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.

Christmas 2023. (also on Jon Solomon’s WPRB 25-Hour X-Mas Show)

Christmas 2023.

            It was time to get a tree, the weather was telling me in the language that it spoke, in the form of wind, snow flurries and of clouds that had morphed during the last week of November to the first week of December, from one cloud into a giant mass of grey. The stores that I warily walk into were telling me, raining songs of a Holly Jolly Christmas and Jingle Bells that rock. My coffee shop was telling me by pushing Peppermint Chocolate Latte’s when I all I wanted was a black coffee (or a Pepsi). My girlfriend’s house was telling me, with decorations and baking commencing the week after Halloween. When my children were young, their mother and I would pack them into the gray Jetta Wagon and we would drive 45 minutes outside of Columbus, playing Christmas songs—always the sad ones (a harbinger to come?) to a Christmas Tree farm, climb aboard a wagon full of hay bales, track through the mud and cut down our tress. This was followed by watery hot chocolate as the workers bundled up the Christmas tree, then we strapped it on the roof and drove back home to set the tree up.  The apartment I live in is small, it’s not lonely even though I basically live alone every other week, but these floors have no history of little feet scampering across the floor towards a tree that has seemed to have birthed presents overnight. Of the sound of giggling little children eating cookies while their father recounts his own insane childhood Christmases that were packed with oversized characters such a The Hungarian Grandmother, The Drunken Uncles and the Impatient Mom. The apartment had heard the sounds of laughter but not from tiny children but of teenagers and adults, whose jokes were no longer watered down, the walls also knew the sound of spinning records and of Christmas Choral music played for a single person and a dog. 

            Memory isn’t like a fog, it is more like a chunk of wood tossed into the ocean, floating and sinking and floating some more over the years as the salt from the sea wears its way through, slowly burnishing it until all the sharpness is gone and it is a light and smooth as a seagulls feather. As a middle-aged man I can no longer remember all of the details of my own children’s Christmases, they probably recall them more than I can but I do recall the feeling of Christmas when the air was magical for them. Their parents and grandparents the magicians who filled the dinner table with stories of Sinter Klass, and as Christmas rolled closer and closer of Santa Claus, oh, they were the lucky Dutch kids who got presents from both. Culture and tradition are part of their lives, just as mine was with that Hungarian grandmother who said it was the angles and the baby Jesus who brought our presents to her house on Christmas Eve. Apparently Santa flies over Budapest every December 24^th to let that other guy do it. My children would pass out the presents on Christmas morning, while their mother and I drank our coffee and everybody would open one up in order. Unpacking the presents was very much packing future memories in their minds, to be opened and shared for years to come. 

            After having a few years of buying a freshly cut tree from the local garden center, and the kids having dwindling interest in decorating it, I purchased an artificial tree—plastic but with very little clean-up and no death except for the environment. It worked, and I bought a scented candle, which is something I never thought I would do and the little apartment seemed to have had a “cozy” switch installed when I plugged in the tree. Not bad, Bela, not bad (keep telling yourself that, the ghost of Christmas past whispers.) 

            This marks the first year of Christmas without my mother and my stepfather, and in some ways some more traditions will fall away. The Impatient Mother who stammered, “Damn it!” from the kitchen while she made her cranberry dish and swear, “this is the last time I’m going to make eggs Benedict, it’s too messy, someone else needs to do it.” I should write a song called “Guilty Eggs Benedict (for mom).” My daughter lives in Amsterdam and my son lives up the street most days, spending a few days with me every week, he’s fifteen and is more interested in his friends than sitting at home with a houseful of books and records, as I was at 15 and for many years until the need for making new memories has decreased as that driftwood becomes smoother and smoother. I have the opportunity to see the magic of Christmas in the lives of my partner’s children, although the youngest found out who the real magician was last year, another crest of a wave. My brother and sister will celebrate with their adult children, the first Christmas in over thirty years where all of us are residents of Ohio, my sister will reopen her memories from Christmas with her grandchildren, I will think about my mom, the different houses we lived in growing up all along the east coast and Ohio. I will also think of my father, someone I never really knew, only as a child—years whittling away at those memories. Sometimes family feels like a snowball dropped on the pavement, and other times it feels like the safety of twinkling lights and a scented candle. 

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. 

March 2023. For Steve.

March 2023. For Steve.

Light. Everything was light  that wasn’t coming from anywhere it was just everywhere, nothing could be seen except the light. Nothing could be felt except the light. She felt him there in the light, not physically she had nothing to physically touch him with, only the sense that he was there with her, behind her. She had waited for him, here wandering in the light as if she were made of water and the light was made of water and her thoughts were made of water. Moving from one end of this sea of light to the next, she was water and so she was everywhere but nowhere distinctly just a feeling of something. The wait was longer than she thought but every time she would think about him, about the wait she would remember the light she was submerged in and all the worry that crept upon her like silent vines would disappear, vanished as soon as she allowed herself to notice the light. There was nothing but being swallowed as well as swallowing in everything that was. 

            Formless but also naked, which she wondered how that could be and there was no shame, there was no anger, there was only purity the engulfed her. There was his voice but there was no voice, his presence behind her and beside her, below her, above her but not in front of her. Something pulled her deeper into the light, a current both propelling and guiding her. She twirled, danced. Frolicked. She exploded and came back together in a moment that wasn’t a moment, everything, and nothing. It made no sense, but it didn’t have. If she was breathing, she would be breathless. She heard him although she had no ears. She could feel him and she waited, she encouraged him although she had no voice and she smiled, she laughed although she had no mouth. She spun in circles, the arms she didn’t have were raised high, higher than high, boundless, she danced, and the joy was consuming, and she felt the giddy panic of love as it grew closer. She was an orgasm. She was music. She was the sky and the sun and the ocean. All of something and nothing of everything. “I hear you” she called out, she stretched outwards as if she were a cloud rolling backwards, rolling sideways, rolling below her and rolling above her, to capture him, to pull him in close. To guide him. He walked into her and they clasped the hands they didn’t know. They wore nothing. They had no bodies but felt as if they did, they laughed, touching all and touching nothing as they became the current, they dissolved into the light. Here, they were together, something more than they ever wondered- they were connected completely. There was no pain, no ache in their bones, in their hearts or in their soul. Although they would soon be pulled into something else, this did not matter, it was nothing. Some answer of a question that they didn’t know existed, providing something more than comfort, more than even language could ever describe. 

            Music poured out of both of them, through them, all the notes that had ever been played bounded around them, tying it all together like the greatest melody ever written. They were a symphony of laughter, a song of lust, the drum beat of the most perfect moment which was every moment that they had existed together. She looked at him, he smiled back-a grin that wrapped around her, tying her to him and unraveling her into the light that dissolved them, she saw him as a boy, as little league baseball player pitching a perfect game, as a child hiding under his bed while his father stood in the doorway massaging a leather belt, as a stoned twenty-year old staring at the cover of “Sticky Fingers.” As a fractured man, with holes in his arms, a coat that needed washing as the county sheriff stood over him, red lights blinding his eyes. Saw him as their limbs intertwined, as she licked his neck, and the world became small and exploded. Saw him as he kissed her forehead and opened the curtains to see the crowd of colors fighting for food, feathers falling to the ground. As he held her brittle hands when she hovered over him from the ceiling, when his tears fell on her cold face. He saw her as a girl pulling weeds by a tractor, wearing a Poodle Skirt and shimmering to “Sh-Boom” across the gymnasium floor, this was supposed to be in black and white like the picture that hung on their bedroom window but her she was, head tossed backwards as she giggled, her toes turning in and out as a line of boys and other teenage girls followed her lead. Her red hair swimming in the lights. He saw her giving birth, the smiling relief, the tears of exhaustion that fell from her eyes as she pulled her newborn daughter to her chest, breathing in the smell of new life. He saw her panicked as fists came down upon her as she scrambled across her bed. He saw her looking at him, a smile that spoke of things to come, eyebrows raised. Her comforting him, holding his hand, instilling hope. He saw her in bed, struggling for breath, all her children holding her. Her laughter that filled the room. Her blue-green eyes. They saw all of this, felt everything. They hovered, collapsed, and hovered again.

Truck-Chair–2023.

This is from a collection of short stories I have been writing on and off for a few years, I am currently working on a book about my mother–so I have not posted very much new writing over the past year–since she got sick and passed away. The “Chair” portion of the title stems from a chair that is in every story–all of them take place in the same furnished apartment. Any feedback is appreciated. -Bela

It was as dented as his head, except the scars that crawled over his scalp were covered by long hair that he sometimes stretched back into a ponytail, usually under a well-worn Red Man baseball cap, but his truck on the other hand wore her dents for the entire world to see—proudly. Every blemish, scratch and nick a story of mistakes, ill-choices and just plain bad luck. He would sometimes remark, “I ain’t got much but luck, mostly bad luck” this was always followed by a laugh that was as disheartening as a laugh could be. If one started from the front of the truck to the tailgate that was fastened to the bed with an old dog chain on one side, one could write a story. From the knarled front fender that had a least fifteen confrontations with trees, fences, dumpsters and at least one deer, to the duct-taped passenger side mirror that once house a mirror but was now only a hollow rusting crater, first the mirror was cracked when he clipped the side of bulldozer in his father’s front yard, and then only a few weeks later when he punched the glass out in a fit of rage that he no longer remembered why. Probably because he was upset with his girlfriend, “better to hit my truck than her face, although she probably needs a good walloping” he said to his on again, off again best friend, Jake. Almost all of these metallic scars were due to alcohol, maybe a few were helped along by marijuana but for the most part his driving and daily life was infused or perhaps, fueled with alcohol. “That’s why I buy trucks, they can handle my drinking” he told Jake one afternoon, this was followed by a belch, the crushing of a beer can and then the cracking of the opening of the next beer. And a swallow. There were always more swallows. Every swallow a scratch towards death.

            A tall can of Budweiser sat between his legs, growing warm as he yanked the steering wheel and passed a slow moving blue minivan, he glanced at the mother of the van and whistled, nobody heard him, and he grabbed the beer, the can half-finished his fingers making mini-impressions in the beer as he accelerated past. The speedometer didn’t work, it bounced back and forth between zero and ninety, as if on a trampoline and googly-eyed, the engine was a brave roar as he sped forward, crushing the can in his hand before tossing it out of the window. He belched in the cab, felt in his right pants pocket and pulled out a crushed pack of Marlboro cigarettes, he was determined to slowly kill himself by small degrees every waking moment, he had lived with anxiety so much of his life that he would not recognize calm if suddenly appeared. Even his dreams were busy, he dreamed of tornadoes, sinking boats, wild dogs and fire. Lots of fire. House fires. Truck fires. Forest fires. Once he even had a dream his shoes were on fire and he couldn’t get them off. He woke up wild-eyed, his legs twitching, reaching down and touching the toes that poked out of the ends of his ruddy white athletic socks. No fire. He eyed himself in the mirror, the five-day growth on his chin filled with gray, the lines around his eyes cut into his face, he yawned.  The image didn’t match what he felt, which was tired rage although he looked just tired, like the bottom of a worn-out boot, he was scuffed and busted, bruised to the core. Although he didn’t stop his mind long enough to even contemplate this, he shrugged at the whiskers and took another swallow. The life he led was teeming with swallows, boundless searching for the most perfect drink in the world, the next one might be better than the last. Maybe.  The hills were spent as well, collapsing into themselves, they appeared to be slouching their shoulders, bent trees lined the ridges, they had dreamed of being mountains but were only foothills—the hills knew this much about themselves. An entire region born in despair, even the landscape was forgotten, remembered only by those that lived there, the way the sun cast the sky pink at 7 pm or the way the flies would explode during the humid August heat, and then there was the mosquitoes, who governed the land with their needle faces from May to September. He pulled off the State Route into a small two-lane road that twisted like a serpent between a cluster of hills. Waving at a woman hanging laundry on a yellowed rubber wire fastened to a water tank and an abandoned pick-up truck, she waved back, her smile crossing her face as if were a curtain rising on a Broadway play. A magical world lay just beyond her lips. An old lover’s memory, she always thought him handsome despite his violence, maybe because of it, she never knew. She watched him drive past until he disappeared around a bend, reached down into the blue basket at her feet and fastened a pair of pants to the laundry line. She felt like a flower when she knew him and he felt like a razor, cutting her leaf by leaf but she never noticed until there was nothing left of her. “It’s o.k., mom, he means well” she spoke to her mother one day, staring out the sooty window of her mother’s trailer, “Mean is the imperative word there, honey. You can’t trust a man who shows his love with a balled fist and knives of teeth” her mother sniffed back. 

            Driving further into the hills that crammed the sky, pushing it out of view while his truck heaved up the narrow road, climbing towards another ridge—a broken fence, trailers and more trailers, yards filled with old appliances, tires, old cars, and decrepit shacks–this was home, this was what was familiar. Pulling off into a dirt road that was more of a trail than a road, the axle groaned and the tires slipped in the mud before catching and rocking the truck forward, the back end swung wide as he pressed the accelerator down, “C’mon” he coached, the words slipping between his yellowed teeth. He could have said this to the truck or for himself.  He drank the last of the beer and tossed the can out the side of the window. Ahead, across a small field his small white house sat, trees stood behind it, like a choir of background singers standing on an otherwise empty stage. Pulling up to a patch of red dirt blotted with black patches of oil and pockets of weeds, he sighed and reached for another beer as he turned the truck off. As he stood by the truck, undid his pants he took a long piss while drinking the can to half empty, thinking about what still needed to do before tomorrow. Unload the truck, make a few phone calls, other than that there were no other plans, this was the way he had lived his life for years, and when lovers and bosses complained they were reminded that they knew they were signing up for when they got involved with him, an assumption they should have known. He wore all the signs of his lifestyle like a walking Las Vegas neon sign. 

            He pulled the boards from the back of the truck, had “found” them on an unattended construction site early that morning after driving back from his cousin’s house after a long day of drinking, he lined them next to his house, kicking some spider webs out of the way while droplets of sweat trickled down his back. Lifted out an old rocking chair that was left in front of another house, some gnarled pieces of gutter and, finally, the groceries. Two twelve packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon, one box of frozen chicken patties, two frozen pizzas, a pack of cigarettes and a bag of cheese puffs. The night was set.

            Sometimes a person doesn’t know they are lonely, it only comes upon in odd feelings, a clutch in the gut or like some eerie background music in their lives. Tom never thought he was lonely, he preferred to be alone until he wasn’t alone, then he would seek out something to keep him occupied until it got too hot then, he would need to leave, it was easier living alone—no hassles except for his own which were best ignored.  Tom put away the groceries, leaving one twelve pack on the floor next to the couch, shut the refrigerator door with his backside as he balanced a cigarette in his left hand while holding a frozen pizza and a beer in his right hand, the pizza box being clutched with his ring and pinky fingers. Carefully laid it on the small linoleum table top in his kitchen, putting the lit cigarette on the end of the table, if it burned all the way down it didn’t really matter, the table was not only covered in small thin blue and silver stars that looked like 1950’s Christmas decorations but also with dozens of cigarette burns, the long suffering table could say nothing but stay silent and take the almost daily abuse of Tom. He stuck the pizza in the over, walked over to the boom box he kept by the television which only got three and a half channels, the local Fox station came in as fuzzy and full of rolling static and put a Joe Walsh CD in, making air guitar motions to “Life’s Been Good” as he walked back in the kitchen to retrieve the last drags of the cigarette. “Close call” he spoke to himself plucking it off the edge of table, an inch of ash dangling for the end, and pulled a long drag and took another swallow off his beer. 

            He had grown up not fifteen miles from this small house, his father a part-time truck driver and part time inmate. His mother worked at the local IGA and sold Avon until she decided that she could make more extra money selling black beauties and then, later, Tom’s Adderall and Ritalin on the side. When she was finally busted by the police, she found Jesus and started attending church groups nearly every night. Tom had one older brother, Tim who had died on the railroad tracks when Tom was twenty-one, “it could have been an accident” he would say when he talked about Tim who had his own share of run-in’s with the police, “then again maybe it wasn’t.” He would add, a pregnant pause with raised eyebrows.  Tom’s younger sister, Tammy, still lived in the small town they grew up in with her two bi-racial kids and her girlfriend who was always begging them to leave. “It’s all fine with me” Tom would say, “as long as they are happy I don’t give a fuck. To each his own.” He got along well with Tammy who sometimes would bail him out of jail, or loan him gas money, drop off a bag of groceries when he was struggling and he was always struggling—“Tom, why don’t you come by the house—the kids would love to see you. So would Marsha and me, you make the kids laugh. Just don’t come by drunk.” This was a problem and was the biggest reason why Tom didn’t stop to  see his sister, she was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, so was Marsha and he had too much respect for them and didn’t want to disrupt their lives, even if was just for dinner.  The last time Tom showed up drunk at Tammy’s he had been on a five-day bender, one that started on a Monday and would continue for nearly ten days by a trip to the county jail. Over dinner he leaned over to his six-year-old nephew, “hey Timmy, you know you were named after your Uncle Tim, he died just a few miles from here. He was a funny man, your Uncle Tim.” Tammy held her fork and eyed Tom over her plate, “Don’t start talking about Tim, not now.” Tom grinned, stabbed his pork chop, lifted the entire piece sideways into his mouth, “anyway, your uncle was one crazy son-of-a-bitch, he used to talk to the devil.” He chewed with his mouth open, the smell of charred meat mixed with whiskey burned from his lips. “Tommy, stop” Tammy set her fork down. Smiliing, he continued while staring straight at his sister, her eyes blew through him like the chill in January, “Anyway, Tim told me one night that the devil, who he sometimes called Mr. Pete, don’t ask me why but when he would say, Mr. Pete came last night we all knew he meant Satan. So, he says to me, this is right before he died, he said—Mr. Pete crawled up under the covers with me last night, he snuggled real close and his breath felt like charcoal on my face and told me he was gonna grab my soul real soon and make me a bed to rest in forever. That we’d be bunkmates. But I wouldn’t need no pillow.” Marsha muttered, “please Tommy stop, you are gonna scare the kids.” He tore off another piece of meat with his teeth, “well, just a few days later he come across that train and the train won that battle. Tore his head clean off, it laid on one side of the tracks while his body laid on the other. Yup.” Tammy slammed her fist down, little Tim stared up at his uncle, wide-eyed, mouth agape, and said nothing. “You can leave now” Tammy scooted her chair back and walked to the front door, “out!” Tom took a long drink of water, “Twats wrong Tammy, ignoring facts don’t make them go away Tammy, a boy should know who he is named after.” He mussed Timmy’s hair and shouted his good nights. He wasn’t invited back for nearly six months and then only under the condition of not drinking. 

            The smell of dust and cracked corn husks floated through the window beckoning Tom outside, turning the boom box towards the door, sliding three cigarettes out of the pack onto the table he put one behind each ear and lit the other one and went outside on the porch while his cardboard pizza baked in the oven. He wiped some dirt off his jeans that were so thin his kneecaps nearly poked through the stretched denim, the dirt just smudged his fingers and fabric from the grease that had built up for wearing them for the past three days. He watched a small stream of ants migrate from under the porch to an apple core he had discarded earlier in the day, he wiped his nose on the back of his arm and squinted as the sun reminded him who the boss was. A thought popped up, a recurring one that came whenever the ache of regret pinged inside of him, an alarm that seemed to be perpetually on snooze—it came on every fifteen minutes. This was involved when he had moved to the city when he was twenty-two, although he was only there for five months it loomed large in his life and was something he never talked about very much. He immigrated to the city to look for work, a new life that would pull him from the drudgery of the sticky poverty he had grown up in. His best friend Aaron told him, “there ain’t nothin’ up there that you can’t get here, plus you’ll get robbed.” Tom answered, “well the nothin’ there will be my nothin’ and you gotta own something to get robbed and I ain’t got nothing except my truck and boredom. I’m going to get a job, a pretty woman and not have to drive from one end of the hills to the other looking at the same ugly shit, like your face.” Aaron smiled and said, “but you will miss this ugly face” and got up to fetch another beer. 

            The bar was wedged between an alley and a store-front “antique” shop that was, in reality a narrow space stuffed with items that had been discarded by others because they had worn out their usefulness: singed skillets, threadbare clothes, broken toys and an assortment of gold- & silver-plated jewelry that was crammed into a glass encased countertop. And the dust. Dust that fell off some of the clothing and items like snow, even the old woman who ran the shop appeared to be coated in dust, she was perpetually rubbing her glasses on the sleeves of her blouse telling every customer who held something out to her to “hold on honey, I need to fix my glasses” before telling them the price of whatever they were wanting to purchase. Nothing had a price tag. The bar was only a few blocks from the apartment he had rented, it was an affordable one bedroom, came furnished except for a bed but he decided he could just as well sleep on the frayed blue couch. After paying his rent and obtaining his keys he trudged up the stairs, opened the door, put the 12-pack of Busch beer on the kitchen counter, tossed his Hefty bag of laundry into the bedroom and opened a window to let the air in. “Smells like old woman and cats up in here” he said to no one as he cracked a beer. He pulled the lone chair out from under the small Formica table and put it beside the window where he gazed out at the people walking on the sidewalk below, blowing cigarette smoke towards the traffic. After three beers he locked the door, went down the stairs two steps at a time and went looking for the bar he noticed on the way towards his apartment. Taking note of the antique store next to the bar, “I can get my pots and pans there” he ducked into the bar, the sunlight closed behind him as he sat at the bar and ordered a shot and a beer. This became his home away from home during the next six months. 

            He got a job at a warehouse where he unloaded hardware goods off  wooden pallets into massive steel shelves that resembled girders and stretched several stories high. He became adept at using a forklift and, at first enjoyed the job, it was tedious but the pay was more than he made working at the convivence store back home and he made a few friends who he could smoke pot with on their lunch breaks. His first paycheck he splurged and bought a steak dinner at Ponderosa, goring himself on the salad bar and the most expensive steak on the menu. After that, he would pay his rent, gas up his truck and spend the rest of his money on beer and weed. In his third month on the job his supervisor called him into his office and explained that the company had recently been sold and there would be mandatory drug screens starting at the end of the month. “Plenty of time to get any substances out of your system” he leveled his eyes at him from across his desk, “not saying you like a little of the devil’s salad but I know some of the men around here like to relax in a certain way.” He knew his days were numbered.

            She pulled up next to him on the barstool, she did not belong in this bar, he was surprised she wandered in. He looked at her from above his bottle of beer, she wore her hair in a long ponytail, had tight leather pants, a band tee-shirt with the sleeves cut off, her black bra straps speaking to the world that she was her own woman. “Can I get a shot of Jager and a gin and tonic” she motioned to the bartender. “Hey” she said sideways to him. “Hey, back at you” he answered, “first time here?” She swallowed her shot, “yeah, I was seeing a show with my friends but my asshole ex-boyfriend showed up so I ducked out and saw this place, I pass it all the time, and figured what the hell, why not?” Lighting a cigarette, he nudged the box toward her and she said thanks, picked up the box and tapped a cigarette out, he leaned over and lit it for her. Nodding her head in thanks as she exhaled a plume of smoke she asked him what his name was and what he did. “Tom, I work at the ACE warehouse—it pays pretty well, at least better than the shitburg where I’m from. I just moved up here a few months ago but, it’s cool. I like the city life.” The bartender put another beer in front of him, another nod of thanks and he pointed to her gin and tonic, she in turn nodded thanks.  It was a dance of nods through the smoke. “What do you like about it? The city, I mean” she asked him. Pausing, “well there is more to do than where I’m from where the only thing going on is getting drunk, driving around the hills looking for the same old pussy and getting high. There aren’t very many jobs unless you want to work at a gas station…. Sorry about the pussy remark.” “No worries, I understand. I get it—but what do you do for fun?” She sipped her drink, made more smoke and looked at him. He had to think about her question, tapping the ashes from his cigarette, pausing—“I guess I come here, I dunno—sometimes smoke a bowl and listen to the radio. I’ve never really thought about it….what about you?” The question was posed as an invitation, his side grin giving him away—“she’s out of my league” he thought to himself. “I read books, I listen to music. Loudly. And I get high. Fuck. All the things everybody does for fun. And sleep, that’s the most fun.” She accepted his invite and for the next three weeks they did all of those things until one morning she woke up on the mattress on the floor that he had pulled out of the empty apartment next to his, their piles of clothes next to the bed, bottles of beer next to the bed-empty except for the cigarette butts, and looked around the room. There was a tacked-up photo of James Dean next to his closet that was half way open because it wouldn’t close from the pile of laundry jutting out from the bottom, his dusty boombox with cassette tapes strewn around it in the rush they were discarded next to it. Lynard Skynard. AC/DC. Def Leppard. Billy Squier. Heart. The music of a dullard she thought to herself. She rolled over and looked at him, his breath making a small whistling noise as it exited his mouth, she could see the ends of his front teeth and smell his breath. 

            She got up, pulled her clothes on, boiled water for the instant coffee he had and she shook her head as she unscrewed the top of the canister, there was a pile of sugar and instant creamer he had grabbed by the handful from the Burger King up the street. She stirred the coffee with a plastic spoon she had to wash off in the sink and sat down on the wooden chair, she smoked a cigarette. Then another one and by the fourth one he walked out of his room wearing only a tight pair of jeans, there was a grimy shine to them at she felt repulsed and attracted to him in that moment. “You have no books” was all she said. “Huh?” waving his hand across his greasy matt of hair, “what do you mean? Did you make any coffee for me?” he asked as he walked towards the kitchen. “It’s instant, just put the water in the microwave. You don’t own any books.” She pressed her fingers into her eyes. “Yeah, so? Who cares, I watch tee-vee, it saves me time.” On the other side of the room sat his black and white television, a VCR sat next to it with a small stack of used VHS tapes: “The Terminator”, “A Rebel Without a Cause”, “Smokey and the Bandit” and three pornos. “I need to leave, this isn’t going to work out” under her breath she muttered, “you have no books.” She scooted her chair back, carried her empty coffee cup to the kitchen where he stopped her, grabbed her by the elbows, “you are leaving because I don’t own any books?”  “Yes, and please let go of me. Your breath stinks.” She felt disgusted by him but more by herself. Grabbing her harder, his hands moved up her arms, he was much stronger than her. “You can’t just leave; we need to talk about this.” “Stop. You are hurting me. There is nothing to talk about, we don’t have anything in common except we like smoking and getting drunk. Most people I know like those things, but it doesn’t mean I have to fuck them! I need to leave before I disappear in my own life.” In a flash he threw her against the counter, “fuck you bitch! Nobody is leaving here until I say so!” His eyes dark, his cheeks full of anger and hurt as he stepped towards her his hands raised. She turned towards him, in a quick movement she smacked him on the side of the face with her coffee  cup knocking him against the cabinet, the cup fell to the floor, a hundred tiny slivers of ceramic exploded on the linoleum. “Don’t you ever touch me again!” she hissed as she rushed past him, grabbing her purse from the back of the chair, and rushed out. He tried to follow her out, left hand against his right temple that was gushing blood, it was cascading down his face onto the floor. Bright red droplets bursting across the floor, he yelled towards her, “come back here! Fucking bitch!” and as he stepped forward, he cut his foot on a large chunk of the broken cup. Moving to the chair, he sat down and folded his hands around his face and wept. On the floor blood pooled around his feet.

            A few months later Tom arrived back in Southeastern Ohio , he called up his uncle Henry, “hey, I’m back—do you need any work done?” There was shame in his voice, the boldness that had once been present had vanished, to be replaced by a shadow, one of humiliation and resignation. He was flat broke and staying with his sister. “The big city finally had enough of you and kicked you out, huh?” Henry chuckled into the phone, “I told you that nothing good came from up there, just a bunch of busy idiots.” A pause, Henry’s voice softened, “well, I suppose you are staying with your sister or one of those drunken hillbilly friends of yours, I have that trailer up on the ridge. I got that cocksucker Holmes to finally move out and you can stay up there. I have some fence work that I need help with and that’ll keep you busy until you find out what you wanna do. Come by tomorrow and we will work it out.” Henry was his mother’s brother, he had a troubled childhood like most in the area, eventually got arrested for t-boning his car into the side of a postal truck and going to prison for a year after the postman died a few days later. After getting out of prison he never drank again, went to church every Sunday and went to work, owning rental properties and building fences and small repairs for the farmers and widows of the area. He wasn’t rich but he wasn’t poor either. “Thank you, Uncle Henry.” When Henry died, nearly ten years ago Tom had burned up the relationship like it was on of his packs of Doral cigarettes, he had to admit the his Uncle offered him many opportunities, gifting him many chances to prove himself of his kindness but Tom was never able to be up to the task of getting over the hump and doing the right thing. There was the first time he stole from his uncle, nearly a year after working for him—he needed some cocaine and sold the tools he was given by his uncle, and he told himself that he wasn’t technically stealing them but he knew that Henry would buy him new ones, “a man can’t build a good fence with just his bare hands” he had told Tom when he was informed that the tools were “stolen” out of Tom’s truck, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a wad of money, peeled off 3 hundred dollar bills and handed them to Tom. Next it was stealing a generator from a job, and not showing up for work, getting a DUI while driving his cousin Tammy home from high school. “You can drink and drive all you want but not with my daughter in the car, for God’s sake Tom-it was three in the afternoon, and you were supposed to go back to work.” That was the first time Henry fired him. And he would go on to hire and rehire him many times, like cards being shuffled in and out of each other, over the next seven years until Tom cursed Henry out at a Thanksgiving dinner while in a black-out. Since then, Tom was hustling, finding odd jobs, trying to sell weed, make half-hearted attempts at getting sober. “Close call” he whispered to himself as he smelled the pizza burning from inside the small house. He pushed the cigarette butt in the ground, turning his boot into it several more times than necessary and headed back inside while Joe Walsh played in the background. 

Christmas 2022.

(written for Jon Solomon’s 25-Hour Holiday Show on WPRB https://wprb.com/jon-solomons-25-hour-holiday-radio-show/)

For many years, the downtown skyline of Columbus, Ohio had one lone solitary skyscraper, the Leveque Tower stood high and bold and a sort of middle finger to the rest of the Midwest, announcing that Columbus indeed had a skyline, damnit. When my immigrant uncles arrived from sprawling Caracas, with its immense buildings rising towards the ever-present fog that sat on the mountains around it, they laughed and for years referred to the Leveque Tower as an erection in the middle of Ohio. “Dat is not a building, it’s a boner in da middle of Cowtown” my Uncle Pedro would laugh every time we passed underneath it. But near the base of the Laveque Tower, just a block away sat one of the very first large department stores in the Midwest, the Lazarus Building was for many years the destination for all Central Ohio shoppers, until the suburban mall craze of the late sixties slowly stole all their customers, until finally in the early aughts the store finally shook, wailed and finally shuttered its doors for good.     

Lazarus was not only the place to buy school clothes, business suits, furniture, appliances, but it also included fine dining as well as a cafeteria that overlooked a large courtyard in the center of the department store—all seven stories of it,  but perhaps the largest attraction of the store was its annual Christmas showpiece which stretched almost a city block. A massive display of elves, Santa, his workshop as well as hundreds of shiny and glittery presents with giant ribbons, cotton-y snow, and the most fascinating attraction of all aan enormous miniature train that ran the entire block, through Santa’s North Pole village, mountain ranges that echoed the great Alps of Europe and eventually to the small towns that dotted Ohio. This was Christmas for many of us.       

Bela’s living room 2022

My grandparents lived just a few miles north of downtown in the sprawling Linden neighborhood that crawled up the east side of Columbus to the far northern end of the city. Their smallish cap-cod was much larger when I was five years old than the broken down house, in the broken down section that my grandparents lived when I drive by it forty-five years later, but I recall the fireplace that was always crackling and popping along with the Christmas muzak the continuously played from the clunky 1960’s stereo console that stood next to my grandmother’s leather back chair sitting opposite of her husband’s Laz-E-Boy. After arriving at my grandparents, sitting in front of the fireplace, drinking hot chocolate while my grandparents slid into their nightly haze of Johnny Walker Red. All the while the Christmas tree flickered, blinked, and amazed me.

Lazarus Christmas Display circa 1950’s—from The Columbus Dispatch

The next morning, always a Saturday, my mother would shepherded  us in the orange four-door Datsun and drive us to Lazarus where she would bitch and complain about the lack of parking, hustle out of the car and there was snow, always the thick, grimy snow of cities that caked itself against rubber boots, rubber tires and the bottom of the heavy metal car doors of the nineteen sixties and seventies. We would go into that large department store full of mystery and awe and  head towards the real Santa and the tiny shed that sat in the middle of courtyard, I would cry and bray as we stood in line, triggered by my older brother’s crying as well—because, hey-if he was crying Santa must be an intense dude. My mother would set us on Santa’s knee, a knee what was probably as soiled with pee as the downtown alleys that many of the homeless drunks would duck into. After the bawling on Santa’s lap my mother would buy a bag of popcorn from the Woolworth’s next door and we would walk the block, mesmerized by the display of Christmas that stretched longer than a child’s imagination could travel, farther than the moon and back, much father in fact—into the space dust of the universe. This was something to behold, the elves, Santa’s North Pole village, the longest (by far) miniature train set that looped and climbed snow caped mountains, multiple tunnels and bridges that went over frozen rivers. And the presents, soooo many presents—what were in those shiny perfectly wrapped packages? 

Lazarus circa 1980’s photo from The Ohio History Connection

In a few years we landed in Springs, Long Island, a village just a breath away from East Hampton and our house sat near the end of long road—the back yard woods filled with ticks, box turtles and poison ivy that kept us occupied for the one glorious year we lived there. Being from Ohio means that whenever you are near a mountain you have to climb it and whenever you are near a ocean you have to either swim in it or stand next to it and think about swimming in the mystery. Thanksgiving of nineteen-seventy-four, after filling ourselves on Turkey, oyster stuffing and mounds of mashed potatoes my mother packed us into that Datsun and we drove the two miles to the beach, which was empty of course with a bitter wind blowing in from the Atlantic. The only people who would be on the beach on this fridgid November would be some idiots from Ohio. We picked up as many shells as we could and when we got home, my mother washed them out, popped popcorn over the stove top, poured out a few bags of cranberries and opened up several packages of contruction paper. There, on the floor around our Christmas tree she weaved string through the shells, cranberries, and popcorn and strung them on the pine tree branches. She helped our little hands glue the construction paper together, making a multi-colored and no doubt adorable pathetic chain that most like stood like an open little boy’s zipper on that tree, but it was our homemade chain. 

 At night after tucking me in, she would sing in her Joan Baez-y affected voice and trill out Silent Night as she tucked the covers in around me. “Honey, right now Santa is flying over the ocean, he will be delivering presents soon, but you need to sleep.” I thought about how cold the old elf must be, “Mom, he’s going to be cold when he gets here.” “We will have hot chocolate for him, I promise, and carrots for the reindeer.” In my head a visions of Santa peering down into the swirling waves as snow pelted him and I drifted off to sleep. In the morning there were presents, even though we were poor there were plenty of them under that cranberry and shell covered tree and it was magical, in the seams of my life as I fold into my memories I realize that only a mother can unwrap a child’s imagination.

Stretch Armstrong with only moments to live.

As I got older, and many of things that I believed in as a child morphed into the logic of a man, one that watched people live and, of course die, of having my own children watching the amazing world that beams from their smiles, and eyes, always their eyes—I realize that it is easy to dismiss the wonderment of life I may feel. This past spring, the last spring of my mother’s life as her mind flickered and words escaped from her throat before she could voice them she sat in her favorite chair looking out at the bluebirds, cardinals and woodpeckers that flew in front of the large picture window to feed on an endless supply of nuts and seed. My mother gazed over at me, as I tried to coax memories from her—the same way that she opened my imagination so many years ago, in the way that only a mother can do-she smiled at me and asked, “Do you remember the Christmas tree we decorated on Long Island, we put the shells in the tree and popcorn? I loved that Christmas, that was my favorite tree ever.” I didn’t remember but I told her I did, because of course I did. 

faded (at seven)

Love and miss you this Christmas mom. 

Death, smoke and birds. Mom-2022

Mom started dying, real dying not the dying that people tend to nonchalantly mention in conversation, “well, we all start dying the minute we start breathing”, not that kind, but the dying dying kind when the mind tends to go, and muscles tremble from the weariness of age. Age that stalks us like an oak tree that finally overcomes a house, dwarfing it under its shadow, bearish and spindly limbs scratching the windows like fingertips. “I am here” is whispers when the wind shows its might, pushing even the mighty oak into submission. I am here, indeed. Death seems to start with an event, sometimes they are obvious like a car crash, a stroke and other times they are so small they appear insignificant, perhaps a fall in the bathtub, or in my mother’s case a very minor traffic accident that broke a small bone in the top of her leg. She was in her mid-seventies when it happened, sitting in the passenger seat of my sister’s car. In fact, I was talking to my mother when the accident happened, they were rear-ended by a distracted driver—my sister’s car, a thinly made Toyota Yaris, was damaged but not too terribly and my mother complained about her leg, her back which was injured way back in the 1970’s when a New York City bus hit her car. Back pain plagued her for years, much like the depression and auto-immune diseases that draped over her life like a shawl. After the car accident she had trouble walking, and it wasn’t very long after she had her first fall that sent her to the hospital and soon to an assisted living center to rehabilitate all of these tiny chips and dents in her body, and as we would find out in  the coming years, her psyche. 

            For her, a woman whose depression and anxiety had at times kept her in bed for days and isolated her from life until she was able to shake it off with the help with life partner, the trip to the nursing home brought on more anxiety, and more fear that she had ever known. For those of us who loved her we pleaded with her to finish the rehab, we could see the writing of the future every day she didn’t complete her exercises, the frustration we felt came off as annoyance, judgement—we wanted more for her but perhaps, we did not fully understand the depths of her depression—who wants to acknowledge that our parents are depressed, have mental health issues. It might rub off on us. Her room at the assisted living felt like a department store display for a nursing home, sea scape painting (check), mounted television (check), wide bathroom door with handicap friendly safety measures (check), white walls (check), Bible next to the bed (check), smell of feces and urine from the hallway (check). It felt more like assisted dying than assisted living. She hated it, she wept, cried out and made a nuisance of herself to the nurses who responded in kind. She wanted to go home and had giant temper tantrums, she threatened suicide if she couldn’t leave and after a week of exasperation my stepfather took her home against medical advice. We all held our breath, we passed judgement, we gossiped but my mother got better, at least mentally—her mood picked up and she engaged in physical rehab at home and was soon standing up, walking with a walker and cooking dinner. “Come down and see us” she would say into the phone during my daily phone calls, and we would pack the kids into the car, drive the 100 miles to Cincinnati, jump into their pool, eat barbeque or burgers on the grill, chat on the patio and head home, relaxed and sunburned. Soon though, her physical therapy took a step back, the water rehab remained unfinished and her depression, that came and went like a bell that rang at the top of every hour returned. 

            My stepfather, Steve worked hard on the garden–both he and mother loved to watch birds and he constructed bird feeders all over their yard, in each one there would be different types of food for the variety of birds that would visit, some feeders were elongated screens filled with peanuts and others were more traditional, filled with small pellets and seeds—in the morning it was busy, sort of a rush hour of feathers and busy squawks, chirps and songs- with wings fluttering and chests puffing for the food. My mother enjoyed nothing more than to sit in her chair and look at these beautiful animals eat breakfast every morning. The back yard was filled with plants and flowers that Steve tended too, my mother would sit on patio and point out flowers she wanted him to cut, or a hummingbird or a chipmunk that had scurried out from the small red shed, its hesitant nose sniffing the air for danger. Theirs’s was a far cry from the life that they had led when they met over thirty years prior to her death, he was in drug rehab trying to beat a deadly taste for methamphetamines, heroin and alcohol while my mother was trying to coax recovery out of him. They fell in love, and while I was living forty miles away, a senior in high school they quietly moved into a small basement apartment near The Ohio State University campus. She had a chair sort of a throne-ish recliner that sat next to Steve’s although he very seldom ventured into it, a whirl of completed chores in his wake. She would look out the window at the birds while she devoured books and magazine, a stack nearby that she was working on or completed, she ate words like a vacuum. 

            The last month as she slowly seemed to melt, every day she slunk towards death ,her life seeming to pool around her, first her legs went—after a few weeks into her decline she could no longer walk or pull herself up, shortly thereafter most of the basic self-care was out of reach for her—like she was trying to catch a cloud in her hand.  Every day brought another humiliation from the universe about the fragility of our bodies, they are are destined to be destroyed. Mom knew this, she realized what was happening but she did not want to talk about it, she did not want to embrace death although it was obvious that she could no longer embrace life, at least the things about life that brought her great joy, her ability to even converse with what made her happy, her husband, her children and grandchildren was being whittled by the great woodcarver in the sky, with his sharpened pocket knife, stroking the life out of her in thin shards that fell around her, we were trying to pick them up. Small slips of her scattered around us. 

            Steve had put her in the sling, wheeled her carefully out into the living room and gently placed her in her yellow chair, she could see out into the front yard to the birdfeeders. A brown plush blanket covered her legs which were at this point, only causing her pain, swollen and sensitive to the touch, even moving them sideways brought stabs of pain the moved up into her lower back, and the blanket stretched up to her chest. Her long gray hair framed her head, her sparkling green eyes were translucent at this point, they struggled to focus, and she would stare into something, trying to make sense of an environment hat was changing around her as if she were gazing at the world from underwater, even though the water was crystal clear everything was washed out, blurry, slow moving—too far to touch. She was not getting enough oxygen to her brain, and her heart was overworking as was everything else in her body, her feet suffered and her ankles would swell up and painful to the touch but not as much as her mind which would slip into a haze, losing all sense of time and space. She began hallucinating. 

            We talked, although she was confused, she wanted to tell me things and she enjoyed hearing my voice. “Mom, what do you want to talk about?” I asked, as she sat quietly. “I don’t know….I’m not sure but I want you to talk with me.” I sat on the other side of the room, on the far end of their brown leather couch, the pillows bulky and soft, next to me another endless cup of coffee that helped me through my days, my afternoons, my evenings. “Why don’t we talk about Long Island” she asked me. She knew I loved Long Island, perhaps my favorite place where we lived when I grew up, I went to ten schools scattered around Ohio, New York and Virginia. I have written a great deal about my love of Long Island and the life we had there and even though we lived there for just under two years, it made such an impression that every day when I look up into the sky, I think of the vastness of the ocean I saw so much of in Springs, New York. “Yes, of course. You know that was my favorite place where we lived growing up.” She smiled, her eyes beaming, “Yes, I know—and guess what, it was mine as well. I want to tell you how much I liked it…..” and she lost her train of thought.  The birdfeeder shook with a cardinal trying to scare away a wren, the hum of the air-conditioner was a soundtrack. “Mom, what were you going to tell me about Springs?” “I don’t know.” The cold air blew out of the vents. “Why don’t you tell me, Bela. What you remember.” I got up and fetched another cup of coffee and sat down. “Well, I don’t remember much of the house, I shared a room with Z. I think Erica’s was across the hall and you and David slept downstairs. I remember having a very high fever, 104 or something, and you called the doctor asking what to do. You and David put me in the tub with cold water, and I remember you stroking my hair in bed while I went in and out of sleep. You kissed my forehead; your hair was long, and it draped over me like a red-haired canopy. I remember all of that and how close the ocean was and the forest in the back of our house, and you could cut through and be at a small harbor. Mom, you told us to never go there but we did anyways.” My mother was smiling as I told her this. And I waited. Feeling the space between us, small moments fell to the side. After a while I asked her if she wanted me to tell her more. “No, it’s ok. Maybe we can play a game?” she asked me. A game? “Sure, what would you like to play?” At that moment my mother transformed into a six year old girl, she was innocent, devoid of pain but filled with wonderment, trying to use her brain she looked around the room, eyes wide—you could feel her mind working on finding a game to play, her answer was sweet and when she mentioned it—I too was transformed to a six year old boy but with the knowledge that I was a middle aged man, a parent and in what happens to only the lucky, a son who was given the opportunity to parent their own parent. 

            “I know Bela, why don’t we count the pictures on the walls? That could be fun.” Moving he head slowly she scanned the walls of the living rooms, where she spent most of her days the last ten years of her life, reading her books, sewing, scanning her iPad, drinking coffee, tea, eating the sweets that she loved so much and of course, looking outside at the circus of birds that visited at all hours. This yard in southwestern Ohio was an oasis of food. As she moved her head, looking around it was as if her eyes were like the sun light moving across the walls, the floor as the day rolled by. “That sounds like a fun game” I replied. Smiling she asked me, “who should go first? Why don’t you start Bela?” On the wall across from me, above her head was a painting by a Native-American artist that Steve and she bought many years ago when they went out west, next to that above Steve’s chair was a Charlie Harper print, this she loved. Harper a native of Cincinnati made colorful paintings of birds and animals, she loved his work and I had always wanted to buy her one of his paintings, but they were too much for my social worker salary. So, she had prints, jigsaw puzzles, coffee mugs and clothing of Charlie Harper’s work, they were not the original, but they were, perhaps better because they were everywhere, reminders of nature—and the playfulness that it brings into our lives. And really, if one can drink out of a coffee mug of something you adore, what could be better? Above the fireplace there were photos of our family, a grand picture of my sister and mother, noses nuzzling each other, a mother transferring generational beauty to her daughter, middle aged both women with long gray hair touching, their smiles stretching past time as only love can do. They are smiling. Across the top of the picture window, Steve and Erica hung photographs by laundry clips so my mother could see her children and grandchildren, it is nearly impossible to feel lonely when in the present of children. By the front door next to a closet with large folding doors hung another painting, bought in a moment of shared interest and love by mother and Steve, across the floor and walls the sun made shadows, moving pictures. I started first, there were seven pictures hanging on the walls, I went slowly and gazed over the room, intentionally moving my head towards each item on the wall so my mother could see where they were. She was looking at me, staring intently but with a soft smile, her wide eyes swallowing up my gaze. “Ok, I have counted seven moms, see how many you can count.” There was a pause from her as if she were psyching herself up, “o.k. Bela, I am going to start” turning her head towards the east wall, the picture above the fireplace, “there is one” she moved to the next wall and quickly counted another one and then waited a moment, turned her head to her left, “I know there is one above me and that one,” which hung over Steve’s chair, she moved to another one above my head, “I think that is five or six” her eyes roamed the room and then they settled down, her face went blank—she turned quiet. Silence. “How many mom?” Looking up, she sighed, “I don’t know. What?” “How many picture are left on the walls?” She was lost. “I don’t know, what were we doing?” “Are you tired mom, do you want to stop and just sit?” She was childlike, still my mother, “yes, I think so.”

March 2002-March 2020: Sobriety, depression and laughter.

March 8 2002-March 8-2022.

                When the sunshine brings itself into the house, dust floats both up and down, circling the room as if air were water and each particle was a miniature fish swimming through the living room, the dining room and everywhere—it is teeming with dust. There is little anything to do about it, the old apartment had a furnace at least forty years old, parts of it incased in asbestos and one reason the rent is so cheap is because of the effort it would take replace it. We all die every moment, some die  just faster than others. Have at it asbestos spewing machine. The flowers add color to the shelves and stacks of books, the walnut furniture and, of course, the giant wall of records and compact discs that line the walls of the dining room. They demand attention, and why not-they most likely have saved my life on many occasions. Lifting my mood or matching it, tiny grooves brought to life by a needle and electricity. I have heard that the majority of dust is human skin, my house would seem to have the skin of every inhabitant that has ever walked the scuffed wooden floors the past hundred years, long after people die parts of then literally continue to swim around us.

                There are days that tug at me from the inside, pulling around the ankles of whatever it is that rests and propels me forward. A soul? A conscious? A sub-conscious? A river of tiny electrical outlets connected by cells and nerves inside my body? A tug this severe can  be an ache, and over the years, it started around the age of nineteen, hit several peaks when I was twenty-one, thirty-three and fifty—these peaks towered above me, but they were the edge of annihilation, like wind slicing through the branches—the ache can be violent or soft, almost undetectable except for the small wisps of the leaves. It is those moments I crave, when it is silent, more of a whisper than an insurrection in my mind—repeating itself like a 100-person choir coming to the chorus now.  I have resisted joining the choir for most of my life, and at other periods the metaphorical church doors were closed and my hope was that it was demolished, wiping out the sounds. The Depression (it deserves a capital D) was planted in me before I was born, like cicadas  already burrowed deep in the ground before my parents even met, it has existed in our family genes much longer than I can even guess—and for some in our family it has sprouted inside of us as if it were a doomsday vine, roots growing inside, and as we have aged so has the vine, its arms reaching deep into our psyche and some of our experiences sprout new buds. At various times in my life, I have been able to prune it, through love, through mediation, music, writing, running and through the past two years walking several miles every day. But the roots are there, entangled at my core, one person I know compared it to a giant pool of black water that feels I am drowning in.

                The asphalt basketball court at East Elementary was baking from the spring time heat, balls were bouncing in an out of the baskets, in the far corner of the court, a small courtyard held a particularly vicious game of dodge-ball, the thick plastic red ball with its red bumpy exterior, zinging unlucky victims—red welts a testament to their lack of mobility, being slow on an elementary school playground can be a deadly trait. The hill at the other end of the court dipped down into the swings, the monkey bars and a giant half buried tractor-trailer tire that smelled of urine and the fidgety moments of first kisses traded after lunch. I had been a quiet child, moving every year had taught me to be silent, wary of friendships and I was always the smallest kid in my class—shy—I tended to stay to myself, keeping myself fortified with Marvel comic books and my early interest in the records I started collecting in third grade. The baseball field was dotted with fourth and fifth grade boys, swinging wooden bats—trying to impress girls and the other boys by knocking a leather ball out of the infield. I stayed back, if it were football season, I would have partaken in the boys’ games but, being small, uncoordinated with limited hand-eye coordination left me quite happily on the sidelines. There, on the side of the black sheet of play I found a voice that I would come to rely on for most days of my life. Several teachers, including Ms. Houska who would vacillate between calm and empathetic to being witchy and loud was there along with one of the student teachers, a blonde woman whose name is long gone and may well be a granny at this point, and of course, there were the other kids who didn’t play dodgeball, basketball, baseball or want to hang on monkey bars and had outgrown the metal swings the past few years. These were, for the most part- girls. In this moment, I developed an instant character, a sort of hippie who spoke in a high-pitched voice and while I didn’t really know what marijuana was, I pretended I was high-my voice a high-pitched sing-song voice—they all cackled. The student teacher doubled over in laughter, and as we sauntered back into class, I felt charged, a bit tired but excited. Several of the girls, one of whom I had a fourth-grade crush on remarked how funny I was, and I felt her eyes on me. From that day forward, I used humor to help placate the sense of isolation, an outsider in my own world that would later take the already seeds of depression into those blossoming vines that would later wrap and choke my life.

                The clatter of the plates, knives, forks, a vase full of flowers surprised my first wife—“what the fuck is wrong with you?!” she screamed, our entire relationship was one long scream, her screaming, my screaming back at her, the broken bits of our house and squealing of tires. “You are fucking with me! Get off my fucking back!” I yelled back, shards of glass and ceramic on the floor— “Watch your step! You broke my plates! What the fuck?” tears streaming down her face, hands against the table-holding herself up. “Our plates, they are our plates!” I yelled back at her as I scrambled for keys and slammed the door shut. Soon, she would move out, the failed experiment of our short lived (more like deathbed) marriage abandoned in that small two-bedroom house on East Patterson Street. “You ruined my life” she said as her friends from work hauled out furniture, she got the keys to my small white Metro, and I was relieved that it was all I lost, the failure of the relationship sat on a throne in the back of my skull.

                The months that followed were a period of shrill fear that I skidded through, nights at various bars, my bedroom floor littered with clothes and records, there were bottles of beer on every piece of furniture in my room, cigarette butts that had burned the corner of my dresser, the table next to my bed—somehow I was never alone—the feeling of being alone brought a desperation that motivated me out of my house. I was a wanderer in a five-block radius. I soon fell in love, and that relationship lasted over twenty years—with chaos, another dip into the deep black water that almost drank me up—a night in a motel contemplating the metal of a gun in my mouth that turned into sobriety that I still live today. There were trips all over country, to Europe which felt like a home I never really had, a house and of course, two children. That marriage ended in 2018, a period where the blackness came oozing to the top and although I was sober, I felt bereft of myself. At times, I would wake up in my bed, my small dog snuggled next to me turn my head and weep into my pillow—I forced myself to work, to exercise and to show up. She and I talk frequently, we have too—the children we created are the center of our lives, and when we part—sometimes we hug and the love the built the children is there, different of course-but there—and it stretches outward into the kids lives, dreams morph, like clouds and I am ok with this. When I see my children, I see all the love I ever feel walking, talking, making me laugh and of course, causing me worry.

                Depression is something that is like a fog, but a fog filled with monsters, it pours outward like a gushing waterfall that heads for the ocean. At times it has felt like there is a snake trying to get out of my throat, but it slithers inside of me, choking me and it finally decides to stay, coiling inside of my guts waiting to spring out when the opportunity arises. Suicide is something that some people live with on an everyday basis, a taste that will not leave– like the bitterness of a lemon, but it never leaves. Add some sugar it makes it easier, but it only dilutes the acid. I get jealous of the branches on the trees that I stare outside my window, I imagine their bravery as the wind whips and rattles them year after year, and when the sun is out they drink it is as if they had never tasted shine before. Their roots hold them solidly, growing up into the sky and deep into the earth and then I walk in the woods and I notice the ones the collapsed under the weight of living too long, the wind catching it just right or a crack of lightening choosing to crawl up its spine and it lays on the soft floor of the forest, for the rest of the trees to see, it’s carcass now a home to insects, moss and critters. Of course they are just trees, with no mind to think of these thoughts that I transfer onto them. They have no eyes to see but they do feel in some ways, their roots communicating in what is called mycorrhizal networks, a language of survival they chatter to one another through fibers intertwining with one another, finding nutrients, water and the ability to let other roots where stones may be a barrier. The complexities of this provides hope, an opportunity to feel small for it is when I am small that I can experience the world, when feeling too full a person can’t learn any more. There is no room.

                A friendly nod, followed by a cold bottle of beer being pushed my way, the cool condensation streaming down its sides was a comfort. An easy way to feel differently, to slip into something else from what I wanted, and predictable. For certain I knew what would happen when I tilted the bottle to my mouth, first the small smell of the alcohol seeping into my nose and quickly followed by the beer. I always took a long drink, letting the beer go directly to the back of my throat, my ability to drink almost half of the beer in one long drag off the bottle was a practice, my mouth craved the cold bath of five p.m. I learned without ever thinking of it. Most of my regular bartenders usually had another one set up by time I could even position myself on the bar stool. Putting the bottle down in front of me, the taste still in my mouth, fermented with a touch of sting, I could already feel the change in my body—it was as if my brain was telling my body to have a head start, the buzz started almost immediately. Twenty years later and I can still taste the beer on my lips, the scent still buried in my mind. Sometimes it feels like I was drinking yesterday. The club was always open in my mind, living near a college campus in the middle of a large city provided shortcuts that gave myself permission to duck away, to squeeze a few minutes of change that was needed, or so I thought at any given moment but usually I only allowed this to happen in the late afternoon. In my perception, I was a disciplined drinker. Eventually if I didn’t treat it, I grew grumpy, agitated and morose—these were the danger zones, an internal DMZ that could prove dangerous for my partner and myself. Drinking was a slow courting, eventually we were married, the bottle(s) and I, although for me it was a private matter that I tended to announce publicly. The Anyway Records tee-shirts during this time had an unofficial slogan on the back, “Buy Me a Beer” which was our joyous secret handshake to one another and for those who didn’t get it, well that was the point.  But like all relationships, they must change, or they become dry, brittle and bitter by the time I was in my early thirties, with a gathering pile of dead friends and brokenness gathering around my path and with my own love story headed towards an oily ditch I had to make a choice.

                At the edge of the slim hospital bed at the Shands detox center in Gainesville Florida, I grappled with the fact that it might be time to break-up with alcohol, which was terrifying as most break-ups are, and I was a person who avoided confrontation, plus I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Who would take my place of the various barstools in Columbus, Athens and to a lesser extent, Gainesville? What would those bartenders do when they pushed a Black Label towards and empty seat, I was creating ghosts. There were the conversations I was having with myself, in retrospect it was both silly and tragic, this is where my behavior had taken me—constructing make-believe scenarios around liquid. But it was scary and coupled with depression and the burgeoning sense that a big part of my identity (I had tee-shirts made for Christ’s sake!), was being discarded, I was not only petrified but also on very shaky ground. Although later that night in the large cafeteria a sea of alcoholics, sitting on hard plastic chairs, sipping coffee from small Styrofoam cups, mixed with powder cream and packets of sugar that always seemed to spill half of their contents on the fake wooden fold up tables, I was offered and accepted hope. Although these small saplings of optimism were like virga, precipitation that evaporates before it hits the ground. So, the trick was to make sure that I had to feed the clouds so to speak, every day before the entire clouds of promise vanished. My years of going to bars, nightclubs and pubs had oddly equipped me with some of the behaviors I would use to stay sober, mostly that while a depressed introverted sort, I really liked being with other people, albeit at a distance, sometimes that unspoken space was a bottle of beer or two inches of Maker’s Mark. I used this learned behavior, the one that allowed me to feel invisible to do something different, to show up—to become a vessel that could water the cloud. Even though I very seldom trusted myself, my inability to fully understand my motivations was naked, raw and I borrowed other peoples, or should I say I copied it. After a year or so of sobriety, I investigated Buddhist practices, mostly meditation but did a great deal of reading and journaling—-and they worked, for many years afterwards, the depression left, evaporated into nothing. There would be moments of lucidity where I noticed the emptiness of where the depression had been like noticing a scar that has dissolved over time, and the relief I felt was an akin to a giant metaphysical sigh.

                The rate of suicide attempts for children of parents who have completed suicide is 400% higher than those whose parents don’t complete suicide, and for people who experience a suicide in their lives, with friends and other family members there is a spike and it isn’t uncommon to see small mushroom clouds of despair that surround a completed suicide, the waves reach out and tap everybody within its orbit and then they too ripple around. If the person is a public figure the ripples continue far into the future, and for most these people it is the first remembrance of that person’s life, more so than even their greatest achievements whether it be music, acting or politics. The act provides a quiet permission that taking one’s own life is an option, it operates like a virus—thus the shame people feel when it is an ever-running option in their minds, as well as the shame for the people surrounding them. There is judgement, self and by others that presents itself as a solid stone mountain for dealing with those thoughts and especially the emotions that they come dressed in. Welcome to the Ball. For many substance users, for people that experience trauma and abandonment at an early age—we feel the actual physical environment differently than others, and this stems from an early age—we seek comfort from even the rooms we walk through and for me the primary one has been music, and it is the safest one. Even to this day, there is nothing more than I enjoy than driving my car listening to music and at times I want to sit in my partners drive way and hold her hand while I listen to Neil Young, Waxahatchee or any piece of music that comforts and inspires me, meanwhile she wants to get in the house, feed the kids, let the dog out, do things and I just want that little hand in mine and to listen. Or when I go to the gym, sit on the elliptical dance/running five or six miles to a soundtrack that I have created. I couldn’t not imagine living in the world pre-Walkman or phonographs. All those poor motherfuckers who lived before the mid-twentieth century, having to wait for wandering minstrels, or being able to afford orchestras—Jesus Christ how they must have suffered not knowing about the future of being able to listen to something whenever you wanted. But of course, it wasn’t just music I fell into to relieve my internal pain, it was alcohol, sex, the internet, buying things—even food—but all of them brought a different heat and different number of consequences, mostly feeding the black pool that has resided inside of me.

                “Hurry up Bela, Jesus you are so slow,” Jenny was yapping at me while I looked for my car keys, summer was coming to a fast close, we were driving from Columbus to her hometown of South Vienna, I didn’t want to go—really had no intention of returning to anything that was near my high school. In my mind I had left the trappings of that building behind when I walked out the door just a few months earlier, and besides Jenny’s family and me soon to be divorced stepfather there was very little I wanted to see in that area save for a few friends. “I have your keys Nerdla!” she was already outside, yelling from the sidewalk—“C’mon!” While the fall brought the end of summer it also welcomed school, new friendships, football, and a change of clothing. She wore a short summer dress and sunglasses, her hair was still long—almost big but more scattered than most of the hairstyles that were so common in the mid to late eighties, mine was long and curly, I had not cut it for nearly seven months—since my senior pictures which was also the last time I have ever combed it. We drove the 40 minutes, listening to R.E.M. on the wheezing tape deck in my car, the fields of soy and corn waved and danced at us as we passed a forty-ounce Milwaukee’s Best between us, “should we stop and get another one?” she asked as she drank the last swig near London, Ohio. We sill had fifteen miles to go. “We can get some at Shoemaker’s” I said, referring to the now long closed supermarket in South Vienna. Jenny’s older sister worked there as her husband’s family owned it, years later after the giant Wal-Mart opened up six miles down the road the store came to a slow, sad and shuttering halt as if it were a slow-motion tumbleweed turning over in the wind. It was the annual South Vienna Corn Festival, something I had never attended while I was in high school, and while most of the other kids in school flocked to both the Corn Festival and the Clark County Fair, these were events that were a bit much too busy for me, if there is anything that makes an outsider feel more outside its an event that is filled with people. The more people there were, doing things I had no interest in the more I wanted to flee—-I’d rather be somewhere, anywhere else. But I was 18, in-love and so we went. Moving to rural Ohio from Athens, Ohio—yes, a small town but also a college town was difficult and in hindsight, almost traumatic for me—going from being able to walk everywhere, hang out in record stores, be privy to college students blaring music on their lawns while suntanning, drinking and laughing instilled the idea of a wider bigger and exciting world. I left Athens at the age of 14, in the early 80’s—and by that time I had discovered R rated movies—I had seen An American Werewolf in London, Apocalypse Now, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, heard Bob Marley, The Clash, The Ramones and Devo. Suddenly I was transplanted into cornfields, and I felt like a scarecrow.  At the Corn Festival I ran into my friend Chris Biester who was home for the long weekend from Ohio University, he had his guitar and played a few songs on the sidewalk—most notably “Sugar Mountain” which he explained was meaningful for him as he just turned twenty. At the time, on that hot September day—for those five minutes everything was alright, Chris’s voice and guitar held the air around me and while some of the passerby’s were no doubt looking askance at him, I never noticed. Twenty seemed far away from me even though I was 18, I would soon be stepping out of adolescence and Chris was already in adulthood. It was exciting, nerve wracking. I drank more beer.  

                The trips back to Western Ohio got less and less, in a few years Jenny and I had broken up—-she would return often as she struggled with homelessness and her mental health she would come back and stay with her mother—these were always short lived, maybe a week or two at best. One time, when she returned from an ill-fate trip to Miami where she had convinced an old bar-fly friend to fly her down to escape the streets of Columbus, a trip the ended with her being forced into Jackson County Memorial Hospital after being found wandering around delusional and drunk, I picked her up at the Columbus airport. “Well. I don’t think I can go back to Miami—there is nothing there for me. Not sure what I’ll do but I can stay with mom for a while.” Shortly though, she was back in Columbus—ducking in and out of Bernie’s and North Campus bars and taking up refuge in the ravines of Clintonville. “I can’t stay in South Vienna” she said one day as we walked towards the Tim Horton’s that sat between my house and her tent, “I’d rather be on the street than feel cooped up there.” “Maybe just staying with your mom would be good for you? You can quit drinking and there are less temptations?” “What if I don’t want to quit? Besides, there is nothing to do, just Mom’s boyfriend and the dog—what am I gonna do, work at Shoemaker’s?” Oddly, I saw her point. She had travelled all over the world, been to Europe countless times, lived in Spain for a few months, not as a student but she had run out of money and a kind Spanish woman welcomed her in until she finally got wrung out by Jenny being Jenny and bought her a ticket home. This was in the early nineties, another adventure Jenny had that peeled under the wheels of her life. Jenny had lived a million lives by the time she arrived at her mothers in 2005, broken and bent—she knew she was becoming a shell of her former self, the bits and cracks of her were dropping off of her everywhere, every night she went. “I love mom, but I’d rather take my chances in Columbus.”

                There were times when we would talk, especially when she was really suffering—her skin bruised from the kind of living she did, she fell a lot—especially the last ten years of her life, not just from the alcohol but she was slowly using the use of her legs, she body thin from anemia and the inability of her to keep food in her body, it would erupt out of her when she tried to eat—it seemed she lived on vodka and Gatorade for most of her forties, “I can’t eat Bela, it doesn’t matter because I’m never very hungry.” Her hair was thinning, falling out in handfuls at times, the only part of her that seemed to be unchanged were her blue eyes, that still glowed while everything around them went dark, her body a leisurely collapse into nothingness, hers  was like an abandoned village near Chernobyl, with only the trees still growing. She would look at me, disparage my depression as if I had some control over it, “I can’t understand why you want to die sometimes Bela, I just want to live soo much—-I wish I could still do the things I used  to do.”  She wore herself out trying to live, later—when she was near death, she told me just a few weeks before she died, the final almost continuous run of hospitalization was like a grotesque version of a baseball player’s hitting streak, “I can’t do this anymore, I just hurt so much. I don’t have it in me .” I could say nothing, just nod in silent agreement, she was battered—the thinness of her living had become too parched, the booze she had tried to quinch it with had only withered her insides.

                Other times I would feel guilty when she said these things to me, as if I was robbing from her by being depressed, that one’s enthusiasm for living could be traded like a commodity. Later, I realized that moods are something I must learn to manage, that every day I drew away from my last drink was not always going to be better—I would have to encounter and persist through some dark times—but I knew if I had a drink it would allow the possibility of my inner doomsday machine to be activated. So, I haven’t. And I fill my days with laughter, regardless of how I might be feeling inside, I am always laughing, even alone—in the shower, on my walks, everywhere—I think if you know me, you know this much about me. I remarked to my partner recently that some people are like cut flowers, they sacrifice themselves to bring their beauty to others, cut at the stem, placed on a mantle, a coffee table, by the window for people to see-to smile, a courageous act. “There’s nothing courageous about it, they don’t have a choice to be cut—somebody just cuts them and sticks them in a vase.” Considering this, I thought about it, and just realized there is an acceptance then, it’s not aways a choice but there is beauty in existing and even in the slow melt of being in a vase, cut at the stem, brightly shining petals until they fall off. On March 8^th, I will celebrate 20 years since my last drink.

Love, Death & Ornaments (Christmas 2021)

There is an old tree that sits in my front yard, I’m pretty sure there is very little life left in it because every time a fierce wind picks up, branches fall from to the ground like corn husks in October, but every spring the leafs manage to wrestle their way out of tree and happily soak in the sun until fall comes again. They do their job, poking up at the sky waving “We’re here! We’re here!”

Christmas 1969 (from left clockwise: Zotlan, Grandma Isabel, Erics w/ Teddy, Bela)

I buy a lot of cut flowers, usually the ones that are marked down at the local grocery store, the kind where if you are not careful, they all may lose their petals ala a Charlie Brown Christmas tree but I’m careful and can get at week of color out of them before they too, fall off onto the mantle and the desk that faces that grandpa tree outside. Perhaps they are commiserating with one another, the wilting sunflower and that gnarled tree outside. Wink. Wink. The past few years, since I was divorced, I wait to get a Christmas tree, usually the week before Christmas and sometimes my teenage children go with me and other times they don’t—but they always insist on getting the most loneliest tree there is, the Charlie Brown kind. I take some satisfaction in the fact that they feel sympathy for the runt of the litter tree. When their mother and I were married we had a tradition of driving out to rural Ohio and cutting down our own tree, having hot chocolate in the little barn on the tree farm and hauling it back to Columbus on the roof of our car. Setting it up while Christmas music played as the kids argued over who got to put on what decoration on the tree. One year after I carried the tree over my shoulder I soon developed a case of poison ivy on that side of my neck—even Charlie Brown didn’t have that happen to him.

December sky in Cedar Falls Ohio, 2021

        This year with a sixteen-year-old and a thirteen-year-old the fascination of the tree, of Christmas is waning in their minds. My daughter wraps all the presents, even the ones for herself and my son is too busy skateboarding and mocking adults to make the effort to get into the holiday spirit which is fine with me as I stayed a teenager well into my thirties. I misplaced the decorations this year, it seems I do a lot of this sort of thing—not just now as I walk into my fifties but for most of my life so for a few days the tree only had lights which because of my nerd-like eyesight was ok, its all a blur anyway. But, the other night rummaging through a closet I found them, a small box as the children’s mother and I split the decorations in half but, really, half the decorations are enough for the small tree I get every year. I pulled them out, each one encapsulating a memory—some are from my Hungarian grandmother and are over 70 years old.

Grandma Isabel Christmas tree 1973 in Lexington, KY

        My grandmother was a towering figure in my life, so much that her presence still elbows its way into the lives of her great-grandchildren who still ask me to tell stories of this epic woman. The woman saved everything, she would cut out pictures of teddy-bears, flowers and kittens from magazines and advertisements so when one sat down at her tiny round kitchen table a stuffed animal with half it’s ear sliced off would be staring at you from under your cup of coffee. “Grandma, why do you have all these cut-outs on your table, they are everywhere?” “Bela, I like dem. Dey make me feel good.” Sometimes she would slide some into the bills she paid, so some unsuspecting worker at the electric company whose thankless job was to open and process incoming checks would get a lapful of cut out teddy bears and roses. Hopefully it made their day or they just knew here, “got another check from that crazy Hungarian lady on Boxwood Avenue.” At Christmas time she would cut out Santa and elf advertisements, so those workers would get a cheap Christmas card with the checks they processed. My tree has a few of her “ornaments” some of which are just small plastic barnyard animals she swiped from my brother and I and tied yellow string around and put up on the tree. One “ornament” is just a plastic man with the string around his neck, he is quite truly hanging from the Christmas tree. There is another, a small yellow plastic man that she told me was me when I was 3 or 4 and there was a blue one that was my brother and an orange one that was my sister, our grandmother told us they reminded her of us when she saw them. Now, when I look at the yellow man I am reminded of her.

Coasters gifted to me by Tim Peaccock 2021

        There are ornaments my children made, small plastic ones they made by warming up plastic beads, some are just wooden laundry clips with shit glued on top of them, but to their parents they are gold. There are some from my elderly mother, ones she sewed and stitched together, small mementoes of her care and wanting us to have something of her—not just for her children but also her grandchildren and great grandchildren. They are all there on the tree, winking and sparkling from across the room. I have a small coffee coasters made from old 78” record labels that my friend Tim gave me last year, he made them during the first COVID year and every time I have a cup of coffee I get to think of his wonderful generosity. I have other things in my house, reminders of sharing and love, dried yellow flowers and a note from my sweetheart that she gave me on my birthday a few years ago, photos of my children in the Netherlands, a painting of Richard Brautigan my friend Derek made, a Sebadoh/Gaunt painted flyer, more dried flowers and books that hold not just memories but magic. I am wading through middle age, looking back and forward at the same time with not quite the lumbering of age but there are some memories that come back slower and with it, the Holidays have changed as people whom I have known have left for other places.  

  My girlfriend whose talent for language leaves me breathless and at times in total wonderment (and hysterics) has two children, the youngest still believes in the magic of Santa and it is a gift to see this still play out—-the telling of what happens Christmas Eve, the specialness of that age, the belief in things that make the world special. Of kindness, and thankfulness. I relish the quiet times in my life, of listening, walking and watching. I hope for everyone to feel connected this year, to laugh and to feel the joy of someone thinking of them and of course, to let others know you are thinking of them.

(a recorded version of this is on Jon Solomon’s 25-Hour Holiday Radio Show–archived every year, on WPRB https://wprb.com/)

from top left (Erica, dad, Bela, Zoltan–1973)

Christmas 2021

Christmas 2015

Uncle Pablo 1943-2021

“Hey! Hey, Bela! Open up” there was someone banging on the front door, I was sitting on the small couch reading a book while music played from the other room. I stood up, walked towards the door, and saw my Uncle Pablo holding up a six pack of Black Label beer and gesticulating with his other hand, “Open up my man!” he yelled through the window. From the upstairs my wife shouted down, “who’s here, you didn’t tell me anybody was coming over?” Her voice had a hint of irritation, it wasn’t uncommon for me to surprise her by not coming home if someone popped into the record store from out of town or invited me for a drink after work. Many times I would fail to call her until deep into my fifth drink. As I opened the door I turned my head, “it’s Pablo” and I could feel her sigh from the top of the stairs as he climbed through the open door. “I brought beer, let’s go to Larry’s.” He walked into the living room, “Heelllloooooo Merijn” he sang up the stairs towards her. “Hi Pablo, I’ll be down in a moment.” The apartment was a duplex with the front room holding all my records and shelves built into the wall to hold the massive amount of compact discs. Art books lined the opposite side of the compact discs, sort of his and hers matching shelves. The living room had two small tan couches that faced each other and a small coffee table, the walls were bare as the shadows from the sunlight made it’s own pictures that did a slow crawl across the room during the course of the day, in the evening the leaves from outside would cast themselves as waving and bending shadow puppets and the street lights provided the perfect background for them to do their lonesome nighttime dance. The kitchen was in the rear of the house, and I placed the beer on the counter, pulling out the bottle opener I cracked open two of the Black Labels. “What are you drinking now?” Pablo asked, raising his bottle to his mouth. “I was just drinking a tea while I read.” At this point in my life I was trying to abstain from drinking at home, it never ended up well and after a few I would be back out on the street and heading to a bar. Putting the rest of the beer into the fridge I asked him if he had eaten, “I had some bread at my mom’s” he said. I knew he quite literally only had bread at my grandmother’s, “we have some leftovers” and I pulled some mashed potatoes mixed with carrots out of the refrigerator, “Merijn made carrot mash and sausages tonight,” I plopped a cold sausage on his plate. “Thank you, no need to heat it up—do you have any mayonnaise” he tended to eat a lot of things with the white creamy stuff. “Have a beer Merijn” he offered as we moved into the other room. “No thank you, I am going to bed soon—I have to be at work early.” She stood for a moment, stared at me, and asked, “you will let me know if you go out, right?” “Yeah, not sure if we will nor not.” I knew this was a lie. Pablo was going to want to go out. I was his wandering late night partner, when he needed to be out he needed someone to go with him for as isolated he was he craved social interaction.

                Soon we were out the door, draining those first six beers only took a short while Pablo cleaned his plate, I washed up the dishes while he talked incessantly about what he did that day, running errands, going to the library, buying cheap books from the library store and dealing with my grandmother who was in the midst of a slow decline that would lead her to a nursing home in the next few years. Pablo had given his life over to care for her, spending most of his time in Columbus the past few years while her health declined and the other time in his home in Venezuela where he had a large apartment in Caracas and where he also owned a small marina in the middle of a massive nature preserve—it was here, on the beaches of the Atlantic that he felt most comfortable. Some one who appreciated nature without being curious about nature, in the same way I love opera—I don’t really care what the opera is about but I know I like to hear it. We first went to Larry’s where everybody he once knew had left years prior for new lives—marriage, kids, dive bars that would quicken their decent into alcoholism, but he scanned the bar nevertheless, like a dog that keeps searching the floor for crumbs. We only saw Jerry at the end of the bar, “hey Pablo” he raised his bottle and took a pull off his cigarette and snapped the pack of Doral’s back and forth with his hand while a cigarette shimmied out of the crumpled pack. Pablo who never bought a pack himself helped himself and let Jerry light it for him. Both him and I smoked occasionally, but we were awkward doing it, as if our faces were trying to walk with high-heels, we just couldn’t smoke elegantly like some others could. “What is going on” Pablo asked Jerry, the cigarette bouncing back and forth as if he were a seagull holding a flopping fish in its beak. Jerry answered with a nod, which didn’t answer his question and we got our drinks and headed to a booth where Jerry joined us, this was a trying time for Jerry-when he was wrestling with the decision to sign with Warner Brothers but it was also a trying time for my uncle who had decided not to pursue another job in chemical engineering and try to earn a living solely by operating the marina. By this time in his life he had sunk much of his life earnings into this project and there was little to show for it. Pablo told us stories of his time at Larry’s during the sixties and early seventies, “we would eat a stick of butter before parties so we could drink more,” “Bill Moss, Jim Williams and I would go from Charbarts (bar) and go to these parties and Bill knew every woman at every party—we would to the east side–after hour bars—the parties would last for a few days, I never went to class.” Bill Moss later started the Cap-Soul label and worked for the City of Columbus, Jim Williams was a Vietnam veteran who was one of Pablo’s best friends until he disappeared. “I don’t know what happened to him, he did a lot of drugs—I went to Caracas one year, came back the next year and nobody knew what happened to him” he said. Years later though a friend of mine in AA said Jim was his first sponsor, that Jim got clean and sober in the early eighties and devoted the rest of his life to helping fellow alcoholics and addicts. When I told Pablo of this he seemed relieved that he didn’t die from drugs. “A good man” Pablo whispered.

                Soon the bar closed, and we headed out to my car, it was late and I knew I would hear it the next day from Merijn. “Hey, let’s go to my friend’s house” Pablo suggested as we got in the car, a take-out six pack in our hands. Popping off the cap with a lighter, “Man, I don’t know. I’m tired” I handed him the bottle and did the same to another one. “You will like him” he tapped the glove compartment and started humming “All My Loving.” We drove for about ten minutes to an old mill that sat in the middle to Columbus, “he lives here, this motherfucker can drink my man!” Pablo was in a good mood. “Are you sure he’s up?” I asked, it was leaning towards 2:30 am and the lights were out. Pablo was already out of the car by time I got the words out, sauntering across the gravel parking lot, his silhouette rocking back and forth to the inner songs of the alcohol sloshing inside of his body. He knocked on the door. Nothing. Knocked some more. Nothing. Then I saw him pounding and yelled out. “Pablo, let’s go. Nobody is home” I poked  my head out the window. Suddenly, a light came on and the door opened. A hunched man with a beard leaned forward towards Pablo, the man looked like a shadowy Ichabod Crane as the moonlight lit up the two old friends. I could see them laughing and after a few minutes Pablo trudged back to the car, “let’s go!” As we pulled out I asked him what happened, “Oh, he wanted to talk about Jesus. He hasn’t had a drink in over ten years.”

                Pablo grew up in Caracas, my grandparents fled Hungary during the Second World War and ended up on a boat that chugged across the Atlantic while my grandparents hurriedly learned English and my grandmother breastfed her three children as there was so little food on the boat. My grandfather nearly died on the voyage, a skeletal shadow of his former self, a well to do engineer and college professor. He weighed less than a hundred pounds when the boat docked on the other side of the mountains from Caracas. Life was difficult for them, as my grandmother did not attend college after she graduated from a Sacred Heart Boarding School in Austria, her father was wealthy, and she married my grandfather shortly after high school and was soon pregnant with my father. The newlyweds did not like each other very much, they had little in common including their age which was fifteen years apart. My grandfather was an introvert, known for his brooding and darkness, he would take solace in painting, butterfly collecting and reading mysteries. My grandmother was the opposite, although a fiercely religious woman she loved parties, drinks, and dirty talk although she would never use a curse word in her life, she took great joy in reveling from others telling their bawdy stories. After Pablo was born my grandfather built my grandmother an a-frame house on Lake Balaton, nearly two hours outside of Budapest where he kept an apartment. Soon though, the war would force them together, their flight from Budapest across the country into Austria could be a movie, but like millions of others during that time survival makes strange bedfellows even if the bedfellows are married.

                Upon arrival in Caracas, my grandmother went to work for Price Waterhouse, and my grandfather gained employment as  structural engineer and just like they lived in Hungary he moved to a town several hours away. Grandmother soon found her social footing, there was a large Hungarian and European population in Caracas and she made fast friends, including the wife of the President. As a child I would marvel at the black and white photos of my grandmother at glamourous parties and smiling like a movie star but underneath this elegant veneer they struggled. My grandfather was not good with money and Grandma Isabel pined to live in the United States, most specifically Southern California. In the end she could not move to California and ended up in Columbus to be near her sons who were attending The Ohio State University. My two uncles, Pablo and Peter moved in with each other, living in various rundown apartment buildings around the Ohio State campus, both struggled with grades, attending class and it took them years to graduate. Pablo was kicked out of the university several times for academic shortcomings, he bounced around several of the nearby liberal arts colleges in the area before returning to OSU where he finally graduated in 1975, twelve years after he first entered. He managed to earn a degree in Mechanical Engineering despite his propensity to drink, it was not uncommon for him to spit up blood or double over in pain when he was younger. Pablo was also dyslexic which must have proved difficult for him as English was his third language, at the time there were no educational supports for him to succeed and even if there were he would not have accepted it.

                During the nineteen eighties, when my brother and I were in high school both Pablo and Peter would watch our wrestling matches, slip us money and knowing we were poor, Pablo bought us an Atari gaming system. Our father had abandoned us a few years prior and the two brothers stood in for him, at times driving us to Columbus, indulging us with White Castle hamburgers and letting us partake in a bit of drinking at Peter’s house. When my sister visited from California, Pablo would make sure to spoil her as well, when she brought her newborn for baptism Pablo arrived in our small, one general store town with my grandmother and beamed from the back of the church. He was not a religious man and his politics ran to the left of the left, he witnessed the crushing blows of American foreign policy in South America and was vocal when politics came up.

                It was just after Christmas in 1985, my senior year of high school was galloping towards it’s end—just five months to go, I was mostly living alone in the parsonage. Surviving on fifty-cent frozen burritos, hot dogs, and instant mashed potatoes, I was grateful when I drove to Columbus and Pablo took me out to eat at a diner and as we scarfed up biscuits and gravy he asked if I needed any money, at the end of the meal he slipped me a hundred-dollar bill. The next weekend I drove to Dayton to my second cousin’s house, Istvan who was my father’s cousin—he and his wife were physicians who fled Hungary in the late seventies, and after arriving in Ohio where he worked as a cab driver before obtaining their medical licenses. They lived in Kettering, a wealthy area of Dayton, I arrived excited to see them and my uncles—and upon stepping up to the front door I encountered a large puddle of vomit and before I was able to knock Istvan opened the door. Laughing, “watch your step Bela, your Uncle Pablo just vomited—he’s already had too much to drink! Welcome to our house” he shoved a long-neck in my hand and showed me in. Pablo waved from across the room, a drink in hand, oblivious to the fact that his body had just reminded him not to drink anymore. That night I got in my car, my head twirling like the snowflakes that were fluttering around the car and drove the forty miles back home, all of my seventeen year old brain turned up to eleven with beer, rum and cokes and the money Istvan and Pablo slipped me. I would have enough beer and gas money to tide me through January. The kindness of Istvan and Pablo followed me my entire life.

Uncle Pedro, “Uncle” Istvan, Uncle Pablo

                My grandmother’s large body had sunk into her bed as if she had been melting over the last few years of her life, a pool of flesh that had coalesced into her sheets. Her head was always propped up by a stack of pillows, her small room covered in photos of her family, a large painting of her father hung on one wall and on another hung several paintings of flowers my grandfather had painted for her. On another wall, next to a small closet door, the kind that is made to look like wood but is as hollow as a Styrofoam cup were photos of her children and grandchildren. Even though she knew she was dying she was always smiling, and we visited her every week—sometimes bringing her ice cream or flowers she would want to reach out and hold Saskia’s hand. Saskia who was two or three would stare down and her great-grandmother’s hand, skin as thin as soup– it was if it were made of the most fragile glass but her hands were always bruised, dollaps of green and brown spots appeared every morning as if they were mushrooms blotting out her once pale skin. Even her hands knew the end was coming. Saskia would look up at me while my grandmother would remark what a beautiful boy Saskia was, and I never felt the need to correct her, that Saskia was in fact the most beautiful girl in the word. “She will be dead soon enough, let her have this” I would think. Pablo was now staying in Columbus full-time to care for his mother and it took a while to convince him that, finally, at one point when her often replaced hips could no longer hold her or be replaced again that she would need to be moved. It devastated him. He was aimless as he watched her sink into her bed the last few years of her life, “did you go see your grandmother?” he would ask me. “Yes, I was out there yesterday.” “She told me you weren’t there, are you sure it was yesterday.” My father’s side of the family was always prone to paranoia, thinking everybody was lying and conniving, “Yes,” I would sigh, “I brought her flowers, they are by the window. I think she forgets things. She told me yesterday you were leaving for Caracas.” “Why would she say that?” he would ask. “Because she’s eighty-five years old.”

                When she got ready to die, she knew it. “I want to see my daddy and mommy” she would whisper, her once booming voice just a soft echo of her former self. The day she died, both my uncle’s split the day in half, as Pablo had grown angry with his younger brother and, sadly, did not want to spend the last days of his mother’s life together. My father had been down the day before she died to say his goodbyes, I stayed away when he was there—no need to have an argument in front his dying mother. The entire day I sat next to my grandmother unless Pablo or Peter wanted to hold her hand and whisper to her. Pablo was broken, tears streaming down his face, “oh mommy, dear mommy. Mommy, mommy mommy” and she smiled at him, “don’t cry Pauli, I will see you soon.” She turned her head to me, “Bela, tell him not to cry. I am happy.” As the day moved on she grew wearier and tired, soon her eyes closed as her breath became more laborious, but she responded to voices, squeezing our hands with those paper fingers until finally she stopped breathing in two long separated gulps. We held her and then Pablo looked at me, silently crying and walked out. He did not return and I took care of the transportation of her body to the morgue, working with the nursing home staff and saw him later that night. After her death, he retuned to Caracas more frequently but sent me an email message when I was vacationing in the Netherlands. “Bela, I have breast cancer. I know it is weird but it has spread to my lymph nodes, I should be ok.” I hung up the phone, at this point Pablo was not only one of my closest family members but also a friend. He had stepped in when my father stepped out and we shared some of the responsibility to care for my grandmother. I phoned Istvan to ask him Pablo’s chances and Istvan explained that they were not very good as breast cancer in men is dangerous, most men who develop it die as they do not get checked. Pablo survived but contracted scleroderma, a hideous disease that turns muscle into scar tissue, it would most likely be the leading cause of his death years later, he was a shell of his former self when he died, labored breathing his esophagus a tunnel of scars, like an hundred year water pipe filled with rust and deposits. He would suffocate to death.

                I am fifty-three, my parents are still living but my uncles are gone, both passing away within months of each other. They made amends a few days before my uncle Pedro died, wherever she was their mother was smiling and I’m certain some flowers instantly bloomed somewhere in the world. My children both met Pablo, who would drop by the house, no longer carrying a bottle of rum or a six-pack of beer but a gallon of vanilla ice cream and root beer to make Brown Cows—which he loved. The stories of my family are like hearing the wind against the eaves at night, just brushes of something to hear—shadows scrapping through their imagination while for me, they are turning into these things as well, almost nothing except uncertain memories. Both my uncles were sick for a long time when they died, I was able to see my Uncle Pedro last summer, spending time by the ocean and eating with him while I had not seen Pablo in years, even though he would travel to Miami for medical appointments he was proud and did not want his family to see him small, shriveled and just a thought of his former self. We would talk on the phone, his voice a weak creak and the last time I spoke to him I told him I loved him and he whispered “you too.” It was the closest he ever came to saying these words.

                I grew up displaced, not just from moving around the Midwest and the east coast as a child but emotionally, where my father would pull us in close then push us away with his anger, his paranoia and religion which he used as a brute force to try to carve his children into something he believed in but ended up bludgeoning  me, his take on religion was one of fear and not forgiveness one built upon his fear of others. He eventually abandon his children, each one of us when we entered puberty, his take initially was it was our mother, then us and then sin that drove us away from him and in reality it was his own mental state and the fact that maybe, just maybe he isn’t a nice person. My uncles, both undoubtedly scarred from their own lives of displacement tried in their own way to help my brother, sister, and I whether it was with food, welcoming us into their homes or slipping us money. They always reassured us our father loved us but we felt otherwise, their love was enough. I think about Pablo quite a bit, his death was not sudden and when his wife messaged me a few weeks ago I did not flinch and it took me a few days to weep which came suddenly, at a stop light like a spring shower that erupts for a moment when the sun is still shining, but the time the light changed it had left me. A few deep sobs and that was it. I was expecting more.

                He lived life at arm’s length and didn’t marry until he was near death, always waiting for something I think that emotionally maybe never came—his father was cold, a man who kept to himself and lived for much of his children’s childhood away from them perhaps for all the losses he had encountered in his life. The Second Word War loomed large in our family, it was a ghost that stole from the family, the stature of my grandmother’s family—the hotel she was born in, her privileged childhood, and the ultimate death of her father (Karoly Gundel) who was a figure larger and more brilliant in our world than anybody we had read about in textbooks. She mourned him daily, a famous chef in Hungarian history-who, based on the story our grandmother told us went blind when the Russian Army burned his treasured cookbooks in front of him. The painting that my grandfather painted of him hung in her living room. Blind smoking a large cigar loomed over our family gatherings, he may be dead but he was still the focal point in my grandmothers, thus in all of our lives. Pablo identified as Venezuelan more than Hungarian or even American (he became a US citizen in the 1990’s) and he lived his life closer to the Latin culture of Caracas and South America, one filled with dancing, multiple women, relaxing and friendship. I think of him, how he must have kept things at bay inside of him, his side of the family did not talk about suffering, only endured it—he was a figure in my life, one I will cherish who had large outlandish dreams, lived an absurdist life and was funny. My uncles offered me advice over the years, advice about sex “always lick the asshole”, drinking “eat a stick of butter before you drink, it was allow you to drink for hours”, self-care “when you wipe your ass, stand up, bend over and wipe from the top down”—one of the uncle’s actually enacted this act at a party I had thrown, eating “wipe the mold off the top, bake it and then put ketchup on it—it will be fine” and “do you want to drink or eat, good choice—booze will fill you up.” These were not the things that one would hear from parents, probably not from very many people but I have them, they make me laugh—even now—with their passing.