The State Journal Goes Underground

For a considerable time yesterday, I considered the improbable but apparently true idea that I was dealing with a newspaper with an unlisted number.

Nor was that the strangest part of the affair. The real question was why the death of Marvin Rabin had hit me so hard. I knew he was in his nineties, I knew that his hearing was bad, but nothing in the video I had seen looked like a man who could die. Is that silly? Yes, but there’s nothing logical about grief.

And so there I was, sobbing in the café, remembering the Saturday mornings, remembering the temper tantrums followed by impassioned appeals—we were better than that, we could play it better. Then I remembered the toilet bowl brush, and I lost it again.

I had house-sat for the Rabins, and everyone had warned me—Rhoda, Rabin’s wife, was neurotically attached to her house. In fact, Rabin had threatened more than once never to take Rhoda anywhere: she spent the whole vacation worrying about her house.

Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo… runs an expression in Puerto Rico: translated loosely, it means the devil knows more due to old age than for being the devil. If true, I must have an old young man, because I knew what I had to do. And that was?

Well, I went out and bought a notebook, and arrived promptly at the door. And for the next two hours, I terrorized Rhoda. We started in the kitchen, where I instantly confronted her on the sea of medicines next to the stove. And where, I asked her, was her expiration medication log?

Rhoda’s eyes dilated.

I didn’t let up—I quizzed her on everything, we probed ever corner of the house. I took ceaseless notes, sighed frequently, frowned incessantly. I made a British nanny look like Santa Claus.

“I don’t imagine you’ll need to come in here,” said Rhoda, at the entrance to the master bedroom. But I was having none of that.

“I need to inspect every room of the house if I am to be responsible for it in your absence,” I told her, and so we spent ten minutes opening the curtains, making sure the closet doors were hung correctly, noting any stains on the walls and carpet.

And then we came to the bathroom, which of course was spotless. I decided to pounce.

“And where is your toilet bowl brush?” I couldn’t keep the acid out of my voice.

Rhoda blanched.

“I really don’t know,” she stammered, “Joyce—the cleaning lady—does…”

I had to interrupt.

“You don’t know how your staff cleans?”

Two days later, I got the report from Martha, the daughter. Rhoda had gone to bed for three hours after the inspection. And ten minutes after I started the housesitting, I ventured up to the bathroom.

Do I have to tell you?

I will tell you—if you are lucky enough not to know—that this is grief. Because there’s no middle, nothing except the extremes. Which is why I was sobbing, yes, but also laughing hysterically yesterday. Nor was I in any control, especially when I heard Ralph’s voice—sounding completely the same as his father’s. Oddly, he was doing better than I.

Not surprising—that’s another thing about grief. You often find yourself comforting people who are calling to comfort you. So what do you do? Well, it may sound heartless, but we took turns answering the phone, after Franny died.

What else happens? Well, for me, I get jittery, to the extent that I can’t type. So how, yesterday, was I going to do Bach and Beer? Could I play the cello—no, I decided, and then told Lady, the owner of the café, who had been hugging me and crying with me and who, like a good Sanjuanera  had come down the street to call up to me in my apartment to see if I was all right.

Why was I there? Because I wanted to be alone, and the moment I was, it wasn’t right., but I didn’t have the energy, somehow, to get up and go back to the café. But seeing her made me realize—I have to get out of the apartment.

Then I was hungry, and didn’t feel like asking for anything. Eventually I realized—the kids were eating pizza.

“Naïa, do you think some of that pizza wants to be eaten by me?”

“Ask it…”

Then I became obsessed—I had to call the paper. What kind of son of a newspaperman could forget to call the Wisconsin State Journal? I could feel Jack frowning down at me. At least I hope it’s down….

And here I confess—I couldn’t find the number anywhere. And today, when I was thinking better, I finally got it through switchboard.com. And why there? Because in all of Madison.com (the electronic version of the State Journal), I couldn’t locate one number, except for the individual reporters. Those were there, but where was the city desk, dammit?

“People forget you when you get older,” said Franny matter-of-factly. Not quite true—Facebook went wild, and my post on Rabin got 341 hits (a normal day is 100).

Nor is it the lack of a telephone number for the city desk, but doesn’t a city of over a quarter of a million have an arts editor? You know, somebody who goes to concerts and knows everyone artistically in town?

I spoke to somebody today—a nice Wisconsin person who cheerfully took my call and promised to follow through.

That stiff breeze, chilling you from the north? It’s my father—Jack—up there spinning….

A Journalist and an Historian

Well, he’s an interesting guy, with an interesting set of beliefs. And he’s much in the news, now, since he has taken Edward Snowden’s revelations public through The Guardian and The Washington Post.

But the hour-long interview that I just watched was filmed two years ago, when Glenn Greenwald was relatively unknown, and had just published his book, With Liberty and Justice for Some. The central premise of the book? That our political institutions have become so corrupted that we now have a two-tiered system of justice—one for the rich and powerful, the other for the rest of us.

A defining moment for Greenwald was Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. From then on, the idea that we had to “look forward, move on, achieve closure” meant that every president since then joins the old boys network. A classic case, according to Greenwald, was how even in the interregnum of winning the election and the inauguration, Obama was slithering out of persecution of the Bush administration for war crimes, for lying to the American people and to Congress, for launching an aggressive war. Which, by the way, was the key crime of Adolf Hitler that the United States and the world charged in the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.

And it’s a clear path—the lack of prosecution of Richard Nixon lead to the lack of persecution for Irangate and high officials in the Reagan administration, the invasion of Iraq in Desert Storm, the torture and abuses of human rights in the Bush years. And as Greenwald points out, anybody who suggests that Bush be held to justice has instantly self-marginalized himself.

What’s particularly curious is—where’s the outrage? We are, after all, living in the most connected era in history. I can now tell you that in Syria, the foreign minister has appeared to agree to demands to allow international inspection or control. A hundred and fifty years ago, people were still fighting in wars after the truce had been declared.

By now, everyone can see the problem: we have an oligarchy. Members of Congress spend half of their time—minimally—struggling to get elected. And that money doesn’t come from you and me. Unless, of course, your last name is Rockefeller….

The other curious thing is how easy it should be, hypothetically, to solve the whole thing. Look, other governments have found out or figured out ways to take the money out of politics. Why can’t we?

We could start with simply funding public elections. Punto—oh, and can we put an end to television advertising? Debates, yes—but a president or senator isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a product. Though they have become so….

The next thing to do would be to throw out all the fancy voting apparatus and go back to the paper ballot and the cardboard box. The voting machine industry, by the way, is highly technical, extremely expensive, and is dominated by about three companies, all headed by rabid Republicans.

We also are going to have to increase minimum wage. Oh, and speaking of which—and speaking also of the corrosive effect of money on public policy—here’s Bill Moyers on the other NRA.

In June, the National Restaurant Association boasted that its lobbyists had stopped minimum wage increases in 27 out of 29 states in 2013. In Connecticut, which increased its state minimum wage, a raise in the base pay for tipped workers such as waitresses and bartenders vanished in the final bill. A similar scenario unfolded in New York State: It increased its minimum wage, but the NRA’s last-minute lobbying derailed raising the pre-tip wage at restaurants and bars. The deals came despite polls showing 80 percent support for raising the minimum wage.     

Rounding back to Greenwald, he argues that we have a system in which the powerful get away—figuratively and even occasionally literally—with murder, whereas the poor are more easily incarcerated than ever.

OK—jailing is one thing we do to the poor. The other thing we do—as I learned in class today—is to use them as cannon fodder. That’s what my student taught me, as she showed me a photo on her iPhone of her nephew, who had just enlisted in the army.

Well, he thought it was all he could do. He had just turned 18, he had bad grades and couldn’t go to the university, and jobs? Are you kidding?

I tried to be hopeful; my student was near tears. But the reality is that if her nephew comes back, his life may be just as hellish as it was in Iraq. It may, in fact, become something like Iraq 2.0, with the terrors being internal and systemic, as opposed to external and random.

Oh, and the people who wrecked the system, so that there are no jobs, and kids have to off to war? The criminals in the thousand-dollar suits? They’re free, and riding a soaring stock market right now….

Greenwald also makes the point that we have blended the lines between the public and private sectors. And nowhere is this more true than in “national security.” Who would have imagined a world in which we have out-sourced granting security access? It’s madness.

And Greenwald’s observation that journalists have changed is interesting—instead of the hard-bitten, cynical, go-after-the-bastards-and-damn-the-costs guys of the past, we now have people who are employed by corporations, and who know how the corporation works. Which—news flash, here—is by smiling, going along with the herd, ducking your head and not rocking boats.

Well, I came upon Greenwald by listening to “Conversations with History,” a great, hour-long program coming out of UCLA. Yesterday, I watched William Cronon, the president of the American Historical Association and a professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Today was Greenwald.

And both men were inspiring. Oddly, both men spoke briefly of the necessity of hope. Given that Cronon is a specialist in Environmental History, and Greenwald in First Amendment and Civil Rights, one wonders…

Which man has the most reason to be hopeful?

Or the most need?

Una Dama, Though Cynical

“Quizzical,” I thought, when I first saw Antonio Quiñones Calderón. There was something—perhaps an ever-so-slightly raised eyebrow—that suggested puzzlement. Or perhaps it was a newspaperman’s curiosity mixed with slight anxiety?

I have a minor talent—I put people at ease. He sat down and told me his story.

And what a remarkable story. Tony grew up in a small town on the west side of the island seven decades ago; his father died either before he was born or just afterwards (can’t recall). At any rate, he grew up early assuming responsibility.

As well as writing. So he wrote his way through high school, and then headed off to work—he had to help his mother and sister back home. And where does a writer who needs a job get one?

At El Mundo, now defunct but then a very serious, respected newspaper. And Tony—fresh out of high school, no money or time for college—started at the bottom. And he worked his way up, in traditional newspaper fashion, from writing obits to the police beat to covering municipal meetings, to finally get the big stuff.

“I remember the funeral of Muñoz Marín—I was covering it for El Mundo,” he said, “and yes, it was big….”

I’m picking his brains, first because the pickings are very good indeed, and second to get him to talk. What is he writing about now?

“A history of the corruption in Puerto Rico,” said Tony.

“Tony, that’s gonna be one long book,” I said.

We joke a bit—he has a wry, self-deprecating humor.

“And how is your health,” I asked—Tony is in his mid-seventies.

Well, I shouldn’t have worried: Tony has one impressive track record. He wakes up and writes, seven days a week. And he’s put together an impressive body of work: 50 Décadas de historia puertoriqueña, published in 1992; La perversión de la política; En los pasillos de poder: Testimonio íntimo de un Secretario de Prensa, 1998; Reflexiones de periodista; El Libro de Puerto Rico; the list goes on and on up until his most recent book, Carlos Romero Barceló: Una vida por la Igualidad. He has about as many books as you and I have fingers and toes.

Well, if anyone can write a book about ex-governor Romero Barceló, it would be Tony. Why? Because he was press secretary for two terms for him, and served in the same capacity for former Governor Luis A. Ferré.

He is unabashedly a statehooder, feeling—as Ferré did—that he preferred to be a state, but if the US said “no,” he’d be quite content to be independent. But colony is anathema to him.

And though a statehooder, he’s tough and fair-minded: he cuts the politicians who favor statehood no slack.

“You’re a cynical old newspaperman,” I told him, after he had pronounced our legislators “gangsters.”

“Old? Old? The rest I accept, but old?”

Relatively speaking, Tony may have a point: his mother is 92 and going strong.

Well, I know newspaper people, having grown up around them. And Tony reminds me very much of my own father: hardworking, critical but just, dig-until-you-hit-the-pay-dirt.

There’s something more about Tony. Beyond knowing more than almost anyone about the political history of Puerto Rico, he’s an expression of something wonderful about Puerto Rico. A self-made man, he sent his kids off to the States; two of them went to Yale. They’re now judges, lawyers, doctors.

We agreed about it a couple weeks ago. What keeps us on this island, with our horrendous crime, our gangster legislature, our continuing economic crisis? Why don’t we bail out and move to Florida; why not join the majority of Puerto Ricans who live off, not on, the island?

The people.

The people like Tony: gentle, kind, scrupulously honest, and gently self-ironic. He is egalitarian in a noble way, extending the same courtesy to all. My mother would have called him a “sweet man.”

But we have an expression, down here, probably very old, probably directly from Spain.

Él es una dama.

One More Corrupt Archbishop

Why me?

Look guys, there are three major newspapers in Puerto Rico—El Nuevo Día, Primera Hora, and El Vocero. The first two are owned by the same company, but maintain separate staffs; the third is privately owned. All three have journalists, who are supposed to do stuff like sniff around, dig a bit of dirt, ask some questions, try and get some answers.

I, however, am not a journalist and know nothing about the profession, though I was exposed to many a breakfast / dinner rant by my father, who believed that the press was railroading Dick Nixon out of town. (Think the jury’s in on that…) So why do I have to step up to the plate? Isn’t that your job?

OK—here’s what I find seriously screwy. Two or three days ago, I reported that the archbishop of San Juan, Roberto González Nieves, had released a copy of a letter he had written to the Vatican. The letter expressed horror that he—González—had been viciously accused of four things, which he came right out and listed. They were:

1.     Protecting pedophile priests

2.     Investigating Reverend Edward Santana with no jurisdiction to do so

3.     Shared residences

4.     El Altar de la Patria

Right—I knew about the Altar, but what was the deal with the other three charges? I turned very trustingly to the press, and guess what?

You guys let me down.

Say whaaa?

We got the highest religious (stet) on the island coming out and saying that the Vatican is accusing him of protecting pedophile priests, and all you guys do is print the letter, state that González Nieves has said all he’s going to on the matter, shrug your shoulders and say, “yeah, whatever…?”

Guys—are you the church bulletin?

If not, maybe you should be making some calls, doing so digging, worrying about something other than—no idea who she is but I see her name all the time—Shakira.

All right, let’s do the unknowns in reverse order.

Despite what I initially thought about “shared residences,”—no, it doesn’t mean that González is living with anybody (though the rumor a decade ago was…OK, never mind). No, González came out in favor several years ago with a proposal that would make people living together under one roof eligible for three things: inheritance, hospital visitation rights, and inclusion in the medical plan of one of the partners. And no—it could be a straight couple or anybody, but the reality was that a whole lot of gay people would be, had it been approved, coming in the house por la cocina / through the kitchen (as we say down here)….

Right—so that was easy.

Now then, charges 2 and 1 are linked. But first, let’s do a little background.

González was born in 1950 in New Jersey, but went to school here in San Juan. He became a priest in 1977, worked in the Bronx until, in 1988, he was appointed auxiliary bishop for the See of Boston. Which at the time—and bells should definitely ring here—was under the head of Bernard Law.

Right—so you didn’t hear the bells. Let me spell it out—Law has cost the Catholic church tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in sex abuse payouts, and, though retired, he’s still very much in the church.

Right—so this morning at 3AM, when I woke craving jellybeans, I began to look up (OK, google) “González Nieves pederast priests.” And there’s nothing much there, except for one survivor network website that says, given Law’s heinous actions, that it wouldn’t be surprising if Gonzalez didn’t have some mud on his white Cossack (if that’s what it is)….

OK—brushed the teeth, went back to bed. And I resumed the search today, this time doing “Puerto Rico pedophile priests” or rather “sacerdotes pedófilos Puerto Rico” (always helps to know a little Spanish)…. And there I ran into a website encouraging, well, here’s a quote:

Aunque hay muchos obstáculos legales para poder procesar a los responsables del abuso, los abogados de Jeff Anderson & Associates están haciendo un llamado especial en Puerto Rico para los casos de abuso sexual cometidos por sacerdotes en la Isla, ya que este equipo de abogados ha trabajado por más de 25 años para superar estos obstáculos.  

Hey, Jeff Anderson up in Minnesota speaks Spanish, too! In fact, Avid Reader, we all ran into Anderson some time ago, when considering the curious case of Maciel, an old buddy of Benedict’s. So here is Anderson, making a special call for abuse victims in Puerto Rico to come forward, and saying his team of lawyers has more than 25 years of experience.

The real find came later, when I was invited to see a list of priests reported to have committed pedophilia, just by clicking, as you can, here: http://www.abusadoenpuertorico.com/Sacerdotes_Acusados.aspx

OK—do that, and I get the list of 14 clergy who have been accused of abuse. And one name in particular caught my eye: The Reverend Edward Santana.

Go back to the list of the four charges so wrongfully slung at the archbishop. Then put a checkmark next to number 2.

Right—some of the clergy have just one PDF file next to their name. Santana has 16. None of which are linked to an active file; I got this when clicking on each one of them:

404 - File or directory not found.

The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

Right—so what would happen if I googled “Edward Santana sacerdote Puerto Rico?” Well, I come up with not much, and so I turn to a website with, perhaps, an axe to grind. Read it, in Spanish, with the box of salt in hand…

OK, here’s the report: Edward Santana was accused in 2001 before the archbishop of Caguas, a city in the center of the island. A mother charged Santana with sexual harassment of her daughter, and the church, reportedly, balked, saying there was no eyewitness. Eventually, however, the diocese offered a deal—a certain sum of money and the removal of Santana from his position, if the claimant would drop the matter. Allegedly, the diocese didn’t come through, and the claimant went up one level, asking the papal nuncio over in Santo Domingo to intervene. Apparently he did, though not before the news gets splashed over the front pages of the papers.

Now it gets murky—Primera Hora, in an article dated 18 May 2002, states that the Archbishop of Caguas had relieved Santana from his duties, and would be sending him off for rehab. Santana could, however, say mass and hear confession.

The website labuenaventurapr.com has a different, or perhaps fuller story. In this scenario, Santana—get ready—got transferred to Arecibo, where he was given a parish and was in contact with kids. Oh, and the goat that calmed the cup (la gota que colmó la copa)? The archbishop of Arecibo named Santana an ecclesiastical judge.

Things got hotter than usual, which is to say very hot indeed, and then the day came when Santana announced he had cancer; he had to go up to gringolandia for treatment. He did, remaining—allegedly—on the payroll.

Well, the sunny skies of Florida had a rejuvenating effect on Santana, and guess what! He’s now cured, connected with the Archdiocese of Miami, and also serving as…

…yes, yet again, an ecclesiastical judge.

Guys, I could call the archdiocese of Miami, or even just look it up.

But isn’t that your job?  

Shooting Jack into the cybersphere

Between the hours of 4 and 5 PM, you didn’t want to be on the second floor of this building.

Why?

I had finally been forced to buy a printer / scanner / fax.

And I completely disapprove of them. When I worked at Wal-Mart, I would beg students not to print vocabulary lists. They did, so I went to the computer guys and asked, could they disable the printing option on my emails?

The guys just shrugged.

I was ardently, passionately green. I tried to organize car pools, but getting people to share rides was as easy as getting them to donate a kidney—without anesthesia.

“What if there’s an emergency?” they asked.

“When was the last emergency?” I’d counter.

“I need it for my kids,” they’d say.

Of course, of course, this sent me off.

“It is exactly FOR your kids that you need to start being responsible and start thinking about what kind of world you’re gonna be leaving them!” I’d diatribe.

With just a few exceptions, the love between Puerto Ricans for their cars is only matched by adolescent boys in gringolandia. It’s now common, by the way, to have TWO cars—‘cause what happens if one breaks?

You’d be stranded.

Well, it was curb my environmentalism or lose my friends. I chose friends. But I didn’t, I reasoned, have to give in to the whole nonsense. I took the bus, and smiled evilly if inwardly when gas soared to four dollars a gallon. I vowed—no printer.

Then the box came that I’d been dreading.

Readers of the blook know that Eric and I tore through the house, the day after Franny died. He took on the photos; I did the poetry.

Franny, I’m sorry to say, had the terrible habit of printing out multiple versions of her poems—all slightly different. Worse, she didn’t put any date on them. Right—she knew what version was the final. But the rest of us?

So I jammed as much as I could find into a box, which Eric drove away to West Virginia. I hoped—I knew uselessly—never to see that box again.

I justify this by citing Franny, herself. Because Lorraine, Gunnar’s widow, had tried to keep the memory of the great pianist and composer alive for years after his death.

“You know, at a certain point, you just have to let go. History will remember him or it won’t. Or maybe it will forget him and rediscover him—he wouldn’t be the first to have that happen to him….”

Practical advice from a sensible woman.

Well, Eric shipped the box a few weeks ago. I retrieved it, lifted it, and decided to spend the ten bucks to take a three-block taxi ride home. How much is my dorsal spine worth?

And the box sat there, a challenge each morning, a reproof each night.

“Screw it,” I said, “the essence of neurosis is the avoidance of pain.” A nod of thanks here to my friend Sonia, whose wisdom this is. “I’m gonna open that box!”

Well I prepared myself—I got a scissors and a big hunk of Kleenex.

There’s no sense in not crying if you have to. You’re better off to get it out, vent it, and then go on. Walk into the pain, live it, let it go. That’s what grief, or suffering, teaches you.

So I knew the tears would come. What I didn’t know was the source. Because the first documents to spring out of the box were a series of letters from Don Anderson, publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal, to Jack, my father.

Here’s one…. 

Well, I became Lorraine. I knew Jack had fought for the open housing drive, but I didn’t know how hard, or that his boss had thought so highly of him.

Wait—his former boss. Anderson, I realized later, had retired years earlier. I knew because Jack had written the story, and Anderson had replied.

Well, the guy knows how to turn a phrase, doesn’t he? I like the somewhat false but still funny self deprecation of the “hung for horse stealing….”

And yes, that “pretty and talented” wife does smack of smugness—it explains why women were burning their bras a decade later.

And the pretty and talented wife had—it must be said—some mixed feelings about Anderson.

It wasn’t much spoken off—but it was there. She watched Jack’s colleagues rise to editor, managing editor, administrative jobs that—guess what?—paid better. And there Anderson was, “sidetracking” her husband.

And she had a three-year-old (me), a seven-year-old (John), and a 12-year-old (Eric). And hadn’t “worked” in over a decade.

How did she feel, reading this letter? A letter that praises at the same time that it announces—your husband’s going nowhere. You’ll never be the publisher’s wife, you pretty, talented thing.

I think it was easy enough for Jack. He loved to write, he loved his work, and the respect and admiration of the community were pay dirt for him.

For Franny? Washing little Marc’s diapers?

There are three more pages—a typescript of a talk Anderson gave at a company meeting….

No, there never was a great fortune in that wallet—or any other wallet that a journalist has. About all he got were enough money to buy food and clothes and shoes, and six pieces of paper.

Now in my hands.

And time will go on, and people will die, and no one will know—perhaps—that there was a time when the Ku Klux Klan marched in Madison, or that neighbors could threaten to burn the first black family’s house in the neighborhood.

Or that a guy named John Newhouse had fought the bastards.

But maybe they will.

Went out, bought the scanner, sighed deeply, invoked doña Taí—patron saint of technological idiots—and prepared for the hell it would be.

I don’t want another device in my life.

But how much had he done for me?

World—remember. There was a reporter, John Newhouse.

And he did it better than anyone else I have ever known.

On Dead Squirrels

Franny figured out, as best I could. Now, who in the hell is my father?

Easy enough—google him. Of course, you do have to add Wisconsin to the search list, because otherwise you get the REAL (to everybody except us) John Newhouse, also a writer.

And then, of course, you have to disregard LinkedIn, which will tell you about John Newhouse, Esq. Some sort of lawyer in New York….

(Come on, Johnny—who in the hell is an esquire in this family!)

Well, you come to page three, or screen three, or whatever it is, and then you get to the John Newhouse of the chase—that would be Jack. The father…

…I don’t know.

It appears that he left some stuff he wrote for Lee newspapers to the University of Montana. I remembered that—Eric was out there, at the time of the donation, and was a go-between (though I suppose if Johnny can be an esquire, Rick could be a liaison…) So you click on that—not the stuff, but the google link—and then you read about him.

Written in 2010, it’s mostly accurate. Sure, they get the date of death wrong (officially it’s May 18, 1993—I suspect it was May 17, 1993) but that’s hardly surprising. Actually, nobody is quite sure when he was born, either. It had been celebrated—as I recall—on the 20^th of April for years. But in his fifties, Jack discovered that his mother, years before, and gone to the County Clerk and filed an amendment, stating he was born on the 21^st. And she was dead…

Oh, and never told him.

Well, it’s a round-about way of knowing your father. Easier it was to call up Dave.

That’s Dave Nelson, a guy I don’t know. But Dave was an obliging sort, and sent me a picture.

And readers of this blog will know—that’s Link!

“The old boy himself,” as Dave called him.

But oddly enough, it may also be Jack. Because I peered at the photo, and thought, “geez, I bet Jack took that….”

And that started me off on a hunt through the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Turns out there are over three hundred images—most of which I’ve never seen.

Well, I knew that story, too. They’d been down at the State Journal all those years when Jack worked there, and then traveled home—in a cardboard box—when he retired. Then, when they moved to the Acres, Jack had to get rid of ‘em—no room. So he dumped them on the State Historical Society.

(Parenthetically—although I probably can’t use that word and enclose it in parentheses—an old lover asked me, seconds after learning my name for the first time, if I wasn’t John Newhouse’s son. “Yes,” I said, tired of again being John’s son, especially with a guy I had just had sex with. But it turned out that Gary knew Jack not from the Journal, or from meeting him, but from the collection….)

So there I was yesterday, wondering—is that Jack who took the photo of Link? Sure looks like it.

And what about Link? What the hell was he doing out there, shooting the damn squirrels?

Well, Dave had an answer for that.

“He was probably manic depressive,” he said. “At least that’s what his son thinks….”

The son being Dave’s link to the…Link family….

(sorry!)

Well, that makes sense. Some of that conduct—one thinks of the morning visits and the Hershey bars—was off the mark behaviorally. But what a wonderful face—craggy and individual and fearless. A guy with a gun. A man with a mission.

And looking at the photo, one sees the bird feeder in the background. Was that old bastard luring the squirrels to their death? Did he prefer birds to squirrels? Too damn cheap to give some bird seed to what were (are) rodents? And we know how Link felt about them!

And am I the only one who feels—maybe—that it’s a shame, our current view of mania? I’ve almost been there, you know, but got the hell away before I plunged—or was plunged—into it. It’s living life on the lip of the volcano—an image from Robertson Davies—that moment before the plunge.

And Link—was that where he was? Always a step from madness, and sometimes over it and in it?

And Jack, observing, recording—and sending me a picture through the decades….

…and through a stranger.

The letters from Link would arrive—“John Newhouse, a scribe” they would be headed. The air temperature and atmospheric pressure would be stated. “Karl Paul Link, rattor,” they would conclude.

They came for years, they stopped. Both guys are dead….

And oddly fragrant.