YANKEE REDUX — MICHIGAN DAYS — WHAT’S IN A NAME?

 

A decade ago, I wrote a series of pieces about my boyhood love affair with the Michigan Upper Peninsula. This was the first story in that series.

When I was a boy, from the time I was about four until I was twelve, Michigan was a name that plunged me into instant joyful reverie. It was the place and the dream I longed for. I wanted to awake one morning to find that I was there and that it was to be my life from then on. Anywhere that I saw water with the blue sky and white clouds reflected in it—even in large puddles after a sudden summer downpour—the word that came to mind was Michigan and it never failed to fill me with an instant sense of yearning.

Michigan, to my mind, wasn’t a vast state with some of the major, smoke-laden industrial towns of the American North. It was, rather, whispering pine and birch forests, crystalline lakes, sandy dirt roads, cold mornings and warm lingering afternoons with Technicolor sunsets. It was a land of tawny deer and multi-colored snakes, of herons and cranes, of pumpkin seed sunfish, bass and bluegill, of perch, walleye, and the great northern pike.  It was the smell of pine pitch and wood smoke, the scent of twenty coats of dark varnish on log cabins in the afternoon sun. It was a place far from where my father was often worried sick, a place we went just for fun, a place where I felt there was nothing to interfere with our happiness. Michigan, for me, was synonymous with bliss, and Michigan was also synonymous with Lake Manistee and the surrounding area.

I should clarify that when I speak of Manistee, I’m not talking about the better-known lake in the county of the same name that opens onto that great freshwater sea that is Lake Michigan, the Manistee that has been so poisoned by years of heavy industry on its shores—logging, paper pulp mills, salt-mining, steel foundries, etc.—that consumption restrictions have been long in force for the different species of fish that still manage to survive there. No, I’m referring to the 860-acre inland lake located over a hundred miles further north, in Kalkaska County, which, when I was a boy, was about as close as you could get to the wilds.

From the time I first saw Lake Manistee and its dense and dazzling wilds, I thought of myself as being part of it, as being from rural Ohio, but also as being from Michigan—that Michigan, the one of my dreams. That landscape was mine. It belonged to me by right of enduring love and loyalty to it. And indeed, some of my most lasting memories are of the precious few vacations my family spent there.

Nor was it as if we ever “summered there”. At the time, my father and two of his brothers owned a family restaurant in my hometown and for the twenty-five years that he remained in that business, Dad never felt as if he could take any more than a week off each year. A week your “regulars” might stand for. Shut down for two, and you’d lose half of them to the competition. That was his logic. I despaired that the time we spent at Lake Manistee was so short, and counted “the days left” on my fingers each night before I fell asleep in the cabin, with a pinewood and birch fire still crackling in the potbellied stove, June bugs buzzing against the screens and the drowsy murmur of the adults still playing five hundred rum at the kitchen table. But then again, perhaps it was how limited the time was that made it all the more precious to me.

Grumpy Old Men. Most years we went with my Grandpa Murel and Grandma Alice. That was how we started going in the first place. Grandpa had been a life insurance salesman for many years, but I think the occupation he cared most about in his life was fishing (or “feeshing”, as he referred to it). His insurance debit was partly located in the area around Russells Point and Lakeview, both towns built on the shores of Indian Lake (originally known as the Lewistown Reservoir), in Logan County, Ohio. So he never went to work without rod, reel and tackle in the trunk of his car. Murel was one of the company’s top salesmen in the area, but he was also a cantankerous, quick-tempered and rebellious man, who had never let anybody tell him how to live his life or do his job. So it wasn’t at all unusual for him, in the middle of a workday, to stop for a little while to see “if the feesh was a-bitin’.” Also in his trunk were other essentials for the well-prepared angler: a see-through plastic mac in case of rain (when the crappies bit best), a battered and stained everyday greenish felt hat, a galvanized catch bucket with a lid (in case he got lucky), a pair of rubber galoshes to protect his fancy two-tone shoes, a square boat cushion to sit on so that he didn’t get the seat of his suit trousers dirty, and an old plaid woodsman’s jacket with worn-slick suede elbow patches to protect his white shirt and replace his suit coat, which he would leave in the car while he tested the waters at places with such enticing names as Sassafras, O’Connor’s Point, Turkeyfoot, Blackhawk and King’s Landing. Everyone knew him over there and he could fish just about wherever he liked undisturbed—unless it was by a Fish and Game warden, since he never was convinced of the need to buy a fishing license.

Now, for a while, Murel had a workmate at the Western and Southern Insurance Company who was even more enthusiastic about angling than he was. The man’s name was Morris Butcher, and Morris and Murel spent a great deal of their time together talking (vociferously debating, actually, since never were there two friends more like Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon in Grumpy Old Men than Morris and Murel) about the best methods for catching a wide variety of freshwater fish.

Morris was a wiry, leathery, piercing-eyed, corncob pipe-smoking man, with a sardonic gold-toothed grin, who looked like anything but a life insurance salesman. And clearly, that wasn’t what he was cut out to be. It was simply a job where a savvy judge of character, which he was, could make the money he needed to do what his heart really desired. Anyway, there came a time before he reached retirement age when Morris reckoned he’d had enough of pounding a debit trying to sell life insurance and decided he wasn’t waiting any longer to start doing what he’d always wanted to do: live on a lake and fish whenever the spirit moved him. So he bought a nice piece of land on a lake he’d discovered in Kalkaska County, Michigan, and, with the sweat off of his brow, built a summer resort there—the Buckeye Rustic Resort, on the shores of Lake Manistee. It was on Morris’s invitation that Murel had first decided to try the fishing on Lake Manistee and found he loved the place—plus, thrifty Scot that he was, the discount he always managed to wheedle out of his friend couldn’t have hurt his decision to go there year after year. Then one year he talked second son Norman (Normie, as my mother called him, Whitie to his childhood friends) into going, and a fleeting family tradition was born.

Beach and woodland at the Buckeye Rustic Resort

Getting There. My excitement would crescendo to an almost unbearable fever pitch in the days leading up to our Michigan vacations. It was always well into summer, late July or early August at least, before we could get away and the waiting was agonizing after the first year we went and I could picture Manistee in my mind. It was always there, like Shangri-La, beckoning me in the mist of memory. I remember my unmitigated sorrow and disappointment the year Dad announced that we wouldn’t be going anywhere on vacation because the restaurant needed painting and remodeling and there would be no time or money for going to the lake. They would close down for ten days and use the time and money entirely for reinvestment in the business. I was devastated.

The years we did go, I started savoring Michigan before we ever left the house, watching my older sister Darla neatly lay out the clothes she wanted to take, following my mother, Reba Mae, from room to room as she retrieved the suitcases—with their wood frames, tan fabric covering and brown leather and brass trim—from the spare closet and started to fill them, and getting together my own sparse fishing gear (the first years, no more than a section of a bamboo cane pole, a bit of line and a yellow and white cork bobber that my grandfather had given me).  Murel equipped us all since Dad always said he was “no fisherman so why buy a rod and reel,” but he would go out in a boat and drown a worm or two while in Michigan just to appease his father. However, he was such an obsessive over-achiever that if the fish started biting, it could be pitch black out, so that you could no longer see your cork in the water, and Whitie wouldn’t say die until his father forcibly grabbed the oars and rowed us back to shore. And since one was as competitive as the other, that usually didn’t happen until we were chilled to the bone and half-eaten by mosquitoes.

For the trip up from Ohio, we would steal away like thieves in the dark of night, at three or four o’clock. Though the trip back then, on two-lane roads through towns and cities, took all day, Dad had a theory about “making time” that hinged on pre-dawn departure. Which was okay by me, since The Night Before Michigan might just as well have been The Night Before Christmas: There was no way I was going to go to sleep and maybe be forgotten and left behind. But Darla sometimes had to be wrapped in a blanket and carried to the car once everything else was packed because she flat refused to get up so early.

I particularly remember a trip when we left in the middle of a fierce electrical storm. It added to the excitement since I could feel Reba Mae’s tension even from the back of the car. She was always game for a trip—though, if she’d had her druthers, it wouldn’t have been to a log cabin in Michigan and it wouldn’t have been with her father- and mother-in-law—but she had an innate dread of wind and thunderstorms. Knowing this, Whitie kidded her as he drove, by saying things like, “It’s raining cats and dogs, honey!” or, “If this keeps up we’re gonna need oars!” or, “Damn! Did you see that lightning? It’s rainin’ pitchforks!”

That was the first time I’d heard this last expression and it stuck—rather like a pitchfork—in my brain. It was cozy in the backseat, wrapped in an old Army blanket, Darla slumped on the other side of the car fast asleep under what was known then as an “Indian blanket”. (The first couple of years it was just she and I, then came our little brother Dennis James—whom we called Jimmy—who traveled between us in back, or up front on our mother’s lap). And now I had this new image of some angry god hurling trident-like pitchforks at us from on high. But here in our car, we were immune. Whitie wasn’t scared. He knew we were untouchable. He wouldn’t let anything happen to us. He deftly maneuvered us through the world’s dangers. So while Reba Mae fretted up front and chewed her Juicy Fruit to keep calm, I raised my half-closed eyes to the bottom of the window and, in a semi-dream state, watched the flashes of lightning over the cornfields, trying to imagine them as fiery-blue tridents that were barely missing our speeding supercar and grounding themselves out around us, rendered harmless by our special powers.

Whitie underscored that image, since for him, trips were serious business with numerous performance factors to be taken into account: the “time you made”, “what kind of mileage you got”, and “what you spent on the road” before you ever got where you were going. So stops were minimal, speeds were as steady as possible and gasoline was only purchased where it “wasn’t high as hell” (a penny or two more or less a gallon was enough to qualify, so that we were often dangerously close to the Empty peg before he would give in and stop). This meant that by the last leg of that long, stressful trip in the midst of a tri-state storm, he began to resemble a mad Captain Ahab, lashed to the wheel, indefatigable and invincible, forging on despite mutinous calls for stops to pee, to eat something, to, for-godsake-get-a-cup-of-coffee-at-least-Normie.

Being There. And then, like magic, the landscape began to change as we headed into the north on the Peninsula. The pitch was rolling, the air turning cool, the late afternoon sky clearing with dark storm clouds now shredded and blown out against a clean azure field. The berms turned sandy. Oaks and maples gave way to yellow birches and trembling aspens contrasting with the deep green of pines and hemlock. Log and varnished wood structures along the road replaced sawn and painted lumber and brick houses that were the norm back home. There was an outback look to everything so different from the regimented tidiness of Ohio farming communities, an individualism that rendered one house or store completely different from another and each with amusing accessories everywhere: toy windmills and pinwheels, colorful birdbaths, a plethora of garden gnomes and painted plaster stable boys, wind chimes of metal, glass and bamboo, shacky stands along the road selling watermelon, wild cherries and berries, Indian souvenirs and live bait and tackle. And then...nothing. Nothing but hills, forest and the road stretching like a ribbon before us, already drying in a stiff breeze.  I rolled down the window part way and breathed Michigan—that crisp northern air on which you could smell the clear water of a thousand lakes and streams.

After what seemed (to me) like an eternity, we left the narrow two-lane pavement and hissed almost silently along a narrower still sand road, now packed and firm from the rain. And finally, we came abreast of the red-shingled cottage where Morris and his wife, Ines (which everyone pronounced aye′-ness), made their home. We turned int atthe Buckeye Rustic Resort on the opposite side of the road.

The car had barely come to a stop when I was already out and running down to the edge of Lake Manistee, with my mother’s words of warning about not getting too close to the water on my own, lost on the wind behind me. The air was chilly from the storm and the crystal clear water was freezing cold. But shivering in the late afternoon air after the warmth of the car, I kicked off my Redball Jets, rolled off my socks and waded in just over my ankles. Smiling to myself, I gazed down at my little-boy feet through the clear water against the tawny sand and round greenish lake stones and heaved a sigh of relief. I was at home again, in Lake Manistee.

 

YANKEE REDUX — HOW I NEVER MET SORIANO

 

This year is the 26^th anniversary of the death of Osvaldo Soriano, one of Argentina’s most celebrated contemporary writers. This is a rewrite of something I wrote about him in 2008, when I first created this blog. Actually, it’s the re-edited story of how, oddly enough, our paths never crossed in the exciting and violent Buenos Aires of the 1970s or later on when democracy returned. But it’s also about how, through his work and reputation, I got to know him all the same.

 

Funny thing, I’ve often thought, how I never met Osvaldo Soriano. We were colleagues, contemporaries pretty much (he was born six years before me), and we haunted some of the same environments in the bad old days leading up to the 1976 military coup in Argentina. Our turf back then were streets where hookers, sailors, printers and newsmen were about the only people stirring long into the wee hours of the night. And we started hanging out in those places in the same era, he having come to Buenos Aires from the Argentine interior and I from abroad.

I suspect we both got into journalism for the same reason, as a way of writing every day and earning a living at it. He did it all his life, despite his fame as a novelist, becoming one of the original founders of the controversial daily, Página 12, when he returned to Buenos Aires from European exile. There—there being Paris—he had written for such noted publications as Le Monde, Libération and Il Manifesto.

Some people go into journalism because they have a passion for the news. Others because they like telling people’s stories. These others are the ones people talk about when they say they never met a journalist who wasn’t writing a novel. In Soriano’s case it paid off big-time. From what I know about him—I became a huge fan of his from the very outset—I figure his enormous popularity surprised no one as much as himself. His novels have sold into the millions of copies (you can even buy them at Walmart!) and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. And still the more asinine among critics are wont to discuss whether he was, in fact, a “good writer”. What was it Hemingway said? Something like, “Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.” Soriano probably would have agreed.

Argentine journalist and author Osvaldo Soriano

Anyway, at about the time that Soriano was writing for owner/editor Jacobo Timerman at La Opinión, I was sub-editing and reporting for editor Robert Cox at the Buenos Aires Herald. Our editorial departments were more or less around the corner from each other in the then-red light district, in the vicinity of 25 de Mayo and Tucumán. Both of our papers printed at Alemann & Compañía, which was handy and one of the biggest printers of the day. It was a location that was a stone’s throw from the SAFICO Building on Corrientes and San Martín, where major international news agencies and correspondents had their offices, a few short blocks from the local agency Noticias Argentinas, and walking distance from the press offices of all major municipal and federal government departments and ministries.

Back then, it was hard to go into any of the bars or cafés in that district without meeting up with a colleague or two. So you would have thought that Soriano and I would have been almost bound to run into each other. But, as fate would have it, we didn’t. It was hard not to run into novelist, journalist, one-time radical Peronist and later fat-cat diplomat Jorge Asís, for instance. Asís was a sort of politically aggressive omnipresence on that circuit. But Soriano was, from what I hear, a somewhat retiring if friendly sort, and I was never really much of a joiner myself. I suppose we both spent a lot more time in front of a typewriter than some, even in the days before computers made it easier still to become a functional hermit.

Dan Newland, circa 1977, Buenos Aires Herald
reporter/editor and correspondent for the London
Daily Telegraph, World Environment Report and
ABC Radio News, New York.
Photo:John Claude Fernandes

I stayed on at the Herald while working as a stringer for papers and magazines in the United States and Britain, and thus started building a career of sorts. It wasn’t on purpose. I mean, the ultimate goal was to become a novelist. It was just that, in the meantime, I was limited to the Herald if I wanted to write in my own language, and besides, once the military junta shut down La Opinión and locked up Timerman, there was basically no other place but the Herald to write a semblance of truth about what was happening in Argentina. The times grew frighteningly interesting and one year just kind of led to the next.

Soriano, for his part, graced the pages of not only La Opinión, but also of Primera Plana, Noticias, Confirmado and Panorama with his inimitable prose. But his leftist bent and his uncompromising objectivity made it dangerous for him to remain in Argentina after the 1976 coup d’état, and he made a decision to live in exile until the military returned to their barracks in 1983. He was off to Belgium and would later gravitate to Paris, where he would co-found Sin Censura with venerated Argentine exile and author Julio Cortázar.

At the Herald, our news editor and my immediate boss, Andrew Graham-Yooll, made a similar decision at about that same time and was off to London practically overnight. I got bumped up the ladder to the news editor’s post and former McLean’s Magazine journalist James Neilson was brought in as associate editor under Cox.

It was in this editorial management post that I started to get a chance to write regularly under a by-line and thus to become mildly well-known in certain circles. So it was too that I got to know Soriano for the first time, without ever actually meeting him.

It happened one midnight (dreary) in 1978, as I was sitting at my desk, struggling with the first lines of an op-ed piece while waiting for the press to roll in our new installations on Calle Azopardo. Momentarily stymied, I decided to procrastinate by going through the day’s mail that was still piled untouched on the corner of my desk. I found the usual readers’ letters (which I dutifully separated and filed for future publication), some magazines, a few brochures (from merchants who wanted some free hype and which I put in the out tray for the advertising department), a couple of formal invitations to lunches and cocktails and, finally, a small rectangular package, the size of a book. It was addressed to my name in black marker, postmarked from Spain, had no return address and was wrapped in plain brown paper, as if to conceal some pornographic content.

Justifiably paranoid as I was in those days, given the constant threats the newspaper received, I sniffed the package, flexed it, shook it, picked at it, and tweaked it a bit, before finally deciding it was probably harmless. When I opened it, what I found was a rather thin little paperback book with a title as Argentine as tango itself: No habrá más penas ni olvido. So Argentine is that phrase from the classic tango, Mi Buenos Aires querido, that it is almost impossible to translate it correctly. I mean, one could try, say, No More Sorrow or Forgetfulness, or No More Sorrow or Oblivion, but what the devil does that mean in English. It is only within the context of porteño lore—of immigrants far from home, of families separated by destiny and longing to be together once more, of perennial hope against a backdrop of barely veiled despair, of terminal melancholy turned outwardly to false cheer, of romantic abandon and unrequited love, of vengeance and remorse, of arrivals and departures, of European Americans with heartstrings stretched taut between continents—that those words make sense, even in Spanish. They would probably make sense in Italian…if they were spoken in America (especially South America). But in English, it’s like: Huh? Anyway, as a title for what was to be an incredibly succinct and immortal synthesis of something as Argentine as the phenomenon of Peronism in the 1970s, it could not have been more fitting.

I scanned the first few paragraphs and was immediately, irretrievably hooked. I kept telling myself, “One more page and back to the op-ed piece…One more page and I’ll go down to put the paper to bed…One more page and I’ll put this thing down! But it was impossible. It wasn’t until I felt the rotary press shaking the floor of my office like a small, benign earth tremor that I tore myself away from the plot and characters that peopled the story to go down and do my duty, plucking a copy of the latest edition of the Herald from the downstream end of the press and having a quick general look to make sure everything was okay before bidding the press crew good night over the din of the machinery.

Arriving home in our tiny mid-town condo at nearly two-thirty in the morning, I took up where I’d left off in the book while I ate the supper my wife had left out on the kitchen counter for me and had a glass of wine. But when I’d eaten my meal, I poured myself some more wine and kept right on reading. By the time I fell into bed around dawn, I’d read half of the book, and before I went in to work the next afternoon, I had finished it.

I was spellbound. Political analysts of all colors and nationalities were straining their intellects to the point of mental hernia to try and paint a clear if complex picture of the Argentine phenomenon. They were seeking some even vaguely objective definition of Peronism, attempting to explain in some feasible way what had gone so horrendously wrong that the country had stumbled headlong into total chaos, only to fall into the gnashing jaws of unbridled repression and ironclad authoritarianism. And by and large, they had failed miserably.

But here was Osvaldo Soriano, high school drop-out, street-beat newsman and natural genius, who created the perfect allegory. He didn’t try to tell the story from the standpoint of the big picture, where cloak and dagger political intrigue made it next to impossible to get to the core of truth. Instead he took the demise of Peronism as Perón had defined it to a tiny town in Buenos Aires Province, where everybody knew everybody else. Into that microcosm, he injected the poison of political avarice, added the catalyst of petty jealousy, sowed the seeds of gossip and doubt, and fanned the flames of a witch-hunt that would turn a quaint and even comic village into a tragic nightmare of civil strife, torture, revolt and murder.

Thanks to this incredible portrait of the Peronist phenomenon following the death of populist strongman General Juan Domingo Perón, the question of what happened in Argentina in the nineteen-seventies becomes graphically crystal-clear, with never a mention of any of the major players, except, of course, for the all-pervading, omnipresent name of Perón.

But even though the story could not have been more Argentine in every sense, it was, I realized, also brilliantly universal. As universal, say, as Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Huxley’s Brave New World, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was an allegory on politics gone awry, a regime’s running rampant, movements placing themselves above the people in whose name they acted and above systems that sought to guarantee the rule of law. It was about an ideal turned caricature, a political thought gone psychotic. It was about human foible—complacence playing into the hands of dictatorial design, rebellion providing an excuse for free-wheeling repression and about what happens when two extremes come full circle and see each other in near mirror image. It was about how no one wins, but how power is retained, at least for a time, by whomever swings the biggest club. But it was also about how moral victory can only belong to those who maintain their principles at all costs, even at the cost of their very lives.

The next day I told a guy I knew in the shop about the book. He was what one might call a closet Peronist revolutionary. He had been, rumor had it, a leftist activist before the 1976 coup. He and I often discussed politics while putting the paper to bed. He had read a lot and I asked if he had ever read anything by Soriano, since this was my first encounter with the author. He said he didn’t think so. Would I lend him the book to read?

“Sure,” I said, “but I want it back.”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’m a fast reader.”

The next night when I went down to the shop and said hello to him, he grunted, glanced over both shoulders to see if anybody was watching, reached into a dark little cupboard, where he also hid his little brown bottle of Bols Ginebra and retrieved the book from the darkest recesses. I couldn’t help laughing aloud when I saw that he had very carefully covered it in heavy black plastic sheeting, obviously to keep the title from showing through.

“Here, jefe,” he said. “Get it out of here.”

“You didn’t like it?” I laughed.

“It was great,” he whispered, “but not worth dying for.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

“You know the security guy at the front desk? He said that if I didn’t want the milicos to "give me a ride in their truck", I’d better get that subversive book under wraps, because the author was a terrorist and the book was banned.”

I lost that copy of No habrá más penas ni olvido in a move some time back, but for all of the years that it remained in my library, right up to the beginning of the nineties, it wore that black shroud. That cover, like the book itself, was a symbol of those times and of the exile from which Soriano so aptly described them.

I recently came across a picture of me when I was a news editor and foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires in the seventies and one of Soriano when he was exiled in Paris. I couldn’t help but reflect that the historical phenomenon that had forced him to flee for his life from the country he loved was the exact same one that had inspired me to remain in the Buenos Aires that he had left behind. We had both chosen to become expats because of the same thing, but for opposite reasons. Just one of the ironies of dangerous times.  

Soriano in Paris

In the early nineteen-nineties, several years after I quit my post as managing editor of the Herald and went free-lance, I had the honor and pleasure of sharing an office in Buenos Aires with a brilliant journalist and writer by the name of Claudio Iván Remeseira. We did a lot of talking, mostly about fiction and writing, when we should have been working for a living, and in the course of those conversations, Soriano’s name came up. I ended up telling Claudio the story about how Soriano’s work first came into my hands. He thought it was a great story and that a guy like Soriano would probably like to hear it. I said that chasing after a big name like Soriano (he was indeed big by then) seemed so sophomoric and unprofessional. He would surely think I was a jerk.

Years later, when I had already moved from Buenos Aires to Patagonia, and when Remeseira was about to pursue his own brand of self-imposed exile in New York, he again approached me on the subject, saying he had told my story to a guy who sort of knew Soriano and the fellow had said he was sure Osvaldo would be delighted to hear it. I said I’d think about it, because to me, hermit that I tend to be, it just seemed like a too extroverted, off-the-wall thing to do. But Remeseira managed to get me Soriano’s home phone number and made me promise that the next time I was in Buenos Aires I would give the best-selling author a call.

And I did, repeatedly, always getting an answering machine with the voice of Soriano’s French-born wife on it. Some time later, I met up with Remeseira in Buenos Aires and casually mentioned over drinks that I’d tried Soriano on numerous occasions but none of my calls had been returned.

“Haven’t you heard?” he asked. “Soriano’s got lung cancer. He’s only seeing a few close friends. They don’t think he’s going to make it.”

Even this seemed like another of his universal images, a passage from his last book, Piratas, fantasmas y dinosaurios (Pirates, Ghosts and Dinosaurs), the book’s first image, in fact, where he writes: “Every New Year’s Eve, I remember, if only for an instant, the last one my father was alive. He was wrapped up in a threadbare robe, on the doorstep of the house he rented in Santo Tomé. There was still a butt between his lips, but by now it was killing him. He raised his arm to wave good-bye to me as firecrackers and colorful roman candles burst around him. We had quarreled, I think, because I hated the holiday season as much as he did and couldn’t figure out what stupid custom made us get together to toast one another and wish each other things in which neither of us believed...”

It seemed to me a universal portrait. His father’s. My own father’s, some years later when he was dying of that same disease and I couldn’t help hating myself for having quarreled with him so often. Perhaps it is, in a way, a scene from the lives of nearly every father and son. And, in the end, a self-portrait as well.

That, I realized, was the universal genius of this author, whose life had run parallel to mine for a time, and whom I would never know.

 

A DECADE AND A HALF TOGETHER

 This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of this blog.

It seems hard to believe that I’ve been writing The Southern Yankee since 2008, or that many of my most loyal readers have had the patience to follow me for that long, but the calendar doesn’t lie…and neither do the lines in the face I see in the mirror each morning.

To celebrate this auspicious occasion, from now until the end of the year, I’ll be reviewing some of what I consider my best past stories and republishing them. Some will be run again just as they were originally written. Others will be completely re-edited or re-written.  They will all be published—on no particular schedule—with the title prefix “Yankee Redux”. I’m hoping that those of you who may have read them before, years ago, will enjoy reading them again, and that those who have only recently started following The Southern Yankee, will enjoy them for the very first time.

As always, I appreciate your reading me, and look forward to your comments.

I’m so grateful that we keep meeting up here.

My heartfelt thanks to all of you.  

 

THE THREE (OR FOUR)-DAY BLOW

 It’s summer here in Patagonia, but you wouldn’t know it by the weather we’ve been having the last few days. Whenever we get weather like this, I’m reminded of a 1925 short-story by Ernest Hemingway—part of his Nick Adams series—brilliantly titled The Three-Day Blow. I think I first read the story when I was about twelve, and I recall that the title hit me then. I was making a great effort to learn to write from the American masters, and that title was one of those that you say, “Man! Why didn’t I think of that?”

Young Ernest Hemingway on the UP

But as much as I loved it, I didn’t really get the meaning until I moved to Patagonia twenty-nine years ago. Then, I realized that the title was even more perfect than I had imagined.

In the story, Nick has hiked up to a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to meet his friend Bill. The cabin is a hunting and fishing hideaway that Bill’s father owns in the wilds of Northern Michigan. It’s early autumn, a dark, windy day for a long hike into the wilderness, but Nick arrives safe and sound. The boys plan to get in some fishing but end up holed-up in the cabin because the first big autumn storm is blowing in. The title refers to the strong winds that carry storms to the Peninsula across the Great Lakes that surround it—Michigan, Huron and Superior.

It is pretty well-known that the Upper Peninsula has some really rigorous weather. The early-autumn storms like the one in the story, eventually usher in the Arctic blast of early winters that are nearly always very long, very dark and very snowy. The Upper Peninsula, indeed boasts some of the snowiest weather east of the Rockies. It averages one hundred-twenty inches of snow a year. But it has certain areas, like Keweenaw (a small peninsula that juts out of the Upper Peninsula into Lake Superior), where the lake effect can dump as much as an annual three hundred inches on this small extension off of the large natural headland that is surrounded on three sides by what amount to a trio of inland, freshwater seas.

What seemed distinctive to me about the weather in Patagonia when I first moved here was that short, sudden downpours of the type I was used to in my native Ohio and in Buenos Aires, where I lived for twenty years, seemed to be an oddity here. Storms were often preceded by two, three, or even four days of strong winds that rocked the giant centenarian beeches around our cabin like palm trees. The winds would only die down when the rain finally arrived, crossing the mountains from the Pacific and Chile, and then stalling for days on end, soaking the surrounding forest and granite crags, before being blown on away by a new front that brought blue skies and more breezy weather.

Flag tree on the Haberton Ranch
at the southern tip of South America

The first autumn I was here, Hemingway’s title immediately sprang to mind: three-day blow. It was the perfect term for the prelude to our Patagonian storms. That—and our huge glacial lakes—is where the similarity with the Upper Peninsula ends, however. Our average snowfall is abundant in the high country, but in the lower-lying areas, far less than anything like what the UP gets. But our winds tend to be stronger and steadier. You get so used to wind, or at least a breeze, that still days seem strange and too quiet, without the music of the wind in the treetops to accompany you.

But the winds here can also be scary-strong and often uproot large old trees and drop huge branches that eventually fail to bear the stress of winds that appear bent on shoving them over. Where I live in northern Patagonia, however, is not even one of the windiest places in the region. There are places, like Río Gallegos, in the deep southern area of Patagonia, where the prevailing winds are so constant year round that they produce a phenomenon known as árboles bandera (“flag trees”), trees so tortured by strong and constant winds that they grow bent in the direction of the gale and with all of their branches on a single side.

The reason I mention all of this is that, for a month now, we’ve been having gorgeous, clear, dry weather. Back in December, I started asking my friend and neighbor, Daniel Pacheco, to make time with his team to fix my roof and sand and re-stain my cabin. I know he’s a busy guy. He and the fellows who work with him do everything from roofing and building maintenance to home construction, fencing, leach-beds and septic tanks. They also do painting and varnishing, tree surgery and logging, as well as land-clearing and lawn care. Spring through fall are his busiest times of the year.

Scaffolding waiting, immutable in the wind

But hey, we’re friends, right? I’ve known him since he was fourteen and I was forty-three, and I’ve been hiring him to do work for me since he was eighteen. So I’ve been nagging him, as I say, since December, to make some time in his busy schedule for me. About ten days ago, he finally said, “Don Dan, next week we’ll start on your place. So last Friday, he and an excellent Chilean handyman named René showed up with roofing materials we’d ordered through our local hardware owner, Félix Lowenstein. Lowenstein also rented us a scaffolding.

Daniel and René set up the scaffolding and then set to work removing the old wooden eave caps, which had rotted out in places. They sealed underneath, and replaced the old caps with anodized metal ones. René declared them “eternal”—I told him if they last another fifteen or twenty years, by any stretch of the imagination, I should be good—and then they ripped up the old galvanized main-beam cap, sealed and insulated beneath it, and then replaced it with a broad anodized metal strip, which they battened down tight with roofing screws.

Daniel Pacheco

Saturday, they had another job but said they’d be back bright and early Monday morning to start sanding. Right on time and in accordance with Murphy’s Law, however, starting Saturday afternoon, summer did one of its infrequent but not unusual disappearing acts. The temperature plummeted and winds with gale force gusts of forty to forty-five miles an hour began to castigate the cabin that evening. They continued throughout the day Sunday and then brought wind-whipped rain showers, settling into a hard squall on Sunday night that thoroughly soaked everything, including the deck and the front of the cabin.

Monday morning, Daniel demurred. The winds were picking up and, although the forecast called for strong wind but no rain, he had his own forecast and said rain was indeed coming. He turned out to be right. Wind battered the house as the rented scaffolding stood there immutable on the deck, stoically awaiting occupation, and the gale once again brought showers that lasted through the entire night.

Early Tuesday, Pacheco sent me a message saying he’d see me Wednesday, that the wood was going to be too wet to sand that day. Fortunately, winds were still gusting to twenty-five or thirty miles an hour yesterday, acting as a natural dryer for the deck and façade of the house.

This morning, I wasn’t taking any chances. At seven-forty-five, I sent Daniel a WhatsApp and asked, specifically, “What time should I expect you this morning?” Immediately, the response came: “Nine, Don Dan.”

And at nine sharp, he and René rumbled up in his 1983 F-100. They were bundled up in caps and sweaters against the unseasonably breezy forty-eight-degree chill. They unloaded an additional extension for the scaffolding, ropes and a disc-sander, and set to work.

René

This afternoon, however, we’re expecting a pleasant sixty-eight degrees and tomorrow, sunny and in the low-seventies. This feels like a new beginning to me. Like the sun is shining anew in my life as well as on my little cabin in the woods.  After a cardioversion procedure in 2017 for arrhythmia, a severe lung injury in 2018, the pandemic from 2019 through 2021 and two eye surgeries in 2022, I’m suddenly feeling fully recovered and ready to go. I’m working on a new book and we’ve started making our little cabin beautiful again after these last several years of neglect.

This morning when I saw the guys setting up for work, all I could ask myself was, “Whatever might lie ahead, whatever remains to be seen, whatever eventuality might be in store, could life be any more wonderful than it is right at this moment? 

But okay, enough contemplation. Now, it’s my turn, to get started on painting and repairing the inside of the house.

Wish me luck!  

 

THE THINGS YOU REMEMBER

Virginia and Dan in Paris, 1972

 The other day I came across a photo of Virginia and me in Paris. That was the second year we were married, so half a century ago. How time flies! On the one hand, some of the memories seem as clear as if they had happened yesterday. But on the other, it seems like it happened to someone else in another life.

That set me thinking about what it is we—or at least I—remember. Like, it’s never the monumental reality of being given the opportunity to live in the cultural center of the world, or even that what I recall was part and parcel of three years of my life that I handed over to the military. No, it’s the little memories. Things that happened on a day to day basis in the midst of one’s reality at the time. And I’ve realized that it’s all like that. That your life is all about what you’re doing while you’re making plans for what to do with the rest of your life.

At the particular time of this photo that I found, we were living, courtesy of the US Army, in Germany, a short distance by train from the French border and about five hours from Paris. It was, perhaps, the most bohemian time of our lives because I’d made Spec-5 (sergeant’s pay grade) by then and was doing some playing with a jazz trio on the side, so we were feeling more flush than at any time since we’d married in LA the year before. If we weren’t playing a tour —“we” being the 30^th Army Band that I was assigned to, attached to the 32^nd Army Air Defense Command under Major General C.J. Levan—our days were usually short. I mean, let’s face it, the “lifers” weren’t any more anxious than we three-year Regular Army and two-year draftees were to work a full day. So there were a lot of hours in the day to just enjoy living in Europe. And since we played tours where we were on the road during weekends and holidays, we also racked up a lot of compensatory time off. That meant we frequently had three, four or even five days off when we hung our soldier suits in the closet and lived like college kids bumming our way around Europe.

Barracks rats - Newland and Hardin (foreground)
Berg and Orcutt (rear). A little foosball after work.

For me, it was sort of like “a junior year abroad” without the benefit of the family money or university education that usually go with that institution. All I had to do in return was the job my Uncle Sam paid me to do—that, and put up with what Whitie, my dad, would have called “the usual Army chickenshit.” The rest of my time was mine to do with as I pleased.

Before Virginia arrived, I spent a month alone, living on the base. I stayed busy after work looking for an off-base apartment for us to live in, since despite being Regular Army, I wasn’t eligible for on-base housing. Those official quarters were only for guys who were already career soldiers and had “re-upped”. But living off-base would make the illusion of bohemian life all the more authentic.

For that month, I lived in a barracks, but nothing like the rough wooden barracks I’d lived in as a single soldier during two of my earlier Stateside postings. This was a former German barracks (Kaserne as the Germans call it) and was a large three story stucco-sided brick and mortar building with a cadre office, storage and shops on the bottom floor and work area, sleeping quarters and spacious bathrooms on the upper floors. We rehearsed in the work area, and there were also foosball tables in there for after work. We barracks rats slept on single beds instead of bunkbeds and each was partitioned off with lockers where we kept our clothes and gear.

Kleber Kaserne - US Base at Kaiserslautern

I made friends right away with a group of other three-year RA troops—Tressler, Toy and Rice. Rice and Tressler were cultured guys, sound intellectuals and Yankees like myself. Toy was a Kentucky boy, born and bred, with excellent musical training and a passion for orchestral trumpet. Hardin, a six-foot-five, two-hundred-fifty-pound Texan who drove a Fiat 1100 that he barely fit into and put on like a shirt when he drove it, was the comic relief. He played baritone horn and was a pretty terrible musician. So you would have thought he’d be a really good soldier, but he wasn’t that either. He simply didn’t have much of a career choice, since everybody in his family, including his aunt and his mother, were, or had been, in the Army. Well, almost everybody. I once asked him if there was anybody in his family who hadn’t been in the Army.

“Yeah,” he said. “My daddy’s little brother.”

“How’d he manage that?” I asked.

“Died when he was fifteen.”

“So that’s the only one, in the whole family?”

“Well, there’s my momma’s older brother. He’s kinda the black sheep.”

“What is he, a pacifist?”

“Nope. A goddamn jarhead Marine.”

Hardin had tried to dodge the draft for a while. Wanted to sow some wild oats before he’d inevitably have to join the family business. So he went down and got lost in Juárez for a time. But he couldn’t stay out of trouble. Got into a fight in a Mexican cantina—something about cards and a señorita, he claimed—and ended up in jail.

His daddy, who was a command sergeant major, had contacts in Mexico and Hardin, after a few days in the clink, availed himself of a phone call to ask his ol’ man to come bail him out. The next day a couple of American MPs showed up. When they stood in front of his cell looking at him like he was a cockroach, he said, “Hey guys, what’s up? Y’all here to take me home?” one of them said, “Not so fast Hardin. Your ol’ man gave us specific orders. We take your ass outa here and accompany you to the recruiting office in El Paso, where you will sign up. Otherwise, pal, Top says you can stay here and rot for all he cares.” And that was how he’d enlisted.

Tressler and Rice both despised Hardin, and Toy was simply embarrassed by him, but I usually found him a comedic addition to any social gathering. He was always saying things like, “Man, I think you could fuck up a steel ball with a rubber hammer.” Or, “Y’know, son, I think the best part o’ you run down yer daddy’s leg.”

Luxembourg

I recall one occasion when I was picked as dance drummer with a four- piece combo to play at an elegant garden party thrown for the American consul on the grounds of a mansion in Luxembourg. Hardin went along as our driver in an Army-issue, olive drab station wagon.

The Luxembourg government treated us like VIPs and assigned a minor ministry official to accompany us to at a very nice restaurant when the garden party was over. I’d gotten my Spec-5 promotion by then so was the ranking member of the group. My colleagues and I made polite conversation with the gentleman accompanying us while we had drinks before our food arrived. Hardin, who was a notorious beer-drinker, was out of sorts because, as our official driver, he couldn’t drink—I made sure he didn’t—and was having a Coke.

Bored with the conversation and anxious for the food to arrive, during a lull he said, “Scuse me, can I ask you a stupid question, sir?”

The other four of us cringed at the thought.

But the polite official smiled, turned his full attention to Hardin, and said, “But of course, please do!”

“I know Luxembourg’s not very big, but just how big is it?”

“You mean surface area?” the official asked and Hardin nodded. “It’s about, but not quite, one thousand square miles.”

Hardin stared at him for a beat, as if he thought maybe the guy was pulling his leg. Then he whistled, shook his head and said, “God-damn! You know you could fit six o’ this little bitty country in my county back in Texas?”

Lunch was pretty quick and quiet after that.

The things I remember best about barracks life there, however, were the little get-togethers after work with my buddies. There were only two private rooms in the living quarters. All of the ranking NCOs but one had on or off-base quarters of their own to go home to after work, so it was just us barracks rats who stayed behind. The one room was occupied by a lifer buck sergeant known to us as Sky King, who was always polite and friendly but never mixed with the rest of us and never left the base except on assignment throughout his entire tour. The closest he came to knowing anything about Germany was the minibar type fridge in his room that he kept chock full of a cheap locally brewed beer called BBK.  

My friend Rice was my same rank but I was a newbie and he was “short” (about to be discharged). He had a year’s time in grade on the rest of us so, other than Sky, he was the ranking NCO at night and had dibs on the room. That was where he, Tressler, Toy and I would retire to after work to play poker or Yahtzee. As the only Midwesterner, I also introduced euchre into our game mix and they all became immediate fans.

Typical Gasthaus

But it wasn’t really about the cards. It was about getting together and chewing the fat, sharing common interests, usually while enjoying good Chianti that we could buy cheap through the PX on post.

The thing I remember best, though, was the little supper adventure the four of us would have when we got hungry. We’d been warned to stay out of the woods behind the base. There was a Gypsy camp in the middle of it and it was considered an insecure place for soldiers. However, on the other side of the woods and across a two-lane highway, there was a wonderful gasthaus that made the alleged risk worth it. The Army never bothered to mend the hole in the fence that we made to slip through, so we had our own back door off the base.

The food there was inexpensive and absolutely delicious German fare. It was a homey atmosphere with a narrow dining room occupied by one very long and broad table and a few other smaller ones. It was attended by its owners and when you sat at the table, the lady of the house, in typical dirndl, apron and head-kerchief, would set out heavy ceramic plates and sturdy stainless silverware that she retrieved from a large hand-carved china cabinet and sideboard that had probably been in the family for generations. Typically, she would offer us schnapps and shot glasses while we waited for the meal and then bring us beer with the food. My mouth still waters at the thought of her wonderful Jägerschnitzel with mushroom gravy, or her sausage and homemade kraut with hand-mashed potatoes. Whatever the dish, it was preceded by hot soup, usually pea, and was served with homemade sourdough bread and butter.

As for the Roma people in the woods, with their luxurious tents and colorful wagons, they didn’t bother us and we didn’t bother them. They got so used to seeing us that they’d wave and bid us guten Abend as we passed through.

Virginia in the window of our attic flat
in Kaiserslautern

Even after Virginia arrived and we moved off-base, I, and sometimes both of us, would still get together some evenings with my buddies, but in downtown Kaiserslautern, at a place called Spinnrädl (Spinning Wheel). To Americans like us, it seemed utterly amazing that we were guzzling beer and schnapps in a tavern where workers had been doing exactly the same thing daily for well over two hundred years—or perhaps longer since that was just how far back the first historical reference to that place dated.

Anyway, about the picture…

The Spinnrädl, a centuries-old tavern 

That picture was from our first trip to Paris. We had been doing some local sight-seeing in Germany, taking daytrips to Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Worms, hiking to nearby Frankenstein Castle, taking the bus or train on a short trip to Landstuhl and so on. We had ventured in to France to see the incredible Metz Cathedral, but that was still close to home. Voracious readers that we were, Paris was the city that both of us were dying to see. That day when my then brand new Cannon Quickload camera snapped the portrait of us, I remember in vivid detail.

We had taken the night train from Kaiserslautern, and it was in the grey light of early morning that we were seeing Paris for the first time. Our first real glimpse of it was the dauntingly huge Gare de l'Est train station, with its endlessly sprawling switchyard. For Virginia, born and bred in Buenos Aires, it was exciting because it was Paris. But her own city was long known as “the Paris of South America” so the sheer size of the urban architecture wasn’t intimidating for her. For my part, however, I can still recall being nervous as a dog in a canoe as the train made its bumpy way over the numerous switches that lined it up with its assigned track in the station, and the butterflies that suddenly took flight in the pit of my belly as the train pulled into the impossibly high-ceilinged station proper, from which our Parisian adventure would begin.

Garre de l'Est, Paris

I had started traveling at eighteen. I had been to South America twice and had traveled from coast to coast with the Army. But the small-town boy in me shrank at the sight of the City of Light. This was Paris, a city that was previously a mere fantasy, a place I knew only through the descriptions of the likes of Hemingway, Joyce, Orwell, Henry Miller and Georges Simenon. I was glad to have Virginia there to snap me out of my daze and get me moving because the mere emotion of arriving had me so mesmerized that I could barely make my way out of the station.

I have vague sketches of Paris in my brain, the rainy Paris of impressionist paintings. There are clear snapshots of certain street corners and neighborhoods. I see the Arc de Triomphe not as a clear-cut memory but as a picture. And I’m not at all sure that it is a memory, but perhaps actually a photograph I’ve seen of it. The image of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica is, instead, authentic, since I found its interior, at least on that rainy day, somewhat dark and forbidding, and that’s exactly how I recall it. I remember little of the interior of Notre Dame, but I clearly recall standing on an outer balcony marveling at the gargoyles along the sides of the building and the view of the Seine from up there.

The Louvre, for its part, was nothing short of overwhelming. I can see a few of the great works housed there in my mind’s eye, and the art students who gathered with their sketchbooks for hours on end to try and capture the essence of one work, one detail or another, with the goal of learning by replication. But what I remember best about that unique treasure trove of great art was how neither Virginia nor I could sleep that night because our brains were overloading with the colors, textures and images that we had taken in as we tried to see as much as we could in a single day. On subsequent visits we learned to concentrate on a single area since trying to take in the Louvre in its entirety is a little like trying to drink Lake Superior in one sitting. I could have gone every day for years and only scratched the surface.

But what comes most clearly to mind when I remember that, and subsequent trips to Paris, aren’t the landmarks that tourists will ask one another about: Did you see this or did you do that. Instead, I have a sharp memory of the down-at-heel hotel we stayed in on the Left Bank. I remember the room with its creaky wooden floor, tall sooty windows overlooking a narrow, crowded street, a four-poster bed with a dusty, fringed canopy, a lavatory and mirror close by, as well as a bidet, but the bathroom—a rudimentary shower and a toilet with a roll of toilet paper that resembled nothing as much as birch bark—down the hall and shared by a few other occupants. And the thing is, I don’t remember it as horrific, which it was by almost any standard, but as romantic—as a room Miller might well have stayed in during his lean early Parisian days, or as that of almost any Lost Generation artist before they achieved fame.

I also have a clear memory of the Jardin du Luxembourg between the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain, which is where the “Jurassic” selfie in question was shot. I can visualize the beauty and color of those verdant gardens on the morning when we went to walk there. I remember thinking about how Hemingway would take his infant son John, whom he called “Mr. Bumby”, in his baby buggy for a stroll in the park and, along the way, would surreptitiously catch pigeons, wring their necks and slip them under the covers with the baby so that he and his wife Hadley could broil them later like Cornish hens.

Sidewalk café in Saint Germain

I recall a lovely sidewalk café in Saint-Germain where we breakfasted on crusty croissants with big bowls of coffee and milk, which, to our surprise, also included a melted bar of chocolate. And leaving that same café, I remember colliding with a pretty young French woman in stylish clothing who smiled and said, sincerely, “Je suis désolée.” It was the first time I’d heard the phrase, which Virginia translated for me, and I thought it must be the most wonderful way in any language to say, “I’m sorry.”

My memories are similar about other places we visited during the fourteen months that we lived in Europe. They aren’t “big picture” memories, but tiny moments.

Like when our band was one of several that marched in a parade through a small town during the Fasching (Carnival) holiday and every time there was a pause along the route, florid-faced ladies from the town would mix into our ranks and serve us shots of cognac or schnapps.

We played at a beer tent afterward, where the organizers showed their appreciation by plying us with free locally brewed beer or mugs of cold white Moselle wine. People all danced, changing partners frequently, even when we played marches (Alte Kameraden—Old Comrades—was always a favorite, but they loved the Sousa marches as well), and one chunky man in his sixties even cheered us on as he climbed up onto one of the tables, bumping and grinding to the music as he stripped down to his undershorts. Nobody got upset or tried to stop him. Everyone was having too good a time, while outside the tent, wherever there was a semi-secluded spot, couples were making out or making love as others walked discreetly on by. The beer tents of Fasching and Oktoberfest quickly dispelled any learned cliché I ever entertained about the Germans being a cold and stodgy race.

The bohemian life - picnicking in Bad Homberg

I have many memories of certain places in Germany that I visited numerous times—Heidelberg, for instance—but there were many daytrips that now afford me a single, simple memory. One of these was a visit with an Army buddy and his wife, who were also our neighbors, to a town called Bad Homburg, located near Frankfurt.

I recall it because, despite the fact that its history dates back to the eighth century, there were no remarkable tourist attractions there. Long a residential haven for the upper classes, it was best known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for its thermal waters and the spa that gave it its modern era designation (Bad, meaning bath). My memory, however, is of a lovely, sunny afternoon, a relaxing walk with our friends and a little picnic of some good Gouda cheese and French bread that we had brought along and a bottle of wine that we bought there, and that we enjoyed in the local park. It was all very impromptu and unplanned, which was what made it so special. 

Another memory of an impromptu picnic is from Genoa. We were staying at a threadbare little pensione that was high enough that the picturesque view from the balcony was of the surrounding hills and the orange-tiled roofs of the many old buildings. I remember little about the room except that it had a tiny balcony with a wrought-iron rail on which we hung our perennial jeans to air out at night. We were traveling light so didn’t have a lot of clothes—pretty much what was on our backs and a single change of underwear and sock. Everything we could, we rinsed out and let it drip dry while we slept. But jeans take a notoriously long time to dry, so they didn’t get washed. By this far into the trip, they were, thus, getting pretty gamey. A nightly airing helped a lot.

The other thing that I remember about the “accommodations”—clearly a figure of speech here—was that bathing was done on another floor in a bathroom with a large claw-foot tub. But the first time we decided to have a bath, we found that the faucets had no handles to turn them on. I went down to the concierge to ask him what the story was. Using pantomime and a few words of Spanish since I knew no Italian, I eventually managed to get him to understand that I wanted to know where the hell the faucet handles were for the tub.

Old Town section in Genoa

As if a lightbulb had switched on, he suddenly smiled, reached under the counter and handed me two handles, one for hot and one for cold. I was given to understand that it was how he made sure no one left the water running and how much time any occupant spent in the bath. So much for a leisurely scrub!

The picnic came after a morning of exploring the strange and ancient city from which Columbus had first set sail for the New World. Over the centuries Genoa had expanded up the steep and varied terrain that surrounds the port. So what I mostly recall is narrow, tortuous streets that twisted and turned in keeping with the lay of the land. Some leading down into the bowels of the city where shopkeepers’ lights are lit the whole day through and where sunlight seldom makes a real dent.

It was down in there that, not having eaten breakfast and feeling quite hungry by forenoon, we stopped at a rosticceria, where we bought a small, beautifully roasted chicken. Further along, we came to a bakery, where we bought a large, crusty shepherd’s loaf. Making our way upward, we came across a wine store where I bought a bottle of deep red spumante wine. Looking for a lovely place to have our lunch, we ended up climbing for nearly an hour into the hills surrounding the city, and there, found a beautiful park overlooking the many layers of the Genoa landscape as it tumbled toward the glistening harbor. There, near some ancient and crumbling stone walls, we flopped down cross-legged in the grass and, eating like savages with our hands, devoured the crispy chicken and delicious bread, and washed it down with the sweet, red spumante.  Seldom have I found a meal more delectable.

In Monaco I remember little or nothing about the Grimaldi’s palace, or the many yachts in their slips. But I vividly recall the pleasure of having nothing to do but sit on a castle rampart above the sea feeding the gulls that would pluck pieces of French bread right out of my fingers.  

Feeding the gulls in Monaco

In Milan, I remember the spectacular sight of Il Duomo Cathedral by night. But I have a clearer memory of wandering with Virginia, quite hungry, and quite by accident, into a wonderful neighborhood pizzeria where we stuffed ourselves on thick-crusted pizza alla Margherita with black olives.

 My recollection of a visit Virginia and I paid to the famed city of Cannes has nothing to do with either the beaches and marinas of the Riviera or the yearly film festival that the place is known for. Instead, I remember a pleasant park flooded with golden light at sunset as we sat on a bench there and watched the people go by.

I also remember our room in an old hotel with tall narrow windows that looked onto that park. Each window had a set of vintage wooden jalousie shutters. I was looking out the window as night fell when I heard a knock at the door. When I opened it, I was facing a tall, expressionless, hatchet-faced man who reminded me of no one as much as Lurch, the Addams Family’s butler. Without a word, he nodded toward the windows. I stepped aside to let him in. He strode across the room, opened each of the two windows, and, in turn, pulled closed the shutters with a bang and latched them. Then, just as silently and expressionlessly as before, he crossed the room and left without a single word. And the following night, at precisely the same hour, he did exactly the same thing. Clearly, having the shutters open or closed wasn’t a question of the occupant’s free will.

Another memory is of getting off the train, on a whim, at the Golfe-Juan-Vallauris station just three miles from Cannes and close to Antibes. There had been no plan to do that. It was all about Virginia remembering that she’d read something somewhere about the town of Vallauris and couldn’t recall what it was. It was nearly noon when the train left us and we started hiking up a winding road from the coast to the town proper. I can still feel the warm sun on my back and shoulders as we climbed.

That turned out to be a pleasant afternoon spent visiting the same streets Pablo Picasso had walked for the seven years that he lived there. Although today Vallauris has grown to the place that it is essentially a suburb of Antibes, back then it was a town of twelve thousand, barely larger than it had been seventeen years before when Picasso had last lived there. An artist of incredible scope and energy, Picasso didn’t move to Vallauris until he was sixty-seven. But his vitality and artistic longevity were such that his life and work would span nearly another quarter-century.

Picasso in his Vallauris studio

That afternoon, on that unexpected side-trip, we learned that the French town was best known for its pottery, and that medium was what would pique Picasso’s curiosity. He enthusiastically embraced the local potters, became their disciple and quickly learned from them the best ways to turn earth into art. Once he had made clay a medium of his own, he became obsessed with pushing beyond the known limits of ceramics into new frontiers. Vallauris became, in a very real sense, a place where the already celebrated painter and cubism pioneer re-invented himself as an artist.

Vallauris

His closest collaborators in those days were Suzanne and Georges Ramie of the Madoura ceramics shop. With them, Picasso created art objects that are among some of his most sought-after—plates, dishes, jugs and vases. Ever the painter, although his interest in earthenware itself was keen and inventive, his most powerful focus was on the firing process and everything that went with it. He worked with enamels, glazes and metal oxides in ways that they had never been used before to create stunningly decorated fire-clay ceramics. But he also created a new ceramic medium called white paste, which was decorated in relief and required no glaze.

It was also in Vallauris where the artist gave rein to yet another new passion: linocuts, the art of engraving linoleum block as a print-making medium for poster art. It was while in Vallauris that he would revolutionize this art form as well by introducing innovative designs and more vibrant colors than had ever been used before. Prolific as always, the combined ceramic and linocut works that Picasso produced there number into the thousands.

War and Peace

I recall being curious about a unique statue that stands in the main square of the town. That too turned out to belong to Picasso, perhaps one of his strangest and most controversial works: Man with Sheep. It was the artist’s first sculpture. He created it in 1943 and 1944, while living in Nazi-occupied Paris. He gave it to the town of Vallauris in 1949, in gratitude for the warmth shown to him during his first year living there. We later visited a chapel which is dominated by another Picasso work, entitled War and Peace, an abstract diptych mural that occupies the arched ceiling and both walls of the tunnel-like room—another gift from the artist to the town he clearly loved.

A momentary decision to get off the train, a whim to see what we could see, and an afternoon in Vallauris became another of those memories that last a lifetime.

These are the memories that we have, the ones that are less about the big picture and more about living every day, the ones born of surprises.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: “Life is a journey, not a destination.” It’s all about the ride, not about “getting there”.