Banquet Horse: Notes Toward a Memoir with Topazia Alliata

The Banquet Horse

Banquet Horse: the phrase slips from the end of a dream and stays with me after the dream has melded in irretrievable shadows. All that’s left is Banquet Horse, something I hold onto, whatever it is—odd and never uttered before—maybe a combination of banquet hours and banquet house, but not either of them. It stirs up an image of wood planks covered with a white cloth under chestnut trees and elms. It reminds me of the final scene in “Mostly Martha,” a movie about a German chef who, after her sister dies in a car accident, goes through the life-altering drama of caring for her pre-teen niece until she finds the girl’s Italian father. Reunited at last, the family does what people have done since the Prodigal Son’s father ordered the fatted calf slaughtered: throw a banquet in the farmyard. It takes me, via a Joycean “vicus of recirculation,” back to Rome and a visit to my Friend Topazia in 2002.

At 89, thanks to healthy eating and good genes, Topazia still reads two newspapers a day, those books her daughters recommend, exhibition catalogues, art journals. She still stays up well past midnight, and if she doesn’t move as quickly as she once did, she says it could be worse. When I write that we’re planning to see her on our visit to Rome, she has her daughter e-mail: “of course you will stay here.” She lives outside the center of Rome, on the corner of Via Bari and Via Como, a section north of the train station in a sprawling complex that originally housed railway workers.

*

The Perfection of Cheese and Pears

To prepare for a “family dinner” on Sunday, she drags a two-wheeled shopping cart downstairs, through her building’s courtyard, out the gate and down the street to the market in nearby Piazza Lecce.

She buys chickory and pears. Bread “al grano duro,” meaning hard grain. It lasts longer than the day-long lifespan of normal Italian bread; the crust is hard, the inside is soft, and the blended flavors of crust and crumb layer the foundation of western civilization. She buys tomatoes and onions, a small container of milk, a quarter kilo of coffee. What cheeses does she buy? There are so many to choose from—from soft spreadable cheeses to parmigiano reggiano, hard and perfect for grating, or sliced and eaten by itself. That evening, when it is just the three of us for dinner, Topazia says a rhyme: “Al contadino non far sapere quanto è buono il formaggio con le pere” or “don’t let the peasants know how delicious cheese tastes with pears.” Otherwise, they’d be eating pears and cheese all day and wouldn’t go back to work. The pears are a perfection of juice and pulp and sweetness, and must be eaten immediately. The cheese must accompany them. What kind? Maybe a caciotta out of Umbria. For dessert there is ice cream topped with Amaro d’Abruzzi.

*

Amaro

Italian amaro is one of those specialty liquors concocted with herbs and roots and flowers. It sometimes resembles used motor oil with a medicinal flavor. Sometimes it transforms, once in your mouth, from a taste like my grandmother’s Sen-sens to a sublime and complex and honeyed dissonance, like the opening chords in Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. Every region boasts its own amaro; families pass recipes down through generations. An alchemy of aromatic herbs, roots, bitter orange.

In Perugia, I went to the pharmacy to buy a remedy for Joan’s upset stomach. The pharmacist sold me an over-the-counter Italian version of Tums. Then, because I was a foreigner trying valiantly to speak Italian, he reached under the counter and gave me a liter of “Amaro del Droghiere,” “Druggist’s Bitters,” which he made himself. He counseled me to drink a small glass after eating to aid digestion. “Never before,” he said.

An other time, in Venice we’d gone to a trattoria near our pensione in the Rialto neighborhood. Typical Americans, we were early, eating supper long before the more civilized hour of nine. It was the year Joan was on a quest for the perfect spaghetti with tomato sauce. Our waiter, an insolent young man who had worked in an Italian restaurant in London for several years, stiffened and said, “Madame. You come all the way to Venice for Spaghetti con Pomodoro?”

Because seppia, a relative of squid, was sold in the Rialto market and available on every menu, and since I’d never had it before, I asked what it’s like.

“It’s fine,” the waiter said with the same air of disdain. “I have it every day. It’s not monkey brains, you know.” I asked if he knew Eugenio Montale’s book of poems, “Ossi di Seppia,” or “Cuttlefish Bones.” He had heard of it, but hadn’t read it. And so, in honor of Montale, I ordered the seppia.

He delivered Joan’s spaghetti with a snort.

“And here is your Ossi di Sepia,” he said, setting down a bowl of black broth. I expected something that black to be pungent, with the lingering odor of things washed up from the sea. But it was fresh and delicate and chewy, as mild as squid, and turned my teeth and tongue and lips black. Beneath it, a square of crisp polenta retained its yellow color and firm texture.

When the waiter cleared the dishes, I asked if he could recommend an amaro to complement the after-dinner espresso. He said he would bring out a bottle for us. If we didn’t like it, he’d give us any other amaro we’d like—Amaro Zuccaro, Amaro Nonino—“But first you must try this.”

I poured. A light viscosity of dirty bronze tinged with gold filled the cordial glasses. And it was magic, lifting our meal from merely delicious to truly memorable, an apotheosis fusing the assorted flavors into a deep, hazy satisfaction that ran so deep it embraced the realm of the metaphysical. The essence of food became one with our bodies; the essence of our bodies became one with the universe.

There was no label. “It’s called Elissir Speciale,” the waiter said with his characteristic hauteur, “and it’s not for sale.” A friend of the trattoria owner makes a small batch of it every year. When it’s gone, too bad.

Some Amaros can’t be imported to the US because the recipes are such a closely held secret. Elissir Speciale was almost certainly one of these.

*

Banquet Flowers

Topazia sends Joan and me to the flower vendor in Piazza Lecce. We pick through explosions of daisies, asters, alstroemeria, roses, carnations, their stems dunked in plastic buckets. We return with armloads of white, red, yellow, a rampant outrage of colors. Topazia asks me to fetch vases from the upper shelves as she trims the stems, efficiently setting them in groups of matching and contrasting color and height, drawing on her experience in Kyoto before the war. Friends suggested, when she said she’d like to learn about Zen, that she apprentice to a master flower arranger. In the end, she attained the skill and inner stillness, the flash of insight necessary to be recognized as a Master flower arranger herself. It’s very important, she said, to arrange them in clusters of three.

*

Construction of the Banquet Table

On Sunday, Mario arrives early. He goes to Topazia’s daughter’s room which was left intact after she died. A large orange and blue painting by Mohamed Melehi fills the wall above the bed. Posters of her recitals line the wall opposite. A blue writing desk, a chair with a wicker seat. Mario, an architect with black hair and beard, Yuki’s partner when she died, leans out the open window, smoking.

Topazia tells him which tables to bring into the dining room, to arrange end to end. Glass-paned doors set the dining room apart from the hallway and kitchen. A bowl of oranges and apples rests on a small corner table under the window. Along the wall, a dark walnut sideboard holds dishes and stemware—Topazia’s final connection to her family home in Sicily. Mario takes four wooden blocks from the bottom drawer to make the kitchen table level with the two other tables.

With the authority of a shop foreman, she directs Mario: which leg to lift, to slide the block under, which to do next. And though he’s done this a hundred times, there is a certain ritual to follow. Tablecloths give the illusion of a single long table. She arranges the plates and silver. The heirloom glasses. Sixty or seventy years ago, everything matched. But now, in her ninetieth year, the most important thing is bringing people together and making the chemistry unfold.

*

Banquet Conversation

Family dinner includes Topazia, her daughters Dacia and Toni, granddaughter Nur, Mario, and friends. There is 95½ year-old-Daisy who has known Topazia more than sixty years; Pina, who operates a resort on Lake Bracciano, renting rooms to tourists and vacationers; a photographer whose name I don’t remember; and an American film critic.

Pina brings the salad. Toni, the bread. I’ve brought two bottles of Prosecco. Dacia has brought pasta dressed with olive oil and roasted tomatoes. Because Topazia and her daughters are vegetarian, the main dish is melanzane—eggplant with cheese and diced onion and tomato. And there is talk.

Always talk.

Dacia and Topazia disagree over where wine corks come from.

“Quercia,” Topazia says. “Oak.”

“But Mamma,” Dacia says, “There is a special cork tree, grown just for the purpose of wine corks.”

She speaks patiently, with the authority that comes from being both a writer and the daughter of vintners.

“And that is oak,” says Topazia, who had been the vintner until forced to sell the family vineyard when the local government raised her taxes. The wine she’d produced had been exquisite, winning awards and acclaim throughout Europe. The current owners produce massive amounts of cheap wine, “good only for the ballast of ships.”

Topazia had asked that I not wear jeans—she called them ‘dungarees,’ since it was going to be a special occasion. I wore the one pair of good trousers I’d packed, and a black shirt. Black suited me, Topazia said, contrasting well with my white hair and beard.

The critic arrived in red shorts, faded t-shirt from “The Flaming Lips” concert tour, and flip flops.

*

The Wine Tasting

As a teenager, her father entrusted her to represent the family’s wines in different competitions and expositions across Europe. She watched the wine judges hold anonymous glasses of wine to the light before sipping and swishing in their mouths. After attending several of these events, she became a kind of mascot to Count Ruffino, Baron Ricasoli and other elders of the wine world. But she was serious about the family wine, and after winning several competitions, the wine royalty thought it might be amusing to give her the master wine taster test, which can only be administered by other master wine tasters.

Her father, the Duca di Salaparuta, showed her the ins and outs of wine, the importance of tannin, proper aging. He was an independent thinker and saw no reason why a woman should not excel in the wine business. His simple but effective strategy was to have her learn from the best: every day he poured a noble wine from his cellar, pointing out its salient qualities, its terroir, vintage, the grape varietals. She later had to define those qualities herself, elaborating on what made a particular wine memorable, what flaws made it mediocre, what made a disastrous wine “ill.”

The master wine taster test was much the same. She gave a full and accurate description of each wine she was presented, passing judgment on good, better, best. In the end, thanks to her father’s excellent instruction, and to Ricasoli, Ruffino and other captains of the wine industry, she passed. No longer just the pretty mascot who represented her family’s vineyard, she was a wine expert, a connoisseur, and for many years my friend Topazia Alliata was the only woman master wine taster in all of Europe.

*

Enrico Alliata, Duca di Salaparuta

Topazia’s father studied Buddhism and Theosophy. Annie Besant was a friend, Krishnamurti stayed at the family home in Casteldaccia. The church did not occupy the central part in his life that it did for his fellow Sicilians who, on the feast of St. Joseph, carry the saint’s statue out of the church and through the streets. He did not observe holy days or his Easter duty.

Topazia, said that when she was a girl and went to confession, the priest asked what good works she had done to help merit her a place in heaven.

She said, “I read to my father.”

“That is very good of you,” the priest said, “and it honors your parents as the commandment says. What are you reading to him?”

“The life of Buddha,” she said.

The priest sputtered, furious. It is forbidden for Christians and most especially Catholics to read that book. If she persisted reading it, he would certainly go to hell, and Topazia will follow. Therefore she must stop at once. From that moment on, Topazia shut the church out of her life; its teachings were like dried breadcrumbs pecked at by scavenger birds.

When her father’s eyesight began failing, the doctors held little hope. He thought he might improve his condition with better nutrition, and began experimenting with a vegetarian diet. Enrico’s eyesight stopped deteriorating, and he thought if he continued to observe proper nutrition, he might actually improve his vision to say nothing of giving himself a longer, healthier life. Not content with merely eliminating meat from his diet, Enrico Alliata also studied nutrition and in 1930 published the first vegetarian cookbook in Italy (Cucina Vegetariana e Naturismo Crudo).

His Granddaughter Toni said, when she showed me the first edition of the cookbook, that Enrico was constantly in the kitchen, cooking, experimenting, making notes with the curiosity and rigor of a scientist, tasting with the palate of a gourmet, combining ingredients with the imagination of an artist.

*

The Banquet Table

Though he wasn’t above chiding others for eating more omnivorously (puzza di cadavere he’d say when he smelled meat cooking), he didn’t insist that others follow his strict vegetarianism. He was a teacher and explorer, not a tyrant.

When Topazia was ten, she watched peasants slaughter a goat. It was to be a community celebration, almost as festive as the feast that would follow. Carried along by the tide of communal excitement and her own curiosity, she was eager to see it. The animal had been selected months before, shortly after it had been weaned. On the fated day, they brought it on a leash to the shade of a large tree. Topazia stood with the woman and children watching the men hoist it upside down by its hind legs, it’s black tongue sticking out. It brayed and bawled loudly, eyes wide and feral with terror as the men seized its horns and forced its head back. It cried as a child might, Topazia said as she looked on, horrified. The goat wailed to the sun, the moon and the stars while one of the men triumphantly slit its throat. The animal twitched and went limp, the blood draining into a bucket. The men cheered and dipped their hands into it, smearing blood on their faces and arms as though enacting a pagan rite. They skinned the carcass, sliced out the guts, saving the organ meat and tripe. They cut off the horns to use as knife handles or amulets or buttons.

Topazia said she was the only one who mourned the death of the goat.

Returning home from the celebratory slaughter, she told her father that she, too, was ready to become a vegetarian.

*

Banquet Conversation II

In Italy, Robert Mitchum has become something of a screen icon in a similar way that Jerry Lewis captivates the French. Something about his masculinity combined with vulnerability that appeals to the Italian sensibility. The critic, who curated a university film archive in the US, had personally delivered reels of three Mitchum movies for a film festival in Rome. He reserved seats for the canisters, the way a symphony cellist buys a seat for a Strad or Amati, constantly checking its humidity in the dry, recirculating air at 35,000 feet.

He had spent time in Rome years earlier, living out of a car before going to stay in one of the rooms Elizabetta rented to foreigners and artists on Via del Teatro Pace, where I also stayed in the spring of 1968.

When those gathered at the table learn of his expertise, the conversation shifts to Italian film and which is the best. He instantly says that “Open City” is the most important one, setting the neo-realist standard for the great Italian films of the fifties. Fellini had helped write the screenplay, it was filmed on the streets of Rome immediately following the occupation. Mario, himself an authority on film, and feeling his pride surge, says certainly it is a seminal film. However, you must agree that “The Bicycle Thief” is the masterpiece of the era, and inspired the blossoming of post-war cinema. They speak in Italian, though it isn’t entirely necessary, everyone at the table speaks passable English.

The critic bristles, raising his voice as he defends his position, reiterating his points, while Mario speaks with the patient, calm assurance of a professor with a stubborn student. We watch the back and forth like spectators at a tennis match. No one enters the fray to deliver a more authoritative view, or to philosophically say that they are both great movies, or the artistic view that when you are in the presence of a painting that moves you, it is the best in the world, engaging your focus and your psyche. It’s as if time disappears, and for a moment you are in a wordless dialogue with the art. You might move onto another painting, maybe by another artist, and feel that suddenly it is the best in the world. You would be right on both counts.

*

Someone mentions the mid-term elections coming up in America. It is 2002 and the invasion of Iraq is growing more certain and imminent. Donald Rumsfield has already pitched “The Coalition of the Willing,” and “The New Europe,” as opposed to the old, tired Europe. In Congressional dining rooms, French Fries have been rebranded Freedom Fries.

The critic bemoans the lack of a candidate he can support. One is just as bad as the other, he says, and if there were a decent third-party candidate, he would feel more enthusiastic. Barely two years earlier, the Supreme Court decided the election in favor of George W. Bush, stopping the ongoing series of recounts in Florida. I said it was silly to expect purity in politics. If Nader hadn’t drawn so many votes from John Kerry in Florida, I said, the United States wouldn’t be revving its war machine right now. At least, he says, he has a clear conscience. I quote a line from Szymborska’s “In Praise of a Guilty Conscience”: “Nothing is more bestial than a clear conscience on the third planet from the sun.” I see Dacia nodding from the corner of my eye. She has recently written a front-page rebuttal to Oriana Falacci’s condemnation of the entire Arab world following the 9/11 attacks. Suffering, Dacia began, marches under no one’s flag.

 

Tasting Wine

“Bring me another bottle,” Topazia said. It was more than a demand, it was Topazia wearing her mantle of authority as a wine connoisseur and master taster. She was too egalitarian to play the princess card, but she was offended that someone would serve an inferior wine. The waiter trembled slightly as he picked up the bottle to carry back to the kitchen.

A group of us, on one of those improvised evenings that Topazia loved (“this is how we do it in Rome, all’ improvviso” she frequently said), had gone to a trattoria that was starting to gain a reputation for superlative wine. Like other family-owned restaurants that populate Rome, this one featured white tablecloths, waiters who appear at your table the instant you make eye contact with them, and the expectation you and your group will be there for hours.

Topazia had interrogated the waiter about the wines and ordered a bottle of—what. Chianti? Barolo? My memory’s too flawed, the Italian too rapid for me to follow. It was red wine, I’m certain. She said, “You must always get red.” There had been a recent scandal where someone had discovered that vintners were adulterating white wine for the sake of clarity. “You don’t know what they put in it,” she said. “Besides, red wine has tannin, which is very good for you.”

The waiter, when he brought the bottle to the table, looked for an alpha male to give the sample, to wait for his nod to pour. Topazia assertively held up her glass for the first taste, telling him to give it to her. The waiter, uneasy with breaking tradition, paused a beat, and seeing no objection, held a napkin to the bottle’s neck and poured an inch into her glass. She swirled it, held it to the light, and sniffed, frowning. Taking a sip, she held it in her mouth a second and spat it into the glass. “È brutto!”

“It’s an ugly wine. Take it back.”

The waiter’s face instantly deflated. Wooden and numb and astonished that she or anyone would turn back their wine.

“Terrible,” she said after sampling the next bottle. She sent the following two back also, waving her hand dismissively. With a slow, sullen gravity, the waiter returned each one to the kitchen, maybe to pour out, maybe to add to the vat of house wine. Were they trying to hustle inferior wine at inflated prices because a woman was ordering, or that we were speaking English and therefore gullible? Maybe they had taken delivery of a bad batch, or the labels had been switched by counterfeiters.

The talk of the table was art, and people in the art world. The art critic Villa had joined the Jesuits who paid for his education. After earning his Ph.D., he thanked his superiors for everything and left the order. He couldn’t help it, he said, he’d lost his vocation. They admired his chutzpa. “How could he fake being a Jesuit all those years?” “Oh, he’s very good.” “And very, very smart.”

The manager delivered the fifth bottle personally, bowing and offering the signora his most sincere apologies for the previous bottles. She tasted and said in a quiet but cajoling voice, almost a whine, that she’d brought these people because the trattoria was so highly recommended. “It’s acceptable, but barely. Don’t you have anything better?”

“Of course, signora,” he said reverently.

“Delicious,” she said on sampling bottle number six. “This is the one you should always bring out first.”

The judgment of a master wine taster could have disastrous consequences if she determines a restaurant is foisting lousy wine on an unsuspecting public. A bad report would spread through her network and expand far beyond until the only patrons of that particular trattoria would be tourists. So the manager brought bottle after bottle of excellent wine to our table; the chef personally delivered bowls of fish soup and rustic bread, on the house.

*

Eating the Cork

In addition to the vineyard, there was an oak grove on the property her family had owned in Sicily. I didn’t think to ask how many corks could be gotten from a single tree. More and more vineyards have switched to screw-top bottles or plastic corks, partly to eliminate that one bottle in twenty ruined by a bad cork. Wine merchants will replace one of those bottles at no charge and “eat the cork.” Despite the spoilage, cork is an ideal stopper for wine bottles since it allows the right amount of oxygen to interact with the wine during storage. And it is a renewable resource. The bark grows back, and in nine to thirteen years is ready to be harvested again.

*

The End of the Banquet

What is Pina saying? How delicious the food has been? She has the kind of face that shows she’s interested in everything. Her ruddy cheeks and quick smile reminds me of Evelyn, my mother’s best friend in high school. Does she mention her resort? A little. She says how delicious the food is. Yes. Certainly. We all drink wine which has not been corked. I am reaching through memory with a pair of long, fine pointed tweezers, trying to extract this one bit. I am like a free diver wearing a single fin, propelling myself deeper, not to set the record, but for something on the bottom, a glint penetrating the murk. I hold my breath and descend. Pina. Pina. Oh Pina, do not go dark on me like the dream that started this chapter. Pina with the light brown hair and sun freckles. Yes, the weather has been perfect on the lake. Her garden is doing brilliantly. I’m hoping she’ll invite us to visit for a night or two, but she is booked through the end of the season.

Because it’s Toni’s birthday, Nur brings cake. White frosting and thin strips of chocolate curving and curling on the top and sides like post-modern architecture. A candle is lit, we sing the Italian version of happy birthday, “Tanti Auguri a Te.” I give Toni a blank book we had picked up in Venice. One writer to another. The gift of paper.

*

Paper

When I was small, an aunt and uncle gave me books for Christmas. My uncle taught high school English; my aunt had written for the South Bend Tribune before she began raising a family. I remember being especially absorbed by The Battle of Britain by Quentin Reynolds, and looked forward to more books at Christmas and birthdays. Anything with airplanes was a safe bet for me. One Christmas, my father said we should give paper—blank paper—to Aunt Helen for the family gift exchange. “Let her write her own book.” Actually, after she and Uncle Charlie moved to California, she wrote a history of Palm Springs, and “Yesterday’s Artists on the Monterey Peninsula.” She lived near Henry Miller, but dismissed his writing. He was a better water-colorist than writer, she said.

The sensual experience of writing by hand is a form of meditation. The way paper resists the pencil, the way it absorbs ink, the sudden intrusion of black on the white page, the first brave argument against emptiness.

Sometimes, when someone gives me a blank book, it seems too beautiful to mar by writing in it. It needs to be broken in, words need to be crossed out, sentences written between the lines, paragraphs circled and arrows pointing out where they should be moved.

*

The book I gave Toni would have to be broken in.

*

After the Banquet

There are mountains of dishes and pots and pans. I offer to start washing, but Topazia says to leave them for the morning. Her housekeeper Agnieska will let herself in and knows there will be clean-up.

It is time leave the table and go to the parlor. The walls are covered with paintings and drawings, including two self-portraits Topazia had painted as a young art student when she and Guttuso were classmates. She wears an evening gown in one, in another she’s dressed in mountain-climbing gear. Loops of rope coil over her shoulder as she grips an ice-axe. Soon after they were married, she and her husband climbed the Matterhorn on their honeymoon.

Toni asks me to read some poems I’d published, which are based on stories Topazia told me years before about being in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. In one of them, “Pencil in the Concentration Camp,” prisoners in the camp weren’t allowed to write anything except under supervision. But sometimes a soldier tossed a pencil away because it was broken, or worn to the nub, almost not a pencil at all except there were more words left in it. Topazia told me she treasured these discarded pencils and wrote on anything—notes home to be passed to the Red Cross which made periodic visits; a journal entry; the alphabet for her children, the only children in the camp.

One poem takes place in the camp immediately after Japan’s surrender. The guards had driven off with the remaining supplies, abandoning the prisoners who had neither food nor drinking water. American planes parachuted life-sustaining supplies to the camp: K-rations, canned peaches, powdered milk. And the children, suffering from malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies, desperately needed milk. Topazia and her husband improvised a way into the cans (the air drop lacked a single can opener) and mixed the liquid from the peaches with powdered milk. The poem ends, “For two weeks… victory/was the smell of lumpy yellow milk/on their children’s breath.”

In another poem, the family was put up in a Tokyo hotel after being liberated, and the children wouldn’t leave the bathtub. All the dirt that had been ground into their skin during the years of captivity had been cleansed (they were allowed to bathe once a week in the camp, but only after everyone else had bathed, the bathwater filthy by the time it was their turn). Still they insisted on staying in the tub long after they’d become wrinkled prunes and raisins, in the unbuttoned joy of water.

Toni translates for those who had limited English.

Daisy looks to Joan, and smiling slyly says, “If I were seventy years younger, you’d have to fight me for your husband.”

*

Bronze Buddha

But now people are standing, on the point of leaving. Pina will drive Daisy back to her apartment. The photographer has already left, apologizing for her early departure, another event that afternoon. We stand in Topazia’s gallery/living room, hugging goodbye. In addition to her self portraits, there’s a drawing by Guttuso, a Palermo street scene; a blue and red pencil sketch of dancers by Severini; several prints and paintings by artists I don’t recognize. I ask about one, a horizontal line of zeros, like eggs falling off the edge of a table. She says it’s by Lenardi, though the way I remember names, she might have said Leonardi. It’s a painting that has momentum, as though the zeros are pushing from behind until each teeters into gravity. She’s displayed her African sculptures on the tops of bookcases that line the lower third of walls like wainscoting; a small bronze Buddha has its own place on a narrow ledge. She told us once it was quite valuable; the American generals gave it to her for the work she did after the war, helping evaluate family treasures the Japanese had brought to sell to GIs. The people had nothing. They were like Topazia and her family in the camp, without food or milk for their children, and had begun selling their ancestral heirlooms for hard currency. The generals, to make sure the transactions were fair, asked Topazia to evaluate them: scrolls, sculptures, netsuke. In her job interview, the generals showed her a number of objects on a table: she had to speak about each one, giving its age, its artistic merits, cultural significance, and in the end assign a value. It was very much like the master wine-taster test she took in another life. So the GI’s bought their souvenirs, and the Japanese could feed themselves and their children. Some of the pieces were too precious to be sequestered away—these went to museums.

*

A Final Cordial

She pours a bright red liquid into tiny glasses, more remnants of her family history. It is, she says, a special strawberry liqueur, available only in very small batches. We toast each other and sip; the essence of strawberries erupts on our tongues.

*

The Ticket

A brilliant October lights up the afternoon. Of that I am sure. I’m also sure that we’re staying at Topazia’s apartment and remain behind when the final guest leaves. But I’ve conflated it with another memory, and I’m positive that we’ve left with the other guests and catch a bus to the two-star Hotel Julia on Via Rasella. It’s the same street where Italian partisans ambushed a German convoy in the war, killing thirty soldiers. The Germans, in retaliation, rounded up ten Italians for every German killed. They arrested over three hundred people at random, trucked them to a cave outside of town and executed them.

We’d used our last two bus tickets on the trip to Topazia’s. I’d planned to buy more tickets for the return, but it’s a Sunday and the tobacco shops where you get the tickets are closed. The critic says he has always ridden buses without a ticket and has never been caught by an agent. We’re on the verge of calling for a taxi when Topazia remembers she has a bus ticket, which she gives to Joan. I decide to use a cancelled ticket and pretend I am traveling legitimately.

We board the bus and insert our tickets in the yellow cancellation machine which thunks approvingly. Then we inch through a clot of passengers to the less-crowded middle of the bus. Three stops on, two men in black leather coats board, each carrying a black book.

They start at the back, examining passengers’ passes and cancelled tickets, making notations in their ledgers. They work slowly, methodically, officially moving from one passenger to the next until one of them reaches us and asks for our tickets. I give him mine, bracing myself to be shown up for a complete fraud. There’ll be a fine and I’ll get kicked off the bus. The inspector looks at the ticket carefully, turns it over, pauses, makes a notation in his book, and without commenting, hands it back to me. He takes Joan’s ticket, glances at it briefly, then at Joan.

“Madame,” he tsks, wagging a finger at her.

Joan, who has the only valid ticket between us, had somehow not gotten it stamped when the cancellation machine slapped down. The passengers clustered in the back of the bus begin to snicker. The Americans are about to get booted! The inspector takes a pen, deliberately writes the date and time on the ticket and gives it back to her. He and his colleague get off at the next exit. We continue to Piazza San Silvestro, our hotel a five minute walk. The day is still brilliant.

*

The Continual Banquet

Each time we travel to Italy it is the same: Topazia takes us to her parlor/gallery and it feels like we pick up the same conversation we had the last time we saw her, four or five years before. Each time there is food, a banquet for only three, made with whatever’s fresh that day, assembled with no fuss. The bread sliced, the cheese plated and on the table. There’s always fruit. Maybe she’s tossed a salad with sliced fennel root, its satisfying crunch and lingering shadow of anise; maybe she’s composed a salad with endive. Once, for dessert, she served the three of us ricotta sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. And whatever wine is on hand. Whatever delicious wine carrying, for that day, Topazia’s personal seal of approval.

 

 

 

 

 

Tut

When King Tutankhamen, dead a couple of three millennia already, was making his rounds of the museums of America, we stood in line for tickets at the Field Museum, thousands of us in Grant Park at 3 a.m., as though we’d missed the chance to pay homage to the boy-king in one of our previous lifetimes. We stood through a thunderstorm, through clouds of mosquitoes and the sounds of single hands clapping, some of us reading by flashlight while a guy came calling for Martha, whom he’d dropped off to get a spot in line while he parked the car.

So many people had lined up that the line itself seemed to have its own logic as it snaked back and forth in the park where demonstraters had been gassed and beaten at the 1968 Democratic Convention. It was difficult to tell where the line ended, or if there were five or six lines weaving through the dark. After the storm passed and stars came out again, we folded our umbrellas and went back to our lawn chairs or blankets, or just shifted from foot to foot.

I was reading “The Duino Elegies,” in a translation which had been criticized for not being faithful enough, but which was effective just the same, especially when I came to the line in the ninth elegy that goes, “Praise this world to the angel, not the ineffable.” I lolled in the elegies rather than actually read them—pausing at a line, going forward or back, letting its images wash over me—which was just as well since it was hard to concentrate while standing in line as for communion, more people joining us every moment making it a festival, like Woodstock with clothes.

A half-hour later, the man came through again. “Martha!” He smiled in a self-deprecating way, and we laughed with him, sympathetic to anyone who will play the fool for the sake of love. “Here!” a man’s voice called out.

The line was miles long the next time he returned, no longer smiling. She could be in the hospital, or had a heart attack in the ladies room behind a locked stall. “Martha!”

As dawn approached and Lake Michigan became visible behind us, the man’s shoes were wet from shuffling through rain-soaked, dew-soaked grass. We saw the fear in his eyes as he imagined the worst—Martha wandering the Loop, having forgotten who she was, personality frayed or completely undone. Maybe she was standing in line unaware that her hearing-aid battery had run out of juice. Maybe the police receptionist said they couldn’t count her as missing until 24 hours had passed.

When the ticket office opened, the line moved quickly. A cashier took our money and handed us tickets stamped with our entrance time. Tut. The golden mask showing the almost female grace of the young king, the alabaster Coptic jars holding heart and kidneys, and somewhere in the back of our memories, something of the tomb’s curse.

The man stood next to the booth, searching anonymous faces for one familiar one, voice raspy and faint from calling her since before dawn, a lonely chant that failed to make her materialize.

(first printed in “Blink: Sudden Fiction by Minnesota Writers” copyright © 2001 Spout Press)

Slugs

It was slugs all along and I didn’t know it. Slugs eating the leaves and flowers, slugs leaving shiny trails across spidery webs surrounding my beloved plants that had died or were in the process of dying.

But I didn’t think about slugs. They exist without minute or second hands, and their hours move so slowly that between our breakfast and afternoon nap, several slug days have elapsed. Underneath their phlegmatic exteriors, however, lurk the souls of agent orange. I didn’t believe it. I thought it had something to do with my neighbor’s garage.

The year he put in his garage was the same year I put in my raised flower bed, my patio, my perennials. I thought I’d be done with mowing forever, except for the three-and-a-half yards of lawn I kept for the sake of my dog, so she’d have a familiar spot to pee. My neighbor, not content with an ordinary two-car garage, built a two-story structure that ran the length and depth of his yard, from his back fence to pack porch. With table saws and mechanic’s tools inside, it wasn’t a garage at all, but a cottage industry in a building the size of two cottages stacked on top of each other.

As he and his helper were busy framing, they looked down on me laying my brick patio in a loose, basket-weave pattern.

“Hey, that’s kind of cute,” said my neighbor. “Yeah,” his helper said, “it’s real unusual.”

The brick came from old buildings in Chicago that had been torn down and sold by the truckload for a fraction of the usual cost of brick. It gave the patio an instantly aged look—with a couple of gargoyles, it would have resembled the bottom layer of a small medieval cathedral.

My neighbor would be able to see the patio from the loft of his garage where he kept his studio. He was, he said, something of an artist. I wasn’t so sure, looking at how the garage design evolved, a sort of plan-it-as-you-go structure with eccentric angles and a roof pitch that resembled a church. “I don’t want to have to mess with snow,” he said. He was thinking ahead; the seasons weren’t going to outsmart him.

A month after the garage went up, my nearby lilacs took on a peaked appearance, and the bark of our ancient honeysuckle began to look as scraggly as a sycamore. Cutting off the evening sun, the garage made it seem like daylight savings time had never arrived in my yard. I let it go with a shrug; I had better things to do than war with neighbors. The lilacs and honeysuckle, hardy and tenacious, held on.

The perennials held on also, and all summer along there was something in bloom: from the first crocus to the final sedum—tulips, iris, veronica, astilbe, Echinacea purpura, mondarda—all flourished. The daylilies grew so dense, bounded by a driveway and my other neighbor’s fence, that there were no weeds to pull at all. There was still yard work to be done, particularly when my wife ordered hundreds of spring bulbs that arrived in time for fall planting. (That was me in the back yard with a shovel, digging where my wife pointed, then burying the bulbs pointy-side up.) In spring, we wrote large checks for everything from basil to blue geraniums to fennel and cosmos (the name alone earning it a spot in my garden).

I used to think gardening was genetic, the result of peasant stock on both sides. But during the summer when I took my morning coffee on the patio, read the newspaper, and wrote in my journal, the garden was my own private outdoor café. I realized that gardening is related to decadence, especially a garden like mine where cats take refuge in the overgrown lemon balm as though it’s jungle foliage.

In the cycles of a garden, decay is a necessary ingredient, and if you don’t recycle dead plants once they’ve stopped growing, you have to buy decayed matter (real or artificial) from someone else. Having arrived at this conclusion, I felt a smug satisfaction in my original impulse for the garden: laziness and avoidance of mowing. The problem is, I have to turn my chair in a certain direction so I don’t see my neighbor working on his not-so-mint ’63 Chevy Nova. I’ve avoided putting up a fence between us. It would be an admission of defeat. On the other hand, it would prevent him from dumping snow from his driveway onto my rose bed in the winter.

When my plants began disappearing mysteriously last summer, I suspected his garage immediately. The marigolds, eaten down to mere stems, withered in a Sahara of photosynthesis. The hostas were full of holes. The sweet cicely, the meadow rue—my entire shade garden disappeared bit by green, shady bit. My wife said it was slugs. I held to the certainty that some varnish or spray my neighbor used had leached into my soil. Besides, I never saw more than two or three slugs at a time, and they weren’t doing much more than looking like fat pieces of snot.

As I listened to my pocket stereo while painting the house, a horticulturist on a phone-in program told gardeners what was wrong with their plants and trees. One listener complained that his hostas had been eaten down to nothing, and the dandelions flourished. “Oh,” the horticulturist said in the same perky way she discussed oak wilt and cutworms, “you have slugs.” The two or three slugs I had seen meant there were whole slippery battalions under the mulch. The horticulturist advised setting out a shallow dish of beer. How simple and devious.

That night, I set out a small bowl of Blatz under the purple coneflowers. The next morning, a hundred pickled slugs floated in an amber slug brew. As I dumped them on a concrete slab left over from the garage construction, they spilled out like a brownish-gray rainbow, almost as liquid as the beer.

The following night I set out two bowls; in the morning, each was clotted with brown and liver-colored slugs. They were like greasy, bloated Rice Krispies, each one beer-glutted to the point of death.

Next, I set out a half-full can of the cheapest beer available. An hour later, looking for an opening through the aluminum lip to heaven, slugs covered the can. Already half in the tank from fumes, they were inching ahead steadily, as unstoppable as hour hands, singing slug versions of Carmina Burana. A yeasty aroma wafted through the neighborhood, advertising all the beer they could drink, Free. They came by the thousands, their horns testing the air for directions to the slug fest. They crawled slowly over the rim and fell in.

I suppose advocates of one stripe or another will take issue with this whole-sale slaughter—after all, slugs are closer to mammals than insects. But I didn’t use the cowardly, fascistic tactics of gas or poison. (As the horticulturist happily explained, Diazanon crystals will kill slugs and every other tiny creature unfortunate enough to stumble along.) But Diazanon death, the slow, gruesome shutting down of the entire nervous system followed by agonizing seizures and convulsions, gives me the feeling of a cold wind blowing over my own grave. How much better, and in the grand scheme of things, how righteous to throw the slugs a party. Of course, in the morning, they end up on a concrete slab, the same result as they’d get with Diazanon, but I’m content knowing they died happy in a sort of slug singles bar.

My encyclopedia says that slugs are hermaphroditic and copulate reciprocally. They lack backbones and don’t know when to say when. As I stood on the back porch at dusk, I could imagine their ecstasy, having lost what little inhibition they possessed. My neighbor, a can of Milwaukee’s Best in one hand, squirmed under his Nova to perform his arcane rituals. He set the can near his head, right next to hundreds of slug cadavers and hundreds of other gray bodies hoofing it toward glory.

The realization struck me that a benign presence rules the universe after all, and I held up my own freshly opened can, toasting the slugs’ happiness and my own.

[Source: Minnesota Monthly, Summer 1995]

The Rock Star

In 1967, the summer before I left for Italy to protest the war and resist the draft, I flew a rock star to his gig at Indiana Beach, an amusement park/resort seventy miles South. I was 19, a certified flight instructor with a commercial rating which meant I could teach and fly for hire, though I was limited to single engine planes. The call came from Jolly Tyme Travel while I was out practicing touch-and-go landings with a student. After, while we reviewed his lesson and discussed what we’d do next time, I overheard my colleagues banter about the rocker. As part of the deal, the pilot had to accompany him to a waiting limo. And if the limo wasn’t there yet, stay with him. How old is this guy anyway, twelve? They said. Do we get paid extra for babysitting?

As I looked in the lounge for my next student, my boss took me aside to say he had rearranged my afternoon schedule and assigned other instructors to work with my students. I would take the charter. “This guy will relate to your youth,” he said. “Take him above the clouds where it’s nice and smooth, ten thousand feet maybe. Let him fly it a little—sell him on how much fun flying is.”

I knew the routine: trim the plane for straight and level flight, let the customer hold the controls. If all goes well, he or she has a small epiphany, I can do it. It’s a sly move, somewhere between your entry-level seduction and a full-blown con. With luck, it might blossom into a passion for flying: lessons and rental of planes from Stockert’s Flying Service.

Dave, my boss, and his brother had recently bought Stockert’s and seriously wanted to expand, taking the business from its pre-war roots to a position at the epicenter of the jet age. “Grow or die,” was their mantra, putting business strategy in pretty much the same category as aggressive tumors.
*
I had grown up at the airport, spending weekend afternoons there with my father who, along with several partners, owned a succession of small, four-seater airplanes. While my mother stayed home changing diapers, he was in a small hangar changing oil or bleeding the brakes.

One Easter in the late ‘40s, he takes the whole family to the airport and poses us in front of his Stinson Voyager for a formal portrait. It would have made a decent full-page ad in Life Magazine—The Voygeur, Your Family Airplane—as my older brother looks resolutely at the camera and my mother and I smile. But I hold my hands on my hips, my head tilted smugly upward as if in defiance. My father, after fiddling with his Argus C-3 camera, figures that so long as the shot is in focus and properly exposed, everything else will take care of itself. Am I smiling because my brother had tossed his brunch—kielbasa and scrambled eggs— during the airplane ride and I hadn’t? It isn’t the real me, at least I don’t think so, just a pose I adopt whenever someone points a camera at me, born maybe of a primitive fear it will probe too closely.
*
We fly everywhere: vacations, Sunday fly-in breakfasts in Huntington, Niles, Logansport (all-you-can-eat sausage & pancakes, door prizes). I follow the routes I’d drawn on the sectional chart, noting the water towers, train tracks, towns, and airports below. I want the landmarks to go by faster to speed our trip, because at six or seven thousand feet the world looks like it’s standing still. The radio hypnotically burbles the three-letter ID of the flight service station in Morse, followed by a recorded voice giving the station’s full name—Goshen, or Knox—on the tape loop. Weather updates every fifteen minutes.

Most of the time we just bore holes through the sky—that’s how my father puts it. When he practices steep 720° turns, the sixty degree bank looks like the wings are vertical, and our bodies weigh twice as much. He does lazy eights and chandelles, those near-aerobatic maneuvers, and stalls with flaps up and down. Sometimes another pilot joins us, and he practices instrument approaches under the hood. He has to log so many to keep his instrument rating current.

After pushing the plane back in the hangar, we make our ritual visit to Stockert’s flight office, a cinder block attachment on the side of the big hangar. It’s painted the shade of green that one sees everywhere in the fifties. A friend of mine later called it “good deal green” because it was probably mixed with war surplus olive drab. Behind a long counter, there are desks where Dora Stockert keeps the books, orders supplies for the shop, writes the checks, makes sure the coke machine is filled, and cleans the toilets. Above Dora’s desk is a bank of metal-paned windows looking over the open vista of Bendix Field. On the wall facing the counter, a large map of the area: Chicago to the west, Indianapolis to the south, South Bend at the center. There’s a retractable string you can pull out to figure distance and heading to your destination. Next to the map, a display case holding pilot ephemera (Ray Bans, chronographs) and candy.

When my father leads us into the office, Dora pushes up from her chair to gather her allotment of hugs. Then she slides the display case doors so we can pick what we want: Hershey’s, Snickers. If we take something small, a pack of Juicy Fruit, she makes us pick something else, too. Other weekend pilots hang out in the attached lounge, watching the black and white TV. Ray Nelson, our family doctor, who flies a Cessna 170; Dick Karstin (a blue and white 182); Tizzy, a corporate pilot for Sollit Construction, keeps a running, usually sardonic commentary on the Sox game. He works on balsa airplanes—large kite-like things with four foot wingspans, and often spends an entire afternoon sanding a leading edge or a propeller’s convex side as he dispenses lore and wit, pausing for breath or a double play.

If there’s too much glare on the TV, they pull the curtains.
*
The Bears were playing when the network cut away to show Lee Harvey Oswald led through the courthouse basement. Jack Ruby, a bulky hunched figure in overcoat and hat, shouldered his way into the camera frame and shot Oswald in front of our very eyes. The men in Stockert’s lounge fell silent, suddenly focused on the screen, even the announcer’s unflappable omniscience was punctured by astonishment: “He’s been shot! he’s been shot! Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot!”

“Is he going to die, Doc?” somebody asked Doctor Nelson.

“It’s hard to say,” he answered circumspectly, professionally.

“If the aorta was hit, yes.”
*
I’d never heard of Tommy James, and now Dave is welcoming him to Stockert’s. Turning to me, he says, “And this is John, your pilot.” I’m used to the double-take, the unspoken “is this kid old enough to shave” hesitation on first meeting me. With a firm grip (thus showing my confidence and control of the situation), I shake his hand.

He stands out like a neon sign: brown and white shirt, the top three buttons opened, the pointy collar spread wide like a lapel, a style my daughter would later characterize as “Aqua Velva geek;” big, complicated rock star hair coiffed like Little Richard, an Elvis curl to his lip. If it’s a sneer, he’s sneering at all creation. If a family trait, it makes him perfect rock star material.

When I take him to the airplane, the Elvis lip curl disappears and his hauteur crumbles.

“I told them I had to have a twin-engine plane. I can’t fly in anything smaller.”

“Your travel agent called less than an hour ago,” I tell him. “This is the only one that isn’t already booked.”

I’m going along with Dave’s variation on the bait-and-switch. Both of our twin-engine Cessnas sit on the tarmac, but even if I had a multi-engine rating, Dave would have assigned the 172: a docile, easy-to-handle airplane.

His wife, standing by his side holding his hand in both of hers, coos soothingly: he can’t afford to miss the gig tonight, and “it’s going to be a short flight, baby.” She looks at me for confirmation.

“Right,” I say. “Forty minutes, tops.”

The summer day glows with blue sky and a few puffy cumulus and endless inhalations of light, everything CAVU: ceiling and visibility unlimited. That’s the thing, isn’t it? To feel unlimited and liberated amid the absolute generosity of creation.

Hesitatingly, petulantly, he follows his wife into the cabin, but I stop him from joining her in the back seat. “You have to sit in front,” I tell him, “for the right balance.”

Technically, I’m right. Flying a tail-heavy airplane can be tricky and dangerous at slower speeds, especially when landing. It’s all in line with Dave’s scheme: show him flying is so easy that a kid like me can do it. Tommy James isn’t falling for it. He reaches between the seats to squeeze his wife’s hand and doesn’t let go.

I leave the window open, a clam-shell affair hinged at the top, that swings out eight or nine inches for a little ventilation while taxiing. I test ailerons and elevator and rudder to make sure they move freely. The brakes hold fast when I rev the engine to check magnetos and carburetor heat, and I pull the window in for takeoff. But it catches on something and I can’t get it all the way closed. I try again—same thing. A screw has worked itself half-way out the frame assembly, jamming the window. The tower calls to ask if there’s a problem, since we’ve been cleared for take off and we’re not moving.

Fishing out my pocket knife—a scout knife with a Phillips screwdriver that Dave makes us carry—I tell the tower we have a minor delay. Meanwhile, poor Tommy James and his wife watch numbly. No jokes about winding the rubber band, this is existential. It only takes a few seconds to torque the screw back in, clamp down the window, request clearance again from the tower.

Whatever chance I ever had of selling Tommy James on flying has evaporated with that single loose screw. Not only is a kid flying him to an important gig, but it’s a single-engine death trap that’s falling apart before his very eyes.
*
One of my favorite moments in flying is lifting off, feeling the wings bite air, the airplane buoyant and responsive, once more proving Bernoulli’s principle.

I don’t know if Tommy’s trying to strike a bargain with the Creator in order to survive this, or if he’s composing a song about the fear of losing you, one of those ballads where the audience sways rhythmically, holding aloft the small flames of their Zippos.

He’s probably asking himself why he hadn’t ridden in the hired bus along with his band, The Shondells.
*
In aviation, a Chandelle is a precise climbing turn which ends 180 degrees from the starting point, just above stalling speed. My father liked the way he was taught it—a very steep bank and climb. By the time I took my flight test, the bank and climb had shallowed, and in the process became more difficult, involving speed control, coordination, gradually decreasing the bank in the final 90 degrees until the wings were level at the finish. It was developed by French pilots in World War I as a way of shaking an enemy plane off their tails. The idea was to do it apruptly and surprisingly without stalling and spinning.

Chandelle is French for candle.
*
In summer the air heats up and rises in thermal columns until, reaching the dew point at four or five thousand feet, it condenses into those summer cumuli with the puffy tops. Flying beneath the clouds is like driving on a road filled with axle-deep potholes. Above the clouds, it’s all cool jazz: the heat and humidity squeezed into white, cotton ball vapor.

Another favorite phase of flight—the relaxed but attentive cruise on a cross country trip, the world moving as slowly as the moon, the great arc of the horizon curving around us.

The temperature drops a standard three and a half degrees per thousand feet if everything’s normal, and everything is normal. At ten thousand feet, the air is 10% thinner, another standard rate, but still quite breathable though one may begin feeling mildly euphoric. My passenger feels zero euphoria; he’s hanging onto his wife’s hand as though their connection is the only thing that keeps us from crashing. Is he on drugs? Though his psychedelic phase is still a year or two away, Jolly Tyme Travel wants a helicopter mom for him until his limo driver takes over.
*
The Cessna 172 will become the best selling airplane of all time because of its stability and forgiving nature. An excellent basic trainer, it can also be equipped with all the doodads needed for instrument flight.

Dave wants me to show Tommy how to make a few gentle banks, explain the rudder pedals—press the right one for a right hand bank, left for left. Watch how, if you push the wheel slightly forward and lower the nose, it will come back up if you release the wheel. By itself. A walk on the beach.

“Would you like to take the controls for while?”

“No! My God! No! No!”

He flings his free arm across his face as if the world will crumble the instant he touches control wheel, rudder pedals, window (especially the window), anything but his wife’s hand.

“Please don’t let go of the wheel again!”

“But really, the plane is flying itself…”

“I don’t care! Just don’t let go!”

At this point in the story I decide that if I press the issue, my passenger probably won’t survive the short flight to Indiana Beach.

If he is on drugs, there’s a better than even chance they’ve augmented his panic. On the other hand, a hallucinogen might have helped him flash on this luminous, singular moment created for his benefit: all the science, engineering, the built-in stability, the entire world, all for him.

Instead, he looks like he’s just taken a glimpse at his birth certificate and it’s stamped cancelled.
*
I don’t fly many charters that summer. Mostly I instruct, sometimes logging eight hours flying time, each lesson lasting around forty-five minutes. Time on the ground doesn’t count—the twenty or so minutes it takes to debrief students, sign their log-books, schedule new lessons.

As soon as I’d gotten my commercial and instructor ratings, Dora gave me a job, but because there weren’t enough students, I worked with the line crew—a congenial group, most of them related to one another—affable, jocular, responsible for wedging expensive airplanes into the large hangars without dinging a rudder or wing-tip. We backed the DC-3 into a corner of the big hangar with the tug—it was tricky because there were three pivot points, the final one on the tail wheel. Earl Blue patiently talked me through it—what normally takes him a minute took me five under his watchful encouragement, his exortations to “not let it get away from you.” The twin-bonanza burned 90 octane avgas. We filled Tizzy’s Twin Beech with 80 octane, using a ladder to climb on the wing. It took two of us to turn the props by hand to work oil through the cylinders before he fired up the engines.

My first student came a month later, a man in his early thirties. His regular instructor wasn’t available, so I was the sub. Because it was my first assignment, and because I was acutely aware of the age difference between us (I was fresh out of high school), I felt a current of anxiety as we taxied out. He was doing a competent job of it, and since I’m not good at small talk, I didn’t keep up a running chatter. I should have leveled with him about being my first student, but glanced out the side window instead. He sensed my nervousness but interpreted it differently: something was wrong. He asked about it.

There was nothing wrong, I said. But the wheels had been set in motion—denial, the first sign of a problem. On my first paying job as a pilot, my student insisted I was hiding something. Animosity toward my mother? Some personal resentment against him? But I had never met him before, and nothing was wrong except for his insisting there was. Finally, hoping to get on with the business of flying and put an end to his probing, I admitted to a vague little problem, “a personal thing,” nothing to do with him.

My student wanted to talk it through, maybe he could help. As his instructor, I needed to be even-tempered: no petulance; no telling him to concentrate on the airplane, not me. There was a problem, though, a big one. I loved poetry, but I was going to major in business when I started college in the fall. I couldn’t exactly tell him I had measured out my life in coffee spoons.

My fledgling career as a flight instructor had all of the sudden gone to hell. Maybe it had to. Maybe after this disaster, where my older student’s insecurities rasped against my own, everything would smooth out. Once in the air, feeling comfortable in my element, I fell back on my training: S-turns along a road to develop coordination between aileron and rudder, adjusting the angle of bank to compensate for wind. Focused on flying, my student had his hands full, so he didn’t try to psychoanalyze me any further. But I never flew with him again.
*
For some reason, Tommy has convinced himself that single engine planes are bad for your health, and now that he’s strapped into one he looks like he’s taken a slap from the cold hand of mortality. It no longer matters that he’s adored by thousands or millions of teens, or how many of his songs sit in the Top Ten. The irony is that if somehow our Cessna hit turbulence so violent it ripped us apart, Tommy would instantly have into the Rock Star Pantheon, joining the ranks of others who had simularly perished—the Big Bopper, Richie Valens, Buddy Holly—revered as much for their unfilled potential as the body of work they’d left behind.

The deathly fear of airplanes is alien to me, so I give my passenger my best professional aura, check temperature and pressure gauges, and do my job like a good chauffeur. What other course is possible? Psychoanalyze Tommy the way my first student tried to analyze me? I begin a gradual descent to the Madison, Indiana airport and adjust the mixture for a lower altitude.
*
My other favorite part of flying: the turn from downwind to base to final, lining up the runway, using the throttle to control descent, the touch-down, the feeling of greasing it on.

As I shut down the engine, Tommy says with an edge of desperation, “You’re a good pilot. But I need the twin tomorrow for the trip back. I’ll pay for it myself. I mean it, really.”
*
Back on firm ground, walking between me and his wife, betraying nothing of his earlier heart-stopping panic, he swaggers toward the operations office. He mocks the southern drawl of the line crewman who asked if we needed gas; his wife giggles. Having regained his self-control, he has once again become a consummate performer and star of the show.

“I’m an entertainer,” he says to the secretary when we enter the office. It sounds like a declaration, almost a proclamation. “A car should be waiting for me.”
*
Tall and gangly, not quite an Ichabod Crane, but neither the Lone Eagle image I’d prefer, I strolled back to the 172 and flew back to South Bend below the scattered cumulus, bouncing through the chop of thermals, and was happy to do so.

Fifty minutes later, I parked in front of the large hangar at Stockert’s.

Dave was disappointed in my lack of sales skills and the loss of a possible new account, but he agreed to send Tony, our designated charter pilot, with the 310 for the next-day pick up. Tony had flown Navy Corsairs in the early stages of the Korean War, and his idea of a good landing was to slam the plane down with no bounce, as though onto an aircraft carrier. There was no greasing it on with Tony. So my rock star would have his twin and he could cuddle in the back seat with his wife. Tony, being older, might even have fared better with the nervous young celebrity than I.

I extracted a cream soda from the coke machine and shook my head when another instructor asked how it went.

“Didn’t you show him a chandelle?” he said.

Uncle Jimmy

 

            What is he thinking as he drives away from town toward Mayflower Road? The garden hose, clipped to length, is coiled in the back seat. One of the last things he has done as proprietor of the Standard Station on Lincoln Way West is drill the hole in the floorboard and cover it with the mat so no one notices, not that anyone would. The next to last day of September, the elms that form green tunnels over every street have barely started the process of turning gold.

            His dog sits beside him on the front seat. The newspaper doesn’t say what kind of dog. It looks around attentively as the headlights split the darkness ahead, the same darkness which folds immediately and solidly behind them. It’s 1937, and electrification has already arrived to the rural area of South Bend. Farmers wire their barns first, so they can get to the cows easier for the pre-dawn milking, but nobody keeps the lights on if they don’t have to. I suppose he drives out Lincoln Way West, past Bendix Field, the hangars at Homer Stockert’s Flying Service locked up tight. In two weeks, the crowns of those elms at their peak, Homer will solo my father in a J-3 with a wooden prop and a 65 horsepower engine. Or it’s a 40 horsepower engine. Whatever engine was used, the plane is light with my father, who sits in the rear seat to maintain the proper weight and balance configuration, and lifts off the ground effortlessly. Apart from his wedding, it’s the most important day of his life.  This is the part in my father’s life where my father and mother aren’t dating. She’s put the relationship on hold for some reason. She wants to date other men. Maybe it’s that phase in her life where she wants to be sure that my father is the one. She’s more likely just being fickle. Better yet, she’s jealous. My father looked at another young woman in that way he used to look at her, and she wants him to look that way at her again. He always says he became a pilot because she dumped him. He buys flying lessons with the money he used to spend on her. This is the spot where, thirty years later, she takes a playful swipe at him as he relates the story.

            But now it’s night. Uncle Jimmy isn’t thinking about airplanes, his fickle niece or my father. Maybe he’s picked out the spot already, far enough away from farm houses so the car won’t be noticed. It’s the waning crescent moon, half way between the last quarter and the new moon. There will be no wash of light to alert anyone, especially since farmers are already in bed. The cows won’t milk themselves when four-thirty rolls around. He drives a little further, a little further after that. More critical is the matter of when, that trickiest of moments. When, after all, does X mark the spot? A little tick on the calendar, a little note to himself, “don’t bother winding your watch today, Jimmy.”

                   #           

In 1972, on one of my visits to South Bend, my grandmother is living with my parents. She had stayed alone on the farm after my grandfather died, then moved to an apartment near St. Joseph Hospital. Her brain has been slowly drying up from age and loneliness and from simple disuse, but there were indications she was slipping: she once called my mother to say my grandfather was asleep on the living room couch and she couldn’t wake him. It was as though the dead were coming back for her, not in any malicious way, just in a nonthreatening, sleeping manner. The clincher comes when the state police call my mother one Sunday morning. My grandmother is driving with my Aunt Pearl to church and had missed the turnoff. Thoroughly disoriented, the two elderly women keep motoring at a sedate 20 miles-per-hour toward Granger on Highway 23, a two-lane highway with a speed limit of 60. They’re leading a long parade of irate drivers toward the Michigan border when the State Police cruiser pulls them over.

            During my visit, my grandmother Laura is as pleasant and delightful as always, sitting in the backyard with us while my three-year-old daughter chases Charlie, my parents’ German shepherd, across the lawn. My grandmother looks at me with ancient, innocent eyes and says, “Are you Jimmy?”

            It’s the first time anyone in the family has ever mentioned him in my hearing. “Jimmy?” I say. She quickly notices my confusion, her brain still resilient: “Oh Jimmy Cover, my brother. He had such a beautiful voice. You just reminded me of him.”

Maybe it’s something in my eyes, the slouch of my shoulders, or a certain shift in my mouth before I’m about to speak. She says he had turned down offers to go to New York to sing. “He just couldn’t bring himself to leave South Bend.” He sang in local musicals, was a soloist in church, everybody loved him. “He died by his own hand,” she says, the expression on her face still bright with surprise at her recovered memory, his image fresh in her mind.

            My mother, when I ask about Jimmy, waves him off with a dismissive gesture, not bothering to hide her annoyance at my grandmother turning over one of the family stones. “That was Uncle Jimmy. He died long before you were born,” as if that is all I need to know about it. Certainly it is all I am going to get out of her.

                          #

            He slows at the crossroads of Mayflower and Adams Road in the rolling flatness of northern Indiana. Fields of recently harvested corn and newly planted winter wheat line the road. He parks and, taking a flashlight from the glove box, gets out of the car to fiddle with the hose. He’s supposed to be at choir practice.

            What’s the point in keeping up your singing, you know you’re never going anywhere with it. Will it pay a single bill?

            Better to spend more time running the gas station and less on that precious voice.

            Having hooked up the hose, he calls the dog who finishes its business and runs to leap eagerly in the car as he holds the door.

            On the northwest corner of Adams and Mayflower Roads is a copse of maples that glow with their vibrant yellow even in the shallow moonlight.

            He’s classically trained, not a bluesman, but he’s at this crossroad where each right-angling branch of gravel road runs true north and true west, straight as the eye can see, off the edge of the earth and into infinity.

                   #

            My mother, still in her mid-fifties when she tells me to forget about Uncle Jimmy, has begun to divest herself of the past. Maybe it’s to balance my grandmother’s tendency to live more in the past, or it’s some regret she doesn’t want to revisit; or maybe it’s the memory of dumping my father it was for another guy, somebody with more of a future, neither Polish nor Catholic, the two strikes my father had with her parents; maybe the other guy had dumped her and she went back to my father on the rebound. Later still, when I ask if she’d ever gone to the Chicago World’s Fair with her family, she snaps back with a sharp “No.” It’s the last word she’ll ever say on the subject.

                   #           

Earlier this year, I began thinking of Uncle Jimmy and contacted the South Bend Library to see if they have anything—articles or obits—on him. Greta Fischer, Assistant Librarian of the South Bend Public Library, writes back saying that she’s looked through the archives, and there are indeed several articles on James T. Cover. For a miniscule fee, she’ll send a PDF of the files over e-mail.

The banner headline under the South Bend Tribune masthead for Wednesday evening, September 29, 1937, reads “James Cover Ends His Life,” the sub-head leading the column on the right side of the page: “Farmer Finds Singer Dead of Gas in Car.” The farmer, William Hays, spotted the car at 6:30 in the morning while out plowing. At 9:30, the car still there, he went to check and found the famed singer slumped over the steering wheel.

            The front page also hosts a story (center, above the fold) of a 14-year-old girl, Alice Hamann of RR#3, South Bend, who was killed on Tuesday in an accident at the intersection of Taylor St. and LaSalle Avenue in South Bend, two blocks from where Uncle Jimmy has his gas station. They tried to perform surgery in the ambulance, but she died of a severed jugular before they could wheel her into the emergency room. Sometimes I wonder if Alice’s tragic death had set off Uncle Jimmy’s determination to go through with his own plan.   

 

The report says nothing of the car he drives, nothing of a note. He stands next to the car, the door still open, breathing the dust of the road, the recent harvest. The night is warm with the clarity of late September. The crickets chirp loud odes in perfect unison to their ladies in waiting. A barbershop quartet plus a million, he thinks.

                     #

My grandmother said he could have gone to New York and “made something of himself,” but he stayed in South Bend. It was love of family and the land that kept him. He’d always kept a day-job: salesman for Standard of Indiana, and later managed the Gafill-Cover Bindery. How could he afford to take time off, or pay train fare to New York? In the end, he’s leasing a Standard station. He’s probably used up all his angels by now. And how much longer before his instrument loses its resonance, its range?

                        #

He’s active in the Masonic lodge on Main Street, the building with the fluted columns supporting the portico in the front which is oriented due east. He belonged to the Scottish Rite. The coroner thinks Uncle Jimmy may have been despondent over money problems. My Aunt Mary, who is the family historian, tells my brother that a woman is involved, a singer in one of the municipal choruses Uncle Jimmy belongs to. He’s ready to leave everything—his wife, his gas station, and his beloved South Bend for her. She, a married Catholic can’t bring herself to risk the church’s condemnation.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s as simple as all that, if maybe he had a fling with the tenor of a touring opera company, and blackmail is part of the equation. Pay up or risk exposure and ruination. Which would make the coroner partly right.

                        #

            He’s 46, until recently a soloist in First Church Christ Scientist, two blocks from his apartment in the Mar-Main Arms. Corner of Marion and Main, one block from the Masonic Temple, that other stone building. So much of his life is within walking distance. On the other hand, he needs to drive to his death.

What music is going through his head at the moment he stops the car?

What is it that makes me think he may have been gay?

            The obit says his wife is distraught, and the coroner holds off the inquest for several days until she comes out of shock. I wondered if he were gay before I knew he was married, but marriage is no guarantee that one doesn’t have another life. I still have a lingering suspicion, a what if moment rather than an ah-hah moment, since the family has a reticence if not an outright hostility in speaking about him. There’s the stain of suicide, certainly, but there’s always a deeper cause. Financial difficulties. He got behind on his payments.

            South Bend is a small town, and Uncle Jimmy was, according to the paper, one of her best-known vocalists. “A soloist in church and in amateur theatrical productions.”

                  #

The crickets stop in unison, and suddenly he’s aware they’d been singing all this time.

Dead Stick

In over fifty years of experience as a pilot, my father had to make a forced landing only once. It was in Kentucky during the war; he was ferrying a small liaison plane cross-country when, out of the blue as it were, the engine stopped. Practicing forced landings is part of every pilot’s training, and as an instructor, my father had often subjected his students to the drill. Now it was his turn. He quickly scanned the terrain—hilly with small plots for tobacco or corn or rye. Luckily it was December and the ground was hard, the winter wheat still dormant.

He been at the tail end of six high-wing, fabric-covered Stinson L-1s destined for Tennessee. The plane, cruising at a hundred miles an hour, had a range of only a few hundred miles between fueling stops, less in a head wind. And those stops could take well over an hour while the gas truck crept from plane to plane, a line-crewman setting up a ladder under each wing and dragging up the fuel hose to top off the tanks. My father didn’t like it. He didn’t like the short range, and he didn’t like the L-1, which he called a sad, lumbering excuse for an airplane. He certainly wasn’t going to hide his displeasure at being saddled with it. He would have grumbled endlessly to the other pilots in his squadron, to the ground crews, even the waitresses who took their orders at the lunch counter. He would mumble by himself under the drone of the 295 horsepower Lycoming as he tagged along in the ragged formation.

One of the virtues of the Stinson L-1 was its ability to fly into and out of very tight places, making the plane ideal for the dead stick landing my father was facing. He would have preferred his former job, ferrying B-24s from the factory to airbases where they were equipped with armor, guns, bombsights and the other paraphernalia to make them fit for service. At that point, combat crews took over and flew to points in the Pacific, or England, wherever. About a year into the war, women auxiliary pilots took over the ferrying assignments to free up more airmen for the war. My father would have been one of those men if his application for active duty hadn’t been rejected for failing the medical. When he was ten, while riding his bicycle, he was hit by a truck. He spent months convalescing, lying in a darkened bedroom with only an Arvin table radio to keep him company. The only reading the doctors allowed were the assignments his brother carried home from school, and which he usually finished in half an hour. The childhood concussion, however, kept him out of the army air corps. Which meant joining up with a squadron of L-1s in December, 1943.

From Fairfield, Ohio, just north of Cincinnatti, the small squadron of Stinsons flew to Fort Knox, Kentucky. There they waited out a winter storm and intermittent bouts of sloppy snow and freezing rain. The planes lacked de-icing equipment and contained only the most basic instrumentation, so the pilots bunked down and waited until the weather lifted and they could continue under visual flight rules. If he’d been assigned a B-24, he’d be long gone, maybe basking on the gulf coast and not stuck in Fort Knox, where the slush slopped over the tops of his shoes whenever he went outside.

It was on the leg between Fort Knox and Bowling Green, that his engine coughed and sputtered and stopped. My father advanced the throttle, he banked right and left to coax more gas into the line, double checked the fuel-selector valve, nothing. Though his fuel gauges didn’t register full after they took off from Fort Knox, he paid little attention. Pilots are taught that fuel gauges are notoriously unreliable and to personally check, by unscrewing the gas cap and dipping a finger, that the tanks are full. Instead, my father had taken the line crewman’s word for it, and he was left high and dry over the Kentucky hill country. Lacking radios, the other pilots were unaware that Edward V. Minczeski, civilian pilot, had dropped out of formation.

Before the war began, my father was an instructor in the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPT), which was designed to prepare a generation of pilots for the war America had not yet entered. He was such a stern, unforgiving instructor that his students called him “Downczeski.” (In spite of his reputation as a hard-ass instructor, he maintained life-long friendships with a number of his old flight students.) His attitude extended to other areas of flying, from the exacting rigor of B-24s to the sloppy, under-performing Stinson he was now coaxing down. “Mickey Mouse” was what he would have called it. I can imagine one of his squadron mates, tired of his carping, telling the ground crew at Fort Knox not to top-off his plane—that he had plenty of gas to make it to Bowling Green. Maybe he was a victim of a general confusion, like mass hysteria, with planes coming and going, everybody rushing, shouting to hurry, hubba hubba, that made him uncharacteristically rely on the line crew and squadron leader rather than inspect the tanks himself.

Safely on the ground, he shut down the magnetos and master switch, the gyros continuing to whine. Soon two men in coveralls trudged across the field toward him, looking like they’d never seen a plane before.

“Oh, she’s a beaut alright,” the younger, a teenager, said, looking at the L-1.

The older man, in his late fifties or early sixties, regarded my father. He looked at the airplane, glanced at the wheel marks at his field.

“I guess you brought her down in one piece. And not much crop damage neither. The wheat ain’t sprouted so much that it won’t spring back. Come on over to the house.”

He sent his grandson to a neighbor who had a telephone. Call the sheriff, tell him to call the air base, somebody would know what to do. The kid must have stopped at every farmstead on the way, spreading word that a flyboy had dropped in. The house soon filled with neighbors and generations of kinfolk. They treated him hospitably, since he was wearing his normal flight outfit: woolen khaki shirt, though without regimental and division patches, and a leather jacket. Years later, my father derided them as “a bunch of hillbillies,” people who resembled depression era portraits of Walker Evans. In spite of their threadbare existence, they sat him down to dinner with the clan, offered a straw mattress in their hovel, and to ease his way into sleep, the men produced a jug of moonshine.

He idled with them on the porch as they passed the hooch back and forth. One of them drawled, “Well, I kinda reckon you Yankees might be all right after all.” My father shared his Phillip Morris cigarettes with them, and though they grew tobacco along with wheat and beans, they politely accepted. When it was time for bed, the older man pointed to the outhouse out back, but if he had to pee during the night, anywhere away from the house was fine.

Hours later, he awakened with just that urge. He blinked. It was all blackness, and not just the blackness of night. How many times had he been warned not to drink homemade booze? His second big mistake of the day. Methanol poisoning. And now he’s blind. He would never see his wife and son again; he could kiss his flying career goodbye. The spanking new B-24s, even the miserable L-1s were beyond him now, should he live until morning.

The older man shuffled into the room to see what the commotion was. “It happens sometimes with Clem’s moonshine,” he said. “He’s just plum stingy. Hardly never tosses out enough of his first pour.” He rattled around under the sink and handed my father a glass. “Here. Drink this—all in one gulp. It’s a antidote.”

More booze. My father’s first impulse was to refuse it, but he quickly reasoned that if he were going to die, he might as well make it quick. Grandpa led him off the porch and said he probably didn’t need any help peeing—just aim directly ahead. The antidote was indeed working, and the stars and moon began to appear—blurry at first—then sharper.

Help arrived late the next day—a military truck, mechanics, a sergeant to smooth things over with the locals. “Nah, this thing won’t ruin your crop. It’s light as a feather.”  In spite of my father’s entreaties that he could fly it out again, the sergeant said orders were to take the wings off and haul it to the airfield on a trailer.

Most hangovers, my father said, could be cured by the pure oxygen aircraft crews sucked through a tube when they flew above twelve thousand feet. A couple of whiffs, he said, cleared his head right up. But there was no oxygen on the tiny L-1, and the sergeant, not terribly happy at having to drop everything to rescue my father, aimed for every rut in the unpaved road as they drove back, just to aggravate my father’s championship hang-over with every jolt.

Next day, the plane reassembled and fueled, my father’s eyesight still good, he took off for Bowling Green, where the commanding officer gave him an earful.

“What the Sam Hill is the big idea, running out of gas! Don’t they teach you anything in flight school any more?”

He paged through my father’s logbook. “And you call yourself an instructor! I hope you’re students aren’t half as sloppy as you are. If we weren’t so goddamn short of pilots I’d bust your sorry ass down to infantry in a second.”

My father tried to explain that the squadron leader had signed off on the gas, that there was no reason not to assume his plane hadn’t been fueled up. A steely glare from the commander was enough to quiet him.

“It won’t happen again,” he said.

“No, I don’t suppose you’ll ever pull that stunt again. Now get out of my sight. Your squadron is waiting for you in Tennessee. They’re probably jumping for joy that you made them lay over a couple of days.”

And so my father, tail between his legs, thoroughly humbled by the Stinson, finished his cross-country trip in Lebanon, Tennessee where he’d been replaced by another civilian pilot, and he caught a ride home on a gooney-bird for Christmas.

That’s how he told it, my father, about the only time he ever had to make a forced landing. He never saw his squadron mates again, which was fine with him. What stayed with him was his moment of panic when swore off alcohol forever, his bargaining with God, the jigger from a clean batch of moonshine that saved him, and a remark from a corporal the following night when he had to sleep on a cot in a hangar. He had asked if there was any place to get a drink around there. His eyes weren’t as bloodshot has they had been, and his hands didn’t feel as shaky.

“Best steer clear of that stuff, sir,” the corporal said. “It’ll kill ya.”

 

 

 

Libraries and Poetry

 

1

I love libraries. I love the work they do, and librarians who fulfill their mission with enthusiasm and zealous helpfulness. Ask a librarian a question, you’re likely to get multiple answers, often accompanied by book suggestions.  It’s a special degree of personalized service, and it’s available to everyone.

            Years ago, when there were still card catalogs, I visited the music department at St. Paul’s Central Library with a friend who needed a certain book on American folk ballads. While she searched, discovering along the way other relevant books that attracted her interest, I quite innocently asked a librarian if she knew the source of the Star Spangled Banner. I had read (I think it was in Vonnegut) that the original tune for our national anthem began life as an English drinking song. The librarian asked a colleague who said he’d heard about it, but didn’t know for certain. He enlisted another librarian, and suddenly it was a full-blown quest, with three highly-trained professionals scrambling through the card catalog, calling to each other like quarterbacks changing plays at the line of scrimmage, shouting catalog numbers back and forth. Their teamwork was smooth and efficient, the way one practices fire drills in school (these days it’s also lockdown drills). How was I to know that librarians live for moments like this? In five minutes, maybe less, I held a volume entitled, as I recall, The Music of “The Star Spangled Banner.” A librarian Xeroxed the first stanza and, when I gave her my library card, checked out the book for me so I could read the other six stanzas on my own.

            Vonnegut had been right. The original tune was “To Anacreon in Heaven,” which had been composed for the The Anacreontic Society, a social club that gathered in pubs in the second half of the eighteenth century. Anacreon, an ancient Greek poet and contemporary of Horace, wrote odes for his patrons (he was a court poet), hymns for Aphrodite, Eros, Dionysus, and he composed witty amorous poems on a more earthly scale. Rather than the lofty sentiments of “dulce et decorum est,” it was the Anacreontic poems on Venus and Cupid that appealed to the all-male drinking club. Anacreontic societies sprang up throughout England, and before long the tune became the rage in America. Unlike the present day, the original tune had not been designed to sing stone sober.

            Very few Americans knew of Anacreon, but the catchy tune was still well-suited for a drinking song, and after it crossed the ocean, others set about composing new verses for it. Before the advent of copyright laws, everything was fair game. Francis Scott Key, a lawyer, anti-abolitionist and amateur poet, who’d written different verses for the music, hit on the patriotic version after watching the bombardment of Ft. McHenry during the War of 1812. (During the shelling, he was aboard a British ship where he’d gone to negotiate a prisoner exchange.) It became the official national anthem in 1930, and has been sung and mumbled before every sporting event in the U.S. ever since.

After the flurry of their search, the librarians went back to their usual job of filing, processing books, and ongoing research. I apologized for disrupting their routine.

“Are you kidding?” one said, “we loved it!”

 

2

 

            I was hired by the Friends of the St. Paul Library to teach a series of workshops on writing poetry. The idea was to develop poems so students could enter them in the St. Paul Sidewalk Poetry Project. Every year the city, along with Public Art St. Paul, sponsors a contest for poems that will be stamped into wet concrete when public works crews replace sidewalks. The brainchild of St. Paul Artist-in-Residence, Marcus Young, the project started six years ago with a competition to select twenty poems written by St. Paul residents. The winning poems were molded into fiberglass dies, each the size of a sidewalk square, and “printed” into new sidewalks whenever an old sidewalk was replaced due to wear, storm sewer upgrade, street widening.  

            Every year, a selection committee picks five or six new poems to add to the collection that construction crews can use on the sidewalks. Marcus’ idea is to create a book written by local citizens, to be read as one walks through the neighborhoods and retail districts of St. Paul. Some of the poems are by writers who have books and other publications to their credit, who teach in colleges and universities and community programs. For some, it is the their first publication, one that will last as long as the sidewalk does, at least a life-time.

 

            At one of the libraries I visited, a six-year-old girl wrote as if she were on fire. She had long, curly hair, blond, and when struck with an idea for a poem, which was often, a smile spread over her face and she bent down to write, her hair spilling over the paper, burying it. In fifteen minutes, she asked for another sheet of paper. The one she had been using was covered in three- and four-line poems, from top to bottom, in the margins and on the back, filling as much of the paper as she could, the way Leonardo used the same piece of parchment to draw studies of hands and faces. All the others wrote too, but more slowly, content to use one poem per page. Some of them, students in higher grades, asked me to look at notebooks they’d brought with them. While I discussed their poems with them, I kept an eye on the six-year-old, her head bobbing up and down, filling up the second sheet in an ecstasy of creation.

            “She likes to write,” her mother said.

            It was like saying a race horse likes to run. “Just make sure she always has a notebook nearby,” I said.

            In a library on West Seventh St., the librarian had left an avalanche of books on haiku on the table where we’d write. I read several as examples of short poems:

            The sea slug

            Thirteen million years

            Doing nothing

                        –Shiki

I picked out the sea slug poems, the way one might pick out a certain flavor of jelly bean, to show that poems can bring sheer enjoyment, and that no matter how humble something is, it can still be a fitting subject for poetry:

 

            Sea Slug,

            Don’t worry

            We’re all Buddhists here

                        –Issa

“Energy,” says William Blake, “is eternal delight.” These Japanese poems have delight radiating out from their seams:

 

            These sea slugs

            Don’t look like

            They’re Japanese

                        –Issa

 

I showed students a simple pattern they could use if they wanted, and we made short group poems that featured objects in the room—chairs, the board, a window, the tree outside the window. After writing them on the chalk board, I rearranged some lines, changed a word here and there to show that simple changes can make a vast difference in a poem. Then the children wrote their own. When they finished one, I asked them to make another. After that one, another, and so on.   It’s like popcorn: first there’s one pop, then another, then a massive rush as each kernel explodes out of itself. I encouraged entire chain reactions of short poems. Many were on related subjects—stoplights, pigs, the twiggy winter trees. Some students bounced all over the place. I didn’t know how else to demonstrate that the business of creation is an ongoing activity, a flow we have around us all the time, and there’s no off switch.

 

3

Ortonville, where I was invited to do a one-day poetry workshop at the library, sits on the shore of Big Stone Lake on the western edge of Minnesota. The Minnesota River flows south from the lake, curves south and east, eventually joining the Mississippi in St. Paul. The source of the Red River is a few miles north of Big Stone Lake. It flows north, a shallow border between Minnesota and North Dakota, through Fargo and Moorhead and Grand Forks and then into Canada where it empties into Lake Winnipeg. Both rivers are prone to spring flooding, but the Red River especially so, since it flows through an immense, ancient lake bed which, during the glacial period, held more water than all the great lakes combined. A teacher once told me that during heavy floods, paddle-wheelers could cross over flooded farm fields from Big Stone Lake to the Red River, and on to Winnipeg. Sometimes receding flood waters stranded a boat in the middle of a field, miles inland where it remained until it was burned or dismantled.

            A three-hour trip, my wife and I drove out the afternoon before. It was July, our GPS had taken us over two-lane state highways bordered by soybeans, knee-high corn and green flowing wheat. We had a small laminated map, the only one that had been available at a convenience store, and it didn’t show half the roads the GPS directed us over.

            “Girlfriend,” my wife asked the female voice of the GPS, “where are you taking us.”

            In spite of the conflict between map and electronics, the corn maze of roads we drove eventually took us through Appleton, Milan, across the Pomme de Terre River, and into Ortonville, to the door of the motel, our promised land for the night.

           

 

Next door, at the supper club where we went for dinner—salad sirloin tips and choice of potato, specialty of the house, a small combo in the bar area playing Elvis and Chuck Berry and The Beatles—an elderly couple made their way from the dining room to the bar. The woman said hello as they passed by our booth, welcoming us to Ortonville. She asked if we were in town for business or pleasure. (There was, it turned out, a big wedding the next day.) I said I was working at the library the next day.

“Oh!” she said, “you’re the poet!”

Word had gotten around.

            Her husband stopped and turned toward me, his face suddenly animated.

“You’re a poet? I love poetry!”

 They stood over our table as he recited a few lines by James Greenleaf Whittier and John Whitcomb Riley, poets he’d memorized sixty years earlier. He was ebullient, full of things that he wanted to say all at once. He was seventeen-years-old again.

            I invited him to the workshop where I’d focus on poets from the area—Robert Bly, Bill Holm, Phebe Hanson, and James Wright, who had written memorable poems while visiting the Bly farm in nearby Madison.

            The wedding kept him from attending, but it didn’t dampen his rekindled enthusiasm.

            As my wife and I read over the dessert menu, the gentleman came around the corner and asked if he could buy us a drink. Poetry had lain dormant in him all these years, since he’d finished high school in the ‘40s, and he devoted his energy to making a living and raising a family. But now poetry flared again in him, the alchemy of language returning in half-remembered poems.

Our wives perched on bar stools, the gentleman and I stood behind them, reciting. I gave him Keats’ “When I have fears.” He answered with phrases from Robinson’s “Minniver Cheevy.” I recited Rolf Jacobsen’s “Guardian Angel,” and haikus my students had written. He had mentally taken his old poetry books out of the box in his basement and was paging through them.

            An electrical engineer, he’d invented a component for cable TV that was the equivalent of the McCoy automatic oiler for steam engines, and it let him retire early, travel with his wife, and keep fiddling with electronic gadgets. 

            Poetry flourishes when people need it, in times of stress, in great happiness or great grief. In the days following 9/11, poems flew back and forth across the internet. Some were original poems, but most were not. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” surged in popularity. He’d deleted one of the more famous lines, “We must love one another or die,” from his collected poems, saying it was a lie since we were going to die anyway. In the aftermath of 9/11, when people turned to poetry for solace, that line surfaced again and again. The New Yorker ran a poem on the back page rather than its usual cartoon caption contest. It was by Adam Zagajewski, the Polish poet: “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.”

            As we stood talking poetry at the bar, my new friend said he’d won a poetry prize in high school, but felt guilty about it.  He’d taken a poem he liked from one of his books and plugged new words into it. But he couldn’t claim it as his own original poem. After he’d dragged his secret around all these years, it felt like he was looking for absolution. I reassured him—poets steal from one another all the time, I said. Maybe I should have given him penance, as a priest would: “Read Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle,” Roethke’s “The Waking,” and Dickenson’s “Because I could not stop for death.”  Sometimes one has to wallow in guilt to purge it, and sometimes confessing to a complete stranger might be the next best thing to the anonymity of the confessional. Being a poet, I may have been the only one besides him to whom this mattered.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” I said, but I don’t think he heard me, or that he especially wanted to hear. Actually, he’d decided his own penance, and it was to give me the books he loved when he was 17.

            I tried to tell him that I have many, many books–two rooms downstairs filled with them, with recent books and literary journals piled in stacks on the coffee table like row after row of grain silos. My wife says (with good humor, thankfully) “too many books!” But he’d made up his mind. The books would go to me.

            The following morning, as the librarian showed me how to connect my computer to the LCD projector in the basement meeting room, my 78-year-old friend arrived and stood in the doorway. The library hadn’t officially opened yet, but it’s a small town and everyone knew him. For some reason, he didn’t want to come in any farther than the doorway. He held the three hard-bound poetry books he’d promised to give me, passing his pride, his youth, his guilt, as if I would keep the flame burning, into my keeping. Thanks to me, he said, he’d stayed up until 3:30 in the morning reading through them, looking for the one poem he’d wanted to recite to me the evening before, and going on from there, regaining something from his past, the same way a smell might take us back to a certain moment, with the intensity and vividness of actually being in that moment again. He couldn’t stay, needing to get home and dress for the wedding (a big wedding, I learned later, involving much of the town). I tried to protest that he still might enjoy those books, but he insisted, pressing his well-worn copy of “Twelve Centuries of English Poetry and Prose,” and two others into my arms.  

            And then he was gone back into the summer morning, the wedding that was waiting for him, preparations for it.

Moments later, the members of the local writing club began arriving, around twenty in all. Many of them had known Robert Bly when he lived on his farm near Madison, Minnesota; one had been friendly with Bill Holm. A woman, around the same age as my friend from the night before, noticed the volumes bound in black buckram, and picked one up, leafing through the worn pages.  

“Oh,” she said. “We all had these in high school.”

It was just after World War II, when the country could stop holding its breath and begin to exhale. In spite of what Auden thought about the line he had deleted, it belonged to the world now, and people still had to love one another or die.

 

 

 

 

A Matter of Control

I took my daughter’s old computer to the shop to transfer data off her hard drive to a new laptop. The old one had been perfectly good until the water bottle in her computer bag leaked when she was at school and soaked everything, most especially the fragile circuit boards in her Macbook. She tried turning the computer on, but it was completely drowned.

            She’s attends a chef school in Minneapolis and her chef-instructor, who likes her for her enthusiasm and hard work and eagerness to learn, grabbed a cooking tray, put the computer on it, then smothered everything with arboreal rice.

            The computer never worked again. But the hard drive was still viable.

            The guy at the computer shop, needing access to her old drive, asked for her password. In a flurry of text messages, she sent it to me: “All You Need Is Love,” resurrecting that song by the Beatles and reflecting the ‘60s, a decade she feels an affinity for, though when growing up her favorite bands were The Ramones and The Clash.

            “She sounds like a liberal,” the computer guy said.

            “Isn’t everyone,” I said, a little flippantly.

            He was big and wore a solid blue v-neck sweater with a white t-shirt underneath. Jeans. Engineer boots that must have been a size 14.

            “I’m not,” he said. “I used to be, and then I realized I’d been brainwashed by the liberal line.”

            “Brainwashed? Really?”

            “Yeah, like on gun control. Those rifles they’re trying to ban are no different than any hunting rifle. I’ve got 2 AR-15s and nobody’s going to take them away from me.”

            Before I could ask him what he did with those two rifles, what enjoyment they provided, whether it was plinking tin cans off a fence post or shooting a sixteen-point buck at two hundred yards, he said, “Why do you think the Colorado shooter chose that theater to massacre those people, when there were three theaters closer to his house?”

            I considered briefly: because it was bigger? Because it was playing the midnight show of Batman? Because the shooter got sprayed by a water pistol during a showing of “the Rocky Horror Picture Show?”

            Instead, I grew interested in what the computer guy had to say, whether it differed at all from the argument I’d heard from the NRA.

            “Why,” I said.

            “Because they banned guns in that theater. He knew they weren’t going to shoot back.”

            Yep, same argument.

            Our conversation didn’t continue because at that moment the owner of the shop came out from the back, and looked hard at his employee. It was the kind of look that said he’d already warned the employee about getting into political arguments with customers. This particular look said “strike two.”

            The computer guy went back to patching the hard drive into the new computer and beginning the transfer program. “It will take four to six hours,” he said. “You can come back later today or tomorrow.”

            I’d been in arguments like this before, and there is no resolution to them. Being brainwashed by the liberals isn’t any different than repeating, word for word, arguments from the other side. In the end, two groups of people stand facing each other at a rally shouting slogans.

            I’d thought of saying that I had little desire to get into the head of the Colorado shooter, someone with a horribly disfigured mental state, but that’s not quite true. I’m a writer, and therefore I am interested in getting into his head. The difference is that I’m only interested in a one-hour free pass: go in, look around, make a few notes, leave. I’d feel revulsion and, I confess, a degree of fascination, something my daughter would describe as “icky” before making a Mr. Yuck face. It’s the “I have to wash my hands right now” feeling when the poop bag breaks as you’re picking up after the dog.

            What did I discover during my brief tour of the gunman’s psyche? A scary rationality: a hyper-clear focus that crystallized on a plan to stash weapons and a suit of plastic armor in the theater’s emergency exit corridor; in the ordering of ammo online, the preparation of weapons. I saw a cold calm where reality and fantasy became interchangeable.

            But I can’t say why he chose that particular theater. Were other theaters showing the midnight premier of Batman? Did he pick it out of his figurative hat? As I poked around his head (I was a tourist without a guide), I saw that the theater was as random as the victims. The point was power. Putting on the shiny black armor and the mask transformed him into a super villain, omniscient and all-powerful. The problem in the theater wasn’t too few armed theater patrons, but that batman doesn’t exist. No one channeled him, or swung on stage from his bat rope to deliver a kick that would throw the shooter off balance, snap on the bat cuffs and turn him over to Denver’s finest.

            We suffer a lack of super heroes. There’s no real superman who’s invulnerable to anything not kryptonite. No spider-sense tingles before a dangerous situation develops. And a gun strapped to your waist does not automatically give you those powers.

            But the villains aren’t omniscient either. The hyper-clarity only lasts as long as it takes to empty a clip or two. Most shooters turn their guns on themselves. But maybe someone can tackle the villain as he pauses to grab a new gun from his back pack.

            But would an armed hero in the audience deter a murderer who can shoot as fast as he pulls the trigger? Between the time it takes someone to draw and aim, the shooter can still take out five or six. He might even shoot the hero. If he’s so rational as to pick places that ban firearms, then he can figure he’s going to die anyway at the end. Why not with someone else’s bullet rather than his own?

            I grew up arguing with my father, a lawyer who made it his vocation to argue. We argued about the war, about the racial situation in the country. We were like the deadlocked congress in the Obama administration. We even argued about the weather. For most of my adult life I was torn between filial devotion and the dread of what we’d fight about next. In all that time, after all those arguments, we never, ever changed how the other thought about something. If anything, we only hardened our positions.

            I should have asked the computer guy if collecting his guns was anything like the comfort I feel when I’m surrounded by the books in my study, but his jaw was set. He was expecting me to toss slogans back at him. To be truthful, I could have said any number of things to him, but I didn’t. Though I knew I was right, it still would have felt like bullying, and it may have cost him his job.

            The next day I went back. The same guy greeted me and handed the computer over. He’d successfully transferred all the data, and repacked the new laptop in the box, just as it had come from the factory. Placing it on the counter, he smiled and held out his hand to shake. I shook it.

            “Thank you,” he said.

The next best thing

The Next Big Thing

Thanks to Carlen Arnett who invited me to participate in this project—not all the questions are appropriate, since I’m working mainly in poetry. I’ll lump a number of these questions together into my response, and I’ll substitute some of my own questions for those above. Here goes:

What is the working title of your book?

“Smoke,” which will not likely be the final title. It’s a poetry collection which is currently lying around in scattered pieces and fragments after I decided it wasn’t working. I take the poems through a process of endless revision, and I probably will be more ruthless before re-assembling it.

How long did it take you to write your book?

I generally publish a new book of poetry once every nine or ten years. There are exceptions: in 2007, I published two chapbooks (well, one chapbook and one that the publisher (Red Dragonfly Press) describes as a pamphlet). I’d finished an early draft of “Smoke” in about a year. A second draft came the year later. And though I’ve published a number of poems from it in journals of various kinds, it doesn’t quite work as a book yet.

You’ve mentioned “Process.” Would you speak about that some more?

In my previous book, “A Letter to Serafin,” my process involved cutting and trimming, trying to get the poems as spare as possible. Many poems came out in a rush following several trips my wife and I took abroad, to Poland and to Italy. In Poland we visited my cousins (we share the same great-grandparents) and traveled to a number of cities including Krosno, Krakow, and Warsaw. In Italy, we visited friends in Rome and traveled to Florence, Spoleto, and Venice. My focus was Renaissance religious art (at the time I wanted the focus of my next book to illustrate arguments with God). I merged poems from both events and included poems from my own backyard.
After putting the poems together in the manuscript, I revised again. And again. I shifted poems around. I inserted sections, I took all the sections away. At the end, however, after sending it to the University of Akron Press and getting reviewer comments, I did another quite major revision. This time, I went back to earlier versions of poems and re-inserted some things I’d cut. I took other poems down to the bare bones and re-wrote them entirely.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I wrote the first several drafts of “Smoke” following my mother’s death. She had a lengthy and very painful decline, and had been brought back from death’s threshold at least a half-dozen times, until at last a doctor, a high school class-mate of my younger brother, said it was time for hospice. When she died, I felt a surge of anger directed at the medical profession for prolonging her suffering, in spite of the health directive she’d signed that no extraordinary measures be taken to extend her life. I also felt a surge of anger at my mother for the mean things she’d done to me and my brothers when we were small. When she died, there was an onslaught of blizzards with -30 temperatures. It felt like she was expelling all of the bile and anger she had stored up in herself. Anger, especially the sustained anger I felt is out of the ordinary for me. I worked on managing it through writing, ceaselessly. Some of that writing evolved into poems for the book.

What is your plan for putting the manuscript back together?

I began writing a memoir of my parents in December as a way of looking at both parents more objectively—at least as objectively as my memory will allow. I don’t think it will be a book-length memoir, but I can’t really predict. Anyway, writing prose has helped generate new poems that I hope will become part of the revised book formerly known as “Smoke ”

Anything else?

I’m working on a sequence of self-portraits, which is a bit odd since so much of what I do could be called self-portraiture. I’m drawn to this particular sequence because each one has an unexpected turn, and there’s s a strain of sustaining energy in the sequence, at least for the present. I’ve taught Zagajewski’s “Self Portrait” to fifth graders with some pretty good success, and I’m sure that’s where the impetus comes from. They are far from being anything like Zagajewski’s poem, however.

Will I publish the book myself, or use an agency?

Neither. Right now I plan on entering it into contests when it’s ready to send out. My plan may change and I’ll send the manuscript directly to an editor of a press, but right now my interest lies in working on the manuscript itself.