Braver than I

He had read my book, as I had read his. But that had been a long time ago—how would it read now? 

And what would I make of the dragons in the book—my uncle and my cousin’s girlfriend? The book is A Crossing and the author is my cousin Brian Newhouse. And I’m happy to say it’s just as good as I remembered it. 

Brian ventured from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic sometime in the nineties on a bicycle—but this is only incidentally a biking book. In fact—blessedly—it’s not at all a bicycling book. It’s a book about a nice guy and two lunatics. 

 “A cock tease,” was Franny’s diagnosis of Karen, Brian’s girlfriend, after she had read the book. She’s a hyper-“religious” girl who likes to test Brian’s “faith” in the Lord by proposing to sleep—and nothing else—together. So he’s lying there, stiff as a board in many senses, and she puts his hand on her breast. 

Brian? 

There is such a thing as too much Minnesota nice. And Brian, you’d crossed the line a country mile back. 

Well, eventually he can stand it no more, and goes to sleep in the guest bedroom. I’d have left the house and never looked back. Karen uses religion variously as a cudgel or a noose, and she’s no dab hand at either. When Brian can take it no more and breaks up with her she attributes the event to the work of Satan, who cannot abide the sight of two loving Christians standing together—the man leading, being a “cover” for the wife. 

I know—pass the Mylanta…. 

Well, he got an interesting character out of her, at any rate. 

And the other lunatic? His father. Just as crazy on Christ as the girlfriend, if not more. 

In the early days, my father would get a call from my aunt, saying that Bill was down in the village, preaching against sin and vice to drunks leaving the saloon. My father would get in the car and drag him home. 

“He was a really funny, high-spirited kid,” said Franny once about Bill. “Then, something happened to him, and he just turned into a religious nut….” 

Who also uses the Bible as a weapon. There always was something sad about going to their house, a farm on the Illinois / Wisconsin border. Religious tracts were everywhere—by the toilet, in the barn, on the table. A sermon was always impending, looming like an August thunderstorm. Any remark could be slash, meant to jolt you to your senses, repent, accept Jesus into your heart, get saved. In short, become as crazy as he. 

It might have been tolerable if there had been any joy, any fun in it. But this is the real fire-and-brimstone stuff, that old-time religion of talking in tongues and walking to the altar and accepting Jesus into your heart. Satan is real and he has his claws in his wife and his brother and his kids. By definition, anyone who is not saved is…. 

 …fallen? 

I don’t know. Nor do I know how he stood it, feeling that he was alone in his faith, and that his family was headed for perdition. 

Also don’t know how anybody else stood it. Because in addition to the religion, we get a guy who has an emotional straitjacket that no one can cut through. This one we know, on the other side of the family. Because Jack never got the religion, but the repression? 

Not in spades—more like the backhoe. 

“Once, my father came back from one of his trips, looked at me, and then shook my hand,” said Jack, my father. “He’d never done that before, and we never did it again. The only time I can remember touching my father….” 

Or how about this? 

“I always tear up when I hear a train horn. Makes me remember seeing my father off on trips so many times.”  

My brother Johnny took him on, as Brian took on his father. And one of the most heartfelt, poignant moments in A Crossing is the moment when Bill calls Brian and they talk at last. Brian gets it off his chest—he crossed a whole continent to get a good word out of the old man. And what does he get? A flip remark about a bad penny from a father who has judged, and judged him a failure. 

Oh, and is sorry he ever had him in the first place. 

Johnny did much the same thing to Jack. And Jack, stunned to hear that Johnny seriously questioned—hey, do you love me?—went to the hardware store, got a plumb bob, some string, and a piece of dowel. Then he went to the garage, found a board, nailed in a support, put the dowel as a crossbar, and hung the plumb bob. Next, he wrote a letter: 

Johnny, 

There are two things that are true.

 1. A plumb bob always hangs true 

 2. A father always loves his children 

 I love you, 

Pop 

Brian waded through this mess, though how I don’t know. “You were never abusive,” he tells his father at one point. 

Yeah? I think telling a kid he’s gonna go to Hell and suffer for eternity and the devil has entered him and if he doesn’t repent now he will…. 

I think that’s abuse. Brian praised Iguanas for its courage. 

I think Brian is braver than I.

Death of a Patrician

Now then, what to do about Ernest Chausson?

On the face of it, there’s not much that needs to be done. Despite the red squiggle that my computer has put under his name—and its suggestions of Caisson and Chausses, neither of whom I know—every music lover will know him. The Poème for violin and orchestra gets trotted out regularly, and his Poème de l’amour et de la mer falls not in the “pass the Kleenex” category but in the “hand over the razor blades.” Besides beautiful, it’s heart-wrenchingly sad.

So his reputation is secure—as long as there are violinists and mezzo-sopranos, Chausson will be heard.

The fact everybody knows about him is that he died in a bicycle accident. What isn’t known, however, is whether he willingly crashed himself into a brick wall—quite a metaphorical death, hunh?—or whether it was an accident.

He had been depressed for some time. And composition, for him, was no easy affair. “Not at all prolific,” states Wikipedia, and notes that he left only 39 opus-numbered pieces.

But he had a number of blessings. Money—first of all. His father had made a bundle redeveloping Paris (those famous boulevards are Chausson Père, partly). Friends—among whom were pretty much everybody in the cultural world of France at the time, as well as Turgenev and Albéniz. A wife and five children. A reputation that was just flourishing at the time of his death.

There was everything to live for.

The curious fact about depression is that it’s everything and nothing. An amputation, an infection, open-heart surgery—all that’s visible, on some level. But there’s not much to see, in depression. Until you choose to ride hard into a brick wall.

I read once that depression is the worst disease in terms of quality of life. Having spent some time in that dark forest, I can believe it.

It may also be that having too much money, or too much affluence / influence can be a curse. It didn’t hurt Trollope to have to get to the Royal Post every morning at 8AM. For all that the routine of work grinds you, it also grounds you.

Or just keeps your mind occupied. For in the music of Chausson, there’s the feeling of a man with quivering sensitivity. As well, a man with perhaps too much time to feel, a man who has passed feeling and entered into brooding. One commentator writes that if Chausson is to music as Proust is to literature.

He had many talents. He wrote, and then destroyed, a novel. He drew and painted, and had many friends who were artists. (Not surprising, then, that Chausson left a major collection behind….)

But he was stymied by that weapon that every writer or composer fears the most….

…the blank page.

Dead Dog Beach

“It’s called underdevelopment,” said a friend over coffee. He’s not only Puerto Rican, he’s an independentista, but he’s lived in the states for years now.

What did he mean? Well, let’s revisit the gentlemen who sell parking on the streets. They are indignant because the police are harassing them. The police are responding that they are merely enforcing the law. They also argue that making a statement like, “hey, gimme five bucks and I’ll make sure nothing happens to your car,” is slightly intimidating. In addition, no one “owns” the street, and these gentlemen have effectively usurped public parking and made it private. “Hey,” say the guys, “you should be glad we have a job! The government hasn’t given us a job, so we made one ourselves! Bíjhte? You see?”

You get that?

If not, you may be living in a developed country—meaning that there is a common agreement, a social contract that is understood and honored. Laws are obeyed, efficiency is the norm, the system works.

What works in Puerto Rico is the human connection. And it applies to basic things. Years ago, I had a problem with my phone. I did what any normal person would do—went to the phone company and got a work order number.

Absolutely the correct thing to do.

What did I do wrong?

I omitted step two. Because the second part of the process is to locate a pala or shovel. That’s anybody who works for—or knows somebody who works for—the telephone company. You need the work order number not to get the work done, but to tell your friend—or the daughter of the hairdresser of the assistant to the division of customer service.  

You know what happened. I waited and waited and waited some more. Then, I mentioned the situation to a student at La Fortaleza—the governor’s mansion. The words were barely out of my mouth when she was calling….

…the president of the telephone company.

I live three blocks from the mansion. And how many telephone company trucks were outside my building 45 minutes later?

Look—it shouldn’t be that way. The president of the telephone company shouldn’t be getting calls about a work order. Nobody can have a friend in every one of the hundreds of government agencies. And sending three trucks to my house that day was just a bit overkill….

A friend in Puerto Rico is like a friend nowhere else. A friend will move the firmament to help you. A friend will cheerfully pick you up at the airport at three o’clock in the morning, bringing along his entire family and all of their boyfriends / girlfriends and take you home where his wife is making an asopao (a Puerto Rican stew / soup) and everybody will crack open numerous beers and tell stories and jokes.

In short, we do people very well here.

Animals?

Err, no. Yes, there are people who are ardent in their love of animals. But at virtually every restaurant, there are stray dogs hungrily staring at you, imploring you for food. To an animal lover, it can be a shock coming to Puerto Rico.

Which is what a woman did. Christina Beckles, a former Golden Glove boxer and a major animal lover, was here on the island with her husband. A professional stunt man, he was filming a miniseries here on the island when the chauffeur of the van he was riding in deliberately ran over one of the 150,000 stray dogs that haunt the island. Shocked, he ordered the driver to stop the van, got out, and rescued a group of puppies.

They discovered that there were several known dumping places for unwanted animals. And that the island’s five shelters had a euthanasia rate of 97%. So they went to one of the most notorious of the dumping places—Dead Dog Beach—on the southeast coast.

Dead dog because the kids do a little target practice after hours, and leave their kill on the beach.

Well, Christina decided to do something about it. And so far, she has rescued 60 dogs and given them away to good homes. She started The Sato Project, sato being the Puerto Rican word for mongrel. She visits the island four or five times a year, and is in daily communication with a woman who feeds the dogs at the beach.

She is—you might have guessed—British.

Oh, and also a saint….

The Killer in Your Kitchen

It was the alert doña Taí who advised me of it.

“You ever heard of the Boston Molasses Disaster?”

Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? And if it weren’t, why, having lived in Boston for a year, had I never heard of it? Definitely something to check out.

It seems that on 15 January 1919, a huge vat of molasses exploded in the North End of Boston, creating a 40-foot wave that rushed through the city. Killed 21 people and several horses; 150 people were injured. And it did some serious damage to infrastructure. Take a look below….

Well, in my zeal to alert the international readership of this blog, I checked all this out in Wikipedia. Only to discover that there was a reference to another disaster.

The London Beer Flood.

Jump back a century or so, to 1814, in the St. Giles section of London. A vat of beer explodes, and causes other vats to explode in a domino effect. All in all, 323,000 imperial gallons (no idea what that is, but it sounds impressive…) of beer flood the city. St. Giles is an area of poor houses, with many families living in basements. These flood, and the death toll is eight.

Well, it seems that nothing is safe anymore. There are killers in the schools. Molasses can kill. Beer as well, in a way I had never thought.

With all the mayhem afoot, I’m happy to report that a great bunch of kids from Ponce, Puerto Rico, decided to cheer up a food court in their hometown. Here they are, in full swing!

An Atheist Confronts Christmas

Mostly I ignore it. Or laugh at it, which isn’t hard to do. For years I sang all the gringo Christmas carols with the worst possible Puerto Rican accent. “Jingle bells” became “jinger bears;” the “one-horse open sleigh” became the “one-whore open sleigh.”

A few things helped. I didn’t have kids, so I was spared having to do the whole thing—the shopping, the putting up the tree, the pretense about Santa. And in Puerto Rico, Christmas is an entirely different affair.

“Why are all the Christmas carols so sad,” asked a student. I knew what he meant, and tried to explain. “Imagine a time of year so dark, so cold. You’re outside, trudging home, the wind is slapping snow in your face. At last you can see the house. It’s totally dark, but you can smell the wood smoke from the chimney. Your legs are tired from the effort of pulling through the snow. Finally, finally you can see—there’s a single candle burning in the window. You’re home.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“It’s all about a light, a single light, that you see in the darkest time of the year. And there’s no reason for that light—in fact, it’s miraculous. You stare at it, this one tiny flame that at any moment can sputter out. It’s infinitely small. Yet it may become larger, grow, warm you and your family and your neighbors. You can cook. You can see. It’s this small, miraculous, filled-with-potential flame that has no reason, no reason whatsoever, to be in your life. You stare and stare, full of wonder.”

“Silent night, Holy night,” he sang. Or rather, parodied. You could have gone out for a cigarette, come back, and still not have gotten to the third line….

“Look, it’s just something in the culture.”

“But it’s a birth, it should be happy, joyous….”

I never convinced him, of course. He left thinking that we celebrated the birth of his Savior with increased and renewed fits of melancholy.

“Christmas is just the time of year when happy people make the rest of us feel more miserable,” said a depressed patient to me, years ago.

I knew what she meant. We were hanging out by the TV, trying not to watch anything about Christmas. We were ignoring it as hard as the rest of the world was shrieking it at us. Oh, except for that afternoon, when family and friends weren’t visiting.

Who wants to go to a nut house on Christmas day?

So occupational therapy had thrown the “Christmas dinner” two days before. We were on marginal staffing. Anybody who had less than a fifty-fifty chance of harming himself or anyone else was discharged.

I worked a lot of those Christmases, operating under the theory that I wasn’t going to celebrate it any way—why shouldn’t I let someone for whom it meant something have the day off? Let some woman be with her kids.

That seemed reasonable up until a couple days ago. When I looked at a guy whom I had first seen as a kid holding his own kid.

And realized for the first time—I didn’t have that.

And I wish I had.

It’s about how you define it. Kids didn’t come into the equation—they were rigorously excluded. So of course I was working those Christmases. Why sit at home and listen to the sounds of joy and delight—presents under the tree!—that weren’t there? Better to go hang with the depressives in the madhouse.

In just the way that generations of Blacks accepted Jim Crow for years, we accepted that we’d never have kids. We squared our shoulders, lifted our chins, got on with our lives. Some of us got kids into our lives as teachers or pediatricians or uncles and aunts. Some of us pretended we didn’t want parenthood. We had better—or at least more expensive—vacations.

That same exclusion worked for God. For most of two millennia, the Christian churches had some news for us gay people, and most of the time it wasn’t stuff you wanted to hear. So now, in the last 20 years, I can find a church that accepts me, embraces me.

So?

Well, yesterday was Christmas Eve, the big holiday here. All of the family was gathering. I got sick.

Was it psychosomatic? Can you really bring on severe diarrhea just by wishing to be anywhere else?

My doctor might say yes. My stomach says no.

Whatever. It was going to be very loud in a very small place. People were going to sing, play the typical percussion instruments, dance, tell jokes. It would be five or six hours of forced gaiety.

I am, by a definition that got redefined, childless and godless. I cannot see that little flame, that flicker that may die, or may grow and warm and transform and reform us.

I’m outside, looking in. But I leave the following, for those inside.

Odyssey

It was a day when the Puerto Rican Goddess chose her theme with typical exuberance.

“Our great grandfather came to Puerto Rico from the Canary Islands as a very young man without a penny. He collected wood in the fields, and then went and stood by the side of the road. Took anything anybody would give him for the wood. He saved and saved, never spending any money on anything, but buying land. He ended up a very rich man, and bought one of the first cars in a town west of here. Then he realized: he could travel for less on the públicos—the public cars. So he sold the car back to the dealer.”

A story a friend, Carlos, told me at the café. We were talking families, and how for the generation of the Great Depression it’s agony to shell out a dime they don’t need to spend.

Now, of course, they can afford all the help they need. But Carlos’s parents are still living frugally, still wanting to pass something on to their children, still worried that they’ll run through their money and be a burden.

“Your mother always wanted to go to Europe,” said Carlos’s father, when Carlos, having reviewed his father’s finances, told him just how well he had done.

They hadn’t, of course. They had stayed home and worked and gotten places their parents hadn’t—both Carlos’s parents went to the States and got Master’s Degrees, both worked, both believed passionately in getting ahead.

No time for Europe.

Oh, and no money, either.

There were similar stories in my family. Franny’s family were eccentrics, Jack came from salt-of-the-earth Norwegian immigrants. No money there, although there is a hospital ward that my grandmother had donated somewhere in Chicago. And she hadn’t had a car until she was shamed into it by hearing a rumor that the Newhouses were too poor to buy one. So she bought a Cadillac, drove it to church, drove it back, had the tires taken off, and kept it on cinder blocks in the front yard.

And like Carlos’s parents, Jack had been a big believer of getting ahead, making progress, going somewhere and making a life that was better than the person’s who had given you that life.

And then giving a hand to somebody less fortunate—but as hardworking—as you.

Which is why Jack had called up his old friend at the Urban League, sometime in the late 80’s.

He’d gotten it into his head that parents needed to read to their kids.

Well, he certainly did.

There’s a photo of me, somewhere, with Jack lying down on the couch, and me sitting on a pillow above his head. He’s holding the book that we both are reading.

So Jack had teamed up with his old buddy, and they were busy on a project involving filming parents reading a book, visible to the viewer, to their kids. At least that’s how I remember it. And since that had been Jack’s project-of-the-moment when he died, we had asked for donations to the program in lieu of flowers.

As a writer, Jack respected conciseness. He tended, however, to use the telephone as an instrument to explore what he thought. He would call his friend at the Urban League, get the voice mail, and then leave one, two or even three lengthy, pontificating messages. The Urban League guy wrote a warm tribute to Jack after he died, and finally confessed that most of the time, he had only listened to the concluding message.

Right—so it seemed to be a day organized around some simple themes: poverty, getting ahead, hard work and giving back. Which had been as the well the theme of the remarkable documentary I had seen the night before.

On the flimsiest of excuses, I had written an old high school classmate, Emily Auerbach, now a distinguished professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We hadn’t been close, but we knew each other. I was a cellist, she an oboist—we shared a lot of Shostakovich Fifth together.

Franny had mentioned her, once or twice, over the years and had attended some of her lectures. And she’s no lightweight. Margaret Drabble writes about Searching for Jane Austen, “Emily Auerbach's approach to Jane Austen is lively, engaging, and thoroughly modern. Like Austen, Auerbach wears her wide learning lightly and imparts a great deal of information in a most enjoyable manner.”

Right, Margaret Drabble—the heaviest of guns….

But I have, as you know, until the end of February 2013 to get my message out. You can have a good, comfortable death at the time and place of your choice. You don’t need to rot away in a nursing home. You can die at home with the cat on your bed on a spring afternoon—just as Franny did.

So it was time to call in whatever artillery seemed at hand. I tracked down Emily—not hard to do—and sent her an email.

Some time elapsed. She replied, apologizing for the delay. My email talking about the book I had written about the death of my mother had arrived…

…on the day Emily had buried her mother.

So it was one of those times that an email couldn’t do it. Time to phone. I did, stammered out an apology, and then began to watch the documentary for which Emily had sent me a link.

I’m happy to say that while I’ve been occupying myself with the daily trot and writing blog posts, some of my high school classmates are actually doing some real work. And no, not on Austen—which I’ve not read, but will—but on the south side of Madison. In a library—The Irwin A. and Robert D. Goodman Library. Didn’t know the library, but did recognize the building behind it.

The Madison Urban League.

Emily, it seems, never knew poverty, as I—knock on wood—have not. But her parents did, and were only able to escape it through the help of a remarkable institution, Berea College, which was free. So her parents, like Carlos’s and mine, had gone onward and upward, and now Emily was reaching out and giving a hand.

Or a handout. Or homework she had assigned and graded.

It’s called the Odyssey Project, and it’s a free, yearlong, fully accredited university course with the intention of getting people who never would have dreamed of going to the university…

…into the university.

And out, with a degree.

More than a degree. A changed life, or rather, lives. Because nothing happens in a vacuum. You’re a kid, and you watch your mother go from homelessness to university graduate. You think that doesn’t have an effect? Especially when she calls you on your skipping classes in high school.

She’s not big on subtlety, the Puerto Rican Goddess. She paints with a pretty big brush. Sometimes that’s best, I think. Sometimes the message really is simple. You can change lives. You can get ahead. If you’re sitting pretty now, stand up, look below you, reach down and give a hand.

Raf swears that there’s something unique about Wisconsin—its efficiency, its earnestness, its almost naïve belief that institutions and systems can work, and can get better. I scoff at the idea.

Until I see an old classmate in a room with thirty poor people on whom, as a colleague says, “she just won’t give up. She won’t let anyone slip away.”

And Raf passes the Kleenex to dry my tears.   

The Great Yorkshire Pudding Race

Well, it was bound to happen. Even I can’t maintain high dudgeon and moral righteousness endlessly. So when Susan sent me the email, I was secretly relieved. Enough Connecticut, enough gun control! Time to read about The Yorkshire Pudding Boat Race.

Which takes place in a little town of Brawby in North Yorkshire. Which has in turn a pub—well, wouldn’t it?—with a view of the village pond. And there, Simon Thackray in a questionable state of sobriety or ebriation (lump it, computer!), dreamed up the idea of a Yorkshire pudding race.

Well, if you have an idea like that, you gotta do it—anybody could see that. So he went off to the village baker, who put together five giant Yorkshire puddings—each with enormous quantities of eggs, flour, and milk (sorry for the lack of precision for which this blog is famed, but the damned Internet is screwing around again…).

Oh, and yacht varnish on the outside.

Now then, a nut with an idea is nothing exciting. What I love is the rest of the gang, which instantly goes along with the idea. The baker obligingly bakes the giant Yorkshire puddings. A poet friend composes a half-true, half-fictional saga, which he declaims around town. The little kids don their life jackets and set to paddle.

Does anybody at any point say, “hey, what the hell is this? Are you nuts? I’m not letting Billy sail in that damn thing! Get a job!”

Oh, by the way, the race has a beginning but no end.  

Well, things seem saner in Europe. Just look at the Spaniards! A Madrid advertising agency has just made Cecilia Giménez—you remember, the 80-year old grandmother who touched up that fresco of Jesus to such notable effect—its chief creative director.

Makes sense, when you think of it. She did catapult to the world stage, doña Cecilia, with that work of charity, which evil-minded people called Ecce Mono.

Well, she certainly can stir around a bit. She’s on Twitter! She has a Facebook page! And now she’s selling on eBay.  Here it is:

Not bad, hunh? Reminds me of a jigsaw puzzle, somehow. And it’s definitely true that landscape painting seems more her forte than portraiture. At any rate, it can be yours for around a thousand bucks, which the good doña Cecilia will donate to a Catholic charity.

Not too into giving a thousand bucks to the Catholic Church?

Right—skip it. Use the dough to go the next Yorkshire Pudding Boat Race….