Steve, one year later. March 2024.

 Watching scattering snowflakes from the passenger window, they swirled and looped, taking their own time to land. The dance they performed was a gleeful dance of teasing the brown dried husks of corn, bending down to touch them, then letting the wind carry them back up and around, a bait and switch that nature plays with itself. When they landed, we are already  further down the state route, onto the next corn field, the next barn emblazoned with fading Mail Pouch Tobacco signs, another trailer park on the road from the parsonage I lived in, mostly by myself that final school year of 1985-86 to my mother’s new house with her boyfriend in Galion, Ohio.

I was in that difficult space between childhood and manhood, where I was not quite ready to be on my own but so close I could taste the freedom that eighteen brings but still dependent on people I was still angry with. This predicament made me angrier, more resentful as I most did whatever I wanted to do but when there were times I couldn’t, when my mother would wave her wand of matronly responsibility, I would seethe inside. A blend of anger mixed with a yet-unknown silent hurt of her abandoning me once more. She had picked me up in Catawba, my stepfather back in the psychiatric hospital 50 miles away from home, she wanted me to see her new house. A condo she was renting with Steve whom she had met at Maryhaven a rehab center in Columbus. She an administrator and he an alcoholic/drug user who was trying for what felt like the hundredth time to quit. I had never met him and was none too pleased to be meeting him this weekend. 

She talked to me from her side of the car while I stared outside the window at all the things that make an Ohio winter something that is as desolate and terrifying as the dead-end future can be for kid that only wanted out of everything that small town Ohio could offer. All of which was basically fuel to want something different. My eyes burned, there wasn’t a catch in my throat but more of a fireball that I kept inside lest it erupt into the front seat of that blue Chevy Cavalier and turn my mother into a stammering, crying puddle. I knew her limits. I just listened and looked. We arrived in the small town of Galion, in the center a  small courthouse, gas stations, hardware store, a feed store at the edge of town my thoughts drifted to my girlfriend who I would have to wait to see in a few days. I pined for her. My mother brought up me moving up for the rest of the school year, “no way,” I replied, “I’m not living in this shithole of a town. I’m almost done with school, so I’ll just finish it out.” Sighing in a way that she perfected, she put her hand on the back of my left hand. I flinched, taking her hand away she softly asked me “think about it. I think you will like Steve.” I rested my head against the window, feeling the cold glass against my forehead, “Jesus Christ mom, you are still fucking married” in a whisper she would be able to hear. We drove the final few minutes in silence.

Steve opened the door to their new condo, it had new furniture and Native-American art on the walls, and Steve had a small stereo in the corner next to it was a large wooden cassette holder and a stack of worn LP’s underneath it. This caught my attention and Steve came out of the kitchen and shook my hand, “I’ve heard a lot about you, your mom says you are pretty funny and like music.” “Sure” I headed towards the bathroom with my lungs in my throat and heat rising in my cheeks. The bathroom was decorated with a candle, sea shell molded soap and new hand towels. This was nothing I had ever grown up with. It smelled like cherry blossoms. As I splashed water on my face, I noticed my hands were shaking, I wanted a beer but they wouldn’t have any. Steve was sober. 

That night we went out to eat in nearby Mansfield, to a chain casual dining place—maybe it was Applebee’s, TGIF or something like that, it was the sort of place I had never really ate at as we were poor, going out to eat was only done if we drove to Columbus to see my grandparents and uncles. It was small talk, Steve mostly remaining quiet while my mother asked me about school, my girlfriend and filling out college applications. “I dunno mom, maybe I’ll go to someplace near Columbus.”  “I thought you were going to go to OU, that is what you have always said, to go home to Athens. You could live with the Zudak’s” The Zudak’s were my middle school best friend, Eric, his older brother and sisters and his mother. Eric’s father had moved out of the house a few years before and I would go down to Athens on most of my spring breaks throughout high school, wander around town, hitting the bars and drinking in shitty cars. “I’m not sure”, I wanted to near Jennifer who was going to Ohio State. “You could move up here with me and Steve and go to a community college?” “Mom, stop I’m  not going to live with you.” The rest of the dinner was quiet and when we got home, I went to bed. Over pancakes as we went out to eat (again!), Steve talked about music not really asking me what I liked but sharing how much music meant to him. “When I moved to Columbus, I probably spent more time going to concerts than I did in class.” “Oh, who did you see?” This was a test, in retrospect it was really a test by Steve to try to understand me, not win me over—he never tried to do that. His goal was to identify with me, he understood I was deeply wounded in my childhood, much of it by my mother even though I had very little insight into this hurt which at this time in my life mostly manifested itself as anger, frustration, and quiet rage. “I saw Lou Reed at the Agora, he had bleached hair and wrapped the microphone cord around his wrist like he was going to shoot up some dope. I thought that was the craziest thing I had ever seen.” “Steve, he doesn’t need to hear that” my mother piped in. Rolling my eyes, “mom I know what dope is, and Lou Reed is one of my favorites. Who else did you see?” I was impressed. “I saw the Rolling Stones in Cleveland on Mick Jagger’s birthday and they played so long they cut the power on them, I thought there would be a riot. There was a giant inflatable penis that went over the crowd.” Many years later he told me he was on acid at that Stones concert. We talked a little bit more, he had seen The New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, Kiss opening for the New York Dolls, Neil Young, Dylan;  so many artists that I had discovered during high school. That day we went for a small walk around the town, I begrudgingly realized I liked my mom’s new boyfriend. 

On the way back from walking my mother and I argued, “just take me home.” Feeling like a dog in a cage, trapped and annoyed that I was helpless and at her mercy. “I don’t want to be here no matter how much you think I will like your new life, I don’t give a shit. Take me back.” In her bedroom I heard my mother cry, mournful wails and I felt no pity for her, no remorse. Eventually she came out of her room, face flushed, eyes reddened from crying. “Steve is going to drive you back, I don’t feel well enough to make the drive.” A part of me felt a tinge of being abandoned  yet again, “Ok.” But what I was thinking was, “fuck, you are going to have your boyfriend drive me back to the empty house I share with YOUR husband? You are kidding me?” I swallowed that thought and fetched my clothes from the spare bedroom. Steve had a small pick-up truck, we rode in silence except for the tapes he let me feed into the dashboard, John Prine’s first record, David Allen Coe’s greatest hits, Dire Straits, and Lou Reed. He dropped me off in the alley next to the parsonage, snow gentling falling around me as I got out of the truck. Steve leaned over, “Nice to meet you Bela, your mom really loves you.” He drove off as I turned towards the house, darkened and empty, a place that was home but never really felt like it.

Over the years as we all worked our way into time as if it were a field of sawgrass, cutting our ankles, a slog into middle age for me and a slow sunken decline towards death for the generation before me and my siblings. There were break-ups, fuck-ups, children and my own struggles with misty sorrow that has seemed to follow me like a sick-feral cat. A walking disappointment was what I felt like much of the time, even though I had enough confidence in myself to live the kind of life I desired (mostly consisting of music, drinking and laughter). But  when it came to my family, I would have sooner not have to let them into my world. The fact that I didn’t really attend college but opted to work in a record store, which didn’t seem like work at all—either to myself or to my family. My mother, father and my brother would pine for me to try college again, Steve never did, just encouraged me to do what I liked to do, “Susan, he will figure it out for himself and if he needs you, he will ask you.” This was as true a statement as has ever been said about me, Steve was the wisdom of our family. A solid towering tree that stood tall in the middle of our brushfires, he felt the wind at the top of his branches and the cold of the winter in our lives, I was gifted to come and sit among the wooden limbs without ever feeling judged. I never heard him raise his voice and living with my mother was a way to practice dealing with frustration on a daily basis. 

Time is tracked in various ways, tracking the stars in the universe their flickering light coming from billions of miles and billions of years from the past and as their lights land upon the eyes of stargazers many will have ceased being billions of years ago. Their sparkles a sort of gravestone etched in the sky for us to gaze up. We mark time through the books we read, a collective history made from the drawing in caves, on stone walls, through the ancient Egyptians  utilizing papyrus over 5000 years ago, to the development of papermaking by the Chinese to the present where digital pixels contain the entirety of humankind at the touch of fingertips. I tracked the age of my children by pencil, every six months they would stand still against their bedroom wall or against the door in my bedroom apartment while I drew a straight line at the top of their head. These inch increments showed them how age can be measured, they quit doing it a few years ago and my son, aged 15 is now taller than me—it is as if the tracking is no longer needed; he has won the contest. Boxes of photographs fill my basement and in corners of my house, shoeboxes, wooden boxes and cardboard boxes carry the information of my past, the past of my ancestors stacked upon one another as if they were ping-pong balls in a lottery machine. Black and white, Polaroid and faded colored photos from the early 1970’s that have grown their own age spots, blotted with fuzzy white and yellow globs that may overtake my siblings, myself and Santa. My whiskers are mostly white now, if I don’t shave then I will look my age so I run the razor over my skin, the skin that is not as tight as it once was and with that razor I make myself younger, anyway this is what I believe. So many ways of tracking time although in my mind I see the universe swirling like a giant whirlpool swallowing up everything all at once, and in this grand whirlpool people are smaller than a droplet of water rushing over Niagara Falls and then become mist. And when I die, my memories die with me and perhaps for one or two generations I will be remembered for a few things in my life but not for the mundane or what my daily interactions were like, not the cuddling of my dog nor the pride in my children or the laughter I was a part of, so much laughter that it caused people’s head’s to turn. I track the days of Steve’s death by my memories of him, there are moments when I breath in and at the bottom of my breath in the tiny flicker where it stops before turning inside on my out breath, it is in that speck of time where I feel a panic and I yearn for him, for my mother the most. 

I have a dream, a recurring one that sometimes comes in different scenarios, always weird because dreams are strange, baffling, and weird, it is the very nature of dreams. As if reality is witnessed through a cracked kaleidoscope. In the dream I am leaping into the ocean, sometimes I’m wading in with the sun hot on my face, other times I am heaving myself into the water from a dock or a boat both and sometimes it is from a cliff like the Mexican divers who hurtle themselves over the rocks below to split the waves in half. The split is spitting into death’s face, “take that mother fucker.” I leap into the water and break the waves and then the waves break me, so they think but I’m already broken. Not whole. Not half, but a million shards of me, each one reflecting something else and in the ocean, they look like diamonds scattering in every direction, carried away. 

Steve lives through my body, my thoughts, this is what I like to believe and when I play the music, he so cherished I feel him in the notes, the yelps of the singers and the bubbles of sound that carry me to a place where I usually feel safe. I know he listened for the same reasons I did, for comfort, for connection. Nobody dies instantly, we all die and live by degrees. Some are just closer than others, some can taste the bitter richness of whatever that unknown darkness carries. I miss you Steve, perhaps more than ever.

Puzzles–new writing.

So many puzzle pieces were scattered on the floor, on the dining room table, stacked on shelves haphazardly against dusty compact disks & half read books, in cardboard boxes that smelled of age and dampness, in plastic tubs filled to the top with even more pieces. They came in the form of conversations with siblings, with partners and family members that were disappearing like steam from a coffee cup. A photo taken from the front yard of a red clapboard house in Newport News, Virginia. Three children ranging from a smallish kid all of eight years old in a red tee-shirt, multi-stripped Brady Bunch Jeans complete with worn out knee, his brother, just one year older wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers the number 32 adorning the front as he would play pick up football pretending, he would be Franco Harris mouth jutting out for the quick and then the old sister. She stork-like, all skinny arms and legs with cut off shorts, long brown hair to her shoulders, she would have been in 7^th grade. Behind them, the mother, short red hair, a yellow tank-top sans bra and reddish jeans, her fingers extended, face serious laying out the ground rules of the soon commencing Easter Egg hunt that was going to be, by all appearances, a throw-down. And finally, next to the mother, standing just inches behind her, but clearly behind her, the stepfather, short but compact and bear of a man whose strength was evident underneath the jean jacket he wore, the one with motorcycle patches sewn on. Eyes on his wife and a small grin on his face, a quiet man who loved intensely. But who took the photo? They were not very friendly with the neighbors who thought that these northerners were interlopers, to be met with guarded suspicion. The neighbor on one side was a gossip who called the mother, Susie, which she hated and dropped the n-word nonchalantly as did most of the neighbors. “The neighborhood has gone to hell since they moved in ten years ago” she had told the mother who promptly asked her to leave, making an excuse that she had somewhere to go.  The neighbor on the other side of their house had four children, the oldest child, a girl went to school with the dark-haired daughter and would baby-sit that youngest child and at times make him take off his clothes and tie him up, telling him they were playing doctor as she took her bra off and rubbing her teenage breasts against him. He never told anyone, he wasn’t scared when it happened just perplexed and wondered what was happening. “Shhh, don’t tell anyone we do this, we will get in trouble.” Who took this picture so long ago? The photo is faded, the edges growing lighter with age, a time when most photos seemed other worldly as if every photo ever taken from 1966-1982 was taken on a soundstage, somewhat out of focus, the colors blurred and in the memory of those who were there, perhaps too, their memories were blurred, the photos directing the past. A soft and faded focus that dulled the pain behind some of these old photographs.

Stretch Armstrong with only moments to live.

            Another photo, three boys almost all teenagers dressed in white blouses, pleated knee length shorts with close cropped hair all parted to the side. In the middle of them, their mother looking over her shoulder and smiling at her middle child, who is beaming a grin back to his mother. To her right, her eldest son, black haired, tall, and handsome, he too is smiling. Leading the front is her youngest son, probably thirteen or fourteen a bit of baby fat on his face, something that he would never quite shed even when he died at the age of seventy-five, a toothy grin looking straight at the camera. They are walking, feet raised and arms swinging. They are on a hill, behind them large parked heavy cars that look like they were props in an ancient noir movie. Palm trees, out of focus in the background informs the viewer of the tropical nature and a large looming mountain sits over it all, lending even more mystery to the locale. The mother’s hair is shoulder length, with artificial curls around her dangling earrings, and a small pearl necklace dips just below her neck. Sober jewelry but showing the importance of looking good, of proper manners. Her dress cut just below the knee, it’s white but it may be yellow, or a light blue—one will never know as the photo is black and white mostly likely taken in 1959 or 1960. Three of them are now dead, all lived to be old; half of them past the age of sixty, and all witnessed the transformation from a black and white world, to the bleached out nineteen sixties and seventies and finally to bright digital world of the 21^st Century. Who took the photo, was it the father, the husband that was not around very often. The head of the household who lived nearly two hours away in a mountain top city near the sea, where he kept a small apartment and worked as an engineer. In his fridge he kept eggs, bread, jam and butter. A case of warm beer on the floor, Nero Wolff books next to his bed. Did he keep other things in this apartment? Other secrets? Did he take this photo of his family who were all smiling, an idyllic nuclear family who just fifteen years prior nearly died from both American and German bombs, making it to an Austrian refugee camp where they barely survived for nearly two years, until getting passage to this small South American country where this photo was taken? He may have, but most likely the mother hired a photographer as she would throughout her life, her growing family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren a testament to survival and, in the haze of chaos some stability. Just who took the photo, what were the color of their clothes? The colors of the bulky automobiles in the background?

            A letter, typed on crispy fragile typewriter paper that feels like brittle parchment paper, if it was near a flame, it would immediately be engulfed in flames like a top secret note in a James Bond film, “this message will self-destruct in ten seconds.” Poof. Words uneven on the page, maybe the “t” and “o” keys were a bit off, as they look like jagged teeth in the middle of the sentences, hiccupping across the fragile page. The letter typed from that oldest son from that black and white photo taken so many years ago  to his now youngest son, who was only six or seven years old at the time, living four hundred miles away on the far end of an island. A world away from the quietness of where this letter was typed, in a Benedictine monastery nestled in southeastern Pennsylvania. It is brief, the words simple but constructed of love and gentleness, where the father tells his son about the beauty and simplicity of picking plums, the brothers in Christ helping one another and laughing. A short description of seeing deer eat from the garden the monks grow, how the father abhors the killing of animals. At the end he asks his son to draw him a picture of flowers, how much he enjoys getting letters from his son. The letter sat silent for nearly fifty years until it was unearthed and given to the son, now middle-aged and over sixteen years had separated son and father since the last time they saw one another. What prompted the letter so many years ago? It was forgotten, a faint scent of the love the father once held closely for his young son who must have been thrilled to get the letter and its accompanying photograph of two young monks pulling plums from a tree. 

            A hole that doesn’t fit anywhere but fills in the large gaps that connect all the pieces, the holes that fill in the memories that are there but that aren’t there. They are not his memories, the boy who is now a man with children of his own on the cusp of their own adulthood, they are all filed away somewhere in the ground, in the ashes of the participants. I arrive in these boxes with my spelunker’s equipment:  a light fixed on my forehead, rope, air, magnifying glass and DNA that can’t be read. Searching amongst these clues for an answer to these holes. So many god-damn holes. 

My Mother Dancing.

A green cover that had the look of a well-played record, the ring of the round discs on the outside of it looked like the small scars of age,  the two enclosed vinyl records sounded as if they had been stored in a coal mine, the songs crackly, skippy and almost faded from too many plays, a sound version of Black Lung disease. The songs sounded different from what was usually on our turntable; Jim Croce, Roberta Flack, Stevie Wonder, and various K-Tel compilation records that were so stuffed with current hits one could say these quick sell records were the forebears to streaming. Twenty-plus songs usually packed each side, it was easy to drop the needle to a favorite like Maxine Nightingale’s “Right Back Where We Started From” or “Rock and Roll All Night” by Kiss and K-Tel was the only way I could sneak one of a Kiss song into the house as an eager third grader. The record we were playing was a record bought over the television, from one of the companies that would flood after school television hawking collections of minor artists like Slim Whitman, Engelbart Humperdinck and Boxcar Willie who were mostly doing spot on covers of older named songs by more popular artists like Hank Williams Sr., Elvis, and Frank Sinatra. These companies churned out these collections at a quick pace, usually with the songs playing in the background while the track listing scrolled up the screen like movie credits, the artist usually singing on a darked stage with red or blue lights surrounding them. One could usually buy a two record set for 6.99 or 7.99 including postage on a double record or twin 8-track tapes, the song list would go on and on as the announcer pulled on the nostalgic heart-strings of folks who were pining for the ”good old” days that, at the time were only fifteen or twenty years in the past. For my siblings and I the music on this green covered double LP collection sounded from a long-lost time, a soundscape time-capsule of a period where the world was black & white, where clothes looked different, the world filled with short hair, the only men with beards were cowboys or villains from the movies and all the women and girls wore dresses. We had borrowed the record from a friend in the neighborhood. My mother bounded down the stairs, jumped off the last few stairs and immediately began to sway her hips from one direction to the other, with two rocks to the right, then two rocks to the left as she inched her way forward. Her lips pursed, a crackle in her eye she started mouthing all the words to “The Book of Love” we, her children sat both horrified and perplexed by our mother knowing the words to this old song that was a foreign to us as a horse and buggy. 

Her eyes raised again, as she twirled around to the sounds of the inherently great “Sh-Boom” by The Chords, we were floored as she even knew the gobbly-gook of the second bridge scat that sounds something like  “heylongleedingdongdelangdelanghohodippohdopeydopeydip” that then flows into the chorus, our brains nearly exploded when she sang the deep baritone solo of “every time I look at you…” This person who was dancing in odd steps, a few steps forward, a few steps backwards but always, somehow moving forward, with twirls and dressed in faded jeans, a yellowed tank top sans bra and large hooped earrings knew this Fred Flintstone caveman-like music. We started the record over while my mother encouraged us, and gasped as she put her lips together and made the burbling-spittle sounds of the revving motorcycle in “Leader of the Pack” and then we completely lost our shit, laying on the ground giggling at the ceiling as she in a womanly-deep voice, in hindsight sounding a bit like Bea Arthur the lyrics to “Chantilly Lace” and held a make-believe telephone to her ear. 

            “Wake Up Little Susie” by the Everly Brothers floated out of the stereo speakers, lifted and carried my mother back to 1957 when she would have been 14 years old, shuffling around the room she took the hands of my step-father David, a shy man who was reticent to show his emotions but beneath his thick beard he took her hand and twirled her, brought her close where she pinged backwards still holding his hands and he twirled her again. She was laughing like the schoolgirl that she was transformed in, I watched every move as they laughed, storing away their dance moves deep in my mind to pull them out in four more years as I attended my first 7^th grade dance and surprised all of my classmates by knowing how to dance, albeit in a 1950’s style but none of us knew better. We pulled out the other record from the sleeve, put it on the turntable and the sounds of Dion & the Belmonts covered the living room. Released during my mother’s senior year of high school, the song is pretty self-explanatory, “here’s my story, it’s sad but true, it’s about a girl I once knew who took my love and then ran around with every single guy in town.” She knew all the hey-heys and wam-bi0le-le, hey-hey as she slung her shoulders down, rocking back and forth, snapping her fingers and twirling her long red hair. I thought she was the most beautiful and carefree woman in the world at that point, to see her joyous was a very precious moment, even at the age of eight I knew this was special. “My friends used to sing this song and ‘wake up little Susie’ to me all the time” she gushed to us, pulling the curtains of her past ever so slightly. She never talked about high school just that she pushed her parents to the limits.  Later, she would go more in depth about her high school experience, how her school Lincoln McKinnley was one of the very first integrated schools in Columbus, that she had black boyfriends with the approval of her mother and that she was known as the most dramatic girl in high school. Later, the lyrics to those songs would tell me a bit more about my mother. 

Stories

“Dad, tell me a story,” Bruno asks me as we lay next to each other, he is restless, his pointy legs shifting under the blankets, elbows unsettled–he is trying to twist himself into slumber. “I don’t’ have any stories to tell, I’m tired” I breath, hoping his overactive body will quit. “C’mon dad, you always have stories, please” he reaches for the dog that has settled between us, her neck reaching out to his hands that clutch her face; she will take anything that is offered. “Remember when you would tell me about Dr. Wigwam? I thought he was a real person, maybe tell me one of his stories?” I can tell he is starting to drift, “you know the one about the racoon making chicken soup?” His legs curl up under him. Dr. Wigwam was a character I had created to help the kids go to sleep when I would put them to bed, sometimes I would try to read to them, “A Cricket in Times Square”, “Wind in The Willows”, even “Tom Sawyer” but they always wanted me to tell them the stories I would make up on the spot, perhaps because the kids were always in the stories I told, they were the main characters. Some of the stories went on for years, “The Daddy and the Little Boy” which was Bruno and myself on an adventure where he had uncovered, by happenstance some nefarious plan for world domination by the evil Dr. Terminus, “Miss Duffberry” which centered on Saskia and her friend meeting a kindly old cartographer who discovers a plot by the evil oil tycoon, yep-you guessed it, Dr. Terminus. The aforementioned Dr. Wigwam who was a magical man who stood tall (nearly seven feet) and lanky, “he was almost as thin as the whiskers that stretched from his chin to his belly” who could speak to the animals, travelled in a lemon colored hot-air balloon and lived in a house that was a magical as a child’s imagination would allow. There was a story of a mouse who found her courage in a bakery behind her rose-garden apartment. The children would mine the stories out of me, and I would usually drift off to sleep myself as Bruno and his father would hide in the bowels of a lighthouse while sinister men marched on the floorboards above their huddled bodies, every creak of the wooden floors causing them angst. The next night Bruno would tell me where we left off and I would start the story again, never really knowing where it would end up. “Buddy, I don’t even know where to start” I reply, he silently knees me, “dad, it doesn’t matter, just start anyway.” Searching my mind for the stories, as if I’m trying to pluck the perfect cloud from the sky, I hesitate and then start, “Bruno shushed his father and pointed to the wall, they could hear the men fighting against the wind, ‘they must be near, their bikes are leaning against the back wall—we need to find them, or Dr. Terminus will have our head.” Soon we are both asleep.

                From my middle-aged perspective, the pulling of stories from a mind that is a haze of bills, deadlines, the emotional tug of relationships, pets, car insurance…is difficult—my thoughts are a chore to wade through, picking through the scraps of the day that passed and the days to come. I sound more tired than I really am when he asks me to pluck tales from my head, there is a tinge of resentment—a weariness as I reflect on all the things that have pushed out the giving part of my brain. From his perspective it is much different, he remembers the time together in bed, his father’s voice painting pictures of adventure with him as the hero. He isn’t aware of the fatigue I clutch too, as if my life choices are what controls my ability to give and receive love. I try to dispatch the wanting to have him shuffle off to sleep so I can cower alone next to him, my sweet boy, sometimes it works and sometimes I fall for the dizziness of my intrusive thoughts.

                My father wore corduroys, the lined indentations stood out like a topographic map, my fingers tracing them—down his leg as he drank his coffee. “Tell me the story of the bull” I would ask him, it is something his mother told us many times, when he was just a child and had stealthily climbed through a hole in a fence to pet a cow who stood near an old tree. Although it was not a cow but a bull who ended up chasing my father until he was scooped up by my grandmother, although my father was a terrible storyteller. Quick and too the point, when he told this story it ended quickly, there was no build up, no description of the heat, or the way his feet got stuck in the mud as the bull barreled down on him—this was how my grandmother told it. He would get up from the couch when his coffee grew cold, walk into the kitchen, taking the comforting fuzzy pants with him. When he spoke his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, a ball of manliness stuck in his throat, I would ask him if I would have one when I grew up, he would chuckle and tell me “only if you are lucky.” He had a tweed jacket, the ones with the elbow patches that he wore to work—most likely a carry over from his brief spell of being a college professor, he would get his hair wet and comb it straight back, the sides turning gray—as he got ready to leave the house, he would leave his dirty razor on the edge of sink. The brush that he used to lather his face in shaving cream sat next to it, I would stare at them wondering what it would be like to shave one day. But my father was mostly quiet, he did not tell us many stories, nor did he read to us—although he loved to read, he would buy my brother and I books from the Little Professor bookstore in Athens, he tried in vain to steer us away from comics. The stories we were told were from his mother and our uncles, Pablo and Peter, their adventures burned into our spongy brains. The story of Pablo driving through Nicaragua and resting for the night, sleeping on top of his car in the jungle while Sandinistas rifled through the car unaware that he was asleep on top. It probably saved his life. My grandmother’s life was a trial of loss and gain, losing the life of wealth due to the Second World War, rebuilding her life not once but twice, in Venezuela and then in Columbus, Ohio. These made an impression on me, like a thumb print on a window, they would fade but always be there. Gaps fill the memories of my childhood, holes where laughter should reside, or learning to hit a baseball—the people who taught me to throw a baseball and a football were not my father, who appeared to be caught up in whatever worries seemed to be choking his life, but from my brother Zoltan and a step-father we had named David.

                The urge to give in to annoyance is great, and I was conditioned to do this—it was easier to complain and let the world know how heavy it felt to me than to work around the urge- to resist the “give-in.” As a parent I realize that this is an insufficient cop-out, that I do not want my children to learn that irritation is something to wear like a pin on a jean jacket. Patience provides the luxury of space, to allow the imagination to grow and feel deeper. Some years ago, when I was working with an addict who was struggling with a mind that was chewing its way out of his mind, he asked me about learning patience, me of all people I thought to myself, and I replied that the only way to learn patience was to do it. Not a very satisfying answer but the only answer. It is easy to get lost in the doom-scrolling of my mind, the reinforcements against this are being present with those in my life, easier to say than to do.

                At some point I started to write down the stories I told the kids, although I am unsure of my skills as a children’s storyteller, when I told my partner this, I added that I tend to sprinkle my stories with words such as “fuck” and “blowjobs” she believed me for a moment and reminded me you can’t put those words in books, probably not even YA books. When I write these memories of their childhood down it is with hope that they can recall sitting in med, staring at the ceiling, my words falling into them like small safety stones to protect and propel them into sleep. The stories would get tucked into their minds just as they were under their blankets.

Ephemera

                On the east wall of the small ranch house where my grandmother lived for over thirty years an old stereo consul complete with built in television, speakers and turntable was covered in plants, glass trinkets and small decorative plates. Above them was a wall covered in photographs, most were black and white, they spoke of a different world where my father and uncles wore matching dark shorts and white shirts, black socks pulled up almost to the knees, my grandmother staring down at them as they gathered around her. Like a proud hen, her eyes beaming while they all smiled into the camera, in the background of these photos were palm trees and one could almost see the invisible heat that rose from the concrete that surrounded them. These photos were taken in Caracas, Trinidad, and Spain, they lived in Caracas, were taught English in Trinidad, and travelled to Spain with her—she insisted they be giv4n the opportunity to leave their life in Venezuela. She was an immigrant to that South American country, forced by the Second World War to sculpt a new life as a woman in her thirties from the wealth she was accustomed to in Budapest. Eventually her children would move to the United States, all settling in Columbus, Ohio where they, after fits and starts made themselves Americans, taking in American football, owning trucks, campers and enjoying fast food. The other photos climbed up the wall like ivy, marking out the memories of her life and the lives of the generation before, the images of frozen ghosts on her walls. There were knick-knacks and other ephemera on the walls, mementos of her travels, a small windmill clock from the Netherlands, a miniature mask from Morocco, small plastic men she put up for me and my brother; “The blue one is Zoltan and the yellow one is Bela” and we believed these solid-colored top hatted men were, indeed, somehow us. In the middle was the Krompecher Coat-of-Arms dating from the thirteenth century, not only was her wall a reminder of a life well lived, but it also was there to prove the family’s bona-fides. There was the menu from her father’s famous Budapest restaurant “Gundel’s” as well as photos from members of the Krompecher family that had served in the Hungarian parliament. These images were imprinted on us as children, that my grandmother and especially her father was someone special, anything less than felt like failure. The images provided not only motivation but a sense of familial loyalty.

                On the south wall of my apartment between my wooden desk and the front door sits two pine shelves made for records and along the top are two Hungarian dolls that are dressed in traditional celebration attire, one of them has her face chewed out from my old dead bad-dog, next to that sits an empty pint of whisky I had bought and drank on an incredibly weird night in Caracas, back when it was safe to travel to that city that sits among the clouds. With mountains looming around its plentiful skyscrapers, I was lost in the midst of the effects of that whiskey, the lights a blur to my eyes while I wondered how Jenny Mae and I would get back to my uncle’s apartment. The whiskey drank all my money, and it was not until a kind toothless taxi driver drove us home for free. The bottle a remembrance to both human kindness and the haze of being nineteen.  There is a painting by my son that hangs above the shelf and next to it a small painting my partner had commissioned for me, a wonderful chunk of wood that reminds me of love and thoughtfulness. Above the mantle on the east wall sits a print by Billy Childish, hanging above Buddhist cards and reminders, this painting is also a reminder of love. On top of bookcase next to the mantle, that comes from my childhood, it was once canary yellow and now is a subtle beige there are photos of my mother, my son when he was six months old—his happy grin stretching across the years, a framed picture of Chenrezik who the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion is. There is a copy of Wind-Up a fanzine by my friend Liz with a note attached to it introducing herself via US Mail, when small packages containing messages constructed of thought and time arrived in post office boxes—the care involved in sending this is still not lost on me. On the same shelf sits a small vase of dried flowers with a note from my lover and below all of these are rows of books and records. Books of poetry, of eastern thought, of recovery, graphic novels, and fiction. Most have traded time with me, imparting humor, wisdom and tears through their pages and I, in turn have given them my attention.

                There are photos of my children on the walls, both taken in the Netherlands, one of my daughter when she was eight, wearing a scarf over her head as she looks out the window of a train. I think we were coming back from the sea. The other photo, of my son is when he was four, this one also taken in the Netherlands, he is naked standing on the old remnants of a pier that had been taken by the water, his hands outstretched as if he was getting ready to hug the water while he holds a bag of chips in one hand. I have other pictures and paintings on the walls, one of Richard Brautigan a favorite writer that was painted by Derek Erdman, another drawing by Daniel Johnston, and walls filled with records, CD’s and box sets. Some of these things I have wanted to put away for years, there are two boxes of “things” I have had sitting next to one of my couches and one next to my dining room table that have not moved over the past two years when I moved into this small apartment.

                The apartment usually smells of coffee and onions two things I consume nearly every day, the stacks of books and the unattended boxes can make me feel guilty as they have sat ignored for far too long. Some of these things are the putty that can hold my sadness in, or my joy depending on what I may be feeling on a given day, a given hour, a given moment.

                When I was a child, I collected things: Matchbox cars, football cards, comic books, records and at the suggestion of my grandfather I collected stamps for a few years but while these captured my imagination, I needed some encouragement to continue and because of the lack of interest by my father my interest in philately soon diminished. In grade school my brother and I would tape our favorite football player cards to the tops of our desks making for a bumpy desk, but it helped get through the drudgery for fourth grade math when one could dream of the exploits of Franco Harris or Jack Lambert while contemplating fractions. Fuck fractions. The miniature cars I collected where things I played with until the fourth grade when in one afternoon of playing with my friend Mark, I realized I had suddenly outgrown them, I put them away and only pulled them our years later when my ex-wife started an interest in them. Apparently, they were not a thing in the Netherlands. My son and I would play with some of the ones I was able to pass down to him but a few years ago, he realized he too, had outgrown them and his are now confined to a box in his room. The comics I collected with my brother were split between us, he bought some large collections in his twenties and there are several long boxes of Marvel comics that sit in the closet. Occasionally I pull them out and try to get my son interested in them, he only asks me how much they are worth. Saskia on the other hand did show an interest in Archie comics which she collected for several years and graphic novels. They both tend to like records, Saskia has a small collection at the end of my towering shelf of records and she plays them when she cooks and reads downstairs, her tastes are towards the emotional and she tends to be drawn to indie female artists: Girl in Red, Phoebe Bridgers and Stella Donnelly.

                Many years ago, I was visiting my father and his wife, I was in my early twenties trying to repair a relationship that had been cracked, punted, and bruised—there was hope in their living room and they poured me hot coffee, brought me homemade Hungarian cookies, and asked about my life which at that time was centered on music and extraordinarily little else. I had dropped out of college a few years prior, was working in a record store, and had discovered an underground community that in no way I could explain to my very catholic and very conservative father. “Why don’t you go back to school?” he asked, his wife chimed in “You are too smart to be in a record store, it’s unhealthy.” My inner response was to inform them they knew nothing of my life, had showed little interest in much of my life and that my thought of the future involved listening, selling, and making records—instead, I replied, “yeah, one day I’ll go back to college.” His office was in the downstairs of his house in Athens, Ohio. As one of the few practicing architects in Southeastern Ohio during the nineteen-seventies he won a lot the contracts from the state and the county and he had a fairly large office staff of architects and engineers. They worked on the state hospital in town, many of the larger buildings and businesses in downtown Athens as well as many home improvements. By all measure he should have been well off but when my brother and I lived with him we were poor, mostly made our own dinner which consisted primarily of box macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, frozen pot pies, cereal and eggs. Once a month he would splurge and buy a $5 Domino’s pizza. He sold his office building and moved his practice into the downstairs of his house, a kitchen door shutting off the living quarters from the office. We sat in the meeting room, which was a white couch, several comfortable designer office chairs, and a glass coffee table. The walls were decorated with his wife’s abstract artwork. When I used the restroom, I had to walk through the kitchen door and it is felt like I had entered the bowels of a museum or government building, this is how they really lived. The kitchen was spotless and there were massive jugs of wine on the floor, the food on counter was healthy, wheat germ, oats, cannisters of nuts and bowls of fruit. If I took to long in the bathroom, they could sense my prying investigative eyes, I would draw in as much as I could to get some knowledge of a man, I did not know but needed too. “Bela, what are you doing back there” his deep voice would bellow. ‘Nothing, just looking for a glass for water” as I wondered what the upstairs looked like. “Come back here, Ildiko will get it for you.” He had secrets he didn’t want me to know. So, I would go back and sit on the edge of the couch waiting for his disapproving beatdown of my life choices. And in my quest to have a connection with him I would accept his judgement only to disregard it as soon as the door shut behind me. It was always emotional harassment. On one of these visits as I was leaving, Ildiko said she had something for me, “Bela you left something here and we need to give it to you” she got up, “wait, I will go find it.” I looked at my father, I could not think of anything I would have left at his house, these visits were infrequent, and I stood up and made my way towards the door. “I need to go; I have some people I have to meet.” I did not add that there were friends I would be seeing at the Union. “Wait, she will be back in a moment.” We made more small talk by the front door, his displeasuring lecture over my life choices a silent barricade between us until his wife appeared with a small blue and yellow winter cap in her hands. “You left this year and I thought you might need it.” I had indeed left this small Webelo scout toboggan that I had left when I moved out of his house when I was eleven years old. It was tiny in my hands, “I washed it for you.” I was now 22. “Oh, thank you.” She seemed pleased with herself for remembering to return this hat to me eleven years later. “Yes, it’s cold out. Wintertime, you should wear your hat.” Thanks for the advice. Last year I gave the hat to my kids. “Honey, its cold out, please wear a hat.” Saskia held the cap in her teenage hands, “didn’t your dad regift this to you?” I paused, as the years sprawled out in my mind, ‘well not this hat, he just returned in, you are thinking of the Ohio State Bart Simpsons shirt my grandmother had me wrap for him one Christmas and he gave it to me the next year for my 21^st birthday.” “He did?! Wait, why did you grandmother give your dad a Bart Simpson shirt, wasn’t he old?!” Smiling, I explained “She bought it because it said Ohio State Buckeyes on it and she thought Bart was cute, and yeah, he was probably 50 years old. Anyway, he gave it to me the next Christmas.”

                “What?! Why did she do that?!” I cried into the sterile stiff hotel pillow, outside the Miami sun was baking the red Chevy Malibu that carried us from Ohio—it was too hot to go outside, we were sunburnt from swimming in the motel pool. The drive took over 20 hours, but my father did it in one shot, drinking thermos after thermos of gas station coffee, talking to himself and rolling down the window and sticking his face into the wind. He refused to stop. There were three of us piled in the backseat, my sister on one side, my brother on the other and me, the youngest stuck on the hump. At various times during the trip, I would curl up on the floor and try to sleep. We passed the hours trying to read, counting VW Bugs, looking at various license plates, singing and teasing each other. My father flipped through the FM dial, where he mostly chose soft rock or Paul Harvey. My aunt Milagros sat in the front seat and occasionally they would speak to each other in Spanish, leaving us to think they were talking about us, a secret code that they used when they needed to talk about “adult” matters. I later found out that they did not like each other, and it was natural that they did not, my aunt was outspoken, a woman and considered some of the mythmaking of my grandmother about Hungarians was just that, myths, and stories. “Your grandmother is nuts” she would tell me when I was older, then she would add “so is your father, something is seriously wrong with that man.” She was right about one of them. I was frozen with panic as I realized that Milagros had thrown away my favorite blue blanket that I.  been carrying around for years, it was thread bare in spots, and the smooth ends had unraveled but left small crinkly threads that I would rub against my nose while I sucked my thumb. I carried it around the house and when I had a friend sleep over, I would hide it under my pillows, so they dare not see that even as a ten-year-old I still clutched on to my blankie for comfort. When it was in the washer my anxiety would rise and I would be disappointed as it usually took a while to replace the comforting smells it held for me, syrup, cereal, cats. Before we got in the car for the trip Milagros sniffed at it, “That blanket is not going with us on our trip to Venezuela, you are way to old to have a security blanket.” My siblings made an effort to explain the importance of the blanket to me and my emotional state. The blanket had provided comfort for me through my parents’ divorce, multiple moves, meeting and leaving friends and at that time my fifth school in five years. Milagros had thrown the blanket out during one of our stops, it was mostly likely now covered in fast food bags, coffee grounds and diapers in some truck stop in Tennessee. She was right, I didn’t need to be lugging around my childhood blanket as I was getting ready to start middle school in a few years and shortly after that trip to Venezuela I quit sucking my thumb, finding other ways to sooth myself—through reading and music.

                I knock on the door of my old house, the one that my children still spend half their time in, the one whose wooden floors will need to be sanded again as my effort to sand them some sixteen years ago was never particularly good but Merijn appreciated it enough to keep the floors in all their misfitted blunted shimmering manner, the murky gloss a testament to my bumbling efforts of being a handyman.  This house holds many memories and as I finally let myself in, it holds new memories now; ones for the children and her. I walk in and it is the house she always wanted, with new furniture replacing the old, white walls where shadows climb and fall in a dance of creativity-learning dance steps from the sun, the duck and stop like gray lizards soaking up the shine. Gone are stacks of compact discs, records stacked against the far wall, books not put away and mounds of letters and bills, replaced by more whiteness and order. It isn’t reclaimed but remade into something hers, theirs while the piles of music, books and bills have migrated to my house. I need to unload of many of these things. I walk into my son’s room, on one wall he has hung up the skateboard he has worn out and collected: his first, that is nearly worn though—a Baker skateboard, next to it hang two others that he has whittled down practicing ollie’s and other tricks along High Street and various skate-parks, a Dinosaur Jr. board he got for Christmas last year. On the other walls hang his artwork, a tee-shirt he designed with “Zero Zero” superimposed on one another, grunge life indeed and old flyers on his walls from my days when I booked shows. One, for the Magnetic Fields has a painting of his mother and in a near kiss while I’m holding a beer. I enter his sister’s room, one wall is basically a giant shelf of books she has read, F. Scott Fitzgerald, manga, fantasy, and some new additions of her recent forays into politics, feminism, and social justice. Some, like Angela Davis where her grandmother’s. She has posters up, signed Mountain Goats and Superchunk posters. She is a resplendent teenager. There are a few things I wish I still had when I was a teenager, things that helped center me and expanded my imagination beyond the cornfields and existential heaviness of rural Ohio, my dog-eared split-spined copy of Breakfast of Champions, the 90 minute Maxell cassette of R.E.M.’s “Murmur” on side A and “Reckonging” on the other—played nearly every day my junior and senior years, or the photo of Lou Reed that hung on my wall—portals to something else, something more dangerous and bigger than the tightly wound world of small town America, where I felt like a proud outsider every day of high school.

                There were railroad tracks that lined the outskirts of Athens, they came up from West Virginia and over the grand Ohio River, hauling passengers, wood and more importantly coal into town and then hauling them north towards Columbus and all over the Midwest. When I was a child, there were still some houses that still burned coal and between the railroad station and the hospital was a gigantic hill of coal. We had a friend, Todd who lived a few blocks from us on Mill Street—they were poor, his father a grounds keeper for Ohio University. They had a tiny two-bedroom house, Todd slept on day bed that sat behind his parents La-z–Boy chairs, they still heated their house with coal and kerosene. When we went over to his house after playing pick-up football, his mother would make us grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, we would spend the rest of the afternoon trading football cards and playing with the miniature football helmets we would buy for a quarter out of the novelty machines at Kroger. The tracks split through the town, and we would walk them as we played army or cowboys and Indians in the fields next to the track. There was an abandoned house in the middle of one of the fields and we would use it as our “headquarters”, and onetime we discovered a cache of Playboy magazines and records. The men’s magazines were quickly snapped up by all the boys to be smuggled into bedrooms for late night discovery while my brother and I grabbed the records. Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, a Motown collection, Mad Magazine Twists Rock and Roll, we listened to them when we got home. I still own them, and every time I flip through my records I hold onto a slice of memory. Bruno and I sometimes pull out the green nylon gym bag that my brother and I transported our miniature football helmets over forty years ago and tape out a field and play with the same game we made up on the floor of Todd’s house. He tells me as we laugh that this was something he loved to play together when he was “little” which means just five years ago or so, his world will still be unfolding as if the future sky is constructed of wrapping paper for him to unfurl.

                I keep things to remind me of love, of connections I felt and, perhaps, lost—always something sweet–a reminder of feeling accepted, of laughing and exchanging tenderness. Every memory is just that, a memory of something I can share through words, to tell a story not so much for anybody but for myself—to recall something that happened, that changed me so much I needed a token to recall it because I knew even as a child that my memories would slide into nothingness—an effort to consul myself. I never kept the items that remind me of pain, I did not keep the snot filled shirtsleeve I wiped my nose with after my father slapped me across the face of that red Malibu when I was eleven years old because I was not the child, he wanted me to be, nor did I keep pencils and the rumpled papers of third grade when I felt alone attending yet another new school. There are other things I do keep that remind me both of my failures and successes, my wedding ring that I keep on my dresser— not a symbol of a marriage that came up short, but of a union that changed, one that brought two wonderful people into the world. The ring signifies a love that produced joy, struggles and, yes divorce but most importantly that produced children that I adore. I keep paintings of my father, when I see them, I feel both a tinge of hurt, a prick into the softness of my being but there are also memories of paining with him alongside the winding roads of Southeastern Ohio, of those brief episodes of soft love he showed me. I don’t hang them anymore, realizing that the hurt outweighs the comfort and realizing that no matter how many times a day that bruise was there to stay. They sit in the closet. Of course, there are some things I could not keep, a favorite dinner atop a sunflower kissed field in Italy while staring up at the Milky Way, or sing-screaming “Tractor-Rape Chain” with Guided by Voices at Stache’s in 1994, or holding my lover’s hand while curling up on her couch while she lays her head against mine, her fingers tracing the veins along my arm, her breath against my neck providing the music of acceptance. I keep pictures, trinkets, photos and even plates from my life—at some point they will mean nothing, perhaps given to the local thrift store when I pass on, the memories of my life destined to fall under the spell of the mundane fluorescent lights of Goodwill, but for now they hang about me, twinkling and winking at me that I am, not alone.

January 10th.

There is quiet devastation that comes with depression, it is insidious and even the word depression brings about a plethora of connotations, most of which can cause others to recoil, roll their inner eyes and sigh. Sometimes the other person will recognize this feeling but at this point of meeting on the subject both may quickly change the subject as two depressives are always going to try to feel better so humor is the most frequent response.  Melancholy is a much more beautiful word, and perhaps is giving more leeway for acceptance.  Two depressives will laugh together more than they will ever cry together. The tears they birth will come from joy not from pain. Those they will hold for when they are alone.

There is a park near where my ex-in-laws live in Tilburg, a medium sized city in the Netherlands. It is situated just a block or so from their house, behind a large apartment building and it has llamas, deer, and horses. There are ducks and swans, who all swim around a pond that extends the length of the park, a few small bridges and a fishing area. They paddle and shake their wings, walk awkwardly around the bank of the pond, dip their heads deep into the green water and slide back in. I could watch them for hours. Every trip we took I would do a daily run, which started with me running out into the country, through a small village, past a farm that raised miniature horses and then into the park where I would circle the pond and maybe stop and stare at the llamas. In the summer the Dutch heat can be overwhelming, and it has gotten hotter over the past twenty years with the temperature rising into the 90s and over 100 degrees the past few summers. These runs would leave me drained and covered in sweat but always revitalized, there is something about the Dutch air and light that is invigorating. There are theories on how this inspired many artists and great thinkers of the Enlightenment. For myself, the runs pulled off layers of sadness that I had not known were there, with periods of my life spent with the silent attachment of sorrow surrounding me although I was one was unaware of it. Drinking, music and the cast of characters I hung around with helped deflect any feelings of bleakness I may have had.

We collect things, comics, records, books are all a part of my culture, insular as it is. Others collect different things, stamp collecting is dying—killed by progress, Longaberger baskets—perhaps too killed by progress in the form of tote bags, Matchbox cars, vintage postcards, trinkets. Every trinket tells a story. Some collect memories, the cobble them together, splay them out in textures, a fabric of the past in the form of stories. I am guilty of this, and my memories have holes like a well-worn tee-shirt. Every missing piece has its untold story. In some ways, there must be a reason to collect the past, to make the present easier—to lessen the impact of now, the present. But in looking back, there are memories that are built in stones constructed of suffering. I see this in my job, when I am talking with someone, trying hard to listen—to be present to their story, a story for many of them they have never shared. They have kept the past at bay, from their earliest days of living, when childhood should have been filled with riding bicycles, forming friendships, they were instead, succumbing to horrendous abuse of (until they tell me) that lay dormant for decades. Some memories are deadly.

I plan memories for the future, simple ones of making someone dinner, of feeling white sand under my toes and my children as adults. These things, in some ways could otherwise be described as hope but I like to feel, although they have not happened yet, they are the seeds of future reality.

My friend Jerry died nineteen years ago this past week, left for dead on the side of the road just a block from my house he would die shortly after arrival at the hospital. Sometimes I think of him, silent on the cold asphalt, unable to move or yell, staring up at the cold January sky, waiting for the sirens to help him. Waiting for help. The moon and fuzziness of the city lights, frozen above him. Was he in pain? His neck was broken so was his pain knowing he was dying; he could not cry out. He was helpless. These are some of the things I think of on January 10^th. The adult me, the father in me, the lover in me wants to go back in time, get up out of my deep sleep and run to him and hold him in my arms. I want to comfort my dying friend Jerry and let him know he is not alone dying on the side of Hudson and Summit streets, that even if he dies, he will be thought of every day by many people, that his cackle and his pointy teeth and the utter ridiculous of him, of Jerry Wick will last for so long after this miserable moment of his slipping life. It seems every January 10^th, I am offset emotionally, and this one was no different. I had, for the most part a terrible day, I was anxious, cranky and it wasn’t until someone sent me a message reminding me of what the day was did, I realize. Trauma changes people on a cellular level, in fact people who suffer from depression and addiction tend to feel the environment around then much more acutely than others, which makes someone explaining depression or even unexplained sadness difficult. Once I realized what the day was, I was able to regroup, and eventually get what I needed.

There are two photos I have in my small apartment, one of Bruno aged three, walking on a broken pier, where the sea reclaimed the audacity of fisherman leaving only wooden poles sticking out of the sand and water. He is naked, a bag of chips in one hand and his other arm outstretched. Bruno Swallowing the Sea. On the same trip, I have a photo of him, naked staring straight into the camera, folding a piece of pizza in his mouth. What Every Man Wants. The other photo is of Saskia, head wrapped in a scarf, staring out into the Dutch countryside, she is beautiful. The Dutch Girl. My memories of the Netherlands, built over years, are perhaps my favorite memories of all. If I could only remember them.

Laughter is the sunshine, although it only peeks out at times, some of us seek the absurd because it is the only way to manage the inner and outer environment around us. And we give, until the feeling of giving is replaced by the nature of us, our brittleness. Constructed by doubt, shhhhhh, we say to ourselves. And we laugh. And we dance.

Cardboard.

There are routines and holes to fill, one by one, or in some cases trying to flood all the holes with certain behaviors only to find that underneath the holes is a subterranean canyon that is waiting to swallow you whole. I have been in my apartment nearly a year, but for the first three months I was a ghost trying to unpack boxes that should have been tossed away fifteen years ago or even longer. Some had grown damp over the years of sitting, it was if all the memories that were stuffed inside the cardboard boxes had slowly started to weep over the years, encased in dust the must and yellowing of the pages of the magazines, the fading photographs were dying from neglect. Hidden in the garage and basement after being hauled a thousand miles from Florida, and prior to that a thousand miles from Ohio to Florida, all the while never being looked at. Given the attention they were once thought to have deserved. This time, years later as the boxes sat in an old-new living room I sorted them out, a keep, a giveaway and a throwaway pile. Knowing that all three piles would most likely be forgotten about and as such there was a need to be planful, I kept repeating “somebody must want some of these.” But who really wants to hold onto someone else’s memories?

Over the past eleven months parts of me have died while other parts have pushed themselves up from the parched soil of myself, small growths that without care could be crushed to death with neglect. Recently, I pulled the rest of the boxes from the garage, a garage that rarely ever held cars but was only used as storage for an old unvarnished life. Some never made it to the apartment, I dragged them out to the dumpster, pitching them in and not really knowing what old memories, what old successes or failures were being tossed into the garbage. Many of these boxes contain old fanzines, magazine, flyers and photographs. Some are of bands and musicians I knew and worked with over the years, I would get these things in the mail, and toss them in a box. They were rarely read, and the plan would be to give them to the bands and artists who were in them, but going through them I realize that many of them have died and others have moved on with their lives, the days of huddling together once a week with friends to pluck songs out of their lives and minds while smoking weed and drinking beer had long been replaced by taxiing children to soccer, to school and minding the responsibilities  of work. The inspiration of newfound love had grown into something, hopefully, deeper and more meaningful than scribble words on a folded bar napkin but in many cases these electrical relationships had turned brittle over the years. Neglected like the boxes of memories. Jenny died and all the magazines and photographs I have of her don’t really have a home to go to, nor do the ones of Jerry, or Jim Shepard or Jack Taylor, so what to do with them?

Some things are best not kept, and a loyalty to the past can be toxic although it seems that the past we carry existed before us, that this loyalty ends up being a lodestone just because parents or family or whomever says we must carry it on for the next generation. For myself this went unquestioned, the stories I was told as a child and even later held no ground for who I should be, they were stories and as such held a fascination for who I should or shouldn’t be. As I gaze backward, over the mountaintop of fifty the realization that some of these ideas of tradition of holding on did nothing except offer cement to a life that strove in many ways to move forward. Glued to a time already lived, sometimes by somebody else, a father, a grandmother, is not always the most productive way to live a life in the present, in the future. It’s ok to toss them out but still honor whatever is needed to be honored but there is a truth in looking backwards with clear eyes, that the craziness and sadness and the pain of trauma can be used as fertilizer to move forward but not to clutch at my ankles preventing me from dancing forward.

For many years I drank to find that oh-so-perfect buzz that I had encountered so much in my late teens and early twenties but eventually, that buzz had grown so elusive it was just a myth, growing so faded in my cells and brain that it was just a foggy mist of a fable. It was as if they never happened, but they did because I could almost feel that excitement of the buzz-y feeling of swaying in front of a speaker, hands clutching a bottle of Black Label, coyly eyeing someway also swaying to the waves of feedback just a few feet away. The cool shock of autumn air at 3 am while clutching hands and sideways smiles shook the very leaves at our feet. But to pretend that can be replaced is a fool’s exercise.

The other day I asked my daughter, aged 14 how her coffee date went, and she laughed as an old soul would, “Jesus dad, we are fourteen what do you expect? We just laughed and had fun.” She talks to me in teenager code, and giggles at my perplexed responses, at twenty-first linguistic teenager play on words, the equivalent of ‘hey hey, Daddy-O” from the nineteen fifties, I don’t even try to pretend I know—this is her space, her memories, her future cardboard boxes so to speak. She doesn’t need mine to poke holes in hers, I grab another box, sort the piles and think if it would just be best to carry them out into the cold.  More than anything though, it’s not that I want to burden her future with the memories of my past, I don’t want her to encounter the canyon underneath it all, to protect her from that is of upmost importance.

 

David.

Sometimes there are pockets in the day, small tiny bursts of nothingness where the only thing to feel is the thumping of your heart, all the confetti in your brain has tumbled to the bottom and all the static has fuzzed itself out. It is in those moments, waiting at the stop light, putting a pen in my desk at work, rinsing out my coffee cup where a hand reaches from the bottom of that void and chokes me from the inside. I shake it off, trying to quiet it, and soon begin being busy again. We make little scars in time, marking ourselves one breath, one memory at a time until all the indentations we can ever make are swallowed whole. Annihilation by slow degrees.

In the turmoil of moving from state to state, town to town and house to house, I searched for calmness, or something greater, perhaps a boundary to guide my way-to lead me forward. I was such a lonely kid at times, it wasn’t until I was in the 4^th grade did I feel the lightness of friendship and discovered a well of humor that kept the lonelys at bay. At that age nobody knows what anything can be, only the moments of laughter and the crackles of fear that can clutch a child, so I found solace in comic books, records and playing outside, usually in a patch of woods or nearby houses that were being constructed, with small mounds of dirt that offered enough ingredients of imagination to keep a ten year old occupied for an afternoon One constant during some of this period was David Hartzband, who my mother  was married to, whom I spent roughly 1973-1980 with, give or take a year here or there. There. Right there.

David was from the Bronx, and he started seeing my mother when our family lived in Athens, Ohio. This was the early seventies, my mother was involved with some of the radical groups in the university town, there a photo of us children, hovering around my mom’s ankle that made the Athens Messenger. We were all protesting Nixon. Certainly, there were anti-war protests and boycotts, I distinctly remember asking my mother was “ripple” was and her explaining it was a type of wine. We had buttons “Nixon Drinks Ripple”, which was part of national boycott of Gallo wines the massive wine company that was engaging in unfair labor practices with migrant workers. David was in the background at this time, I remember he rode a Honda motorcycle, had a yellow helmet and wore a leather jacket the had a patch on the left breast. Maybe it was a motorcycle insignia. Soon we moved to Youngstown with David. He and my mother got married, I am unsure if the ceremony was in Youngstown or in New York although I recall it was in the synagogue as my brother and I had to learn the proper etiquette of being in the synagogue. Our first Hanukkah was that year and I giggled as David spoke Hebrew as we lit the candles and he told us the story of how the oil and the temple. All I knew was we got presents.

After moving to Athens to live with my father in 1977, I only saw David a few more times, their marriage struggled and eventually David disappeared from my life. Like a raindrop in the trees, he had vanished only to be replaced by another man whom was much different from him, who didn’t care about comic books, or playing records for me or explaining all the small things in nature that appear big in a young boy’s eyes. Worms. Spiders. The things that wash up on the beach. Those were gone. In hindsight, a small room that was being furnished with windows was closed off within me. Childhood was a stumbling affair, left to my own devices the escape into records, comic books, and playing backyard football was the easiest way to go.

David moved on after divorcing my mother, living in Germany he got his PhD and then went to work for a variety of tech companies in the 80’s and became faculty at MIT all the while doing consulting work. Somehow, we found each other in the mid-nineties, he came to Columbus and we had dinner and then later my wife and I travelled to Boston and stayed with him and his wife. We had reconnected, and it was as if the old tiny room had one of the windows open, although we didn’t communicate frequently it was nice knowing that he was in the world, as if you knew that your front door was locked when you go away on a trip. Security.

There is a pile of clothes at the end of my bed, on the floor, more under the bed and scattered about like leaves from a tree but the tree is me. I like to do the dishes but hate the laundry. Every day I look at the clothes and as they get mixed with the clean ones, which go unfolded the thought comes that if I don’t put them away then nobody will. The panes of glass in the bedroom are not really glass but plastic, which is fitting as the house is more of a house than a home, something temporary, something soft and not something to grasp. The only hardness of the house is that it is temporary.  The neighbors are different, more of them, which means living anonymously comes easier, I don’t have to say hello, the fellow next to me drives a kind of hybrid pick-up/El Camino and hauls in boxes of beer every weekend. The trashcans in the ally are testimonials to loneliness, if I still drank there is no doubt that they would be overflowing every week. Cascading over the sides in a fountain of discarded ache. We nod to each other when we cross each other’s paths, him with his armfuls of beer and me with my headful of ideas.

My mind doesn’t stop not even when I’m asleep, I remember many of my dreams and have a unique ability to control some of them but of course this only happens when I’m in slumber mode, in awake mode the mind doesn’t stop as much as pause for scattered moments throughout the day. Of course, there is little control over all those thoughts, which tend to blend together as if constructed with watercolor paints sitting in the rain, but there are tricks to calm them. Sitting. And. Sitting. Music. And. Music. And. And. And. So, so, many ands.

Standing on fifty the losses in the past get sucked into the whirlpool of time, an existential treadmill the slips and eats everything in its path, every happy moment, every disappointment, every loss until, at some point to be determined it will chew me up and I will slide into a vortex of nothingness. Annihilation. Life is filled with forgiveness which means that life is bursting with pain, one can’t learn to forgive if one hasn’t hurt. So, the circle is blended, and both sadness and joy are mixed with the other, nothing is pure. Even in our happiest moments as adults the thought of everything is fleeting, just movement towards something else, colors everything. Nothing stays the same not even memories.

I remember holding Jenny’s hand underneath the soft hushed voices of Christmas carols on Christmas Eve 1985, the hardwood pews forcing us to sit up straight, she passed me a note. “Only one week”, our one-week anniversary, even my fingers danced with joy. There was San Francisco, sitting in a Guatemalan diner, trying to read a book of poetry but feeling the sharp stings of betrayal that welled up from feeling so alone as a youngster, and increased in intensity through other relationships, that stinging of rejection never seems to have left from those first years of my life. There was peeking through a small jeweler’s shop window in the Centrum of Tilburg, Netherlands at two matching gold and platinum rings, feeling the unspoken said enough and we put the rings on her credit card. Even then, the joyful seriousness of the event compelled me to sprinkle humor over it, I bought a bag full of McDonalds hamburgers to present to her father as there was an old Dutch tradition of giving the bride-to-be’s father a cow. My unwillingness to face the present moment in our relationship, to be an adult would push us apart. Humor is not always funny. Flash forward twenty years, my daughter nervously reading her poetry to a sold-out hall of adults as she bravely faced them, composed and poised. Authors and business leaders walked up to our table to shake her hand and congratulate her. The memories rise up, like cigarette smoke tasting the air and then the wash themselves away, vanishing while the next one gently thrusts itself out, billowing up and becoming invisible.

David died last week, I got an email from his wife and it went to my work email, for a moment I thought it was another David I had once worked with. Sitting on one of my half-couches, together they should make a couch but since they are separated, they just make two half couches smushed together. Total fucking rip-off.  I had my morning coffee, setting it upon a small stack of books whose words were waiting to be devoured, plying for my attention but only to be used to protect a new coffee table from being scarred from a hot coffee cup. I re-read the email and felt alone. The skin on my arms raised up about half a centimeter while the blood pushed its way out of my heart. Moving to the other half couch, I looked at my phone, Anna Netrebko’s angelic voice drifted in from the other room, and I thought of how David and I talked of our love of opera last spring when I saw him in Boston. I eventually called my wife, she was in our house. Her home, my memory. I told her of David’s passing, his gentle soul touching my throat. Then when I got to saying David’s name, tears spilled from my eyes, a heave of the chest and then it was gone. It was the same when she told me that our friend Edo died, a few moments of great sadness, of the body trying to rid itself and then. just. weariness. Just weariness.

There are times when I wish I was just a note in a song, a bubble of sound whose only purpose is to pop in your ear and make your mind go a flutter with emotion. And then there would be nothing. Annihilation.

 

Stories.

“Tell me a story about when you were a little boy!”, Bruno crawls over my lap, his knees poking into my skin, “where has that baby fat gone?” I wonder as a grimace appears across my face. My memory comes in spurts and when it does, it is shaded as if it were hiding behind a soft white, almost transparent curtain. At night. This child has heard all the stories I can remember from my childhood, for the most part these number less than the number of digits on my hands. But the boy never tires of them, in his mind they are always fresh, always new but if I tell the story wrong he commands and corrects my telling, reminding me that I left a part out.

My brother lives across the country, practically in an entirely different country in fact, he lives in Texas and when we talk it is through the hic-cups of our days, mostly when I am driving in my car and he has a moment to spare. I see the other main partner of my childhood, my older sister Erica, more frequently as she just lives down the winding road of Interstate 71 in Southwestern Ohio, near my mother and my nieces. The stories have been bandied about, and if they were a piece of metal they would be burnished smooth by now, as they have traded hands, ears and tongues over the year only the rooms in which they have been told have changed. For the life of me I wish I could remember more, but a childhood spent moving from town to town and school to school (I attended seven by the sixth grade) did not exactly re-enforce memories. I struggled with making friends until the fourth grade, as my brother left my mother’s house in the third grade to end up at living with our father, Zoltan was my constant playmate so emptiness filled me much of my second and third grade years.

Long Island was uh, long, when we entered New York City for the first time, driving straight through from the soon-to-be burned out streets and houses of Youngstown, I was awoken by my mother and siblings, “wake up we are in New York!”, I crawled from the floor of the back seat, no doubt my face filled with the red lines from the plastic floor coverings. I rubbed my eyes and stared straight up out of the window, the highway twisted around high-rises that stood like sci-fi trees, with thousands of lights bursting into the sky I thought of all the people who lived in them. New York City was another world compared to Youngstown, where mornings smelled of rotten eggs from the burning and melding of steel just miles from our blue-collar house.

We lived on the far east end of Long Island, in a small town near East Hampton called Springs. It is best known for being the town where Jackson Pollock lived and William DeKooning lived a few houses down from us, but by that time in the mid-seventies, his mind must have been eaten up by dementia, although my mother remembers him talking to her about us, her children.

For some reason, my memories of Springs (which are very few) are idyllic although we barely spent more than a burp there. My step-father, at the time, David had gotten a job working as a scientist near Montauk which lies at the tip of the Island complete with a massive and brilliant lighthouse. His office, or laboratory (?!) was just down the road from the lighthouse, and I have vivid memories of walking the beach at Montauk as what appeared to be billions of mussel shells stretched over the sand in crunchy bunches that cracked and split under my shoes. The dense odor of salt and fish is still in my nose nearly forty years later. We lived in a small house that abutted a small thatch of woods to the rear of the house, with a quick shuttle through the woods, nary a spit from our back door we would be at a small harbor. We spent hours in those woods and on our small wooded street, where I taught myself to ride a bicycle, got bit by a dog and had a disastrous  first attempt at a sleep over.

There was a community picnic one evening, just off the beach, volleyball was set up and the older children had taken a group of us fishing. The sky was a whirl of clouds, twisting over the ocean, mimicking the breaking waves, filled with grays, whites and iridescence blues that appeared to be a cauldron that could come and swallow the ocean if the universe would only let it. I held an older boys hand, the rain would come, I was certain of that but for now, we were going fishing and my parents lay just beyond the lump of trees that provided a shimmering barrier between the beach and the grilling of chicken, hamburger, hotdogs and corn. In hindsight, this must have been the weekend of the fourth of July. There were piers constructed of hunks of blue and black rock that strode bravely into the sea, where one could fish and stare into the vastness of water while contemplating the smallness of oneself. These were slippery rocks and were instructed not to go to the end of the piers where the water was more dangerous and violent. Only the big kids could go there. A young fattish boy, with a yellow ball-cap helped me bait my hook, I had some experience fishing with my father and told him I could cast the line myself, which I dutifully did. Sitting quietly by myself as the bustle of ten and twelve years old, raged on further down the pier, no doubt engaged in primitive games of masculinity for girls who giggled at their antics, no doubt because they had no other idea of how to react. The fishing rod, pulled gently–a small tug and knowing instinctively to tug a little back and suddenly like shot from a gun, whatever was on the other end of the line swallowed hard and sensing immediately that the food it had just eaten was not a normal dinner as the hook dug deep in its throat, frantically tearing away from the thin line that twisted in its mouth, “good God! What the fuck is this?!” it may have thought, if it was possible for a sea creature to hold such a thought. It fled, and in doing so, my little-boy hands, soft from innocence and barely large enough to hold onto the fishing pole, wrapped themselves around the base of the pole, frantically trying to reel the fish in.

It was a struggle and I was shy, my brother was towards the forbidden end of the pier, no doubt throwing small chunks of rocks into the sea with the other boys, some shouted out behind my slight shoulders, “that kid’s got something!” By now my fishing pole was bending into an almost half moon and the sweat and excitement was now pouring from my brow. “I’m sweating!” I thought, “I never sweat.” Suddenly the fat boy with ball cap, cupped his hands over mine, “let me help you,” he whispered behind me, “wow, you got something big here.” A small group of children hovered around us, trying not to slip on the wet rocks, “be careful” somebody hushed to another. The line was taunt, and for every spin of the reel, the fish would take another foot of wire deeper into the sea. The struggle of the fish was apparent in the effort we were putting into bringing it ashore, with our feet and ankles wading into the sea. Careful not to slip. At one point, it became obvious that we were winning, as the pole almost dragged us into the water, and with a couple of yanks and pulls we managed to shore a long, slick black eel, its body twisting out of the water and the sharp teeth clutching tight against the fishing line. “what is that thing!” yelled yellow cap. “It’s an eel, they are delicious!” I spoke for the first time, “my dad eats smoked eel.” Someone behind me shouted, “that little kid caught an eel!” The realization that I had done something exhilarated me, “hold on!” I screamed and went yelling towards the picnic. Leaving the group of children with the frightened animal, whose entire world had just been transformed into nightmare absurdity, I ran across the sand, “I caught an eel! I caught an eel!” If I had died then, I knew in my heart that I had accomplished something extraordinary. My gravestone, tall and proud, scripted with the words: “He caught an eel.” My mother hearing my shrieks had thought my brother had fallen into the sea, “where is he? is he ok?” She must have thought I was screaming, “Z fell into the sea!” instead of “I caught an eel!” or something like that. Quickly settling things, my parents and others ran towards the pier, and upon arriving on the wet rocks, the wind picking up with thick pellets of rain striking our faces we were informed that the eel had slipped through the rocks and was back out at sea. “did you get the hook out?” I asked, not wanting it too suffer. “Yeah, I was taking it out when it squirmed away” yellow shirt replied, “you are a good fisherman kid,” and he rubbed my head. Zoltan told everybody what happened, how I was fishing by myself and off on my own, and then how I caught the fish, “it smelled real bad!” A part of me was disappointed that the eel had gotten away but I was also relieved.

Bruno loves to hear this story, as I sit on his bed, behind me a large framed Spider-Man puzzle given to him by a close friend and on the other wall a huge Avengers poster (the comic book, not the band), his room littered with Lego’s, Charlie Brown books and on top of his book shelf and Dinosaur Jr. poster. Some nights, as the wear and tear of trying to patch together people’s tattered emotional lives takes its toll on me, I climb in next to him and I tell him a continuous unending story of a father and son, alone of a dingy hiding the plans they had stolen from a mad scientist titled “How to Take Over the World.” His world is simple, easy and I can tell him stupid shit and he’s cool with it, as I tell him the story of the father and the little boy, how they avoid getting caught, I fall asleep. “Daddy, wake up, you’re falling asleep.” Of course I am I think.

 

and a few of Bruno’s favorites:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqZPGT0TsZ8