And the Various Journeys Continue . . .

So Much Has Passed

Even though I am not able this weekend to do all the grapic postings I had planned to do, while I have power and consistent dial-up connectivity, I can at least put up one of my musings the last several weeks since I returned from holiday in the UK.

The most auspicious passing was the third anniversary of September 11, 2001. I spent a couple of hours one afternoon reflecting upon my experience of that terrible day in what for me was a horrendous year:

9/11: Three Years After

It was an awful year. It was a most awful day . . .

It began like so many of that dreadful year. I awoke somewhat stiff and cramped on the futon out in the office. I was still quite tired, emotionally hung-over as usual, having been up until the wee hours of the morning online. For most of the past year I had been sleeping out in the office. Since Sara’s and my desperate estrangement. Our house was mostly empty. She had moved out several weeks before, taking most of our stuff. The remainder I had given away or sold at a tag sale the weekend before. The detritus of our fully separated life was scattered throughout the empty rooms. I only went inside for showers and occasionally to cook meals in the kitchen, when I didn’t eat out. It pained me to even be in the patio with our sunflowers and Montauk daisies, or to use the pool we had put up in the late 80s. Our 22-year, mostly wonderful relationship had crashed on the shallow shoals of my unrelenting anger and rage, a pernicious holdover from the war trauma I experienced in Vietnam. The lovely faux-Victorian house that we had placed so many of our dreams -- and all of our capital investment in -- had been sold. I was waiting to close the transaction, so I could take my half of the proceeds, pay cash for the Rialta RV I had ordered, and hit the road to reinvent myself, or at least find a way to survive a radically different way of life.

No doubt Chutney, our English standard poodle that I had custody of, was out doing his morning constitutional in the fenced backyard. I probably had my first cup of latte, either in hand or brewing, when the phone rang. I picked it up with a flurry of hope it might be Sara. Nope, it was one of my clients, who worked for the now defunct TWA,. He was yelling excitedly into the phone for me to turn on the TV, that a plane had just crashed in to one of the World Trade Center towers. I turned the TV on, and MSNBC came up on the screen. It wasn’t the normal Don Imus. Instead, an excited correspondent breathlessly described the chaos as a handheld camera jerkily panned horrified faces, necks craned back, looking upwards. A thick, black smudge of smoke was coming from one of the towers, out of which flicked yellow-orange flames. In the background was a hubbub of noise and confusion, and the hallmark sound of that awful day, the wailing of incessant sirens. I switched to CNN. Different commentators, same scenes. Back to MSNBC. No change. A quick scan of CBS, CNBC, ABC, the local New York Stations. No difference. Every channel depicted a Hollywood special effects nightmare -- except it wasn’t fake, it was way too real. Could I pinch myself hard enough to make it go away? No way, damn it.

Suddenly a huge, horrifying, psyche-tearing roar muted the screams of people beginning to run in panic. A second plane had hit the second Tower. Mesmerized in terror, in a trance, I mutely switched from channel to channel for the next couple of hours, as the gathering terror piled up one after the other: the strike at the Pentagon, the downing of Flight 93, the President flying in Air Force One all around the country, the collapse of one, than the other huge tower, confusion, dismay, babbling conjecture from the plethora of talking heads and quickly rounded up experts on everything -- but the truth.

By late morning, I was resoundingly driving myself crazy, flipping from one speculative, self-important suit to another, each carefully groomed for primetime to cover the biggest story of the new, now no longer idealistically hopeful, Millennium. The world was inexorably changed; history would never be the same.

I had to do something. I called the Suffolk County Red Cross to volunteer; they suggested I contact nearby Nassau County Red Cross, who was mobilizing Mental Health Volunteers. Since I had spent much of my professional life dealing with trauma, both Acute and Post, as well as having been trained in Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, I thought I might be of some service. I found copies of my NY State Social Worker license, as well as a copy of my Vitae, and started to drive to the Nassau county Red Cross office in Mineola.

On the 45 minute drive, I switched between 1010 WIN News and the Bloomberg Channel, no real new news, just lots more speculation, uncertainty, various conflicting rationales. The Southern State Parkway at noontime had little traffic going in towards the City, but already a near rush-hour stream of traffic heading East. Driving north on Meadowbrook Parkway, I got quite emotional near where Sara and I had lived in Garden City, when we first moved back to Long Island from Albany during the early, good years of our relationship. That was in ‘83, three years after our son was born, a time of unbearable innocence and a multitude of dreams, now long gone . Soon I was pulling up in front of the Nassau County Red Cross building.

By late afternoon, I was registered with the Red Cross, had been given a couple of Red Cross Orientation sessions, and was issued a Red Cross ID badge. I had just missed the last Red Cross Mass Disaster Vehicle that had been dispatched to what was now designated as Ground Zero, a term burned into the lexicon of a whole brand new, most unsettling and radically unstable era. Someone was needed to go to LaGuardia Airport to offer counseling and support to American Airlines staff and passengers stranded in the terminal. I volunteered to go. I was given instructions, the name of an EAP colleague to contact, and a special Red Cross pass that would let me on the Parkways and Expressways going into the City. They had been closed to the general public at the Queens border since that early afternoon.

By the time I left the Red Cross Office, dusk was gathering. I stopped at a Seven Eleven on Hempstead Turnpike to get a large cup of coffee and a sandwich to eat on the drive in to LaGuardia. Everything had a specter of unreality – it was like being in an endless fog while at the same time everything sharply glowed. I remember what a beautiful early Fall day that Tuesday had been, a gorgeous day, a radiant day with bright, cloudless blue skies, and a hint of Fall crispness in the air.

The Red Cross ID easily got me on the Northern State Parkway. The nervous middle-aged Nassau County Policeman didn’t take his hand off his service revolver, while he examined the ID and my driver’s license. It was most eerie driving on the empty road at that time. During normal, rush-hour traffic, all lanes in both directions would be stop-and-creep-forward full of homecoming traffic. Just after I left the Cross Island near Whitestone Bridge, I noticed the huge, dark plume of dark brownish black smoke, leaning East over Brooklyn from far downtown.

As I merged onto the Grand Central Parkway, I became aware of the screaming wail of sirens from emergency vehicles by the dozens -- fire trucks, ambulances, military vehicles, ugly, squat bomb squad trucks -- speeding along in both directions. I carefully stayed in the slow lane, hugging the shoulder as much as I could. It was almost dark when I turned off the exit into LaGuardia Airport at 97th Street. I could still make out the darker splotch of smoke pouring out from where the Twin Towers had been. The dark cloud now glowed ominously deep-orange red, casting an uncanny sheen all along the skyline from Lower Manhattan up into Midtown. There were no stars.

Two regular City road patrol cops carefully scrutinized my ID and radioed to their headquarters for instructions. After a static-filled conversation, I was brusquely motioned onto the LaGuardia Airport premises. Again I was struck with how strange and like a Twilight Zone episode it was, like I was driving through jello in an alien time warp. There was not a plane in the sky or on the runways. One of the busiest of our nation’s airports with planes landing or taking off every 10 seconds or so, LaGuardia was completely shut down. All commercial airline traffic everywhere had been grounded indefinitely. No planes were flying anywhere, since four had been hijacked that morning, which now seemed another lifetime away. Occasionally, I would hear in the distance the distinctive whump-whump-whump of a helicopter, or the screeching roar of covering F-16s overhead.

I shortly ran into a roadblock manned by National Guard troops in full battle gear, who would not let me further into the main airport artery. A Captain directed me to try going around a back way. Within a quarter of a mile, I was stopped by a Mutt and Jeff SWAT Team, both wearing flak jackets over khakis and dark blue NYPD baseball caps in combat boots. The large, burly, silent one kept his sawed-off double-barreled shotgun trained at my head during our entire encounter. The other was a diminutive, high-strung, nervous fellow, like the Dustin Hoffman Ratso character in Midnight Cowboy, with an M-16, hopefully locked, and fully loaded. He couldn’t understand what I was doing at LaGuardia, being not at all impressed by my Red Cross ID. He was obsessed with my car, which was an old, gray ’88 Pontiac 6000 SE, which had my mountain bike on the trunk bike rack. I guess, looking back, it makes sense that he was concerned by my driving around in a 13 year-old, rattle-trap of a car with a bike on the back. I mean, what better, though perhaps too obvious a strategy, than to pack a clunker up with dynamite or other explosives, park it somewhere, then ride off to safety and detonate by remote control or with a timer. He carefully searched me and the car, finding nothing by trash, but in a squeaky shout he informed me that no, I could not go into the parking garage, and no I could not go into the terminal because everyone had gone home. I asked him if I could call Nassau Red Cross for instructions. After he carefully examined my cell phone, he allowed as I could, muttering all the while what a cluster-fuck this was.

I called the office and was told that yes, American Airlines had moved everyone into a nearby hotel, but no, there was no need now for me to provide any counseling services, for me to go home and come back in the morning. Disappointed, thoroughly thwarted, I thanked the officers, carefully turning around, and headed for the East entrance to the Grand Central Parkway. As I entered the Parkway, the steady stream of emergency vehicle sirens continued, swirling red lights blinking and streaking, in both directions. This was soon punctuated by another, louder sound, however, the roar of the engines from a large aircraft. I looked up and saw over Shea Stadium, making it’s final approach, a large four-engine aircraft heading straight towards me. I could only hope it was a military aircraft.

Apparently it was, because I made the long, lonely trip back to the empty shell of a home in Islip unscathed with no further incident. Bone-aching tired, I collapsed on the futon where I had begun that awful day, an eon or so previously. Little did I suspect just how much my life and existence had been changed. Chutney cuddled up beside me on the futon, burrowing in, offering me some whimpering comfort, as I sobbed myself to sleep to finally end a perfectly awful day.

September 12, 2004
Mutur, Sri Lanka

A Senior Moment

Good Blogger Buddy, Ronni, has started a series on her wonderful blog, As Time Goes By, which deals with the aging process, entitled Meditation on Mortality. On the cusp of the rapidly aging Baby Boom of the late 40s and 50s, it strikes me as very ironic that we, who had such disdain for anyone over 30, are now beginning to face not only the aging process, but are beginning to stare our mortality full in the face of a fading whimper, not the bombastic, strutting bang of our callow youth.

For me it is doubly ironic, because I was blatantly suicidal throughout my late teens and twenties. It was a Jekyll and Hyde existence. On the one hand, I was living life on a silver platter, full of academic and other achievements; on the other hand, I was living an overtly self-destructive lifestyle of addiction, trying to propel myself over any available edge. I drove a motorcycle, drunk and drugged, helmetless, up, down and around the curving hills of Cincinnati at break-neck speeds, thrice surviving crashes. I volunteered to go to Vietnam to have Charlie do what I was too chicken-shit to do, because though I desperately wanted to die, I was paranoid that if I were to put a gun to my head or do a header into the Ohio River, some God, whom I professed steadfastly not to believe in, would manifest Itself out of the Kosmos and send me to hell forever and ever and ever and a day, just because I was me.

It turned out I survived Vietnam in 67-68, which was a pretty safe place to die as a lieutenant, especially during Tet of '68. I also survived myself and my deepening addiction as well, to include living on the streets of the Lower East Side for several months, for another four years after I returned from Vietnam to get into recovery. I remember how daunting it was at about six months sober to turn 30, to feel then so old, so useless, so used up, but I had a glimmer of hope that life could be different than the keening death-wish I had always been immersed within, so I stayed sober, and here I am at age 61, still living a bountifully blessed life, but beginning to get glimpses of the Mortality Beast out of the corner of my eye, to catch a glance of a wisp of ghostly smoke in the mirror staring back at me.

In truth, for me it is not death itself that I am afraid of -- I have a fairly strong belief in an afterlife, in a karmic series of afterlives, as a matter of faith. Like Woody Allen, however, I just don't want to be there when Death knocks gently or bangs upon the door. The process of dying, on the other hand, scares the bejesus and buddha and allah and shiva and yewah out of me. I yearn for a quick MI, like a couple of my dear friends have experienced to swiftly pass on through to some other side from this earthly illusion.

In the summer of 2001, just after the devastating decision my third wife, Sara, and I had made to end our 22 year relationship, sell out Victorian dream house in the lovely South Shore seacoast village of Islip, close our successful relationship counseling business, and just before the devastation to my favorite hometown known forever in a changed world as 9-11, my Father died quietly at age 87. He had suffered from a slow-degenerating Alzheimer's like condition for the previous five years. He had been first for a year in a very expensive facility, St. Catherine's, and then for his last year-and-a-half in a VA nursing home, where services contracted out to HMO companies became increasingly worse and worse. Mother devoted her life to being with him from sun-up to sun-down. My plan had been to spend the Christmas holidays of 2001 with him and to stay with him until he passed on. An example of the old Yiddish saying, "Man plans and God laughs," he passed quietly and suddenly in his sleep on July 23rd, five full months from when I was available to be with him.

After his funeral I visited a childhood neighbor in another unit of St. Catherine's, an upscale residential "retirement" community, where today Mother has an apartment. Out of that visit came the following piece, which indicates what I dread most about the aging process and facing mortality:

A Senior Moment

It was a typically hot, humid, Mississippi noontime, when I drove out to Siena Hall at St. Catherine’s. As Momma had said it was right across the street from where last year I had visited Daddy in the Alzheimer’s unit. I was visiting Wilkins, the kid from down the block, who has suffered from cerebral palsy since birth.

Most of his life he had lived at home, which his Daddy, whom he called Tommy, had turned into a suburban paradise from his most successful insurance agency. The large backyard had a large pool, hot tub and meticulous landscaping, chocked full of Southern flowers and semi-tropical plants. Wilkins had been in the nursing home for the past couple of years since his Momma had died. Tommy was still alive, but in his early 80s himself he wasn’t able, I guess, to provide the kind of in depth nursing care that Wilkins requires. He had been most gracious a couple of days earlier at the Visitation about what a loss Daddy’s death was for Jackson and the neighborhood.

As I walked through the main floor entrance hall into the waiting room, I was immediately drawn to a striking 8X10 glossy print of an absolutely gorgeous young woman on a bulletin board; she had long, flowing blond hair and a face of exquisite Southern beauty. Like a moth to the proverbial flame, I was mesmerized, reading about the current resident of the week. Originally from Georgia, during World War II she had lived in a sixth floor walk-up apartment in New York, my hometown for the past 30 years. She had a fairly successful career as a model before her high school beaux, a successful businessman after the war, came searching for her in New York City to make her his wife. In the early-60s they had moved their growing little family and his bustling business to Jackson, where they had apparently prospered and manifested the all American dream life. At least that’s what her write up as Resident-of-the-Week, complete with kindergarten-like graphics on prominent bulletin board, profusely indicated.

As strains of a Fred Astaire song from a small shelf unit CD player surrounded me, I looked around at the rows of pinched and slumping Little Orphan Annie life-sized rag dolls, dotted here and there with an Andy rag doll, stacked in their wheel chairs as neat as little tin soldiers on a parade field, trying to pick her out, most comatose, wrapped tight in blankets, slumped over, hooked up to IVs. I couldn’t find her, even with help from the other pictures that included a family portrait from the late 80s with her as the tall, dignified matriarchal head of a fine Southern clan of beaming blond adult children and grandchildren. Geez, I wondered, in 25 years will folks from my generation be likewise stacked in this nice, clean, Holiday Inn franchise environment with the tasteful Martha Stewart prints and muted earth tones, listening to Jimi or Janis?

After about 10 minutes, waiting for one of the staff to be freed up enough to give me directions to Wilkins’ room, feeling such sadness, such dread, such confusion about how we come to such a lonely and isolated end, a surly orderly pointed me in the general direction of his room, yelling a correction or two at me down the hall until I found his door. I knocked and Wilkins called me in. He was sitting in his wheel chair, looking out his window at the moving cloud patterns against the dark green and deep blue of land and sky. I was surprised that he wasn’t the young boy I remembered him as, just as I had been dumbstruck by the incredibly attractive, sophisticated woman his sister, Olivia, has become, when I also saw her at Daddy’s Visitation. He’s now as old as Sister Beth, in his early 40’s, with gray hair and prominent paunch from his sedentary lifestyle, sitting in a wheelchair all day.

We visited for a while, him talking about how much he was suffering for his sins, me wondering what sins he could have committed in such a broken and bent body since birth. He then insisted we look at every one of his copious albums of photos, 5X7’s, neatly ordered in their plastic sleeves. Pointing generally with his right clubbed-hand and through the drool of his tortured speech, which gently from time to time I would wipe away with a Handiwipe, he carefully explained to me who everyone in each of the photographs were. I had wanted to take him out in the sunshine for a while, to let him meet and see Chutney, my almost grown puppy, but it was important for him to show me his gallery of family memories, for him to relive them with me. I easily let slide off any concerns about being late for Sunday noon dinner with the family. This was just as important. I trusted that Chutney, who I left in the car parked in the shade of some trees with plenty of water and the windows open, would be okay.

After a couple of hours, I was able to leave, carefully shutting him in his room, sitting there by himself, looking out the window again, such a forlorn, sad and distant look on his face. I walked toward the front door, a Rosemary Clooney tune from the 50s stirring within me also memories from so long ago. I glanced again in disbelief at the striking visage of the resident of the month, which I still couldn’t compute with the sacks of discarded humanity stacked in the room.

When I got to the double front doors, I pushed them to get out. They were locked, tight. I could see the green and blue of the outside world brightly lit from the early afternoon sun. I was most surprised I couldn’t get out. I pushed harder, feeling the start of a panic cloying at me from deep within -- nothing. I looked about confused. Couldn’t figure out what to do. Tried to open the doors, once again, this time harder, making a loud, crashing sound each time I pushed sharply against them, almost frantic now, really feeling an awful panic. The racket of me pounding against the locked glass doors roused one of the orderlies, who came rushing over to see what the ruckus was about. When she realized that I was a visitor, stuck in my panic, she aloofly pointed to the buzzer with the note explaining to summon staff to let one out that I had been oblivious to.

As she unlocked the door with a large key, I thanked her, somewhat blandly smiled, and quipped, “Sorry. Didn’t see the buzzer. Must be having a Senior Moment.”

She did not think it witty one bit, and if I could have dug a tunnel with my bare hands, like those intricate ones at Cu Chi in the Vietnam part of my callow youth, so as to escape her withering glare, I gladly would have done so. Pulling myself upright, I tried to reassume some dignity, as I walked out the entrance and across the parking lot -- in a New York minute.

Some Pics

Blogger friend, Ronni, suggested I expand my "Ego Wall" photo album to include more pictures from the various journeys of my life this time around. I'd love to, but here in Sri Lanka without a scanner with all my pictures packed away somewhere or inaccessible with one of my ex's, there aren't too many other pictures of yours truly available.

As it happened, however, I just found today a picture that I had lost, mislaid within the jungle of my chaordic filing system. This is a shot taken by a dear online friend, Richard, from Berkley who I first encountered several years ago on Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds and whom I have evolved a deep online friendship with the last several years on Rheingold's private online community, Brainstorms, where I have hung out much of my time online pre-blogging. A group of us from the Brainstorms Community had a "Meet" in New York City in October, 2001, about three weeks after the fateful 9-11. We traveled together to Ground Zero to comfort and provide solace to each other for that awful time. We all signed the Memorial Wall. Hmmm, wonder where that is now?

As it also happened my eldest daughter, Rebecca, who was born while I was in Vietnam, sent me a photograph of us taken in 1973. I'm not proud at all to say this, but for three years of her youth, my last two years of virulent drinking/drugging and the first year of my recovery, I was totally absent from her and her younger sister, Jennifer's, life. This was the first time that I visited them down in Maryland where they lived with their mother after I had moved to New York. Rebecca, on my left was about three when I left. Jennifer, at whom I'm looking was an infant. This was my first time to know her. My abandonment of them has haunted our relationships for most of our lives, but we keep choosing to keep working it out. For this I am most blessed and grateful.

And here is a picture of Froggy Friend, taken last night in our Mutur Sri Lanka bathroom, where s/he hangs out in all zir golden glory. Ain't s/he grand? Not intimidated at all by the weird creature with the huge big eye poking closer to her. And if she gets scared? Well, she just leaps to an opposite wall or window pane, clinging like the bestest SpiderPerson to whatever s/he lets catch zir.

Life with Father

An Eulogy for Daddy
July 25, 2001 -- Jackson, Mississippi

I look at pictures, Daddy, of you holding me as an infant, you so tall in your Navy uniform, looking so handsome, so straight with the deep black hair, all that wavy hair you had then. I never knew you with so much hair. And you really seemed glad and proud to have a son. You smile so deeply at my chubby face, holding me in your strong arms, at least they look strong. I don’t remember anything before maybe four or five when we were still living in the Fortification Street apartment just before Babs was born, so any memories of you holding me at that young an age are long gone in the deep recesses of my consciousness.

Momma says I was such a happy baby, and in a baby picture when I was about two, I sure look happy. I guess I was happy for you too, like Kate related you said she was for you. I don’t know. We never talked about it, what it was like for you to have finally a small child after you and Momma were married in ‘41. I look at the pen & ink drawing you did of “Tommy Lad”, so I can deduce that the reality meant something quite deep and meaningful to you. BTW, since I’m going “on the road,” I’m passing that drawing of me on to Thomas Aaron. He wants it as a memento of you along with the picture of me, naked holding him naked as an infant.

It sort of belies what Aunt Mary told us kids in one of our “reunions” at Beth’s during the early 90s that you never wanted children, Daddy, that you didn’t want to share your “Bobbie” with anyone, that Momma had to practically force you to impregnate her in 1942 with who I became after you became an officer in the Navy (btw, I haven’t foggiest how you became a Navy lieutenant junior grade – just another of the million or so of topics we were never able to talk about.) She desperately wanted your child, so that in the event you went off to war and were killed, she would have something of you to hold and to treasure for the rest of her life.

It makes sense to me, Daddy, that you didn’t want to share your beloved. I can be quite possessive myself in love relationships. Also being mostly a loner myself, I’ve come to accept that like you, in many ways I’m most comfortable sitting in solitude listening to my music, as I’m doing now listening to the CD from the Phantom of the Opera, which I saw with Jennifer and Eric in New York City a couple of week ends ago, as I write this about 4:30 a.m. on the morning of the day of your wake doing my own thing. I am truly your son; my apple didn’t fall far from your tree. And intimacy? Communication? Guess what, Daddy? I am more like you than sometimes I care to admit, even though for many years I made a fairly decent living teaching those skills to others. Just like us, eh? We’re damn fine writers, we just had difficulties writing each other . . .

The only time I remember you holding me as a young child was in the Fortification street apartment. We walked out into the garage, and you pulled the pull-string to turn on the light. When the garage burst into light, there was a snake wrapped around the pull-string. Did that actually happen? Did I dream it? I seem to remember it; another thing I can’t ask you about it. I don’t remember being afraid, even you being afraid -- just an isolated clarity in a sea of murkiness from my deep childhood past.

I have another photograph, Daddy, of me sitting on the front stoop of the new house on Hawthorn Drive. I’m five, maybe six, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and dark shorts. I am not a happy fella, a worried look on my face, deep furrowed eyebrows, pursed lips, looking like the weight of the world is on my small shoulders. What had happened in between the two photographs, those three or four years? The one, chubby cheeked, smiling wide-eyed, happy, so bright; the other so pinched, dark, full of angst. Surely not just the birth of Babs, the several moves, including the one to the new house, eh?

I doubt that you would have any answers, but I would have liked to have talked with you about this and so much more. Of course, Dad, over the last number of years, since the early 80s really, we’ve made a number of attempts to relate, to communicate -- we just weren’t very good at it, except for that “cluster of precious moments” we had the last visit in October of last year, which I’ll add here later.

There was that week in the summer of ’83 when I came down with Tommy. He was about three years old and an SRK, a spoiled rotten kid. We were very close, he slept with me, I coddled him, to a great extent probably I overcompensated, spoiling him to avoid the estrangement I felt we had experienced. It seemed the longer we were here, the more distant you and I became, the more critical you and Momma were of how I parented, or didn’t parent, him.

Somewhere in my Islip office is a folder with a stack of letters, of correspondence between us in the late 80s, maybe early 90s when I was trying to establish some kind of connection with you. As with so many efforts in my life in many areas of endeavor, there was a lack of follow-thru on my part. As well, Daddy, I sensed, a difficulty on your part to respond in kind, which contributed to this effort also fizzling, drifting off into inaction.

Then, Daddy, there was that time in ’92 or ’93 when I drove down here with Tommy and we all sat around the kitchen table, talking about your shame with your Father, Lonnie, how he was a gambler, how hard that was for you, how shameful that was. Also how difficult it was when your best friend, Will was it? from Monticello became an alcoholic and died so young from the disease. I don’t know if you ever really understood, or accepted my alcoholism. I remember early in my recovery coming down here, oh maybe ‘75 or ‘76 and leading a meeting over on West Northside Drive with me being hell bent in trying to shock you and Momma with how awful and degrading my drinking/drugging was. I may have succeeded too much. Silly of me, I suppose, to be so intent on negatively impressing you so.

Anyway, as I grew up, as a kid, I remember we grew more and more estranged: you would retreat to the phonograph player in the living room to listen to your @#$%^@*^#$% Classical music, and I became more and more engaged in my activities outside of the house. Once I remember taking you on a Boy Scout camping trip, which was most uncomfortable for us both. By high school I hated Classical music, and you hated emerging rock & roll. I remember once you caught me in the old Greyhound station behind St. Joe, squandering your and my hard earned pocket money from the paper route playing the pinball machines.

We were never able to talk about boy and Daddy stuff: hunting, fishing, baseball and football, war – I was so ashamed, Daddy, that you didn’t go to WW II; that was one of the major reasons I volunteered to go to Vietnam. The snot-nosed, little buggers here in the neighborhood kidded me unmercifully during the 50s, when we built our forts and played our war games, about how you must have been a coward, a sissy. It was much later that Momma showed me the stack of letters you had written to the Department of Navy, requesting sea duty, all turned down because someone had to teach navigation to the poor saps before they got shot down or bailed out over Dresden or Tokyo. So little did/do I know.

So ironic that your first major depressive episode happened the year I was in Vietnam -- actually, Daddy, the main reason I volunteered for Vietnam was as a suicide mission myself, due to my drinking/drugging. Pretty ironic, huh? In ’68 you failed in killing yourself here at home, and I failed in killing myself by going to war because you didn’t.

I do so wish we could have talked more about how weird and wonderful life and living is, about crying and grieving and laughing and wondering, stuff like this and stuff like that. I wish I would have read you more of my poetry and talked to you more about my war. How wrong it was then, how much I hated it -- yet ironically also how much I loved being there and doing it, how it has shaped every waking moment since. How much I have come to hate this country I fought for and what it stands for, the evil empire it has become, as the world’s only superpower, violating all of it’s sacred founding principles and values in the politics of greed and globalization, since I’ve come back. The barriers, however, in your life and in my life were just too hard and too high I guess for that to happen.

Sitting out in the backyard with Meg and Edward Tuesday afternoon, Daddy, I scared Meg with the vehemence of my still keening rage about that dirty little war in Southeast Asia I volunteered to go to 34 years ago this past April, our nation’s longest and most ignoble war. It’s kind of sad (see I’m getting more comfortable saying that word about us), you took all the anger and rage in your life, at your crazy-making upbringing with Lonnie and Grand-mu-mu, going from Bible belt, backwater Monticello, Mississippi to super-progressive far-left of the most socialist Indianapolis. You turned all that dark energy against yourself. I, your son, have so much of that same dark, dark energy, and I still explode it bombastically out in verbal onslaughts and seething rants. When Timothy McVeigh was executed several weeks ago, a deep part of me sighed a prayer of relief that there but for the grace of God go I!

Gee, I wonder what ever happened to the old 410 shotgun I used to oil and keep clean in the old boyhood bedroom; oh yes, and I don’t want to forget to take your violin with me. I can take that on the road, and maybe I’ll take up fiddling again. One of my regrets is that I gave up playing the violin to concentrate on playing football. I could have done both.

During adolescence and high school, I think much of my rebellion and anger was mostly directed toward you, whose anger and rebellion was directed mostly against yourself. You came to all my games, all my theatre productions, all my chorale concerts, supported me passively in all my activities, but we were never able to relate, just to talk, boy to man, son to Father, young man to older man. I’m so sad about that. There, it slipped out; I’ve said it again -- I am so sad about that, and I must bear the responsibility for not insisting, demanding that we do it more.

When I left Jackson in ’61 it was mostly to get away from you, and my disdain for you and the small, little life, I judged you to have at Gordon Marks and in Jackson. You know, Daddy, you and the advertising biz has always been oxymoronic for me. If there’s one bidness that’s cutthroat and vicious it’s advertising, and you with your super gentleman’s sensibilities and your fine-honed honor thrived in it, got the highest awards in it, not despite your honor and honesty, but because of them. Yes, Gordon Marks, especially the spoiled son, Sutton, took advantage of you and your talent, you and your craftsmanship. Yes, that hotshot Madison Avenue guy, retiring from the big time came down and stole the Deposit Guaranty account away from you, but you always delivered quality and authenticity, value and service, characteristics that make you far more loved in this city, in this community than they will ever in several lifetimes know the meaning of. Speaking of quality, authenticity, value and service, my generation has made a mockery of such traits in hollow slogans and bottom line metrics only. We who rebelled so boisterously against your generation in the establishment during our pampered youth that you provided for us became the largest, most spoiled youthful generation in the history of the planet, not trusting anyone over thirty. And we have outdone your generation, Daddy, in spades, in overarching greed, conspicuously consumptive cancer, and diseased values. I rant, I ramble.

After your internal battles with your demons and dark side, at about the age I am now, you went on to honor your friends and associates in business, creating legacies to them and a legacy for yourself as a chronicler of the histories of ordinary men and ordinary institutions, even an ordinary city, Jackson, doing extraordinary good deeds and excellent good works. You became a writer of history, the common stories of extraordinary events, and today you shared the billboard of the funeral parlor with one of the greatest writers of our era, Eudora Welty. It is fitting. It is just. You deserve each other. And I imagine you are in heaven looking down at us, sharing a cup of tea and crumpets, discussing small matters, momentous or mundane. Better yet, yes, I envision the two of you, dancing a jig in exuberant glory of IT all.

You know, Daddy, despite all the estrangement, all the resentment for a life between us mostly unlived, all the bitterness for what we did not have, the far greater truth is that I *am* your son, and you gave me despite our outer estrangement a core of value, a legacy of talents and skills as well as a set of deep principles which have inexorably shaped and molded me, Daddy, to be the man that today at 58 I am still in the process of emerging myself to be. I sit here listening to rousing, deep, beautiful music, whose love you gave me, despite myself, looking out the window of my first childhood bedroom in the early light of the day we shall wake you . . .

What a wonderfully ironic twist of words, Daddy, you will “waken” today in the eyes of your family and community from this earthly mortal coil to “a better place to be” after the days, weeks and months of living a mostly institutionally dehumanized life in nursing homes, to the arms of Grand-mu-mu and Lonnie and Will and Lassie and Bambi and all the others near and dear to you who have passed this illusory earthly veil, so that you can reconnect with them on the other side. So that you can also prepare a place for your beloved, Momma, when it’s her time, as well as to prepare a place, to recon, to be the advance party, to scope it out, to get the skinny, for me and for Babs, for Kate, for Meg and for Beth and for all our chillens that’s better, deeper, realer, according to the always loving will of the Holy Spirit who rests and holds us all, all of the time in His/Her/Its loving arms throughout eternity . . .

Whew! Sorry, Daddy, got on a raving roll there -- along with love of music, from you I have been blessed and gifted with a(n):

• Love of words and crafting words
• Deep sense of justice and racial equality
• Appreciation for simplicity in material needs, not wants
• Value of friendship
• Value of books and the written word
• Passionate sense to learn and to seek to know more
• Respect for dignity and protocol, though often still I flaunt it and rebel against it
• Ability to live up to commitment and to one’s honor “for better or worse”
• Belief in the common good and decency of all people, regardless of race, color or background

Lastly, Daddy, from you and Momma I grew up with a very progressive political view, not only about race relations, but about the whole spectrum of political thought, which was quite liberal, even socialist, especially compared with the mostly conservative South. No doubt this was due to you being shipped off to live with the “Black Sheep” socialist wing of our family with Eleanor. I also really regret that we didn’t talk more about her and what you experienced there, your knowing Paul Robeson, your experiences during the Depression. So much we could have spoken about had we taken the time . . .

Later today, Daddy, at Wright & Ferguson and tomorrow at St. James, hundreds of Jacksonians, those here in the community as well as folks from Monticello and some from afar, the Wilson’s, Aunt Mary, etc. will gather to honor you, to pay respects to you, to salute you for the life well lived, well crafted, well served that you lived. As your son, though much of it remains mystery for me, is not directly understood by me, was often in my callow youth spurned and ridiculed by me, I will watch proud and humble, grateful and with heartfelt joy that though I didn’t understand and walk much of your path with you, I am very open-hearted glad and happy for you and for Momma and for all of us that you did . . .

I love you Daddy . . .

Your son,
Tommy-lad

P.S.

Here’s the prose poem rendition I made of that last conversation we had in the den my last visit down last October:

One Cluster of Precious Moments

Father and I are sitting in the den. Momma and the girls are in the kitchen preparing the noon family meal like we always do on Sundays after church. Our relationship as his first born has always been strained, even estranged for most of our 57 years. For many reasons, which I understand, but still am emotionally vulnerable to, he never wanted children, did not want to share “Bobbie” his lover/sweetheart/hostage, our mother with anyone.

I ask him what he does with his time at St. Catherine’s, the Alzheimer’s facility where he is, which is excellent and most caring.

He pauses for a moment and slowly replies. “I think about all the friends I’ve had, all the family I’ve know, each of you children, your friends and children, my grandchildren. I think how grateful I am to have known so many wonderful people. It fills me with such gratitude.”

“That’s really nice, Dad.”

We sit in silence for a while, listening to the tick-tocking of the mantle clock.

“That’s a really nice sound. The mantle clock tick-tocking,” I say.

“Yes,” he replies.

“I was with you, oh I guess around 11 or 12, maybe younger, when we bought it as a birthday present for Mom up in Fondren Place.

“I remember,” he says.

The tick-tocking seems to slow, focusing all reality into each passing beat.

“Yes, each tick, each tock is so soothing, so comforting,” he says after a slow passing while. “Such a nice sound.

“Yes, Daddy, it is.”

P.P.S.S.

In 1965-66, Daddy, while at Xavier, Otto and Diane Kvapil, my theatre mentors, introduced me to the poetry of ee cummings. We did a theatrical presentation consisting only of the words of his poetry. One of the poems we performed is the following poem, which even at that time resonated deeply with me. Even though I was most estranged from you, Daddy, I fantasized then, 36 years ago, reading this at your or Momma’s funeral, because even then it reminded me of the deep quality of your love, your devotion, your caring for each other. As rebellious, as bitter, as self-and-other-hateful a youth then as I was, I recognized, Daddy, that what you and Momma had was a good thing. Here is the poem:

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have one. It will not be a pansy heaven or a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose
standing near my

(swaying over her
silent
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,
& the whole garden will bow

Its a Small, Small World After All

In the summer of 1965, a couple of months after I graduated from Xavier University I made my first trip to New York City. Since a small child watching our tiny b&w tv in the den shows about New York City such as The Honeymoners, The Ed Sullivan Show, Naked City, etc. and bunches of movies, New York had been the Mecca of my mind. As my life turned out, I ended up living there just shy of three decades most of the time out in Islip, Long Island. Today though I have traveled far away, living presently in Sri Lanka, and having spent a couple of years on the road and in Tucson, I still identify myself as a New Yorker; not as an American, mind you, but as a New Yorker.

On that first visit to NYC with my parents and four younger sisters during the week when I was supposed to be on my honeymoon with Roseann, but thats another story for another time, we visited the Worlds Fair out in the Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, riding the Number 7 train out to Shea Stadium. One of the exhibits that I vividly remember is seeing the Pieta, standing in a long line to wind by it, starkly lit in golden rays against glowing purple-blue background. Was I moved? Did I appreciate how incredible a piece of work it is? What did I experience? I dont recall precisely, but I do have a vivid, visceral sense memory of standing there in what must have been total awe.

The only other exhibit I recall is the UNICEF exhibit. It was a huge calliope, with hundreds of mechanical dolls from every nation of the then world, singing the rousing anthem Its a Small, Small World After All. I do remember being very moved, the tears streaming down my face in wonder and joy and gratitude at the lovely music and the cacophony of movement and dance of the hundreds of mechanical dolls. Is it coincidence that almost four decades later some of my work as a peace worker in Sri Lanka is with UNICEF, dealing with the families of former child soldiers released by the LTTE?

Anyway, several months ago I had an incredible demonstration of just how small, small a world, literally, it indeed is after all. I was in Mumbai for the World Social Forum. I was not in a good head or heart space; I found Mumbai to be oppressively crowded, the side by side incongruity of the super-rich with the super-poor most depressing, the dirt, the traffic, the pressing crowds everywhere weighed heavily upon me. The grand rhetoric about how the down-trodden masses of The People were going to rise up and overcome the tyranny of the globalized, oliarchial tyrants of transnational corporatism was waxing most thin. Less and less am I able to believe it.

One morning on the crowded commuter train to the World Social Forum, I had a panic attack. I had to get off the train, so I did one stop before the one from which I knew how to get to the Expedition Area where the Forum was. Its tricky, Mumbai being so large, if you dont get to the right side of the railroad tracks, the 3-Wheeler taxi drivers dont know where you want to go. I was disoriented when I in a panic got off in a surging sea of commuters, being pushed this way or that. I couldnt get my bearings as to where I needed to go. Bobbing along up ahead of me several meters away was a tall Occidental young man with glimpses I thought I could see of an accompanying young woman. I gritted my teeth and barreled my way through the maddening masses, catching up with them. I was most relieved when I saw that they had World Social Forum badges and shoulder bags.

We struck up a conversation, quickly exchanging info about who we were, what we were doing at the WSF. It turns out they were a young couple from Providence, R.I. who had been traveling throughout South Asia for the past several months. When I told them I worked with Nonviolent Peaceforce, they asked if I knew Ramu. Yes, I replied in astonishment, Ramu, who is part of the International Governing Committee of NP, was instrumentally involved in setting up the Sri Lankan project where currently I work. We had been buddies, helping each other during the training activities and simulations, at the Basic Training we attended last summer in Chaing Mai, Thailand. They had spent the previous two weeks before the WSF in Tamil Nadu working with Ramu, building a safe house for refugees.

Now, considering that among the millions of lives in Mumbai amid the hundred of thousands of attendees at the WSF, what are the chances that I, getting off a stop earlier than usual, would bump into two people, also from the States, who had shortly before worked with one of three, among the billion or so, Indians that I knew? Pretty high, I suspect, unless of course one believes that it is indeed a small, small world after all . .

Try To Remember

Of course, is one of my favorite songs -- ever, of ALL time. It's the most well-known song from The Fantasticks, the longest running show in American Theatre, and the longest running musical in the world. Jeez, when it opened on May 3, 1960, Ike was President. What a different world that was then!

When I was a freshman in college at Xavier University in Cincinnati, my first of many entrances on the Masque Society stage in the old South Hall Theatre, as the Lord of the Manor in Act III of Ben Johnson's The Alchemist, was accompanied by the overture, which was playing if you loaded up the link above. Whew! That trips me the light Fantastick down memory lane.

A then young buck, Jerry Orbach, sang "Try to Remember" on the original cast recording. Of late, for the past 14 seasons, he has played cynical, sardonic, streetwise Detective Lennie Briscoe on Law and Order. What a come down, but, Hey, it's work, and steady work at that.

One of the high point memories of my long love affair with "Try to Remember" happened in the summer of 1964. I was at ROTC Summer Camp for six weeks at Fort Indiantown Gap in the beautiful Blue Mountains of central Pennsylvania. ROT-C Summer Camp is the equivalent of basic training for folks who aspire to become Officers and Gentleman in the U.S. Army by act of fucking Congress. A requirement is that you must qualify on the rifle range with the basic infantry weapon. For me way back when, it was the old M-1 rifle of WW II vintage, very heavy with a kick like a Southern mule. On the first try, a test round, I breezed in with a full house of Maggie’s drawers – the humiliating indication that not only had I not hit the bulls-eye, I had not hit anywhere on the target. I was mortified. If I didn’t qualify, I wouldn't get my first pass the following weekend. I would be out at the rifle range on Saturday until I qualified. For some reason, I got the inspiration to start whistling “Try to Remember.” I approached the line and fired away. I got 6 out of 10 shots. I started humming “Try to Remember;” the next round I got 8 out of 10. On my third round, I was singing “Try to Remember” at the top of my lungs. The DI was pissed, but I kept hitting the bulls-eye, 10 for 10. I was no mere marksman, I was a fucking expert. I am most grateful to all the fates above and below that when I was in Vietnam I never had to use that “skill,” when I carried an M-1 Carbine, much lighter, not much of a kick, especially on semi-automatic, in my gun-jeep escorting convoys in the Central Highlands.

Over the years, I saw many productions of The Fantasticks, several at the Sullivan Street Theatre in the Village. Just today I got an email from dear friend, Fran, who recently walked by the bistro where we ate before the seeing the show late in the summer of ’95. That’s a good memory I don’t have to “Try to Remember”; it’s etched in the sinews of my mind . . .

Memory

Yesterday morning in my quiet time reading, I came across this quote in Pema Chodron's book Start Where You Are :

"Every situation is a passing memory."

Early on I intuited this truth, though certainly not due to any spiritual enlightenment. Quite the contrary. Due to a virulent addiction to alcohol and other drugs in my youth, I existed in a vacuum of insecurity and extreme self-consciousness. I was self-tortured by illusions of low self-esteem, convinced that on the "The Great Chain of Being" I was lower than proverbial whale turds. I was so locked-down in a constant state of anxiety and panic that I was generally unable to fully appreciate any situation. Most of my existence I experienced as an ordeal; I used to say that I was very adept at "faking it, making it, getting by." Funny, viewing it objectively, I lived quite a charmed life, one of many adventures, awards, achievements, etc. That was part of the problem; I felt so undeserving of what my life was that I felt extraordinarily guilty of having had life "handed to me on a silver platter." Wierd, the machinations of callow youth, huh?

Somewhere, I got the idea that I could experience life better in memory. I became an expert in waxing and waning nostalgic. I also used to say that I was "a maker of memories." I could hardly wait for an experience to hurry up and get over with, so I could go off and appreciate it by myself, yes -- in memory, usually with the utmost regret that it was gone, kaput, done with in the irretrievable and irrevocable past.

In the mid-summer of 1966, just before I went into the U.S. Army to fulfill my obligation as an ROTC-graduated Officer and Gentleman by act of fucking Congress, I started what has been a life-long endeavor since, writing poetry. Here is my first poem, which explores the theme of memory:

Projected Memory

After all my bows are taken,
when dust clings to the window pane of my soul,
perhaps then Ill think of one rose petal.

Its fragrance will swirl through me,
bringing with it bright memories
of youthful yearnings across the pit of time.

In sweet silence,
probably rocking with eyes closed,
a smile will caress my wrinkled lips.

I shall remember this magical time,
when in shadows laced with moonlight
we slowly kiss.

Summer, 1966
Cincinnati, Ohio

What's that cliché about youth being wasted on the young?

Late last night, I perused the entire fotolog of new cyberfriend, Ronni. The very last entry I read, before collapsing into Titania's web, was this quote from the The Uses of Photography by John Berger:

"What served in the place of
the photograph; before the
camera's invention? The
expected answer is the
engraving, the drawing, the
painting. The more revealing
answer might be: memory."