A Train Runs Through It

Edna St. Vincent Millay apparently enjoyed train travel. She wrote these famous line that roll the reader along with her wanderlust:

                                          My heart is warm with friends I make,
                                           And better friends I'll not be knowing;
                                           Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
                                                     No matter where it's going.

I've found that I perhaps enjoy the idea of train travel more than the trips themselves. I once took Amtrak's Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco and back, booking a roomette. Going through the vast emptiness of Nevada at night, looking out my window at the miles and miles of nothing except glimpses of the Milky Way, became almost a mystical experience. I became one with the lullaby rocking of the train… the rocking, the clicking. The greatest onomatopoeia in any language is the Spanish word for "railroad," if you rightly roll your "r's" - ferrocarril…ferrocarril…ferrocaril…

The stops we made also gave me a sense of going back in time. There were the wood-beamed train stations out west. I felt I was stepping off into the year 1880 in Elko, Nevada. A clutch of taciturn, raw-looking cowboys was huddled on the platform, their breath made visible by the cold morning air. Some flakes of snow started to drift down. And it was the Fourth of July! At those altitudes, anything is possible. Then there was the harrowing one-inch-from-the-edge ascent through the Rockies, overlooking the Donner Pass. Watch out! Don't lean over! That shift of weight might plummet us off into the same deadly fate as that Donner Party of old.

Yes, it was breath-taking, thrilling - at times. But there was a certain numbing boredom about it too. I was glad each way when the trip was over and I was back on solid ground, relieved of any twinge of motion sickness, able to read, eat, move around expansively again. I wasn't sure that the romantic idea of train travel would be enough to sustain me through too many more long journeys.

But a few places I visited more recently made me realize that I could have my cake and eat it too. I could have the pleasure of that rolling ferrocarril refrain, without being confined to actually going anywhere. I just had to stay in railroad towns that have a track running through them and a steady flow of freight making its way to distant points. I stayed in motels not far from the tracks in two such towns that are both lulled and enlivened by the rhythm of the trains coming and going.

One of these towns was Revelstoke, British Columbia. There's no passenger train service to this jewel of the Canadian Rockies anymore, so I got there by Greyhound. But the sound of the freight cars chugging through town provides a steady, reassuring heartbeat to life there. 

Trains still define much of the town. There's a train museum by the tracks which includes much of the often cruel history of the building of the Canadian-Pacific Railway. Wherever you go in the area, you see reminders of how Chinese laborers were worked to the bone building the railway, were confined to squalid ghetto parts of town, and then were discarded and left to die when they were too old or ill to do a long day's labor anymore. Some relatively fortunate workers were able to make it out of that most dangerous grind by advancing into laundry jobs. That work had its own hazards though. It involved handling scalding hot irons that had to be regularly re-heated over burners. A very few of these workers managed to advance further to become waiters in, and then even owners of Chinese restaurants.

All this history of prejudice and poverty was on display at the train museum. But then there was also the gleaming brass achieve of the train cars themselves. They had some old Pullman cars appointed as they would have been in the heyday of train travel, in the 1940's, with a rose on every dining car table. An "old-timer" was at the controls of a retired lead car. He showed tourists what all the levers and dials were for and told us the difference between running steam engines and the more modern locomotives.

From there, I explored the newer downtown area. Revelstoke was featured in a psychological thriller starring Malcolm McDowell called The Barber. In that film, they showed the town as retaining some of its old mining and railroading atmosphere, with wooden plank sidewalks and swinging saloon doors. I didn't see any such Wild West remnants though. The downtown stores all tended to be typical modern boutiques. Except for one. There was one really distinctive storefront along this main street. It housed a player piano/nickelodeon museum owned by a British couple who had made the maintenance and exhibition of these extraordinary music-makers their life's work.

After I had paid the modest admission charge, they offered me a cup of tea as I took the guided tour. I was both charmed and a little disappointed at the same time. I was charmed by the Agatha Christie Miss Marple aspect of these two transplants from Britain, but I was disappointed when they tussled with each other a bit over who would do the chore of guiding me around. "Well, I took the last one," the husband gently protested. So I fell the lot of the wife.

Since it was rather late in the autumn, there were hardly any other tourists in town, which meant I got a private showing of all the rare old pianos. The wife played them or set them in motion for me, one-by-one. She cited pianos or harpsichords from the 1700's that had the capacity to produce the same gamut of special effects that the most souped-up keyboard of a modern rock band can produce. With the flick of a switch, you could activate brass, percussion, or string accompaniments to your playing, all in a variety of styles and rhythms. Of course, these embellishments were accomplished with intricate mechanics rather than with electricity. The place was a little pocket of exquisite craftsmanship in a world of disposable plastic. If you ever pass through Revelstoke, I can recommend the Nickelodeon Museum on First Street to you.

Then I crossed to the other side of the tracks and meandered up through the residential hillside. There was a poster at the start of this winding road, with red "X's" showing spots where grizzly bears had been sighted. Walking along, part of me hoped I'd get to see a grizzly bear - but a larger part of me hoped I wouldn't!

There was the most eclectic assortment of houses imaginable along this way. There'd be a shanty next door to a brick mansion. Trailing from one of the more impressive homes was the compelling sound of a bagpipe. I walked a short distance up the house's flower-lined driveway to pause and listen a while. It seemed likely someone was inside practicing on the instrument, although whoever it was needed little practice. He or she was already pitch-perfect. The rallying drone made me want to stay on. "The pipes, the pipes are calling…" But after a short while, the playing came to an abrupt, self-conscious halt. I wondered if the person inside had spotted me in the driveway and didn't wish to perform for an uninvited audience. So I reluctantly walked on.

I ventured a little farther afield and took in a tour of the big hydroelectric dam outside of town. The dam generates electricity for a large part of the Okanagon Valley area and beyond, so security was tight. I took a cab onto the grounds, and both the cab driver and I had to show passports as ID. A guard then came out with a mirror on a stick and checked the whole undercarriage of the cab as well as probing through the trunk and every nook of the car's interior. Once I was inside at the Visitors' Center, I had to relinquish everything - purse and wallet and all. But past that checkpoint, I was free to wander through the generating plant at will, on a "self-guided tour."

Once again, I was alone, one of the last tourists of the season. To get to the viewing platforms above the big generators, I had to walk through a long, dank tunnel that ran under the big lake reservoir created by the dam. Water was seeping ominously through the pores of the surrounding concrete, puddling on the floor. I could sense the weight of all the water above and around me - pressing in against the walls of the tunnel as if it might bulge and buckle them at any moment. I hurried on through to the elevator at the end of this subterranean (or submarine) passageway.

Beyond the generators, visitors could walk outside to the parapet walls overlooking the massive concrete construct of the dam itself. I have never seen the Hoover Dam, but it's hard to imagine that it could be much more impressive than this Revelstoke Dam. The escarpment of concrete sloped over 500-feet to the tumble of waters below. It made a hypnotically dangerous ski slope of a curve going down, almost daring the person who had started as a casual sightseer to end by taking a fatal plunge.

So there had been plenty to see and do in Revelstoke. But somehow it was the coming and going of the trains that made the most lasting impression on me. My motel was about two blocks from the tracks, just the right distance to be lulled rather than rattled by the steady migrations. As the trains came and went, emitting their occasional muted whistles, they sent a gentle, subtle rumble of vibration through my surroundings, settling me into a peaceful sleep.

The second train town I visited recently was Springfield, the capital of the State of Illinois and the place where Abraham Lincoln practiced law the longest. I was finally seeing the City, after a delay of more than half a century. Most Chicago students are treated to weekend junkets to Springfield when they graduate from grade school or high school. However my class had its scheduled trip cancelled because we were deemed to be too savagely unruly to be let loose on an unsuspecting world.

Truly though, many of my classmates depredations had not been comical. When people cite the more recent shootings and other acts of violence in schools as unique signs of the violence of our times - they forget that one of the hallmarks of the 1950's and  60's was "The Blackboard Jungle." Those were the days of switchblades and vicious gang rumbles and ransackings. The geography teacher in our grade school had been blinded in one eye by a carelessly hurled switchblade. One of my classmates had had a fingertip amputated by that weapon of the day. Then when our class had been let out for an afternoon field trip, many of them had run amok in the neighborhood, committing so much vandalism that the school board might still be paying reparations.

So "No Springfield trip for YOU!" I had to arrange my own trip there decades later. But I'm glad I finally did get to go. Springfield really puts the Lincoln in the State motto "The Land of Lincoln." While a lot of the Lincoln-related attractions in Springfield are geared to tourists, most have avoided becoming kitschy recollections. For example, the Lincoln Library does have a lot of "family-oriented" entertainments aside from the place's repository of books. But its hologram show is truly touching, invoking spirits from the past in diaphanous 3-D. The show had a twist-ending that left me pondering the nature of reality.

I was surprised to learn that Springfield itself has been losing population, fading from its days as a transportation hub and as a center of mining activity. Some of its main streets are now as boarded-up and destitute as Detroit's. Outside the peripatetic attendances of the Governor and other politicians who come to the Capitol Building when the State Congress is in session - the year-round residents have been forming a shrinking club. Many of these people cross paths daily as they work in one capacity or another in the Lincoln trade. It's hard to find a local resident who hasn't participated in a Lincoln re-enactment at one time or another. If they weren't the right types to play the leads of Abraham and Mary Todd themselves, they could still participate by playing lesser known figures in Lincoln's life, such as his stepmother Sarah Bush, or his law partner, William Herndon.

My favorite Lincoln site though was one that wasn't on our regularly scheduled tour. I made my way by myself into Lincoln's restored law office on the second floor of an old brick building on one of Springfield's main streets. It was furnished with the kinds of wick lamps, writing desks, law books, quill pens, and the other appointments, that would likely have been found there in Lincoln's day. Lincoln historians had taken care to recreate the smallest likely details of the scene, including splashes of ink on the walls and over various papers left lying around. The guide explained that Lincoln was very indulgent with his boys, letting them play as wild and free as they wished in his office. To the occasional dismay of clients and law partners, this playtime often came down to rough-housing that included hurled ink bottles. As a result, some potentially vital clauses in legal documents would get obscured on a regular basis.

The first floor of this building had also been restored to its 1850's function as the town's post office. Since my family and I had run a mailing business, I've always been especially interested in postal history. I learned a lot on this visit to Lincoln's ground floor, things I hadn't learned even in the excellent postal museum that's part of the Smithsonian complex in Washington, D.C. The Washington Museum emphasizes the hardships involved in delivering letters in the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries and into the 20th century when young pilots such as Lindbergh flew rickety biplanes through fog and dark to land their cargo of mail at airstrips barely lit, sometimes still by gaslight. Many of these flyers crashed and were killed seeing that the mail got through this way.

But this little Springfield storefront re-creation emphasized the hardships of mailing letters in Lincoln's day.  Back then, you were charged more exactingly by the weight of your missive. Few people could afford to be extravagant about adding the slightest extra fraction of an ounce to their letters. So they wrote on onionskin, and even avoided using more than one sheet of that for their chatty letters by cramping their handwriting small, first horizontally across the page, then vertically over the first lines. They might use a slightly different tint of ink or use a lighter pressure when they over-wrote. But some of the letters still became drudgingly difficult to read.

Back on the regular tour, we took in the larger highlights - of Lincoln's tomb - and then, the train station where Lincoln gave thanks and bid farewell to the people of Springfield as he set off on his mission as the country's newly elected President. He was to come back along those same train tracks barely five years later, carried from Washington to Springfield by train. I thought of a Tom Waits song lyric - "It was a train that took me away from here, but a train can't bring me home." In Lincoln's case though, the train did carry him both ways.

I was once again lucky in the location of my hotel in Springfield. My room was right across the street from the Lincoln Hotel which had an illuminated circle at its rooftop, painted with Lincoln's image. This medallion of gentle light was like a full moon watching over me. And once again, my place was just near enough to the tracks to let me be lulled by the rumblings of the freight cars through the night. That sound is as piercingly nostalgia-producing as a round of "Auld Lang Syne" - or "Waltzing Matilda" - or a distant bagpipe.

As I lay there, that long rolling through the night trailed a train of melancholy remembrances - of our 16th President - and of my own life. But at the same time, there was, as ever, something hopeful, reassuring in the sound. It promised places to go, more things to see, a pulling through to another morning. And so I fell into the same peaceful sleep I'd enjoyed in that distant realm of Revelstoke - myself made safe and fast in counterpoint to the ever onward moving ferrocarril… ferrocarril… ferrocarril…

Let Her R.I.P. - The Art of the Epitaph

I've seen many collections of witty or telling epitaphs, and I've known people who make a hobby of roaming cemeteries to find interesting epitaphs. Sometimes they make rubbings of epitaphs that give funny or historically enlightening send-offs, or that are on the gravestones of famous people. So when my parents died - first my father and then two decades later, my mother - I gave a lot of thought to epitaphs for them. I didn't want to simply have them lying their labeled with their expiration dates.

I think I managed  distinctive, arresting summations for both, summations they'd probably approve. But when I've visited at their separated graves (the cemetery didn't have adjacent plots available), I've found no sign that anyone has ever come over to take a rubbing. That's despite the fact that my father is in a high-traffic, high-visibility area of the cemetery, in a spot my sister-in-law, then a new mother, initially greeted with the enthusiastic relief of, "That's great! It's near the washrooms!" But even though at least one of my parents has such a prime location, no one ever seems to have noticed the epitaphs. No one has ever contacted me to inquire further about their meaning or applicability. So I'll tell the story of them here.

My father lies under the rather jaunty, enigmatic assertion:

The Bright Ones Can Stay Home

That derived from an instruction one of my college professors issued, and that became a byword and family joke among the three of us. I didn't go away to college. I attended the school that had sprung up just down the street from me. There, at what is now Chicago's Northeastern University, my math teacher decided to have a review day for the students who were still lagging.. She said that those who already knew the material needn't attend that class session. Then, less tactfully, she rephrased her instruction as, "The bright ones can stay home."

That had been the only major class I'd had that day, so I indeed stayed home - the whole day. When my father saw me lounging about the house, he was curious. He asked why I wasn't in class as usual. "Oh," I told him, "the teacher is having catch-up review. She said 'The bright ones can stay home.'"

It was one of the few times I ever saw my father laugh with genuine warmth - at something that wasn't simply the slapstick cruelty of a Three Stooges gouge-in-the-eye. He was laughing at the alacrity, and perhaps the downright chutzpah, with which I had assumed myself into that charmed circle of "bright ones." My mother soon caught the hilarity of it. It became a catch-phrase and family joke among us three. After that, whenever one of us was spotted shirking a duty or simply lazing about when there was work to be done, another of us was bound to chide, "The bright ones can stay home, eh?"

When my father died, I thought of our family joke again and realized it could have a larger encapsulating applicability for him. My father had been quite a gad-about in his youth. He'd worked briefly for Al Capone, designing and printing labels for the bottles of booze coming off Capone's distillery assembly lines. My father had been a minor bootlegger himself, greeted as the life of the party wherever he went. He partied all night, every night. He was a high roller living the high life.

But by the time I came along, several decades later, he had completely reversed course. His experience after the Roaring 20's dwindled to a beaten growl soured him on people. As soon as Prohibition ended, he was persona non grata among all his old pals. He realized how empty all those old associations had been. They'd never wanted him - only the booze he brought. He turned his back on going places and seeing people. He became something of a hermit. He was content to stay home in the circumference of our family printing business. Since we had our business attached to our living quarters, that meant he hardly ever traveled farther than the little candy-and-cigarette store at the end of our block.

Although he wouldn't have recognized or acknowledged any "exotic" philosophy such as Buddhism, he in effect became an advocate of the wisdom of staying home in contentment with and appreciation of whatever a person had in the here-and-now. Unlike most youths who at least initially want to fling themselves out into the larger world, I was generally disposed to follow that more inner path myself. Oh, after high school, I would occasionally become roused by a notion to go somewhere other. I once saw an invitation to Americans to attend college in Japan and I actually started to make serious plans. I got a book on the Japanese language and made lists of "things to take."

My parents would have supported any decision I made, but my father was a little deflating. He wondered why I would want to go all the way to Japan when there was still so much of Chicago I hadn't seen. When I would argue my case in favor of Japan, he would say, "Yes, but have you seen 55th and Halsted?" I really don't think he knew or had any interest in what was at that particular Chicago intersection. I think he just chose the spot at random, perhaps because that conjunction of number and name had a certain poetic ring to it.

I groaned, and continued to champion the advantages of Japan, but much more feebly. I could see his point. In the end, and with quite some relief at not having to go through the trouble of packing and departing, I did stay home and happily attended the college in my neighborhood. But "55th and Halsted" became another catch-phrase in our household, advanced whenever one of us started to entertain some infatuation with the far-flung, instead of pursuing a more deep, abiding familiarity with our own home ground.

So in the end, "The Bright Ones Can Stay Home" seemed the most apt way to summarize my father's last, best philosophy of life.

I'm not as pleased with the epitaph I finally settled on for my mother. It too has a certain summary aptness, but it has a cynical, sour cast that perhaps shouldn't be a person's parting shot to the world. I often think of having her stone re-carved with a more upbeat afterthought, but in the end, her stone will probably remain as it is.

My mother majored in languages at Northwestern University (which is east of the misnomer Northeastern I attended). She especially enjoyed her Spanish classes and the classical Spanish poetry that was assigned reading. She memorized some of the stanzas of Romantic poet Adolfo Becquer, and remembered them. In lieu of lullabies she would soothingly recite them to me years later when I was a child….

             "Volveran las oscuras golondrinas

              en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,

              y otra vez con el  ala a tus crystals -

              jugando llamaran."

Freely translated, that says, "The black doves will come to hang their nests on your balcony and will once again call to you, playfully tapping with wing on your windows."

I was moved almost to tears just a few years ago when (against anything my father would have wholly approved), I took a whirlwind tour of Spain. Our guide was a young woman, seemingly barely out of college. So I had no hopes of her having any familiarity with Bequer or with the Spanish writers my mother studied in the 1920's. But I was wrong! The young guide lit up the moment I mentioned Becquer's name - and she immediately started to recite in unison with me his poem about the lost love to which the doves were witness. When my mother died, I thought I would never hear those lines again - or in fact meet anyone with any memory of them. It certainly would be hard to find any young Americans who could recite whole poems by classic poets so readily ("The Dead Poets Society" notwithstanding). But perhaps they take a different educational approach in Spain - one that puts a slightly nationalistic emphasis on honoring their noted writers, even from centuries past, with remembrance of their words.

However, it was the last line of this Becquer poem, this "Rima" from the 19th century, that my mother invoked most often, not as lullaby but more as lesson. The English translation of that last line reads roughly, "Disenchant yourself of the idea that anyone will ever love you as I have loved you."

That might seem a cruel, even a psychotic thing to say to a young girl who is so eager, so hopeful of finding romantic love in the world. I can see any psychiatrists who might read this shaking their heads in dismay at what they'd probably interpret as signs of a Norman Bates mother with a cripplingly jealous attachment to her child. But it wasn't like that at all.

Well, perhaps there was just an iota of self-concern in my mother's occasional interjection of this bitter line from an old poem. She had a mild form of agoraphobia and doubtless was afraid that I would leave her, and she would have to struggle out into the terrifying world on her own.

But for the most part, she was just putting into words what I myself could perceive but might be too dangerously needy of companionship to acknowledge. She might mutter the words when she saw me inclined to pursue an indifferent youth who came late to our date, who honked his car horn hurrying me out to him rather than bestirring himself to come up to the door, and who gave every sign of only grudgingly buying me dinner if he was assured of my delivering what he inevitably wanted. Looking at this parade of calculating, appraising peers, I had to admit what so many foolishly refuse to admit - that unconditional love will be hard to find once you move outside the sphere of good parents. "Oh yes, he slaps me around, but I know that deep down, he really loves me." I was impressed with the destructive illogic of any such attitude early in life, by the reminder of the line from Becquer's poem.

The line might just as well have been delivered by my mother to the world at large though. She did everything effusively for free, while others were always bent over their calculators, figuring what they'd charge. She excitedly considered every potential guest as a State event - while, at best, they squeezed her in between other appointments. Little did they know how much they meant to her as they hurried out the door on their way to somewhere else.

So there her epitaph is carved, hiding its rue behind the original Spanish which I thought it unlikely any relative could decipher and resent:

Como yo te he querido, desengáñate - así - no te querrán

Then how about me? I think I might have settled on my own epitaph. Once again, it's a line provided by someone else. It was suggested to me years ago by Stuart Brent, Chicago's famous bookseller. Brent had his little shop, which often served as salon for the literati, on Michigan Avenue, part of the City's "Magnificent Mile." He became one of the last independent booksellers, holding his own against the chains, the mega-bookstores, and the warehouse operations. He did it by maintaining his personal interest - in every book and every customer.

Sometimes his habit of voicing his own, often crusty, opinions about his customers' reading preferences ran contrary to what most merchants would consider good business sense. When an acquaintance of mine once failed to find L. Ron Hubbard's then best-selling Dianetics anywhere in the store, he rather accusingly asked Brent why he didn't stock such a popular book. Brent roundly rebutted that he didn't want pseudo-scientific drivel like that taking up room on his shelves. However Brent finally relented and agreed to order a copy to satisfy my friend's persistent desire to read "that hack junk." Another, even more antagonistic exchange occurred when Brent called my friend to tell him his order was in, and my friend informed him that he hadn't been able to wait - that he had already bought the book elsewhere. In the wake of the verbal abuse that Brent then dished out, my friend never patronized Brent's store again in its fifty-plus years of existence.

I never quite made it plain, but frankly, I was on Brent's side in this scuffle. I felt on Brent's side in most things. While many of my peers were swooning over the Beatles, I became a Stuart Brent fan. He had a local weekly TV show devoted to book reviews. My mother and I would both watch the show faithfully.

If pinned down, we would have to admit that all his reviews sounded much alike. Whether he was reviewing what was then the latest book of social critique, Riesman's The Lonely Crowd,  or whether he was reviewing a classic such as Eliot's Middlemarch - Brent would trot out pretty much the same observations. He would simply use whatever book he selected for his morning talk as a hook on which to hang his dissatisfactions with modern society.

Brent would even work the same phrases into most of his reviews. He was sure to find in each book-of-the-week some support for his blasts against "mass culture," "group-think," and our current educational system intent on producing merely "educated fools." My mother and I, as alienated as we were from popular culture, reveled in these criticisms.

If Brent couldn't find direct support for his contrarian views in whatever book was under discussion, he would freely go off on a tangent. He always introduced these tangents in the same way. He would preface any digression with the fetching admission - "Apropos of nothing…"

Thinking back on those old TV reviews, I realized that Stuart Brent had handed me my epitaph on a platter. I've never really had a job, and certainly not a career. My school attendance was desultory at best since I mostly learned at home. Therefore, I've never felt had any strong affiliation with a school, a class, a team. I've never attended any religious services. I have mostly eschewed collecting things or having a hobby of any sort. I've generally lived beyond the pale, completely irrelevant to the worldly doings and lives of others. So the phrase will suit me perfectly:

Here lies Marlene Vorreiter

Apropos of Nothing

A Marriage Proposal

Many people like to make big ceremonies out of their weddings. All their creative energy and planning skills go into producing the Event. They place highest priority on coordinating colors, on designing place cards, on rallying musicians and photographers and ushers and bridesmaids into one big extravaganza.

I’m not that sort. If I should ever get married, I’d like the occasion to be as low-key as possible – a drop-in at the Courthouse. When I first read Shakespeare’s MacBeth, I was moved by the description of the way in which the Thane of Cawdor went to his death. Malcolm, King Duncan’s son, famously said of the purportedly traitorous Cawdor: 

Nothing in his life

Became him like the leaving it. He died

As one that had been studied in his death

To throw away the dearest thing he owed

As ’twere a careless trifle.

 

Not that I equate getting married with being executed (unlike what any number of stand-up comics would claim). But I liked the idea of doing momentous things simply, without fanfare. It seemed to me that a person couldn’t be very committed to taking a step if he needed a big production to mark the passage. That inflation of the act into extravaganza seemed as if it might be necessary to impress an otherwise luke-warm individual with the gravity of the proceedings. Indeed, in most cases, that could be the point of the ceremonies that most cultures, from the tribal to the most modern, make out of certain decisions. Something that might have been casual becomes carved in stone by the mammoth investment attached to it. After all the public hoopla, a person can’t easily back out of such a celebrated decision. After all those invitations, all those gifts – an individual feels committed to staying committed for a while at least.

Ah, but I never thought I would need that kind of external prod. I thought that when I loved, I would do so whole-heartedly, with so much intrinsic fervor, that I could make a trifle out of the ceremonial binding itself. Drop into the Courthouse for a second – and be bound forever. Take that one step forward and plunge into the infinite. Entering so merely into something so mammoth was the thrill for me.

I’m reconciled to the fact though that it’s different for most people. They want what at least initially seems like the fun of all that planning, and then they want the enforcement that a big planned event gives to their decision. But, as most talk show hosts preach to their Bridezilla (and sometimes Groomzilla) guests – there’s the danger of making the wedding, rather than the marriage, the point of it all. While they are minutely color-coordinating flowers and placemats, they overlook their partners completely. They know the ingredients they want in their California sushi rolls, but there’s so much they don’t know about the people with whom they’ll presumably be spending the rest of their lives.

If I were in charge, I’d correct that state of affairs with a simple expedient. I would require that everyone contemplating marriage be required to submit a biography of their prospective spouse before tying the knot. No biography – no marriage license. I would enforce this requirement with a special category of courthouse employees, perhaps called “Readers.” They would be given the task of reviewing the biographies submitted in contemplation of marriage, make sure they were earnest attempts, and, as far as possible, try to ensure that they were actually produced by the person signing off on them rather than by some paid proxy.

Although these government employees might be called “Readers,” I don’t mean that all the biographies would have to be written. Many people just aren’t good with words. Many couldn’t sufficiently read or write, and that’s OK. But a person could compose a song, get together a photo collage, or make a movie video illustrating their partner’s history. There’s a baby picture of Mary, segueing into a round-about video of the place where she was born and the first home she was brought to. There’s a picture of Michael standing scrawny and abashed among the beefier members of his high school swim team, segueing into a picture of the home gym his parents installed in their basement and that still exists there, a fine scaffolding for cobwebs.

In the process of creating these biographies, people might answer a lot of crucial questions about each other, questions that they oddly enough had not already thought to ask. Had his parents been poor and forced to lead a scrounging life, thereby making him all the more determined to buy the best of everything as soon as he got a chance? Would he now be inclined to want to make a triumphal, avenging display of wealth? Or alternatively, did that early experience impress him with a similarly penny-pinching habit? Did she grow up in a household of rowdy siblings, thereby leaving her determined to have a nice, quiet, childless household? Or alternatively, will she want to replicate the liveliness of that upbringing with a large brood of her own?

It’s amazing how often people enter into marriage without any sense of where their partners stand on these basic issues. The resulting disagreements can be the source of major rifts in marriages. But in the process of producing a thorough, earnest biography of a prospective partner, many of these fault lines can be detected early – and either reconciled, or result in wise dis-engagement.

Then I would impose the same requirement at the other end of marriage. Before a couple could be granted a divorce, I would require that each partner produce an up-dated biography of the other. This would make the people look at each other one last time. It would call for each partner to step outside of himself or herself for a while, to step outside the immediate anger and disappointment and consider the way the other person had come since the start of the marriage. Once again, “Readers” or “Reviewers” could be employed to try to insure as much as possible that honest attempts had been made to consider the other person’s history and point of view before a divorce would be granted.

There would be other benefits to requiring such biographical attempts before any marital rite of passage. It would give young people a reason to go more diligently about learning how to express themselves, whether in schools or as autodidacts. It would give learners a concrete, additional reason to master reading and writing, art and observation.

Rather than simply focusing on what kind of clothes they might like to wear at their wedding ceremonies, boys and girls could also be focused on how they might adequately prepare themselves to produce a biography of their future mates. Rather than just preparing themselves to get jobs, earn a living, and support a family, young people would realize they had the additional obligation of developing some expressive talent – something that would make them outward-looking, interesting and interested individuals. In the same way that the knowledge that they might be drafted into defending their Country once gave some boys an incentive to master certain skills – this projected requirement attached to getting married might encourage young people to prepare themselves in broader ways. It would give meaning and focus to their studies and provide an answer to the perennial grumpy question, “Why do I have to learn all this stuff about writing (or history, or grammar, or etc., etc.)?” The requirement of producing a biography would give a relevance to acquiring such understandings, and would encourage young people to develop some longer-range facility at expressing themselves, rather than simply day-dreaming a brief expertise in coordinating reception banners and bridesmaids’ dresses.

Again, people need not be aimed at producing Boswellian biographies. Large vocabularies and a way with words just might not be the way the minds of many individuals work. But almost everyone has some unique talent in some medium, some way of crystallizing their observations. So whether the “biography” they come up with is indeed a traditional Boswellian effort, or whether it’s a charm bracelet or a photo album – as long as it’s earnest, individual, and considered, it would qualify to grant them the marriage license, or, alas, the divorce decree.

But in any case, all the attention would no longer be compacted into the diamond presented at the altar. The requirement of a biography would spread an individual’s attention more broadly into the whole run of his or her life with another. It really would help accomplish what all the television talk show hosts try to accomplish with just their closing words of advice. It would encourage people to really look at their partners long-range, and not just preoccupy themselves with the one day of spectacle. It would encourage people to consider their marriages at large, and not just get tied into knots over the minutiae of their weddings.

 

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice in Wonderland - Alice again meets a Queen with whom she verbally spars. This time it's The Red Queen, a different sort entirely from The Queen of Hearts whom Alice encountered in Wonderland.

After the Red Queen declares herself to be over 100 years old, Alice objects that she can't believe that. She can't believe impossible things. In an often quoted rebuttal, the Queen says,

"I daresay you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

As I reviewed some of the pictures I've taken over the last years, I saw that in my morning walks around my house, my garden, and my neighborhood,  I had captured any number of things that - well, weren't actually impossible, but that were unusually lively and unlikely sights to see. I share six of them here:


                   

 

I once kept an array of stuffed toys on the hassock next to my couch. One morning, I was scrolling through pictures I had  stored on my camera, when I looked up. It seemed to me there were more stuffed animals there than I recalled having. Let's see, 1, 2, 3... One moved! It was a squirrel who had obviously come in through my cat's pet door to solicit peanuts from me personally. I caught the moment on camera and now I have a record of my own private E.T. - a real live alien who came in and camouflaged itself among my stuffed toys.



                                      

 

I saw this Cooper's Hawk on my gardening table one morning. It's feathers were being ruffled right and left by a strong breeze. Here the wind has turned the hawk into a stern traffic cop, directing the cars to "Keep to the right! I said - KEEP TO THE RIGHT!"

 





 

Oui Oui Enterprises, Ltd.

November 5, 2013

   

                                           

 Usually, it's businesses such as hair salons that have the clever, punning names. How often do you see a "Clip Joint?" But in this case, it was a distributor of port-a-potties who wins the title in my book for the cleverest name. It's "Oui Oui."

 

 

 

                                                           

This advice that the owners of a lost greyhound are giving - "Please Don't Chase" - can serve as good advice for life in general Don't chase your dreams; let them come to you. Otherwise - well, you can just picture the result. It would be a losing proposition.

 

This picture of young love walking down my block is not something you often see anymore in its springtime tenderness. I think the young man is even carrying the girl's books!

 

 

 

                                               

 

This sign sums up the human condition. We are all lost white kittens after a snow storm.





 

 

 

 

 



 

 

Be a Face, Not a Facilitator

A friend of mine, committed to homeschooling her son, recently brought me up short when she summarized her role by saying, “I’m only a facilitator. I believe that’s all parents should be – facilitators of their child’s learning.”

That general idea is often voiced in one form or another by both parents and teachers, but in homeschooling circles in particular. However, I’d rarely heard the attitude so bluntly stated. Usually it remains as a more tacit understanding of the ideal approach an adult should take toward children. When expressed that explicitly though, it hit me like a slap in the face. Despite my having been raised as a “life-learner” and my eagerness to advocate in favor of that philosophy - I realized that was one common interpretation of the parental role that I couldn’t support. It crystallized a disagreement I’ve probably had all along with any such completely hands-off approach to the parental/teaching role.

I don’t think parents and teachers should diminish themselves to the role of mere facilitators - for several reasons. First of all, the word “facilitator” is itself objectionable. It belongs with “finalizing,” utilizing,” maximizing outcomes,” and all the other empty box phrases that characterize business reports and totalitarian governments. No good writer would ever use such colorless word-cubes to tell a story, and no good parent should paint herself into a corner with such words.

Second, adopting the role of facilitator actually runs counter to what homeschooling is all about in a larger sense. By demoting themselves to the passive role of facilitators and elevating the child to the status of recipient of all this facilitation - parents once again make a special preserve out of the state of childhood. Childhood and adolescence become distinct phases which command special treatment. A divide is created with the facilitators on one side, and the facilitated on the other. The child is seen as the one whose needs must be served, whose interests must be catered to by adults. The adult becomes the server. Family life becomes all about the child. It forces the flow of attention in one direction only.

Being designated facilitators does indeed cast parents in a self-effacing role in one sense. However, at the same time, it grants parents a subtle foundation of self-importance. Parents now have a commanding platform of priorities. They can slip into a kind of busy-ness that their role authorizes. As appointed facilitators, they are officials. As such, they can officiously proceed to shape the world around them. They can swing into championing all sorts of causes and promoting all sorts of projects designed to “make sure my son is safe and able to realize his full potential.” They can work to enforce leash laws; check-up on the activities of all registered sex offenders in the area; put in speed bumps; keep the park basketball courts open extended hours; set up a food co-op; maintain a book exchange…” Any one of these projects may in and of itself have some merit, but taken together, they can add up to a mighty wind of pre-occupation.

Meanwhile, the adults’ preemptive role of facilitators seems to relieve the children themselves of ever having to be the guardians of other people’s hopes and dreams. The children aren’t encouraged to take any interest in adults’ lives. The job of facilitating steers the family away from simply, quietly facing each other, and from facing the anguish and wonder of the world together.

The main reason though that I object to defining the parental role as one of “facilitator” is that such a reduction is so awfully impersonal and downright dull. It sounds robotic and in fact is robotic. Perhaps it’s part of a jargon that many homeschooling parents automatically mouth without really meaning to reduce themselves to that status. It’s hard to believe that parents can actually be satisfied turning themselves into blanks under the mistaken belief that they are thereby doing the best for their children. More to the point, it’s impossible to believe that that’s what most children want of the adults around them.

If most children are anything like I was, they would choose the company of a joyously, bounteously self-proclaiming, madcap parent over the company of a passively facilitating parent any day. Most children would prefer an Auntie Mame to some stereotypical reference librarian. Children want to be taken along for the ride. They want an instigator. They want to tag along with the uncle who asserts his own enthusiasm for gathering mushrooms by moonlight, for building birdhouses, for restoring Edsels - rather than the uncle who would simply suggest reference materials in response to their passing interest in dinosaurs.

In the book and movie A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the child prefers her irresponsible, irrepressible father to her endlessly workaday mother. Even though her father too often reels off tipsily, unable to hold a steady job - he loves music and has a beautiful Irish tenor voice. By showcasing his own gift, he is lovingly able to inspire a lyric spirit in the girl. The girl finds this more valuable than her mother’s diligence at trying to keep food on the table and some semblance of respectability in their home.

That lesson about what children really want and need is actually almost a dramatic cliché. It pops up over and over again. In Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, Sook brings her little cousin along on her magically charged adventures gathering the ingredients for her annual fruitcakes.

The adult who forges a rebel right-of-way for herself and her child always has more appeal than the dutiful, managerial parent. Not only does the rebel win more of the child’s affection, but, more crucially, provides more of what’s essential for the child. Sometimes the eccentric has to be reined in a bit – but the lesson of these dramas is that such adult assertion should never be completely eliminated from a child’s life. The lesson is that everyone needs both bread AND circuses – if you define “circuses” not as simple sensationalism, but as a free-wheeling show that includes surrounding adults’ most extravagant, extraordinary talents and interests.

Of course I don’t mean to depreciate the value of holding a family together with responsible planning. I certainly don’t mean that any children should be left in the care of an unbalanced, potentially harmful adult with corrosive interests. I somewhat overstated my case in the above paragraphs in order to highlight the difference between a vivid, self-expressive individual and a shadowy, faceless facilitator. To some extent, one needs both personalities to foster a child into maturity. But a parent should never be “only” a facilitator.

Few children are Mozarts with a very specific, early genius that simply requires other people to get out of its way. Most people find their life’s work along some unintended path down which they were randomly propelled. So it helps to have some positive beacon of a person leading the way. Children want just such a person whose light they can merrily follow for some of the journey into new adventures. Children thrive on having such a trailblazer. They want someone who will chart an unpredictable, highly individual course through all the herding pressures that they’ll face. Children want someone with a capability and an enthusiasm they can respect. In short, they want a real live person to love.

This all has practical implications for how children might avoid compromising themselves even if they are compelled to attend school and be “taught.” This is important because, despite the growing number of homeschoolers, there seems to be so much more countervailing pressure from governments, politicians, and liberal reformers alike, to corral children into schools for longer and longer periods. Canadian officials have announced their intention to crack down on the parents of truants and to make homeschooling much more difficult. U.S. officials are everywhere advocating longer school hours and shorter summer vacations. Many are pushing for the elimination of summer vacations altogether. Every politician’s platform seems to include some pronouncement in favor of better schooling and much, much more schooling,

However, if children aren’t imbued with the idea that only their own interests should be facilitated, they can still find some value in attending school if that becomes an absolute requirement. Indeed, some of the features of schools that homeschoolers most often object to, might in fact become some of the most rewarding aspects of the enforced experience.

Take tests for example. I know that to most homeschoolers, tests are anathema. However, looked at another way, without any parental pressure to rank or reward children, tests can be a way of getting to know teachers better. Tests can bring children out of themselves and provide encouragement to them to look for the individuality of their teachers.

I was largely homeschooled in the decades before there was even such a word or a concept. I only went to school enough to keep the truant officers away from our door. My parents encouraged me not to take the tests seriously, not to spend too much time studying for them. In fact, they encouraged me to get “D’s,” or to outright fail as often as possible. They pointed out that either way, at the age of 16, I could quit school (the limits of compulsory schooling at that time in my State) and be done with the farce. But I wanted to do well on the tests, not as a way of proving and flaunting superiority over my classmates, but for a host of other reasons. I believe these reasons were legitimate, and strike at the heart of my objections to the parent/teacher-as-facilitator model.

Of course there usually is a fugitive impulse to see how well one might do on a test in comparison with others. Who can resist the questions on TV game shows such as “Jeopardy,” or “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” You pass through a room where one of these shows is playing, and you have to stop to see if you know the answer to the next question – and if the contestant knows the answer.

One speaker at a recent homeschooling conference said that, in his experience raising both boys and girls, the boys in particular looked for occasions where they could compete, where they could jockey for position, be ranked, and test themselves against the capabilities of others. He noticed how this interest carries over for many men into an abiding interest in sports statistics. Who made the most RBI’s in 1952? Who has the highest batting average over all? So possibly not all occasions for testing oneself and for seeing where one fits in a ranking of “best” and “most” are uninvited.

However, that ratings impulse wasn’t a large part of my reason for wanting to do well on tests. I viewed tests more like fitted sheets on a bed. They gave me a sense of completion and accomplishment. I wanted something that would let me know when I’d sufficiently completed a certain step and could move on to the next step. Fitted sheets are fun, whereas the top sheets always leave you with a vaguely unsettled feeling. It always seems as if those open-ended sheets could be re-positioned to better effect. So tests are a way of rounding off a chapter of study.

More than that though, I felt that by exceling at tests, I demonstrated respect for the subject matter my teachers had chosen to dedicate their lives to, and I thereby demonstrated respect for the teachers themselves. It would have been contemptuous to blow off a geography test just because I felt somewhat more interested in studying caterpillar metamorphosis at the moment.

Of course, it was a matter of striking a balance. I didn’t want a school’s curriculum to monopolize all my time and dictate all my priorities. But neither did I feel it would be right for me to always put my immediate interests ahead of my teachers’ interests. It did me no harm to at least occasionally lend myself to the interests of others, rather than always insisting that they simply facilitate my interests.

However, my motives were larger than merely wanting to be dutifully polite and considerate of others. A college anthropology professor summed up my feelings beautifully in his introductory lecture. As ever, the controversy over evolution was simmering. A significant minority of students at the university were religious fundamentalists who thought it was wrong to believe that humans were in any way related to apes, or to believe that the history of our species extended back millions of years.

This professor flatly said that he wasn’t going to devote any class time to a consideration of religious doctrine though. He said he would only lecture on classic Darwinian evolution, and that’s what we would be tested on. He would expect us to answer those test questions accordingly. But he reminded us that being required to answer the test questions according to the information presented in his lectures did NOT mean that we had to agree with those answers. Answering “correctly” on the test would not enforce conformity or compliance within us. The test was merely designed to prompt us to listen. Whatever our private beliefs might continue to be, all this teacher asked was that we demonstrate we had listened.

That was it! That summed up the real value of tests. They ask that we listen. That’s the point that so many opponents of all tests miss. Those in the homeschooling movement tend to be especially critical of tests because they say they require students to “regurgitate” answers. But it isn’t regurgitating. It’s listening!

That’s a legitimate requirement or expectation to at least occasionally have of young people. It could only be a good thing to encourage a habit of listening. And that expectation shouldn’t be limited to young people. It would probably be a better world if adults knew that after every cocktail party, after every conference – they’d be tested on some of the more heartfelt things that people had said to them. Such a requirement wouldn’t force people to change their opinions; but it would encourage them to listen so that they’d be accessible to broadening their outlook. Again, I’m drawing a bit of a cartoonish caricature of my argument in order to make my point that being asked to listen doesn’t necessarily involve a curtailment of one’s own creativity or freedom.

This was why I couldn’t sympathize with my classmates when, after any test, many of them would predictably complain, “What did he expect us to be? Mind-readers?”

My private answer to that question was, “Yes! Exactly! If schools and teachers have any value at all – it’s to give us a chance to exercise our talents as mind-readers!”

I felt that was the ultimate reason for giving and taking tests - those tests personally written by the teacher or those which the teacher at least had a hand in writing. Taking tests and doing well on them could be a way of honoring a parent/teacher by listening to him, and more than that, by understanding him. If it’s worthwhile to walk through a nature preserve and become acquainted with the plants and animals there, then it’s equally worthwhile to walk into a classroom and become acquainted with the other people there, especially with the teacher who makes the classroom his or her natural preserve. If it’s good to commune with nature, it’s just as good to commune with human beings in a classroom. The challenge of the in-house test was to know the teacher or teachers in the department so thoroughly, that you knew their particular interests and priorities, and therefore could in fact predict what questions they might put on the test. Doing this sort of mind-reading wasn’t a matter of making oneself a teacher’s pet. It was a matter of demonstrating how earnestly one had gotten in touch with another person.

That’s why I didn’t mind lectures either. Lectures are generally another anathema for homeschoolers and in fact for most educational reformers. For a long time now, there’s been constant pressure for teachers to get away from lecturing and toward making their classrooms more interactive, more child-centered. But I only met one or two teachers who were able to pull off that high-sounding theory and make it worthwhile in practice. For the rest, their attempts at turning the classroom into a conversation open to all ended in a sort of cacophony of voices and the teachers soon drifted back into constrained and disguised forms of lecturing. But I had never minded out-and-out lectures in the first place. I relished them.

Again, because I had never bought into the teacher/parent-as facilitator model, I came to school to learn the person, with the presumption that each individual teacher would have something novel of their personality to present. I came to class as I would read a book or look at a painting. I saw it as an expression of the teacher’s personality. So I looked forward to these crafted presentations, just as I would look forward to opening the pages of a book.

Some teachers’ lectures veered in the direction of being sensational tell-all autobiographies. They dragged in all their obsessions, prejudices, and cruelties, and put them on display. Other teachers stuck more strictly to the subject matter at hand, and only gave more personal glimpses of themselves through tantalizing keyholes in the course material. One such college physics professor I knew stood back looking with a strange sort of sadness at the number pi he had written on the board, with its many places after the period and with the possibility of stretching that series of digits into infinity, without resolution. Looking at that number and its endless expandability, he said, more softly to himself than to us, “To me, the messiness of pi is the greatest proof that there is no God.”

I had always liked this teacher for his stoic reserve. After I caught that cast-off insight into his mind, I liked him even more. After that, I came with special eagerness to his lectures every morning. The following year, I learned that he had died during the summer of Hodgkin’s disease. They said he had been suffering from the disease for some time and knew, what was in those days, its fatal prognosis. Then I understood the sadness in his voice when he’d considered the messiness of pi.

So from kindergarten on all the way through the years of compulsory schooling - while I hated the confining concept of school, I liked lectures. They were the only chance I got to concertedly get to know people outside my family circle. Most other social venues were no good at all for that. Most social events just afforded a milling-around chance to catch snatches of insight into other people. At parties, I gleaned only fragments of opinion and personality heard through the background blare of TV and stereo. I never got a satisfactory sense of who another person was amid the myriad of distractions. I never felt I’d been allowed a concerted insight into the mind of another human being there.

So for all its oppressive elements, school provided the only entree I had into the minds of different people,, and that came mostly through the lectures the teachers gave and the way they presented the course material. That’s why I never had the complaint against the school curriculum and teacher lectures that many of my classmates and their parents had. I’d hear those complaints over and over again. So many parents would protest that since their Johnny was exceptionally bright, the class work just wasn’t challenging enough for him. (As is the case in Garrison Keillor’s mythic town of Lake Woebegone, it seemed that everyone’s children were always above average.) The parents (and Johnny himself) would protest that Johnny already knew “all that stuff.” He already knew the alphabet; he already knew long division. So he was being bored to the brink of juvenile delinquency by having to sit through it again. He was wasting his time unless the teachers moved him along to more advanced material.

That was never my problem because I never viewed school as existing for the purpose of teaching me subject matter. If I wanted to learn subject matter, I could go to the library and read a book. No, to the extent I attended school at all, I attended in order to learn people, not subjects. Hearing about long division for the third time would never have bored me, because I came to learn, not the subject matter, but the person presenting it. And every teacher had a special way of bringing the subject forward.

Would I have refused to listen to Tony Bennett sing a song because I’d already heard Barbra Streisand sing that song? Would it be a waste of time to hear Beethoven’s Fifth performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra just because I’d already heard a recording of the Symphony with Leonard Bernstein conducting? Would I have been right to dismiss a Van Gogh painting of sunflowers just because I’d seen a floral painting by Monet? Obviously not. The value of each such presentation lies in the unique interpretation given it by the different individual artists.

And so, the ideal parent/teacher is not a passive facilitator of a child’s interests. Just the opposite. The ideal parent/teacher is an artist - someone who can express himself vividly and humanely through his command of his medium – whether that medium is music, paint – or a presentation of the facts about long division. It’s someone who can expand the child beyond his own self-interest.

The movie No Country for Old Men ends with a sort of solemn soliloquy delivered by Tommy Lee Jones in the character of the local sheriff. Jones talks about a dream he had, a dream in which he and his father are riding together on horseback through a rough and cold country. After a little distance, the father rides on ahead through a pass. But Jones doesn’t feel abandoned. He knows his father is riding ahead to start a fire somewhere in the distance. He knows that when he catches up, the warmth and comfort and light of the fire will be there, waiting for him. And his father will be there, waiting for their togetherness.

Jones’ character was probably meant to project this dream as a metaphor for death. But I equally interpret it as an expression of that longing after someone who is the ideal parent/teacher. I was lucky enough to have parents like that. They were not faceless facilitators. They didn’t see their role as a scramble to accommodate and to cater to my every passing proclivity. Instead, they were individuals secure in their own knowledge and interests. They rode ahead and lit a fire – a fire that drew me forward – forward into an understanding of them and of the landscape we inhabited together.

He'd Like Me - Now That I'm Old

I was almost born a few decades before my actual birth date, and I almost had a different father. That is, but for a sleepy Justice of the Peace, my mother would have married another man. That would have made me much older now, and in fact, I’d be a different person entirely. As the cosmic stand-up comedian can tell you - so much depends on timing.

When my mother dabbled in post graduate work at Columbia in the 1920’s, she met a dashing scion of those “Roaring” years. He was Cleland van Dresser, son of the noted American illustrator William van Dresser. He would pick my mother up for dates in a fancy car (I picture a Bugatti) and drive her out to his family’s summer estate on Long Island. Since his father had made such a success as an illustrator, the van Dressers could afford every luxury. My mother was attended to by maids when she was a guest at the house. It was a Great Gatsby kind of life.

The van Dressers were loving parents, but there was one thing Cleland had trouble prevailing on his father to do for him. He wanted his father to do a portrait of my mother (the woman who would become my mother). His father was reluctant. First of all, he was busy with other commissions. He was illustrating a book by Jack London. He was illustrating books his wife was writing. He was assigned to do covers for McClure’s and American magazines. But the real reason for his reluctance was my mother herself. He said quite frankly that even though she was a pretty girl - she had no character. He said he preferred to draw older people - people who showed life’s weathering. He said my mother’s face and hands were too bland. That critique rather smote my mother, because she regarded herself as being more than just a pretty face. She thought her looks were already at that young age at least interesting, if not downright enthralling.

But Cleland persisted. “Pleas, Papa. Please!” And finally William relented. He’d do a charcoal drawing of her. That medium was his specialty.

He had my mother pose in the fashionable flapper clothes of the day, draped languidly, loosely. He drew her hands resting languidly over the arm of her chair, over her purse. Van Dresser was famous for his ability to draw hands. Those are the most difficult features to draw. Most artists avoid them. Many commissioned Renaissance portraitists would charge by the hand. You can tell how rich a subject was by the number of hands visible on those canvasses done in the 1500’s and 1600’s. Two hands – a veritable king. One hand – a wealthy member of the nobility. No hands – a minor burger with pretentions.

Van Dresser’s rendering of my mother’s hands proved to be especially compelling. The whole portrait relaxes the viewer into repose, a contemplative detachment from all the busy-ness of this world. That was the kind of demeanor most admired in women then. Women were considered attractive if they had a center of quietude. The ideal wasn’t the running, jumping, ever-active woman ubiquitous in modern ads. Back in the 1920’s, it was the becalmed woman who sold you.

 

                                             

That kind of appealing lassitude came naturally to my mother. She was never one to seek the action of any playing field. However she did bestir herself to do some properly 1920’s-style madcapping with Cleland around New York. After they had known each other only a matter of weeks, they decided on the spur of the moment one night – to get married. They sought out the home of a Justice of the Peace in the boonies of Long Island. It’s possible that the formalities of preliminary licenses and blood tests weren’t necessary then. They seemed to have some expectation of actually being married on the spot. But it was not to be.

Like in some movie, the Justice was roused at that late hour from his sleep and, looking down from his bedroom window, told them to come back in the morning. He said he was not performing any ceremonies at that time of night. He couldn’t be coaxed. The two turned away from the house in the woods. Hansel and Gretel got a reprieve from what might have been too unprepared a venture into the forest.

By morning, their madcap enthusiasm had evaporated. When my mother’s semester of study was over, they parted friends with a cheerio good-bye honk from Cleland’s Bugati, or Stutz Bearcat, or whatever. My mother went back to her parents’ home in Chicago, and almost three decades later - had me. Another time, another place.

I didn’t know, until I just recently did researches on the Internet, into what ethereum Cleland might have evaporated. I still only know very little about him, tidbits of his life such as that he eventually settled in Florida and wrote occasional hunting and fishing pieces for the local newspaper. Not a life that my mother would have blended into very happily. Although the life she ended up in was in many ways even less likely and less congenial to her nature.

Once I got started speculating on “whatever became of…” though, it was hard to stop. I looked up the name of “van Dresser” in the White Pages. There was of course no more Cleland by this time, but there was a “William” listed in a southern state. Since it’s not a common name, I took a flier and phoned that van Dresser. A machine answered and I started babbling about trying to trace relatives of Cleland van Dresser and his father, a famous illustrator from the early 1900’s. I said I had a portrait of my mother done by William and I was just curious…

At that point a man picked up the phone. With a nasal, rather disaffected tone, he said, “Yeah?” I continued to babble into that uninviting vacuum. I asked if he might be any relation to the illustrator who’d been a sort of early Norman Rockwell. As I spooled out an increasingly incoherent motive for my call, I could hear a woman swearing savagely at what sounded like a ravening pack of children in the background. From the reverberations that her vituperations were creating, I gathered that the family was occupying rather tight quarters, possibly a trailer in a trailer park.

I thought these couldn’t be the descendents of the William van Dresser I was researching! If they had been, surely the phone would have been answered by a butler with a British accent, and I would have heard the tinkling of a silver tea service in the background. I started to make my apologies and ring off.

But just then the man caught me up. He said, “Yeah, well, I dunno. I got some pictures stored here somewhere. They’re drawings. They’re all like done in charcoal. They’re pictures of people sitting – and then there are pictures outdoors, of lots of trees and stuff like that. I dunno. I think some aunt or maybe my grandmother gave ‘em to me. I never really looked at ‘em.”

Yes! Yes! Charcoal was van Dresser’s preferred medium! And besides doing portraits of seated subjects such as the one he’d done of my mother, he also often did illustrations of rural scenes. On the Internet I’d seen that some of the pictures of his going up for auction were scenes of willows by a riverbed, of maples by a stream. But how could a branch of the family have become so divorced from such an illustrious past? And how could they have passed from refined Long Island wealth to trailer park squalls and squalor - from F. Scott Fitzgerald to William Faulkner, in such a relatively short span of time? Of course the Long Island world of Gatsby was, in its way, as corrupt and mean as the world of the Snopes Family of Yoknapatawpha County. But the van Dresser Family’s quick transition from one to the other seemed odd, even inexplicable.

But now that I was sure I had legitimate descendents of THE van Dresser, I explained a little further. I underscored how famous William van Dresser had become and how any cache of his originals would likely be worth quite a bit of money.

The man warmed to me a little then, but not as much as I would have liked. However, we ended the conversation with my promising to follow up. I said I’d send more information explaining how nearly I missed being a cousin of his, and telling more of what I knew of his ancestors.

I plunged into this completely irrelevant project with gusto. It got me out of doing the hard work of writing my own Great American Novel – and I have always been up for any excuse to postpone that job. I researched the van Dresser Family more thoroughly than I’d ever researched my own. I found that William wasn’t the only notable in the family. His wife Jasmine got quite a bit of critical acclaim for the children’s books she wrote, which William illustrated using Cleland as a model for the Tom Sawyer-like character featured in a series of them. William also had a sister who gained some fame as an opera singer. I found Marcia van Dresser even has an archive devoted to her in the New York Public Library. It’s a repository of her correspondence with a veritable Who’s Who of the glitterati of the first half of the 1900’s. Marcia had also been one of the opera stars whose pictures were featured on decks of playing cards distributed by a soap company as high-brow advertisements for their product. I also learned that she might well have been ahead of her time in having a female consort, none too discretely - an actress become secretary/companion named Gertrude Norman. The two lived together for the years they were in London, charming the haute monde there.

I didn’t know if I should include this last bit of information in what I sent off to the man on the phone. It seemed possible he might be a religious fundamentalist who wouldn’t take too kindly to hearing that some ancestor of his had been a pioneer for Gay Rights. But in the end, I enveloped the whole of it, the respectable and the experimental, the Internet pictures, copies of microfilm articles, and my own elaboration of what I knew of the family – and sent it all off in a plump package to the latter-day William van Dresser.

When I hadn’t heard anything from him in a couple of months, I called his number once more. This time, it seemed an actual person, not a machine, answered the phone. I could hear cautious breathing on the other end of the line, but no salutation was offered. So I launched into another flurried summary of who I was – “the woman who contacted you a while back about your ancestor William, the artist, who drew the charcoal pictures you have. I wonder if you might have received…”

At that point, the line went dead.

Oh, I’d done it again. I am the perennial carrier of TMI – too much information! I’m always hurtling in from outer space, crashing leaden lumps of meteoric excess into other people’s back yards. But I had accomplished a lot for myself. I had postponed doing the hard work of any creative writing. I had learned something about the life and times of the man who had almost been my father. And I had had an entertaining run of it. As with most of my offerings, I had ended up giving them only to myself. Me – the eternal sole recipient.

As I tucked my copies of all this other-family history away, I remembered that smarting affront my mother had received at the hands of the artist. Too bland indeed! She had never forgotten that insult. When my mother was old and ill in her eighties, I remember one evening how she spread her hands out in front of her on the kitchen table. Surveying them with all their liver spots and wrinkles, she remarked with a sense of having finally achieved a rueful triumph – “Van Dresser would like me now.”