GREG—A PORTRAIT

 From the time we were just little kids, and throughout my childhood and youth, my cousin Greg was also one of my closest friends—one of my two best friends, in fact, along with our classmate Mark Gallimore. And throughout our pre-teen and teen years, the three of us were inseparable, since we were mutual best friends as well.

When we were still very young, I could always count on getting into trouble, and having fun doing it, whenever I was with Greg. Like his father before him, Greg was a natural athlete. But he was a completely different body type than his dad. They looked nothing alike.

Greg Newland

My Uncle Red (a.k.a., Bob Newland), Greg’s dad and my father’s older brother, was a Henry (his mother’s family) through and through—pink skinned, red-haired and prone to struggling with weight throughout his life, despite having been a Navy frogman and a truly dangerous Golden Gloves boxer in his youth. He remained, however, agile and ever quick on his feet, despite the extra pounds he carried around from late middle-age onward. Greg, on the other hand, took after his mother’s side, more specifically after his Grandma Adams, whose family was said to have Native American blood.

Whether they did or not, Greg looked the part. He was black-haired and copper-skinned, with very white teeth and a certain angle to his dark brown eyes. The two sides of our families seldom if ever got together. You met with the Newlands or you met with the in-laws. That was how it worked. But I one time asked my mother, Reba Mae, if I could take Greg along to a summer reunion of her maternal family, the Cavinders. Greg and I, who were the same age, must have been eight or nine at the time. She said she didn’t see why not so off we went to Grand Lake Saint Marys for a multitudinous family picnic. At one point, Reba Mae’s mother, my Grandma Myrt, came over and whispered confidentially to my mother, “Reba Mae, who’s that little Korean boy playing with Danny?”

My mother looked at her quizzically and said, “Korean boy?” Then she glanced over at Greg and me and, turning to Grandma, she laughed out loud and said, “That’s Bob Newland’s oldest boy, Greg, and he’s not Korean, Mom, he just looks that way!”

Taken out of perspective, he was naturally built like a figurine of the perfect male body, with broad shoulders, a torso cut in a V to the waist, and with very narrow hips. But seen in context with the other kids his age, he was diminutive—a pint-sized scale model of the “average boy”. He was jockey-size but much better proportioned. By high school, he looked like an aspiring featherweight, and he had the swagger to go with it.

He was a problem student who was always in trouble and tended to give serious teachers ulcers and grey hair. He also had a laid-back, drawling tone and cadence and a wise guy attitude that put teachers on edge, but the things he said kept his classmates in stitches. Like the time an eager young English teacher told us how important outside reading was and that we would have to do at least two book reports during the term in order to pass.

From behind me, where Greg always sat, alphabetically proper, in classes we had together unless one or both of us had been moved for disciplinary reasons, I heard, “Book reports!?”

“Greg Newland, did you have a question?” the teacher asked. “If so, please raise your hand.”

Slouched as coolly as he could possibly slouch in his seat, Greg raised a desultory hand, and again, in exactly the same tone of voice, said, “Book reports!?”

“Do you have something against book reports, Greg?” the teacher asked.

“Well, no...not as such,” Greg drawled, “But...man! I think the last book I read all the way through was The Three Billy Goats Gruff in the second grade!” Everybody but the teacher found this uproariously funny, so he’d succeeded in his goal of disrupting the class.

Just as different as he and I were in looks—I couldn’t have been more Teutonic with my light complexion, blue eyes and big bones—so too were we different in character. I was a worrier who was always weighing risks and looking before I leaped. Greg was just the opposite—adventuresome, bold and courageous, a kid who never backed down from a challenge or a dare. A boy who was curious about life, about others, about how the world and human nature worked. But at the same time, unlike most of the other “winners” in our midst, I never once saw him make fun of or bully kids who were less brave, less coordinated or less adventurous than he was. In fact, he seemed to have a soft spot for the underdog, as if he realized that his innate abilities were the luck of the draw and that a lot of other kids had to train a lot harder and overcome a lot more inhibitions to accomplish a lot less than what came naturally to him.

Nor did Greg ever boast about his clear athletic prowess. His grace, speed and ability spoke for themselves and he knew it. In sand-lot games, he was usually one of the first picked for one team or another, while I was one of the last. But he always made sure that whatever team he was on, I was on it too.

When we were both still little—maybe five since I think we were both still pre-K that summer—I accompanied my mother one sunny morning to the pretty little grey-shingled house where Greg’s family still lived then on Washington Street in our home town of Wapakoneta. Reba Mae had to talk to my Aunt Betty about something—can’t remember what. But it was an unusual visit. For Greg and me it was as if a children’s holiday had just been declared. We immediately were out the door to play in the yard while our mothers sat at the kitchen table inside talking and drinking coffee.

In the yard of that little house on Washington Street there was an enormous hardwood. I can’t remember if it was a sugar-maple or an oak, but it dwarfed the house. While we were hanging out under it, Greg started talking about how cool it would be to build a tree fort in it, like ones we’d seen in the kid shows we watched on TV.

“Where would we put it?” I wanted to know.

“There are some real good branches up high,” he told me. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

And with that, he scampered up into the first big crotch in the spreading branches of that tree as if it were nothing. I followed as best I could, clumsily scraping knees, ankles and palms on the rough bark and, with a hand from him, managed to struggle onto that perch with him. But as soon as I’d made it, he moved on to higher goals, shinnying up another large branch that grew up and out in a different direction. Not wanting to be a wuss, I started to shinny up after him, but halfway up, the ground started looking so far below us that I froze, in a wave of vertigo. Higher up on that branch, Greg grappled his way out onto another one that reached out in a new direction from it.

“Come on up,” he said. But he could tell by the petrified look on my face that I wasn’t going to. “Just come up to this one today,” he coaxed. “It’s straight, you can sit on it.” And with that he sat up as comfortably on it as if he were on the couch in his living room, ankles crossed, swinging his feet as if to a happy tune. “I’ll show you from here where I think the fort should be. Come on up.”

And then he continued to climb until he got to the intersection of two fairly large branches that he figured would make a pretty good foundation for a fort. I painstakingly inched my way up the branch I was on to the one where he had told me to sit. It took a monumental effort to overcome my vertigo enough to sit out there, but I finally did. However, I had no notion of how I was ever going to get back down.

From where he was, Greg said, “See, isn’t this a great place?” I could barely nod and was thinking he’d play hell ever getting me to build anything, not even a birdhouse, let alone a tree-house, out there where he was.

“Isn’t it great up here?” he cried. “You can see everything from up here! And with that, he started moving higher, and higher, and higher still. Like a little spider monkey, he was swinging hand over hand from one branch to another. Testing, testing, testing to see how much higher he could go before the top branches would no longer hold his slight weight.

It was about then that, from far below, I heard my mother gasp and say, “Oh my god, Betty! Look where they are!”

And then my Aunt Betty, voice cracking, was screaming, “Gregory Bruce! You come down from there right now!”

And Reba Mae was like, “For godsake don’t scare them, Betty!”

But Greg wasn’t one to scare easily. If he was going to be punished, it would be after he got down. So he was taking his time, moving from branch to branch like a beautiful little simian and thoroughly enjoying the view while he still could.

Me, I was frozen stiff with fear out on the first big limb where he’d left me, looking down at the pale, panicked faces of my mother and aunt. When Greg, one of the most willful five-year-olds ever, got good and ready, he picked his way swiftly down, swinging from one branch to another, to the desperate gasps of the two women on the ground. When he got to where I was out on the limb, he deftly sidestepped me and then put his hand on my shoulder and gently said, “Come on Danny, I’ll help you.” And with that he guided me safely down out of the tree to the ground.

As we grew older and more independent, we often played at each other’s houses, rode our bicycles all over town, or hung out down by the Auglaize River that runs right through the middle of Wapakoneta. It was what Greg called “messing around”. And that was his standing invitation even when we were young men. He’d call me up and say, “So, ya wanna mess around?” I came to understand that this simple phrase had a deep meaning: take a drive, get a bite to eat, have some coffee, go on a double date, get a drink, shoot some pool, build a house, rob a bank, take a trip to the ends of the earth. There was only one motive behind any of it, and that was to get together, because we were brothers at heart, and the only thing that was important was getting to see each other.  

I avoided organized sports like the plague after a season of Pee Wee League with a perpetually hung-over frustrated “baseball star” coach who was a lot more interested in having a winning team than in teaching little kids to love the game. But with Greg I learned to play sand-lot sports of all kinds.

His backyard was our stadium. (Uncle Red and Aunt Betty believed that yards were meant to be played in and were never worried about the grass getting torn up). We played baseball and softball and pitch-and-catch and touch or tackle football with our brothers, and mutual cousins, and with whomever else dropped by from the neighborhood. We even played badminton when Greg’s parents bought him and his brother Mark and sister Dianne a set for Christmas one year.

Aunt Betty was our den mother for Cub Scouts, and Uncle Bob taught us all to box. I learned how to hit with all of my body weight. Greg was greased-lightning fast and could keep his left jab perpetually in your face until he saw an opening to clip you on the button with his right and put you down. His brother Mark, whom we called “Mugsy”, was a lot younger than us, but from the outset was just plain dangerous on all levels—big, fast and a very hard hitter. As we all grew older, I remember Greg saying, “I’ve never backed down from a fight, but the only guy who it’d scare the shit out of me to tangle with is Mugsy. That boy’s like my dad. He’s lethal.”

For Greg, on the other hand, fighting was all about the challenge, never about a grudge, and that’s what made him so good at it. Like all good boxers, he maintained grace under fire. He was quick and agile enough never to lead with his face, and he was skilled enough that despite his size, he could usually end a fight quickly and, unlike me, without resorting to fighting dirty. He was too small to do something as stupid as saying, “Give me your best shot,” and allowing his opponent to hit him first. And he had the most disarming tactic to ensure that when a fight was inevitable, the first punch would be his.

When we were together, I always knew that we’d passed the point of no return when Greg would grin at the leader of whatever merry band was trying to pick a fight with us and say something like, “Well, I guess I’m just gonna have to smash my nose all over your fist.” It was in the split-second that the guy was off-guard thinking, “What’d this punk just say?” that his fate was sealed. Because he was usually on the ground before he could take his first swing. And more often than not, the fights Greg got into were because he was defending someone else. He hated bullies. He saw them for the cowards they were. And even if he didn’t know the victim, he wasn’t one to say it was none of his business and walk on by. If they wanted to pick a fight with somebody, he was their huckleberry.  

But Greg was an even better lover than he was a fighter. In fact, Greg was all about love and kindness. But also about sexual discovery. He and I spent hours on end talking about girls even before we had any real idea of what we were talking about. Even then, Greg was a far better, more well-applied investigator than I was and he was the one who availed me of my first salient data about the birds and the bees. Some of the details were dicey, but he was in the ballpark from the time we were eleven. It’s just that when he told me who put what where and what they did with it, I balked. Especially when he told me that all mothers and fathers did it. That, I told him, wasn’t something my mother would ever do—though I wasn’t terribly sure about Whitie.

Undeterred, Greg kept right on probing the subject. Girls liked him. They liked me too, but it wasn’t the same. Me they liked like a friend-friend, a surrogate brother. Greg they took as an intimate friend, a confidant. And so he was able to find out what they were curious about too. They compared notes with him about what they’d heard and how much of it they believed. He was able to confirm some things his little girlfriends had heard about boys and they were only too glad to reciprocate with confirmation of some really incredible things he’d heard about girls. Later, he would share all of this ground-breaking knowledge with his nerdier friends, a group in which I was not only included, but starred. It would have been interesting if someone had taken pictures of these quasi-teen conferences in which Greg sat cross-legged like a guru, holding forth, with the rest of us in a semi-circle around him, mouths agape.

When we were in junior high, another kid whose father had stacks of some really explicit porno material stored in the attic of their garage, pilfered a few and traded them to Greg for a first-baseman’s mitt. The photos, a few of which he generously ripped out and shared with me and a couple more friends, documented some of the stories that he’d told us and that we had been hard put to believe. Now the proof was there in black and white and vivid color and had become indisputable fact.

It wasn’t long before Greg’s mutual investigations with girls had gone from share-your-secrets-and-I’ll-share-mine to show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine. And then one thing led to another and before we’d reached high school, Greg was the only one of us with the hands-on experience, so to speak, to be an impartial arbitrator on all matters of debate about sex. There was no sex education back when I was in school. But we didn’t need it. We had Greg.

Greg in high school

In high school Greg discovered something that interested him even more than girls and sports—well...than sports, anyway. Namely, business. Up to then, he had found just about everything they had ever tried to teach us superfluous and impractical. But there was a new course of study called Distributive Education, which taught basic economic and business skills and even placed students in on-the-job training as part of the course. Greg suddenly perked up. This was what he wanted to do: make money and, more importantly, find out how to keep it.

He enjoyed the Distributive Education training, and through it, he landed, first, an internship and, later, a regular job with the G.C. Murphy’s Five and Ten chain. Retail appealed to his minimalist simplicity. He had always thought that there was nothing complex about life. Happiness was in your own backyard. Nothing to get all het up about. Just take it as it comes. Retail, especially five-and-dime retail, was about selling little things everybody could afford and still making a tidy profit. That was something he thought was well worth learning about.

And it was working for him. While we were still in high school, he’d bought himself a nice old Mercury Monterrey to drive around, and later on he got himself a Honda Superhawk bike that we all envied him.  He had always had a deep interest in music. And when I joined the school band, he joined too and took up the clarinet. But the band director’s Toscanini-esque temper tantrums, shouting and abuse were too much for Greg’s gentle soul and he quit during the first year of junior high. But now he bought himself a good box-guitar and started teaching himself the blues. And it wasn’t long before he had mastered some impressive riffs.

Greg in Mr. Carmean's
Distributive Education class

Before we graduated from high school, Greg had become assistant manager at the Wapakoneta branch of the Murphy’s chain. And shortly after graduation, the manager told Greg that he would be sending him to headquarters in Pennsylvania for management training. Murphy’s was expanding at the time and would be needing able store managers like Greg was sure to be.

That’s where my cousin and best friend Greg’s life was heading when I left on my first trip to South America and then came back and went to the Ohio State University for a year, before joining the Army for three years. At some point in the first year that I was away, Greg got an induction notice from Uncle Sam, before he could realize his ambitions in retail. By the time I was enrolled at OSU, he had been drafted and was doing his basic training. He went from there to advanced combat training and then was part of a special group of draftees who joined regulars for jungle survival training in Panama. The Vietnam War was at its peak at the time, and Greg was about to be dropped into the thick of it, as one of the “boy soldiers” (average age nineteen) who fought and sometimes died in the most traumatizing and unpopular war in US history.

I was in the Army when Greg came home from his tour in Nam. I recall seeing him when I was home in Wapakoneta on leave. He and our friend Mark Gallimore came over. Like me, Mark was glad to have Greg back in one piece, unlike our friend and classmate Mike Oen, who had been killed in an exchange of small arms fire and came home in a body bag. I had attended his funeral, in uniform, when I first got out of Basic Training.

Mark and I tried to take up where the three of us had left off. We drank beer and talked about our friends and our town and our families. We joked and tried to force laughter on Greg. We tried to talk about anything but Nam. And that seemed okay with Greg.

In response to our effusive behavior, Greg wore a tight-lipped, enigmatic grin. But his dark eyes held no humor. They were deep, black, anxious and old beyond his years. He was tense and agitated. Any loud sound made him jump, and it seemed he might hop up from where he sat chain-smoking and run out of the house at any time.

Downtown Wapakoneta in the 1960s
Murphy's 5&10 is just visible on the left

He wasn’t quite twenty-one yet. In the State of Ohio of those times, he wasn’t old enough to marry without parental consent, to vote or to drink hard liquor. But he was already a highly-tested war veteran, who had witnessed enough pain, suffering, senseless violence and mass destruction to last him a lifetime—and indeed it did.

I didn’t see Greg for a long time after that. The Army sent me to Los Angeles for a year and then to Europe for more than a year after that. After I was discharged, my wife—whom I’d married while in service—and I struggled to adapt to civilian life for six months in the recession that took shape toward the end of the Vietnam Era, and then decided to move to her country (Argentina) “for a year”. It wasn’t until five years later that I returned to Ohio for the first time.

By then, Greg had rented an old farmhouse out in the country near town and was living with the woman who would turn out to be the love of his life, Mary Jo Knoch. Beautiful, creative, positive and full of energy she gave Greg something to live for and motivated him in the most non-invasive of ways.

Greg no longer seemed to have any more retail ambitions. He wore his thinning hair long and tied it back in a ponytail, and like many Vietnam vets, he sported a variety of facial hair styles, all matching his quasi-Asian looks. His greatest ambition was to find peace, and in that, Mary Jo, who was a country girl, as well as a gifted photographer and artist, perfectly adapted to the quiet lifestyle he sought. She was his solace.

Back from Nam

His entrepreneurial spirit, however, led him into some business ventures. For years he organized and promoted rock recitals. Later on he did what seemed to many totally out of character, studying for and acing the complicated licensing exam to become a financial advisor. As such, he worked as an independent agent for Prudential Investments and did quite well, mainly thanks to his simple, down-to-earth style that small town and rural investors identified with.

But the older he got, the more he drew into himself and into that dark cloud that had followed him back from the war. He had his bone-deep battle scars where nobody could see them. He never lost his wit, however. He was laconic and often morose, but if you were lucky enough to be paying attention when he said something, it was usually either profound or knee-slappingly funny.

Once when I was back from Argentina for a visit, I called Mary Jo, who by this time had also become one of my very best friends, to ask if it would be okay to go out that evening to the farm near the village of Fryburg, Ohio, where they had lived for decades, and where Mary Jo still lives today. I said I’d bring pizza and she told me to get it at the Beer and Wine Carryout in Wapak.

“They have great pizza!” she told me.

So I went to the carryout on the east side of Wapakoneta, bought a huge pizza with numerous toppings and then drove out to Fryburg five miles away. When I drove back their quarter-mile lane, I saw that our friend Mark Gallimore’s car was there as well. We were all old friends, no formalities. It was always as if we were taking up where we’d just left off, no matter how many years had passed in between.

Greg was sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette and drinking beer from a can with a neoprene sleeve on it while watching one of his favorite cartoon shows on TV. Once the hellos were said he got mildly irritated that we went on talking when Wiley Coyote was about to lay another ingenious trap for The Roadrunner.

Greg on the right, with my wife Virginia, 
Mary Jo and me at my parents' 50th
wedding anniversary party in 1992.

Over our chitchat, he said to me, in that drawl of his that lately sounded for all the world just like Sam Elliott’s,  “Hey man, go get yourself a beer and come watch cartoons. This is a good one!”

“I’ll bring you one,” Mark said and Mary Jo said something like, “Heaven forbid we interrupt cartoon night!”

So we all gathered around Greg and the TV and started having at our beer and pizza. After taking the first bite of mine, I said, “Hey Mary Jo, you were right! This is some kind of great pizza.”

“Isn’t it?” she said looking around for agreement from Mark, who said, “It’s all right, I guess,” and Greg who ignored her entirely.

“All right?” she said. “I think it’s great pizza. It may just be the best pizza I’ve ever eaten.” His eye on The Roadrunner, Greg took a long drag on his cigarette, swigged his beer and in his best Sam Elliott voice said, “Yep, sure enough. People come from all over the world just to eat Beer and Wine Carryout Pizza.”

Another time, Greg’s brother Mark and I had set up a family get-together at The Old Barn Out Back, a smorgasbord-type country eatery located in the industrial city of Lima, fifteen miles north of Wapakoneta. We had, of course, invited Greg and Mary Jo but she said she was going to be in Columbus visiting her daughter, and she wasn’t at all sure that Greg would venture out of his lair in Fryburg if she wasn’t there to drag him off the couch and out to the car, but she would tell him.

When I arrived at The Old Barn, Mark had everything organized. He had reserved one of the private rooms off the main dining room and people from both my mother and father’s sides of the family plus a few friends were already there. When I asked Mark if Greg had come, he said, “Well, he said he was coming, but you know Greg.”

I decided to go have a look around. It didn’t take long to spot Greg’s Mahatma-skinny frame and thin ponytail from the back as he gazed first into one side room and then into another, searching for a familiar face.

“Greg! Hey Greg!” I shouted across the dining area. He turned, grinned, shrugged and started over. I went over to meet him halfway and when I got to him, spontaneously gave him a semi-bear-hug.

“Geezus, man,” he said, “thanks, you cracked my back. I needed that.”

And while I was still laughing from that, he glanced over his shoulder and back at me and, cocking his head at the side rooms across the way, he said, “Ya know, I joined another party over there for a while.”

Not often, but now and again, veteran to veteran, Greg would sometimes mention something about Nam to me. Just a sentence or two. An image. An impression. And I think the only reason he did was because I had once told him how guilty I felt that I’d spent my foreign tour in the Army with the NATO forces in Europe, while he and so many of our friends were humping through the boonies in Nam.

“Consider yourself lucky and don’t regret it,” he had said.  “I sure don’t hold it against you.”

Once when we were having a breakfast beer together at a Wapakoneta tavern, out of the blue he said, “Ya know, I think about Nam every night just before I fall asleep. I remember how I used to dig a grave-sized trench and lay my blankets out next to it so I could just roll in if shit started flying.”

But he never talked in detail about the fighting. He did, however, talk about the people and about the countryside. He said he found it the most beautiful place on earth. Scenery in the mountains and jungle like you wouldn’t believe. And the people, some of the nicest, sweetest and most beautiful people he had ever known. And therein lay his everlasting pain, guilt and sorrow, for those good people who had known only war and dying for decades on end.

My cousin Mark once said that “One Greg went to Vietnam and another Greg came home.” Today, he would surely have been diagnosed with PTSD. But no one wanted to hear about the Vietnam War back then. It was a war no one wanted to remember and its veterans were an uncomfortable reminder of it. Greg was one of the Vietnam vets who fell through the cracks but had the good fortune to fall into the arms of Mary Jo, his wife, his lover, his friend and companion for forty-four years. It was in those arms that he passed away last week at age seventy-one, taking her love with him and leaving his dark cloud behind.

                                                                                                                  

FALL...I PREFER AUTUMN

This time of the year does something to me. As I may have mentioned recently in this space, it’s autumn in Patagonia. It’s a season that makes me singularly restless. It’s not just the existential symbolism—which at this age becomes rather poignant, the fall before the winter of the seasons and of life. I really try not to pay much attention to that. There’s nothing I can do about it and, frankly, I’m a lot freer now than I ever was at thirty or forty.

At thirty or forty I used to pretend I didn’t give a crap. It was an attitude I copped, though a more conscientious professional than I was would have been hard to find. But when things got tough at work, for instance, I’d say, “Hey, I was looking for a job when I found this one,” and I was rebellious enough to say it to the face of whatever boss or client I happened to have at the time. But back then, things ate at me anyway and filled me with stress and nerves and neuroses.

Well, at this stage of the game, when another several decades have passed and any day you get up feeling fit and healthy is a gift, I really don’t give a crap anymore, and nothing is more important to me than whatever I’ve undertaken voluntarily and for as long as it strikes my fancy, whether I’m getting paid for it or not. Nor will I let anything stand in the way of the activity of my choosing at any given moment, and that, for me, is a first. One I’m still trying to get used to. Maybe that’s what people mean when under “occupation” on their social media profiles they put “happily retired”. Maybe they mean that free-wheeling feeling of “not giving a crap” what the rest of the world is doing because their time is now their own. But I wouldn’t know, because I’m not retired. It’s a word I don’t like. It sounds too much like “withdrawn”, and I haven’t withdrawn from anything.

On the contrary, I’m often more engaged now than ever before, more passionate about what I’m doing, more certain that the only thing that is important is doing the things I do to the very best of my ability, because if not, I’ll just be wasting my precious time. I’m not retired, or even semi-retired. And just as I don’t care for the word “retired”—synonyms include former, past, ex, pensioned off, disengaged, elderly, etc.—I prefer the word “autumn” to “fall” (synonyms, drop, decline, descend, diminish, decrease, dwindle, dive, etc.), although in this last case I do use them interchangeably. The simple fact of the matter is that I’m just making better choices of the activities that I take on, and for the first time in my life, the ones I don’t get paid for are just as important to me as those that I do get paid for. Quite often more important in fact.

Take this blog for instance. It is of paramount importance to me, because it’s where I’m visited by my “ideal readers”. I’m talking about people who aren’t reading me because my by-line happens to appear in this magazine or that newspaper, but who are actually coming here specifically to read me! I’ve worked for publications where I was writing for many thousands of readers. And I won’t lie. It was important to have my work in periodicals that were household names for many English-speakers in different parts of the world. But I find myself much more enamored of the hundreds and often thousands of people who take the trouble to read the very personal pieces I write here each month. And even more so of those who share them with others, via the social media or by other means so that my reader base continues to grow.

But even this precious blog sometimes gets sidelined when some other task or factor is temporarily obsessing me. In this particular case, a piece should have come out on the twenty-second and here it is three days later and I’m still here writing. It’ll say April 22^nd on the dateline when I publish it, but that will be a white lie. Though I started writing it in time to publish by deadline, another matter monopolized my attention: the weather.

Early morning in the forest gathering wood. 

Mark Twain is often paraphrased as saying something to the effect that “everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Quote nigglers will tell you that the quip was originally made in print by Charles Dudley Warner, a friend and fellow reporter—Twain did indeed say that “a journalist is a reporter out of a job”—whom Twain may later have quoted in one of his public talks, but never in any of his writing or interviews. But whoever said it knew what they were talking about. People do talk a lot about the weather, especially people from my native Ohio and from my adopted Patagonia, probably because weather—especially all-pervasive weather—in those two places is a predominate force to be reckoned with.  

Now, worry is something else that I’m slowly but surely rooting out. You know, like when you can’t sleep at night and your old habits of worrying yourself sick about things return and you always seem to forget that this has happened over and over again over the years and that things have seldom turned out to be nearly as dire as you expected them to be, so all that worrying was of no use whatsoever and only managed to encroach on and spoil your present moments. After all is said and done, you may realize someday, as I have of late, worry begins like worthless, and if that’s just a coincidence, it shouldn’t be, because those two terms should always be used in tandem.

Off for a morning hike

Practical thought about a situation is worthwhile. Because you might just find a solution. But worrying when a problem is insoluble, or the future unfathomable—as it nearly always is—does nothing more than waste your precious now-time and fill you with anxiety when you could instead be enjoying the present moment. Whatever it is, it’ll be what it’ll be, que será será, as Doris Day sang, and there’s nothing much you can do about it except face it the best you can when the time comes.    

April here is like October in Ohio or Michigan. And like in those places that witnessed my childhood and teen years, the approach of winter is a very big deal. People talk about “how bad it’s going to be” long before it arrives. They worry about being isolated, about cold temperatures, flu and months of gloom. They wonder if winter storms will knock the electricity out and for how long. Will pipes freeze and burst and cut their water supply. Will pipeline heads freeze and interrupt their gas supply. They so often use the word “dread” when speaking in fall of the coming winter. So stop worrying about it and do something about it! Insulate. Make sure you have redundant services. Buy a gasoline generator. Move to a warmer climate. But don’t just sit there and bitch!

Here in Patagonia those precautions can be crucial depending on the year, and the severity and length of the winter. In 2017 and 2018, I had some health issues that limited how much of my own rural labor I could do. In those years, the answer was “none”. I had to hire it all out. And in the following two, I did a lot of my own physical work but still not close to all of it. In those years I worried about having enough firewood to get us through a sometimes five-month Patagonian winter. And the rural workers whom I paid to help me out were always busy with other fair weather projects before they started gathering wood, just in the nick of time, before the rainy season began. So for four years there has been just enough—about eight cords minimum—but not one stick too many before spring.

This year I’m feeling pretty hale and hearty again and promised myself that I wouldn’t be caught out. I started gathering firewood at the end of last year, in the first days of Patagonian summer when it was first dry enough, and haven’t stopped since. By the time the day laborers got around to asking me how much wood I’d need for them to come up with this year, I had already gathered, cut, stacked and covered well over the eight cord minimum. I was going to let my pride take over and tell them that this year the ol’ man wasn’t going to need a thing from them. That he’d done it all himself, and had enjoyed every minute of it.

Last evening light - photo_Daniel Pacheco

But the autumn weather has been spectacular this year with little rain, drying breezes, clear skies and a plethora of windfall timber on the ground. On top of everything I’d gathered myself, I decided to ask the two groups of workers to help me gather another three cords.

So on the twenty-second, when I should have been posting this blog, from first light in the morning until last light in the evening, I was cutting, loading, hauling, unloading and stacking the last three cords. The day’s work I did was the single most intensive day of manual labor that I’ve put in over the last twenty years. It felt wonderful and like a very good day. Night was falling as I covered the last stack with thick black plastic sheeting. I was exhausted and slept fitfully and restlessly from overdoing it. But I had a little smile on my face when, in the middle of the night I heard rain on the galvanized metal roof of our cabin. I had all the firewood in that we would need until next summer and it was dry, under cover and protected from the elements. Nothing could have felt more satisfying.

So for the last couple of days I’ve been writing this blog. It has been the most important task in the world to me for the time it has taken. Today is a stunningly beautiful blue and gold autumn day in this corner of Patagonia. So it also seemed of capital importance for me to get in a four kilometer hike along the mountain road this morning. It was indeed a great day for it. Crisp, clean, bright and wonderful. That hike and posting this blog are the two most important things I’ll do in my life today. Who knows? Maybe ever. And maybe that’s how every day should feel.

 

THE TELEVISION BLUES

I’m having TV withdrawal. TV news withdrawal more than anything else. My pandemic isolation has caused me to go cold turkey, as if I’d been forcibly placed in tele-addiction rehab.

We have DirecTV. It’s satellite television. It’s all we can get out here where we live. I have to say, it pretty much sucks. We have fifty blue million movie channels, all of which seem to have been showing the same dozen movies for the past decade—which they also appear to share with each other (like, “It’s Wednesday, okay, you take Fast and Furious 8 and 9 and I’ll take Fifty First Dates and The Wedding Singer, while to me it all seems like Groundhog Day...forever).

News channels are a paltry selection of local national channels, a couple of Chilean news stations, CNN en Español, the CNN International signal in English and the BBC. We used to have Fox News as well, which gave me something to vent and cuss at when I wasn’t watching CNN or “the Beeb”. But they eventually took it off the schedule, because who in Latin America could possibly give a flying crap about the ultra-American super-nationalist drivel that spews from that signal twenty-four/seven? For jingoistic lies and propaganda, it was far more interesting for South American audiences to tune to the Venezuelan state channel and listen to a load of BS about how good venezolanos were having it under the Bolivarian regime of Nicolás Maduro. What I wouldn’t give for the addition of CBS, ABC and MSNBC!

I know I can watch the news, and, more often, read the news on the Internet. And I do. But I have to admit that I’m a child (I’m talking inner child here) of the TV era. The first generation to have television, that phenomenon of the late forties and early fifties that couldn’t have seemed more like magic that brought the world into our homes. So breakfast or supper without my daily news fix is traumatic, despite having the world at my fingertips via the digital phenomenon of the current age.  

DirecTV comes with a few dozen sports channels that are the big draw for most guys, but which I can’t recall ever having paused on for more than five minutes unless it was for a boxing match—I really hate how the art of boxing is being pushed into a backseat by cage-fighting, which I find appalling. There are a similar number of children’s channels—which are pretty much extraneous noise to two childless and grandchildless senior citizens— housewife mediums (or is it media?), and a slew of reality shows involving hillbilly Gypsies, backwater crocodile tamers, enormously obese brides, treasure hunters, gold-diggers, pawn brokers, little people, tattoo artists, and XL couples who are alone, naked and afraid (and censored which kind of defeats the purpose) out in the wild—I mean if you don’t count the camera crew, guides, handlers and the helicopters flying constantly overhead. It’s all kind of a grotesque sideshow.

Very occasionally there will be a good old movie—not “old” like 1990 or 2000, which I refer to as “yesterday”, but old-old, black and white old—or a classic Western. Although for some reason, despite the thousands of motion pictures cranked out in the golden age of Hollywood, DirecTV can’t seem to find more than five or six (always the same five or six) to show. I mean, The Tin Star and Last Train from Gun Hill might be venerable classics of the Western genre (although I’d take the original Magnificent Seven—Yul and Steve, not Denzel and Cris—over them any day), but it starts getting hard to stay awake for them when you’ve seen them thirty times or so...in a month.

And then there’s that other problem with satellite TV: If it rains hard, you can’t see it—sometimes it rains hard for twenty days straight in Patagonia. If it snows, you can’t see it. If there are solar storms, you can’t see it. If the dish can’t be pointed in the direction of the nearest repeater antenna, you can’t see it. If you don’t have a direct line of sight to the sky from the dish, you can’t see it. If a weed grows an inch too high in front of the dish, you can’t see it. If somebody happens to spit out the window on an otherwise clear summer day and the spittle lands on the dish, you can’t see it.

Well, this is problematic in a place like ours where, despite being perched on a promontory, the house is surrounded by dense forest and tall crags. But when we first got DirecTV installed, we lucked out, because the direction of the repeater was northwest of our deck and the deck looked out over a lagoon that connected with a major lake, at the northwest end of which was the hill on which the satellite repeater antenna was erected. So it was all open sky between here and there. The deck is high and back then, the vegetation around it was low—a few beech saplings, a couple of tiny wild apple trees that we’d transplanted, a few waist-high Douglas firs that the birds had seeded with pine nuts from a nearby property that had exotic pine groves planted back in the nineteen-forties, a few scrub bushes. Nothing tall enough to interfere with our view all the way down to the lagoon, or with the open line of sight between the dish and the repeater several miles away.

But since then, the saplings have grown into formidable, towering hardwoods, the apple trees have flourished, and the little pines have spread like an evergreen tidal wave over the lower part of our lot to form a dark, brushy, deep green thicket, rising toward the sky and blocking any view of the wetland below except from the second storey of our cabin. 

At first the dish was bolted directly to the deck and reception was perfect. My wife and I had neither one ever had anything like cable or satellite TV and we were fascinated by the variety of available channels. More fascinating still were the music channels included in the nine-hundreds. Flip through the channels for a cavalcade of genres and styles: pop, rock ‘n’ roll, blues, soul, reggae, tropical, salsa, standards, big band swing, jazz, modern jazz, jazz vocals, easy listening, new age, classical, opera, hard rock, show tunes, ballads, Music of the Seventies/Eighties/Nineties, etc., etc. So we hooked up the sound through our stereo for better quality. It took us a while to realize that in this case too, it was always the same line-up, so that you could set your watch by Beethoven’s Ninth or by the Boogie-woogie Bugle Boy from Company B.

But then the trees in front of the deck started growing. After a few years, the beech saplings were even in height with the handrail. The apple trees started bearing fruit and shot up higher every year. A native broom grew high and strong on the edge of the property next door—which I would eventually acquire—and gracefully hung its big head full of lavender-blue blossoms over the fence. The process was gradual, of course, and we failed to connect the dots with our also gradually failing signal. When the interruptions to our viewing became ever more frequent, I called the DirecTV technical department and they sent a guy out to have a look.

“You’ve got way too much foliage out there under the deck. No way a clear signal can get through all that. You’re going to have to cut some of that.”

“Oooor...” I said, “alternatively, we could find another place to put the dish.”

He looked at me as if he had a choice suggestion for where I could put it. But then he shrugged, went out to his truck and came back with a toolbox and extension ladder. After looking around, considering angles, checking this and checking that, he said, “How about high up here on the end of the house?” I gave him a thumbs up, and suddenly, we had a nice clear signal again.

As a parting shot, however, he couldn’t help returning to his original solution. “I’m warning you, though,” he said, “it won’t be long before you don’t have a signal again, if you don’t do something about that.” He jerked his head disdainfully in the direction of the stunningly verdant forest beyond the deck, as if he were referring to something shameful.

“You mean like cutting it all down so I can see the same ten movies for the next ten years?”

He pursed his lips, looked down his nose at me and said, “I mean, if you want to keep having TV, this is going to have to be thinned out.”

“Yes, well, I doubt that’s going to happen, so, who knows? Maybe when the time comes, we’ll find another solution.”

All was right with the world again. I had New Day and/or BBC World News with breakfast in the morning, Anderson Cooper 360 with supper and, if I was lucky, there was a movie I hadn’t seen more than a dozen times to doze through before going up to my bed and reading a while until I went to sleep. On luckier nights still, I might even get a documentary about the Civil Rights Era or about some interesting historical personality or event. Those were too precious for them to run again—once or twice, and you’d missed your chance to see it, buddy. But you could see White Chicks at just about any hour of the day or night—for ever and ever, amen.

Anyway, in this ages-long Year of the Plague, the DirecTV technician’s proclamation of bad augury has come to pass. Just as it has been a year in which COVID in all of its variants has thrived, so too has the forest, and it has taken full advantage of a long rainy season and a warm, sunny dry season to grow with unusual impetus.

Long story short, our DirecTV signal has grown weaker and weaker as the foliage has grown higher and higher. Which, if it weren’t for the pandemic, wouldn’t have been a problem. I would merely have called another reluctant technician out to move the dish higher still—onto the gable of the roof if necessary—in order to capture a clear piece of sky.

But in the Year of the Plague there are more important things to worry about than whether I can see my TV or not. After making very real sacrifices in order to mitigate the risk of catching the virus and, perhaps, dying—my wife refraining from traveling to Buenos Aires to see her aging, unwell sister or her younger brother and nephews in more than a year, and I not having been able to travel either to the US to see friends and family there, or to Buenos Aires to visit with colleagues and friends since the end of 2018—having someone completely unknown to us come to the house after, perhaps, going maskless, partying and howling at the moon nightly, to say nothing of visiting multiple homes daily, merely to fix our TV, has seemed to us a ridiculous risk to take.

So eventually it got so we would lose the signal and to get it back I’d have to reboot the decoder and then painstakingly click through every channel until one could catch the ghost of a signal filtering through the tree branches. And then, even more cautiously, go up or down gradually until I got to the channel I wanted. It was an exhausting process. And, in the end, it got to the place where changing channels was just too risky, so I left it on the news channel twenty-four/seven and simply turned off the image and sound when we weren’t watching it. 

Then one day last week, the screen went black, then flashed like lightning, and died. I realized this wasn’t a question of satellite signal. The flat screen, which wasn’t more than six years old, was kaput and refused to be revived. In the troubleshooting manual, it said, “Try not to leave your screen tuned constantly to the same channel, since this can damage the device.” Shit! Who knew?

I thought, “Well good. Maybe this is a good chance to break myself of the TV habit. But how do you kick a habit that started when you were three and is now going on six and a half decades?” My wife likes a little TV in the evening but finds my morning appointment with the news and my running, often profane, commentary a major intrusion in the quiet of the early morning hours. And since she is also an absolutely voracious reader, she couldn’t really care less whether the TV works or not. If I think about it, I don’t need it at all. I do all of my research online. TV is just a little mind candy I suck on between work and sleep. But just you take that candy away from a Baby Boomer! The withdrawal is instantaneous.

All of which got me to thinking about where my TV habit began. In the Jurassic Age of Television, when forty-four million Americans made sure that they were home at the prime time hour for I Love Lucy, or when similar millions tuned in to CBS to hear Walter Cronkite read the news. No twenty-four-hour news cycle. No video recorders. Just the appointed hour when you were there in front of the set to hear Cronkite, or you didn’t have the slightest idea what was happening. He was the trusted name in news, and he “anchored” millions to their sets...forever. But that’s a story for another day...

Well, a few days into withdrawal, my wife brought home a new forty-inch Hitachi flat screen that she bought at the supermarket when she went to do the grocery shopping. We’re “on the list” to get vaccinated, but so far...chirp, chirp, crickets. First thing I’ll do though, once I get a couple of shots of Sputnik 5 in my arm, I’ll get the DirecTV guy out here and get my breakfast date with the news back. In the meantime, we’ve got the eleven seasons of Cheers, the five seasons of Taxi and the nine seasons of The King of Queens on DVD. Hopefully that’ll be enough methadone to get me through until some real TV comes along.