Father's Day Reflections

          His wife and his mother—two living rooms!
          In the one, there is no trace of him, as the linoleum tiles must have been pulled up and discarded, or scrubbed until colorless and bald.
          In the other, his boyhood portraits—one on each side of the blotter—overpower the desk. On the piano, his face begins already to be sad, the strange bloating of his last two years apparent. His wartime snapshots, and those of the uncertain civilian years that followed, look like frames from Hud.  
          Then quite suddenly, he made 33 look like 50.
          I have his suede windbreaker with the leather buttons. I have his slide ruler in its rigid kid leather case with FOGLE in big block letters down the side. I have every driver's license and vehicle registration he was issued between 1946 and 1952 and his Pennsylvania Railroad passes in bright construction-paper colors. I have his christening jacket and cap and tiny cotton socks the color of tapioca pudding.
          But most of all I have his drawings, the caricatures of a too-privileged childhood on Philadelphia's Main Line. One group is a tablet of faces labeled "Village Hen," "Writer," "Hick," "Queer," "Genius," and "Young Jew." Everything is extrapolated, objectified, the traits made lurid in the funhouse mirrors of his observant, articulate isolation.
          All through elementary school I remember the word, in the warm navy-blue ovals of my mother's penmanship, on the line designated for Father: deceased. "Heart attack," she would say, checking on a pot roast or dead-heading some petunias.
          But my grandmother would close her eyes, then open them, her voice full of a sad honey: "Your father died of a broken heart."
          Once when I was 35 and visiting her for the weekend, my mother and I went up to Ridge Pike to buy some flowers for her patio. I missed the parking lot for the garden center and had to turn around near a church. "Your father and I were married here."
          Such disclosures came throughout my life as the bricks of an old foundation work their way up to the topsoil of a flowerbed. 
          When I was 10 we were cleaning out our storage area in the basement of our apartment complex and I found a small, black, musty three-ring binder. The tiny pages inside were filled with a clear, bold handwriting that recorded, with a strange candor, household life. The only line I remember from it is Marion may be pregnant again.
          I handed it to my mother and she flipped its pages, balling some of them up with her fist. After a few minutes she handed it back to me.
          I gave it to my grandmother. 
          I never saw it again.

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          Knowing my mother as I do, now and then I subtract her robust traits from my personality and reflect upon the ghostly remainder of the equation. They form a fragile etching, these genetic touches from another person, entirely unknown to me yet so present during my childhood in my grandmother's house—the shoebox of pictures, the dark closet of sports coats, neckties, and shoes. 
          I admit I feel a kinship with his rapid, confident pencil lines—that blind impulse to express.
          A proliferation, a superfluity of nerve endings just at the surface of his consciousness amassing a toolkit of mouths and chins and noses and knees upon which—from which—he drew. 
          A thousand painful, spiteful, delightful impressions.

Throwback Thursday

          The blue slipper box that says "TOWNCRAFT" has the old wooden chess pieces in it. The grey Asics box holds my vine charcoal and drawing pencils.
          Where is the green box with my photos from the eighties?
          Furious, my heart racing, I shine Gary's super-duper killer flashlight—the size and shape of an old car headlight—under the library table and back behind the bookcases temporarily fanned in front of the hall windows like Tarot cards or cold cuts until Gary refinishes the big bedroom. John Updike and Robert Louis Stevenson squeeze together on the dusty shelves like subway riders.
          There aren't enough Saturdays for this house, and we fall behind and further behind, until the idea itself has crossed the horizon—out of sight. What was it we were trying to do?
          I find the box and open it, but every picture has been scanned and heightened, its story already told.
          My narrow self in that black wool coat, bleary-eyed and porcelain in the middle of Avenida Corrientes, exhausted from a night of fucking.
          Jose's harrowing close-up of my face at Valley Green Inn, my jaw like a bone filigree.
          Our cats and Ikea, my old car, and the shots of me on New York streets—in 1986 we had to go to a travel agent's office in Manhattan to buy plane tickets to Argentina—have all been embroidered with my prose, lovingly recalled.
          For I was on a mission, in my late forties—after my mother had gone and released the past from the tyranny of her silence—to tell it all. My life became my art, and I weaved it into web pages and spliced it into so-so-so many videos. I sculpted it into sentences that I read to myself, now and then—so pretty, and so accurate.
          I am past talking about the past—sizing it, laying down its audio track, feathering it as I loved to do: blurring the edges, bleeding one nut-brown image into another. I feel empty, no better for having hung my gallery—nothing was achieved. Even poor Jobriath has had his party, and he falls back to sleep on his pillow of vitamins and Brewer's yeast.
          Perhaps art has only ever been a way of fighting the stubborn banality of the present time, its refusal to elaborate—its colorless silence. The desire to entertain or impress has left me. Or, maybe, the people that inspired it have gone. Childless, grandchildless, nevertheless I too am forced to turn to the present. But nothing around this house is forming itself into photos, no childhood memories are being made in these rooms. It's time for gardening and bingo.
          Like my pouting, adjectiveless mother, we are all the sum and retrieval of our past—stunned, caustic more often than is attractive, covering our ears to irony's perfect end rhymes, living without any resolution to the pointless suffering, turning the corner to sixty, and silent.

Two Cats

          Bit and Holden sit in the unfiltered sunlight at the foot of the bed, sphinxes facing one another. 
          Their overlapping front paws form a hairy rectangle, half grey and white, half beige and brown—striped like a barber's pole.
          They know that I have carefully made the bed, and their Neoclassical posture mimics the embroidered figures in the fancy white spread.
          It's been ten summers since I heard the six-week-old kitten crying like a bird inside the tall Barberry hedge surrounding the school. I was within yet another rage of dieting and exercising—trying to bend my forties violently back toward my thirties—and I still had Rock Creek Park between myself and home.
          Kneeling down on the pavement below the August sun I fed it sushi from my backpack. No larger than my palm, it alternated between feeding and rubbing its head against my thigh.
          All the way through the park, the kitten gripping my T shirt, I tried to think of what agency or organization to call. I still don't know.
          From the beginning she was a subject for the camera, her saucer-large eyes and insouciant gaze so hypnotic. She remained essentially feral, never appearing before guests and—confined in a tiny powder room—deftly eluding the vet on home visits designed to accommodate her.
          Four summers later, again fleshy and resigned to my lost beauty, I heard Gary call nervously from the front of the house:
          You let Bit outside?!
          A clean young tabby—a taffy-colored Doppelgänger of my own—was boldly exploring the cement columns and painted floorboards of our front porch.
          And within six weeks Gary had a house cat of his own. Sitting on the bed talking one night, we came up with the name Holden because I read one of Alain de Botton's tweets that day: "William Holden is the working man's William Holden."
          It fit the new cat, who accomplished the transition from stray to pet without scruples or temerity: bawling into the dining room windows from the driveway like Stanley Kowalski, he possessed the lurid treble of Jagger (which we had first thought to call him). His gaze was urgently communicative and singular in its motivation. He possessed no complexity of intentions or second thoughts. He took the house, and us, as a rite of passage—upholstered and stocked with food. 
          He was instantly, deeply affectionate.
          His gradual pairing with Bit (from Gary's moniker "the little bit") was boilerplate Tennessee Williams. He cleaned her head, her discomfited expression as his tongue pressed down on her ears like a woman in a crushed bonnet. At night we could hear their paws like horses' hooves sprinting through the upstairs rooms, and Bit screamed—to be certain, disproportionately to the pain—when Holden gave, occasionally, those little assertions of his control.
          When the new puppies came, they were exiled together, permanently, to the second floor. This came as no hardship to Bit, who continued to commune with me from the toilet seat as I sat in the tub, or posed providentially on the bureau top as I took scores of pictures of her before I went to sleep. 
          Her gift is waiting; her genius is contemplation, the motionless hours before a deft kill ... or a mere decision to relocate. All is empty, but gorgeously athletic, strategy. Visceral, impossibly elegant, her eyes are wary and reptilian, and she cannot be lifted or held. Each striped leg bears a shallow cotton glove of white fur at the paw, and, ladylike, on a long sunny afternoon she might extend them in front of her, delicately crossed.
          But Holden suffered in the restructuring.
          His treasured access to us, his daily requirement for physical intimacy, defined him. In the afternoons he cried from the other side of the doors, faced the dogs from behind gates, and once braved a leaping run to the top of the sofa, the dogs barking and nipping from below him. At night he dominated me, sprawling on my chest so close to my face he had to turn his head slightly to the side, covering me in kisses and chin rubs, and always threatening to inflict those little bites that were an inconvenient byproduct of his bottomless, proprietary affection.
          Before sleep, he positioned himself in the half circle of my arm and shoulder with a roaring purr, and with a single gesture he touched my face with the mere tip of his paw.
          But in the last few months his determination—his belief in his relationship with us—has flagged. I kept feeling him for lumps and staring at his coat for signs of dullness. I observed how he held his tail, and I gently stroked his back and sides, which seem to have softened and lost their tone and resistance. 
          His cries are infrequent and sometimes 'silent,' his mouth opening with intent but expressing only resignation.
          Last week we took him for a complete evaluation. The vet's palpation revealed nothing of importance, and a few days later his labs came back perfect.
          Last night Holden failed to appear on my bed at all. He seems to have found some place to hide in another bedroom, and often I cannot even locate him. Bit wakens me on and off during the night, her back and rump so firm and vibrating with initiative, but affection takes hold of her like a head cold—something to suffer briefly and to recover from, slightly embarrassing. I dispense a few pats and scratches and, thankfully, we are done.
          Sometimes during the day I find Holden on the bed, stretched out shapelessly as a coat thrown across a chair, and I speak to him. 
          Bit will be with me for years, outsmarting stink bugs, arranging herself artfully, until her sinewy shape simply evaporates as she regards a lamp shade intently. 
          But Holden's need is too great for this world, and he has not even his body to console him.

My Irish Aunt

          Sharon still lived in the house in York when we started tubing a section of the Big Gunpowder Falls, the ice-cold, fast moving river below Prettyboy Dam. 
          There were several parties in the summers of 2003 and 2004, always with two cars. But one July day Gary and I drove up alone, parked at the old railroad station in Monkton, then walked the length of the river up to the low, slightly creepy concrete bridge of Blue Mountain Road where we always put in, screaming as we first sat back into the giant whale-colored tubes.
          After the hour's ride, shivering in the hot car, our hands pruned and white, we got to the intersection with Route 45—the Old York Trail—and I suddenly told Gary "Keep going on this."
          What has kept us together for 24 years is his responsiveness to my passionate or manic concepts—in the graceless, bureaucratic parlance of modern therapy, an enabler—and we found ourselves silently heading north, following the serpentine rise of the two-lane road up from the river valley. The opposite direction from home.
          At the top of the hill, I looked back over the fields to find the high bridges, like two towering aqueducts, that carry the four lanes of 83 across the river.
          I last saw them when I was seven, and the distant view (there were far fewer trees then) provided me with my first full-on Sehnsucht. My grandmother, my great-aunt, and I were driving down from Shrewsbury to White Hall to visit my Aunt Lillian. I had never met her, and after that day I never saw her again.
          Thirty-seven years later, I am trying to remember the roads and turns as I saw them from the massive back seat windows of my grandmother's 1951 Buick.
         "Turn right."

A Habit of Remembering

          The smell of snow in my grandmother's deep backyard.
          Alice's smile as I laid on top of her—a slight show of tooth and the eyes wide as if we were about to take a trip.
          The smack of my mother crushing ice cubes for another cocktail.
          Everyone has memories.
          I listen for the boiling point in others—a certain tone of voice, a moment of combustion in the narrative.
          Yet the craft of empathy, like piano scales, requires discipline. I want to be sucked in, struck dumb.
          Is reticence the calling card of stability?
          I prefer a hair out of place, something to be caught on—the wire of an old fence—repeating forever a sad, pretty theme. Lighting it differently, restaging it.
          Is it hubris to think life has something—quite specific—to tell us? Flipping backward in the book when one is so close to its end. Still asking: What did I fail to understand?
          The creamy assault of my first wedge of Roquefort, purchased because it was the most expensive—and most unfamiliar—cheese in the case. The sound of the desert wind over the bathroom skylight my first night in Palm Springs.
          My first Easter with Gary.
          My last walk with Jamie.
          The foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

January Still Life

          Highly colored, sodden fabric dog toys, chewed apart as a butcher butterflies a lamb leg, dot the back yard. 
          One small brown bird sits, alone, on the fence post and will not stop declaiming, bouncing his body entirely to the left, then to the right, as if in parade uniform—his tail decorated with a pencil line of vermilion.
          Some tender-leafed ground cover proliferates in the frozen soil, proving that gardening is not a skill but merely a preference for things that refuse to thrive.
          The air is wet and cold, and the distances between objects are long. The park is too far away today.  
          The concrete bowls of the birdbaths lie face down on the ground, sitting winter out like bystanders to sudden, sourceless gunfire. When we lift them in March, the handful of spindly dandelions beneath will expire in the sunlight.
          The canvas top of the neighbor's Home Depot cabana lies hiked up like a wet skirt over the metal frame, exposing chairs grouped like riderless carousel horses.
          And even now a gauzy copper band of light is forming in the west, and night is coming while we are still at work. 
          February is a week away.
          The back yard waits for our summer candles and outdoor kisses.

Self Among Others

In my beginning is my end.

—T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"

          The first time I went into the cement building with the big cross on it, set at the top of the hill like a pan of bread dough slowly rising, I was 10. Nannie ordered us off across the Betzwood Bridge not to church but to Sunday School, which has no Hell—only pianos on wheels and classroom doors with paper hands and crayon-heightened Jesuses taped onto the glass.
          The two stories sat upon one another like Duncan Hines layers, with a portico running the length between them like escaping frosting. The ground floor was a dark labyrinth of little rooms, but upstairs was a single meeting hall, airy and open as a ballroom, with a stainless steel kitchen at one end and a small stage at the other—the whole studded by curtainless casement windows gazing down onto the tiny green cemetery like portholes. 
          Poppy just dropped us off, and I didn't know which tiny room to enter. I was terrified of the families—all familiar to one another—and at the end of the hour we never went back.

* * *