September
1985
Mom
was gone; Will was gone; John was gone – each on their own respective paths.
I
was standing in the drive way on Nakoma Drive, looking. They were all there. We were kids, a family.
John
left first, then Will, then Mom – and then one day all three gone.
I turned
around and they were gone, seemingly vanished.
Dad
and I looked at each other, tears, instantly recognizing the oddness of the
moment.
I
was a sophomore in high school in Dallas.
Our
family of five was down to two – Dad and me.
And that’s
how it would be for the next few years.
It
all felt a little strange.
Not
knowing what else to do, we went to the movies.
Out
of Africa was playing, based on the Isak Dinesen novel. Dad drove me to the theater
where Meryl Streep’s booming voice filled the room:
“I
had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across
these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude
of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up;
near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful,
and the nights were cold.”
We knew
something was ending. Something else was
beginning. The world was opening up. Dad
and I went to Jerry Jeff Walker shows, talked at dinner on Greenville Ave. His best friend moved into the house for a bit.
We talked about Jung and individuation, and Beat poetry and growing and
learning and Jack Kerouac and the road and Texas and what it’s all about over
and over and over, evening after evening.
Some days or weekends he traveled and I had time on my own, or with
friends. And on it went for three unique
years, years that would cement a friendship, a time like no other, three years
of high school with Dad as my teacher and mentor, sage and advisor, here and
there. Good advice and bad, it was all
there.
Finishing
high school, he looked at me and wondered why I didn’t look back.
Dinesen
wrote:
“Difficult
times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and
beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying
about are of no importance whatsoever.”
That
was certainly the case. Twenty-nine years after that fall day, Dad
shuffled off to parts unknown. Each march, before I travel, I think of him,
rummaging through his letters, making sense of a life, of the road, a space
between here and there, between his life and Ma Ma’s and Moultrie and Texas and
Paris and Afghanistan and Hong Kong and California where we're going tomorrow. Rummaging through a dusty old box Will and I
brought from Texas, there are letters of longing and wanderlust, admonishments from
his father, love letters, and letters of friendship long disappeared, many I cannot
read. There are incomprehensible poems
on bar napkins, some typed out, half completed memoirs and other stories.
In
the summer of 1968, he wrote to his parents from the Raffles Hotel in Singapore:
“Dear
Parents,” he writes, his penmanship more clear than usual, as if still grasping
at that elusive task of trying to impress them.
“The
Afghanistan leg of the trip is over. We
toured the entire country, including the extraordinary rough northern road up shore
to the Soviet frontier. The country was
extremely beautiful. Sortov like riding through the Yellowstone Park day after
day. We came across a canyon to rival
the Grand Canyon, ie five miles across and two thousand feet from top to bottom. We covered a dessert where the lion dust was
up the to the hub of the rover….”
On
and on the story goes, recounting missing the two-year-old son John left to
stay at the grandparent’s. Dad recalls John running behind the car when they dropped
him off, begging for them not to leave him behind.
Uncle
Bruce recalled Grandad as a menacing man, although his tone was quite
thoughtful in letters to Dad.
Like
many of his generation, the war changed the old man.
It
changed everything.
As
Dad wrote shortly before he died in the second chapter of his unpublished
memoir:
“Toward
the end of World War II, existentialism was in the air. Paris had been liberated and young soldiers
were using their passes to flock to Les Deux Magots to sit at the feet of Jean
Paul Sarte. .. Dad was at an air base in
Gaya, India. Yes the town where the Dodhi
tree, under which the Buddha received enlightenment, stood. Uncle Carl and Uncle Louis were in the Philippines. Uncle Winston, the only daredevil of the
bunch, was in Moultrie, Georgia, gnashing his teeth….”
The
army thought it best one of the brothers remained home. Winston taught dad to shoot a bow and arrow,
taking him out to the woods to find a bow.
“And
I, at the age of seven, was looking out of my classroom window and realizing
that I was me. And I began just began my
eyeballs. The rest of the world was out
there and not-me. I was different from and
separated from my classmates, the classroom, the whole outside world beyond the
window. I was a separate alone entity.,
all my myself and locked inside my head.
It had never occurred to me before that I was not just an organics part
of this world with the entire rest of the world. It was lonely feeling and with came the
uncomfortable that there really could be
a not me and the world would carry on with me.
It was my first hind, certainly , not my last, feeling of existential
angst.”
That
feeling would remain throughout Dad’s days.
A typed undated poem, reflects the same theme:
“The
moon revolves around the Earth and the earth spins on its own axis and revolves
itself around the sun. The Earth wobbles
on its axis and we record it by the starts.
The sun, also a star revolves around its nebulae. Does it also wobble. And the other starts, what do they do? The watch is an instrument whose gears turn a
pointed around a dial in an even motion, and we call it time, yet in the beginning
there was no time.”
This
is the first of many poems in a folder entitled, “Tobacco Smoke: An Odyssey.”
A
note about the poems. Dad was moved to
drop out of college when he first read Howl in 1956 hanging around in
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s old bookshop in North Beach. His first poems were presumably written then,
although the first dated poems are from 1964, the last in 1990.
Dad’s
grandmother taught him to read, asking him to re read from Gods and Heros. He loved the story and wanted to find out
what happened, compelling him to think about the world of myths and mythology,
a fixation that would endure all his days.
“Books
became my steady and reliable friends,” his writes in chapter four of the unpublished
memoir, “Bookworm.” His father, a Harvard
trained doctor who scolded him often, was suspicious of his interests:
“Jack,”
he addressed his son, who’d spent his day reading and day dreaming in the back
yard.
“I
have noticed that you with your reading are moving into a dreamworld. This is unhealthy, so from now on you are not
to read any books until it gets too dark to see.”
He
hoped to kill his father, the war hero he adored.
“Mentally,
I entered a period of covert, but thorough going, rebellion with Dad, which to
was to last the next ten years. Until I
left home for good and it didn’t make any difference anyway. I longed for his approval, but not enough to
change my ways.”
Leaving
home, Dad made his way to Cambridge Mass, to Harvard, following in his father’s
footsteps, before dropping out to be a Beat Poet in San Francisco. Many of his early poems take place in North
Beach, near Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookshop. Over the next decade he moved incessantly,
back to Harvard, back to the military, back Harvard, back onto the road. Dad
would travel for the next decade, meeting mom at Ft Benning, Georgia, seeing
with his best friends, completing that Harvard Law degree and Princeton PhD in
literature.
There,
for a small time in the early 1970’s, Dad found happiness. As his writes a handwritten undated poem in
1973:
“At
that table much was debated
The pain
in my chest was alive
But were
the children
The boys
with their golden hair.
One
straight, one curly.
Benny
came into my arms.
Time
and again.
John
laughed and wanted to talk.
I sit
with them and know them and love them.
Dorothy
was there and loved it.
Loved
the matter of love and the way we all laughed.
And I
know that this time I wouldn’t.
Have
to hope to see them tomorrow.
Because
I had tomorrow.”
He
had a heart aneurism that year.
The theme
of a literal broken heart, runs throughout his poems.
He
hated being a lawyer.
“I deal
in pain,” he wrote in one poem.
“And
with every case, I try to make it so I don’t die a little.”
Still
the poems flow, sometimes drunk, sometimes angry, or futile:
“To hell
with it all, to try to understand it,
Peer
out through a fine alcoholic haze.
To
understand, perhaps to dream
To
look to laugh (cry?) to sit in a bar.
But
it has red checkered table cloths.
Have
another bourbon. Think I will.
To
laugh, and to feel like crying… that’s no literally cliché.
Tired - can you understand that – tired….
This
poems getting out of shape Mahitable, and where’s the wry humor, does the other
show too bad.”
Still,
he reflects on this mix of cultures, of his life, of the food, history, mixing
spices:
“Coagulating
the gumbo mud to bog down the soul,
Until
ripped and blown about by the flash, and light and relief of hit tears,
blinding remorse.”
Still
his heart ached:
“Open
Heart Surgery” he wrote on the same yellow legal pad from 1973.
“They
rolled me into a room
An they
shaved my body clean.
They
covered me and they were good.
They
hooked me up and explained why they did it.
And I
thought of mother.
And
chatted with them.
And
they said, “lets go.”
I said,
“ how long?
‘
They
said, “three words.”
I
learned now to murder.
To
learn how to die.”
That
night Dad prayed to God, in a familiar deathbed refrain, if you get me the hell
of this one, I’ll give my life to you. A 70- to 1 chance, Dad survived. And he found a way back into that church that
he was lost within, between First Baptist Church in Moultrie and Freudian analysis.
His
memoir includes a story from 1943 in Moultrie:
“I
remember very much one question because I knew the answer to it; “What is the
color of your heart?” … I held up my
hand. As it turned out the question was rhetorical,
and without acknowledging me, the earnest you man in front of us held up his
Bible and proclaimed, “Your heart is black, as black as the color of this
Bible.” Adults preaching that sort of
balderdash were not to be trusted and I avoided Sunday school when I could. In a way these events all occurring, between
the ages of four and six, are paradigmatic of my subsequent relations to religion. As a retired clergyman of 75, my relationship
with religion still involved a resentful resistance of arbitrary authority and
a great impatience with ignorance.”
His last
poem was drafted 18 years later, dedicated to his second wife.
“We
know that in our being,
We
have her and we have me.
9 December 90.”
I often
think of that fall day we went to see Out of Africa, beginning my second
year of high school 36 years ago, 29 years before he shuffled off, when I needed
him most. We talked about the wonder of
it all over diner. That conversation is
still going, even now, all these years later, with all its pain, heartache and recovered
love, between Brooklyn where he visited and the Chelsea Hotel and Afghanistan
and Bastrop Texas and Houston where we read
Robert Frost poems and Shakespeare and said goodbye, throwing his ashes
into the trees in the Sam Houston National
Forest all those years ago.
