People die.
They die all the time.
And, yet, every now and then, one of those people reminds us all of our mutual mortality.
My mother died when I was 29, my father when I was 43. I woke up to life all at once at 29, I never forgot again at 43. And I am still, at 57, mindful every day of those losses and of so many more, so many friends, so many family members, before and since.
And then…and then Paul Newman dies.
And, ah, come on, I should care?
Me, distant by so many years, by so many degrees of acquaintance.
And yet I care, I really do care.
Maybe because the milestones of Paul’s career meshed here and there with the admittedly lesser milestones of my own then-young life.
Cool Hand Luke, back in 1967 the talk of many a high-school classmate, even though I, cultural nerd that I was, did not then see the movie.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and I’m still a kid myself, a college kid, packed in a car in 1968 at an Atlanta drive-in with half a dozen other college kids, not one girl between us, all of us dreaming that night of getting lucky, and all of us, every single one of us, destined to go home lonely.
A breath of years later and The Sting. If you saw it, as I did then, in the theater, that last scene caught you by surprise, by happy, happy surprise: our Paul getting away with movie murder, our Bob living to love again. Who could ask for more?
Try seeing The Sting now, now that Newman is dead, now that all he was in that movie — the contained confidence, the mustache, that small stick of a cigar in his mouth, the fedora slanted on his head, those blue eyes, those scintillatingly blue eyes, saying whatever you wanted them to say — now that all that is gone, so, so irrefutably gone. Try, just try, go ahead, just try, as I did tonight, not to watch Newman and to feel so human, so fragilely human and so utterly doomed.
Admit it.
As Newman aged, so did you. And me. Except, of course, that Newman never seemingly seemed to age.
Even when he played some old codger, as in Nobody’s Fool or Empire Falls, he was still Paul, still somehow the Butch he’d been, let alone the Hud he’d been earlier, not to mention the coolest of Cool Hand Lukes. A guy who lived life the way I would wish to live life, the way many of us would wish to live life, at once embracing it, but still almost entirely suspicious of it, those blue eyes summarily icing whatever they viewed. Newman could no more die than Gable, or Valentino, than Tracy or Hepburn, than you, than me.
Except, of course, that he did.
The message, let’s face it, is that life is short. Chalk up 83 years, as Newman did, and count yourself lucky. Clock 49, as my mother did, and oh, well. We live the lives we live, as long as we live them. Nothing more, nothing less. And Newman’s life, at once so long and so short, reminds us, if reminding was necessary, that nothing is forever. Newman’s death sucks life from all of us, if only because he was one of us.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
The celebrity in all of us...
Monday, September 29, 2008
On settling down, in, for...
I should long ago have lost count of the number of moves Karen and I have made in our 28 years of marriage, but that number, 19, is as sticky in memory as gum in July to sneakers, easily making up in magnitude whatever it may lack in any evenness or roundness.
Sure, not all of those moves were of the long-distance kind, although enough of them covered enough ground, so that if movers in those days had given out frequent-packer points, we could long ago have cashed in. Even so, even the short moves, with the shortest of all only across a driveway in Vermont, were never easy. There was still the pitching of stuff accumulated since the last move and the packing of stuff that would seed the next move, still the lifting down stairs and the lugging up, still the last-minute cleaning; and then, once on the far end of the move, came the unpacking, the trial-and-error of the couch here or there or maybe there, the frantic, frustrating search for the bed hardware or the clock or your favorite cookbook, which, you knew, you absolutely knew, you put in a box somewhere; and then, slowly, imperceptibly, over some measure of months, the ineluctable settling in.
Karen and I have now settled in 19 times.
We have, however, settled down maybe once, that in the trim and heartbreakingly beautiful village of Peacham, Vermont.
There, over the span of a decade, interrupted only by a stint at Notre Dame, we raised our then-young children. There, in fact, in a robin’s-egg blue bedroom on the second floor of a quintessential white-clapboarded, green-shuttered, 150-year-old house on the main street — “the prettiest house,” I once told Karen, “we may ever live in” — our youngest son was born, deep in a knee-deep, mid-April snowstorm in 1992, his home birth at once the occasion for two weeks of meals provided by friends and neighbors and, briefly, a cause for village concern, as Karen and I dithered for a week over a name for the lad, teetering between eventual winner, Dónal, and also-ran Fintan (“That boy got a name yet?” came the inevitable, but good-natured question I fielded from all quarters, as I picked up the mail at the post office across the street and across the farther green). And there, too, in the steeply-gabled back room on the third floor, with VPR blaring from the radio on the windowsill and sheep bleating from the fields beyond our back fence, I wrote in architecturally lofty solitude for what was then my family’s living.
It was also in Peacham that our lives became inextricably stitched into the community quilt, that quilt blanketing at its center the old cemetery on the hill below the Bond house, where the graves speak of lives lived and lost in the 1700s; one edge then drifting up and over the Civil War monument steepling Church Hill; the whole thing a patchwork of field and forest, of farms in families for generations, its fabric stretching south from Harvey’s Hollow and the covered Greenbank Hollow bridge, up and over the brow of Cow Hill, its flanks forested and pocked with the cellar holes of homes that once were and are no more, your imagination free there to conjure up the long-ago scraping of plows, the lowing of cows, laughter in fallen kitchens, love in vanished bedrooms and lofts; down and up again to the village itself, over the mast of the Congregational Church, rumpling west to Macks Mountain and dipping eastward toward Harvey’s Lake, then spreading south to where the snow drifts perennially in winter across the road fronting Elizabeth’s Farm.
So, you ask, if so lovely, how could we ever leave?
Medical school, in short, the longer answer a topic for another day.
But for all our practice in settling in, and our single successful attempt at settling down, what Karen and I have never done, and what is so often misunderstood about us, is that we have steadfastly refused to settle for less.
It was desire that led us 25 years ago to cross the Atlantic to Ireland, and it was family that brought us back. Friendship pulled us to Massachusetts, and longing took us again to Virginia. Vermont happened, as I’ve often told the tale, because Virginia’s unrelenting heat and humidity at last drove me far enough north until, finally, only an hour from the Canadian border, I cooled off. Notre Dame took us west to Indiana, home took us back to Vermont, and medical school to Iowa. And always, always, to this day always, there remains the tug of adventure: e-mails that trumpet opportunities for doctors in New Zealand, Australia, British Columbia; others that tout jobs in Montana, Idaho or, dare I write the words, back home in Vermont; or that inner call, the one that says, life’s short, there’s so much yet to do, so little time in which to do it, sell the house, chuck the stuff, get up, get going, c’mon, man, you’re 57 and time, time, time…
Yet here we still are, still in Iowa, four years after medical school, one year after residency.
So, have we settled?
In, yes. Down, no. For less, absolutely not.
Karen and I are, I admit, and in keeping with the title of this blog, in the simmer dim, neither here nor there, but somewhere in between. Where we’ll be a year from now, I cannot now predict, but home, for me, remains the one place in which we once settled. Can you go home again? No, no, wrote Thomas Wolfe, so emphatically he put it in the book’s title. As for me, we’ll see.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Sure, not all of those moves were of the long-distance kind, although enough of them covered enough ground, so that if movers in those days had given out frequent-packer points, we could long ago have cashed in. Even so, even the short moves, with the shortest of all only across a driveway in Vermont, were never easy. There was still the pitching of stuff accumulated since the last move and the packing of stuff that would seed the next move, still the lifting down stairs and the lugging up, still the last-minute cleaning; and then, once on the far end of the move, came the unpacking, the trial-and-error of the couch here or there or maybe there, the frantic, frustrating search for the bed hardware or the clock or your favorite cookbook, which, you knew, you absolutely knew, you put in a box somewhere; and then, slowly, imperceptibly, over some measure of months, the ineluctable settling in.
Karen and I have now settled in 19 times.
We have, however, settled down maybe once, that in the trim and heartbreakingly beautiful village of Peacham, Vermont.
There, over the span of a decade, interrupted only by a stint at Notre Dame, we raised our then-young children. There, in fact, in a robin’s-egg blue bedroom on the second floor of a quintessential white-clapboarded, green-shuttered, 150-year-old house on the main street — “the prettiest house,” I once told Karen, “we may ever live in” — our youngest son was born, deep in a knee-deep, mid-April snowstorm in 1992, his home birth at once the occasion for two weeks of meals provided by friends and neighbors and, briefly, a cause for village concern, as Karen and I dithered for a week over a name for the lad, teetering between eventual winner, Dónal, and also-ran Fintan (“That boy got a name yet?” came the inevitable, but good-natured question I fielded from all quarters, as I picked up the mail at the post office across the street and across the farther green). And there, too, in the steeply-gabled back room on the third floor, with VPR blaring from the radio on the windowsill and sheep bleating from the fields beyond our back fence, I wrote in architecturally lofty solitude for what was then my family’s living.
It was also in Peacham that our lives became inextricably stitched into the community quilt, that quilt blanketing at its center the old cemetery on the hill below the Bond house, where the graves speak of lives lived and lost in the 1700s; one edge then drifting up and over the Civil War monument steepling Church Hill; the whole thing a patchwork of field and forest, of farms in families for generations, its fabric stretching south from Harvey’s Hollow and the covered Greenbank Hollow bridge, up and over the brow of Cow Hill, its flanks forested and pocked with the cellar holes of homes that once were and are no more, your imagination free there to conjure up the long-ago scraping of plows, the lowing of cows, laughter in fallen kitchens, love in vanished bedrooms and lofts; down and up again to the village itself, over the mast of the Congregational Church, rumpling west to Macks Mountain and dipping eastward toward Harvey’s Lake, then spreading south to where the snow drifts perennially in winter across the road fronting Elizabeth’s Farm.
So, you ask, if so lovely, how could we ever leave?
Medical school, in short, the longer answer a topic for another day.
But for all our practice in settling in, and our single successful attempt at settling down, what Karen and I have never done, and what is so often misunderstood about us, is that we have steadfastly refused to settle for less.
It was desire that led us 25 years ago to cross the Atlantic to Ireland, and it was family that brought us back. Friendship pulled us to Massachusetts, and longing took us again to Virginia. Vermont happened, as I’ve often told the tale, because Virginia’s unrelenting heat and humidity at last drove me far enough north until, finally, only an hour from the Canadian border, I cooled off. Notre Dame took us west to Indiana, home took us back to Vermont, and medical school to Iowa. And always, always, to this day always, there remains the tug of adventure: e-mails that trumpet opportunities for doctors in New Zealand, Australia, British Columbia; others that tout jobs in Montana, Idaho or, dare I write the words, back home in Vermont; or that inner call, the one that says, life’s short, there’s so much yet to do, so little time in which to do it, sell the house, chuck the stuff, get up, get going, c’mon, man, you’re 57 and time, time, time…
Yet here we still are, still in Iowa, four years after medical school, one year after residency.
So, have we settled?
In, yes. Down, no. For less, absolutely not.
Karen and I are, I admit, and in keeping with the title of this blog, in the simmer dim, neither here nor there, but somewhere in between. Where we’ll be a year from now, I cannot now predict, but home, for me, remains the one place in which we once settled. Can you go home again? No, no, wrote Thomas Wolfe, so emphatically he put it in the book’s title. As for me, we’ll see.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Saturday, September 27, 2008
So you think you can govern...
“I — I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink….So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”
Okay, if you’ve been reading or watching, you have to know who said that in response to a question from ABC’s Charlie Gibson, and you can probably already guess on what side of the readiness fence I’m on.
What’s that? Not entirely sure?
So, we’re talking a one-time mayor of a town of maybe 6,000, generously 9,000, and less-than-one-term governor of a state that is at once the largest and smallest, or almost smallest, in the nation. We’re talking she of the “Bridge to Nowhere,” who supported it, only to abandon that support after the Congress had already said flatly no, and who, even then, greedily took the same amount of money, to be spent at the Alaska’s discretion, in welcome compensation. And we’re talking the same former mayor and same current governor whose 20-20 vision remains so exquisitely acute that she can. in the blink of a designer-spec’d eye, readily winnow obvious supporters from hateful “haters”. The same former mayor, the same current governor who, in keeping with some-or-another faith, does unto others the way she would do unto others of some-or-some-other persuasion.
Okay, so now we’re on the same page.
And while we’re flipping pages, let’s skim the resume (and, risking insult to the injury of McCain’s choice, this won’t take long): small-town mayor, governor for less than two years, like 21 months and counting, a stint on city council paving the way, with a reputation for vindictiveness and cronyism to fill the potholes.
Now, let’s quick-reverse through recent history: small-potatoes governor of a big state becomes president; values loyalty above else to honesty and openness; has, on any level you want to choose — oedipal, political, ethical, religious — something to prove; shoots enemies from the hip of utter and unforgiving righteousness…hmmm…
And, over the last eight years, under the guidance of he-who-must-be-obeyed in the White House, that has gotten us where, as a nation, a people, a civilization?
Can history repeat itself?
Alas, a country that blinked, as Sarah is wont to say, and got Bush, only then to outright elect the same son-of-a-Bush, can certainly choose a Bush by another name the next time around. I mean, just because we pledge allegiance to one nation under God, invoke, again and again, that God bless America, and call down the One and Only from every near mountain on high, doesn’t mean that we, as a country, in the form of our prophet-in-chief, can’t align ourselves, knowingly or not, with the devil. Let’s face it, the moral balance sheet is anything but on our side.
Witness Iraq and the now-they’re-here, now-they’re not WMD. Or that nebulous and, I’m really being kind, link between Sadam and al-Qaeda. Or, dare we mention his name in anything more than a whisper, the not-only-not-dead-but-still-alive Osama bin Laden, on whom, if you believe him, our current president, he of the swaggering, dead-or-alive dictum, has drawn a bead for, oh, the last seven years. And do we even have to talk about Katrina, let alone the current mess on Wall Street, let alone that pesky definition of that troublesome word “torture” and its locus, the foreshortened Gitmo.
Oh, c’mon, what in the same Lord’s name possessed us, or at least possessed those tens of millions of voters who made themselves the W’s enablers!
And, then, along comes Sarah.
Let’s see, at the risk of repeating myself: worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; ongoing war in Iraq, to the tune of $10 billion per month; the ground gained in Afghanistan all but lost; Osama still on the loose, dreaming of who-knows-what in his own response to the now-and-forever war on terror; and, closer to home, New Orleans still not New Orleans, now three heck-of-a-good-job-Brownie years after Katrina; tens of millions — I mean, tens of millions, as in almost 50 million men, women and children, as in one out of every six Americans — without health insurance in this, a nation of ostensible equals; a tax structure that benefits the haves and leaves the have-nots to fend for themselves.
And we, as a nation, are going to put Sarah Palin — to whom that oldie-but-goodie “I Can See Clearly Now” conjures images of the icy Bering Strait and nearby Russia and, by convoluted extension, unexampled prowess in foreign policy — the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency, when the president himself would be the actuarially-challenged John McCain?
Time out.
There’s reality TV — and then there’s reality. And, right now, it is time for a reality check, if you, forgive me, catch my blink.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Okay, if you’ve been reading or watching, you have to know who said that in response to a question from ABC’s Charlie Gibson, and you can probably already guess on what side of the readiness fence I’m on.
What’s that? Not entirely sure?
So, we’re talking a one-time mayor of a town of maybe 6,000, generously 9,000, and less-than-one-term governor of a state that is at once the largest and smallest, or almost smallest, in the nation. We’re talking she of the “Bridge to Nowhere,” who supported it, only to abandon that support after the Congress had already said flatly no, and who, even then, greedily took the same amount of money, to be spent at the Alaska’s discretion, in welcome compensation. And we’re talking the same former mayor and same current governor whose 20-20 vision remains so exquisitely acute that she can. in the blink of a designer-spec’d eye, readily winnow obvious supporters from hateful “haters”. The same former mayor, the same current governor who, in keeping with some-or-another faith, does unto others the way she would do unto others of some-or-some-other persuasion.
Okay, so now we’re on the same page.
And while we’re flipping pages, let’s skim the resume (and, risking insult to the injury of McCain’s choice, this won’t take long): small-town mayor, governor for less than two years, like 21 months and counting, a stint on city council paving the way, with a reputation for vindictiveness and cronyism to fill the potholes.
Now, let’s quick-reverse through recent history: small-potatoes governor of a big state becomes president; values loyalty above else to honesty and openness; has, on any level you want to choose — oedipal, political, ethical, religious — something to prove; shoots enemies from the hip of utter and unforgiving righteousness…hmmm…
And, over the last eight years, under the guidance of he-who-must-be-obeyed in the White House, that has gotten us where, as a nation, a people, a civilization?
Can history repeat itself?
Alas, a country that blinked, as Sarah is wont to say, and got Bush, only then to outright elect the same son-of-a-Bush, can certainly choose a Bush by another name the next time around. I mean, just because we pledge allegiance to one nation under God, invoke, again and again, that God bless America, and call down the One and Only from every near mountain on high, doesn’t mean that we, as a country, in the form of our prophet-in-chief, can’t align ourselves, knowingly or not, with the devil. Let’s face it, the moral balance sheet is anything but on our side.
Witness Iraq and the now-they’re-here, now-they’re not WMD. Or that nebulous and, I’m really being kind, link between Sadam and al-Qaeda. Or, dare we mention his name in anything more than a whisper, the not-only-not-dead-but-still-alive Osama bin Laden, on whom, if you believe him, our current president, he of the swaggering, dead-or-alive dictum, has drawn a bead for, oh, the last seven years. And do we even have to talk about Katrina, let alone the current mess on Wall Street, let alone that pesky definition of that troublesome word “torture” and its locus, the foreshortened Gitmo.
Oh, c’mon, what in the same Lord’s name possessed us, or at least possessed those tens of millions of voters who made themselves the W’s enablers!
And, then, along comes Sarah.
Let’s see, at the risk of repeating myself: worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; ongoing war in Iraq, to the tune of $10 billion per month; the ground gained in Afghanistan all but lost; Osama still on the loose, dreaming of who-knows-what in his own response to the now-and-forever war on terror; and, closer to home, New Orleans still not New Orleans, now three heck-of-a-good-job-Brownie years after Katrina; tens of millions — I mean, tens of millions, as in almost 50 million men, women and children, as in one out of every six Americans — without health insurance in this, a nation of ostensible equals; a tax structure that benefits the haves and leaves the have-nots to fend for themselves.
And we, as a nation, are going to put Sarah Palin — to whom that oldie-but-goodie “I Can See Clearly Now” conjures images of the icy Bering Strait and nearby Russia and, by convoluted extension, unexampled prowess in foreign policy — the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency, when the president himself would be the actuarially-challenged John McCain?
Time out.
There’s reality TV — and then there’s reality. And, right now, it is time for a reality check, if you, forgive me, catch my blink.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Dancing in the dark...
Sometime around 1972 or 1973, back when I would have been 21 or so, my sister Moira and I, and maybe even our very much younger brother Patrick, went to see then-hot Chicago at a concert in Richmond, Virginia, where we lived at the time. I dimly recall that we had pretty good seats at the Coliseum, for a show that I was very much up to see, having been a Chicago fan ever since the group’s debut double-album under the banner of Chicago Transit Authority some four or five years earlier.
I’ll admit that, prior to the concert, I hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the opening act and, in fact, didn’t even know who it was, figuring, not unreasonably, that, not unlike most opening acts, this one was preordained to be forgettable. I mean, c’mon, we’re talking Chicago, and any opening act could, even under the best of circumstances, be little more than a speed bump en route to the night’s ultimate destination — forty minutes, maybe more, of somebody else’s one-riff-beyond-the-garage music, then on to the real deal. And, whaddya know, as if to confirm that dim expectation, out on the stage steps this decidedly scruffy fellow from Jersey, a young guy, a guy with the seriously un-billboard-like name of Springsteen, backed by an imposingly large sax player named Clarence, linchpin, if only by stature, in a crew that inexplicably cast itself as the E Street Band.
Since then, my life, maybe like yours, has been signposted by Springsteen: 1984 and Born in the USA, me a mere 33, new dad, this time second time around, in relatively good shape myself, albeit nothing like the newly, sexily buff Springsteen; a year or two later and I remember, as if it were yesterday, the day I bought that boxed, three-CD live set at the Book Annex in Alexandria, Virginia, with that album, if memory serves, the incentive for buying our first CD player; come the 1990’s, and I’m pretty much cruising at 40 and steering beyond, my compass not then set on the Boss, with family, life and a writing career tugging my needle from the due-north of E Street; by 2001, and the unhappy inspiration for The Rising, I’m in med school, all ears when it comes to the Boss’s message, but all broke when it came to ever hitting a concert.
But just four years later, in the fall of 2005, at a solo concert in Madison, Wisconsin, a concert that was for Karen and me a celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary, Bruce and I had at last and again hooked up. And if Bruce didn’t know it, I certainly did. Entire decades had come full circle, I was for a moment that comparative kid again in Richmond, Virginia, and the world, apart from the devils and dust of our collective nightmare, was for that same moment, not the complicated place which Karen and Bruce and I otherwise inhabited, but for she and he and me a renewal of sorts, and, for Karen, in particular, a first chance to put flesh to the other love of her life.
But, for Karen, alas, that love was unrequited.
Sure, this was Bruce, but only Bruce, just Bruce, no E Street Band, and so Karen felt somewhat short-changed by what was a comparatively low-octane Springsteen gig. Fast-forward two years, though, and the Boss is again hitting the boards, this time to push a new album, this time backed by the E Street Band, and, with anniversary 27 in the offing, I, as a surprise to Karen, snagged tickets for two to Bruce and the Band at the United Center in Chicago.
If Springsteen was great that night, and he was, the concert was all the better for giving me the chance to watch Karen shed her middle years and dance that night in the dark, each lick of the Boss’s guitar cranking chords of memory as much as music: “Born to Run,” and, Karen, our own meanderings — 19 moves in 28 years of marriage — leapt that night immediately to mind, even as the Boss belted words I’d so often said in other words, “Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place where we really want to go…but till then…tramps like us, baby, we were born to run”; “Thunder Road,” and, who’s kiddin’ who, we’re as scared as we’ve ever been, “that maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” with the ghosts of our own twined lives haunting all those decades lost to parenting and med school and residency, no less, beautiful Karen, than the ghosts of “all the boys you sent away,” like those of Springsteen’s storied Mary, haunt the “dusty beach road” of your own young life; and, don’t you know, dear Karen, that when I hear “Out in the Street,” that you, you, my own and much loved Karen, are that girl again, the girl I knew back when we first met, walking the way you wanted to walk, talking the way you wanted to talk, wha-oh, wha-oh-oh-oh-oh.
But if there is Bruce solo and Bruce with the Band, there is also Bruce as he can only be experienced from the pit, surrounded by fans of fellow deep persuasion, an experience that was then still unticked on Karen’s life list.
So, come this last March, there Karen and I were again at a Springsteen concert, this time in Omaha, this time right there on the floor, close enough to imagine what it was like, all those years ago, when a younger Karen, a younger me, might have rocked to a younger Bruce, right there on the floor, with everyone around us, then as now, writhing in unison, thousands of arms pistoning air, thousands of hips pivoting as one, thousands of mouths mouthing words long ago tucked into memory.
Am I going somewhere?
“You bet,” in the vernacular of this, the Midwest of my long-ago youth.
Because a couple of weekends back, back in those dying days of August, Karen and I motored to Milwaukee, where Bruce was the closing act for Harley-Davidson’s 105th Anniversary. It was, in addition, the last stop on the Boss’s latest tour, a tour begun about a year ago, a year that had also marked the loss of one of the members of the E Street Band, dead these many months ago to melanoma. Time, it seems, had caught up to the Band, as much as it had caught up to me, who in E-Street years, had already counted the loss of both parents and all too many friends and relatives, and to Karen, whose own father was among those more recently fallen behind, his hand slipped suddenly free of his daughter’s, his life lost, as Bruce, singing alone to Karen, might have sung, “in the shadow of the evening trees.”
But on that night, time, and loss, and memory, were one.
Because there Bruce was, his arrival announced, loudly and in total darkness, by the vroom-vroom-vroomvroom-vroom-vroom- vroom of a Harley, even as the audience, 50,000 or more shadows on the lawn of Milwaukee’s lakeside Veterans Park, Karen and me among the shadows, scanned a darkened stage, all of us fully expecting the Boss to power-drive the stage, only to have the lights light to reveal Bruce, not astride, but striding toward the stage, band members already at their stations, the opening lyrics of “Gypsy Biker” even then filling the black and starlit air. Minutes later, that song done, and with no breath between, the Boss declared his intention to have fun with “Out in the Street,” leaping, almost immediately from the main stage to the catwalk beyond, sprinting up and down the ramp, his free hand grabbing strangers’ hands, his back suffering unnumbered, anonymous pats, and, once and then again, flinging himself to the mosh pit of the audience, fans’ hands offering him to the gods of the black Milwaukee night.
Now, I’ll admit, that I was hardly enamored of the crowd around me, most of whom subscribed more to the Harley fetish than they did to Springsteen: leather, both thin and thick, fringed or not; denim shirts snipped short at the sleeves; cigars, sported as much by women as men, and, if not cigars, cigarettes seemingly touched one to another; weak-ass Miller slapped back at $5.75 a slap, and we’re talking beaucoup slaps, with the expected wobbly results in a standing-room-only crowd; and, dare I tell, those baring the most skin, men oddly more than women, were those who should most have covered up.
Still, fists pumped humid air, feet sprang, hands clapped, hips swayed, and I’m only talking Karen. And, song after song after song, the Boss played on, until more than three and a half non-stop hours later, after two concert-tested, half-hearted entreaties to band member Stevie Van Zandt, “ What time is it, Steve?” and the equally concert-tested, half-hearted response, “It’s quitting time,” even the Boss himself, now on the far side of midnight, finally had to call it quits, this after 31 songs, a record for the tour; after repeatedly throwing himself to the mercy of the chosen, wrist-banded 3,000 nearest the stage; after knee-sliding the catwalk; after glad-handing God-only-knows how many fans, suffering Lord-only-knows how many touches here, there and everywhere; and after making the night memorable, not just for Karen, but also for one very much younger face in the nearer crowd, who, echoes of Courtney Cox all those decades ago, suddenly found herself on stage sa-shaying hand in hand with the Boss to “Dancing in the Dark.”
Admittedly that night, some lines rang all the more true, if only for me.
In fact, all those decades ago, back in my once loved and still lamented Vermont, back in the days when I made my living as a full-time scribbler of words, I was known to play Springsteen, loudly, and I mean loudly (just ask the kids), to sparkplug the day’s writing.
To this day, I still joke that those lines in “Dancing in the Dark” — “I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book…I need a love reaction…come on, baby, gimme just one look” — led, for this freelance writer and his all-too-available lover, in all-too-bucolic Vermont, to five children. And you can’t know how often in how many places since I have thought, like Springsteen, that, “this town is full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win.” And, I’ll confess, even now, even as recently as Milwaukee, wanna-be-adventurous me bellowed along with the Boss (just ask Karen), “I ain’t nothing but tired, man, I’m just tired and bored with myself,” even as I looked beyond the here and now of the here and now, “I ain’t getting nowhere, I’m just living in a dump like this.”
Whatever, as I’m too often wont to say, too often to the irritation of those around me.
But with Milwaukee behind us, both Bruce and I now get to motor on, he to home and New Jersey and whatever lies beyond, me to whatever waits beyond this specific moment, this particular place. I look forward, as does Karen, to whatever moves the Boss to make music, and hope, on behalf of Karen and me, that time and health, things all of us, Bruce included, had to take for granted when younger, conspire to allow future tours. As for Karen and much older me, we’ll keep feeling our way forward, too often blindly, so rarely with anything resembling sure-footedness, knowing nonetheless and all the way, “the night’s busted open, these two lanes will take us anywhere,” and, more important, that even at this late hour of life, “we’ve got one last chance to make it real,” (even as Karen reads this and thinks, oh, God, hold on and hold on really tight, ‘cause here we go again!).
And, yet, I confess yet again, the life I’ve lost ‘til now.
Spent, too late at mid-life, were those two years in grad school at beloved Notre Dame. Spent, too, even later, were four more years in med school and three years in residency, not to mention two more years along the way doing all those pre-med science courses. And all along, all the time I lost with Karen, with our children, years I can never have back, years that can never fully be justified on the profit-and-loss statement of life, no matter how many meaningless letters of however many worthless degrees get tacked after my name. Bruce, too, I’m sure, has paid the price for all his years on the road, but you can’t help but think that his lost years bought joy, while mine bought only security and, even on the best of days, mere contentment.
But, oh God, what I would give for joy.
Bruce, in parting in Milwaukee, vowed he’d be back. “We’re only getting started,” he promised the hungry of heart still begging for more deep into that August night. And, Bruce, buddy, I’m gonna have to hold you to it. After all, “There’s something happening somewhere,” both us spinning to sixty know, “even if we’re just dancing in the dark.”
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
I’ll admit that, prior to the concert, I hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the opening act and, in fact, didn’t even know who it was, figuring, not unreasonably, that, not unlike most opening acts, this one was preordained to be forgettable. I mean, c’mon, we’re talking Chicago, and any opening act could, even under the best of circumstances, be little more than a speed bump en route to the night’s ultimate destination — forty minutes, maybe more, of somebody else’s one-riff-beyond-the-garage music, then on to the real deal. And, whaddya know, as if to confirm that dim expectation, out on the stage steps this decidedly scruffy fellow from Jersey, a young guy, a guy with the seriously un-billboard-like name of Springsteen, backed by an imposingly large sax player named Clarence, linchpin, if only by stature, in a crew that inexplicably cast itself as the E Street Band.
Since then, my life, maybe like yours, has been signposted by Springsteen: 1984 and Born in the USA, me a mere 33, new dad, this time second time around, in relatively good shape myself, albeit nothing like the newly, sexily buff Springsteen; a year or two later and I remember, as if it were yesterday, the day I bought that boxed, three-CD live set at the Book Annex in Alexandria, Virginia, with that album, if memory serves, the incentive for buying our first CD player; come the 1990’s, and I’m pretty much cruising at 40 and steering beyond, my compass not then set on the Boss, with family, life and a writing career tugging my needle from the due-north of E Street; by 2001, and the unhappy inspiration for The Rising, I’m in med school, all ears when it comes to the Boss’s message, but all broke when it came to ever hitting a concert.
But just four years later, in the fall of 2005, at a solo concert in Madison, Wisconsin, a concert that was for Karen and me a celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary, Bruce and I had at last and again hooked up. And if Bruce didn’t know it, I certainly did. Entire decades had come full circle, I was for a moment that comparative kid again in Richmond, Virginia, and the world, apart from the devils and dust of our collective nightmare, was for that same moment, not the complicated place which Karen and Bruce and I otherwise inhabited, but for she and he and me a renewal of sorts, and, for Karen, in particular, a first chance to put flesh to the other love of her life.
But, for Karen, alas, that love was unrequited.
Sure, this was Bruce, but only Bruce, just Bruce, no E Street Band, and so Karen felt somewhat short-changed by what was a comparatively low-octane Springsteen gig. Fast-forward two years, though, and the Boss is again hitting the boards, this time to push a new album, this time backed by the E Street Band, and, with anniversary 27 in the offing, I, as a surprise to Karen, snagged tickets for two to Bruce and the Band at the United Center in Chicago.
If Springsteen was great that night, and he was, the concert was all the better for giving me the chance to watch Karen shed her middle years and dance that night in the dark, each lick of the Boss’s guitar cranking chords of memory as much as music: “Born to Run,” and, Karen, our own meanderings — 19 moves in 28 years of marriage — leapt that night immediately to mind, even as the Boss belted words I’d so often said in other words, “Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place where we really want to go…but till then…tramps like us, baby, we were born to run”; “Thunder Road,” and, who’s kiddin’ who, we’re as scared as we’ve ever been, “that maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” with the ghosts of our own twined lives haunting all those decades lost to parenting and med school and residency, no less, beautiful Karen, than the ghosts of “all the boys you sent away,” like those of Springsteen’s storied Mary, haunt the “dusty beach road” of your own young life; and, don’t you know, dear Karen, that when I hear “Out in the Street,” that you, you, my own and much loved Karen, are that girl again, the girl I knew back when we first met, walking the way you wanted to walk, talking the way you wanted to talk, wha-oh, wha-oh-oh-oh-oh.
But if there is Bruce solo and Bruce with the Band, there is also Bruce as he can only be experienced from the pit, surrounded by fans of fellow deep persuasion, an experience that was then still unticked on Karen’s life list.
So, come this last March, there Karen and I were again at a Springsteen concert, this time in Omaha, this time right there on the floor, close enough to imagine what it was like, all those years ago, when a younger Karen, a younger me, might have rocked to a younger Bruce, right there on the floor, with everyone around us, then as now, writhing in unison, thousands of arms pistoning air, thousands of hips pivoting as one, thousands of mouths mouthing words long ago tucked into memory.
Am I going somewhere?
“You bet,” in the vernacular of this, the Midwest of my long-ago youth.
Because a couple of weekends back, back in those dying days of August, Karen and I motored to Milwaukee, where Bruce was the closing act for Harley-Davidson’s 105th Anniversary. It was, in addition, the last stop on the Boss’s latest tour, a tour begun about a year ago, a year that had also marked the loss of one of the members of the E Street Band, dead these many months ago to melanoma. Time, it seems, had caught up to the Band, as much as it had caught up to me, who in E-Street years, had already counted the loss of both parents and all too many friends and relatives, and to Karen, whose own father was among those more recently fallen behind, his hand slipped suddenly free of his daughter’s, his life lost, as Bruce, singing alone to Karen, might have sung, “in the shadow of the evening trees.”
But on that night, time, and loss, and memory, were one.
Because there Bruce was, his arrival announced, loudly and in total darkness, by the vroom-vroom-vroomvroom-vroom-vroom- vroom of a Harley, even as the audience, 50,000 or more shadows on the lawn of Milwaukee’s lakeside Veterans Park, Karen and me among the shadows, scanned a darkened stage, all of us fully expecting the Boss to power-drive the stage, only to have the lights light to reveal Bruce, not astride, but striding toward the stage, band members already at their stations, the opening lyrics of “Gypsy Biker” even then filling the black and starlit air. Minutes later, that song done, and with no breath between, the Boss declared his intention to have fun with “Out in the Street,” leaping, almost immediately from the main stage to the catwalk beyond, sprinting up and down the ramp, his free hand grabbing strangers’ hands, his back suffering unnumbered, anonymous pats, and, once and then again, flinging himself to the mosh pit of the audience, fans’ hands offering him to the gods of the black Milwaukee night.
Now, I’ll admit, that I was hardly enamored of the crowd around me, most of whom subscribed more to the Harley fetish than they did to Springsteen: leather, both thin and thick, fringed or not; denim shirts snipped short at the sleeves; cigars, sported as much by women as men, and, if not cigars, cigarettes seemingly touched one to another; weak-ass Miller slapped back at $5.75 a slap, and we’re talking beaucoup slaps, with the expected wobbly results in a standing-room-only crowd; and, dare I tell, those baring the most skin, men oddly more than women, were those who should most have covered up.
Still, fists pumped humid air, feet sprang, hands clapped, hips swayed, and I’m only talking Karen. And, song after song after song, the Boss played on, until more than three and a half non-stop hours later, after two concert-tested, half-hearted entreaties to band member Stevie Van Zandt, “ What time is it, Steve?” and the equally concert-tested, half-hearted response, “It’s quitting time,” even the Boss himself, now on the far side of midnight, finally had to call it quits, this after 31 songs, a record for the tour; after repeatedly throwing himself to the mercy of the chosen, wrist-banded 3,000 nearest the stage; after knee-sliding the catwalk; after glad-handing God-only-knows how many fans, suffering Lord-only-knows how many touches here, there and everywhere; and after making the night memorable, not just for Karen, but also for one very much younger face in the nearer crowd, who, echoes of Courtney Cox all those decades ago, suddenly found herself on stage sa-shaying hand in hand with the Boss to “Dancing in the Dark.”
Admittedly that night, some lines rang all the more true, if only for me.
In fact, all those decades ago, back in my once loved and still lamented Vermont, back in the days when I made my living as a full-time scribbler of words, I was known to play Springsteen, loudly, and I mean loudly (just ask the kids), to sparkplug the day’s writing.
To this day, I still joke that those lines in “Dancing in the Dark” — “I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book…I need a love reaction…come on, baby, gimme just one look” — led, for this freelance writer and his all-too-available lover, in all-too-bucolic Vermont, to five children. And you can’t know how often in how many places since I have thought, like Springsteen, that, “this town is full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win.” And, I’ll confess, even now, even as recently as Milwaukee, wanna-be-adventurous me bellowed along with the Boss (just ask Karen), “I ain’t nothing but tired, man, I’m just tired and bored with myself,” even as I looked beyond the here and now of the here and now, “I ain’t getting nowhere, I’m just living in a dump like this.”
Whatever, as I’m too often wont to say, too often to the irritation of those around me.
But with Milwaukee behind us, both Bruce and I now get to motor on, he to home and New Jersey and whatever lies beyond, me to whatever waits beyond this specific moment, this particular place. I look forward, as does Karen, to whatever moves the Boss to make music, and hope, on behalf of Karen and me, that time and health, things all of us, Bruce included, had to take for granted when younger, conspire to allow future tours. As for Karen and much older me, we’ll keep feeling our way forward, too often blindly, so rarely with anything resembling sure-footedness, knowing nonetheless and all the way, “the night’s busted open, these two lanes will take us anywhere,” and, more important, that even at this late hour of life, “we’ve got one last chance to make it real,” (even as Karen reads this and thinks, oh, God, hold on and hold on really tight, ‘cause here we go again!).
And, yet, I confess yet again, the life I’ve lost ‘til now.
Spent, too late at mid-life, were those two years in grad school at beloved Notre Dame. Spent, too, even later, were four more years in med school and three years in residency, not to mention two more years along the way doing all those pre-med science courses. And all along, all the time I lost with Karen, with our children, years I can never have back, years that can never fully be justified on the profit-and-loss statement of life, no matter how many meaningless letters of however many worthless degrees get tacked after my name. Bruce, too, I’m sure, has paid the price for all his years on the road, but you can’t help but think that his lost years bought joy, while mine bought only security and, even on the best of days, mere contentment.
But, oh God, what I would give for joy.
Bruce, in parting in Milwaukee, vowed he’d be back. “We’re only getting started,” he promised the hungry of heart still begging for more deep into that August night. And, Bruce, buddy, I’m gonna have to hold you to it. After all, “There’s something happening somewhere,” both us spinning to sixty know, “even if we’re just dancing in the dark.”
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Monday, August 25, 2008
Slippery slope...
A few weeks ago, our youngest son Dónal traveled with friends to Wisconsin, in large part to slip and slide the various water parks that make Wisconsin’s Dells “the Dells.”
I long ago, back around the time I last climbed aboard a roller coaster at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania — and we’re talking some 25 years ago, when Karen and my youngest brother Patrick last convinced me to ignore common sense — started resisting any spur-of-the-moment impulse that might give gravity even more leverage to sooner end my life. Since then, I have reasonably reasoned that the older I get, the more opportunities there are to die without, on my own volition, having to add to the list of possibilities. So, for all my youngest son’s entreaties to the contrary — “oh, c’mon, Dad, it’s fun…can’t wait to do it…it’s only a 50- (or was it 80-) foot vertical drop” — I proverbially begged to differ. After all, he’s sixteen, what does he know about what life can do to him, to me, to his mother, to all those who love him, in that, that one instant of unknowing.
The thing is, that at this, my age of 57, there are not only more — and more frequent — opportunities to die (yes, Karen, I’m showing my Irishness again), but it is truly all too easy to gain admittance into that somewhat less than amusing amusement park that beckons at middle age and broadens beyond. Ignore your high blood pressure, and you’re screwed. Step into the minefield of diabetes, and, guess what, you’re screwed. Crank up on the burgers and fries, and, you know what, you’re screwed. Wait a few more years, and, for whatever good luck you might have had before, the time bomb of genetics goes off, leaving you at the mercy of glaucoma, cancer, stroke, you name it.
It’s a crap shoot…life, that is.
In my former position as a family physician in a small and rural town in Iowa, I would, every Tuesday, every other week, visit a local nursing home. Most of those Tuesdays, I’d see six or eight or ten nursing home residents in the course of a couple of hours. Most were routine visits, mandated, mostly, by Medicare. But some were the kind of encounters, which, I knew, could all too easily lead to that slippery slope, that water slide, which is, young or old, the realm of the possible for all of us, and hardly fun.
If you’re young, let’s face it, time is decidedly on your side.
But get yourself into a nursing home, and all it takes is one infection, one new onset, as those of us of the medical persuasion shorthand it, of A. fib, of an otherwise ordinary UTI, of ARF, and you are, in the vernacular, a get-out-of-my-emergency-room “gomer,” if not an outright goner. And if that shorthand gives you the short end of the stick, consider this: giving you the benefit of a doubt, stretching your diagnosis to atrial fibrillation, to a urinary tract infection, to acute renal failure, changes nothing. It all depends on those immediately around you and how quickly they respond to your more or less pressing problem.
Dare I share a secret?
Every time I entered that nursing home, I smelled death.
I would slip, in an instant, from the car into Iowa sunshine, walk toward the shade of the building, pull open the front door, step into the vestibule beyond, reach for the next door, the shadows beyond, give that last door a yank, and then…
Sometimes it was the smell of the newly dead.
Mostly, however, it was the smell of those about to die.
The infection festered; the heart failure neglected beyond the usual swelling those of us in the know chalk up to everyday lower extremity edema; the pneumonia, treated, too often half-heartedly, and now gone amuck; the emphysema, COPD to those of us in the trade, that makes comfortable company until it decides that today, today, this day is the day you die.
All of us die.
But none of us, not one of us, need be sped off life’s stage.
It is, this doctor is going to say, too easy to die in a nursing home.
You — or your mother, father, sister, brother, does it really matter — are, let’s face it, a bed. Nothing more, not much less. A bed that ups the occupancy rate, ensures reimbursement from this insurance or that, or, if age allows, from Medicare, and, in the end, keeps the nursing home in the black. If you — or your mom or dad or those luckless siblings — die, oh, well. The tail end of the greatest generation and the front end of the baby boom bunch pretty much ensure plenty of replacements. Why get hung up on good-hearted Bob, after all he’d already had 101 good years, or ill-fated Ruth, who, until she started paying rent at the home and then started packing on pounds of water weight, had been in pretty good shape; or luckless Helen, bride, all those decades ago, of Bob and now his widow, whose heel wound, somehow, without anyone noticing, became the feeding ground of maggots; or, for good measure, poor, poor Thelma — ah, c’mon, she’s already 97, who cares if she makes it to 98, and so what if she has a son who himself cares. I mean, she’s 97, what, what at this point is left to enjoy of anything that resembles life?
Let’s say, though, it was me. Or, maybe, you.
Are you ready to be admitted to the home, welcomed, more or less patronizingly, encouraged to mix with those who, knowingly or not, signed on before you, survived so far, and who are, like it or not, your new neighbors and roommates? Are you willing to give up those extra years, whether in your 80s, 90s or beyond, to the unintentioned ignorance or ill-intentioned malfeasance of those hired to care for you? Are you, at 97, ready to hear, in action even more than words, why bother imagining a future when your life, your precious life, is all about the past?
If you’re lucky, you’ll fit in, stay healthy, avoid the ever-swirling infections, the stumble in the hallway, the all-at-once illness that means a trip to the emergency room and, perhaps, a longer stay in the hospital, and the risk, simply by the company you’re keeping, that you’ll buy the infection that will buy you the farm. If you’re even luckier, you’ll look forward to bingo, enough so that, even when called out for your every-other-month checkup, you won’t, as did my patient Jean, who threatened me with a “kick in the pants,” mind the intrusion. Luckier still, and lunch — which, like breakfast and dinner in a nursing home, is but a stepping-stone in the slow, ineluctable journey that marks life’s end, and which, on any day, guarantees a traffic jam of wheelchairs and walkers at the chalk line of the cafeteria — will be nothing more than a speed bump in your day, and you’ll soon be in and beyond to the momentary nirvana of gelled this and gravied that. Another meal, another day, in lives all too achingly short of days.
And if you’re not as lucky, if death sniffs around and decides you are the one, that today is your day, that no number of prayers, no amount of hope can stiff-arm its approach?
Oh, well.
Life, if not for you, goes on. Your bed is serendipitously open. There is, like it or not, insurance money to be had. Those left behind — spouse, siblings, children — will get over it, won’t they?
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
I long ago, back around the time I last climbed aboard a roller coaster at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania — and we’re talking some 25 years ago, when Karen and my youngest brother Patrick last convinced me to ignore common sense — started resisting any spur-of-the-moment impulse that might give gravity even more leverage to sooner end my life. Since then, I have reasonably reasoned that the older I get, the more opportunities there are to die without, on my own volition, having to add to the list of possibilities. So, for all my youngest son’s entreaties to the contrary — “oh, c’mon, Dad, it’s fun…can’t wait to do it…it’s only a 50- (or was it 80-) foot vertical drop” — I proverbially begged to differ. After all, he’s sixteen, what does he know about what life can do to him, to me, to his mother, to all those who love him, in that, that one instant of unknowing.
The thing is, that at this, my age of 57, there are not only more — and more frequent — opportunities to die (yes, Karen, I’m showing my Irishness again), but it is truly all too easy to gain admittance into that somewhat less than amusing amusement park that beckons at middle age and broadens beyond. Ignore your high blood pressure, and you’re screwed. Step into the minefield of diabetes, and, guess what, you’re screwed. Crank up on the burgers and fries, and, you know what, you’re screwed. Wait a few more years, and, for whatever good luck you might have had before, the time bomb of genetics goes off, leaving you at the mercy of glaucoma, cancer, stroke, you name it.
It’s a crap shoot…life, that is.
In my former position as a family physician in a small and rural town in Iowa, I would, every Tuesday, every other week, visit a local nursing home. Most of those Tuesdays, I’d see six or eight or ten nursing home residents in the course of a couple of hours. Most were routine visits, mandated, mostly, by Medicare. But some were the kind of encounters, which, I knew, could all too easily lead to that slippery slope, that water slide, which is, young or old, the realm of the possible for all of us, and hardly fun.
If you’re young, let’s face it, time is decidedly on your side.
But get yourself into a nursing home, and all it takes is one infection, one new onset, as those of us of the medical persuasion shorthand it, of A. fib, of an otherwise ordinary UTI, of ARF, and you are, in the vernacular, a get-out-of-my-emergency-room “gomer,” if not an outright goner. And if that shorthand gives you the short end of the stick, consider this: giving you the benefit of a doubt, stretching your diagnosis to atrial fibrillation, to a urinary tract infection, to acute renal failure, changes nothing. It all depends on those immediately around you and how quickly they respond to your more or less pressing problem.
Dare I share a secret?
Every time I entered that nursing home, I smelled death.
I would slip, in an instant, from the car into Iowa sunshine, walk toward the shade of the building, pull open the front door, step into the vestibule beyond, reach for the next door, the shadows beyond, give that last door a yank, and then…
Sometimes it was the smell of the newly dead.
Mostly, however, it was the smell of those about to die.
The infection festered; the heart failure neglected beyond the usual swelling those of us in the know chalk up to everyday lower extremity edema; the pneumonia, treated, too often half-heartedly, and now gone amuck; the emphysema, COPD to those of us in the trade, that makes comfortable company until it decides that today, today, this day is the day you die.
All of us die.
But none of us, not one of us, need be sped off life’s stage.
It is, this doctor is going to say, too easy to die in a nursing home.
You — or your mother, father, sister, brother, does it really matter — are, let’s face it, a bed. Nothing more, not much less. A bed that ups the occupancy rate, ensures reimbursement from this insurance or that, or, if age allows, from Medicare, and, in the end, keeps the nursing home in the black. If you — or your mom or dad or those luckless siblings — die, oh, well. The tail end of the greatest generation and the front end of the baby boom bunch pretty much ensure plenty of replacements. Why get hung up on good-hearted Bob, after all he’d already had 101 good years, or ill-fated Ruth, who, until she started paying rent at the home and then started packing on pounds of water weight, had been in pretty good shape; or luckless Helen, bride, all those decades ago, of Bob and now his widow, whose heel wound, somehow, without anyone noticing, became the feeding ground of maggots; or, for good measure, poor, poor Thelma — ah, c’mon, she’s already 97, who cares if she makes it to 98, and so what if she has a son who himself cares. I mean, she’s 97, what, what at this point is left to enjoy of anything that resembles life?
Let’s say, though, it was me. Or, maybe, you.
Are you ready to be admitted to the home, welcomed, more or less patronizingly, encouraged to mix with those who, knowingly or not, signed on before you, survived so far, and who are, like it or not, your new neighbors and roommates? Are you willing to give up those extra years, whether in your 80s, 90s or beyond, to the unintentioned ignorance or ill-intentioned malfeasance of those hired to care for you? Are you, at 97, ready to hear, in action even more than words, why bother imagining a future when your life, your precious life, is all about the past?
If you’re lucky, you’ll fit in, stay healthy, avoid the ever-swirling infections, the stumble in the hallway, the all-at-once illness that means a trip to the emergency room and, perhaps, a longer stay in the hospital, and the risk, simply by the company you’re keeping, that you’ll buy the infection that will buy you the farm. If you’re even luckier, you’ll look forward to bingo, enough so that, even when called out for your every-other-month checkup, you won’t, as did my patient Jean, who threatened me with a “kick in the pants,” mind the intrusion. Luckier still, and lunch — which, like breakfast and dinner in a nursing home, is but a stepping-stone in the slow, ineluctable journey that marks life’s end, and which, on any day, guarantees a traffic jam of wheelchairs and walkers at the chalk line of the cafeteria — will be nothing more than a speed bump in your day, and you’ll soon be in and beyond to the momentary nirvana of gelled this and gravied that. Another meal, another day, in lives all too achingly short of days.
And if you’re not as lucky, if death sniffs around and decides you are the one, that today is your day, that no number of prayers, no amount of hope can stiff-arm its approach?
Oh, well.
Life, if not for you, goes on. Your bed is serendipitously open. There is, like it or not, insurance money to be had. Those left behind — spouse, siblings, children — will get over it, won’t they?
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Her beautiful life...
Karen and I first met Joan in 1988, twenty years ago now, at a farmers’ market in Middlebury, Vermont. She was selling apples from her orchard in nearby New Haven, and Karen and I were among the day’s browsers and buyers.
It is distant enough now in memory that I cannot recall exactly where in Middlebury the market was located. Nevertheless, at some point in that morning’s wanderings, Karen and I had chanced upon Joan’s booth. Again, time has smudged the details, but without question we exchanged the appropriate niceties of the moment, in the course of which Joan at some point spotted the Claddagh rings that both Karen and I wore, and we, for our part, took note of Joan’s accent.
“Where in Ireland are you from?” I asked, my eyes drunk in an instant on Joan’s own eyes, her blonde hair, her cheeks at once appled and summer-blushed, a smile dialing up the glow.
“Dublin,” came the answer, the geography confirmed in a breath by the brogue.
Joan, as we soon learned, had left Ireland for the States as a lass of twenty-something and had, at some point not long after, met an American lad from Massachusetts named Frank. That meeting had led to marriage, which, in turn, had led to children, three begotten, one adopted, and to the usual vagaries to which time and circumstances make us all victim.
For Frank and Joan, that road forward had led eventually to New Hampshire, to a farm in rural Francestown, the house and land heartbreaking in their beauty, and, years later, to that apple orchard in New Haven, culmination of Frank’s dream to live in Vermont.
Résumés, if you had them, would tell you that Frank had done time as a high school guidance counselor, while Joan had earned her stripes as a small-town librarian. Along the way, too, there had been a detour to some sun-soaked island in the Caribbean, Frank and Joan’s would-be ticket to a better and different life, that had led, as unhappy circumstances would have it, only to a ticket home to New Hampshire.
For our part, Karen and I had only five years before lived in Ireland. We had sold almost everything back in 1983, cast fortune to the proverbial wind and crossed the pond with the intention of never returning to the States, only to return to the States, partly because Karen missed her family and partly because my youngest brother, Patrick, whom we were then raising, missed mine. We had lasted six months, more or less, and we have ever since, especially in these the years of Bush redux, regretted leaving.
The Claddagh rings were a testament to those Irish leanings, both genetic and otherwise, even as the lilt of Joan’s accent had, in an instant, again brought us home. I don’t have to tell you, but will, that the fact that she and Frank and Karen and I were spirits both kindred and free ensured nothing less than camaraderie right from the start. Indeed, not long after we had met Joan, on a fall day lit less by sunlight than by leaves crimsoned and gilded, Karen and I and three kids shoveled five pairs of feet through windrows of leaves to the roadside shed from which Frank and Joan sold apples. There we found, as I remember, apples by the bag and apples by the bushel, and, somewhere on a table, a basket for collection by the honor system, but no Frank.
Later, I’d come to understand that that same honor system, by happy design, put the buffer of the basket between Frank and his market, something, which, in Joan’s Ireland, would have been beyond all reason, but, which, to consummate New Englander Frank, was reasonable enough. But on that day, the day on which we first met Frank and the first of many get-togethers over the decades and all the many miles since, I also learned that Frank’s New England veneer was easily scratched, exposing the heartwood that was so obviously the common ground between Frank and his Irish bride.
Not much deeper into that first fall of our acquaintance, six-year-old Declan, his four-year-old brother, Brendan, and I killed any idle hour, rare as they were, in those, the years of my freelance writing, picking up drops — apples fallen by wind or whim — the better to help our new friend, Frank, who would otherwise have had to cull all 200-plus acres himself. We’d later feed these drops to the neighbor’s cows, whose involuntary swish and sway, laughable to see at the time, spoke to their fermentation-induced happiness.
God, I loved those days. Lord, how I remember them.
They were so different from what I did for a living every day. No writing. No solitary me in an otherwise empty room. No pleasing this or that client — only apples, bruised and ripe for the rotting, awaiting the salvation of our hands and a last chance to become fodder for heifers. And, in those, my own wistful and halcyon days, there I was, along with my sons and my good friend Frank, raking apples by the fistful, in an orchard which in that time, for me, of relative youth, and, for Frank, of middle age, stretched forever, even if our shared sun was then, without us even noticing, dipping ever lower that fall and every fall since.
That autumn, and those memories, give glow today to the mind’s hearth, and are all the dearer now that lovely Joan did herself slip away this past year and a summer ago. Indeed, Frank’s visit today is the first since Joan’s death, and her absence was beyond heartfelt.
To be sure, there had been times in the past, when Frank had visited us alone in Vermont, mostly because Joan, her feelings toward Vermont tempered by what she came to see as an unhappy experience in New Haven and a foreordained return to Francestown, would do anything to avoid crossing the border from New Hampshire. And always, always, we knew that Frank’s Vermont was not Joan’s, no less than my Ireland and my own Vermont was like the Ireland or Vermont of those I love. Moreover, like my own meanderings, Frank’s had come at cost to those he loved, something he knew and felt, as do I about the price of my own wanderings.
Yet here we all were, on this, the second day of August, Frank, Karen, me — all of us, of course, except our missed Joan. Around us, too, were three of our five grown and almost-grown children, all of whom Joan had known, and who, in the years since, had grown from tots and toddlers to four young men and a woman.
For two hours, Frank and Karen and me and the gathered children talked and laughed, even as we stopped short of speaking of Joan, the better, I knew, then and later, to stop short of sobbing. There were memories, memories of bread pudding, absolutely perfect bread pudding, baked once, only to have Joan change the recipe forever; of other dishes when Joan, not finding a needed ingredient, substituted whatever was handy, regardless of its relationship to the required ingredient; of the Scottish Highland cattle Frank once raised, which, on one afternoon, were driven to dancing — no exaggeration, as we’ve the photos to prove it — by our son Brendan’s bagpiping.
Those things never mentioned last Saturday count for more: Frank’s “Go Away” welcome mat at the farmhouse in New Haven; Tiernán’s christening all those years ago, with Frank and Joan enlivening the celebration; so many weekend dinners together at our home in Cornwall, Vermont, or theirs in nearby New Haven; the visits, time and again, after we had moved to Peacham, to Francestown, to Frank and Joan in their book-lined family room, in the kitchen of changed recipes, and, just beyond, in the field of the Highland cattle. Or the time Frank helped me haul a washing machine up the outside stairs of our Vermont home in Peacham, in the course of which the washer, easily given to tumbling in its day’s work, tumbled less willfully from the handtruck and down the steps, although, to Sears’s credit, it took a dinging and kept on wringing. Or, in the year or two after returning to Francestown from New Haven, when Joan, by her own admission never more than an Irish cook of her time, welcomed the good excuse that the oven of her rented house lacked a door, rendering any temperature, and any result, beyond her control.
Life, in those days of our shared Vermont and, later, shared border, seemed, in the naiveté of those years, without limit. None of us could imagine at the outset of our friendship that my family would twice leave Vermont, once for graduate school at Notre Dame and later for med school in Iowa, stretching but never breaking our ties to Frank and Joan. That visits since would be so few, so far between. That that last visit, four years ago, when we were returning from Maine to Iowa, would be the last for all of us.
And, yet, Joan is now dead, and Frank is stiffer of limb since we last saw him four years ago. He is, nevertheless, still Frank, his references to the “fahm” a testament to those New England roots, with enough granite, and only just enough, in his constitution to firm the foundation. Everything above ground, however, reflects Joan: that easy laughter, the easy laughter of an Irishman by marriage; that shared memory; his own unbearable lightness of being, which, without Joan, might otherwise, given that New England upbringing, have become rock.
But it is Joan, now, who is missing, missing for Frank, missing for their children, missing for Karen, for me, for our children, for all of us lucky enough to have ever touched — and been touched — by her beautiful life.
Frank, true to the spirit that first led him to Joan and to all he and Joan later lived together, is moving on. He is San Francisco-bound this time, the promise of a new, if later, life luring him west. If it doesn’t work out, he says, he’ll go back to New Hampshire. And that, with nothing more than a shrug, was spoken like Frank.
I have written here of friendship. I have implied, and surely do intend, love.
Karen and I loved Joan. Karen and I love Frank. And neither time nor loss has dimmed our love for either, nor could it ever.
Shortly after we all met, Frank and Joan joined us for the christening of our fourth child, Tiernán, baptized maybe six months after our meeting. Since then, that child has grown to a man of almost twenty. And yet, can I again write the words, Joan is now gone. Since then, Karen and I and the kids have wandered elsewhere in Vermont, then to Indiana for graduate school, and later still back to Vermont, only to leave again for Iowa and medical school and for all that has happened since. Still, still, Joan is gone. Tiernán has turned another decade, Siobhán has become a woman of almost 22, Dónal a lad of 16, and two more, Declan and Brendan, have grown and gone from the fold. All of them knew Joan, and, if I’m allowed to speak for them, all of them, every one, every last one, loved her.
We are told that hundreds from Francestown and thereabouts attended Joan’s funeral. Should it surprise me that so many found in Joan what I did and what friends from Scotland took note of in an online memorial: a heart, both wonderful and big. A fund, established since Joan’s death, has bankrolled an ongoing lecture series in Francestown, ensuring that a sliver of what Joan was will live on in the New Hampshire town, which despite those sojourns in Vermont and the Indies, she called home and which, from somewhere beyond, she still loves.
I can, if I want, walk right now into our kitchen and pause for a moment before a simple hutch against the back wall. Two of four shelves are lined with Nicholas Mosse pottery, crafted in Ireland, but sold in New Hampshire, and showcased in her barn, by local rep Joan. I bought some pieces as gifts for Karen, and Joan gave us others as gifts from her and Frank. Each cup, saucer, pitcher is made of Irish clay, shaped by Irish hands, embellished with Irish designs. Each piece is of and from Ireland. But each cup, saucer, pitcher, speaks only to me of Joan. So, too, does our recipe file, however softly, of that changed bread pudding, as does the apple pancake, which Joan, on one occasion, memorable to our daughter Siobhán, hurried to check on lest it explode. Nor can any mention of Joan fail to include the coziness of her home and, again, to daughter Siobhán, the embrace of that favorite armchair in the family room.
Truth is, our lives are our lives because Joan, then and now, brushed against ours, once, then and forever. We have lost Joan. We still have Frank. And onward, for all that loss, we go, Frank and his children, Karen and me and our children, all of us the better for having loved Joan.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
It is distant enough now in memory that I cannot recall exactly where in Middlebury the market was located. Nevertheless, at some point in that morning’s wanderings, Karen and I had chanced upon Joan’s booth. Again, time has smudged the details, but without question we exchanged the appropriate niceties of the moment, in the course of which Joan at some point spotted the Claddagh rings that both Karen and I wore, and we, for our part, took note of Joan’s accent.
“Where in Ireland are you from?” I asked, my eyes drunk in an instant on Joan’s own eyes, her blonde hair, her cheeks at once appled and summer-blushed, a smile dialing up the glow.
“Dublin,” came the answer, the geography confirmed in a breath by the brogue.
Joan, as we soon learned, had left Ireland for the States as a lass of twenty-something and had, at some point not long after, met an American lad from Massachusetts named Frank. That meeting had led to marriage, which, in turn, had led to children, three begotten, one adopted, and to the usual vagaries to which time and circumstances make us all victim.
For Frank and Joan, that road forward had led eventually to New Hampshire, to a farm in rural Francestown, the house and land heartbreaking in their beauty, and, years later, to that apple orchard in New Haven, culmination of Frank’s dream to live in Vermont.
Résumés, if you had them, would tell you that Frank had done time as a high school guidance counselor, while Joan had earned her stripes as a small-town librarian. Along the way, too, there had been a detour to some sun-soaked island in the Caribbean, Frank and Joan’s would-be ticket to a better and different life, that had led, as unhappy circumstances would have it, only to a ticket home to New Hampshire.
For our part, Karen and I had only five years before lived in Ireland. We had sold almost everything back in 1983, cast fortune to the proverbial wind and crossed the pond with the intention of never returning to the States, only to return to the States, partly because Karen missed her family and partly because my youngest brother, Patrick, whom we were then raising, missed mine. We had lasted six months, more or less, and we have ever since, especially in these the years of Bush redux, regretted leaving.
The Claddagh rings were a testament to those Irish leanings, both genetic and otherwise, even as the lilt of Joan’s accent had, in an instant, again brought us home. I don’t have to tell you, but will, that the fact that she and Frank and Karen and I were spirits both kindred and free ensured nothing less than camaraderie right from the start. Indeed, not long after we had met Joan, on a fall day lit less by sunlight than by leaves crimsoned and gilded, Karen and I and three kids shoveled five pairs of feet through windrows of leaves to the roadside shed from which Frank and Joan sold apples. There we found, as I remember, apples by the bag and apples by the bushel, and, somewhere on a table, a basket for collection by the honor system, but no Frank.
Later, I’d come to understand that that same honor system, by happy design, put the buffer of the basket between Frank and his market, something, which, in Joan’s Ireland, would have been beyond all reason, but, which, to consummate New Englander Frank, was reasonable enough. But on that day, the day on which we first met Frank and the first of many get-togethers over the decades and all the many miles since, I also learned that Frank’s New England veneer was easily scratched, exposing the heartwood that was so obviously the common ground between Frank and his Irish bride.
Not much deeper into that first fall of our acquaintance, six-year-old Declan, his four-year-old brother, Brendan, and I killed any idle hour, rare as they were, in those, the years of my freelance writing, picking up drops — apples fallen by wind or whim — the better to help our new friend, Frank, who would otherwise have had to cull all 200-plus acres himself. We’d later feed these drops to the neighbor’s cows, whose involuntary swish and sway, laughable to see at the time, spoke to their fermentation-induced happiness.
God, I loved those days. Lord, how I remember them.
They were so different from what I did for a living every day. No writing. No solitary me in an otherwise empty room. No pleasing this or that client — only apples, bruised and ripe for the rotting, awaiting the salvation of our hands and a last chance to become fodder for heifers. And, in those, my own wistful and halcyon days, there I was, along with my sons and my good friend Frank, raking apples by the fistful, in an orchard which in that time, for me, of relative youth, and, for Frank, of middle age, stretched forever, even if our shared sun was then, without us even noticing, dipping ever lower that fall and every fall since.
That autumn, and those memories, give glow today to the mind’s hearth, and are all the dearer now that lovely Joan did herself slip away this past year and a summer ago. Indeed, Frank’s visit today is the first since Joan’s death, and her absence was beyond heartfelt.
To be sure, there had been times in the past, when Frank had visited us alone in Vermont, mostly because Joan, her feelings toward Vermont tempered by what she came to see as an unhappy experience in New Haven and a foreordained return to Francestown, would do anything to avoid crossing the border from New Hampshire. And always, always, we knew that Frank’s Vermont was not Joan’s, no less than my Ireland and my own Vermont was like the Ireland or Vermont of those I love. Moreover, like my own meanderings, Frank’s had come at cost to those he loved, something he knew and felt, as do I about the price of my own wanderings.
Yet here we all were, on this, the second day of August, Frank, Karen, me — all of us, of course, except our missed Joan. Around us, too, were three of our five grown and almost-grown children, all of whom Joan had known, and who, in the years since, had grown from tots and toddlers to four young men and a woman.
For two hours, Frank and Karen and me and the gathered children talked and laughed, even as we stopped short of speaking of Joan, the better, I knew, then and later, to stop short of sobbing. There were memories, memories of bread pudding, absolutely perfect bread pudding, baked once, only to have Joan change the recipe forever; of other dishes when Joan, not finding a needed ingredient, substituted whatever was handy, regardless of its relationship to the required ingredient; of the Scottish Highland cattle Frank once raised, which, on one afternoon, were driven to dancing — no exaggeration, as we’ve the photos to prove it — by our son Brendan’s bagpiping.
Those things never mentioned last Saturday count for more: Frank’s “Go Away” welcome mat at the farmhouse in New Haven; Tiernán’s christening all those years ago, with Frank and Joan enlivening the celebration; so many weekend dinners together at our home in Cornwall, Vermont, or theirs in nearby New Haven; the visits, time and again, after we had moved to Peacham, to Francestown, to Frank and Joan in their book-lined family room, in the kitchen of changed recipes, and, just beyond, in the field of the Highland cattle. Or the time Frank helped me haul a washing machine up the outside stairs of our Vermont home in Peacham, in the course of which the washer, easily given to tumbling in its day’s work, tumbled less willfully from the handtruck and down the steps, although, to Sears’s credit, it took a dinging and kept on wringing. Or, in the year or two after returning to Francestown from New Haven, when Joan, by her own admission never more than an Irish cook of her time, welcomed the good excuse that the oven of her rented house lacked a door, rendering any temperature, and any result, beyond her control.
Life, in those days of our shared Vermont and, later, shared border, seemed, in the naiveté of those years, without limit. None of us could imagine at the outset of our friendship that my family would twice leave Vermont, once for graduate school at Notre Dame and later for med school in Iowa, stretching but never breaking our ties to Frank and Joan. That visits since would be so few, so far between. That that last visit, four years ago, when we were returning from Maine to Iowa, would be the last for all of us.
And, yet, Joan is now dead, and Frank is stiffer of limb since we last saw him four years ago. He is, nevertheless, still Frank, his references to the “fahm” a testament to those New England roots, with enough granite, and only just enough, in his constitution to firm the foundation. Everything above ground, however, reflects Joan: that easy laughter, the easy laughter of an Irishman by marriage; that shared memory; his own unbearable lightness of being, which, without Joan, might otherwise, given that New England upbringing, have become rock.
But it is Joan, now, who is missing, missing for Frank, missing for their children, missing for Karen, for me, for our children, for all of us lucky enough to have ever touched — and been touched — by her beautiful life.
Frank, true to the spirit that first led him to Joan and to all he and Joan later lived together, is moving on. He is San Francisco-bound this time, the promise of a new, if later, life luring him west. If it doesn’t work out, he says, he’ll go back to New Hampshire. And that, with nothing more than a shrug, was spoken like Frank.
I have written here of friendship. I have implied, and surely do intend, love.
Karen and I loved Joan. Karen and I love Frank. And neither time nor loss has dimmed our love for either, nor could it ever.
Shortly after we all met, Frank and Joan joined us for the christening of our fourth child, Tiernán, baptized maybe six months after our meeting. Since then, that child has grown to a man of almost twenty. And yet, can I again write the words, Joan is now gone. Since then, Karen and I and the kids have wandered elsewhere in Vermont, then to Indiana for graduate school, and later still back to Vermont, only to leave again for Iowa and medical school and for all that has happened since. Still, still, Joan is gone. Tiernán has turned another decade, Siobhán has become a woman of almost 22, Dónal a lad of 16, and two more, Declan and Brendan, have grown and gone from the fold. All of them knew Joan, and, if I’m allowed to speak for them, all of them, every one, every last one, loved her.
We are told that hundreds from Francestown and thereabouts attended Joan’s funeral. Should it surprise me that so many found in Joan what I did and what friends from Scotland took note of in an online memorial: a heart, both wonderful and big. A fund, established since Joan’s death, has bankrolled an ongoing lecture series in Francestown, ensuring that a sliver of what Joan was will live on in the New Hampshire town, which despite those sojourns in Vermont and the Indies, she called home and which, from somewhere beyond, she still loves.
I can, if I want, walk right now into our kitchen and pause for a moment before a simple hutch against the back wall. Two of four shelves are lined with Nicholas Mosse pottery, crafted in Ireland, but sold in New Hampshire, and showcased in her barn, by local rep Joan. I bought some pieces as gifts for Karen, and Joan gave us others as gifts from her and Frank. Each cup, saucer, pitcher is made of Irish clay, shaped by Irish hands, embellished with Irish designs. Each piece is of and from Ireland. But each cup, saucer, pitcher, speaks only to me of Joan. So, too, does our recipe file, however softly, of that changed bread pudding, as does the apple pancake, which Joan, on one occasion, memorable to our daughter Siobhán, hurried to check on lest it explode. Nor can any mention of Joan fail to include the coziness of her home and, again, to daughter Siobhán, the embrace of that favorite armchair in the family room.
Truth is, our lives are our lives because Joan, then and now, brushed against ours, once, then and forever. We have lost Joan. We still have Frank. And onward, for all that loss, we go, Frank and his children, Karen and me and our children, all of us the better for having loved Joan.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Monday, July 28, 2008
Dog days...
In Iowa, this time of year, heat hangs heavily.
You can see it in the trees, slack-shouldered, knees to the ground, sweat all but dripping from the drooping leaves. The grass, too, so recently eager to roll out its green carpet in that remembered blush of spring, now staunches its once-and-future youthful enthusiasm in favor of a more seasoned approach to summer. And everywhere, flowers, the sun-worshippers among them anyway, bare all, petals akimbo, stamens and pistils all but whistling at bees that might be up for a buzz. Those blossoms more demure, sidelined by choice to shade or chance to shadow, Mona-Lisa from the background, their modesty draped in a well-placed sepal or three.
In any other year, you could also drive down any back road of your choosing, your wheels churning a dust-devil of gravel and powder to chart your passage against a sky-blue sky, with the road itself rimmed on either side with corn high as the nearest elephant’s eye. This year, however, floods have stemmed the corn’s tide, so much so that Iowa’s seasonal sea of corn, rising and falling on a groundswell of hill and hollow, is, in most places, a foot or two shallower. Not so, though, the layer of haze above, as all those acres of corn pump up the already amped humidity, thickening all the more the gumboed summer air.
Across a more charted, more Atlantic ocean, the rain in Spain may still fall mainly on the plain, but, l’air en France, or at least in that part of the country known as Cognac, is the better for the “angels’ share,” that surprisingly large percentage of alcohol lost in its aging by the local eaux-de-vie to evaporation. Not to be out-proofed, however, those who care about such things have also shown that Iowa’s humidity owes much to the transpiration of mega-acres of corn, conjuring images of the entire state heaving on inspiration and blurring the horizon with the first morning breath. Still, it beggars the same imagination that any angels of any persuasion, perched wing-to-wing on a fence rail in some Iowa that is truly heaven and not merely a field in someone’s dreams, are huffing corn when there’s headier cognac to be had, but, hey, whatever rings an angel’s bell.
Me?
I’m no angel, especially when it comes to taking the heat, since my inner thermostat tops out at 80 degrees — anything above might as well be a hundred, just ask the woman who shares my life and who suffers the consequences on these, the most howling of my dog days. Toss in humidity to fire up the heat index, and I’m the unhappiest bowser you can imagine. Indeed, I have been known to enter the locally famous beer vault at John’s Grocery in Iowa City and pipe to any who would listen, usually and only that same long-suffering bride, that you could haul in a desk and maybe punch out a window, and I’d be in hop heaven. Back at home, though, under less air- or, for that matter, cask-conditioned circumstances, I am the one long-suffering, known to lament often and aloud, much to the chagrin of the purgatoried souls around me, “I’m Irish, built for cold, bleak islands,” an observation bolstered by the fact that while I’m stripped to shorts, and still complaining, everyone else is shivering under blankets.
Back in those fresh-from-Vermont, new-to-Iowa days when we lived in West Branch on the outskirts of Iowa City, back when I was still in med school, our own backyard butted against a cornfield at the town’s eastern edge. On those dog days of those first summers, made junkyard-dog days by the added heat of med school itself, when there was no beer vault anywhere around stocked well enough to slake my discontent or cool enough to temper my distemper, I was known to ramble to the fence line separating the crew-cut grass from the rank-and-order corn beyond. I’d stand there, still as the stalks themselves, face to the field, feet rooted, haloed myself by the academic haze du jour, whether it was anatomy or path, micro or pharm, and would watch, literally, the corn grow.
It was an intentionally mindless activity, demanding little more than observation on any voluntary level and as little obligatory perspiration as I had to muster. No fathoming the function of kidneys at a cellular level, no cramming the kinetics of this or that analgesic, no mapping the neural comings and goings of the brachial plexus. Only the horizon inching higher, seemingly by the hour, the corn in a cloudless sky breathing in and breathing out, leaves splayed in the sun, tassels tossed to the breeze, and, as the weeks wore on, the field itself all ears, attuned to some distant and timeless melody, its rhythm the rhythm of that summer and every summer before and since.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
You can see it in the trees, slack-shouldered, knees to the ground, sweat all but dripping from the drooping leaves. The grass, too, so recently eager to roll out its green carpet in that remembered blush of spring, now staunches its once-and-future youthful enthusiasm in favor of a more seasoned approach to summer. And everywhere, flowers, the sun-worshippers among them anyway, bare all, petals akimbo, stamens and pistils all but whistling at bees that might be up for a buzz. Those blossoms more demure, sidelined by choice to shade or chance to shadow, Mona-Lisa from the background, their modesty draped in a well-placed sepal or three.
In any other year, you could also drive down any back road of your choosing, your wheels churning a dust-devil of gravel and powder to chart your passage against a sky-blue sky, with the road itself rimmed on either side with corn high as the nearest elephant’s eye. This year, however, floods have stemmed the corn’s tide, so much so that Iowa’s seasonal sea of corn, rising and falling on a groundswell of hill and hollow, is, in most places, a foot or two shallower. Not so, though, the layer of haze above, as all those acres of corn pump up the already amped humidity, thickening all the more the gumboed summer air.
Across a more charted, more Atlantic ocean, the rain in Spain may still fall mainly on the plain, but, l’air en France, or at least in that part of the country known as Cognac, is the better for the “angels’ share,” that surprisingly large percentage of alcohol lost in its aging by the local eaux-de-vie to evaporation. Not to be out-proofed, however, those who care about such things have also shown that Iowa’s humidity owes much to the transpiration of mega-acres of corn, conjuring images of the entire state heaving on inspiration and blurring the horizon with the first morning breath. Still, it beggars the same imagination that any angels of any persuasion, perched wing-to-wing on a fence rail in some Iowa that is truly heaven and not merely a field in someone’s dreams, are huffing corn when there’s headier cognac to be had, but, hey, whatever rings an angel’s bell.
Me?
I’m no angel, especially when it comes to taking the heat, since my inner thermostat tops out at 80 degrees — anything above might as well be a hundred, just ask the woman who shares my life and who suffers the consequences on these, the most howling of my dog days. Toss in humidity to fire up the heat index, and I’m the unhappiest bowser you can imagine. Indeed, I have been known to enter the locally famous beer vault at John’s Grocery in Iowa City and pipe to any who would listen, usually and only that same long-suffering bride, that you could haul in a desk and maybe punch out a window, and I’d be in hop heaven. Back at home, though, under less air- or, for that matter, cask-conditioned circumstances, I am the one long-suffering, known to lament often and aloud, much to the chagrin of the purgatoried souls around me, “I’m Irish, built for cold, bleak islands,” an observation bolstered by the fact that while I’m stripped to shorts, and still complaining, everyone else is shivering under blankets.
Back in those fresh-from-Vermont, new-to-Iowa days when we lived in West Branch on the outskirts of Iowa City, back when I was still in med school, our own backyard butted against a cornfield at the town’s eastern edge. On those dog days of those first summers, made junkyard-dog days by the added heat of med school itself, when there was no beer vault anywhere around stocked well enough to slake my discontent or cool enough to temper my distemper, I was known to ramble to the fence line separating the crew-cut grass from the rank-and-order corn beyond. I’d stand there, still as the stalks themselves, face to the field, feet rooted, haloed myself by the academic haze du jour, whether it was anatomy or path, micro or pharm, and would watch, literally, the corn grow.
It was an intentionally mindless activity, demanding little more than observation on any voluntary level and as little obligatory perspiration as I had to muster. No fathoming the function of kidneys at a cellular level, no cramming the kinetics of this or that analgesic, no mapping the neural comings and goings of the brachial plexus. Only the horizon inching higher, seemingly by the hour, the corn in a cloudless sky breathing in and breathing out, leaves splayed in the sun, tassels tossed to the breeze, and, as the weeks wore on, the field itself all ears, attuned to some distant and timeless melody, its rhythm the rhythm of that summer and every summer before and since.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Slouching towards Bethlehem...
You could spend a lifetime straddling stools in bars from the bay side of Isle au Haut to the far side of Tillamook, and every once in a bottle of Blue Moon you might find yourself squinting through rivers of neon and smoke, tucking your beer a bit tighter to hand and leaning into the voice beside you, all at once aware that what you’re hearing might well pass for wisdom, even, and this, a true test of wisdom, the morning after.
More often, of course, all that beer breeds only so much blather, all of it as frothy and evanescent as the foam trimming the top, none of it relevant, if even remembered, in the fog of a morning after.
But try as you might, in that same lifetime of jockeying bar stools, you’d be hard-pressed to hitch that voice of lagered palaver to a face, and to have that face belong to a wise man of dubious wisdom with the unlikely, but, oh, so mellifluent name of Melchior.
So imagine, for a moment, my own good fortune, when, a week or so ago, after a couple of hours fielding riffs from the grassy bleachers at the Iowa City Jazz Festival, Karen and I popped into a local watering-hole, angled for the empty corner of the bar and, while Karen headed to the ladies’, I swung into the saddle and took the lay of the land.
To my left the jukebox, the empty stool saved for Karen to the right and, just beyond, another empty, with a pack of smokes and a proverbially half-empty/half-full glass laying claim to what was obviously temporarily abandoned territory. The owner — a gallon of a man in a pint container, a tree or two on the shady side of 60, the brim of a ball cap topping a head given to a comical bobbling — returned before Karen did, slipping easily into the saddle of his own seat and immediately crossing the divide with a good-natured dig at the recently implemented ban on public smoking in Iowa.
“It’ll never last,” expounded the man who would soon enough introduce himself as Melchior, in story the name of one of the wise men, in legend the one who bore the gold, giving me, suddenly all ears, the gift of writer’s gold. “They’ll repeal it before the summer ends. You just watch,” he sputtered, the words whistling between missing teeth.
I nodded, far less in agreement, given the welcome improvement in oxygen content since the new law had gone into effect on July 1st, than in politeness, then watched as Karen cantered toward, then slipped between us, Melchior brightening visibly at the suddenly lovelier horizon, and almost immediately registering his improved prospects with the downing of the dregs of what might, under less fortuitous circumstances, have been his last call.
After that, all I had to do was listen.
He had grown up in the Poconos, spent a decade and then another, not one day of which he could ever live to regret, in the Navy, some of that stint, if I close-hauled his wake, in a dreamily remembered Hawaii. Along the way, he had met, married and later ex-ed the woman who had been his wife. At some point, too, and somewhat incongruously, he had studied art in the company of Andrew Wyeth. And somewhere two more roads had diverged in a wood, and Melchior had emerged by the one more traveled by, piloting the business end of a semi while another pair of decades slipstreamed by.
I’m not sure when he picked up the pilot’s license, although he was quick, and we’re talking in the next breath, to invite me up for a spin.
Now, I left out the part where Melchior related how he’d not so long ago given up riding a bike to the bar after he’d taken a tumble on the way home. Better, I suppose, to walk, wobble and make whatever headway against a beer-and-bourbon tide than to ever again do a header over those handlebars.
It would also help you to know that the only times I had ever enjoyed travel by air was when Ireland had been the destination. I can’t explain that, other than by some dead-reckoning of the soul that had, on those many ocean crossings, led me reassuringly home. Except for that, every other flight, almost always of a business persuasion, owed much to wing but more to prayer. Not only that, but a life detoured by all this recent education, had meant a life without much in the way of vacation, the upshot of which is that I’ve not been on a plane in 14 years. Yet here Melchior was, having walked away from a boozy bike wreck, teetering as precariously now on a bar stool as he had that accidental night on a bicycle seat, and going Frank Sinatra on me with his own version of “Come Fly with Me.”
So I did what you’d do and ignored the invitation.
As luck would have it, nature, in the form of a nicotine break, called, and Melchior, more deftly than I would have predicted, fingered a smoke from the pack, snagged his lighter with his other hand and followed temptation and the brim of his cap to the great outdoors.
A bit more luck, and any memory of that invitation would have been just that, memory. Instead, no sooner had Melchior remounted his bar stool when he tried again.
“Anytime you want to go up, you just let me know.”
I looked at him, took in the bobbling cap on the bobbling head, the merriment in his eyes, remembered in that instant all he had already told me, and, even as I reveled in the wonder, the utter and unexpected wonder, of the moment, dropped any pretense and bared my manhood.
“I’m not one for planes,” I confessed, choosing not to add, “unless Ireland’s on the far end of the flight path,” lest he trump my petty ante and offer to ferry me by air to Shannon.
With the grace born of long years of marriage, Karen, right on cue, vouched for my midair derring-don’t, grounding for good any further flight of fancy on the part of our newfound companion. The three of us moved on to talk idly of other things, then, at some point, Karen and I huddled a moment to share a thought, only to look back to see that Melchior, this time cigarettes and all, had himself become night and memory.
Wisdom is, often as not, a wistful thing.
You can, if you listen, hear it in Springsteen and, if “Thunder Road” is what you’re listening to, catch it in passing in the rear-view window of your own life. You can read it in the likes of a Whitman or Agee, sense it on prayer mat or pew, encounter it in proverb or, even better, the script for “Bull Durham.” And sometimes, just sometimes, when you’re entirely unaware, when you’re slouched on a stool, with the namesake of a wise man at your elbow, each of you bound for your own private Bethlehem under some distant and brighter star, wisdom, in its wisdom, bellies up to the bar and buys you a round on the house.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
More often, of course, all that beer breeds only so much blather, all of it as frothy and evanescent as the foam trimming the top, none of it relevant, if even remembered, in the fog of a morning after.
But try as you might, in that same lifetime of jockeying bar stools, you’d be hard-pressed to hitch that voice of lagered palaver to a face, and to have that face belong to a wise man of dubious wisdom with the unlikely, but, oh, so mellifluent name of Melchior.
So imagine, for a moment, my own good fortune, when, a week or so ago, after a couple of hours fielding riffs from the grassy bleachers at the Iowa City Jazz Festival, Karen and I popped into a local watering-hole, angled for the empty corner of the bar and, while Karen headed to the ladies’, I swung into the saddle and took the lay of the land.
To my left the jukebox, the empty stool saved for Karen to the right and, just beyond, another empty, with a pack of smokes and a proverbially half-empty/half-full glass laying claim to what was obviously temporarily abandoned territory. The owner — a gallon of a man in a pint container, a tree or two on the shady side of 60, the brim of a ball cap topping a head given to a comical bobbling — returned before Karen did, slipping easily into the saddle of his own seat and immediately crossing the divide with a good-natured dig at the recently implemented ban on public smoking in Iowa.
“It’ll never last,” expounded the man who would soon enough introduce himself as Melchior, in story the name of one of the wise men, in legend the one who bore the gold, giving me, suddenly all ears, the gift of writer’s gold. “They’ll repeal it before the summer ends. You just watch,” he sputtered, the words whistling between missing teeth.
I nodded, far less in agreement, given the welcome improvement in oxygen content since the new law had gone into effect on July 1st, than in politeness, then watched as Karen cantered toward, then slipped between us, Melchior brightening visibly at the suddenly lovelier horizon, and almost immediately registering his improved prospects with the downing of the dregs of what might, under less fortuitous circumstances, have been his last call.
After that, all I had to do was listen.
He had grown up in the Poconos, spent a decade and then another, not one day of which he could ever live to regret, in the Navy, some of that stint, if I close-hauled his wake, in a dreamily remembered Hawaii. Along the way, he had met, married and later ex-ed the woman who had been his wife. At some point, too, and somewhat incongruously, he had studied art in the company of Andrew Wyeth. And somewhere two more roads had diverged in a wood, and Melchior had emerged by the one more traveled by, piloting the business end of a semi while another pair of decades slipstreamed by.
I’m not sure when he picked up the pilot’s license, although he was quick, and we’re talking in the next breath, to invite me up for a spin.
Now, I left out the part where Melchior related how he’d not so long ago given up riding a bike to the bar after he’d taken a tumble on the way home. Better, I suppose, to walk, wobble and make whatever headway against a beer-and-bourbon tide than to ever again do a header over those handlebars.
It would also help you to know that the only times I had ever enjoyed travel by air was when Ireland had been the destination. I can’t explain that, other than by some dead-reckoning of the soul that had, on those many ocean crossings, led me reassuringly home. Except for that, every other flight, almost always of a business persuasion, owed much to wing but more to prayer. Not only that, but a life detoured by all this recent education, had meant a life without much in the way of vacation, the upshot of which is that I’ve not been on a plane in 14 years. Yet here Melchior was, having walked away from a boozy bike wreck, teetering as precariously now on a bar stool as he had that accidental night on a bicycle seat, and going Frank Sinatra on me with his own version of “Come Fly with Me.”
So I did what you’d do and ignored the invitation.
As luck would have it, nature, in the form of a nicotine break, called, and Melchior, more deftly than I would have predicted, fingered a smoke from the pack, snagged his lighter with his other hand and followed temptation and the brim of his cap to the great outdoors.
A bit more luck, and any memory of that invitation would have been just that, memory. Instead, no sooner had Melchior remounted his bar stool when he tried again.
“Anytime you want to go up, you just let me know.”
I looked at him, took in the bobbling cap on the bobbling head, the merriment in his eyes, remembered in that instant all he had already told me, and, even as I reveled in the wonder, the utter and unexpected wonder, of the moment, dropped any pretense and bared my manhood.
“I’m not one for planes,” I confessed, choosing not to add, “unless Ireland’s on the far end of the flight path,” lest he trump my petty ante and offer to ferry me by air to Shannon.
With the grace born of long years of marriage, Karen, right on cue, vouched for my midair derring-don’t, grounding for good any further flight of fancy on the part of our newfound companion. The three of us moved on to talk idly of other things, then, at some point, Karen and I huddled a moment to share a thought, only to look back to see that Melchior, this time cigarettes and all, had himself become night and memory.
Wisdom is, often as not, a wistful thing.
You can, if you listen, hear it in Springsteen and, if “Thunder Road” is what you’re listening to, catch it in passing in the rear-view window of your own life. You can read it in the likes of a Whitman or Agee, sense it on prayer mat or pew, encounter it in proverb or, even better, the script for “Bull Durham.” And sometimes, just sometimes, when you’re entirely unaware, when you’re slouched on a stool, with the namesake of a wise man at your elbow, each of you bound for your own private Bethlehem under some distant and brighter star, wisdom, in its wisdom, bellies up to the bar and buys you a round on the house.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Friday's child...
For a guy who started out on a Friday the 13th 57 years ago today, I really can’t complain. After all, I’ve mostly sidestepped a more or less equal share of adversity, created opportunity where often there was none, been luckier overall than most, and if I’ve not quite lived the life I planned, I’ve certainly lived the life I wanted, at least in retrospect.
Oh, sure, I do seem to have a disproportionate number of what I call “Charlie Brown” moments, where, whether by whim or wile, the football of life is yanked away just as I’m about to send it toward the goalpost. But those moments, while seemingly frequent, are minor in impact and importance, and always more inconvenient than ever incapacitating.
Nor, perhaps in deference to my Friday the 13th start in life, am I a betting man, although, truth is, my caution has more to do with a long-ago San Gennaro Feast in New York’s Little Italy than it does to any ill-omened birth. Back then, at a time when I earned scarcely $13,000 a year writing copy for Doubleday and was supporting not just myself, but my mother, father and youngest brother, I allowed myself to be swindled by an unscrupulous street vendor running one of those ubiquitous games of chance, mistaking early luck for good fortune and not for the set-up it was. In the end, I lost about $100, maybe half a week’s pay, surely a week’s groceries, probably a big bite from the month’s rent, at a time when even the cost of a subway token to take me to Karen, whom I was then dating, was a luxury.
Since then, I’ve not wagered money, unless you count the thousands lost on houses that only rarely and only briefly let us capitalize on investment. I have, however, been somewhat profligate with time, betting months on a stint in Ireland intended to be a lifetime; months more on this or that writing project in the days when I was a hired pen; and entire years on graduate school, med school and residency, all in the name of affirming the writer I’d always been and becoming the physician I always dreamed to be.
Has it been worth it? Again, I’ve lived the life I wanted. But certainly those gambles on time have come at a cost, especially this last decade devoted to tacking that MD after my name.
I’ve already lamented to some that those ten years are ten ghosted years during which I seldom wrote a word, let alone the poetry, articles or books that might better have bricked a life’s work and mortared a legacy, that might, in the end, have built a happier life. The greater cost, however, has been exacted on my family, each and all of whom have dearly paid for my career change in laughter never shared and memories never made. Several of our children have, in this same lost decade, grown into adulthood, and no doubt too often recall their father as the worried med student prepping for the next exam or the wasted resident sleeping off a long night’s call. For Karen and me, too, full too many of our middle years have been years of unneeded stress and struggle. Nor can I argue that I am, as a physician, the better for my family’s sacrifice, since the practice of medicine, for all its inherent idealism and altruism, is today less practice than it is process, done at the behest of hospital employers, insurance and pharmaceutical companies to whom productivity, as measured in patients seen and prescriptions written, and efficiency, as charted in procedures avoided and dollars saved, is what makes the stethoscope go around.
The nursery rhyme would have me, as Friday’s child, loving and giving, and over the course of this lengthening life I have tried, I have really tried. That much I know. But I also know that I have too often failed. And to those who have paid the price for that failure, those I love most and to whom I have given much but not enough, my gift to you, on this my own 57th birthday, is, even if papered in heartfelt regret, the equally sincere hope for brighter days to come.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Oh, sure, I do seem to have a disproportionate number of what I call “Charlie Brown” moments, where, whether by whim or wile, the football of life is yanked away just as I’m about to send it toward the goalpost. But those moments, while seemingly frequent, are minor in impact and importance, and always more inconvenient than ever incapacitating.
Nor, perhaps in deference to my Friday the 13th start in life, am I a betting man, although, truth is, my caution has more to do with a long-ago San Gennaro Feast in New York’s Little Italy than it does to any ill-omened birth. Back then, at a time when I earned scarcely $13,000 a year writing copy for Doubleday and was supporting not just myself, but my mother, father and youngest brother, I allowed myself to be swindled by an unscrupulous street vendor running one of those ubiquitous games of chance, mistaking early luck for good fortune and not for the set-up it was. In the end, I lost about $100, maybe half a week’s pay, surely a week’s groceries, probably a big bite from the month’s rent, at a time when even the cost of a subway token to take me to Karen, whom I was then dating, was a luxury.
Since then, I’ve not wagered money, unless you count the thousands lost on houses that only rarely and only briefly let us capitalize on investment. I have, however, been somewhat profligate with time, betting months on a stint in Ireland intended to be a lifetime; months more on this or that writing project in the days when I was a hired pen; and entire years on graduate school, med school and residency, all in the name of affirming the writer I’d always been and becoming the physician I always dreamed to be.
Has it been worth it? Again, I’ve lived the life I wanted. But certainly those gambles on time have come at a cost, especially this last decade devoted to tacking that MD after my name.
I’ve already lamented to some that those ten years are ten ghosted years during which I seldom wrote a word, let alone the poetry, articles or books that might better have bricked a life’s work and mortared a legacy, that might, in the end, have built a happier life. The greater cost, however, has been exacted on my family, each and all of whom have dearly paid for my career change in laughter never shared and memories never made. Several of our children have, in this same lost decade, grown into adulthood, and no doubt too often recall their father as the worried med student prepping for the next exam or the wasted resident sleeping off a long night’s call. For Karen and me, too, full too many of our middle years have been years of unneeded stress and struggle. Nor can I argue that I am, as a physician, the better for my family’s sacrifice, since the practice of medicine, for all its inherent idealism and altruism, is today less practice than it is process, done at the behest of hospital employers, insurance and pharmaceutical companies to whom productivity, as measured in patients seen and prescriptions written, and efficiency, as charted in procedures avoided and dollars saved, is what makes the stethoscope go around.
The nursery rhyme would have me, as Friday’s child, loving and giving, and over the course of this lengthening life I have tried, I have really tried. That much I know. But I also know that I have too often failed. And to those who have paid the price for that failure, those I love most and to whom I have given much but not enough, my gift to you, on this my own 57th birthday, is, even if papered in heartfelt regret, the equally sincere hope for brighter days to come.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Saturday, July 12, 2008
After the deluge...
Last Saturday, Karen and I went into Iowa City for the Jazz Festival, a three-day annual affair made more celebratory this year after the June floods that devastated eastern Iowa, including Iowa City.
Strolling toward the Pentacrest lawn, venue for the Jazz Festival, across the higher ground of the city’s east side, you’d be hard-pressed, as we were, to find evidence of the Iowa River’s mad slosh through Iowa City: the odd poster trumpeting a flood-relief benefit; here and there tiers of sandbags buttressing walls which, in the end, never saw water; and, only if you had paused in the library lobby on the way, a display of FEMA clean-up booklets.
Not unless you were to amble across the Pentracrest and around the Old Capitol to the portico fronting the building’s west façade and overlooking the river would you get a glimmer, and even there just a glimmer, of the deluge that was: ductwork funneling fouled air from the bowels of the university’s new journalism building; strands of yellow police tape, even from this distance spiraling in the evening breeze and warning the curious from the recently swamped Iowa Memorial Union, where, photographs attest, the river had had its way with the lower-level food courts and university bookstore, ransacking the place to the envy of the most frenzied burglar and swirling the ensuing mess into a sodden mass; the Iowa Avenue bridge, normally four lanes and doing a kind of limbo beneath the bar of a railroad bridge, now bottlenecked to two lanes, courtesy of a sinkhole the river had gouged from the eastbound lanes; and all around and everywhere the brickwork of buildings sporting the high-water scars of the Iowa River’s grimy embrace.
Although not within view from the Capitol portico, things were worse still on the river’s west bank, where the university’s arts campus, including the nationally renowned Hancher Auditorium, scene of concerts, graduations and regular visits from the likes of the Joffrey Ballet, was all but drowned a few weeks ago when the river leaped, all but laughing, the half-mile-long sandbag dike intended to elbow the flood away. A short drive away, Dubuque Street, one of Iowa City’s main approaches from points north, remained closed as of the weekend. At high tide, Dubuque had bottomed the lake the river had become, and the street’s usual course could then be traced only in the outline of streetlights, the poles stilting the river like a flock of outsized flamingos.
But that was then, and the Jazz Festival was now, with the Iowa River itself, like some sated ogre returned to its cave, in most places again back in its banks.
Coincidentally, the evening we were there one of the headlining groups hailed from New Orleans, its members undoubtedly more intimate with the effects of water than they’d ever dreamed to be. Regardless, the music was memorable, the weather, at this point in an Iowa summer for an Irish guy whose inner thermostat tops out at 80 degrees, deliciously pleasant, the audience of several thousand rife for people-watching. Here were kids for whom every tree was an invitation to climb; there, lovers, still courting high school as much as each other, their eyes, smiles and occasional, socially-acceptable caress a reminder, to any not too hoary to have forgotten, of youthful summers past; and everywhere families, friends and couples, like Karen and me, forgetting, flood and all else, for this shared moment on a summer’s eve.
Many of these same people would also have been among the army of sandbaggers, who, a month ago, sought to keep a river at bay. On that mid-June Saturday, Madison Street had been lined with anthills of sand, each crawling with volunteer workers scooping, bagging, tying and stacking. A fleet of trucks, Bob-Cats and front-end loaders scurried from hill to hill, back-up beepers announcing their unscheduled comings and goings, their business ends hefting and hauling bags by heaps and hundreds to the waiting receiving lines of sandbag slingers, Karen and me and two of our children among them, who would then pass the bags hand to hand to the river’s edge. I read later that 100,000 sandbags were laid in the course of that single Saturday, a testament to the hundreds of people who rallied that day to the cause. Indeed, even in the face of imminent heartbreak, it was heartwarming to see so many do so much in so short a time, all in the name of saving the city they love.
In the end, the river pulled its punch, but not before a historically telling blow, cresting on June 15th at 31.53 feet, a foot and a half lower than expected, but three feet higher than the previous record set in 1993. Nor was the Iowa River in any hurry to leave, unlike the Cedar River farther north, which crested on June 13th and slinked back below flood stage eight days later. Instead, not until July 7th, some three weeks after cresting, did the Iowa slip again below its own flood stage. And, as impressive as that might be, upstream along the Iowa River at the Coralville Lake Reservoir, the flood called it quits only after topping off at a bit more than 717 feet, water as deep as a 70-story building is high, the top five of those feet tumbling for days over the spillway at the rate of tens of thousands of cubic feet per second. The word biblical comes quickly to mind.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Strolling toward the Pentacrest lawn, venue for the Jazz Festival, across the higher ground of the city’s east side, you’d be hard-pressed, as we were, to find evidence of the Iowa River’s mad slosh through Iowa City: the odd poster trumpeting a flood-relief benefit; here and there tiers of sandbags buttressing walls which, in the end, never saw water; and, only if you had paused in the library lobby on the way, a display of FEMA clean-up booklets.
Not unless you were to amble across the Pentracrest and around the Old Capitol to the portico fronting the building’s west façade and overlooking the river would you get a glimmer, and even there just a glimmer, of the deluge that was: ductwork funneling fouled air from the bowels of the university’s new journalism building; strands of yellow police tape, even from this distance spiraling in the evening breeze and warning the curious from the recently swamped Iowa Memorial Union, where, photographs attest, the river had had its way with the lower-level food courts and university bookstore, ransacking the place to the envy of the most frenzied burglar and swirling the ensuing mess into a sodden mass; the Iowa Avenue bridge, normally four lanes and doing a kind of limbo beneath the bar of a railroad bridge, now bottlenecked to two lanes, courtesy of a sinkhole the river had gouged from the eastbound lanes; and all around and everywhere the brickwork of buildings sporting the high-water scars of the Iowa River’s grimy embrace.
Although not within view from the Capitol portico, things were worse still on the river’s west bank, where the university’s arts campus, including the nationally renowned Hancher Auditorium, scene of concerts, graduations and regular visits from the likes of the Joffrey Ballet, was all but drowned a few weeks ago when the river leaped, all but laughing, the half-mile-long sandbag dike intended to elbow the flood away. A short drive away, Dubuque Street, one of Iowa City’s main approaches from points north, remained closed as of the weekend. At high tide, Dubuque had bottomed the lake the river had become, and the street’s usual course could then be traced only in the outline of streetlights, the poles stilting the river like a flock of outsized flamingos.
But that was then, and the Jazz Festival was now, with the Iowa River itself, like some sated ogre returned to its cave, in most places again back in its banks.
Coincidentally, the evening we were there one of the headlining groups hailed from New Orleans, its members undoubtedly more intimate with the effects of water than they’d ever dreamed to be. Regardless, the music was memorable, the weather, at this point in an Iowa summer for an Irish guy whose inner thermostat tops out at 80 degrees, deliciously pleasant, the audience of several thousand rife for people-watching. Here were kids for whom every tree was an invitation to climb; there, lovers, still courting high school as much as each other, their eyes, smiles and occasional, socially-acceptable caress a reminder, to any not too hoary to have forgotten, of youthful summers past; and everywhere families, friends and couples, like Karen and me, forgetting, flood and all else, for this shared moment on a summer’s eve.
Many of these same people would also have been among the army of sandbaggers, who, a month ago, sought to keep a river at bay. On that mid-June Saturday, Madison Street had been lined with anthills of sand, each crawling with volunteer workers scooping, bagging, tying and stacking. A fleet of trucks, Bob-Cats and front-end loaders scurried from hill to hill, back-up beepers announcing their unscheduled comings and goings, their business ends hefting and hauling bags by heaps and hundreds to the waiting receiving lines of sandbag slingers, Karen and me and two of our children among them, who would then pass the bags hand to hand to the river’s edge. I read later that 100,000 sandbags were laid in the course of that single Saturday, a testament to the hundreds of people who rallied that day to the cause. Indeed, even in the face of imminent heartbreak, it was heartwarming to see so many do so much in so short a time, all in the name of saving the city they love.
In the end, the river pulled its punch, but not before a historically telling blow, cresting on June 15th at 31.53 feet, a foot and a half lower than expected, but three feet higher than the previous record set in 1993. Nor was the Iowa River in any hurry to leave, unlike the Cedar River farther north, which crested on June 13th and slinked back below flood stage eight days later. Instead, not until July 7th, some three weeks after cresting, did the Iowa slip again below its own flood stage. And, as impressive as that might be, upstream along the Iowa River at the Coralville Lake Reservoir, the flood called it quits only after topping off at a bit more than 717 feet, water as deep as a 70-story building is high, the top five of those feet tumbling for days over the spillway at the rate of tens of thousands of cubic feet per second. The word biblical comes quickly to mind.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
By way of explaining...
In Shetland, that scattershot of islands at Scotland’s far northern edge, there is in the midst of a midsummer’s night a half-hour span when the day in its dying leaps the horizon, only, in an instant, to change its mind and to shinny again up the cliff face, renewed and ready as ever to gild a dawn. It is a twilit time, neither light nor dark, neither day nor night, a time somewhere between and known to locals as the Simmer Dim.Back in 1989, back when I was a comparative lad of 38, I was myself in a kind of Simmer Dim, a somewhere-between time that was, admittedly, as much frame of mind, one occasioned by my family’s desire to move back to Ireland, a move stymied then and forever by a house in Vermont that we couldn’t sell, owing to a well contaminated by road salt. Eventually, the problem was remedied; eventually, the house sold, albeit at such a loss that the seed money that would have bankrolled the move and allowed us to sink new roots in the Old Sod had gone, all too literally, down the drain.
It was in that summer of the salted well, with a planned solo jaunt to Ireland providing the excuse to hopscotch Scotland to Shetland, that I visited this Ultima Thule of the ancients, lured largely by a longstanding, but otherwise inexplicable, tug in that direction, and partly by a writer’s more understandable desire to stand entirely alone and at the edge of the world.
In fact, in the course of that visit, I would do exactly that, abandoning a hired car in the car park
at the Hermaness Nature Preserve at the northernmost tip of Shetland’s northernmost isle of Unst, striding two miles and more to cliff’s edge, then, with not a soul to be seen or heard, stood staring north, beyond the rocky scarp of Muckle Flugga, to a far and imagined polar cap; east, more or less, to Norway; west, by some compass of the mind, to Greenland. And still, all these years and miles later, how easily I recall myself there again, how comforting once more the solace of all but unbroken sea and all but endless sky.Think of it…
There I was. Absolutely and utterly alone. My feet having traversed a long length of moor and bracken, my entire being at long last at land’s end. Before me now a ragged edge of earth, grey sky overhead, grey ocean beyond, and, as I drew nearer the brink, gulls and guillemots skimming near rock and farther foam.
Some twenty years later, the mind’s eye all too tauntingly allows me to see my younger self at that particular precipice, not knowing then what I all so well know now. That life would lead me again, back from that latest cliff, back to the relative safety of Vermont, and, later still, after Notre Dame and graduate school, to Iowa and to the edge again, this time, at age 49 and with five kids in tow, in the form of medical school. Graduation meant only another cliff, with the roiling sea of residency beyond, and, still farther and yet finally, to harbor again, not so much as a physician, but as an adult. Indeed, throughout medical school, I had dreamed often of days to come beyond its puerile, boot-camp-like atmosphere, while throughout residency, I had teased myself forward by the unabandoned notion that at its end I would again be the adult I’d been a decade earlier, free once more to chart my days as I wanted to chart them, with nary the shoal of a rotation nor the shelf of some requirement to put to lee, even as I sped then, as I speed now, full sail forward into this, our shared Simmer Dim of unknowing.
(If the spirit proverbially moves, I will tell you more of my decades-long transition from salaried penman to freelancer to physician, but, for now, do permit me passage.)
For those so inclined, here’s a poem from the past, regrettably without its original line breaks (the vagaries of Blogger remain frustratingly vague to me):
In the Simmer Dim
I.
Night falls and catches itself
before hitting bottom,
leaving light enough to still be light,
light enough that
midnight here is only midnight
on the clock, but not out there,
not there where Shetland’s barrowed
isles speedbump the Atlantic
and once-drowned Jarlshof
slumbers again at Sumburgh,
its spectral sentries listening still
to the lapping of ocean, the licking of sea.
II.
Water
ran everywhere that first morning,
running in rivulets on the green sponge
of Stanydale, running tea-brown
across my shoetops and wanting now
only to be boiled into whisky.
Beyond that rise rose a gate,
and beyond the gate gaped a hole
where once a temple stood
and true believers, wetted much
as any field or stone, had cowered
then in the fear of faith.
There is wind here,
there is always wind, the scent of salt,
the spittle of sea and little else. Neither
farm nor farmer. Sheep nor shepherd.
Boat nor boatman. Time circles,
hovers, wings away.
III.
I had come because I had
always wanted to come.
Because a finger traced once
across a map had led me
to this fringe of island fringe.
To Thule, the ancients called it,
to the edge of the world.
And now I’m here. Straddling
past and present. Scanning
the sea of the coming time
and seeing only sea. Lost.
Lost in the simmer dim.
to the edge of the world.
And now I’m here. Straddling
past and present. Scanning
the sea of the coming time
and seeing only sea. Lost.
Lost in the simmer dim.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Friday, July 4, 2008
The view from the porch...
From where I sit, the flag on our porch droops in the late afternoon of this Fourth of July.
One can’t look at it for more than a moment without reflecting, as have many before me, on its meaning and its cost. Wars, causes, lives, the hopes that sugar forward both the life of a nation and the lives of its citizens, the declaration, that singular Declaration of Independence, that all those years ago set it all in motion, commemorated today, as it has been for two centuries and more, in the words of the prescient John Adams, “with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other” — all measured in what is right now, on my porch, on this July 4, 2008, a languid field of red, white and blue.
Some in Washington some years ago saw in that same starred banner a call to arms, counting more on ruse than right that those easily led would sheepishly follow, and, more cynically still, that those easily swayed would saunter behind. All too unhappily, they were at once right and so wrong, and as a people we all bear the consequences, in the form of diminished respect among our friends, increased hatred among our enemies, a loss everywhere of the uniquely human hopes and dreams woven into every inch of the fabric that is our shared history.
The current resident of the White House can, in language both verbal and physical, bloviate, as he so often does and did so again today from the portico of Monticello, about the virtues of liberty. But he himself, who in his youth so famously signed in liberty's name only to infamously sidestep its defense, lacks virtue. Easy it is to wrap one's cause, however ill-imagined and self-serving, in a flag reddened by lives lost in its name; easy it is to snatch from the world its shroud of sympathy in the wake of 9/11 and to use it, callously, to shroud one's own oedipal quest for glory. Harder still to lift from its ashes a nation wronged, to rise above the hatred that so obviously fed that wrong, to twin grief to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," to truly make might equal to right.
Instead, here we all are, deep in the afternoon of this Fourth, long in the coming night of this most disappointing presidency, many, if not most, of us contemplating a different dawn.
And perhaps, just perhaps, the way forward lies in, of all things, following the flag.
Now by that I do not mean the blind adherence to the jingoism that has led us into this, our current, epochal dead end. Rather, I mean a new beginning, not just a blind eye to our historical inheritance, but a re-dedication to the sacrifice inherent in stars, the values intrinsic in stripes — to nothing less than a rebirth of liberty bought at such a cost by those before us, of whom so much was so often asked, by whom so much was so often given.
All of us, you, me, our families, friends, neighbors, can, if we wish, be the people those vaunted forefathers wanted us to be; can, if we want, subscribe again to what Jefferson termed the "unalienable rights" of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; can, if we we choose, remind ourselves, as the author of the Declaration did, "that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."
I exhort you, my friends, to wish, want and choose, and to do so wisely.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
One can’t look at it for more than a moment without reflecting, as have many before me, on its meaning and its cost. Wars, causes, lives, the hopes that sugar forward both the life of a nation and the lives of its citizens, the declaration, that singular Declaration of Independence, that all those years ago set it all in motion, commemorated today, as it has been for two centuries and more, in the words of the prescient John Adams, “with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other” — all measured in what is right now, on my porch, on this July 4, 2008, a languid field of red, white and blue.
Some in Washington some years ago saw in that same starred banner a call to arms, counting more on ruse than right that those easily led would sheepishly follow, and, more cynically still, that those easily swayed would saunter behind. All too unhappily, they were at once right and so wrong, and as a people we all bear the consequences, in the form of diminished respect among our friends, increased hatred among our enemies, a loss everywhere of the uniquely human hopes and dreams woven into every inch of the fabric that is our shared history.
The current resident of the White House can, in language both verbal and physical, bloviate, as he so often does and did so again today from the portico of Monticello, about the virtues of liberty. But he himself, who in his youth so famously signed in liberty's name only to infamously sidestep its defense, lacks virtue. Easy it is to wrap one's cause, however ill-imagined and self-serving, in a flag reddened by lives lost in its name; easy it is to snatch from the world its shroud of sympathy in the wake of 9/11 and to use it, callously, to shroud one's own oedipal quest for glory. Harder still to lift from its ashes a nation wronged, to rise above the hatred that so obviously fed that wrong, to twin grief to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," to truly make might equal to right.
Instead, here we all are, deep in the afternoon of this Fourth, long in the coming night of this most disappointing presidency, many, if not most, of us contemplating a different dawn.
And perhaps, just perhaps, the way forward lies in, of all things, following the flag.
Now by that I do not mean the blind adherence to the jingoism that has led us into this, our current, epochal dead end. Rather, I mean a new beginning, not just a blind eye to our historical inheritance, but a re-dedication to the sacrifice inherent in stars, the values intrinsic in stripes — to nothing less than a rebirth of liberty bought at such a cost by those before us, of whom so much was so often asked, by whom so much was so often given.
All of us, you, me, our families, friends, neighbors, can, if we wish, be the people those vaunted forefathers wanted us to be; can, if we want, subscribe again to what Jefferson termed the "unalienable rights" of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; can, if we we choose, remind ourselves, as the author of the Declaration did, "that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."
I exhort you, my friends, to wish, want and choose, and to do so wisely.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
A river ran through it...
I have twice had occasion this week to visit Cedar Rapids, the first time on Monday to welcome the new residents at a picnic, the second on Saturday to send off the graduating residents.
On Monday, for example, the path to the picnic led us across over the Cedar River by way of the Eighth Avenue bridge. Perhaps 50 feet south lies what was once a railroad bridge across the same river, but is now a twisted span that has become an oversized trap, one all too effective at catching every manner of trash flowing downriver, from the plastic bric-a-brac of lives that once were and are now forever changed, to tree limbs of every size, to entire parts of houses. Also imprisoned within the bridge’s contorted fretwork are fully laden railroad cars, parked intentionally on the span in the hope of stabilizing steel against what was two weeks ago the imminent onslaught of water. All too obviously, that ploy failed, and now those same cars are either, like some giant’s jewelry, spun within the same steel, or, discarded, like so much dross, bottoming the river.
The same path also had us veering here and there around road debris, usually unidentifiable in passing, although when we got to the picnic and learned that one of the residency staff had earlier slit a tire on a domestic roadside bomb of a boxcutter, I was glad to have given way to the river’s scattered last laughs.
Other sights: everywhere, in every direction, what were once sidewalks heaped with the detritus of the wants and necessities of modern life — refrigerators, furnaces, water heaters, lumber of every shape and size, boxes containing whatever once was worth saving and now was, like it or not, lost. Those people, who must also count themselves among that loss, were gone. The luckier of the lot, doctors’ offices, city hall, Mercy Hospital, other businesses, sported their relative good fortune in the form of vans, trucks and, in the case of Mercy, nothing less than a necklace of semis, courtesy of disaster clean-up companies that have, in the wake of the deluge, become their own kind of flood.
Most memorable of all on that Monday: the smell, so redolent, so inescapable that, to me, it gave new meaning to the word “stench.” Think sewage. Now factor in the olfactory herbage of garbage. Now layer in god-knows-whatever the river only knows. Imagine yourself, for this, this whiff of a moment, in a landfill heretofore unimaginable. Now, breathe, breathe deeply of what was weeks ago a city alive. You cannot, will not, forget.
Can I add more?
Only this: last night, after leaving the residency graduation, we drove south on I-380 through Cedar Rapids, midnight, more or less, and, more more than less, its own garden of evil. To my left the downtown Crowne Plaza hotel, on any other night ablaze with tumescent swooners or more-so honeymooners, the odd corporate-card layover or a weekending family or three, now dark, a single room on a penultimate floor inexplicably alit. Around it block after block of apartment buildings and office towers, and even the enisled city hall itself, all, all, in ink. Further south still, whole neighborhoods, power still out, the lanes between homes shadowed in streetlights, the homes themselves no longer homes, just houses, each one fronted by its own pile of debris (a ton per house, I read, some 300,000 tons overall), each with its red, yellow or green placard on the door whispering, respectively, to drive-by passers-by of doom, hope and the eventual return of owners. (To give you some sense of how widespread that doom and how spartan that hope, some 45,000 people in Cedar Rapids — fully one-fifth of the city’s population — have been displaced by the flood, and hundreds of houses are expected to have their own close encounter with the bulldozer. And that’s only Cedar Rapids; elsewhere in Iowa, the story is much the same, or worse.)
And, oh, oh, oh god, the smell, oh,no, the stench.
We here, Karen, me, the kids, are among the spared — and surely blessed — yet all too mindful of the many friends and co-workers who have lost some or everything. Whatever prayers you might want to loft, do so for them. We’re okay — and, again, surely blessed.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
On Monday, for example, the path to the picnic led us across over the Cedar River by way of the Eighth Avenue bridge. Perhaps 50 feet south lies what was once a railroad bridge across the same river, but is now a twisted span that has become an oversized trap, one all too effective at catching every manner of trash flowing downriver, from the plastic bric-a-brac of lives that once were and are now forever changed, to tree limbs of every size, to entire parts of houses. Also imprisoned within the bridge’s contorted fretwork are fully laden railroad cars, parked intentionally on the span in the hope of stabilizing steel against what was two weeks ago the imminent onslaught of water. All too obviously, that ploy failed, and now those same cars are either, like some giant’s jewelry, spun within the same steel, or, discarded, like so much dross, bottoming the river.
The same path also had us veering here and there around road debris, usually unidentifiable in passing, although when we got to the picnic and learned that one of the residency staff had earlier slit a tire on a domestic roadside bomb of a boxcutter, I was glad to have given way to the river’s scattered last laughs.
Other sights: everywhere, in every direction, what were once sidewalks heaped with the detritus of the wants and necessities of modern life — refrigerators, furnaces, water heaters, lumber of every shape and size, boxes containing whatever once was worth saving and now was, like it or not, lost. Those people, who must also count themselves among that loss, were gone. The luckier of the lot, doctors’ offices, city hall, Mercy Hospital, other businesses, sported their relative good fortune in the form of vans, trucks and, in the case of Mercy, nothing less than a necklace of semis, courtesy of disaster clean-up companies that have, in the wake of the deluge, become their own kind of flood.
Most memorable of all on that Monday: the smell, so redolent, so inescapable that, to me, it gave new meaning to the word “stench.” Think sewage. Now factor in the olfactory herbage of garbage. Now layer in god-knows-whatever the river only knows. Imagine yourself, for this, this whiff of a moment, in a landfill heretofore unimaginable. Now, breathe, breathe deeply of what was weeks ago a city alive. You cannot, will not, forget.
Can I add more?
Only this: last night, after leaving the residency graduation, we drove south on I-380 through Cedar Rapids, midnight, more or less, and, more more than less, its own garden of evil. To my left the downtown Crowne Plaza hotel, on any other night ablaze with tumescent swooners or more-so honeymooners, the odd corporate-card layover or a weekending family or three, now dark, a single room on a penultimate floor inexplicably alit. Around it block after block of apartment buildings and office towers, and even the enisled city hall itself, all, all, in ink. Further south still, whole neighborhoods, power still out, the lanes between homes shadowed in streetlights, the homes themselves no longer homes, just houses, each one fronted by its own pile of debris (a ton per house, I read, some 300,000 tons overall), each with its red, yellow or green placard on the door whispering, respectively, to drive-by passers-by of doom, hope and the eventual return of owners. (To give you some sense of how widespread that doom and how spartan that hope, some 45,000 people in Cedar Rapids — fully one-fifth of the city’s population — have been displaced by the flood, and hundreds of houses are expected to have their own close encounter with the bulldozer. And that’s only Cedar Rapids; elsewhere in Iowa, the story is much the same, or worse.)
And, oh, oh, oh god, the smell, oh,no, the stench.
We here, Karen, me, the kids, are among the spared — and surely blessed — yet all too mindful of the many friends and co-workers who have lost some or everything. Whatever prayers you might want to loft, do so for them. We’re okay — and, again, surely blessed.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
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