Tour of Homes – Recent Flashbacks

• Caption - A bit of Wapakoneta skyline: The Courthouse, St. Mark's Church, the back of the Fire Department. Winter 2009.
  

Earlier this year, I returned to my hometown. It was the first time in three years that I had been back and the first in six years that I didn’t go back specifically to pay my last respects to yet another loved-one.

It was also the first time that the only thing tying me to that town were my memories, and I knew as soon as I saw it again that I needed to hang around for a few days and reclaim it, grab a bit of soil in my hands, walk the streets, tour old haunts, smell the air, remember things, because from the moment I checked into a motel on the edge of town, like any passing tourist might have, the whole adventure felt way too much like “The Twilight Zone”.

My father surrendered to a four-year battle with lung cancer in January of 2003. Argentina, particularly Patagonia, where I now live, is so far from, well, everything, that it’s not as if I can just pick up and rush to Ohio whenever there is a family crisis and I’ve always felt bad and guilty about that. It was a big load on my sister and brother and particularly on our mother, Reba Mae. I should have been there.

Jim, my younger brother moved back from Saint Louis where he had lived and worked for many years. He was kind of ready for someplace else. Fairly recently divorced but hardly resigned to it, he had also quit a long-standing job as a regional manager for a national music store chain and was sort of at odds with his life and himself. He wanted to come back “home”.

In retrospect, I don’t know if that was the best thing for him. But there are times in life when you go with your gut. So he left Saint Louis, traded the Mississippi River for the “mighty” Auglaize – the river of our alma mater – and went back to Wapakoneta to stay with Mom and Dad and lend a hand. My sister, Darla, made the three-hour trip down from Cleveland as often as she could as well, which helped take some of the load off of our little brother, but he was there the whole time for Mom and Dad and bore the brunt of it all.

I did what I could, got back three times during the four years that Dad was ill and stayed nearly a month each time. Somehow it just didn’t seem like enough and probably wasn’t. Despite the sorrow of watching our father slowly waste away, however, those trips were good. My sister, brother and I reconnected as a family and all felt closer than we had in years. My father and I worked out some old issues and were able to express our love for each other. And my brother and I deepened the friendship we had rekindled from the time we were middle-aged, but this time one-on-one, since, as I say, he was divorced and my wife had stayed behind in Patagonia on these trips. So my little brother and I did the things we had never done together in our youth because of what back then had been a big age difference of five years between us.

Now, we went on some nature hikes and long walks together, hit all of the local watering holes, did some shopping, played euchre with our sister and her boys while we got quietly drunk together, and mostly just talked. About anything and everything. About how we felt, about our lives, our parents, our relationships, how we took being – suddenly, it seemed – sort of upper-middle-aged. Even about how now, aged forty-something and fifty-something, the five years between us were meaningless, when once they had seemed like an impossible gap to span.

After Dad died, I went back and spent a month with Mom. Darla was really busy at the time and could only manage to get down from Cleveland a couple of weekends to visit. But Jim and I spent time together just about every day.

He was trying something different. He had become partners with a high school friend of his in a business selling and installing upscale kitchen cabinetry. Since I know my way around a carpentry shop, I tagged along on a couple of the big jobs while I was home, mostly to lend muscle for loading and unloading the truck, manhandling the cabinets into place and holding them firm while Jim’s partner did the fitting and fastening.

It was fun and even a little exciting to work with my brother that couple of days. It made me think how nice it would be if we lived close enough to work together, how great that feeling of being both family and friends was, how much I truly enjoyed his company, how much I admired him for the good and honest man that he had become. I thought how I enjoyed riding in his pickup with him the forty miles north to Findlay where he had his shop, getting a donut and coffee together, sweating the heavy crates off the dock onto the truck, unloading and unpacking on the building site – he, his partner and I working seriously and well all day – taking time out for lunch, a coffee break, a couple of laughs, stopping off for beers on the way back home at the end of the day. It was simple and pleasant, because Jim and I liked each other and got along as friends as well as loving each other as brothers.

Our time with Mom – Jim’s, Darla’s and mine – was strange. Mom wasn’t herself. That’s really the best way to describe it. Jim and Darla both put it down to grief. She and Dad had been together for 60 years. It was natural, they said. But I was sensing more than that. Perhaps because I was coming from so far outside, so far away. The changes in her had been gradual for my sister and brother because they had spent a lot of time with her while Dad was dying. But for me, the difference was clear-cut, like night and day. This was more than plain grief. It was something distinct, something decisive.

I knew she had been through a lot. Dad had toughed out the cancer. He had always been competitive and when the doctors said they figured six months to a year was the likely progression for the type of cancer he had, it had pissed him off. Three years after he was supposed to have been long dead, he was still looking the white-coated fortunetellers in the eye and asking, “What next?”

Lung cancer is a cruel illness and toward the end he was doing a lot of morphine. It didn’t sit well with him and he acted strangely. Mom would place his food on the table in front of him and he would say, “What’s this?”

“That’s your supper, Honey” she would say, placing his knife and fork in his hands.

He would look at the silverware in his fists and say, “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do with these?”

It must have been trying, and certainly exhausting.

Once Jim said he had received a desperate call from her.

“Your father’s backing up all over the house.”

“Backing up?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean, Mom, by backing up?”

“Just what I said. Norm’s walking backwards all over the house.”

“Why?”

“How should I know? If I knew, I wouldn’t be calling you. I’m afraid he’ll fall down the basement stairs or something.”

So Jim left work early and drove the forty miles down from Findlay to Wapakoneta in under half an hour and strolled in through the back door of the house to find Mom sitting at the kitchen table with a half-cup of cold decaf in front of her and the ol’ man, sure enough, walking backwards around the living room with the remote control in his hand, as if searching for someplace to parallel park so he could watch some TV.

Jim walked up to him quietly, gently, like you might do with a skittish horse and, by way of greeting, said, “Hey Dad.”

“Hey Jim,” the ol’ man said back.

“How’s it going?”

“Not s’bad.” And then after a little pause, “Better than the friggin’ alternative.”

Dad backed up toward the couch, aimed the remote and turned on the TV set. Then he just stood there, still pointing the thing at the screen.

“So tell me, Dad,” Jim said gently, “uh, what’s up with this reverse gear thing?”

“Huh?”

“What’s the deal with this walking backwards thing?”

Dad look away from the TV at Jim with an expression that held something like suspicion and said, “What d’you mean?”

“Well, uh, you’re walking backwards…”

Dad looked down at his feet and back at Jim and said, “Wuh, how the hell d’you want me to walk?”

So Jim stood up, placed his arm lovingly around the ol’ man’s skinny waist and, as if this were the most normal thing in the world, patiently gave him some walking lessons, walked him all over the house, around the living room, up and down the hallway, as if he were teaching him the steps to a new dance. And after that, the ol’ man could walk just fine again.

Then Dad sat down to watch TV and Jim smiled at Mom and she smiled back and mouthed the word “thanks”. But the whole thing was really heartbreaking.

We all hoped that after Dad was gone Mom would have a few good years to enjoy in relative peace. The ol’ man had been nothing if not careful with his money. There were investments, a couple of properties, insurance, and as frugal as she was, she could live out her days without having to worry about finances.

But Dad had talked her into retiring when he did and so, for the last 15 years or so, her sole occupation had been seeing to him, taking care of him, responding to his every whim. And in the last four years, she had become his live-in nurse and care-taker. Now with him gone, she literally didn’t know what to do with herself. She had always been a prodigious reader – fifty books or more a year. And she had enjoyed going out to eat, going to the local spa, shopping with her younger sister, traveling to Florida for the winter each year. But suddenly, nothing seemed to interest her.

I started working on her, giving her pep talks, telling her that her life was all hers now, to do with as she pleased. She could travel, take a cruise, sell the condo in Florida and go wherever she wanted, a different place every few months, all the places she wanted to see. She could go with friends or on her own, go to Phoenix, the Bahamas, Europe. She could come down and visit me in South America. Stay as long as she wanted. Hey, there was an idea! Why didn’t she come spend some time with Virginia and me? And she would seem to be listening, would get an attentive – if distant – look on her face, but she wouldn’t respond.

“Mom,” I would say, “you can do anything you feel like doing. You know that, right? You have the chance, the means, and the right to do whatever you darn please! Take up painting again, open a little shop of some kind, anything at all.”

I tried to get her to write down her feelings, a journal that would be only hers. Start out writing about the weather, which, country girl that she was, had always interested her. And then write about whatever came to mind – thoughts, memories, people, places, sort of like word snapshots.

Finally, one day as we were coming back from eating out in the city of Lima, fifteen miles north of town, she asked me to pull over and let her take the wheel. “If you keep chauffeuring me around,” she said, “I’m going to forget how to drive.” So as we drove along through the still barren, tired-looking, late-winter landscape of rural central Ohio, I started my spiel again. How she should start thinking about getting out, traveling, going places, doing anything active at all. She could, I reminded her again, do anything she wanted to.

To my surprise, she said, “I can, can’t I? I really can do whatever I want.” Then she paused pensively and said, “The problem is that I can’t find me anymore.” She waited for a response and when she didn’t get one, she glanced over at me and said, “Y’know?”

“Not exactly, Mom, what do you mean?”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s like, I’ve lived you’re father’s life for so long that I’ve actually become him. I mean, I’ve been Norm for such a long time now that I can’t find Reba anymore.” She glanced my way again. “Does that make sense?”

“Sure it does, Mom. But that’s why you have to start doing something about it.”

She avoided the topic from then on, however, and no matter how many times I suggested she come spend some time with my wife and me in Argentina, she changed the subject. Shortly before I was to return to South America, I stepped up to the plate again.

“Tell you what,” I said, “in November or December, when it starts getting cold up here and warm down there, I’ll fly up here and get you and we’ll both travel down to Argentina together. How does that sound?”

She turned to me, then, took my shoulders in her hands the way she had when I was a kid and she was about to give me a stern talking-to, locked her eyes on mine and said, “Look, Danny, get this through your head, because I’m only going to say it once: That’s not going to happen!”

This was March. She fell ill in May and died in July, just seven months after Dad. So I was back again for the funeral and stayed over a month with my brother and sister, straightening out all of the legal questions of our parents’ deaths, the will, sale of their house, what to do with their belongings, a sad difficult time, but also one in which the three of us grew even closer than before.

As we took care of clearing the house and getting it onto the market we also spent a lot of time remembering how it had been growing up together. We went through old photo albums and had some laughs, and cried together and did a lot of comfort eating and drinking together. We talked about how strange it was to suddenly be the older generation, to no longer be anyone’s “children”, to suddenly be disconnected from our town and childhood.

But once we got through it all, there was a kind of relief, to feel that nothing like this was probably going to happen again for a very long time. Now we would get back to our own lives with the happy thought that we would probably have lots of opportunities to enjoy each other’s company in the future.

Nevertheless, our parents’ dying changed things. Changed the permanence that we had once perceived. Both Darla and Jim talked about coming down to South America for a visit. Darla did. The first time in the more than thirty years I had been an expatriate. And we had a great time vacationing together in Buenos Aires, Río Negro, Chubut, southern Chile. She told Jim that he just had to do it too.

But Jim had issues. A new relationship that had gone bad. A partner who ran the business into the ground and left him stuck holding the bag. A decision to pull up roots again and move down to Mom and Dad’s condo in Florida. A monumental effort to change something, everything about his life, to start fresh and get happy again. He got a new job, made new friends, tried new things, but nothing seemed to click. Then his girlfriend came down, moved in, spent six months, decided it was over for her – when he had thought it was forever – and left as suddenly as she had come.

We talked often. Long phone conversations…hours long. He kept trying to start over, find something to get excited about, but he couldn’t seem to tear loose from his sorrow and loss – Mom, Dad, his faltering friendship with his business partner, the relationship with his girlfriend gone sour, it all got him down and he couldn’t seem to get back up.

That December, two years after Dad and Mom died, he called me to wish me a happy birthday. I said, “Do yourself and me a favor and come down for a visit. No, not a visit, a stay. Just stay as long as you like, a month, a year, the rest of your life. But come now! Maybe we can start a business together, bring tourists down from Ohio…I don’t know, whatever. But we’d be together.”

He was quiet. Then he sighed and said, “I am going to come down. Honest, Big Bro’. I’ve got my spanking new passport right here by the phone. But I just started this new job and wouldn’t have much time right now…”

“Leave it,” I said. “Leave the job. Come down here and we’ll figure out something else to do together.”

He sighed again. “Look, Dan, I’ll be down this year, don’t worry. But I’m going to go next June when I’ll have more time.”

That was December 9th. On December 12th, he died in his sleep. He was 51.

So anyway, as I say, this year, three years after Jim’s funeral, I was back in town again. The excuse was that everything had happened so suddenly that Darla and I hadn’t had a chance to arrange for some sort of monument for him, but the truth was that I needed to go back to my hometown again, browse among my memories for a while and come to terms with my past. At age 59, it was high time.

(To be continued)

Snow Days – The Patagonia and Ohio Express

The sound of the rain awakens me. The rhythm of it on the galvanized metal roofing of my cabin in the mountains in Patagonia. The sound of it, gentle, deceivingly soothing if I didn’t know what it meant, snaps me out of sleep and wakes me right up. Muffled, it sounds, drumming rather than pattering, thumping now and again as well, plopping as it slithers off the branches above the house and falls like a heavy cream pie on the roof, because it is no longer rain - that steady rain out of the northwest, out of the Cordillera, out of the Andes, Chile and the Pacific beyond - that lulled me to sleep less than five hours ago.

*Snow days in Patagonia

I raise myself on my elbow, draw back the curtain over the window behind my head and peek out. It won’t be dawn for another few hours and from this angle, all I can see are the undersides of the boughs of the ancient beeches that surround the house, towering over it, to the east, south and north, and with the waning moon behind the clouds, it’s hard to tell the state of affairs: rain, rain mixed with snow, or snow – the dangerous kind, heavy, wet snow.

But I hear three or four soggy, weighty plunks on the roof and know I can no longer hope for rain. It is, doubtless, snow.

With no little effort, I extricate myself from the pile of covers I have on top of me – the cocoon in which I was only minutes ago giving free rein to my dreams – and kneel on the mattress to get a better look. Yes, now, even in this pre-dawn darkness, I can see how the Spanish broom and smaller trees – laurels and junipers – are hunkering down under the crushing burden of a very wet and heavy snow.

Almost immediately, I get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and start getting anxious. Better charge the battery on my laptop, charge up the flashlight batteries. Oh, and my cell phone. If the lines are down the cells are all we’ll have. I get up as quietly as possible so as not to wake up my wife and pad barefoot into my studio, where I plug in various and sundry chargers and devices. I then go back to bed. I try to relax and go back to sleep. I look at the luminescent hands of the alarm clock. Four a.m. – too early to start the day. But who can sleep? I lie there staring into the darkness, trying to gauge the weight and type of the snow. The worst, I conclude, heavy as lead. Like industrial quantities of lemon ice-cream piling up on the branches of the trees in the windless pre-dawn hours. That means downed power lines, snapped phone cables, blocked roads. It means days of work lost, clients upset, deadlines missed.

I’ll never get back to sleep this way, so I decide to change focus, to think about something else, or to think about this but in a different light.

I think about when I was a little boy. Oh how I loved the snow back in Ohio! I wanted it to snow always. Back then, when I was small and, in fact, until I was middle-aged and moved to Patagonia, I was a snow fanatic. I knew when it was coming, had an intimate relationship with it. I even fancied I could make it snow, so intimate was the bond. I literally had a nose for it. Could smell it on the air, the same way I could smell frost, before it came.

I remember when I was about to turn 43, being back in Ohio, alone, for a visit with my folks in October. It was the last time everybody was still well – Dad, Mom, my Aunts and Uncles, my Little Brother, who nobody would ever have guessed would fall ill. The last time, in other words, when things would be normal and going “home” would just be that, going home.

We had been having that crisp, gold and blue weather of Midwestern autumn. October blue days, my mother called them. A gorgeous, euphoric kind of weather in which it seems nothing could possibly go wrong. Cloudless, china-blue skies, the tawny wheat still in some fields, waiting to be harvested, the cornfields just hard dry dirt and raw stubble now, strewn and studded here and there with missed ears and scattered kernels of sun-parched maize, the soft maples already standing stark and stripped against the azure sky, their silver and golden foliage lying like fine lingerie passionately shed at their feet, the sugar maples putting on the last act of their fiery red-leafed show before also letting fall their autumn hues, the oaks looking plucked and sparse with just a single dark-reddish-brown leaf still clinging here and there to their branches, as if trying hard to withstand the temptation to simply let go and allow a random autumnal breeze to carry it drifting down to the ground that lay littered with its peers and with the acorns that gray and red squirrels scrambled to collect for their winter hibernation.

Paying my last respects to my native land – this particular rural land – on the day before I was to return to Argentina, I had gone for a drive in a borrowed car on the familiar back roads of West-Central Ohio and in the golden autumn-light of late afternoon, alone on the Buckland-Holden Pike, had been privileged to watch a large white-tailed buck, his head holding high his impressive rack of antlers, bolt from the open field where he had been grazing on abandoned corn, make a dash ahead of my on-coming car, vault the seven-strand fence in one impressively graceful leap, gallop and skitter across the pavement, so close I fancied I could see the white of his startled eye, and jump the fence on the other side of the road, before cantering off into a nearby woodlot, where he disappeared from view. It was a sign, I thought, a blessing, an omen: Life was good.

That night, after supper with my parents, in the house where I had been brought up from age twelve, I went for a last-evening walk around town, stopping off at the Alpha for a couple of drafts, bellied up to the gorgeous old African mahogany bar that was owner Bill Gutman’s pride and joy, before trekking the mile and a half back home. When I came out of the Alpha, I noticed the weather was changing. My light windbreaker was insufficient for this new twist and I shivered when I exited the homey warmth of the stuffy bar onto the main drag of town. There was a strange, frigid breeze out of the north and the sky was fast clouding over. The air seemed charged and somehow “electric” and, walking home, when I looked back from where I had just come, the streetlamps of Main Street were casting an eerie orange glow, so typical of winter nights, against the clouds. It was only October 22^nd, but when I breathed in the night air, the scent was unmistakable. Even after 20 years of living in Buenos Aires, my rural Ohio nose knew right away what that indescribable fragrance was. Snow!

When I got back, Mom was dozing in front of the TV set and Dad was in the kitchen dishing himself up a sundae of chocolate ice-cream, peanut butter and Hershey’s chocolate syrup.

“Hey, Dan!” the ol’ man said when I waltzed in through the back door.

“Hey yourself, Dad, how’s it going?”

“Okey-dokey, want some ice-cream?”

“No thanks. Hey Dad, know what? I think it’s going to snow tonight.”

“Snow!!” he cried, so loudly that it jolted Mom out of her nap in the living room. “No way, Dan. It’s October, for chrissake! Hell, you aren’t gonna get any snow around here till Thanksgiving at least.”

*Snow days in Ohio

Dad had never been a fan of snow, but his last job before he retired had been as a route salesman for a local cheese manufacturer and after endless winters of slipping and sliding around on rural Ohio roads and city streets in a sixteen-ton truck loaded full of cheese he had grown to unequivocally hate snow. “Look at that white shit comin’ down out there,” he would say when it started snowing. I didn’t get it. For me snow was about the most amazing and beautiful thing on earth.

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “The air sure smells like it.”

“Smells like it?” he grinned dubiously, “Aw, com’on now, Dan, don’t try an’ bullshit your ol’ man."

“No, really, Dad, I can smell it on the air.”

“Naw, never happen. November, maybe. Christmas for sure. But October? I think you and your snozz have been in South America too long."

“Okay, Dad, if you say so. But I’ll tell you what, if it doesn’t snow tonight, it’s gonna miss a helluva good chance.”

“Nah, not to worry, Dan. I’d wager good money on it.” Strong words for the ol’ man, who had a reputation for being more than just careful with his money.

“Actually, I’m not worried,” I said. “I’d kind of like for it to snow.”

“Well, yeah, because you’re leaving tomorrow, and going back to sunny South America, but the rest of us have to stay here and put up with it after you’re gone and it’s too damned early for it to start snowing already, damnit.” He was so adamant that I half expected him to forbid me to ‘make it snow’.

But the next day, Dad had to eat his words. When we got up early to go to a pancake breakfast that the Lions were putting on before Dad and Mom were to drive me the 60 miles to the Dayton Airport to take my flight to Miami and back to Argentina, the ground was blanketed with a pristine four inches of snow, and there were still snow flurries in the morning air.

Dad took this miraculous autumn snow personally – a personal affront – and I was, he seemed to feel, somewhat to blame. I had wished it on him.

“You drive,” he said, holding out his car keys to me with two fingers in a gesture whose disdain was only thinly veiled. “I had twenty years of driving a truck on this white shit. Any time I can let somebody else do it, I will.”

I shrugged, smiled and took the keys. I opened the garage door and then climbed into the big Mercury Grand Marquis and started it up. I had tried to explain to Dad on numerous occasions that these modern, fuel-injected, computerized cars didn’t have to be warmed up like the cars of the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties that he grew up and matured on. But it was no use. It was easier not to try and fight his routines or soundly developed opinions. His rule of thumb was a warm up of at least ten minutes, so ten minutes it was. His house, his car, his way.

As the exhaust from the big Merc billowed white into the unseasonable chill of this October morning, I went back into the house, retrieved my luggage from the room I shared as a boy with my kid brother, carried it out to the garage, popped the trunk and loaded it in. It was all decided: We would go right from the pancake breakfast to the airport. “Hard telling how long it’ll take us to do 60 miles in this damn weather,” Dad said.

Mom and I got into the car and waited. We knew this ritual by heart. We had been participants in it ever since our family was a family. The rest of us would sit in the car and wait while the ol’ man ran his checklist. Holding his one hand under the spigots in the kitchen and bathroom and tightening the faucets with the other hand he would do the check, a liturgy as strict as that of any religion: “Left faucet off once…off twice…off three times. Right faucet off once…off twice…off three times.” And so on throughout the house checking windows, appliances, anything that might run or leak or in any way operate uselessly while he was gone. Off one, two, three…Closed one, two, three…obsessive/compulsive by the numbers.

My mother and I sat there, saying nothing, waiting patiently, or impatiently but wordlessly, for him to be done. We knew the drill. We waited for it to be over.

Finally, he was visible, at the back door of the house: “Door locked once…twice…”

And as usual this was the point at which Mom’s patience wore thin. She rolled down the window on the backseat passenger’s side, where she was sitting in order to let Dad sit up front with me and she called out to him, “Will you please come on and get your butt into the car sometime today, Norman, so that we can get going.”

“Noooowww, Mother,” he said as he approached the car, “don’t go being a dibbick.” Then he climbed in beside me and said, “Take ‘er away, Dan.”

Already the snow had stopped, the morning turning crisp, a good ten degrees under freezing. The snow crunched and squeaked, a frozen powder, under the tires of the Merc as I backed it down the driveway and onto the road. The county snowplow hadn’t been by yet, but some neighbors had already laid tracks on the road. I followed them and coaxed the Merc gently up the hill to the Hamilton Street Bridge. These big eight-cylinder engines were entirely too powerful for snowy streets and if you gave them too much gas you just spun the tires and went nowhere.

As I turned left onto Hamilton, I saw in my rearview mirror how, although it was still early on a Saturday morning, the county snowplow was already crossing the bridge and turning onto our road to do its work. When we were kids, we loved to watch the snowplow, and it was the same kind now as it was back then, a big five-ton dump-truck the back-end tipped slightly to keep feeding rock salt into a hopper and feeder that scattered the salt on the pavement, the front-end fitted with a huge blade, set skewed toward the passenger side of the cab so as to throw the snow off to the side of the road. Effective, efficient, a powerful tool with which to keep things open and moving.

The main streets of town, as we cruised through it, were also already cleared and salted. This was a Northern town where people were used to handling snow. Everything was geared to snow’s not being a problem: Even as it snowed, the streets were being cleared. Cables were mostly underground and those that weren’t were over open terrain and were tested and approved for use in heavy snow and high winds. This was Ohio, with its rich rural and industrial tradition.

When we arrived at the K of C Hall, ceded on this occasion to the Lions for this annual fundraiser, its blacktopped parking lot was also cleared. And the machinery used was still in evidence: An aging John Deere tractor with a scoop on the front sat parked off to one side. It almost certainly belonged, I speculated, to a volunteer from the Knights of Columbus, the Lions or both, and he was just as certainly now inside getting his just due – all the pancakes and sausage he could eat, with plenty of hot coffee. There were already quite a few cars parked outside. It was a farm town. People here were early-risers.

Inside we were greeted by the warm sweet and spicy smell of hot buttered pancakes, warm maple syrup and pork link sausage. Drifting above it all, the aroma of brewing coffee. And the cheery salutations:

“Hey, Norm! How are you Reba? ‘d you guys order this weather?”

"Not me, Charlie,” Dad responds. “I hate this shit and it’s too damned early for it.”

“Why, it’s just enough snow to be pretty, Normie!” Another familiar face cries.

“Pretty! Not if you have to drive in it, it’s not,” Dad responds.

“Well, you don’t because you retired, so have some pancakes an stop your bitchin’,” says somone else, and then in a sunny tone, “Hey! Is this Dan? Hey Dan’el, how ya doin’? Haven’t see you in a coon’s age!”

It never changed. You went away twenty years, came back, and it seemed like they were all still there. Robust, red-faced, thick-waisted men, being jolly and friendly of a Saturday morning, wearing bibbed aprons and serving up breakfast to their neighbors to raise funds for charity. It was the very best of small-town life. Reliability, solidarity, efficiency. This wouldn’t change, I was thinking, hoping. But I realized, that day, that the faces would. These men were mostly of Mom and Dad’s generation, World War II and Korea vets. But even now, mine were there too, classmates, Vietnam vets, who were doing the grill work ceded to them by their elders, who now did the greeting and the dishing up and the ticket-taking.

My generation and theirs dropped by the table to say hi as we enjoyed our pancakes and coffee. They all wanted to know the same things: Did I order this weather (Dad responded – not without certain acrimony – that yes I had… “Said he could smell it, if you can believe that”). How was South America treating me, Brazil wasn’t it? No? Argentina? What did they speak there, Spanish? So where was it they spoke Portuguese. Was it true it was summer there now and didn’t that seem funny somehow. Huh, Christmas in the summertime, imagine that! But at least you didn’t have to drive in the snow, huh?

It was funny: After all these years, it wasn’t just my family I started missing as soon as I took the plane and headed south. It was this – this place, my town, what it meant, how it felt when I sought it out in my heart and held it cupped in my two hands like something ever-cherished.

I’m thinking about this now, as I’m standing in the darkened kitchen of my house in Patagonia, staring out the window at the snow that is gathering on the lawn under the Patagonian beeches. I’m thinking how all of that, which once seemed so permanent, so inexhaustible, is now gone: Dad, Mom, my Little Brother, the house I spent my teen years in, people I thought of as anchors in my life and keys to who I was, my very links to that town and the land around it.

I’m also thinking of the snow, how it’s a test of individuals and of peoples. How you cope with snow, whether you can love it in spite of itself, whether a people has the solidarity to live with it and make it work for them. I remember that morning, when it snowed in October and surprised everybody. But how everybody in that small, rural-Ohio town knew just what to do, knew there was no use complaining, knew that what you did if you were from that town was clear the roads and parking lot in time for that pancake breakfast you had been planning for months.

I feel bad, I’m thinking, about how I can no longer see snow like I did when I was a kid, that it’s no longer just pretty. It means grownup things now, here in Patagonia – hours, a day, a week waiting for the electricity to be restored. My translation clients in Buenos Aires, Houston or Madrid being incapable of understanding how anybody, anywhere, can be without power for a week, but understanding one thing for sure, that it’s not a problem they are going to stand for. Trying to make it the two klicks down to the main road in my four by four pickup to leave tracks for my neighbors and me to follow before it gets too deep to move at all, because only God knows when the municipality will get around to sending a road grader out this far. Hoping against hope that no branches will break and fall on the telephone lines because repair orders are already normally backed up for weeks on end, hoping the snow will turn to rain, hoping the sun will come out, hoping this won’t be the worst winter ever. Wishing that things were like “back home”, where everybody knew what to do and did it, immediately and without complaint.

Even as I’m thinking this, I hear the UPS alarm on my computer upstairs and know the electricity is gone. With aerial lines, one broken beech bough is enough to knock out an entire sub-station. I climb the stairs with a flashlight and shut down the UPS and my computer. I go to bed to wait for daybreak. There’s nothing else to do.

Lying there still unable to sleep, I think about how this is good in its own way. It’s a more real world. Here, the snow is just the snow and you are just you. It teaches you self-reliance. You cope without expecting anything of anyone else. Whatever you do to cope with Nature, you do on your own. In the meantime, there are no false hopes, no misunderstandings, no thinking anything or anyone is permanent. There’s just you and how you handle what comes at you for as long as you are still breathing.

There’s something to be said for that, and it doesn’t make the snow any less beautiful. On the contrary, it is a thing of beauty that is indifferent to your condition or your problems, which are all of your own making. It just is what it is and how you live with it is all about who you are. The beauty of it is all its own. It’s up to you to take it or leave it.

Wapakoneta – Moon Town, My Town, USA

The forty years since Neil Armstrong made his “giant leap for Mankind” and left his footprints on the moon may seem like a long time to most people, but to those of us who grew up in Wapakoneta, Ohio, and are old enough to recall that amazing day, it seems, in a way, like the blink of an eye. There are at least two things that make my hometown unique: its name – I mean, if you say you’re from Wapakoneta, nobody asks, “Which Wapakoneta?” – and the fact the Neil Armstrong was born there.

Caption: Apollo 11 Crew - Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin. In Wapak, we all felt like we knew them personally, because Neil was one of our own.

True, Wapak (as we call it for short) has a World War I general, whose name no one recalls but who was a close aid to Commanding General John J. Pershing.

Caption: Dudley Nichols, Courtesy Wapak Alumni Hall of Fame

And it has Dudley Nichols too. Dud – as my dad, among other people, referred to him - was a very famous American screenwriter and director: He wrote the screenplay for Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as for Stagecoach, And Then There Were None, The Tin Star and other famous films of the 1930s and ‘40s. He was also the president of the Hollywood Screen Writers Guild and became even more famous for being the first-ever movie-land name to refuse an Academy Award – a protest move followed many years later by the likes of Marlon Brando and George C. Scott. Dud won his Oscar in 1936 for writing the screenplay of The Informer. But the Guild was on strike for higher pay and better conditions at the time and in protest, he refused to go to the Awards Ceremony. His most famed work as a screenwriter was the script for the 1930s Howard Hawks comedy Bringing Up Baby, starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, which was not a big box office hit at the time, but which is today considered a comedy classic.

More recently, we also have my childhood playmate, Jenny Smith. If you’re not from Wapak, you won’t know her by that name, but as Jennifer Crusie a 15-time bestseller of witty he- said/she-said romantic novels like Crazy for You, Faking It, Fast Women and Tell Me Lies, and, from what I hear, still one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet.

Caption: Jennifer Crusie (Courtesy Wapak Alumni Hall of Fame)
But while these shining hometown stars are well-known, Neil is in a league apart, because he is now and will always and forever be the First Man to Walk on the Moon. It wasn’t his only first, either. When I was a little boy the sign at the city limits read:

Wapakoneta
The Friendly City
Pop. 7,800

But by the time I was a teenager, it had been changed to read:
Wapakoneta

Home of Neil Armstrong

First Civilian Astronaut

For a long time, as a youngster, I felt like I vicariously shared something with Neil. When I first heard his name and about some of his achievements, I asked my dad if he knew him. (He was used to this kind of questions, because when I was smaller, I had also asked him, for instance, if he had known Abraham Lincoln – which Mom found hilarious, but Dad, not so much so).

“Not really,” he answered. “But your Uncle Don went to school with Neil.” Don was Dad’s younger (much younger) brother.

“Were they friends,” I asked, hoping they were.

“I don’t know about friends, exactly, but they played basketball together. Don was the captain of the team. Neil was kind of an egghead, but he played ball anyway.”

That crack wasn’t aimed at Neil, but at me, since the ol’ man had never been able to get me interested in playing team sports. I liked bike hikes, trekking through the woods and just about anything that involved fishing poles, swimming pools, shotguns and pool cues, when I wasn’t reading, playing music or writing. But all somebody had to do was mention any activity ending in the word “ball” and I got to feeling instantly queasy. Dad just about jumped up and clicked his heels when I started wrestling in seventh grade, found out I liked it and was even pretty good at it. I liked the coach, who was also my phys-ed teacher and a tough but understanding trainer. He had been an All-State wrestling champion himself, loved the sport and imbued us with that love. I planned to keep wrestling the next year and (who knew?) maybe even go out for high school wrestling later on. But that same year, the coach, who was in his late thirties, had a massive heart attack at the dinner table and dropped dead, and after attending his funeral, I just didn’t have the heart to wrestle again – although everything I learned that year came in handy later in occasional street fights and in the Army.

But my uncle’s high school basketball career wasn’t my only link to Neil. I had an “in” of my own with the Neil Armstrong Story: namely, Neil’s mother, Viola Armstrong.

A Nose for News

I started working when I was twelve. Besides shoveling snow in winter, mowing grass in summer, raking leaves in autumn, assisting people with their gardening in the spring and helping out at my father’s restaurant on Saturdays, I also became a paperboy. My first route was with the Dayton Journal Herald, a job I inherited from one of my sister’s high school freshman friends. It had seemed somehow glamorous to me when I first accepted it, but the glitz quickly wore off when the drudgery of it set in. The Journal Herald was a morning paper so the job involved getting up at 4:30 a.m. and pedaling my bike through the slumbering town to the Post Office, where my package of papers awaited me in the unlocked hall where the P.O. boxes were. The papers came in a bale, wrapped in sullied newsprint and banded with baling wire, which meant that I always had to remember to carry a pair of wire-cutters in my pants pocket. I got that job in the late fall and kept it through most of that winter and the dark Ohio mornings were freezing cold. The best part of the task each morning was sitting on the floor of the hall in the silent Post Office building, warmed by a hissing radiator, un-baling and rolling my papers, before packing them carefully into my cumbersome canvas shoulder bag. The hard part was leaving the hall - where I would have been only too happy to curl up like a dog by the radiator and take a nap – to go back out into the cold and pedal my bike from the northeast side of town to the northwest side, near my home, hurling my rolled and rubber-banded newspapers onto the porches of my customers.

By the time I got back home at 7:00, all I wanted to do was climb into my nice warm bed and sleep. But there was no time for that. Mom was waiting for me with hot Ralston, Cream of Wheat or eggs and toast, and then, there was just time to wash up, change clothes and with the first light of winter morning, catch the school bus when it swung by to pick me up. By noon I felt so tired I scarcely knew how I would make it through the rest of the school day, but somehow I always did. Mom, however, started worrying about my grades and my health – I had had hepatitis the previous year and wasn’t very strong yet – and asked Dad to talk to one of his steady customers, Russ McLean, who owned the local newsstand and managed the routes for the Lima News and other Ohio papers, to see if he could get me an afternoon job. The following spring Russ gave me a prime route – 120 papers a day in a central part of town near my school – with the Lima News.

Hot Chocolate at Neil’s Place

Caption: Neil Armstrong's Childhood home. Photo by Steve Centers

That’s when I got to know Neil’s mother. She lived with Neil’s father, Steve Armstrong, in a large, pretty old two-storey house on West Benton Street, a main Wapakoneta thoroughfare that formed part of my route. During that first spring, which started off cold and snowy, and the following winter, the Armstrong home turned out to be a kind of a way station for me. Whenever it was so snowy that I either had to struggle through the slush and mud on my bike or leave it behind and walk, Mrs. Armstrong would often invite me in to get warmed up.

She would have me take off my coat and cap and gloves and sit at the dining room table, where she would serve me piping hot chocolate with slowly melting marshmallows on the steaming surface, accompanied by homemade cookies – chocolate chip, oatmeal and other favorites of mine. And while I sipped the scalding milk and ate my cookies, she would talk to me about Neil.

On a bookcase against one wall of the room, there was a scale model of the X-15 rocket plane that Neil had flown as a test pilot. And while we chatted, she would sometimes take it down and let me hold it and look at it “as long as I was really careful with it”. Mrs. Armstrong made me almost feel privileged to be a paperboy. She told me about how Neil had sold papers to help pay for his pilot training. After he did his paper route, he would bicycle out to the Wapakoneta Air Field – actually a mown disused pasture with a makeshift hangar and a windsock on a length of water pipe en lieu of a mast – where he took his flying lessons. He had soloed in a light plane and won his wings before he was old enough to get a license to drive a car.

Mrs. Armstrong was always like that, considerate, a very nice lady. For Christmas, if people gave you anything at all it was usually a tip of a dollar or so when you came around to collect the week before the holidays. But Mrs. Armstrong gave me a one pound box of Brach’s Chocolate-Covered Cherries all gift-wrapped with a bow in red and green. It wasn’t hard to tell why her son turned out to be exceptional. He had learned it from the get-go.

One Small Step for a Man…

As you can imagine, when Neil first set foot on the lunar surface on July 21, 1969, you could have heard a pin drop on the deserted streets of Wapakoneta. Everyone was glued to his or her TV screen.

It was a shared event. Friends and family got together to watch. It was summer and we young people were all home from college, the Service or wherever we had been earlier in the year. I had started that year off with my first trip to Argentina and had then gone to Ohio State University to study music. I was home for the summer break and, appropriately, was watching the historic event in Wapak with family and friends. Everybody who knew somebody in Wapakoneta wanted to see it from there: Moon Town USA. Merchandising was rife, with everybody selling or giving away Apollo 11 cups, glasses, caps, shirts, post cards and other memorabilia and gimmicks to clients and friends. The Fisher Cheese Company of Wapak had created a greenish product that it called Moon Cheese to commemorate the landing and built a small specialty product sales outlet on the edge of town just off of Interstate-75 where the “lunar” cheese was featured and tourists bought it as a souvenir. Despite the fact that it wasn’t one of the company’s better cheeses, its pull as a novelty caused the company to have to put on an extra shift to meet demand in the run-up to the moon walk that July.

Our in-laws-to-be had arrived from Cleveland for the occasion as well. My sister’s fiancé, Tom, and his parents, the Ginters, had wanted an excuse to get to know my parents better and this seemed as good as any. On the historic launch date, Mr. Ginter drove to the Post Office in Wapakoneta, bought commemorative Apollo 11 postage stamps, affixed them to as many envelopes as members of the two families and mailed them all to us. His theory was that an Apollo stamp posted and cancelled on that day from the hometown of Neil Armstrong would someday be worth a fortune.

I still have mine somewhere. So far no avid collectors have beaten down my door with proposals of fame and fortune, though I remain open to offers. Anyway, it was a nice gesture on Mr. Ginter’s part.

Homecoming

A few months later, Neil finally came “home” after the moon walk. The town went wild. There was a parade even bigger than the ones held each year for Memorial Day and a later celebration at the Fairgrounds. Celebrity sidekick Ed McMahon accepted an invitation from the Chamber of Commerce and rode next to Neil in the open car provided by one of the local dealerships, both men smiling and waving at the thousands of local and tourist well-wishers that lined the streets of the little town.

I was back in town for the occasion and  one of the first people I saw when I got home was my former band director and music teacher, Bill Trunk. I found Bill at a local coffee shop, hard at work putting the finishing touches on a score while he was having his mid-morning java. Although I had been his head drummer and student conductor and had also played gigs with him at local nightclubs, he didn’t recognize me at first, so changed was I since he had last seen me, but when he finally did, he beckoned me to sit beside instead of across from him so that we could look at the score together. He immediately and enthusiastically began to sing it to me.

“It’s for the parade, when Neil gets here,” he said, “to play in front of the grandstand at the Fairgrounds.” As he hummed the melody, I glanced at the title he had penciled in. It was a patriotic march entitled Footprints on the Moon by William Thatcher Trunk.

My former art teacher, Dick Chadwick, has also gotten into the act, creating a spectacular downtown mural for the occasion with Neil standing tall in his space suit in the foreground. Heartfelt tributes by local talent anxious to be part of the historic even. As for myself, normally a rebel and non-conformist who was lately drawn to anti-Vietnam War protests and anti-establishment rhetoric, I couldn't help but feel a rush of patriotic pride that the first man on the moon was from my hometown. I was there with the rest of the town to cheer and wave as Neil was driven by and it felt right and warm to be doing just that. 

Still the Big Cheese

Featured at this week’s celebration of the 40th anniversary of Neil’s lunar landing in Wapakoneta was a 180-pound spaceman. No, not Neil. Typical of the semi-reclusive erstwhile professor of aeronautical engineering, Armstrong gave the hometown event a miss. In his place was a work of edible (though no one was allowed to eat it) art by Sarah Kaufmann depicting a 6-foot-tall, 180-pound spaceman, carved in cheddar cheese. What was edible at the Wapak moon fest was the world’s biggest Moon Pie: A 55-pound, 40-inch diameter version of the popular and delicious commercial snack pie containing 14 pounds of marshmallow and six pounds of chocolate. It was on display for two days before the tasting held on July 19^th.

There was also a cooking contest in which all entries had to include novel ways of using – what else? – Tang (the famed vitamin C-rich powdered drink originally developed for use in space) as an ingredient.

For those who wanted to wet their whistle with something other than orangeade, however, the Thirsty Dog brewery of Akron, Ohio came up with a special beer called Lunar Lager, distributed exclusively to Wapakoneta for the 40-year celebration festivities.

For a festive week, Wapakoneta has rocked again. But even after things quiet down and the town goes back to being its sleepy quiet, rural self, the unique emblem that Neil has left us as his legacy will remain. We’re the hometown of the First Man on the Moon.