TELL ME YOUR DREAMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How'd you sleep?” Loretta asks.

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

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

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

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

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

“How'd you sleep?”

“I don't know. Had dreams.”

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

“But they were really interesting.”

“Maybe, to the party concerned.”

“But not to anyone else?”

“Exactly!”

And there the conversation would have ended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleasant dreams!

 

REBA MAE DAYS

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

Reba Mae at sixty-nine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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.

 

STAGE FOUR — A ROOM OF MY OWN

I’ve been taking stock the last few weeks. I just realized that was the exact term: taking stock.

It all started when I decided to have the outside of the house painted and repaired, and to paint and repair the inside myself. This time, I also decided to start painting the interior with what I loosely call “my studio”—a tiny room of approximately eight feet by six feet, where I spend a very large portion of my life.

Over the three decades that we’ve lived here, my studio has most often been pushed to the end of the line on the To Do List. So, by the time I decided it was time to give it priority, it had become a sort of third world corner of the house, so to speak, a slummy place where way too many things with no particular utility were stored, where the bookcases were littered with all sorts of things that had no business being there, where two large storage tubs and a lidded wicker basket were heavy-laden with god-knew-what, because nobody (meaning me) had sorted through them for at least twenty years, and where every manner of obsolete hard and software lurked in the corners, just in case some use might eventually be found for them. 

A doorway but no door

Be that as it may, although I suffer from classic claustrophobia—they once tried to roll me into a coffin-like tunnel and run an MRI on me, but I raised such holy hell that they had to pull me out and send me to another facility that had a different sort of scanner—I’ve never thought of my studio as cramped. For one thing, it has a doorway, but no door, so I’m in contact with the rest of the house. My wife coming and going, our six cats chasing each other up and down the stairs (oh, by the way, the studio is upstairs), the sounds and smells of meals cooking, the chug and whir of the washing machine, or the sound of music or the TV when either happens to be on. And then too, practically one entire end of the room (all six feet of it) is windows: two, a fixed pane and a hinged window that opens in. They look onto the great outdoors—our unruly broom sedge and towering centenarian beeches, as well as the wooded side of a tall crag. As I work I only have to turn my head to look out and see the green and sun of summer, the blooming colors of spring, the golden tinges of autumn and the glistening rain and blankets of snow in winter.

The view

Then too, since it’s the place where I do my writing, it’s also a creative space, a “room of my own” as Virginia Woolf might have said. And as such, it seems way bigger. Boundless, in fact. It’s where all my thoughts and memories come to the fore. Never mind that I put it on like a proverbial overcoat when I sit down at my desk. It’s as big as my mind is willing to make it.

But for many years, it was also the “salt mine” I went to every morning and often stayed long into the night, cranking out millions of words of translation, writing and editing for a variety of clients in several different countries. It was the scene of all-nighters and abject exhaustion. The terrain of my professional ambitions. But it was also the headquarters for a one-man business that paid bills, put food on the table and generated life savings. So while it was often a place where I felt if I had to spend one more minute in it, I might lose my mind and burn it down, it was also a space to which I was grateful for the opportunity to make a living doing what I knew how to do best.

My intimate relationship with this little room, where I’m sitting at my desk writing at this very moment, is also enhanced by the fact that, in one way or another, I’m the creator of practically everything in it. The main two-inch thick, thirty-inch wide, sixty-three-inch long varnished desktop, attached to the wall at one end and resting on a tongue and groove support at the other. A marine plywood side desk under the window. The bookshelves above my desk and corner storage shelves at my back. The closet that runs from those shelves to the other end of the room. The varnished pine sill beneath the windows. Even the walls of the room itself, made of insulated twelve-millimeter plywood clad with white pine tongue and groove. They are all my own handiwork. Perhaps not beautiful, but utilitarian and indestructibly strong.

A tight reference library that accompanied
 me through decades of translation
and reseach.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember building all this stuff. But paying attention to it, painting and varnishing it, working under and over it, has gotten me back in touch with it and given me a glimpse into the past when I enthusiastically put this little corner of mine together after hauling out the ragtag jumble of tables, sawhorses and random lamps that originally made up my workspace when we first moved in.

But the real stock-taking began when I started digging into decades of papers, diskettes, magazines and documentation that had accumulated to the point of squalid overcrowding and unhealthy mildew. Not normally a hoarder, when it came to work, I suddenly realized, I had an intrinsic preoccupation with throwing anything out for fear of “needing it someday”—in case of repeated work, future reference, possible lawsuits, or simply a client’s request for something he or she had misplaced. And in Argentina, where bureaucracy is utterly stultifying, this care in keeping personal records also reached ridiculous proportions.

Paper trails from international court cases I translated in the nineteen-nineties and at the turn of the century. Background materials and hard copies of books long in print that I’d ghosted and/or translated ten or twenty years ago. Background data for articles long-since written and published in international periodicals, myriad notebooks for projects completed when I was still in my forties and fifties. Paper road atlases from the turn of the twenty-first century (just yesterday to my mind but already a quarter-century in the past). Reams upon reams of hardcopy that there was no conceivable reason to hang onto. All of these things have now been piled into boxes and placed where they belong, with the kindling with which we’ll start our morning wood fire in this and future winters to come.

Corner shelves cleared for a facelift.

Computer discs! I heaved a sigh of relief that, at least, I was no longer the owner of any 7-inch floppy discs. But 3.5-inch computer discs? Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Kept as backup until they were obsolete, but still here. What to do? Could I, in good conscience, just bag them up and heave them into the neighborhood recycle bin? The answer was “no”.

For one thing, I had to find out what was on them, since a small portion of them held, not work for hire, but my own creative writing, some of it forgotten fiction and non-fiction that might perhaps be worthwhile having a second look at. These I would sort out and set aside to take to Gonzalo, my computer genius, and have him rescue them and place them on a pen-drive for future reference.

For another thing, however, I had to consider the privacy of the many clients I’d served over the past thirty years. Everything I’d done was copyrighted material for magazines, reports for government agencies, procedures and testimonies for the courts, international litigation, safety and procedural manuals for nuclear projects, confidential reports from investment banks, insurance and oil company studies, environmental impact reports, and the personal stories and data of people for whom I’d been a biographical ghostwriter. For many of these jobs, I’d signed non-disclosure agreements, even one for the translation and re-writing of scripts for an eight-chapter Hollywood miniseries and catalogues for the Argentine National Museum of Fine Arts.

Only one thing to do: Go through each and every diskette, reading the labels and either placing them in a tiny pile of files to be downloaded onto pen-drives, or breaking them physically to render them useless and tossing them into a large black garbage bag—which then became two large black garbage bags full to the brim with the remnants of broken discs.

Bookcase now free of extraneous items
and in alphabetical order by author.

Then there were the thirty years of personal records: tax records for Argentina and the US, international banking records, old investment papers, personal and business emails, transactions for properties long-since sold to others, documentation for vehicles I no longer owned, evidential data for my Argentine Social Security claims (despite the fact that I’ve been drawing retirement for the past seven years and copies of all of this evidence were presented at the time), pictures of people whose names and relationships to me I no longer recalled, copies of newspaper front pages I’d designed in the seventies, pocket notebooks where I’d jotted down data no longer relevant to anything, a copy of Internet for Dummies for the early nineties, a copy of Useful Computer Terms from the eighties, step-by-step hardcopy instructions for How to Install Windows ’98… You get the picture.

Pre-USB cords and computer connections, a spare keyboard for a nineteen-nineties Compaq laptop, old console computer keyboards, computer transformers of every vintage, two and three-button pre-optic mice, and other devices whose purpose I no longer recalled. I took all of these to my computer guy along with the discs I would ask him to download to drives.

“I brought this stuff along in case any of it is of any use to you,” I said.

One look into the bag and Gonzalo whistled low. Smiling into the bag, he said, “Wow, this stuff is like to start a computer museum with.” I watched as, one by one, he hurled the artifacts into the trash, except for a lone transformer, which he turned over in his hand like an archeological find and, shrugging, said, “Well, I might be able to use this one for something.”

But I got to reflecting that little or nothing of any of this transformation of my studio had anything to do with the physical clean-up of a room. It was, instead, mental and spiritual, all about whisking away a three-decade accumulation of cobwebs and mental refuse. About refurbishing my mind and soul. About having, as Hemmingway once described, “a clean, well-lighted place” in which to conduct my creative endeavors for the rest of my life.

It was also about Stage Four.

I’ve come to think of my time here—I mean here on planet Earth, not here in Patagonia—as four stages. In fact, practically four separate lives. Perhaps these separations or chapters in a lifetime become clearer to an expatriate than they do to some other people who never leave home. I don’t know. But my life has been clearly divided into episodes. My childhood and adolescent years in Ohio. My youth traveling in the US and Europe with the Army and then continuing my travels to South America, where, after several random adventures, I initiated my life-long career as a journalist and writer. My middle age and older years in which I was striving to build and maintain a career and a name for myself. And now, Stage Four.

Reading back over the previous paragraph, I realize it all sounds very clear-cut. It’s not. After young childhood, I immediately wanted to “be big”. In the summer between my twelfth and thirteenth years, Grandma Alice, Whitie’s mother, handed me an old Gillette safety razor and told me I might want to think about starting to shave. It was true. There was a sparse blond fuzz growing on my cheeks and upper lip and chin. Still ignorable except in strong sunlight, but definitely a presence. I was kind of embarrassed at first, but then grateful to her. She, at least, had realized I was growing up. But then again, having raised four boys herself, how wouldn’t she notice? She knew all the signs of male adolescence.

She also gave me my first pack of Gillette Blue Blades, and that same evening, I had my first shave. As an afterthought, however, I decided not to shave my upper lip. It was, as I say, summertime, the perfect time to see if I could grow a mustache.

A week in, Reba Mae said, “You smell nice. Is that aftershave?”

“Skin Bracer.”

“You’re shaving?”

I nodded.

“Where’d you get the razor?”

“Grandma Alice.”

“Figures,” she muttered under her breath as she continued preparing supper.

A few more days passed before Whitie said, “What’s that piece of toilet paper stuck to your chin. You shavin’?”

I nodded.

“Well, you missed a spot on your lip there.”

“No,” I said, “I’m growing a mustache.”

“Y’are, huh,” he said and grinned. “Well, good luck with that.”

When my Uncle Ken saw me, he wryly said, “Hey, Danny, I think your lip’s dirty. Better go wash up.”

Eventually, I found an old discarded mascara case of my mother’s. It still had the little brush and a small amount of black mascara in it. I figured that, perhaps, with the slightest of touch-ups, I could make the incipient growth on my lip more visible. I shaved the light fuzz down to a shape more or less imitating the pencil-mustaches of actors like Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks, and then, ever so lightly, touched it up with the mascara. Pleased with the result I was sure that I looked like a grown man now.

Reba Mae said, “I sure hope you haven’t been into my mascara.”

“Mascara?” I said, my face reddening. Oh this? No, it’s just turning darker is all.”

“Right, uh-huh.”

Uncle Ken asked if I was still going around with a dirty lip. But my mother’s mother, Grandma Myrt, asked Grandpa Vern if he’d noticed I was growing a mustache already. He said, no, he hadn’t. But he couldn’t think of a young man who’d look nicer with one. I really appreciated that. And it was uncommon, since Vern wasn’t the complimentary type. He usually warned one not to “go around lookin’ like Raggedy-Assed Bill,” or would tell you that the trousers you were outgrowing looked “like you're expectin’ high water.” Thanks to Grandma Myrt, his own rural work-clothes were always impeccably clean and with creases rigidly ironed.

My 1960s persona, age eighteen.

But that facial hair episode was short-lived and I didn’t grow another mustache until the summer after my junior year, when it came in full, if still quite blond. That was the year I started playing nightclub gigs with a jazz trio and, at least until I had to return to high school at summer’s end, the “stash” helped me maintain the illusion of being older than my years, which I reinforced with the clothes I wore—suits, sport coats and gabardine slacks, ties, cufflinks, topcoats, wing-tipped shoes and snap-brimmed hats.

Suffice it to say that I’ve spent half my life trying to look older and the other half trying to look younger. I really didn’t get comfortable with who I was until I was a very mature man. In fact, I never came into a writing or even personal style that I could really call “my own” until I was nearing fifty. Until then, I was always striving to be more than anyone ever expected me to be. And it was only from then on that the only person I felt it was worthwhile surprising was myself.

That’s the attitude with which I’ve come to Stage Four. When does Stage Four happen? Hard to say. Probably different for everyone. But it’s when you realize that something has quite apparently ended and something else has clearly begun.

The Rolling 'Bones' still going strong

Now, for some folks, admitting you’ve reached Stage Four is like admitting your life is over. But I don’t see it that way, and neither do the most creative people I’ve known, or a lot of others I haven’t known. Mick Jagger is still rockin’ on with what’s left of the Rolling ‘Bones’ (Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts recently played his last gig), as are Graham Nash, John Fogerty, Pete Townshend, Bob Seger, Eric Clapton, Gladys Knight, Boz Scaggs and Roger Waters, among a raft of other septuagenarians, who continue to pack the venues where they perform. Writers still going strong in their seventies include such famous names as Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Sue Grafton, Isabel Allende and Stephen King, among many others. And Joyce Carole Oates, who published her first novel in 1963, last year published her latest one, Babysitter, at the age of eighty-four, and she continues to work.

I guess my point is that age is inexorable, but being “elderly” isn’t. I’ve known a handful of people who weren’t elderly at ninety. I’ve also known some who were elderly in their sixties. Health, of course, is a factor. I’m not denying that. But all things being equal, it’s all about attitude and purpose. A hobby, a profession, a craft, a skill, a passionate interest, a December love affair, or just a commitment to enjoying life to the fullest, they are all the key to aging not merely with dignity, but also with continuing joie de vivre.

Anyway, my studio is now neat, clean, uncluttered and, finally, the place where I will no longer be doing “other people’s work.” Only my own, the ideas and writing that have long been my passion, the stories I’ve longed to tell “someday”, the place where I can give free rein to a world of my own. The cobwebs and extraneous distractions have been swept from my workspace and from my mind and soul. It’s a brand new room, a brand new day, a brand new mindset, and a brand new life, in which, for as long as it lasts, I have never been freer.