave me a suite.

I didn’t arrive until late afternoon and that evening I decided to walk to dinner instead of taking the car. The wind had died down and it didn’t seem all that cold when I first stepped out of the motel lobby. But living in South America, even in often chilly Patagonia, I had forgotten just how cold the northern Arctic cold is. By the time I had walked a few hundred yards across the parking lot and up Bellefontaine St. – originally having thought I might walk all the way to downtown and back – I found I was frozen stiff, my fingers, toes and ears numb, and I decided to forego the exercise and duck into El Azteca.

Owned and operated by the Aguirre brothers, El Azteca is a fortuitous anomaly in a very white, very traditional Ohio town. A real, authentic, genuine Mexican restaurant, with excellent quality cuisine. Anyway, I had their scrumptious beef fajita with pico de gallo – which is about the same thing we in Argentina would call salsa criolla (diced onion, tomato, peppers and spices) – and washed it down with a couple of Coronas after a José Cuervo aperitif. My belly full, and after the freezing walk in the Arctic breeze back to the motel, I decided to call it a night.

The next morning was still below zero, but calm as could be and sunny with the very low humidity that accompanies such days. It felt almost pleasant out – as long as you were careful not to stay out so long that you got frostbitten. I walked over to the Waffle House across the way from the motel and had a real, as opposed to ‘continental’, breakfast – eggs, bacon, potatoes, toast and abundant hot black coffee. Then I went back to the motel parking lot, managed to get my frozen car door open, scraped the ice off the windows and – not unconcerned that, since I’d rented the car in Florida, the radiator fluid might be watered down – headed across town to the cemetery.

There, working in a spacious new pole-barn at the back, I found Sam Ruck, the caretaker. I told him my sister and I were the ones who had put in the call to him from Cleveland and then I launched into a bit of our family history, including the fact that our grandfather had been the Greenlawn Cemetery superintendent for a quarter-century, until he retired in the early 1970s. This got us into a rather lengthy conversation.

“I’ll bet they did most of the work by hand back then,” Sam said, shaking his head sympathetically.

“Oh yeah, and Grandpa Vern was really particular about how the graves got dug. Said he never did manage to hire a hillbilly that could dig a straight-sided grave and he always ended up doing a lot of the work himself.”

“Must’ve been tough work in this kind of weather,” Sam allowed.

“Yeah, when he got older, Grandpa finally let them get him a Holland compressor and jackhammer to bust up the frozen surface in the dead of winter. But once they got under the frost line, they went back to spades. He prided himself on it.”

An amiable guy, Sam smiled.

“I see you have a tractor with a backhoe.” I was looking over his shoulder at an aging John Deere.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the machine, “but this one we use for other things now. Did you see the big one out back,” he chuckled. “That one’s kind of an exaggeration, I guess, but I asked for it and they got it for me. With that one, I can have a grave dug in half an hour. Beats the heck out of shovelin’ it by hand.”

Sam confessed he had never really wanted the cemetery job. “I farm,” he said, “but I used to lend a hand around here when the other fellow was in charge. Then he got sick and couldn’t work anymore and they asked me to take over. I said just till they found somebody else, but they just never seemed to get around to finding anybody else,” he laughed. “Anyway, they finally said, ‘Well, why don’t you just stay?’ And here I am.”

I asked if he was originally from Wapak and he said he was. I said, “I don’t know why I don’t remember you. You must be a lot younger than I am.” He looked it, a sturdy, clear-eyed, medium-sized man with a pleasant, youthful face and a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair visible from under his cap.

“Oh I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sixty-five.”

I was really surprise and said, “Boy, the outdoor life surely agrees with you, Sam. I’m six years younger than you, but I guess the mileage is catching up with me!”

When we talked about the marker for Jim, he said, “you sure you want a stake? A slab is cheaper and not so likely to get damaged or knocked over or anything”. So he took me out behind the shed and showed me what he was talking about. A smooth concrete slab of about 28 inches by about 20 inches that could be in-set to ground level so it could be mown over without suffering any damage.

I said I would talk it over with my sister and asked if anybody still prepared stones and markers in Wapak. “There used to be a fellow called Schneider…” I said.

“Oh, he’s still around,” Sam interrupted.

“Really?! I thought for sure he’d be retired or dead by now.”

“Oh, no! I didn’t mean him. Yeah, he passed away. No, I mean his son, Dave.” Sam smiled.

“I notice the shop’s not there anymore where it was by Leland Stroh’s place.”

“No, Dave works out of his place out there by I-75, where his dad had the farm.”

“Oh, I thought that place was gone too! Isn’t that about where the new Super-Wal-Mart is?”

“No, no, the Schneider place is still there. Just hidden back behind all the fast-food joints. You go out to where the Lucky Steer is and right after it there’s an entrance. You just turn in there and follow the driveway around till you get to the house and Dave’s got his shop out back.”

So I drove out to see the stone-cutter.

Dave Schneider was a friendly if no-nonsense type of guy. After only minimal small talk, he got right down to business. We talked about the markers Darla and I had been looking at, the ideas we had been kicking around, what Sam had suggested, and so on. Dave listened, looking at me with frank attentiveness and then said, “You don’t want a stake. It’s not like when your granddad was the caretaker out there. Most of the boys that do the mowing are kids and they use the tractor. Whatever’s in the way, they’ll run right over it, and you don’t even wanna see what that stake’ll look like after it gets hit with the mower.”

“So you’re saying a footstone…”

“Well, no. You’ve already got a stone out there. You and your sister the only survivors?”

I nodded.

“Then that stone of your mom and dad’s is yours. You own it, and one whole side of it’s blank. Since your brother isn’t actually buried there, I’d use that, just put the inscription on the blank side of that tombstone.”

So after calling Darla and talking it over with her, that’s what we decided to do. We also talked over what we wanted it to say. It wouldn’t be traditional, but it would be heartfelt. I went back to Dave and told him to go ahead. How long?

Said Dave: “They say it’s gonna warm up some and maybe thaw a little, so I’ll get out there tonight, probably, while the ground’s still hard, and get that stone out of there while I can still get the truck in without tearing everything up. Have it done and back in place by the weekend.” Did he want me to pay him up front? He held up his hand in a ‘slow-down-there-buddy’ kind of gesture and almost seemed offended by the question. “I trust ya,” he said, narrowing his eyes and tightening his lips.

He was respectful about it, but I could tell that Dave also had his doubts about the inscription. “Lot o’ words to get on there,” he said, doubtfully.

“Well, we don’t need the birth and death dates,” I suggested.

His face twisted into a scowl of disapproval. “Now, see, you’re gonna want those dates on there. That’s history. It’s not for you, it’s for the future, for your descendants and so on. Cemeteries are historical.” So I gave in on the dates. Dave also balked a bit at putting an exclamation point on a tombstone, but this time I held my ground. It was an inside message. It was Kabbalah. I wasn’t budging on that one. So he shrugged, sighed and worked up a mock-up on his computer.

In the meantime, there was finally time for my Tour of Homes. This was a private, singularly intimate ceremony that I had promised myself. I would go around to the four homes I recalled living in, take a photo of each of them and help myself remember some events from each of those stages of my life.

I returned to my sister’s place in Cleveland and enjoyed those days with her while Dave Schneider was doing the work we had contracted. Darla and I enjoyed each other’s company and just hanging out together for a while. Always at the back of my mind was “the tour”, recalling each house in turn, remembering the things that had happened in each of them and what they had meant to me. Even taking the pictures would be exciting. Would I knock on the door and ask their current owners if they minded? Or would I simply “steal” a snapshot, which to me seemed somehow akin to the belief of some primitive tribes about the camera stealing their souls.

• Caption: Hanging out. A winter walk in Rocky River Park near my sister's home in Cleveland.
  

However, it was on this that I finally decided. I decided I didn’t really care who lived in the houses now. It was like what Einstein said about all times existing simultaneously. How in order to cope with forever, we humans moved through time as if we were in a boat on a river. The river was time that flowed endlessly, but we were always in our boats on a bend in the river and couldn’t see ahead to the future or behind to the past, although both were there and existing simultaneously. Those homes existed for me now as they had back then, when they were part of my life. Whoever lived in them now couldn’t change the fact that I had lived there before them and that my memories were a sort of chain of DNA that connected one place to another and that would live on as long as I did, even if those structures were sold a thousand times over or torn down and their scraps hauled away. In my mind, in my soul, those homes were still mine and always would be, because they formed pieces of my past and who I was.
Time was running out. I would soon have to be back in Miami for the flight back to my other life in Argentina. I began to get anxious again, to get the itch.

Then Dave Schneider called. The stone was done and back in place. I could stop by whenever I liked. And so, a couple of days later, I hugged Darla good-bye and headed back to Wapakoneta one more time. The weather was warmer. The snow was still on the ground, but like Dave had said, it had started to thaw a little. The first thing I did was drive out to Greenlawn to see his work. He had done a good job, made it all fit. Now the inscription on the back of our parents’ tombstone read:

NEWLAND

Son

Dennis James

Nov. 14, 1954

Dec. 12, 2005

LOVING SON, LOYAL FRIEND, BELOVED BROTHER

“I’M HERE!”

Tour of Homes 3 – Home away from Home

• Caption: L-R - Jim, Darla and Dan, in the '90s at the Newland family home on Kelly Drive.
  

As shopping sprees go, I’ve had better. My sister Darla and I were in the market for some type of monument to mark our younger brother Jim’s passing.

We had been talking about this ever since his sudden death three years before. At the time we had both been in a kind of prolonged state of shock. Our brother – whose name was Dennis James and who was known to us as Jim and to his friends as Dennis – had been one of those guys who are always looking for a good time. He loved life, took his play-time as seriously as his work and liked to party. He looked young for his age. In his mid-forties he could easily have passed for late thirties. When he was unattached after his second divorce, if we were out having a drink together and he struck up a conversation with the barmaid, waitress or some other young woman in the places we frequented, I would always interrupt when he started to introduce me and say I was his “uncle”. I didn’t want to cramp the guy’s style, since I knew I looked fifteen – rather than five – years his senior.

He was always dressed to the nines no matter what the occasion was and he was slender, athletically built and clean-cut. He was a long-distance runner – rather than a jogger – much of his life and although he was a light smoker and enjoyed his beer and Jack Daniels, he couldn’t have looked healthier if he had tried.

• Caption: Fun guy. Above: A door glass decoration reminds Jim of a "mic" and he spontaneously breaks into song. Below 'bumper-car' fun with friends.
  
  
  He had a whole philosophy about the balance of things. I recall once when I was visiting him in St. Louis, where he was regional manager for Camelot Music, he and I had gone for an afternoon jog together and when his then-wife got home she found us both, still in our sullied sweats, sitting at the kitchen table with a six-pack of cold Miller long-necks on the table-top between us and each with a cold one in his fist.

• Caption: Time out! Jim gets in a little fishing.
  

“What, you guys go run and then do this?” she said, obviously peevish, pointing at the beers.

Jim grinned, held up his well-chilled brew and said, “Nope, we go run soooo we can do this. Here, have one yourself and chill out.”

Truth be told, my life of tough deadlines, night work, and a tendency toward overweight, as well as toward often self-abusive habits surely must have made most of the people who knew us think that I would die long before him. I was certainly a better candidate for sudden death than he was and my life as a newsman had not infrequently put me in situations where I could easily have died of something other than natural causes. In fact, when I called Pastor Rick Bell at our parents’ church to tell him that Jim had passed away and that he would have wanted his funeral to be in the Methodist Church in our home town and would have wanted him, Rick, to officiate, the preacher got confused, was convinced that he was talking to Jim and that it was I who had died. I realized this when he said, “Where did it happen, here or in Argentina?” Jim had never been out of the States in his life, except when he was sixteen and visited me for ten days in Germany, with our parents, while I was on a tour of duty with the US Army.

So Darla and I were not only in a profound state of grief, but also of shock. All of the grisly details and befuddling bureaucracy did, however, help us come to grips with reality, by chucking us headlong into it. Jim had been living for about a year in the Ocala, Florida condo that had belonged to our late parents. I had spoken to him three days – apparently – before he died and he had seemed fine, if depressed because of some things that were going on is his personal life. Five days after that, Darla received a call from the Marion Country Sheriff’s Detectives saying that Jim had been found dead in the apartment and that they were investigating. Jim had listed Darla, in some papers they found, as next of kin.

Darla flew down from Cleveland and I flew up from Argentina immediately. We checked into the nearby Silver Springs Holiday Inn and for the next ten days, the hotel became our home and the Denny’s attached to it, our dining room and office. Since Jim had died alone and his body had been in the condo a couple of days before it was discovered by a friend and neighbor, the police had to treat the place as a potential crime scene.

The friend had been calling him because he had missed a meeting of the condo board of which they were both members. After several calls she got a little worried, but jokingly – because it seemed unthinkable enough to be funny – said in her last message, “Dennis, this is the third or fourth time I’ve called. If you don’t answer this message, you had better be dead.”

The body had to be turned over to the Medical Examiner. A positive ID had to be done using dental records. A complete autopsy had to be performed. The deceased’s next of kin had to be questioned separately by detectives. The apartment had to be gone over for evidence, etc.

When it was my turn to talk to the detective in charge, he asked me a lot of typical detective questions: Did my brother have any enemies? Did he live alone? Did he have any known illnesses? Was he an alcoholic? Did he use drugs? And so on and so forth. Then he said: “Mr. Newland, we have to investigate, but I’ve seen a lot of corpses in my life and bodies tell you things. For me, your brother’s was a case of sudden death. I don’t think he even had time to react. I think he just had a heart attack or stroke, died instantly and fell over to the left on his bed the way we found him.” Then he added: “The Medical Examiner’s got the corpse. We’ve positively ID-ed him by his dental records. You and you sister have a right to see him but I’m suggesting you don’t.”

So after the detectives and the crime scene cleanup team were done with the condo, Darla and I started the grueling task of going through Jim’s personal effects and papers and getting a lawyer to handle his estate, while we waited around for the coroner to be done with our brother’s body and to hand it over to us. This all happened starting on December 14, and no amount of pestering could make the Florida Medical Examiner hurry things up. But finally, in a dead heat with the Christmas holiday, the body was turned over to the funeral home we had contracted and was cremated.

Christmas Eve found us still slipping and sliding through the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky on an icy, snowy I-75. I was driving. We were in the Taurus station wagon that had been our parents’ last vehicle and that Jim had taken with him when he moved to Florida. The scent of his Marlboros and pricey cologne still lingered there and was somehow comforting to me as I steered the big car through the chilly darkness.

Our baggage and some family things we had taken from the condo were in the back. In the hidden lockbox under the floor in the rear end compartment of the wagon were two small, sturdy cardboard boxes. The largest one contained a metal urn with our kid brother’s ashes in it. The smallest one contained the ashes of Jim’s beloved cat, Stinky, custody of whom he had gotten when he divorced his second wife. This box, with the cat’s name on the lid, we had found on a little pedestal beside Jim’s bed. The cat had died about the same time as our father had in our family home in Ohio, next to the bed Jim was sleeping in while taking care of our parents. It didn’t seem right, somehow, for Stinky’s ashes not to travel back to Ohio with his owner’s.

• Caption: Jim and Stinky playing. Inseparable.
  

So, we ended up holding Jim’s funeral on New Year’s Eve Day. I recall quipping that a party animal like he was would have found it amusing to have all of his old buddies gathered in church for his funeral on an ultimate party-day like December 31^st. I also told a story. It went like this:

When Jim was about four or five, we lived half a block from a soft ice-cream shop. It changed hands a few times, but I think back then it was a Tasty Freeze. Anyway, Jim was always little for his age. Darla recalled how he weighed about the same for like three years straight when he was a little boy. He was so small that when Mom gave him a quarter to go to the ice-cream place, he couldn’t see over the lip of the little self-service counter. So he would reach up with his coin and, tap-tap-tap, peck on the Formica counter-top and call out, “Heeeeey! I’m heeeeere!”

The girls who worked at the place thought the little tow-headed kid was about the cutest thing they’d ever seen, so they would hide out in the back for a while, spying on him while, increasingly frustrated at the lack of service, Jim would tap harder and harder and shout louder and louder, “Heeeeey! I’m heeeeere!” until they finally waited on him.

I said that, in a way, Jim had been doing that all his life. He was always saying, “Hey watch this, big guy,” whenever he did something daring or clever or just plain funny. He enjoyed great physical grace and poise and was something of a show-off, but a really likable one, a natural comic, the kind of guy that was popular and that everybody wanted to hang out with. But also the kind that it was hard to be truly intimate with, a fiercely private person who covered up his deepest feelings with a truckload of wise-assed attitude and carefully learned savoir faire.

• Caption: Jim in the Ocala National Forest in 2001.
  
  

Shortly before he died, on one of my visits back home, he said: “Hey big guy, I don’t know how you’ll take this, but you know what I’ve always wanted?”

“No what?”

“For you to write something about me.”

“Like what?”

“Like, you know, how you feel about me.”

“Well, hell, y’dumb ass, you know how I feel about you. I love ya, y’dipshit.”

“Yeah, no, but I mean…seriously, how you see me, y’know?”

He never mentioned it again, but I know that this was important to him, for people to like him and see him in a positive light and it was devastating to him when they let him down and didn’t seem as committed to him as he was to them.

So after the funeral service, when both his ex-wife – who had left him because she “needed her own space” – and the woman whom he had most recently lived with (and who had left him six months earlier for similarly vague reasons) came with tears in their eyes to ask what we were going to do with the ashes, it was with a kind of cruel, ugly glee that I told them it was a family affair and private.

And it was. Later, on that chilly, windy, last day of the year, Darla, her two boys and I spread the ashes at an undisclosed location, in a ceremony of our own devising, and to which only we were privy. I was only sorry that our cousin, Don, had already left after the funeral and that I hadn’t thought quickly enough to invite him along, since he had been a second big brother to Jim when I wasn’t around and I knew he deserved to be part of this farewell.

Anyway, now, three years later, we had decided that we needed to give Jim some kind of marker, some minimal “shrine” to which friends and family (and ex-wives and ex-girlfriends) could go and remember him and pay their respects. The “where” wasn’t really a matter of great debate. Jim had told me that often after both of our parents died, he had gone out to Greenlawn Cemetery to “visit” them.

“You’re gonna think I’m crazy,” he said, “but I’ll get to thinking about things and I’ll go out there, and, y’know what I do? I sit down on top of their headstone, I light a cigarette and I talk to them.”

“What do you say?” I asked.

“I just sit there and tell them all of the things I always loved about them, and everything I hated. And when I’m done, I feel a lot better. People go by and look at me like I’m nuts, sometimes, but I really, really, feel a helluva lot better afterward.”

So like I say, it wasn’t a question of “where”, but “what”.

Darla and I had taken a week’s vacation together in Florida. It was the first time in six years that I hadn’t come back to the States to mourn the death of a loved one and we were celebrating. We met in the Miami Airport – I on a flight from Buenos Aires, she on one from Cleveland – rented a car and headed across the State via Alligator Alley (where I-75 runs east to west through the Everglades wilderness) to the Gulf. We paid a pleasant visit to Sanibel and Captiva Islands, then visited our Aunt Marilyn – our mother’s younger sister who has always been like an older sister to the two of us – and her husband, Virgil, who were vacationing in northern Florida, and then headed north for Ohio.

It was in central Kentucky that I started getting “the itch”. I’m talking about my hometown itch, that feeling that grabs me when I start seeing countryside I recognize, when the air starts smelling like home, when the farms start looking like the ones surrounding our town. And suddenly, I was in that trance I get into when Wapakoneta is within my reach. Like an old fire-horse, I start heading for the stationhouse and the devil himself can’t stop me.

It was late and cold and raining torrentially and threatening to turn to snow. We were both hungry and tired. But I just kept on driving. Once we crossed over from Kentucky across the bridge over the Ohio River into Cincinnati, I was on automatic pilot, headed for Wapakoneta an hour and a half to the north.

Darla was quiet. She could tell something was up. My behavior begged an explanation. I said: “I thought maybe we could get to Wapak tonight and tomorrow morning see if we can find that stone-cutter.”

“Which stone-cutter’s that?”

“You know, the one that used to be there next to Leland Stroh’s house. The older guy’s dead, I think, but maybe his family took over the business.”

We checked in at the motel where I had stayed when Jim died. It was, back then, what I had fondly referred to as the “Worst Western”, but was now under new management and had a new logo as a Comfort Inn and had improved greatly. We had something to eat at the Bob Evans that stood where the Chalet Inn once had. The Chalet had never been, to my mind, a particularly good restaurant but it had been where people held their fanciest events. It had been there that we had held a surprise party for our mother on her sixtieth birthday, and the venue for Mom and Dad’s golden anniversary with all of their old friends, many of whom we saw there for the last time. It was funny, I thought, that I had never had any special liking for the Chalet. It had always been, I felt, overpriced and overrated as restaurants went, but now I missed it, seeing the Bob Evans chain store there in its place.

We turned in right away after supper, but I couldn’t get to sleep until quite late, despite having driven all day. I read, took notes for something I was writing, checked e-mail on my laptop and looked out the window of my room at the rain mixed with snow falling steadily through the halos of orange light from the sodium streetlamps in the parking lot, while listening to the big 18-wheelers swoosh by on I-75 hauling freight north to south from Detroit to Miami.

By the next morning, the rain had stopped, an icy north wind had kicked up and everything was fast drying off and turning cold. Darla was unimpressed and would rather have been still in Florida, I think. But for me the north wind was the native breath of home and the chilly blue sky with ragged snow clouds still scudding across it cheered me. After partaking of the motel’s “continental breakfast with original sausage gravy” (which I gave a miss, though I did have a do-it-yourself waffle), we were off on what I figured Darla would consider my ‘wild goose chase’. And she would have been right. I had no idea what I was doing. It was mostly an excuse to drive around town and “see the sights” while pretending to be looking for something. I was a newsman, after all, and hadn’t even bothered to look in a local phone book to see if Wapak Monuments, the place I was hunting for, still existed.

It didn’t, as it turned out, at least not in the little shop next to the Stroh residence on the far end of the main street out near the County Fairgrounds and not far from Greenlawn.

“So we’re done here, right?” Darla said. Which was Big Sister for, “Let’s quit dicking around here and head for Cleveland.” Which is what we did. By mid-morning the “city tour” was done and we were back on I-75 heading for the Ohio Turnpike.

The idea of waiting three years to put a marker in Greenlawn for Jim was that it was something Darla and I wanted to do together. So now, in Cleveland, her adopted hometown, we set off on our lugubrious shopping spree. The places we visited dealt in what the late and inimitable Wapak undertaker Charlie Siferd would have referred to as “underground novelties”. The first of them was a veritable “underground supermarket” that displayed every imaginable kind of cross, star, header, footer, angel, inscription, stone, urn, vase, plaque, vault, statue, statuette, mantle and monument imaginable. But not what we had decided we wanted: namely a stake, with a plaque, something in bronze that we could just drive into the ground in our family plot with an inscription in memory of our brother.

The woman who waited on us couldn’t seemed to think “outside the box”, as it were, and looked at us with such suspicion that you would have thought we had asked for an illegal firearm or a half-kilo of blow. She said flatly that no such thing existed. So we decided to go elsewhere.

At the other place, the “showroom” was a much more modest one. A quarter the size of the first one, discreetly arrayed with a dozen samples of tombstones and adornments and nothing else. But the woman in charge was a real go-getter. She took us into her cramped little office at the back of the shop and started going through catalogs of photographs until she came up with what we were looking for. A solid bronze stake and plaque.

But then she said: “Have you checked with the cemetery to see if they’ll allow these.”

“Uh, no,” I said. “Never thought of that. Since it’s something you just stick into the ground.”

“Oh, well they’re real particular about these things. I mean like mowing issues, or how deep it goes into the ground, or if the person named is actually buried there. Stuff like that.” So she generously called information, got the number for Greenlawn Cemetery in Wapakoneta and called up.

“Who am I speaking to? Sam Ruck?” She raised her eyebrows and made a questioning gesture with her free hand in our direction like asking if we knew the guy. I shook my head no. So she proceeded to ask Mr. Ruck a long series of technical questions. After hanging up, she said, “He said you might want to stop out and talk to him personally, but it doesn’t sound like a problem.”

But she wasn’t very convinced about the stake idea. It was too easy to knock over or uproot and it was unnecessarily expensive, she thought – twice as dear as a nice footstone. Why didn’t we consider a ground-level stone, something the maintenance workers could mow right over without damaging it, and so on? She showed us samples in different materials and had started to convince us, but then came the clincher. All of their stones were done in Pennsylvania and even at the most urgent, delivery would take ten or fifteen days, maybe longer depending on backlog.

So we were back to square one. This was not going to be something we could do together before I left and if I left before it was done, Darla was going to have to find a way to get a 200-pound stone from Cleveland to Wapakoneta and get it installed by herself.

Plan B: No problem, I’d go back to Wapak and find somebody local to do the job. And while I was there, I was thinking to myself, I would do something I had been thinking about ever since my parents and brother had died: A Tour of Homes.

In Look Homeward Angel, Thomas Wolfe said, “…you can’t go home again.” But maybe he got it wrong. Maybe some people never really leave, no matter how far away they go.

To be continued.