Roses for a Sunday Evening

My friend Dr. Teddy dropped by last night with the amazing news that her mother, who we thought would have been dead weeks ago, is not only still with us but serenely declared, in her new adult foster care home, "I'm happy." There is a message here -- about the depths of mercy and possibilities not just for a good death, but for a redemptive final chapter. We sat on the back porch sipping our frosty gin and tonics and puffing Sherman ovals (just two each -- we are very particular about our cigarettes, both in quantity and quality) and smiled at each other. It's enough to make us believe in religion.

And Teddy brought these roses, from her garden. They remind me, I told her, of Sunday nights back on Gibbs Avenue in Canton in the 50s, where after the evening service on a summer night like this, the whole small congregation would troop over to Flossie McLaughlin's tiny house on Sherlock Place to see her roses. They were much like these -- prolific and delicate and sweet smelling. These sit on my kitchen table, gently scenting the whole room with nostalgia.

There's one more thing about this photo. I put the roses in a vase given to me 40 years ago when we'd moved from Canton to Akron, a difficult parish my father served for just two bumpy years. As I noted in a blog post earlier this month, my maternal ancestors' homestead was there in Akron -- they had been a prominent family with a big house and a lot of land. We lived across the street from what had been my great-grandmother's house -- a place my mother had visited many times as a child. I went to a junior high school named for my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Thornton. My grandmother, Amy -- one of Sam Thornton's dozen of grandchildren, had married a man from Akron named Austin Vandersall. By the time we moved there, however, the Thornton house was long gone, replaced by a row of tawdry storefronts. The neighborhood was in deep decline and the reminders of my ancestors' prosperous days were fragmented and ambiguous. It particularly affected my mother to be there; I think the street was full of ghosts for her.

Anyway, back to the vase.

It was given to me by a woman named Sarah Russ, who at the time (1962) was nearly 100 but still sharp and engaged. I still have the note she included, rolled up in a drawer. It says, in a shaky script: "Long ago my sister Anna taught a class of little girls in our Sunday School. I think your grandma Amy Youtz, who later became Amy Vandersall, was a member of that class. My younger sister Nellie was about the same age but she was in another class. Here is a vase my older sister Anna gave to her at Christmas. It was just like the ones she gave to the girls in her class. We thought they were pretty. I would like to give this one to you. Rev. A. Vandersall was our minister when I was a little girl. He gave me the nickname of Sadie. I liked him and I liked the name, so I used it for many years. I seldom use it now. But, in memory of him and your grandma, and in memory of my sisters Nellie and Anna, I will sign this...Sadie Russ."

I've always appreciated this small act of kindness from an old woman to a young girl struggling with a depressed mother at a time we were haunted by history.

Sam Thornton, the "French Balloonist" and my blue Granny

Ancestors' lives, all finished and receding, dangle out there like ornaments on a tree, the fragments of facts about their lives compelling and tantalizing.

Today I found out that my great great grandfather Samuel Thornton once sold an island in his property around Turkeyfoot Lake in Summit County, Ohio to a French balloonist. Actually, if I've got this right, it may have been Frank Purdy Lahm, an aviator and associate of the Wright brothers. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and educated in France. Or it might have been his father, who also had French connections.

Also, preparing for my visit with my second cousins Anne and Cyrus, I found among my mother's stuff a letter she received in October, 1924, when my mother was 14, from my great-grandmother Matilda Youtz, one of Samuel's many daughters. (It had a 2c stamp on it with a head of Washington) Grannie Youtz writes, among other things, "I get blue and lonesome about dark." An arrow to the heart. I recognize in that simple, plaintive confession a melancholy I know too well, the sadness of dusk. She was about 80 at the time.

She's considering taking in boarders and she writes, "enuf boys here for a room but all these night workers and I will not take them...no use for star boarders." Cyrus tells me there was so much factory work going on in Akron at the time some beds went to one man during the day, and to another at night. The "star boarders," he thinks, might have been so-called because they worked all night, under the stars.

The Here and Now is so much more complicated, the data pouring in from all directions, confusing and fluid. Yet, I find myself still turning back to what I know, what the senses have to offer. I'm still alive, unlike all those others, whom I thank for their idiosyncrasies and struggles, their stories.

Thunder and heavy rain, soothing.

P.S. Cousin Cyrus picked up the tab, very nimble at 91 in extending the courtly gesture. And yes, the gas was WAY more than the lobster.

Happy Birthday to My Sister

She was born at 4:27 p.m. this day in 1939. She repeats that detail today in our phone conversation. Her birth came at the end of one of the worst years in the Twentieth Century, yet she represented the start of our parents' creation of a family. They were painfully naive and awkwardly finding their way. Her birth was hard, and her life also has been fraught; she is, according to her horoscope today in the Akron Beacon Journal, which she reads to me, "a stalwart pragmatist." She knows the word "stalwart" well enough to say it, but spells out "p-r-a-g-m-a-t-i-s-t," and seems to enjoy my description of what I think it means: strong and practical, sturdy in the world.

She took herself to Belgrade Gardens for her birthday -- a Hungarian chicken restaurant in Barberton, Ohio where she lives. Disappointed that this capacious family enterprise no longer serves wine, a treat she allocates for herself once or twice a year, she ordered Diet Coke and fish, which she said was too crusty and hard to eat. But there was a bright spot: across from her, an unaccompanied gentleman watched her closely.

Finally he said, "Excuse me, ma'am, but were you a bell ringer for Salvation Army at the Norton Acme?"

She said indeed she was. She was a champion bell ringer this year. One day somebody wrote a check for $2,000 and said explicitly it should be added into the take of the woman he described to be my sister two days before Christmas.

"Would you care to join me for dinner?" the gentleman said, and my sister said, "Yes, I would."

"I hear it's your birthday," the gentleman eventually said. "Would you allow me to buy you a piece of pie?"

"Sir, I'm very full already," my sister said. But she told me it was coconut cream and it was delicious.

My husband and I have just climbed out of our giant oval tub after a long conjugal bubble bath on our last afternoon in San Pedro for awhile. It has been a stressful interlude, for a lot of reasons, but this afternoon I am at peace. I lie back on our bed, loving the sound of my sister's voice in my ear. She sounds so happy. My husband, still steamy and pink, naps serenely at my side.

"And he paid for the pie," my sister says. She and the gentleman sat there and talked -- about world events, she says, and how things have changed since the Forties. And then she came home, to her three cats and a four-pack of wine coolers in the frig -- her treat for the holiday. She wants to make sauerkraut and ribs for New Year's Eve, just for herself, and asks if I remember our mother's recipe. I don't offhand but look it up on Google, find one that sounds right, and read it to her over the phone. She writes it down, reading each item and instruction back precisely, as the cursor blinks congenially in front of me, and our mother, long dead, is a loving presence between us.

My sister seems to have been perfectly content to spend this day by herself, pursuing her own adventures.

I love my sister.

By the Way, His Name was Knight

(By the way, his name was E. Knight Worth. He went by "Knight," and my mother's print of "Galahad," which one of her girlfriends gave her when she got engaged to my father, was one of her prized possessions. I have it still.)

The Smell of Sawdust -- My Father's 100th Birthday

When I was a kid in Ohio, we lived just a few miles from the runway of the Canton-Akron airport. We used to make fun of our father, who’d stop whatever he was doing every time a plane went over. He’d look up and invariably utter, “Isn’t that amazing?” We thought his unsophisticated awe was embarrassing. We, after all, were kids of the Sputnik age.

Our father never quite got comfortable with a telephone, either. He’d jump whenever it rang and hesitate before picking it up as if it were a poisonous snake. While he died before the era of a PC on every desk, computers likely would have flummoxed him.

But lately I’ve been missing the stubborn old coot. He would have turned 100 today, and even though he and I tangled endlessly through the years over everything from dancing to the GOP, I’ve begun to think that the world is deeply poorer without men like him. I wish he were back, with his contrarian self-sufficiency and plethora of skills.

My father was born on a farm in Central Indiana. In 1907 they had no cars, no electricity, and no indoor plumbing. The first house he remembered burned to the ground. He grew up in a punishing seasonal cycle of efforts to keep the farm afloat: a few cattle, horses, chickens and hogs, about 80 acres of corn and alfalfa. Once he was bitten by a rabid mutt and had to take the train to Indianapolis a dozen times for painful shots in the stomach – a terror that filled his adult nightmares and fueled a lifelong fear of dogs. There was not much fun. It was a crushingly difficult life and he craved adventure and aimed to escape. At 18 he rode the rails to North Dakota to work another harvest for a German farmer – a journey that morphed into an epic family myth. But he came home after just one season to his own extended family. A mix of Quakers and Nazarenes, they were opinionated and devout, and they encouraged him when he received the call to the ministry. Halfway through divinity school in the depths of the Depression, he had to drop out when his father was hit and killed by a car in front of their farm on Route 40. The family struggled to survive but lost their land, a crisis that plagued my father with grief and guilt for the rest of his life.

Eventually, though, he did become a minister in a succession of parishes in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. In one of his assignments, he was a “circuit rider” among four small churches in the Coshocton County, Ohio villages of Nellie, Blissfield, Layland and Shepler. He bought a motor scooter to travel between them, not always avoiding ice, floods on Killbuck Creek, turkey vultures on road kill and slow-moving tractors.

I’ve often called him “fundamentalist” for want of a better word, but he was also an intellectual, poring over original Greek and Hebrew texts for his sermons and even reading Saul Bellow and John Updike to try to understand the secular world. He studied the theologians Reinhold Neibuhr and Martin Buber. One of his favorite writers was the Quaker Elton Trueblood.

In 1950, concerned about not owning any land as they moved from church to church, my dad and mom scraped together a few hundred dollars for a single acre of Ohio land. It had problem drainage so my father brought in topsoil and designed and installed an elaborate system of drainage pipes. He drew up plans for a small house and built it from the foundation up, doing the masonry for a stone fireplace. He planted a modest orchard of pear, plum and apple trees. And then there was the garden – a quarter acre of potatoes, melons, tomatoes, strawberries, corn and beans that kept our family healthily fed for years. He was self-sufficient and shrewd.

For fun, he started designing wall “sconces” to hold candles and antique oil lamps. His favorite woods were cherry, knotty pine, wormy chestnut and walnut, and there was nothing that roused his passions more than a pile of seasoned lumber. Forever scarred by the Depression, he paid cash for everything, and it turned out that his sconces were also puzzle boxes, with secret compartments where we eventually found astonishing rolls of greenbacks he’d squirreled away. While he was suspicious of “art,” he created it, including a screen carved with grape leaves, the symbol of plenty, for one of his churches. The trustees, scandalized by such idolatry, made him take it out: he and my mother used it as a headboard for years. (I wrote about that notorious "raredos" here months ago. )

The other day I tried to tell my students that writing was like building a house. But before I’d gotten very far, I realized they weren’t getting my point.

On a hunch, I asked, “How many of you have ever built anything?’ Only one lone hand went up.

It hit me hard that they haven’t grown up like I did – with the smell of sawdust never far off, the apple trees tended with care, and boxes and jars of fresh beans and corn frozen and canned for the winter. My father left me with many gifts, but today it also feels like something rare and irreplaceable is gone.

My Imaginary Family

One of my favorite features in the Saturday Flint Journal is "People," the thin little pull-out tabloid almost lost between Sports and Classifieds. It usually features some local yokel on the front (I was once one of those featured yokels -- me and the mutt of the month competing for readership, and I think the mutt won). "People" is a rich storehouse for a hermit like me with no family within 200 miles. I really don't miss having a family to speak of -- in fact I'm grateful for it most of the time, but I get perverse vicarious delight from reading every word about engagements, weddings, wedding anniversaries and geezer birthdays. Not to mention the Pet of the Week.

Today's is Dixie, a two-year-old beagle/terrier mutt. Somebody slapped a yellow bandana on her for her desperate closeup. Her long pink tongue sticks out, and she's smiling in that doggie way as if she knows how much this matters. The way she's sitting there, her little white paws on a hard floor at the Humane Society, breaks my heart.

On the engagement and wedding pages, I look at all the panicky smiling couples in their fancy clothes, their heads touching, the guy's hand tenderly and tastefully on the girl's waist, the women in complicated upswept hair and lacy headpieces, the guys looking slightly strangled by their unaccustomed tuxes. Stiff little flowers, rosebuds with sprays of cliche baby's breath, seem to interfere with hugging. But everybody's smiling. Looking at all of them, the Nicoles and Scotts and Caras and Lances and LaCreshas and Fruquwas (that's the guy) and Sarahs and Dereks, I think, yes indeed, there is somebody for everybody.

And then on the next page, there are the anniversaries: names from another era -- Harold and Phyllis and Shirley and Kenneth and Gordon and Tom...and these couples suggest the toll the years take, a whiplash of time from the hopeful naivete of decades before. The couples are thick and wrinkled, bespectacled and silver-haired -- and still smiling, thanks, I think, to "Cheese." I think they look surprised, and relieved, that they've made it this far. I wonder if they still like each other. The contrast between the two sections -- the young beginners, the weathered survivors -- is almost more than I can take before my second cup of tea. It makes me want a drink.

But the best of all is "Generations" -- the photos where somebody whose 15-year-old kid just had a baby in the family tradition lines up with great-grandma, grandma, mom or dad and a tiny papoose, usually in the arms of the oldest relative, little aware of his or her place in history.

Today's "People" yielded a Generations bonanza: SIX GENERATIONS. Unbelievable! Great-great-great grandmother Lucille, 98, holds little Devan, five weeks old. Arranged around the aged granny and thumb-sucking infant are great-great grandmother Norma, great-grandmother Brenda, grandfather James and mom Nicole. I try to calculate how in the hell this could have happened -- everybody procreated before the age of 20, I guess, and everybody lived. What relentless family-making!

I'm amazed. My GRANDFATHER was born in 1870 and has been dead since the early 50s -- my mother was born in 1910 and didn't get around to giving birth to me until 1949. I come from a long line of extreme late-bloomers, some of whom never actually bloomed. I, for instance, never had kids myself, and I'm still waiting for the break that will bust open my expected celebrity to snare me a mythical -- if truncated -- twig on my family tree.

So my historical family, the people we call ancestors, are largely mysteries to me. And what I know of them, through various myths, memories, scars and resentments, are filtered through "he said, she said" second- or third-hand accounts at best.

My Ancestors Aren't Listening

And, to continue with the above...

The energetic and wonderful New York hip hop playwright Will Power, who's a visiting professor at UM-Flint this semester, came to my fiction-writing class this week. At one point, he said he calls to his ancestors when he's writing, and they often answer back. His ancestors, he suggests, consistently wish him well and enhance his creative juices.

I'm confounded. I'm trying to figure out how this works. As I just wrote above, in the family category, almost everybody before my generation has now kicked off. My brother and sister and my cousins and I are what count as elders now. And coming after me, in my immediate family, a single nephew and three nieces. Two of the nieces are in adult foster care, and the other, carrying a big weight of historical expectation if you buy such logic, is a beginning doctor in the first year of her residency.

I'm pretty sure my ancestors are mute.

And I have no reason to believe that if they knew me, that they'd like me or wish me well. They were very religious and didn't seem receptive to nonconformists like me, especially women like me. In their way, they were nonconformists but intolerant ones -- their nonconformity was rooted in passionate belief that everybody should be like them.

The stories I've heard about my ancestors depress me. I'm feeling cynical today, but even the most colorful ones, like my Grandfather Vandersall, a traveling evangelist, seem screwed up and unhappy. What would they say? I keep thinking, from the Great Beyond, that they might utter, like Philip Larkin,

"Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself."

Lord Jim, a Mother Lode and my Mother Tongue

It's amazing how one thing leads to another. A couple of weeks ago, from a box in a closet, looking for something else, I retrieved my high school paperback copy of Lord Jim and started rereading it. The reason this particular book drew me in now is a topic for another time. But something startled me as I thumbed through it. In the margins and on top of many pages, I'd scrawled words I was learning as I read.

In my still-childish hand, on the browning pages are: prescience, torpid, furtive, truculent,alacrity, lugubrious. All words I have loved my whole life. Is it possible Conrad's lushly styled prose is the lode from which I originally mined these words for my vocabulary? The habit of words, the hunger for them, springs from a deep well.

When I left my first husband and moved to Sylvester Manor, a granite pile in downtown Flint filled with a lot of other weepy and disappointed women, one of the first things I did was put a list of my favorite words on the door of the fridge. Along with unearthing Lord Jim, I just found it, tucked in a journal from that time: aileron, catalyst, springerle, baleen, ephemeral, mango, jettison, meander, suffused, inexorably, vituperative, sobriquet. These words comforted me because I loved them -- loved knowing them, loved the way it felt to say them, the way my mouth moved around them, loved their precise complexities. They offered order and continuity when all else was chaos.

And while looking for that list, I came across a third artifact -- a little brown leather ring binder notebook of my mother's, in which she kept lists of words. Like Lord Jim, this was another lode -- a Mother Lode of deeply emotional significance.

It's roughly in alphabetical order, with definitions. I see some of my words are also hers: "catalyst" and "ephemeral" jump out. For some reason, the "e" and "p" pages have been lifted out, so the first thing I see when I open the little book is this: "escargot - snails" and "epicurean - refers to Gr. philosopher who was fond of luxury & sensuous pleasures." Each word and definition adorns the lines in her neatly curved handwriting, as distinct to me as her voice but easier now to enjoy, preserved in many old letters and her prolific notes to herself.

It interests me that it is not so much the words in sentences; my mother collected individual words -- protean, pizzazz, platitude. On the page, they are like bouquets where no two flowers are the same, a cornucopia of words in which each one registers on the mind like an individual gourd, bright and textured -- catatonic, cowl, curmudgeon.

My mother kept her cache secret. I never saw this little notebook until after she died. It was in a drawer in her desk. She didn't write where she found the words or why she liked them, just list after list, in her own hand, crisp and quaint: "dichotomy -- a division into two subordinate parts -- hence a cutting in two," "debacle -- an overthrow, rout or sudden disaster," "drivel - foolish talk."

I think she kept these words simply for herself, for her own pleasure, or like me, for reassurance, like a stash of kruggerands in a vault. Or like dozens of idiosyncratic buttons in a tin, which I also found among her effects. I knew that she loved words -- she used them playfully in conversation, insisting that we pay attention. But I wish we'd talked about all these individual choices; I would have asked her why she liked them. There's also sadness in it -- that she saved these words in solitude, for what? for when? Did she whisper them to herself in a dark night? Did she leaf through the pages for tonic when she was down? Did she review them as she aged to remind herself that, in fact, she had used her sharply observant and cataloguing brain?

Here's the way Lord Jim and my mother juxtapose. As I riffled through the novel, I realized with a start that not all the words at the top were in my hand. Some, I see, are in hers. She must have picked up the book after I left and pulled out her own: rancor, moribund, fecund. We pursued our lexicons out of the same book, but at different times. What was she thinking when she picked up my habit? Why this book? What did she think about Marlowe's story and the fate of the poor Muslim pilgrims aboard the Patna? Of course I'll never know. What I do know, though, is that her hunger for words continued long after her children left home, driving her into the small and tattered libraries we left behind.

Robert Pinsky is fond of saying that the art closest to poetry is dance -- the body is so intimately involved in both -- poems literally come from the poet's breath. Touching my mother's notebook, holding it in my hand, I realize my poetry began even earlier -- from the person who gave me breath. My mother conveyed to me a visceral love of the way words work in the body, in the mind, and in the heart. They come from hunger, sometimes a secret hunger. And they live after we die. So this is to celebrate Joseph Conrad and Carol Worth, beloved progenitors of my mother tongue.