Tarmac Meditations

Writing Before Daylight: Dreams of Fathers and Sons

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When I’m writing, like I was this morning, I am reminded that my father would probably hate the whole thing. Other people did that. Writers are important, but you, son… — he would have left the rest unsaid. He would have dismissed the writing, the words themselves, the subject matter, my attitude, my not having a real job, a useful job, all of it, every bit of it.

I imagine how he would raise an eyebrow at my talking about it even though I’m good at it, even though I work hard at it, even though I work at it every day just like a job. It is a job, a hard job. It’s my work. He would have dismissed all this as just plain fuzzy-headed.

He used to tell me when I was growing up that it didn’t matter what I did, just that I did my best at it. He was a guy who was good with his hands, could fix anything. In his world there wasn’t screen door or a window that couldn’t use a little “adjustment.” With all that, he was also a PhD, a community organizer, a teacher.

He used to say that I could be anything, a carpenter if that’s what I wanted, a plumber, just so long as I could saw straight and level on the level. I came to see that as a code. Maybe it was the remnant, or more accurately, the defining attitude of men who lived through the Great Depression. I figured it as personal shorthand for “you can be anything you want son just so long as you are a lawyerdoctorteacher with salarybenefitsreputation and a retirement package.” I hated that.

He is gone now. I get up everyday, long before sunrise, at just about the same time he did, to go to work. When the words are flowing, and even when they are not, I sometimes think he might be all right with all this writing stuff. When I get it right, I cut a straight line and get it level on the level. I think he would see that and I think he might smile a little at the possibility that I would be alright in the world, that he had done okay.


Photo Credits

“M. Mickey Lebowitz PhD” Photo provided by  Michael Lebowitz


War Story

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Part I

When the war came we all left home. Some of us joined the army and went to Vietnam. Some of us stayed in college and went to law school. Some of us went to Canada or stayed hidden away in the cracks. Most of us came back, but we were not the same as before. Some of us left and never came back. The war changed everything for all of us. Along the way we found out that the dead don’t change.

My friend Ira and I dreamt of glory and death while we played war. When we were six, seven years old we saved the world from under the dining room table. I carried the Republican flag south of Teruel; he died in a hail of Franco’s fascist fire. No Passerans! we said to anyone who would listen.

Ira and I held the line in the snow at Bastogne; we stormed ashore at Tarawa, died inside at the gates of Buchenwald. We rode with Stonewall Jackson at Fredericksburg and Teddy Roosevelt on San Juan Hill.

We died with glory; we killed for peace. We were American sons of American fathers who had taught us what we needed to know. We made the world safe for democracy, safe for truth, justice and the American Way in 1953.

I was playing pool in an upstate bar — Swat’s, it was called — when an old man started in on me about the hair and the beads and the music. Grow up boy, it’s a man’s world, that’s the way it is, that’s the way it always has been, always would be…men go to war, and just who the hell was I to think I had the right to change that.

I felt like I always felt in those days, like I was nowhere, like I was no one who mattered much. Like I was just so much cannon fodder.

“Eight ball in the side pocket,” I said.

I saw Ira again in March of 1968. We were on a green Army bus at 5 a.m. We were on our way to Fort Hamilton to take our draft physicals. The draft call was 68,000 that month, the largest of the Vietnam war. The bus was crowded, but we recognized each other. We didn’t speak. There wasn’t much to say. No one was saying much of anything.

It was the first day of the rest of our lives.

Ira and I went through the physical together. We shared a laugh at the absurd quality of it, the glimpse of things to come. There were the screamers and the raving fags, the fierce warriors ready to die for God and country. These were the same guys who were sharing piss for the urine test because they couldn’t piss in public.

A platoon of sergeants carried us forward, yelling, berating, full of disgust, hurrying us from station to station so we could stand in line. After the first couple of hours most everyone was talking about the war and how this physical really sucked.

Some were ready to fight because that’s what you did or their fathers did or because the Judge said so. Most of us were there because our time had run out. Before anything else could happen in our lives, we needed to deal with this thing; with this long, dreaded, morning.

We were odd companions, full of false pride and bravado. We didn’t know it at the time but we were very young and very scared. Six hours later we got back on the bus.

Ira and I got off the bus in front of the Draft Board and stood in the freezing rain. After awhile, we shrugged and said good luck. He got into a yellow Valiant and drove west along Flushing Boulevard. It was 11 a.m.

I went home and packed my things. I called Susie Hoffman, a college friend who was living in the city. We got together and started to drink. Eventually, we tried to have sex. She was uncertain, almost unwilling, like she always was with me. I was too drunk to care. We drank until there was no more whiskey, no more cocaine, no more time. We were not friends when we said goodbye.

I left for Canada in the morning. I planned on staying there a short time and taking things as they came. Thirty-three years later I came home.


Part II

I was in Washington last Christmas Week and I made it a point to go to the Vietnam Memorial at sunrise. I thought it would bring some resolution, some closure. Maybe I was looking for absolution.

Red was patrolling the Wall when I got there. “Name is Red on account of I got all this red hair, you see,” he said when he introduced himself. He was nearly bald, but he could smile.

We started talking.

He told me he would have gone to Canada…too.

Instead, he did three tours in-country. Now he has PTSD and is a retired firefighter in treatment.

Could he help me find what I was looking for, he asked?

I told him I was counting off 12 weeks of basic, then maybe a couple of weeks of leave and then some time to get assigned in-country, say, October ’68. Then I added in 13 months, the standard Vietnam tour of duty. I told him how I had started counting the names in each month, how I was doing my own personal body count. I wanted to see how many there were, figuring, just for the hell of it, what my chances might have been, checking out whether or not I would have been my own childhood hero.

“Pretty sick?” I said.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said. “See anybody you know?”

Ira died in the Ashau Valley, in March of ’69. Outside of Currahee Ta Ba. We were 23.

Red and I walked over to the “Linc”, as he called it. The sunrise through the mist made it seem…holy. The Lincoln Memorial stood quietly in the rising light, its weathered stone bearing witness to its majesty.

Red said goodbye and wished me luck. He strode back to the Wall, walking point, it seemed to me. I went up the long steps, past the signs that said it was closed, over to the wall where Lincoln’s words “With malice toward none, and charity for all…” were bare, stark in the low light.

I had seen them first as a 6-year-old, and many times since, although not for many years. “With malice toward none…” said I, out loud.  The words echoed through the empty memorial, down the broken years to those days so long ago.

Then came tears and later, silence.


Part III

No more made-up heroes for me. I came down to these nowhere hills near Brown Grass, Texas to start over. Childhood is long gone now and much of what came after drifted away in the smoke of lost rooms, in a parade of uncertain mornings on the Northwest rain coast.

I have done what I’ve done. I’ve run for cover until the skies rained down blood, lived as if I were Death, walking in Dante’s eternal cold. Somewhere over the rainbow, they say, it’s always paradise. I say if you’re looking for paradise, ask any junkie.

I have become who I am, who I set out to be when I started down the road to meet my fate — or was I looking to find my destiny? It doesn’t really matter I suppose. When I think of that six-year-old’s dreams of doing right, of how they went so wrong, I know now that they are better left under an ancient gate-leg table. I still have the table and sometimes, when I’m not looking, I have the dreams.


Photo Credits

“Crack troops of the Vietnamese Army in combat operations against the Communist Viet Cong guerillas.”

“Fort Hamilton, Nov 2, 2008” fonchis @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“Vietnam Memorial”, Tommy Canu Hearme, The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, The Wall-USA

“Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool” Wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License


Photographer’s Reflection

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Minnesota Morning

Photography, it is said, tells painting what it should not, what it cannot do.

This photo was taken  shortly after sunrise on a lake shore in northern Minnesota. On the shore that is implied to the left there was a fiery orange streak in the water rolling ashore, an accident of the sun’s angle and the absence of fog. Equally on side of the lake to the west (the right) the fog was thick and the lake glass like. The reflection of the boat, this perfect reflection, seemed more a painting than a true life image. And in fact this is not what my eye saw. What I saw as I turned and set up to take the picture was grey fog and green reeds and two boats at rest under the lightening  morning sky to the west. It all suggested a good day of fishing ahead. What the camera saw is what you see here, probably, certainly, an accident of white balance and angles. But here is the thing about what is and what can be. The camera saw what I, unconsciously, wanted to see, because it felt that way: a painting by Winslow Homer, a Matisse blue,  a quiet, surreal  mindscape where all was possible, where everything was in its proper place; hommage to childhood’s memory of a place occupied by happy elephants and talking monkeys, a place long gone but apparently still with me.

Dark Roast

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Some days. Like today. Up before the alarm, rain sluicing down the west windows, a chilly morning in the Pacific Northwest. Spring. I go into the kitchen and start making my coffee. Everyday I make the same choice; that is, I decide whether or not to use the drip filter, the French press or the stove top espresso thing. Most mornings I go with the filter. Lately I have been grinding a pound of the strong stuff – Dark French – when I buy it at the market, so as not make an ungodly amount of noise when I start the coffee process at home. Did I mention that I get up most mornings at three thirty or earlier?

Once the coffee is measured into the filter, after a ritual of opening cupboard doors in order, taking down the paper filters, the requisite flick of the wrist to open the filter and the out-loud counting of double tablespoons, I turn to the sink, grab the ugly plastic cup that holds exactly the right amount of water, fill it, turn back to the machine, fill the tank and close the top. I hit the switch and turn to the freezer top of my refrigerator in order to get a couple of slices of “good” bread. Once I have my hands on the bread slices, I put them in the toaster on the island across from the coffee machine, put the dial up to eight and turn back to the refrigerator.

I take out the half and half. These days this comes from a local dairy operation which claims — but for the USDA Organic rules — their old-fashioned dairy farm would be certifiably organic. Whatever. They are local and cheaper,  and seem to be pretty tasty and easily available. I put the half and half on the counter top near the toaster, turn back to the refrigerator and grab the butter, carefully jammed into a ramekin for the memories of France and a long ago romance it suggests. With my other hand, I grab some jam made by a local farmer.

The toast pops, the coffee bubbles through, the kitchen smells of bread and coffee – pungent, reminiscent, inviting, earned. I put half and half into the hand-painted coffee cup that has followed me from that long ago romance and pour the dark roast home. I butter the toast lightly and spread a little jam on it, carefully, like each time is the first time. I slice the toast in halves and put it on another relic of France gone by.

Most mornings I sit at the table in the kitchen and look out the window to the west. This morning it is streaked with rain; the mist in the valley plays ghostly with the cedar and the spruce. The valley lights are circled and diffuse, the mill far off bellows smoke into the wet night sky like a dragon in search of a knight of the realm. It is peaceful here, in the dark. Quiet. It is morning, my time of day.

Today I remember that a few years ago I had just moved into a small place, a coach house with one big wood-paneled room and a kitchen and bathroom on the other side of the center wall. It too was a quiet place, off the road, set back among the Post Oaks and the Elms. I had just come through a long and heart-rending process wherein I gave up pretty nearly everything I had ever done, left everyone I knew, moved out of town, out of state, out of the country, to take a run a new start.

I was worn out, broke, jobless and clean.

I found myself just up the road from a store with an enormous pig on its sign. A chain supermarket that I had thought only existed in Eudora Welty or Barbara Kingsolver novels, yet there it was. I went down there after I unpacked my one suitcase and began to take stock, and stock up for the road ahead. Coffee was the first priority, but then I remembered that I did not have my assortment of pretentious high-priced coffee apparatuses. So what to do? I discovered, hiding in the back of the cupboard over the sink, a Mr. Coffee machine. The kind I used to howl at, as if anyone would ever use THAT to make coffee. But that’s what it had come to – so me and my new best friend, Mr. Coffee, began to get acquainted.

The machine didn’t change the fact that being new in a town with no coffee shops – not a Starbucks for 40 miles, and no good coffee immediately available – meant I was going to have reinvent my morning routine. I found some Fog Buster from San Francisco for six bucks a pound, ground. I went looking for “good” bread, artistic loaves, and found Franz white bread and a stray Orowheat whole wheat. The half and half came straight from the industrial complex outside of town. There was a jar of jam and a plastic container of whipped Land O’ Lakes butter in the fridge, a gift from the former tenant.

The next morning, after a ghastly, nightmare-filled sleepless night, I went into the kitchen, plugged in Mr. Coffee, pulled out the Fogbuster, eyeballed the measurement, filled the tank, put the toast in the toaster and waited. Eventually all things came to pass: the coffee brewed, the toast toasted, the whipped butter thing spread, the jam layered, the knife cut the halves and an awfully ugly but very serviceable plate carried the “first breakfast” to the table, which was in fact the very desk at which I sit right now.

A spring rain came hard out of the North, pounding rhythm on the red tiles.  Familiar and warm, it was also forlorn, the sound of something breaking apart, or maybe it was a sound of something healing. Time would tell.

The paned windows were streaked, the Post Oaks lovely, quiet in the rain. I could smell the coffee and the toast in the morning air. The room empty of nearly any familiar thing took on a different tone. It wasn’t six-dollar-a-loaf Sourdough made by an ancient recipe; it wasn’t Dark French roasted Arabica from Colombia or Sumatra; it wasn’t organic sweet butter from the cows just over the hill. What it was though, was my breakfast, the first in the new house, in the new land if you will, on the first day of the rest of my life – or so it seemed.

There was nothing familiar out there waiting for me. It would be a long day of finding meetings and learning the street names. It would be filled with false starts and wrong turns, some low-level swearing and a moment of recognition in the eyes of a stranger. It would be the beginning. If I did the footwork, stayed true to the possibility that I could survive the worst I had done to myself, then I would have another cup of coffee tomorrow morning, butter the whole wheat lightly, put a layer of jam on it and get on with it. It wasn’t much; in fact, it was nothing at all. A cup of cheap coffee, a couple of pieces of toast and jam, an early morning promise in a cracked cup. But it was mine and it felt like a true thing.

This morning the taste of it, the feeling of it comes back to me. The coffee is much better; the bread too. The view is longer and trees outside are large and evergreen. The mountains to the west are boundary to ocean and endless tide. Some days, despite the changes in my circumstances, the upward curve, the second chance, I am reminded of that coffee, of the smell of the morning rain down on the Elm Fork of the Trinity, of the sun rising over bayous to the south, of the early days, of my first days.

Some days that’s as good as it gets. Some days, like today, after the coffee is gone, and toast eaten, the dishes washed and stacked, there is nothing to do but hang on, to keep it tight, to seek out the words from wherever they may be hiding, to look far off south and keep the tears at bay, to wait for nightfall with its ghostly promise that tomorrow will be a better day.


Photo Credits

“Textured Coffee Cup” Scholastica Ees @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“Piggly Wiggly” onesundaymorning @ igougo.com


The Woodpile

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The storm knocked out the power several months ago.

A branch from the silver poplar in the yard hit the wires.

“Should have been pruned back years ago,” the power company guy was saying that morning.

“Where do you want the wood?” he asked me.

I told him to pile it up over by the lower deck while I went to call the owner of the house and the trees in question.

Days later the owner came by, an older guy with a shy smile and a slow country walk, even here in the middle of town.

“Let’s leave it there,” he said. “I want most of it for my stove and heater this winter, but you keep some of it for the fireplace. I’ll come by and get it in a couple of months.”

I said thanks and left the wood where it lay.

The rains came early this year. The pile sat below the hill and while it was in a good place to dry in the summer sun, it was now getting more wet with the hard rain that falls steady here during the fall and winter.

No sign of the owner or his crew, no response to several messages to come and get the wood. Seemed a good time to move the pile out of the weather.

I picked up the first round. Oak, I think — heavy like oak, anyway — and moved across the deck to a spot under the stairs. Walked back and did it again. I moved steadily, if slowly, over the afternoon.

The wood pile became a stack of rounds piled under the stairs, lit up by the now setting sun.

I was tired and sore. I’m not used to hauling wood rounds much these days. I ate some soup and went to lie down on the couch. I turned on the Jazz Show on the local NPR station. After awhile I got up to light a fire in the fireplace, using kindling from last year and several pieces of the summer wood.

The fire caught. I lay back down, listening as Chick Corea returned from nowhere on the radio. I smiled at the idea of smoke drifting across this particular room. It seemed, well, almost holy.

I awoke much later in the cold, dark, early morning. The smell of burnt oak and poplar in the room, and maybe sage from a long lost Cheyenne prayer relic, caused me to wonder where I was.

Who was this old man whose back hurt and whose arms were sore as if he had worked all day in the woods, setting choker in the first growth cedar out by Poets Nook on the Alberni Canal? Where was the sound of the ocean as it broke on the reefs in the outer channel and washed up on the beach, nearly a hundred yards away? Where was the Franklin with the dented kettle on the burner, steaming slowly into the quiet breathing of his sleeping newborn son, and his own coming days of fatherhood?

I went to sleep in my bed then, as if it had all been a dream.

 

Photo Credits

“Woodpile” rachaelvoorheees @ flickr. Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.