Seeds, Confusion, and 90-Year Olds

I think it started in those days of confusion when I was walking with Moisés. 

I was explaining something to him from a documentary that Sonia had shown Raf and me. It was years ago when we saw it, so I was a bit unclear.

But it was about failure, and how almost inevitable it is biologically.

An example?

Well, today I walked under a palm tree, and saw the ground beneath it completely obscured with pea-sized seeds.

How many of them will become a palm?

(Could make the same analogy of semen, but this is not that sort of blog….)

Well, I remembered all that last night, after I had called my doctor—a terrific woman—to ask her to review Iguanas. She’s bright, funny, an excellent practitioner. Only one problem!

Her specialty is geriatrics….

Stop that sniggering!

Well, well—she said sure, as I thought she would, and then I returned to the problem. For a book is at least potentially a seed. How to get it to grow? How to ensure that it won’t be, like the seeds this morning, one more book among the millions of others that people walk by, unheeding?

Well, I’m ruminative these days, and continued thinking of the old. And also of the documentary. And then, of course, it hit me.

Rita Levi Montalcini!

She was in the documentary all those years ago, and I was fascinated by her story. She was born on 22 April 1909 into a prominent Jewish family. Had a wonderful childhood and then, in her teens, defied her father: she went to med school. World War II erupted, and she fled to Belgium. She returned to Turin, and lived in hiding.

Didn’t stop working, though! She somehow got hold of eggs and continued her investigation of “limb extirpation of chick embryos.” (Don’t ask, I don’t know….) Then the war ended, and an Italian colleague living in St. Louis invited her for a semester to work at Washington University. 

Stayed thirty years!

Then picked up, and went back home to Italy. Then, in the 80’s she won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.

She had discovered, or helped discover, nerve growth hormone.

Well, that’s an achievement! That puts Iguanas to shame! And that’s not all—she’s a senator for life in the Italian Senate.

Great story, hunh?  And she is now, by the way, still going strong. Maybe because she puts drops of nerve growth hormone each morning into her eyes. Take a look at her—what a charmer!

Oh, and nice sense of fashion, hunh?

Well, well—back to thinking of the old. And then I began to wonder about Imogen Cunningham, and her book After Ninety.

Cunningham was a photographer—one of the greats. And she got around—photographing Martha Graham, Darius Milhaud, a whole cluster of greats. Then she got into photographing old people. And that’s where I saw the face that prepared me. Here it is.

She was a distinguished radiologist who asked me to photograph her.  I wasn’t taking on commissions anymore, but I did it because she didn’t care if she looked old, and she didn’t hate her face.

That’s what the caption says. But no…

She wasn’t a distinguished radiologist. At least not to me. She was the face I knew one day I would see.

Maybe it was just being the youngest that explained the bond between my mother and me. But I think it was more. I sat often and stared at the photo and wondered when I would see the reality. 

Well, I lost the book but not the image. Then I lived the reality and created another one—a book I called Life, Death and Iguanas. 

And now I have the image again—peering at me, challenging me, accompanying me as I go into my own third age….

The Crustiest Old Men in Puerto Rico

They were, with only one exception, the crustiest old men in Puerto Rico.

And believe me—I can tell you. I’ve spent twenty years with these men, these irascible, taciturn (except when provoked, which is almost constantly), grumpy relics of a tradition gone by.

Los choferes de carros públicos they’re called. But don’t imagine that a chofer has anything to do with its cognate, a chauffeur.

OK—the driver (chofer) will be at least 70. He will remember days gone by, when he made three, four, five trips to from Ponce to San Juan (65 miles each way…). His car—most often a minivan—would have had eighteen people maximum.

Oh, and also minimum. Because he didn’t leave until the van was full.

Not a problem if you don’t have a boss with a stopwatch waiting for you.

And if you did?

Well, then you had to get up early, didn’t you?

Well, the people up in the mountains do. Four in the morning. That’s when the chickens start clucking and making sleep impossible. Also when the first públicos leave.

Sensible, really. Why should you be sleeping if the chickens aren’t? And besides, it’s cooler at 4AM. Which is nice, because none of the públicos has air conditioning.

What, air conditioning? When the price of gasoline is near a dollar a liter? (About 4 dollars a gallon….)

But if you are late for work—say, 6AM and expected by 8AM—well, you may have a problem. There are 17 of you in a minivan. It is six-thirty, then seven.

And no one is coming.

Or has come for the last twenty minutes. 

So you wait.

The driver, in the meantime, is enjoying cooling breezes and hot coffee. Also busily pretending that the van of which he is the owner / driver…

…doesn’t exist.

Not bad. But imagine August, or July—which it currently is. Also imagine the humidity—it has rained enough to humidify, but not to cool.

Instantly, on seeing the first drop of rain, everybody will close the windows. 

Why? The windows open out an inch at the bottom—it’s virtually impossible for anything but hurricane band torrents to enter.

But there’s this thing. In Puerto Rican eyes, rain means cold.

Oh, also monga.

OK, not bad, for the first twenty minutes or so. And very fortunately, the 15 co-passengers have practiced excellent hygiene. Only the 16^th has not….

…and he’s sitting next to you!

Tempers fray. People get restless. At last someone calls out—“¡Que nos vayamos! ¡Estamos asfixia’os!” Literally, we're asphyxiating.

The chofer turns the page—he’s on Sports now…. He lights a cigarette. Or goes to get more coffee.

At last, the miracle arrives: the last passenger that can be stuffed into the van. A cheerful guy!

All three-hundred pounds of him.

Oh, and there’s a hitch.

He has a twenty.

Instantly, the chofer who is absolutely not a chauffeur flies off the handle. What? A twenty? Impossible, he can’t change a twenty.

They have this rule, you see.

Nor does the three-hundred-pounder do the sensible thing—go to the same coffee shop and change the bill. Arguing with a chofer is like arguing with a cat.

What, and miss an argument?

The hands are raised, the voices are raised. The chofer walks away in disgust, only to come back and resume the diatribe.

Spectator sports! For the van has now erupted into commentary, laughter, catcalls, encouragement, and fierce partisan side taking.

Invariably, it will be witty. Always, someone will have a mordent sense of humor, dissect the situation, provide the comedy and the backstory.

It’s now 7:30. Remember that boss?

At last, the argument will be resolved. The chofer will agree—¡esta vez solamente!!—to change the bill. Or a passenger will change it for him. The three-hundred-pounder will attempt—catch that verb?—to enter the van.

The vans—as you may know—have two doors, each opening the opposite direction.

But the chofer NEVER opens the other door.

Another little rule….

Which means the three-hundred-pounder is coming in…

…sideways.

Oh, and the empty “seat?” It’s in the very back of the van, an area very justly called la cocina.

The kitchen….

There’s no way the guy is gonna make it.

So he does the sensible thing. He waits for someone to move.

And nobody wants to go there.

Resolution?

Well, there’s a crazy gringo who has decided to sit in the front row of seats.

And who needs to get to work….

And of course, the gringo has a problem. No, not three-hundred pounds, but…

A height of 6’3”.

Which means that he looks like a string bean imitating a football player in a tackle.

Well, it’s an experience. And it taught me a lot.

Spanish, for one thing.

It taught me how amazingly resilient and patient Puerto Ricans can be.

Also how funny….

And it gave me time to reflect, as I did this morning, on days gone by, and how so much has changed.

I had gotten up, taken my walk, and then left to take the público down to Ponce. And why wake up at 4 to do that? So I sat for an hour in the plaza talking to Tico. We had the driver (that’s Tico). We had the van.

We didn’t have the 17 others.

And Tico had made no trips yesterday.

Also none as of today.

So I waited an hour, and talked to Tico, and learned that his father had been a chofer for fifty years. The fare was 3 dollars then. Times had changed. Everybody has a car now.

Then Tico moved off. I sat and waited.

And into my mind popped…

…JackDelano!

I met him only once—but he was our own Eisenstaedt / Dorothea Lange / Ansel Adams. Came to Puerto Rico in the 40’s, under the same project as Eisenstaedt. Went everywhere, just as the others did, and took amazing photos.

I could have waited, but both Tico and I were tired. And hot. So he went home, I went home, and, still curious, looked up Delano. Knew he was good, but didn’t know how good.

He’s major league.

Malaria poster in small hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Jack Delano, December, 1941. Image courtesy of  Wikipedia.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Delano)

Jack Delano in his studio. Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, 1990. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Delano)

Dust Bowl Days

It’s a curiously haunting photo, this newly released image from Life Magazine—or is it?

It could be just me—the dust bowl was an unspoken, unacknowledged force in my childhood.

It marked Jack. Born in 1909, he was 20 when the Great Depression hit. He took a year off school, and went out to North Dakota.

No money.

The stories got told. Feeding the newborn lambs: he would sit in one room next to a partly barricaded door. He’d grab the first lamb, feed it with a bottle, and then toss it over the barricade into the other room. Then grab another.

Why? Where was the ewe?

He needed wood for the wood-burning stove. And there was none. He hit on the idea of chopping down telephone poles….

He baked his own bread, and was a bit ashamed of having to. He was caught in the act by a cowboy, visiting, looking for coffee if not a free meal. So Jack threw a towel over the dough, talked to the cowboy. At last, the cowboy spotted the rising dough. “Christ, son, you gotta knead that dough!” shouted the cowboy. Threw off the towel, punched down the dough, and started kneading away.

The stories carried the message—life is grim. You can lose everything overnight. Only the tough survive, and sometimes not even then.

And another message—implicit, not stated. You got it easy. You weren’t there in that cold dark house with the damn lambs puling and needing to be fed and the wind attacking the house and coming through the cracks in the walls and wondering…

…am I ever gonna get out of this place?

Ever get back to the university?

Ever make anything of my life?

“He didn’t think he’d make it,” Franny once said of him in those years. And he couldn’t quite believe that he did.

And what of this family, in the photo above? Here’s the caption:

"Farmer John Barnett and his family are 'Okies' who stuck to their land near Woodward. They have 21 dairy cattle which yield a scant seven gallons per milking. Mrs. Barnett takes care of a vegetable garden that is always blowing away. The children, Delphaline, 17 (top), Lincoln, 11 (right), and Leonard, 9, do plenty of chores. On Sundays the Barnetts eat jack rabbit." Oklahoma, 1942. (Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Oh. It almost raises more questions than answers. Seven gallons of milk from 21 cattle? That’s a third of a gallon per cow. And that garden—blowing away. Couldn’t she mulch it? Or was it so infernally dry, and so fiercely windy, that nothing could be done?

The jack rabbit—the only meat that they could eat? Here in Puerto Rico there are chickens everywhere in the country. Why no chickens there?

They stuck to their land—why? Nowhere to go? Obstinacy? Didn’t believe it was any better anywhere else?

Mostly, though, it’s the faces that haunt. Barnett—strong and tough and lean. Life has beaten him—does he know it? Can’t look into the camera, and yet his eyes are lifted—as if wishing to see out. His wife, also looking down, is she as submissive as she appears? Does she really acquiesce, as she sees her garden—that is, the food for her family—blow away? What woman would not be full of rage—rage at a man who had taken her to this barren place, who had put her and her children is this position? Rage at a man who had failed to do what a man was supposed to do: support his family.

Each of the children now—so different. Delphaline—and what’s the story behind the name? And yet she looks out at the camera, apparently untroubled, a typical girl. She has none of the tight-lipped, compressed look of her mother.

Lincoln, who I assumed was the youngest. But he appears, instead, the shyest. And then Leonard! That look—wry, innocent, savvy, questioning, impish…what? What is he thinking, as he sits in front of his broken father? Is there some life in him that has been snuffed out of his father?

A photo captures a moment. But life goes on. Jack went on, made a life for himself, got the hell out of North Dakota.

And also didn’t.

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.