Jesse’s Story: Epilogue

Jesse’s sardine tattoos

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm: for love is strong as death.” –Song of Solomon 8:6

In this first month since my son’s death, I’ve managed to stay afloat. Reading and responding to cards, emails, texts, and social media comments have been cathartic. I find myself drifting on that vast but well-charted ocean of grief – for each wave crest of normalcy, an offsetting wave trough of depression. When talking about grief, it somehow feels right to turn to metaphor, to make that leap beyond the rational.

In my more buoyant moments, I catch sight of the horizon and, with luck, landfall. When I’m deep in the trough of a wave, all I see is steel blue water. In those darker moments, the same movie plays in my head, over and over: Jesse as he’s about to be struck by the Ford Bronco, in slow motion, that flash of realization in his eyes, the awful impact of steel on bone, the cracking of vertebrae. And then, me kneeling in the median grass, cradling his head in my lap, beholding his broken body, weeping. And then, me appearing beside him just before he walks into traffic, grabbing his arm and swinging him around, the two of us hugging as cars whiz by.

This pattern of highs and lows is similar to how it felt all those years as the parent of someone with an addiction (and how it feels, I’m sure, for someone with an addiction): the bright hopes of rehab and sobriety, the deep disappointments of relapse. I imagine this is something like the highs and lows of the bipolar disorder that presented in Jesse in his early twenties: the euphoric and creative hypomanic phase, followed by depression that fills the void when the elevated and energizing mood has vanished. And how similar to the stressful daily routine of a restaurant chef: Hours of prepping the night’s specials and other menu items. The mad rush of the dinner hours, orders pouring in, a string of tickets hanging above each workstation. Then winding down by midnight, putting food away in the walk-ins, planning and ordering supplies for the next day, and ending with a drink or two or three.[1]

When Jesse was hypomanic, too wired to sleep, he’d come home from his job and, even when not drinking, stay up all night. He’d work on some art or bike project, waking us up. I’d go down to the basement. “Jesse, could you please go to bed?” He’d grimace and shake his head, knowing I didn’t understand. In those moments, I’d recall when he was little, when I could put him to sleep by singing a song and rubbing his back, and wish I could still do that.

* * * 

One memory of Jesse transports me to 2015. It had taken a lot of gentle persuasion to get Jesse to the point of giving rehab a try. Although less than enthusiastic, he was well aware the counselors were offering him tools and strategies that could help him make healthier decisions. Pat and I participated in the family sessions held on Sunday afternoons, and were feeling hopeful when he graduated from the program that December.

The rehab center found a placement for him in a sober living house in Minneapolis. Although we would have been happier if he were closer to home, we knew this could be an important step for him. He had begun scouring websites for sous chef jobs in Minneapolis. I helped him load his possessions into my car and drove him 300 miles north. After paying his first month’s rent at the house, I helped him haul the boxes up to his second floor efficiency, gave him a big hug, and drove home.

When we called the main office the next evening to see how he was doing, we learned he wasn’t living there, that he’d gone out for dinner with some housemates and had returned drunk. Per the house’s rules, he was banned from staying there, and they had no idea where he was. 

The next day, not having heard from Jesse, we began to call police stations and hospitals. This went on for a week. We were distraught, trying hard to ignore the darkest possibilities – January in Minneapolis can be brutal. 

We finally got a call from him. He was sleeping on a couch in a communal house. The good folks there had found Jesse panhandling on the streets and taken him in. I drove to Minneapolis and picked him up, and we retrieved his gear from the sober living house and returned to Iowa City. Not much conversation on that long drive – I saw no value in reminding him of what he already knew, and Jesse was withdrawn, ashamed of his failure to live up to our hopes, and his. Pat and I never did hear the whole story of that week.

The next summer, lacking a steady chef job, Jesse found a temporary haven at Echollective Farm in rural Cedar County. Led by Derek Roller, former co-owner of The Red Avocado,[2] the farm had been in operation for fifteen years by then, both as a CSA and a supplier of produce to various businesses. Jesse pitched his tent at the far end of the fifteen acres of farmland he worked during the day. He seemed happy. On one of my visits, he showed me a barn filled floor to ceiling with crates of seed garlic, the farm’s specialty, ready to be shipped out. Working on the farm became a way for him to get some distance from bad habits he’d cultivated. But he usually came into Iowa City on the weekends, sometimes getting a ride from one of the farm crew, sometimes asking me for a lift. This poem emerged from one ride returning to the farm.

Driving with Jesse

I’m driving my son Jesse

25 miles into the countryside

to the farm where he lives and works.

It’s 10 PM and 80 degrees,

and we’re done with the small talk.

Cruising the two-lane blacktop at 60,

all the windows rolled down,

we let our speed invent a wind

from the still summer heat.

We rush through a restless night,

sensing shifts in temperature – warmer 

as we crest a hill, the slight frisson of a chill

as we dip down to cross a creek.

At one point we drive through

the almost visceral funk of a dead skunk.

Except for the occasional glare of headlights,

nothing else distracts us from our meditations.

I want to remind Jesse the red-winged blackbird

tattooed on his shoulder blade is indeed black,

but its red and gold epaulets were earned

through acts of fearless tenacity.

But we each abandon ourselves to the moment

or wrestle with our thoughts – I don’t know –

as I deliver him to the darkness and silence

and next step in his journey.

* * *

Jesse posted the above photo on social media with this caption:

Considering the stage of life I’m in, it would be so easy just to drift through it.

But I wake up to this shit.

All I can think about is moving forwards.

16 July 2022

I’m still amazed by my son’s ability to maintain a positive outlook despite all the obstacles he faced. Like other unhoused people, Jesse dealt with daily scarcity, which often brings out the worst in people. I know he wrestled with despair and cynicism, but I also know he was determined to be better than that. Two other recent social media posts from Jesse evoke his efforts to share his goodness with the world:

On my backpack, I have two side pockets where I usually keep water bottles. I reached back for water and found candy and NarCan. Now, I don’t use any drugs that would require NarCan, but I know some people that do. I hope I never have to use it, but I feel it is important to carry.

I thought that if I have to revive someone, it would be like going to the dentist when they give you a sucker afterwards. If I have to bring you back from death, you get a sucker. No, you get two. Fuck it, you can have the M&M’S too. Welcome back to life.

28 December 2023

In recent days I’ve had two people who I have not seen in a while come by the area where I live, asking about me and how I’m doing. Crazy to think about it because no one does that shit. Apparently I made an impression.

The homeless community usually only operates according to their own desires and needs. To find out that people are coming back and seeking me out makes me worried for them. I wish them the best; I can only do so much. These are good people.

If you can, I ask that you hold Angelina, Mayra, and Native in the light; I hope that they find their way.

5 January 2024

* * *

Jesse and Lilia

“Move forward now, there’s nothing to do/ Can’t turn around, I can’t follow you/ Your coat’s in my car, I guess you forgot/ It’s crazy, the things we let go” –The National, “Weird Goodbyes”

Lilia and I zoomed a week ago. Lilia, who now lives in Berlin, who had written to me after Jesse’s death, “He was my home, my better half, the light when I was dark. My love for him will never die.” There were tears, but it felt good to see her and talk, a grace to know the best parts of Jesse live with her. She mentioned that she’d like to have a more tangible remembrance of Jesse.

I realized I might be able to provide that. After Jesse left Iowa City and moved to New York to be with Lilia, I took on the Herculean task of cleaning out his apartment, hoping to recover some of our security deposit. Because I’m that guy who hates to throw anything away, I packed up a dozen boxes of odds and ends, the residue of his two years there. Who knows if he might need some of it at some point? When I spoke with Lilia, those boxes were still under the basement stairs.

I began to unpack. Beans and grains, ten different vinegars. (Does vinegar ever go bad?) His bass guitar amp. Two crates of bike parts and accessories and tools, which I donated to the Iowa City Bike Library. And a box of clothes, which I washed and folded and tucked away in a box for Lilia. 

I also discovered a box of Jesse’s art supplies: tubes of acrylic paint, spray paint cans, X-acto knives, glue gun and sticks. In an art portfolio bag, I found one plastic stencil sheet Jesse had worked on. I remembered him cutting out these painstakingly detailed designs and then printing them on t-shirts he wore or gave away or sold on consignment at White Rabbit.[3] I’m looking forward to learning how to print his stencil design on some t-shirts. It’s a wonder the lift this plan has given me.

* * *

“We shake with joy we shake with grief/ What a time they have, these two/ Housed as they are in the same body.” –Mary Oliver, “We Shake with Joy”

On an unseasonably warm late February day, I visited a homeless encampment on an otherwise vacant property on the east side of the Iowa River. The camp is near the intersection of West Benton and South Capitol, tucked beside a railroad spur and at the edge of a concrete lot that once served some forgotten industrial warehouse. It feels like a brownfield. Scattered along the treeline above the riverbank are ten or twelve brightly colored camping tents or jerry-rigged tarp shelters.

I suspect most of these folks were living nearby last summer, in a spot under the Benton Street bridge called The Quarry, but a fire broke out there in October, leaving them even more unhoused than they already were. The city came a few days later with bulldozer, backhoe loader, and dump truck to remove all evidence of the camp’s existence and then lock the area behind a chain link fence.

It was noon on a Saturday. I parked my car on the street and walked across the lot toward the camp. A gray-bearded man close to my age was working on a bicycle. I noticed clothing hanging on makeshift laundry lines, and scattered piles of bikes and bike parts, transportation for the unhoused.

As I approached the tents, I called out “Howdy!” sounding as friendly as I could to assure the man I wasn’t there to cause trouble. “How ya doing?” I told him, “My son Jesse – he was living unhoused in Austin, Texas, for the last year and a half.” Another man poked his head out of his tent, scowling at first. “Earlier this month he was hit by a car and died.”

They expressed their sympathy, “Aw man, we’re awful sorry about that.”

“Thanks. Well, the reason I stopped by is, I have his wallet.” I pulled it out of my satchel. It was a clear plastic zippered bag, like a package for store-bought pillow cases. “It’s not a lot of money, but I think he’d want me to pass it on to someone like you all, someone living like he was.” I handed Jesse’s wallet to the man with the bicycle.

“Hey, that’s mighty nice of you. We’ll be sure to divvy it up.”

“Thanks.” I looked around for a moment at their site, the ashes of their campfire. “Well, you all take care of yourselves.”

As I started to walk away, the man with the bicycle called out, “What did you say your son’s name was?”

“Jesse was my son.”

“Okay, good. Be sure to thank Jesse for us.”

* * *

Footnotes

[1] The Emmy Award–winning TV series The Bear provides a fairly accurate depiction of this experience.

[2] An excellent Iowa City restaurant that specialized in vegan and vegetarian fare until its building succumbed in 2012 to ruthless real estate tactics.

[3] A wonderfully funky Iowa City shop with a focus on local and handmade clothes, which, sadly, closed recently.

Jesse’s Story

Emma, Jesse, and Sierra, from a portfolio of Jesse’s high school graduation photos.

My son Jesse is one of the sweetest and most generous men I know. His sparkling blue eyes under beautiful bushy eyebrows. His goofy gleeful chortle that erupts effortlessly. He’s an excellent musician, a badass bass player. He’s good with his hands and wonderfully creative. When he was in high school, he made his electric bass from a kit. An inventive chef, Jesse is able to concoct something delicious and original from any array of ingredients. But also, for much of his adult life, he’s struggled with bipolarism and depression and, as an at least partial consequence, alcoholism.

After high school, Jesse tried college at our request, but his mind never fit the mold that school demands. He returned to Iowa City, lived in a farmhouse near Lone Tree with friends, delivered pizza for The Wedge, and decided to become a chef. In the fall of 2006, he enrolled in a culinary school in New York City and found an apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue in Sugar Hill, across the street from where Sierra was living. He’d bring home whatever leftovers he could scavenge from his classes to share with his brother. Roast duck, pork roulade, spinach quiche, berry torte.

Jesse styling at the farmhouse near Lone Tree.

Each student was expected to have a job in the industry as a kind of internship. Jesse became a sous chef at The Fatty Crab, a popular Asian fusion restaurant in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. On a trip to New York, Pat and I ate dinner there, Jesse bringing out mysterious little bites of food he made especially for us. Deciding he’d already found a good chef job, he dropped out of culinary school. When he came back to Iowa City in April 2009 after Pat’s first surgery, we realized the extent to which he’d been scuffling, drifting from job to job, squatting in a sketchy Brooklyn warehouse. We also began to notice his unhealthy relationship with alcohol.

He was hired as a sous chef at Leaf Kitchen, a job he came to love, and kindled a romantic relationship with Emily, a high school friend and waitperson at Leaf. But his drinking became more and more of a problem. Over the next six or seven years, Jesse’s life became the far-too-common nightmare of many alcoholics. Years of denial. A first OWI in 2010, a second in 2014. When he began to see a psychiatrist, we came to realize that depression and bipolarism were a part of his life. She prescribed antidepressants and mood stabilizers for Jesse, but he hated that they made him feel dull and drowsy. We finally got him to try rehab, which gave him tools to help address his condition, but he relapsed almost immediately.[1]

Jesse moved back in with us, which proved to be an untenable situation. While Pat struggled with her health, going through a second, third, and fourth surgery, she worried mightily about her youngest child. She saw his alcoholism as her failure as a parent, which did nothing to help their relationship. The tension in our household became toxic. We eventually helped Jesse locate and move into a small apartment at the end of Washington Street – best for us all.

He continued to flounder, but he also met a next-door neighbor, Lilia, who would become his soulmate. A German woman working as a postdoctoral research scientist at the university, Lilia could see all the goodness in him, and was strong enough to face his alcoholism without backing down or running away. When she moved to Manhattan in 2016 to continue her postdoc work at the Weill Cornell Medical College, Jesse soon joined her. Lilia set strict rules for cohabitation, but he still slipped off the wagon. His love for her spurred him to locate a good rehab program in the Boston area, and Lilia covered the cost by adding him to her health insurance as her domestic partner. After Jesse finished the first month of the program, he continued his treatments at Recovery Unplugged in Austin, thinking it would offer a good fit because it incorporated music-making into the rehab process.

After graduating from Recovery Unplugged, Jesse stayed in Austin, finding an apartment with a friend he met in the program. Lilia had returned to Germany by then, but they began making plans for him to move there so they could get married. In May 2019, as those plans were beginning to firm up, he got his third DUI. He served jail time, and the Texas penal system sank its claws in him. Five years parole. The rent for the ankle bracelet and subsequent electronic monitoring devices he was required to wear ran over $500 a month. Nearly two years ago, unable to cover his share of the rent, Jesse was asked to move out of the apartment, and he joined Austin’s unhoused community.

Jesse’s camp in 2022. His caption: “I’m exactly Where I’m At.”

I offered to help, but Jesse mostly passed on that offer, believing he needed to face the consequences of his actions. I always tried to remind him I was there for him. For various reasons, news from my son could be sporadic. He had a hard time hanging on to a cell phone. But these last three months, thanks to public library computers, we’ve been corresponding fairly regularly via email. Here’s his part of that conversation:

10/31/23

I’m struggling like Chaka Khan. Tell me something good.

All that’s left in the fields are cornflowers. They don’t fit behind my ear. How to impress the girls. Weave a wreath with prairie grass.

Ever dug a pit in a road bed? Pretty sure it doesn’t take seven guys.

I want municipal funds for a Christmas goose – on my bucket list for a long time. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. Blood and vinegar.

Homeless in Austin. Yesterday on the bus, some guy said, “Hey, I remember you.” I once gave him my shoes. Went home barefoot.

Need to remind myself to be that person.

update of sorts (11/28/23)

So, I’ve been busy in odd ways. Been hanging out at the Friends meeting house here. Participated in their business meeting and made editorial changes to the letter they were submitting to government officials – senators and such.

Can’t remember if I told you this, but I took on a boarder/companion named Mayra. She saw the world as out to get her, and I’ve tried to show her that there are good people and good things. It seems to me that the message is sinking in. I thank Max[2] for the tent and the rest. I’m able to give her and myself a safe space.

I attended a forum on city planning about cyclists and pedestrians and how to make them more safe. Also about diverting the city’s money from the highway and more towards infrastructure. I said my peace/piece and they thanked me for it.

Weather is getting colder. I send my love and wish you well.

–J

learning from history (12/8/23)

I’m going through a more difficult time right now, and it has caused me to remember our history. Remembering the struggles that you and Mama had trying to raise three children with not much for financial means. But we had friends. Those are means.

I give great thanks to all the people who helped us and me. I’m trying to do as much as I can to help my friends. But I’m having trouble parsing my own needs with theirs. I am recognizing that their problems are interfering with my own well-being, but I have trouble letting go.

I woke up today wanting to go tell all of them to go fuck themselves. I don’t want to feel that way, but it’s hard.

If you have any advice, I could use it right now.

Love you,

–J

12/10/23

Thank you, Papa. I’ve been feeling the same way. I’ve just been having trouble relaying it to my compatriots. I’ve been trying, but I’ve chosen to give up on them and leave them to their own devices. I’ve helped a lot of people at a sacrifice to myself. It is time to take another route.

Keep being a baller-ass father, and I’ll keep loving you and passing on all the good things that you have taught me.

I’m having trouble with my boarder. I’m reminded of a punk band’s album entitled “Everything Now” (12/21/23)

She seems to think that even while homeless, she can have anything she wants. I’ve provided the best I can, but it has been at a cost to my own well-being. I want to provide for her, but street life implies that we all provide for each other.

You once told me a part of a book you read about kids in hard times: “If I have ends, you have ends.” I take that to heart, but I feel like I’m running thin.

I don’t want to abandon her, but I think I might have to. The thought of it breaks my heart. Any advice that you might have I would be gracious to hear.

12/22/23

What you said is something that I have come to realize. Thank you for your words. I just need to figure out a way to let her go in a way that I don’t feel like a bad person.

I’m trying to work on myself and my own situation, which has been difficult. In addition, I’ve taken on a lot of other people’s burdens.

I may be homeless, but I still call my tent a house because that’s what it is for me right now.

When Mayra asked for safe harbor and I said I could provide it, I didn't fully understand what I had actually done in the last few years. When I first showed up, everyone was disparate. I gave everyone what I could – cooked for them, helped set up camps, gave them clothes and food and money that I had, showed them friendship. Now there is a community of people who look out for each other rather than just looking out for themselves.

People have been calling Mayra my wife. She is protected. I guess I should be proud of that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my current state and think that I was meant to be here. I feel that I did my job and need to get out rather than get trapped. It is a slow process; I’m still trying.

Love, JPD

12/28/23

I’m glad to hear you had an interesting and eventually beneficial Christmas. Mine sucked. I had to kick Mayra out after she chose to abandon me for some strangers.

I met a nice girl on the bus, gave her my hat and some food. She said she lived in a house that had empty rooms and invited me to stay. Then I met her boyfriend, who threatened to hurt me twice. When he turned and said, “Why the fuck are you following us?” I responded, “I’m not,” and I went home.

At least some guy on the bus shared his blunt with me.

12/28/23

Oh, and two women showed up to the area where I live, asking about me. They had no other reason to be there.

I don’t like this. Sure, one of them is gorgeous and the other one is super nice. But fuck this shit – I don’t want anyone taking advantage of me. ‘Oh, I fucked up and made bad decisions. This guy is nice and will take care of me.’ Don’t need it, don’t want it.

I’m super lost right now.

12/30/23

I’m trying to avoid this, but I think everyone is going to come live next to me. I like my quiet. I enjoy the idea of balance, and yes, in theory balance should occur naturally. I’ve learned that sometimes it requires a lot of patience; it can’t be forced. C’est la vie.

I’ll figure it out. 

Thanks, Papa

I shared this with Lilia but thought it might interest you so I’ll pass it along. (1/22/24)

I had another interesting day yesterday. I went to the Quaker meeting house and then to the library, where I ran into Mayra, whom I hadn’t seen in a hot minute. She introduced me to a guy she had been hanging around for the last two weeks named Angel. He was very skeptical of me at first, guarded and protective of her. After he felt me out, he opened up. Turned out to be a really nice guy. We kept talking and he said to me, “She loves you.” I laughed, and he said, “No no no, she really loves you; she talks about you all the time and I see the way she is around you.”

I recognize it, but I don’t think she really knows what love is. I mean, it took me a long time to figure out what love actually feels like. That’s why I’m sure I love you.

Later that night, it was raining non-stop, and David, Mason and I were hiding under the awning of the McDonald’s. There was another guy there we didn't know who asked me for a lighter, which he used to set a T-shirt wrapped in a chunk of plywood on fire. David asked me for some water, which he used to put out the fire. I helped stomp it out and threw that stupid mess over the bushes. We told him that what he did wasn’t cool. David made the wise decision to leave, as we were on camera and we frequent the place. We both told Mason that we need to leave, and he was like, “Naw, I’m just going to stay here.”

Dumbass.

I’ve been subject to an interesting I-don’t-know-what. (1/30/24)

I know I told you about Mayra. She is off on her own, and I don’t know where she is. Random people keep asking me about her. Some are asking about her and some are asking why aren’t you together in the sense of you are supposed to be together, so where is she?

It happens on an almost daily basis, and it is kind of fucking with my head, and when I say kind of, I mean completely.

Two days after that last post, at dawn, Jesse was hit by a car while crossing a busy intersection. He was clinically dead when the EMTs arrived, but they were able to resuscitate him and transport him to a hospital. That Saturday, his sister Emma flew from Roanoke, his brother Sierra flew from Seattle, and my girlfriend Cile and I flew from Iowa City. We made our way to the hospital to be with Jesse and learn more about his medical status. His injuries were extensive; most serious were cervical spine fractures and a spinal cord injury. He was in spinal shock. In response, the neurology team had done a partial cervical decompression. He was critically stable, responsive but heavily sedated and intubated.

Monday morning, we met with most of the ICU care team, hoping to get a clearer picture of Jesse’s prognosis. That afternoon, we finally met with the neurosurgeon who performed the cervical decompression. That conversation confirmed our worst fears: the cervical spinal damage was so extensive that Jesse’s best outcome would be a life as a quadriplegic. Given all the adversity he’d faced in his life, Sierra, Emma, and I agreed this was more than he should be asked to bear. We elected to have his life support withdrawn, and after this was done late Tuesday night, Jesse peacefully slipped free of his body. That strong and generous heart beat on for more than five minutes after his last breath.

Sierra, Jesse, and Emma making noodles, Christmas 2011.

I lost track of time after that. We sat in the ICU room, the door closed and curtain drawn, sharing memories. Jesse making pasta in our tiny kitchen, laughing with Sierra and Emma, three-foot-long noodles draped over every piece of furniture. Jesse at a party, dancing by himself as if in some kind of spotlight, a significant hole in the armpit of his yellow shirt. Jesse biking through the countryside with a friend, pulling out a set of tools to repair the friend’s bike so they could continue riding. We traced the tattoos running down his left arm: the bison jumping off the cliff of his shoulder turning into eagles and then into razor blades tumbling down his forearm and sardines swimming over his fingers. I played “To Lay Me Down” from my phone, Jerry Garcia singing, “To lie with you, once more, to lie with you/ With our dreams entwined together/ To wake beside you, my love still sleeping.”

In my last dream the next morning, I was in bed with Pat in the farmhouse near West Branch where we lived in the nineties. Awoken by a knock at the door, I wrapped a bedsheet around myself, went to the top of the stairs, and called, “Come in!” At the bottom of the stairs appeared a group of my students from the last two years I taught – Justin, Peja, Ryan, Seth, Mats, Ethan, Zane, Drew, Alex. They said, “We’ve come to see Jesse.” I told them to come up. They trooped past me to the end of the hallway, entered my son’s bedroom, and closed the door. In the jumbled logic of dreams, it felt right – to be in the house of Jesse’s youth, his mom still alive, and my students coming to be with him.

Footnotes

[1] We experienced firsthand the dire shortage of addiction treatment and mental health care resources in Iowa. The one affordable rehab facility in Iowa City had a lengthy waiting list. And that place primarily provided court-ordered weekend rehab, a revolving door for folks with DUI convictions. We paid out of pocket for Jesse’s psychiatric care and for his rehab at the nearest facility offering both mental health care and addiction rehab, over fifty miles away.

[2]  The private nickname that Jesse and Sierra used to refer to each other.

Ways to Endure, Part 5

At the pre-wedding brunch at Sierra and Tina’s apartment, Pat helps Sierra with his corsage.

On November 16, 2012, our son Sierra Soleil and Tina Yin were married in New York City. Pat and I had landed at LaGuardia two days before that, Sierra picking us up in a car borrowed from a friend. He’d found an Airbnb for us in Washington Heights, two stops on the 1 train line past their West 138th Street apartment, big enough to accommodate not only us but Emma and Zach, Jesse and his girlfriend Emily, our old friends Sharon and John, and my mother. We relished the differences between Iowa City and Washington Heights, hub to a lively Latinx community and home to such brilliant artists as Puerto Rican actor and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, Dominican American writer Junot Díaz, and Cuban American jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, whom Sierra had emulated when he played trumpet in his high school jazz band.

The day after our arrival, while Pat, Emma, and Tina went sightseeing and shop-browsing, Sierra, Jesse, and I met up at a barber shop tucked into a Soho side street for a shave and shot of whisky. It was my first, and still only, hot-towel straight-razor shave. I don’t have a heavy beard, but my face hadn’t felt that smooth since I was sixteen.

The next morning, Pat and I went to Sierra and Tina’s for a pre-wedding brunch of appetizers and mimosas. In the tiny kitchen, Jesse was furiously cranking out tasty tidbits to amuse our mouths. It was standing room only. Pat and I were swept up in the energy of the city and the moment, meeting and conversing with friends of the couple, Tina’s Taiwanese American family, and Pam and Stu (Sierra’s biological father), who had flown in from the West Coast. At one time tense and strained to the breaking point, relations with Stu could now be described as slack. We no longer found it difficult to be at least civil to him.

The hours passed in a blur. Before we knew it, we were all heading down onto the street, west to the end of the block, then up another set of stairs to Riverside Drive. Our little procession then traipsed twelve blocks in the crisp autumn air to a freestanding portico across the street from Grant’s Tomb, held up by the same tall Doric columns. Soon, we sighted Sierra, Tina, and Miso, their corgi, coming up the street, Tina and Miso sitting in the large front cargo basket of the bicycle Sierra pedaled, the groom in a stylish dress suit, the bride in a white knee-length sheath dress.

Sierra, Tina, and Miso biking up Riverside Drive to their wedding.

Joined by thirty friends and family, Sierra and Tina said their vows under that portico looking out on the Hudson River fjord.[1] I officiated, as I did for Emma’s wedding, beginning the ceremony with something meant to be moving. I know I was moved that two of my children in the past year had expressed their love for another and taken this brave step into the world of commitments and responsibilities.

We crossed the street and lingered in Riverside Park while the wedding photographer took every possible permutation of a group portrait. Then we headed toward the subway for a rousing interborough journey to a little Brooklyn restaurant for the reception dinner. The party was intimate enough to allow me to make a toast, which went something like this: “I know my kids sometimes wonder how Pat and I have survived as a couple all these years. We do argue a lot, we often don’t see eye to eye, but we’ve never stopped talking and listening to each other. Sierra and Tina, always listen to each other, always make up afterward.”

As is always true when I spend time in New York City, by the end of that day I was both exhilarated and exhausted.  This was even more true for Pat, who wore a joyful smile on a face drawn with pain. We spent most of the next day relaxing in our Washington Heights brownstone and then flew home on Sunday.

We’ve all experienced plane-flights-from-hell. By the time we got to LaGuardia, grabbed our tickets, and navigated the terminal to our departure gate, Pat was spent. Because the flight from LaGuardia to O’Hare was jam-packed, Pat had to check her carry-on suitcase at the gate. The flight was uneventful, but when we disembarked in Chicago at five o’clock, we learned all connecting flights to Cedar Rapids had been canceled because of an ice storm there. We were rebooked on a flight leaving the next morning and encouraged to spend the night at one of the nearby hotels. But Pat didn’t have her suitcase, which contained all her meds (the last time she’d do that). The crew at the gate directed us to baggage claims service, where we could retrieve the suitcase. 

When the person at the claims office told us they couldn’t locate her luggage, Pat became upset and pissed off. She probably could’ve used one or two pills at that moment. We kept trying to explain that “We can’t find it” was not an acceptable answer. Feeling faint at one point, Pat collapsed into one of the plastic chairs along the office’s wall. The woman at the desk asked me, “Is your mother going to be okay?” I was seething. Through gritted teeth, I hissed, “She is my wife! Now find her bag!”

Pat’s luggage was eventually found that night, averting our mutual meltdown. We returned to Iowa City, and to the realization that all our children now lived at least a thousand miles away. That August, Emma and Zach had moved to Richmond, Virginia. Zach started work on an M.F.A. in kinetic imaging at Virginia Commonwealth, and Emma landed a job in the state medical examiner’s office, gathering data on a range of subjects, from roadkills to spousal abuse. Pat and Emma missed each other. They’d grown closer during those years since Emma’s return to Iowa City after college. We could’ve complained about our kids flying the coop, but neither of us had stayed close to home. In our early twenties, we each found our way to Iowa City after leaving the San Francisco Bay area (Pat) and the Akron, Ohio, area (me). It was not surprising our kids would follow suit.

That same month, when Pat saw Dr. Farivar for her six-month checkup, the CT scans indicated the stability of all dissections and aneurysms under observation. This was the last time that Farivar would be directly involved in her care. He left the University of Iowa in September to become the chief of cardiac surgery at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia. By then, it had been twenty-six months since her last surgery. 

But the scans at her next check-up in February 2013 showed two new outpouchings (or pseudoaneurysms[2]) from the ascending aortic graft. Pat no longer had much confidence in the University of Iowa surgeons. Everyone she consulted frankly expressed hesitancy, if not trepidation, about opening up someone with her medical history.

Pat called Gretchen Oswald, the Johns Hopkins genetic counselor and Loeys-Dietz Syndrome Foundation co-founder whom she’d met the previous year. She asked Pat to have the hospital send the CT scans to her at Johns Hopkins, and she forwarded them to Dr. Duke Cameron, head of cardiac surgery. Although he described these new pseudoaneurysms as merely “worrisome,” he agreed she needed her ascending aorta and aortic arch replaced soon, before her condition became more urgent. He proposed using the elephant trunk procedure. As Gretchen explained to Pat, “They would replace your ascending aorta and the root that still has the dissection and the arch completely; then they would put a graft down within the descending aorta.” Between 2006 and 2017, this technique would be performed worldwide on only 68 patients, including Pat.

On May 13, 2013, two months after Pat’s phone call with Gretchen, she was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital for the surgery. Because our HMO was denying coverage for the surgery and the provider, Dr. Dietz had to write a letter wherein he explained that Loeys-Dietz syndrome is a condition typified by “arterial tortuosity and an aggressive predisposition for aneurysms and dissections throughout the arterial tree,” that in Pat’s case “urgent cardiothoracic surgery is necessary,” and that Dr. Cameron “is a cardiothoracic surgeon with specific expertise in the surgical management of aortic enlargement associated with connective tissue disorder” and “allowing Ms. Duer access to this expertise would clearly optimize outcome.” A polite way of telling the HMO beancounters to quit obsessing over their profit margin and allow this woman to continue living.

We sat in Dr. Cameron’s office while he used graphics to explain the elephant trunk procedure to us.

We arrived in Baltimore five days before her admission date for preoperative workups. Gretchen had shared information with us about lodging that catered to the families of patients. The row of two-story brownstone townhouses on McElderry Street was a block from campus. The weekend before Pat’s hospital admission, Sierra and Tina and Jesse took the train from New York City, Emma and Zach drove up from Richmond, Sierra’s Grinnell College friends Jeetander and Alicia, and Emma’s childhood friend Zoe commuted from the DC area.

As anxious as we were about the upcoming surgery, spending time with our children and their friends and catching up on what was happening in their lives proved to be a happy distraction. We strolled down Washington Street toward the historic waterfront neighborhood of Fells Point. I was carrying Pat’s portable oxygen machine, and Alicia, nine months pregnant, was carrying their first child, Siddhartha. A very leisurely stroll.

It was a lovely gathering. These young folks at the beginning of their adult lives had taken the time to join us in Baltimore and remind Pat her life wasn’t ready to end. Emma, also pregnant, made sure to remind Pat she had a grandchild to meet in November.

The surgery took place on Tuesday, May 14. Revisiting the surgical notes, I’m fascinated by their depiction of the precision and expertise required to do open-heart surgery. “We cooled to 20 degrees C. During the cooling period, we dissected out the right axillary artery and placed a longitudinal pursestring in it. When the heart fibrillated, we divided the sternum with the oscillating saw. We entered the pseudoaneurysm and induced circulatory arrest. We exsanguinated the patient…. We were able to free up the distal ascending aorta, clamp it and then resume bypass.” Total bypass time was four hours and thirty-eight minutes. No detail was too insignificant: “Sponge and needle counts were correct.” Because of bleeding at the surgical site, the incision was sutured but her sternum was left open. The following day, Dr. Cameron closed the sternum once he was assured all bleeding had stopped.

I stayed with Pat the first four days of her post-op recovery. During breaks from sitting by her side, I got to know some of the gritty charm of Baltimore. A crab house on Locust Point, floor covered with sawdust, that served the best crab cakes I’ve ever eaten. Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, tucked in a corner of the Westminster Hall Burying Ground. Perkins Homes, a former public housing development that called to mind one of our favorite tv series, David Simon’s The Wire. 

One thing has stayed with me from those days at Johns Hopkins: When the doctors made their rounds, they always included (and often deferred to) the floor nurse in their discussion of patient care, a respect for the knowledge of nursing staff not as widespread as it should be. Pat finally ordered me to get back to Iowa for the last few weeks of school. When she was discharged, twelve days after the surgery, Emma drove up and took her home to Richmond, so they could return a week later for a follow-up with Dr. Cameron. 

A month later, back in Iowa City, she had another follow-up with her new primary care doctor, Dale Bieber. He added an unusual note in her after-visit instructions: “Keep your spirits up. Make a few happy memories for yourself and others!”

Footnotes

[1] The lower 150 miles of the Hudson River is a tidal estuary as much as 200 feet deep.

[2] Vascular abnormalities (such as elongations or bucklings of the aorta) that resemble aneurysms in radiography, just as dangerous as “real” aneurysms.

Ways to Endure, Part 4

As we drove to Tennessee for a wedding in June 2013, after Pat’s fourth surgery, a rest stop offered Pat a chance to display her superhero persona.

In September 2011, a month after our daughter Emma’s wedding, Pat decided to reach out to Gretchen Oswald, a genetic counselor at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of Genetic Medicine and co-founder of the Loeys-Dietz Syndrome Foundation. Pat knew that Loeys-Dietz syndrome (LDS) was a connective tissue disorder similar to Marfan syndrome but with certain key distinctions. She knew it was the root cause of her three open-heart surgeries over the last three years. But during that time, she’d met too many doctors who, after reading her medical chart, either asked her to explain LDS to them or stepped out of the room so they could quickly research it on their phones or in their medical reference books.

We usually gave those doctors a pass – LDS had been identified only six years earlier. But Pat wanted to speak with doctors who could give her a better understanding of the disease and a better plan for treating it going forward. She wanted to meet Dr. Harry “Hal” Dietz, a professor of genetic medicine at Johns Hopkins and a leading authority on Marfan and Loeys-Dietz syndromes.[1] Gretchen responded to Pat’s email by inviting her to schedule appointments in conjunction with the first Loeys-Dietz Syndrome Foundation conference, to be held in June. Having never met another person with this condition, Pat jumped at the offer, and Gretchen scheduled appointments with doctors who specialized in the treatment of genetic diseases such as Loeys-Dietz.

For me, a new school year had begun at Cedar Rapids Washington High School. I dove into it – getting to know a new group of students, building communities in my U.S. Humanities and AP Lang and Comp classes, meeting after school with the new staff of the Washington Literary Press. My traditional “song of the day” for the first day of classes was Joe Cocker’s version of “I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends.” My students and I had a tacit understanding: Despite the valiant efforts of my fellow teachers, high school could be a, well, perhaps not an institutional hell but at least an institutional purgatory, a place of temporary misery.[2] And yet, if we all helped and supported each other, we could get through it. In my personal life, over the past three years. I’d learned the value of that help.

My days were long – I usually left home by 6:30 in the morning for the thirty-mile commute and arrived home by 5:30 – but for me, teaching was important work. Maybe I was able to persuade some students to write more effective arguments. Maybe I showed some students ways to become better at listening to the ideas and opinions of others, or I helped some discover that beneath Hawthorne’s verbose and convoluted literary style was a timeless story that hooked our interest and empathy, or I encouraged some to become more comfortable with being different, unique, themselves.

It was my eighth year of teaching, and Pat was used to the long hours, although since she no longer worked equally long hours, I was missed at home more than before. I did my best to leave school at a decent hour, but I also felt it was better to get most of my after-school grading and lesson-planning done at school rather than bringing it home with me. I was striving to be completely present, whether at school or at home

We hosted our usual elaborate dinner at Thanksgiving, Pat’s favorite holiday of the year by far. She had an endearing habit of inviting all manner of folks for dinner, resulting in a curious but always congenial gathering of family, friends, and holiday orphans. But we didn’t have thirty guests that year (the most we ever stuffed into our cozy 900-square-foot house for Thanksgiving dinner) and everyone helped out by bringing dishes. Pat still had a weight restriction, so we wouldn’t let her lift the bird into or out of the oven. 

Two weeks later, the Washington Literary Press held PAM Slam, its biggest event of the year. I loved that the students conceived of the event – a Poetry slam with Art exhibit plus Musical performances – in order to raise funds needed to publish a full-color edition of their end-of-year literary and arts journal, Fingerprints. I loved that every one of the fifteen staffers pitched in to make the event a success. I loved that the student body turned out to support us – always close to 200 paid admissions. I loved that the administration supported the students’ right to free expression, recognizing the purpose of the profanity heard in some poems was more to express emphasis or catharsis than to offend or disrespect. I loved that PAM Slam had become a school tradition.[3]

We spent a quiet Christmas with Emma and Zach and Jesse. Even though they were adults, we carried on certain family traditions. After we each opened one gift on Christmas Eve, Pat and I waited till everyone had gone to bed before bringing out the majority of the presents and filling the stockings, “from Santa.” We all enjoyed the frisson of waking up to a pile of brightly wrapped packages under the tree, sipping coffee and waiting for Pat’s cinnamon rolls (made the day before) to finish baking.

In February, the results of Pat’s follow-up appointment with Dr. Farivar after her latest surgery gave us cause for cautious optimism. The CT scans showed no change since before the surgery in a number of areas of concern: a short dissection of the aortic root, dissection flaps in the thoracic aorta, and aneurysmal dilations of the aorta and arteries. This stability was a good sign, but she was not out of the woods, not in the clear. By then, Pat and I knew she’d never be out of those woods, but we were determined to enjoy the life we shared, and to ignore, without ever completely forgetting about, the cardiothoracic clock faintly ticking in the background.

If it’s true that into every life a little rain must fall, we had come to realize it never rained on Pat’s life without pouring. Those CT scans also showed areas of emphysema in both lungs, which explained the shortness of breath Pat had been experiencing. In addition, Pat revisited with Farivar the problem with her voice, reduced to a hoarse whisper since the second surgery. This dysphonia could be traced to pharyngeal nerve damage that occurred during that surgery. More recently, she’d been having trouble swallowing. Far too often, Pat would suddenly stop eating in the middle of dinner because food was stuck halfway down her esophagus. This dysphagia could also be explained by the nerve damage. When she participated in a swallow study at the University of Iowa Hospital’s Otolaryngology Clinic in May, it showed not only the muscle walls of the esophagus not working properly but an abnormally narrow spot restricting flow.

To give you a sense of the inner demons Pat was battling at that time, among her double-digit array of prescription drugs was alprazolam (Xanax) for anxiety and insomnia, clonazepam (Klonopin) for panic disorder, fluoxetine (Prozac) for depression, and hydrocodone (Vicodin) for pain. Pat hated having to use these drugs, and was always trying to reduce the dosages or completely remove the drugs from her regimen. When she was young, her mother had struggled with drug addiction, and memories of that experience haunted Pat. I understood her fears and tried to reassure her: “You are not your mother, and the alternative to taking alprazolam and hydrocodone is getting worn down by sleepless nights and constant post-surgical pain.”

In June, Pat embarked on her pilgrimage to Baltimore, home to the widely acclaimed Johns Hopkins Hospital and School of Medicine. At the Loeys-Dietz Syndrome Foundation conference, she became an embodiment of hope to many younger LDS patients and their families. As a 59-year-old woman, Pat offered to fellow attendees the possibility of outliving the current life expectancy of 37 years. Her medical history also challenged the theory that pregnancy and childbirth were risky if not impossible for women with LDS because of the chance of aortic aneurysms and uterine ruptures.

Pat’s initial exam was performed by Dr. Mark Lindsay, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins. His clinical notes suggest the meeting commenced with an upbeat and optimistic attitude: “Today, we had the pleasure of evaluating Ms. Patricia Duer.” By page 3, the notes take on a more serious tone: “The next concern going further up the aorta is Ms. Duer’s dilated aortic arch.” Although Lindsay indicated its current dilation of 4 cm didn’t normally call for surgery, Pat’s LDS diagnosis altered that calculation. After consulting with Dr. Duke Cameron, they agreed an aortic arch measuring 5 cm could signal the need to replace it. Although this indicated another surgery was in Pat’s future, and we knew there was nothing she could do to keep that aortic arch from dilating further, the specificity of this plan was reassuring.

Let’s spend a moment with that consulting physician, Duke Cameron. According to his Johns Hopkins Medicine website page, “He is internationally recognized for his contributions to cardiac surgery, particularly aortic surgery for Marfan syndrome, Loeys-Dietz syndrome and other connective tissue disorders.” But we had a hard time getting past his name, joking that he surely removed his Stetson hat and cowboy boots before going into surgery. We soon realized how badly we’d misread his character. Duke Cameron was the least macho cardiothoracic surgeon we ever met. During Pat’s next two surgeries, we came to rely on his accessibility, kindness, and quiet confidence.

The following month, I got a chance to participate in Tony Hoagland’s Five Powers of Poetry Seminar[4] in Santa Fe, New Mexico. An old friend of mine and Pat’s from our undergraduate days at the University of Iowa, Tony had gone on to become an exceptional poet and teacher. He’d created this week-long seminar to help high school and college teachers develop new strategies for bringing poetry and poetry writing into the classroom. I spent a wonderful week with Tony, his wife Kathleen, and a dozen other teacher-writers in that city of art, culture, and history. Although Tony was dealing with serious health issues of his own, he only wanted to hear about Pat. He was always that generous and selfless. As we discussed and wrote poems that week, I thought a lot about her. This is one poem that emerged from those thoughts.

Together

We’ve unharnessed the horse of abstraction.

It whinnied a moment, then galloped off

to a fresh meadow of oats.

Now we are left with the wagon –

four wooden wheels careening down

the long hill of our lives.

At times we veer off the winding trail,

but the wagon somehow finds it again.

We had a hand brake,

but it’s been rendered worthless by overuse.

All the plans we’d made are

neatly packed in the bed of the wagon,

but as we pick up speed

on this steep rocky trail

items go flying out the back –

to-do lists, itineraries, agendas, pension plans.

This makes us lighter, less encumbered,

but we don’t know if that helps.

Meanwhile, the bottom of the hill approaches

more swiftly than ever.

Hang on tight! I shout,

and we do, we do.

Even as we went “careening down the long hill of our lives,” our children continued to forge their own paths, to our great pleasure. Sierra and his longtime girlfriend and flatmate, Tina, announced to us their decision to get married. So, we began to make plans to travel to New York City in November for their wedding.

Footnotes:

[1] In 2005, Drs. Hal Dietz and Bart Loeys had identified and characterized Loeys–Dietz syndrome.

[2] For more on this, check out the TikToks of my former colleague Joe Sloma, for example, “would that i weren’t so bored” @squirehaligast.

[3] Here’s one example of a student performance, and the popularity of the event, from PAM Slam 2012.

[4] The five powers are image, diction, voice, structure, and implication.

Ways to Endure, Part 3

Helping with an Iowa Youth Writing Project workshop on Art & Writing, I made this linoleum block print at the Iowa City Press Coop with Pat in mind.

My daughter, Emma, recently mentioned that the golden anniversary of her mother and my wife’s death was approaching – five years ago on November 5 she died. I’ll always be able to count on Emma to remind me to hold Pat in the light.[1] I’ve been looking through Pat’s recipe box, recalling favorite dishes, and promising to make some, although her recipes usually lack instructions and often lack quantities – they’re more like reminders. For Thanksgiving this year, I made the oatmeal rolls we traditionally devoured with that meal. I thought of Pat as I savored the nutty flavor of those soft, dense rolls on her favorite holiday of the year.

After Pat’s second open-heart surgery in September 2009, our lives regained a small measure of stability. But as her health and strength improved, she began to confront the loss of focus that materialized at the end of her career as a geriatric nurse and nursing director. She scheduled a weekly appointment with a psychologist, and although I imagined I could have helped her deal with her anger and frustration, I came to realize what a smart move that was. She needed someone with professional training and with no emotional investment who could help her gain perspective and point her toward emotional stability.

I never attempted to pry into those conversations between Pat and her therapist. But if she  shared an insightful comment after a session, I’d file it away. When Pat would go into an anxiety spiral about her health, I could sometimes calm her with “Remember what Amy said …” It helped that I could couch that advice as coming from her therapist, not me.

One suggestion the therapist made was to get involved in a volunteer program. Pat began to help with Meals on Wheels, picking up twenty-five hot lunches from The Senior Center every day and delivering them to homebound clients on Iowa City’s east side. The work revived that sense of purpose she sorely missed. It became a way for her to continue to care for the elderly and disabled.[2]

In 2010, we began to appreciate the joy of watching our children growing into adulthood. Sierra was finishing up a master’s degree in Japanese history at Columbia University and working as an assistant producer for a news correspondent at Tokyo Broadcasting System Television. Jesse was holding down a good sous-chef job at Leaf Kitchen and had moved in with his girlfriend, Emily. Although he was still struggling with alcoholism, we were hoping a steady job and girlfriend might help him right his ship. And in early 2011, Emma announced she was getting married. Her fiance, Zach, was an intermedia artist from northern Minnesota wrapping up an MFA at the university, a tall, easy-going guy. 

Emma wanted a big wedding that would bring together all our friends and family, but she also wanted it to express her personal style and tastes. This would be a casual DIY affair, the vibe equal parts artist, neo-hippie, and Quaker, and no wedding planner was going to tell her otherwise. It was a delight to see Emma and Pat work together to plan the event.

It was about this time that Pat began to realize all was not well with her heart. Loeys-Dietz Syndrome – the connective tissue disorder that caused the aneurysms and dissections wreaking havoc on her cardiothoracic system – was at it again. Pat often felt tired and lightheaded, the effects of low blood pressure. Her cardiac surgeon, Dr. Farivar, described it as “increasing symptoms of severe aortic deficiency.” Based on the echocardiograms, he concluded that the primary culprit was a faulty aortic valve, and recommended Pat undergo a minimally invasive surgery to have it replaced. Without missing a beat, Pat agreed to the surgery. The memory of the first surgery, which she barely survived, would’ve caused me to pause. But for Pat, it was “Fix this right away – I need to be there for my daughter on her wedding day.”

The surgery was scheduled for June 2, the day after my last day of classes. I took a stack of essay finals with me to the Day of Surgery waiting room, hoping that grading them would occupy and distract me during the long surgery. Dr. Farivar planned to replace the damaged aortic valve with a porcine valve. The use of pig heart valves dates back to 1965. Similar in size, weight, and structure to human hearts, the hearts of pigs grown for human consumption are often used for medical purposes. The next time Pat and I had bacon for breakfast, we joked it might be the same pig donating his heart valve to her.

Pat took the lead-up to this surgery more in stride than I did. Dr. Farivar had called it “minimally invasive,” but it was still open heart surgery. At some point, I tried to write my way through my fears so I could set them aside and stand by her side. It was my way of whistling in the dark.

The ascending aorta

The descending aorta

The septum and the right atrium

The vena cava and the aortic arch

The wondrous architecture of the heart

An architecture with structural damage

A weakening of the arterial walls

An anomalous bulge on the MRI scans

The dreadful lyricism of “aortic aneurysm”

Yet my wife’s heart is strong, stubborn, resilient

I’ve danced to its fierce beat

For thirty years

And her cardiac surgeon

Can replace a ransacked chamber

Of her heart with that of “some pig”

Can remove a vein from her thigh

Switch it with a ticking aneurysm

And stitch it securely into place

With the delicate precision of knots

Handed down by generations

Of Persian carpet weavers

So that my wife’s heart

Can go on beating

Pumping

Loving

The full surgical procedure took nine hours. Pat’s body was on a cardiopulmonary bypass pump for 134 minutes. But nearly everything went as planned. Reviewing Dr. Farivar’s post-op procedure notes recently, I was struck by the unusual beauty of his medical language: “Using a pediatric ball tip sucker, we emptied the heart out. We placed a pediatric wire-reinforced sump to drain the heart. The valve was insufficient and floppy…. We then placed twelve pledgeted mattress sutures in a non-everting manner in the aortic annulus…. We closed the aorta with a teardrop-shaped bovine pericardial patch in order to minimize any fish-mouthing of the coronary artery…. We de-aired the heart with provocative maneuvers.”

One hiccup in the surgery occurred when the medical team cracked Pat’s chest. Her breastbone (sternum) had not healed from the first two surgeries. When they removed the wires holding together the two halves of her sternum, the bone fractured on both sides. When it came time to close up Pat’s chest, they decided to use two titanium plates shaped to fit on either side of the aorta, held in place by four self-tapping screws and double wires. According to Farivar’s post-op notes, “The patient tolerated the procedure well.” Well, I guess. 

From then on, those breastplates would cause annoying red-tape delays at airport security. Although the titanium might suggest Pat was working on her Iron Woman armor, it made me more sensitive to her fragility. If I slowly ran my fingers over her sternum, I could feel the screws.

Pat recovered more quickly than she did from the previous surgeries. She was extubated the day after the surgery, moved to the general ward the day after that, and discharged three days after that. Because of the extraordinary sternal repairs, discharge instructions included no driving for four weeks and no lifting, pushing, or pulling more than five pounds for eight weeks. Emma and Zach’s wedding date was eight weeks away.

During the two weeks leading up to the marriage, all our efforts were focused on making the event as beautiful as possible within our means, and Pat worked harder than anyone. We hired a photographer. Jesse played a major role in preparing the dinner catered by Leaf Kitchen for our 250 guests. Everything else was done by us and our friends. Our musician friend John played songs as guests arrived for the ceremony. Each table was adorned with a vaseful of flowers from our friend Mary’s gardens. In lieu of a band, Sierra compiled a great playlist and became our deejay for the day. Instead of providing a traditional wedding cake, we asked guests to bring homemade pies. At least thirty-five pies of every possible type showed up.

At the wedding reception, from left to right, Jesse, Emma, Zach (in the background), and Sierra.

The wedding took place on a steamy mid-August day thirty miles west of Iowa City in Amana, one of the seven villages of the Amana Colonies.[3] Emma and Zach were married in a grassy field overlooking farmland near the Festhalle Barn, a restored century-old dairy barn that served as the wedding reception venue. The ceremony began with Pat escorting her daughter down the aisle toward Zach and me, all of us beaming and teary-eyed. Emma had filled out an on-line application so I could be ordained in the Universal Life Church and officiate the ceremony.

The reception brought together in one building forty members of my immediate family without, as far as I could tell, any of the squabbling typical of most families that size. Then again, I was in a place that left no room for any pettiness that might interfere with my joy. Everyone looked exceptionally beautiful. The little white lights strung up in the rafters glowed like stars. Like everyone else there, I was honoring the love shared by those two young people, but I was also honoring the unstoppable will of my wife. She was not about to let the “single nucleotide mutation at position 605 in axon 4”[4] keep her from celebrating the wedding of her daughter with family and friends.

Footnotes:

[1] A common (and personal favorite) way of referring to prayer among Quaker Friends.

[2] On one Meals on Wheels run, Pat had the misfortune to have her car stolen. She’d left it running in the alley beside the Senior Center while she slipped inside to grab the insulated meal carrier bags. When she came out a minute later, the car was gone. We filed a stolen vehicle report with the police, hoping the car would turn up. And it did a week later – in Anamosa, thirty-five miles away. A neighbor of the man who stole the car, suspecting he’d come by that late-model minivan parked in front of his house by illegal means, turned him in to the police.

[3] The Amana Colonies were settled in 1856 by German Radical Pietists escaping religious persecution. Their members lived communally and self-sufficiently until 1932, and that history survives in the many shops that sell the products of local woolen mills, furniture shops, clockmakers, smokehouses, breweries, wineries, bakeries.

[4] The genetic diagnosis of Loeys-Dietz Syndrome.

On a Bicycle

Jesse test-driving one of the bicycles he helped make. Note the front fork - that’s a baby doll inside the car shock absorber.

“On a bicycle, I’m alert, aware of everything. It’s exhilarating, the narrow margin, the exposure to injury, the steadying force of the spinning wheels.” –Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

Bicycles have always been a part of my life. When I was a kid growing up in northeast Ohio, our family of twelve had a small fleet in various stages of functionality. My first bike was a red fixie,[1] otherwise forgettable, but we also had a girl’s Huffy that was indestructible. It had balloon tires and a handlebar that we never could straighten out properly. We learned to steer slightly to the right to go straight.

In the early Sixties, a new bike style was becoming popular. Schwinn’s Sting-Ray was one of the best of these trick bikes: butterfly handlebars, banana seat and sissy bar, twenty-inch back wheel with a slick tread, fourteen-inch front wheel, built for doing wheelies, precursor to the BMX. I never owned one, but I’d join my friends at the Holy Family Grade School parking lot, which offered lots of space to lay patches and do tight figure-eights, to see how far we could ride on our back wheels.

In those days, my bicycle was freedom, the thrill of going as fast as I could, wind ruffling my hair (no helmets back then). It was also transportation. I used it to deliver newspapers, go fishing at Silver Lake, meet up with friends for pickup football games behind Stow Cemetery. One summer weekday, my mom asked me to go to the store to buy a gallon of milk for lunch. I held the glass jug by its plastic handle as I was heading home, coasting down the Park Road hill. The right turn onto Lakeview Boulevard, where we lived, was near the bottom of that hill. I usually made the turn with no problem, using the downhill momentum to help me get up the hill to my house, but that day I failed to account for the gallon of milk weighing down my left hand. I executed half that turn before hitting the curb. I tumbled head over handlebars, landing sprawled on the devil strip,[2] the jug of milk shattered to pieces. I suffered a few bumps and bruises, but my ego was bruised the worst. I had to limp the bike the half block home and explain to Mom why I didn’t have the milk.

Years later, when I started taking classes at the University of Iowa, I lived fifteen blocks from campus. I looked forward to walking to and from school through the charming Goosetown neighborhood, but when I came upon an old fixie with a bent front rim, unlocked and forsaken on a campus bike rack, I rescued it. I replaced the rim but never bought a lock for the bike; I couldn’t imagine anyone considering it worth stealing. But its basic utility did eventually appeal to some bikejacker. By then, getting ready to travel, I was glad to know that hooptie of a bike was in the hands of someone who might appreciate it.

When Pat and I got married in 1981, we moved to the married student housing trailer park on Hawkeye Park Road, over three miles from downtown. We shared a car and a three-speed Raleigh bicycle equipped with a child seat. When Sierra was four and five years old, he and I would take the Raleigh, sometimes for fun, sometimes to get from here to there, pointing out to each other what we saw along the way. Sierra still has a memory of riding on the back of that bike at dusk, rolling through the cooling air as my flannel shirttail flapped around him. I like to think those rides inspired his lifelong love of biking.

Sierra on his bike trip around New Zealand, 2002-03.

He learned to ride when we moved to West Branch, just east of Iowa City. We lived in an apartment where First Street dead-ends into a cornfield. Either Pat or I would run beside him, holding his bike steady until he’d built up enough speed and then letting go without telling him, so he could discover for himself the irrelevance of training wheels. Thus began his biking adventures. By his mid-twenties, he’d spent a summer touring New Zealand on a recumbent. And when he married Tina in 2012, he used the large front cargo rack on one of their bicycles to transport her from their West 138th Street apartment up Riverside Drive to the wedding site in Riverside Park. They pulled that off while still looking elegant.

Emma’s and Jesse’s first bikes. Christmas 1989?

By the time Jesse was born, we had outgrown that West Branch apartment. We moved to a farmhouse three miles southeast of town, and all three kids eventually became bicyclists. The gravel road was not easy to ride on, but we found a good dirt trail shortcut that followed the Wapsinonoc Creek into town. And when we moved back to Iowa City as Jesse was beginning seventh grade, his cycling interest took off. In his junior year at City High, he fell in with a crew of DIY bike mechanics. His friend John had access to an arc welder and some garage space. They started scavenging frames and then cannibalizing them to bring their bizarre brainstorms to life – tall bikes with one frame welded atop another, choppers with ridiculously long front forks and tiny front wheels, a flatbed trailer outfitted with a barbecue grill. They’d fire up that grill, hop on their Franken-bike creations, and ride around town. When the coals were hot, they'd park in front of some popular spot such as the Deadwood Tavern and grill a pack of brats for consumption. Although the Iowa City Police were no fans of their escapades, the boys could have easily stumbled down some path to much worse trouble.

In 2008, my kids pooled their money to buy me a birthday present – my first high-end bicycle, a Trek 7000.[3] Fitted with two panniers, it was perfect for doing errands and commuting to and from work. But it also became a vehicle for long leisurely rides into the country – I’d head down Sand Road to Hills, feeling the rhythm of the miles, greeting wild bergamot, prairie blazing star, partridge pea, black-eyed Susan, oxeye sunflower along the way.

In July 2010, Sierra and Jesse decided to do RAGBRAI[4] with five of their friends, and invited me to join them. Pat was just nine months past her second open-heart surgery, and I wanted to stay close by, but she persuaded me to spend this time with my sons, now young men moving out into their own lives. I traveled a fifty-mile rail trail from Hiawatha to Waterloo (the Cedar Valley Nature Trail), and met up with them at the end of their fifth day. We camped in the backyard of friends in Cedar Falls, and I finished the last two days of the ride with them.

It was a trip, riding with the young’uns. Although each day’s route averaged seventy miles, our group would enjoy a leisurely breakfast, never in a rush to get going. The guys took turns driving the sag wagon,[5] buying groceries for the day and meeting us for a late lunch, and then scouting out a campsite in the overnight host town. Our squad included one tall bike, and someone else pulled the trailer, laden with two coolers packed with beverages, primarily beers. We usually got rolling by 11:00 AM, after nearly all the other bikers were well on their way. Unhindered by crowds, we could move at a brisk pace, but after a spirited fifteen-mile sprint, say, the team would stop to enjoy a beer and the scenery. I balked at the idea of beer that early in the day, but the others tried to persuade me that beer supplied much-needed electrolytes.[6] The crew also observed a ritual of visiting every cemetery we passed to smoke a joint. Again, because I wanted to be sure I lasted till the end of the day, I was the lightweight in the group.

With all that dillydallying, we would hit the pass-thru towns as people were packing up their concession stands, which functioned as fundraising tools for various local organizations. If folks hadn’t already sold out their food items, they were usually happy to give away the remnants. On the last day, we made a long stop at the town park in Epworth, fifteen miles from the Mississippi, and drank beers with Epworthians[7] celebrating the haul they’d made from the 20,000 riders who’d recently passed through. We told stories of our week, let them try their hands at riding the tall bike, and made some new friends.

Two years later, when Emma invited me to ride part of RAGBRAI with her, I happily said yes. Married the previous year, she and her husband would soon be moving to Virginia. Again, I was looking forward to an opportunity to bond with my offspring via cycling. Cedar Rapids was the overnight town on Day 5, so that day we rode a mix of rural roads and bike trails from Iowa City to Van Vechten Park, just east of downtown and near the route the riders would take the next morning. Unlike most bikers, all our gear – tent, sleeping bags, extra clothes, food – was strapped to our bikes’ back cargo racks. 

Through the three open-heart surgeries Pat had undergone and recovered from over the previous three years, Emma and I had stood by her side. Of all our kids, she had taken Pat’s health issues most to heart. We talked about an impending decision she was struggling with – to move out into her future or to stay near her mother. But we also stopped thinking for a while, listening instead to our wheels spinning, our gears clicking, our minds unwinding. We shared the joy of biking through the rolling eastern Iowa countryside, and the late July corn standing along the road raised its arms in praise of our efforts. The days would heat up but we’d keep moving at a comfortable pace, creating our own breeze. On the second day, somewhere between Oxford Junction and Lost Nation, we stopped at a creek with a rocky bed to cool our feet and bathe our faces in the knee-deep water. Like the river this creek fed, the Wapsipinicon, we continued to braid our way through the countryside and, by the end of the day, dipped our tires in the Mississippi.

I rode that Trek 7000 for fourteen years. Repairs were becoming more and more frequent, and when I blew a back tire last summer, I decided to hang up that bike. As I procrastinated buying a new one, I dug out a black Giant the kids had bought for Pat. It was too small for me, but sturdy and fun to tool around on. I felt a bit like a circus clown riding a tiny two-wheeler. This past spring, according to the eyewitness account of a neighbor, a young teenage boy ran into my garage, grabbed that Giant, and rode off on it. I presumed he was going for a joyride, but the bike never turned up, so I finally stopped by the Iowa City Bike Library and bought a used Gary Fisher Capitola hybrid, a sweet ride. 

When Cile and I went up to Wisconsin’s Door County in August, we took our bikes along. We cycled all over the northern tip of that peninsula, from Gills Rock on the Green Bay side to Newport State Park on the Lake Michigan shore, taking the ferry across the Porte Des Morts to Washington Island and biking to Schoolhouse Beach, a cobblestone shore of polished gray limestone nestled in a deep blue harbor on the north side of the island. As always, I felt the freedom of self-propulsion. We passed well-tended pastures, fields of bee-laden lavender, thick stands of beech, maple, and hemlock. We transported ourselves at a human pace, absorbing the subtle beauty, stopping whenever our hearts asked us to.

Footnotes:

[1] We didn’t call them fixies. Single-speed bicycles with pedal brakes were the norm then.

[2] A vernacular term, particular to the Akron area, for the piece of land between the street and the sidewalk, although the word originally referred to the narrow swath of land between streetcars going in opposite directions.

[3] The same model, I later learned, that President Obama rode.

[4] It was the 38th Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, from the Missouri River to the Mississippi, “an epic eight-day rolling festival of bicycles, music, food, camaraderie, and community” (per the official website). Although registered participants numbered 10,000, at least as many folks rode without paying (as we did), sleeping each night wherever they could pitch a tent or roll out a sleeping bag.

[5] Support-And-Gear transportation. Ours was a pickup fitted with a camper.

[6] Yeah no.

[7] Epworthers? Epworthites?

Ways To Endure, Part 2

Pat didn’t like having her photo taken. But in 2014, while we were enjoying a dinner before a full day of appointments at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, I took this candid photo of her. By this point she’d survived five surgeries.

In late June of 2009, two months after being released from the hospital after her emergency open-heart surgery, Pat returned to work. She was the Director of Nursing at Crestview Care Center in West Branch, Iowa, and loved her job. In 1990, after our youngest child, Jesse, started school, she took a job as a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) at Crestview, and quickly realized she had an aptitude for and interest in geriatric care. She was a hard worker who never shied away from the more unpleasant and challenging tasks associated with caring for the elderly. She grew close to many of the women she cared for, often coming home with amazing stories about their lives. She also had a thick enough skin to handle male residents who, because of the challenges of adapting to the confinement of age and disability, were often surly, rude, even combative. She treated them with compassion, but could also fend off their cantankerous commentary and throw it back at them, and the men respected her for that.

Crestview’s administrator, Cheryl, was soon encouraging Pat to take advantage of a company benefit that covered the tuition for CNA staff interested in becoming nurses. She enrolled in the nursing program at Kirkwood Community College and began taking classes while continuing to work full-time and care for our family. At the old rambling farmhouse we rented near West Branch, weeknights were study nights. Sierra, in high school, and Emma and Jesse, in elementary school, did their homework, while Pat pored over her Human Anatomy or Pharmacology textbooks.[1] Because my wife was such a good cook, she’d gradually taken over most of the cooking duties, leaving the cleanup to me, but when she started taking night classes, I became the cook, much to the amusement of our kids, who gave me grief that I only made flat foods – pizzas, pancakes, tacos. In my defense, the pizzas and pancakes were made from scratch.

Pat graduated in 1996 with an Associate Degree in Nursing, passing the exam to become a Licensed Practical Nurse. Before long, she was promoted to the Assistant Director of Nursing position, and by 2009 had been Crestview’s Director of Nursing for nearly ten years. She may have gained an office, a desk, and daily paperwork duties, but she still spent much of her time on the floor with the residents, helping the nursing staff, often filling a shift if someone called in sick at the last minute. How many times did we encounter people – while eating out or walking through the Ped Mall – who stopped to thank Pat for how well she had cared for their parent or grandparent.[2] Simply stated, she loved her job.

But at an appointment with her surgeon, Dr. Farivar talked about the unusual state of her cardiovascular system, recommending she undergo genetic testing to see if that might provide an explanation. It did. In July, Pat was told she had a newly discovered connective tissue disorder known as Loeys-Dietz Syndrome (LDS). The disorder had been identified in 2005 by Dr. Bart Loeys of Ghent University Hospital in Belgium and Dr. Harry Dietz of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, whose findings had been presented in an article they co-wrote and published in Gene Reviews journal just one year before Pat’s surgery.

Similar to the more widely known Marfan Syndrome, Loeys-Dietz Syndrome is characterized by aggressive cerebral, thoracic, and abdominal arterial aneurysms and dissections.[3] Because of this, the average lifespan of LDS patients is 26 years and women with LDS have a high incidence of pregnancy-related complications, including uterine rupture and death, all which made Pat, a 56-year-old woman who had given birth to three children, an extremely rare case. Some of my wife’s features that made her interesting and endearing to me – her velvety and translucent skin, her wide-spaced eyes, the hyperflexibility of her joints – now helped confirm the LDS diagnosis. More importantly, the diagnosis raised the question of whether she’d be able to continue working.

In early August, at a follow-up appointment with Dr. Farivar, a CT scan revealed a dissection of Pat’s descending aorta. He immediately scheduled a second surgery and urged her to go on disability. Cheryl sat down with her and persuaded her that this was the best course of action. Pat did not want to leave the job that she loved, that gave her life purpose. (We often talked about how, in the middle of our lives, we’d both found paths to professions – nursing the elderly, teaching teenagers – that felt meaningful and important to us.) It didn’t help that the decision to stop working had to be made quickly to verify the disability so she could qualify for full long-term benefits. Even considering all the cardiothoracic surgeries she would undergo over the years, this forced retirement hurt her heart more than anything else.

During those days, Pat and I would each climb aboard our own runaway trains of thought. For her, the fact that LDS was now part of her body and life, something perhaps treatable but never curable, seemed patently unfair. She had taken care of her body, paying careful attention to what she put into it, shunning chemically processed foods for homegrown and organic produce and meat. She couldn’t let go of the randomness and injustice of it all. I’d try to offer the perspective that illnesses aren’t handed out on the basis of some moral calculation. If we could agree that no one deserves to be ill, correspondingly no one’s earned the right to be healthy. But in light of all Pat was facing, it was hard for her to be philosophical.

I was vexed by my own emotional and illogical distractions. A stitch in my side while jogging became a harbinger of a heart attack. A bout of indigestion might be the first symptom of a stomach or colon cancer brewing inside me. This focus on the slender and unraveling rope of my mortality would be momentary, but I often had a hard time shaking it. I mean, who knew? Pat was perfectly fine that April morning in 2009 when I kissed her goodbye, neither of us aware of those cardiothoracic booby traps ready to explode. By the end of that day, she was clinging to life on an operating table. I kept these spells of death anxiety to myself. Given what Pat was going though, it didn’t feel right troubling her with them.

However, the situation of our 24-year-old son, Jesse, occupied both our minds. Before moving home after the first surgery in April, he had been living and working in New York City as a sous chef. Bit by bit, we began to learn how badly he had been scuffling there, never holding down a job for long, squatting in an empty warehouse in Brooklyn, developing an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, an occupational hazard in the high-stress restaurant industry. After the surgery he found a good chef job in Iowa City, and we held out hope for a turnaround. Jesse is a sweet man, and we were happy to have him around. But his alcoholism was slowly becoming apparent, as much as he tried to hide it from us. His sunny disposition would get lost in a fifth of gin, and our growing concern for him pushed the impending surgery into the background.

Even with all that seemed to be hanging over our heads, Pat and I were grateful for my school break and the time we had together that summer. Not that I ever stopped thinking about teaching, but in those months I could stay home with her while updating my curriculum and fine-tuning my courses. We’d take Auggie, our Aussie–border collie mix, for long walks around the neighborhood. In the evenings we’d binge-watch TV shows, mostly police procedurals – Law & Order and CSI: Las Vegas, Prime Suspect and The Closer because we liked strong female characters, Criminal Minds and Dexter because we liked our stories dark, Sherlock and House because Pat was fond of Benedict Cumberbatch and Hugh Laurie, both of whom looked a lot like her father.

The surgery to repair the descending aortic aneurysm took place on September 3, 2009. I knew I’d be taking some time off early in the school year, so I made an extra effort to build a good rapport with my students in that first week and made sure I got the best sub available. I spoke frankly with my students about why I’d be gone, reminding them that although I was committed to being their teacher, I had equally important personal commitments. As was true after the first surgery, my students displayed a surprisingly deep reservoir of empathy. That fall, both before and after the second surgery, students from the previous year would often stop by my classroom or catch me in the hallway to ask how my wife was doing.

I told my students the surgery was risky, but I tried not to let on how worried I was about it, neither to them nor to Pat. I’ll never know how she was able to manage the anxiety she must have been feeling, but as I’ve said before, she possessed remarkable inner strength.

For this second surgery, Dr. Farivar had a better sense of what he was walking into. His surgical team included seven assisting doctors, eight nurses, and two perfusionists. Even with all that help, the surgery took ten hours. Pat was kept in the ICU for four days and sent home ten days later. The surgical outcome was positive except for one complication – some injury (perhaps during intubation) had paralyzed her left vocal cord. An otolaryngologist’s attempt to repair the vocal cord with an injection proved ineffectual. All that was left was a raspy whisper. She would never again speak to me in her normal voice.

For years, I kept a voicemail from her on my phone so I could hear that voice. It didn’t matter that she was chewing me out because of my bad habit of not answering her calls – I’d muted my phone, or forgotten to charge it, or left it on my desk while I made copies – and that her message was particularly salty. It was still good to hear from her.

Footnotes

[1] Sierra has told me, “I vividly remember the intensity of her study habits. She started every session with the assumption that she couldn’t do it, but her notes and review processes were amazing. This stands out to me because as a ‘gifted kid,’ I never had a fraction of her determination and perseverance.”

[2] In 2002 Pat was nominated by Cheryl for the Director of Nursing of the Year award given by Care Initiatives, Crestview’s parent company.

[3] That is, abnormal swellings in the wall of an artery or tears along the inner lining of an artery, weak spots susceptible to sudden ruptures causing massive internal bleeding.

Ways To Endure, Part 1

This photo was taken somewhere on the California coast a few months before I met Pat, but it’s a favorite of mine. By the ocean with her dog Felix, she is calm, tough, happy.

In the early evening of November 5, 2018, on the tiny hospice ward of Mercy Hospital in Iowa City, while my 35-year-old daughter Emma and I nibbled our take-out dinner from El Banditos and chatted with my sister Julie and our old friends Ken and Helen, Pat quietly passed away. Her body, diminished in size and energy by the bladder and lung cancer she’d been fighting for the past two years, was dwarfed by the bed in the middle of the large room. The ever-present oxygen machine, which had helped Pat’s damaged lungs to draw breath, was still wheezing away, but Pat had stopped breathing. Pain meds were still dripping into her veins from the IV bag. The screen that displayed her vital signs – heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate – was now registering flat lines, but the alarms that would’ve gone off had been silenced days ago.

Heavily sedated with pain medications, Pat had been nonresponsive for the past five days. When Emma had arrived from Virginia and said, “I’m here, Mom,” she replied, “Oh, that’s good.” Those were her last words. She closed her eyes to the world soon after. Her fierce battle for life, which began over nine years earlier, was all but over, and the group of us kept vigil. As many other friends had during that time, Julie, Ken, and Helen had dropped by to visit with us for a while. They’d found the elevator located near a back entrance that provided the only access to the hospice ward on the fourth floor. Now, we were quietly talking by the tall narrow windows that looked out over the bare treetops of Bloomington Street and, a block beyond that, the spire of the St. Wenceslaus church steeple.

Emma was the first to sense Pat was gone. She walked over to the bed, held Pat’s hand for a moment, and let out a soft cry. We all joined her to stand around the bed and say our goodbyes. I had not thought to share a final goodbye with Pat when we were still able to talk to each other, but I’d been whispering it into her ear those past few days. She and I had been rehearsing that farewell for years.

Forty-three years ago, I moved to Iowa City to take classes at the University of Iowa, renting a room on the second floor of the Montessori School on Reno Street, ten blocks northeast of this hospital. That fall, I met Pat when we worked nights alongside each other in the Stone Soup Restaurant bakery on the corner of Clinton and Jefferson streets, eight blocks to the southeast. So this hospice ward room where we were gathered was at the geographical epicenter of the beginning of our lifelong friendship. 

We made an unlikely pair. Pat had just moved to Iowa City from the redwood rainforests of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her family consisted of a father who died of smoke inhalation in a San Francisco hotel fire when she was seven, a younger sister with whom she never spoke, a stepfather who had sexually abused her, and a mother who struggled with substance abuse. When Pat was seventeen, she’d had to sign the papers committing her mother to a detox facility. To free herself from all that, she married Clifford when she was eighteen, divorcing him two years later to escape that mistake. I grew up in the unremarkable suburbs of Akron, Ohio, the eldest of ten children in a decidedly practicing Catholic family. I could count the number of girlfriends I’d had on one hand. Sporting an imperceptible wisp of a goatee, I imagined myself a neo-Beat poet. Somehow, we discovered common ground on which we could base a friendship that, over time, filled in and deepened and became a loving relationship.

So It Goes

Manic twenty-year-olds

we frantically fumbled in bed

fire engines racing to the blaze

or the clumsy tumbling

and mid-air collisions 

of novice acrobats

making slapstick love

it was never enough

Now forty years later

I'm reading a New Yorker article

and you’re watching The Walking Dead

on your tablet

I lay my hand on your hip

or rub your back 

or hold your hand

to keep you here with me

a little longer

that’s enough

The story that ended on that snowy evening in 2018 can be traced back to April 9, 2009. It was a Thursday afternoon. Pat, the director of nursing at Crestview Care Center in rural West Branch, was cranking a bed when she experienced sudden chest and back pains that knocked her off her feet. Though she was able to stand up and, after a few minutes, was ready to return to her duties, Cheryl, the care center’s administrator, had already called for an ambulance. When a CT scan at Mercy Hospital showed an aortic dissection (that is, a rupture or tear in the aorta’s lining), she was immediately transferred across the river to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, much better equipped to handle such a case. A message had been delivered to my classroom about Pat being taken to the hospital, and I was on my way, speeding the thirty miles from Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, my mind racing through all the worst-case scenarios.

When I arrived at the emergency room check-in desk, I was quickly escorted into a room full of doctors and nurses. I barely had a chance to exchange glances with Emma and Cheryl, who were standing outside that huddle of hospital staff, before I was informed of Pat’s medical status and the potential risks and benefits of surgery. I was asked to sign a form approving the emergency surgery. I normally defer to my wife on medical issues, but Pat, who had been in perfectly good health that morning, was drifting in and out of consciousness. I signed the form and told her I loved her before they wheeled her out.

The attending doctor, Dr. Robert Saeid Farivar, was a cardiothoracic surgeon who had graduated from the Boston University School of Medicine ten years earlier. He immediately impressed me as competent and reassuring, even though he was aware of the mortality rate of aortic dissections. He would be dealing with two aortic aneurysms – an ascending aneurysm and a descending aneurysm that extended from the aortic valve to the renal artery. As they began to prep her, Dr. Farivar noted that her “pericardium was tense with blood.” When Pat’s chest was cracked open, the doctors discovered “the entire right coronary artery had been sheared off the aorta” and “appeared blown out.” They began cooling her body to 65° Fahrenheit, and she was put on heart bypass. Then began the painstaking repair of a cardiothoracic disaster, a heart in tatters.

As Pat was being wheeled to Surgery, a nurse escorted Emma and me to the Day of Surgery Lounge on the sixth floor of Colloton Pavilion. Emma had just completed a Master’s degree in public health at the University of Iowa, and was working with one of her former professors on a funded research project at the local Planned Parenthood clinic. I called our sons, Sierra and Jesse, who were living and working in Manhattan and Brooklyn, respectively, to tell them about Pat’s surgery. They made plans to get to Iowa City as soon as possible. I also called our closest friends in the Iowa City area, many of whom soon joined us. Pat’s colleagues from Crestview also stopped by to see how she was doing. I found myself recounting the events leading up to the surgery over and over. Based on what little I knew of Pat’s diagnosis, our friend Mary, a doctor, filled in some of the blanks of what might be transpiring in the operating room. 

The Day of Surgery Lounge is a misnomer – we did considerably more pacing than lounging. Most of the scheduled surgeries were being wrapped up and the waiting room was beginning to empty out. I was afraid to leave the lounge, afraid I’d missed an important update, but at some point I went to the Java House station on the first floor to get coffee. With Emma’s help, I created a text message group to make it easier to update folks. We located blankets and tried to sleep in chairs or on couches. I repeatedly forced myself to turn back before descending into the mental cave of horrible outcomes. The surgery began a little after 4:00 p.m., and the doctors didn’t close her up until the early hours of the next day. 

When Dr. Farivar finally met with us, still wearing his navy blue scrubs, the mental and physical exhaustion etched on his face must have mirrored our own. His news of a successful surgery was tempered by his report of the catastrophic and tenuous state of her cardiovascular system. In the intervening years, whenever a nurse or doctor would read her chart and Farivar’s surgical notes in our presence, their response would invariably be something along the lines of “It’s a miracle you survived!”

I can’t overstate Pat’s will to survive. She spent the next week in the ICU, heavily sedated, kept in an induced coma as she fought to recover from the surgical trauma. Her progress was slow, incremental. By then, Sierra and Jesse had arrived. Knowing our three children and many friends were ready to help, and knowing I could do little for Pat in the ICU other than watch and wait, I had returned to teaching. It felt good to get back with my students and colleagues, all of whom were incredibly supportive. I became a master at compartmentalizing, but when the final bell rang, I’d head back to the hospital and spend my evening with her. 

On Day 5, when the doctors were confident she was strong enough, they reduced the sedatives and withdrew the breathing tube. We were ecstatic when she opened her eyes and looked around. Our joy and relief stood in stark contrast to her response – shock, disbelief, and anger. She had no idea why she was there. Agitated and disoriented, she tried ripping out her IV lines, her chest tube, her catheter. She yelled at me, certain I’d given the doctors permission to perform some cruel experiment on her. Unsurprisingly, she had no memory of her medical emergency of five days earlier. We attempted to describe all that had happened, but it took a while to calm her. Meanwhile, one of the doctors led us out of the room and explained “ICU psychosis”[1] to us. By the next day, Pat had gone out of her way to apologize to every nurse in the unit for the way she’d acted. But the disorientation and anxiety lingered for days. At one point, in a moment of contrition, Pat said, “Well, happy Easter I guess.” When I thoughtlessly replied, “Easter was like a week ago,” she burst into tears.

After her chest tube was removed, she was transferred to the general ward and, a week later, was discharged from the hospital with a medication list fifteen items long and instructions to begin physical therapy. As weakened as she was by the surgery, she applied herself to an exercise regimen designed to slowly rebuild her strength and mobility. She was anxious to return to her job at Crestview, which was for her much more a calling than an occupation. But this was just the beginning of a survival story that would last for nine more years.

Footnote:

[1] According to an article in The Atlantic, “The Overlooked Danger of Delirium in Hospitals,” ICU psychosis is “a sudden disruption of consciousness and cognition marked by vivid hallucinations, delusions, and an inability to focus, that affects 7 million hospitalized Americans annually.” The piece goes on to say that “patients treated in intensive-care units who are heavily sedated and on ventilators are particularly likely to become delirious; some studies place the rate as high as 85 percent.”

Balancing Act: Living (and Teaching) Through a Plague, Part 3

Wednesday, 25 March 2020

Just one day after the latest snow had melted, always a surprise, those ephemeral beauties – purple crocuses! – popped out of the ground.

Thursday, 26 March 2020

I cleared the garden yesterday, looking to see what might be sprouting this early spring. I pruned the wild raspberry canes that grow around the compost bin so I could access the hatch at the base of the bin. Then, I mined the rich vein of compost, using hand tools to reach as far and as carefully as I could, making sure the tunnel didn’t collapse. This labor yielded a wheelbarrow-load of dark humus littered with brown eggshell fragments, which I strewed over the garden. In the last few years, I’ve neglected to save my kitchen scraps for the compost – one less task to complicate my life – but I’ve vowed to reinstate that practice. 

Saturday, 28 March 2020

Four women are walking down the middle of our quiet street and talking so loudly I can hear them from inside the house, their voices raised because they’re spaced five feet apart, in a neat square shape. As the coronavirus marches on, as the informal quarantine continues, everyday activities look and feel different. Walking through the City High parking lot, I saw three teens sitting on beanbags beside their cars, forming an equilateral triangle whose sides are six feet long, perhaps talking about geometry or sex or both. On Lower Muscatine Road, in the driveway next to their house, a brother and sister play a violin and cello duet. 

Other than a trip to school on Monday morning, when the building was opened for anyone needing to pick up work or equipment, I’m staying close to home. Climbing the stairs to the second floor, I came upon five other teachers spread out in the hallway and lingered there, hungry for conversation and connection. On Wednesday afternoon, Adam started a group text for all the English language arts teachers. The thread went on for four hours as we shared favorite jokes and memes, photos of our pets and spouses. Missing each other, and human contact in general, we realized this is now what’s available to us.

At least once a day, I feel a little frisson of Covid-19, wondering if I’ve contracted it, and what I’ll need to do if I have. Yesterday evening I broke my quarantine by ordering from Wig & Pen, an old Friday tradition to celebrate the end of the workweek (except I’ve been doing little work). Cautiously walking into the shop to pick up one of their mozzarella-laden Flying Tomato pizzas, gingerly handing over my credit card, I feel the weight of my irresponsibility. When I think about what’s happening in Italy and Spain and New York City, I recognize the privilege of my ability to work from home. I want to show respect for my fellow human beings, and don’t want to contribute to the virus’s spread. Even though its impact on Iowa has been minimal, Johnson County is the state’s epicenter, home to over 25 percent of its cases.

I’d almost forgotten that this coming Monday is my wife’s birthday. But Pat’s still in my mind – always will be, I’m sure. Sixteen months after her death, I can still feel her presence – a breeze brushing my arm, a tingling sensation – then I remind myself she’s gone. Well, the thought of her is with me, but I can no longer read an interesting passage to her or rub her back or give her a hug. I often take an afternoon siesta in the red leather recliner, one of the few places where she could sit comfortably in her last year. More than once, I’ve awoken from a dream of her, certain she had been sitting right beside me. A friend has urged me to consider this not as a figment of my imagination, but Pat’s spirit paying a visit. Doing this has become a solace.

Working in the garden this week, I pay attention to the buds on flowers she planted – the orange-and-yellow flames of the early-blooming dwarf tulips, the forget-me-nots preparing to share their blue reminders. Scything down and raking out the waist-tall stalks from the patch of bee balm that grows by the creek, I’m enwrapped in and enrapt by its fragrance, its resilience, its minty balm. The sprouts of this year’s bee balm are emerging, but the flowers won’t bloom until mid-summer, a brilliant swath of scarlet in the back of the garden. Hummingbirds – and bees, of course – can’t get enough of them, their buzz and hum audible from a distance. According to the website Practical Self Reliance, “Bee balm is antimicrobial and soothing, so it’s often used to treat colds and flu.” The petals are not only used in medicinal teas but are also edible. I might try some on my salads this summer.

Tuesday, 31 March 2020

I’ve been thinking about our response to Covid-19, our efforts to open our hearts and stay in the moment. We’re into the third week of sheltering-in-place and social-distancing, with the likelihood that it will now continue through the entire month of April. Maintaining some kind of emotional balance is needed during this quarantine time. It’s important to stay in touch with what is happening in the world around us. A twelve-year-old Belgian girl and a thirteen-year-old British boy have become the youngest victims of the virus; the 4,000-member crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier are now in quarantine after an outbreak; a funeral in Albany, Georgia, has turned into a “super-spreader event.” And yet, following the news, we risk getting caught up in the potential dangers, the number of cases, the pandemic possibilities and what-ifs. That path leads to paranoia, an irrational fear of the world. A more constructive response is a rational fear of the virus.

I want to act responsibly – one way of staying in the present – washing my hands often, disinfecting surfaces regularly, avoiding physical contact as much as possible. I’m also trying to be aware of my habits or patterns of life. Although the district hasn’t yet given us guidelines on possible online learning, I’ve decided to start a daily email to my students, which has helped me focus. Each morning, I send a short message to each of my classes – AP Language & Composition, U.S. Humanities, and African American Humanities – letting them know I’m thinking about them, mentioning school work they might be doing, sharing a short reading and the song of the day. The last of these is a classroom tradition – to play a song during passing periods to get our minds dancing. It could be a new song I’m listening to – Sudan Archives’ “Nont for Sale” or Fiona Apple’s “Fast As You Can” – or a timely song such as Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” or The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” (an obvious choice) or a joyful energetic number such as The B-52’s “Love Shack.”  These daily emails impel me to keep my students in mind as I go through my day, reading books, listening to music or podcasts, watching movies – activities that keep my mind engaged with meaningful work.

Because the weather has been kind, I’ve been able to go for runs and walks, and work in the garden, clearing off the dead leaves and vegetation, getting the garden ready for planting. I visited my neighborhood garden center yesterday afternoon – again, feeling a bit uncomfortable about disregarding the informal restriction – to pick up vegetable and herb seeds, starter mix, topsoil, and a witch alder shrub to replace the burning bush I had cut down and excavated. I appreciate how this is helping me focus on productive solitary activities and staying in the current moment of spring and rebirth.

One silver lining of the pandemic is that I’m getting better at using online communication tools. I set up a Google Meet with Sierra, Emma, and Jesse this past Sunday. I have not been great at staying in touch with them, and decided this would be one way to bring us all together, to strengthen our Roanoke-Iowa City-Austin-Seattle ties. It worked fairly well, and everyone is on-board with doing this on a weekly basis. If I call on Sunday at 4:00 p.m., it will be five o’clock in Roanoke and two o’clock in Seattle. Yesterday, the Washington ELA department met on Zoom for an hour and a half. We had an agenda, which primarily justified our need to chat, catch up, enjoy each other’s company, offer moral support. These online meetings gave me some practice for the Google Hangouts editorial meeting I’ll be holding with my Washington Literary Press kids this afternoon.

Because I live alone now, the lack of physical contact has been a challenge. When I’m working in the yard, I wave to and converse with my neighbors, and I’ve noticed the increased friendliness of our little sidestreet. On walks with my friend Jennifer, we’ve engaged in comforting and affirming exchanges about how we’re learning to rebound from loss. I hope to reach out to other friends – Sharon and John, Mary and Steve, Nancy – to arrange conversational strolls with them.

I’ve definitely noticed some hindrances to staying present since the onset of the pandemic. Becoming anxious or overwhelmed by all the news could send anyone into a tailspin. Because of my physical isolation, I need to get better at staying on task and following a schedule. I sometimes flit from one thing to the next – a butterfly’s focus that doesn’t usually feel productive or satisfying. I don’t want to force myself into a rigid schedule, but I do want to say, “I’m going to read this afternoon,” and then do so for an hour or two without interrupting myself. The night is my most productive writing time, but I was up until four a.m. last night, and those were not productive hours. I don’t want to always be nose-to-the-grindstone, but I do want to be engaged in work, by which I mean “activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.”

Friday, 3 April 2020

We seek out the small signs that we’re still human and whole and hale.

In our Zoom meeting

The birds are singing at Alexia’s home.

She’s sharing her home with us.

We share our homes with each other.

This is how we will learn to love again

After the pandemic.

Balancing Act: Living (and Teaching) Through a Plague, Part 2

The new maroon Converse All-Stars of joy.

Monday, 16 March 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic (and the public response to it) is getting more and more serious. School has been canceled for four weeks – spring break and the following three weeks of scheduled school. Are we going to extend our school year by three weeks? But it’s all for the best. Even though it has barely infected our little inland state, the virus is wreaking widespread and deadly havoc in other parts of the world, and this could potentially go wild everywhere. Shutting everything down is the smartest thing to do to minimize the spread of the virus. 

Nonetheless, I’m feeling the disappointments of canceled events I was involved in organizing – no student-staff basketball fundraiser match-up, no Just Mercy movie field trip and Black Writer guest speakers for my African American Humanities classes, probably no Chicago field trip for my U.S. Humanities students (scheduled for April 28), maybe no Guatemala student service trip (scheduled for June 1-10). I’m trying to resist the impulse to wallow in my anxiety that the rest of the school year will be canceled. The Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919 infected over 25 percent of the world’s population and killed approximately 50 million people. You might think we are more knowledgeable and better prepared a century later, but we don’t seem to be. Our nation’s slow response, in terms of canceling events and gatherings and putting together testing kits, even as the virus was hitting China like a sledgehammer, suggests that this will get much much worse.

Last Wednesday, we were able to squeeze in our African American Humanities field trip to Hancher Auditorium just before everything started shutting down. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performance was amazing. A friend of mine in the marketing department may have played a role in reserving the front row center seats for us. Twenty minutes before the performance began, many of the dancers were on stage warming up, giving us a fascinating peek behind the scenes. The performance combined historical background about Alvin Ailey and the dance troupe with two dance pieces, which included some participatory dancing in our seats. My students loved the experience, and yet, I will feel terrible if any of them contract Covid-19 because they came into contact with the virus at the show.

In the front four rows of Hancher Auditorium, my students and their chaperones await the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater performance.

Saturday night, my friend Jennifer and I watched a stunningly beautiful movie, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, at Film Scene, a day before it closed its doors. The twenty people in the theater all carefully chose “socially distant” seats, but one might argue we were being unnecessarily risky. And last night, six friends came over for what had been planned as a potluck dinner to welcome my daughter Emma and her two sons. Although Emma had to cancel their trip, it felt good to get together with friends and enjoy some delicious food. We cautiously bumped elbows rather than hugged, and our gathering was well under fifty people, so we obeyed that restriction, but again I wonder if we were being foolhardy. I’ve made a list of errands and tasks I don’t have time to do when school is in session, but out of sympathy for store clerks and cashiers, I’m hesitant to enter shops unless I must. 

Tuesday, 17 March 2020

I had a Covid-19 nightmare last night. People with the coronavirus were taking everyone else with them. Once they knew they had the virus, they gathered everyone with whom they had been in contact into a room and then shot them all and then shot themselves. I think this has something to do with the fact that people have not only been stocking up on toilet paper and antiseptic wipes and hand sanitizer but also guns. Why do people feel that they need more guns and ammunition at a time like this?

Thursday, 19 March 2020

Inspired by Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and determined to cling to some optimism during these dark times, I’m attempting an essay on the joy of pancakes: When my kids were young, I would usually make pancakes on Saturday morning. When Pat was working on her nursing degree, taking classes during the day and working evening shifts at the nursing home, I would sometimes make pancakes for dinner. (The kids made fun of me because they claimed I only knew how to make flat meals – homemade pizzas, pancakes, tacos.) Somewhere along the way, I found a good pancake mix recipe: unbleached white flour, whole wheat flour, cornmeal, a bit of buckwheat or seven-grain flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt. I’d often add blueberries or overripe bananas, and in the summer, leftover sweet corn off the cob. Sometimes I’d make small silver dollar pancakes. The kids liked this tradition. As they slathered the pancakes in butter and syrup and peanut butter, they’d often sing, “she never made me pancakes,” which I somehow assumed was an Ol’ Dirty Bastard song, but it turns out it’s from the song “Pancakes, off The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits album.[1]

Now I make those pancakes for my grandsons. They have come to expect them whenever I visit them. They call them Poppy Pancakes and claim they’re the best. As I cooked some on the griddle this morning, I meditated on the transformation from batter to pancake by the influence of heat, how the batter slowly rises on the griddle, bubbles forming on the surface and then popping, the edges lightly browning, a signal the pancake is ready to be flipped. A sweet and simple way to show my love for my children and my children’s children.

Monday, 23 March 2020

Spring break is over and we should be back in school now, but we’re not, and won’t be for at least another three weeks, probably longer. It’s distinctly possible this school year will be canceled entirely. I worry about my students. Are they safe and sound? Are they following pandemic restrictions? Are they bored? I sent out an email to all my students today just to connect with them, a habit I plan to continue until we are together again.

The snow that fell yesterday outlines the branches of every tree and bush, the sharp contrast of black and white, but the snow is already melting and dropping from the trees as I write. 

On a whim and out of a desire to give myself something to look forward to, I’d ordered a pair of maroon hightop Converse All-Stars on Amazon. Rather, the fifteen-year-old inside of me ordered them. And the fifty-year-old didn’t complain or object, nor did the sixty-five-year-old who is the combination of the other two. These were the tennis shoes I wore all through my teen years. They were the basketball shoe de rigueur at that time – lightweight canvas uppers, high tops whose extra support protected against ankle rolls, rubber soles in a grid pattern that enabled us to make sharp cuts on the hardcourt. We called them Connies or All-Stars, never Chuck Taylors or Chucks. That all came later.

Only two colors were available back in the sixties – white and black – and I always wore white Connies. Now, Chucks are fashionable casual wear rather than athletic shoes, and come in a rainbow of colors. When my maroon hightops arrived on Friday, I immediately laced them up. In a time of coronavirus and sheltering in place, they make my feet feel lighthearted and fancy-free.

Tuesday. 24 March 2020

I love moments when minds intersect, when paths cross, and I get to witness those serendipitous moments. Here’s a “conversation” that took place yesterday between a scientist (Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl) and a poet (Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights) about the symbiotic relationship between fungi and trees. While reading Jahren, I came upon this:

Every toadstool, from the deliciously edible to the deathly poisonous, is merely a sex organ that is attached to something more whole, complex, and hidden. Underneath every mushroom is a web of stringy hyphae that may extend for kilometers, wrapping around countless clumps of soil and holding the landscape together. The ephemeral mushroom appears briefly above the surface while the webbing that anchors it lives for years within a darker and richer world. A very small minority of these fungi – just five thousand species – have strategically entered into a deep and enduring truce with plants. They cast their stringy webbing around and through the roots of trees, sharing the burden of drawing water into the trunk. They also mine the soil for rare metals, such as manganese, copper, and phosphorus, and then present them to the tree as precious gifts of the magi.

Jahren goes on to ask why they are together, but posits no scientific answer, only suggesting that “perhaps the fungus can somehow sense that when it is part of a symbiosis, it is also not alone.” Maybe she’s guilty of anthropomorphizing the fungi. Or maybe she’s suggesting lessons that we can learn from trees and fungi, reminders of what Paradise might feel like. In my reading last night, Gay continued this conversation:

In healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplused.

By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (so close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And that in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight: the phrase fungal duff, meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes, who get a little sugar for their work.

Gay is a bit more explicit than Jahren about the allegory: “Joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love.” I’m sure Jahren and Gay are not the only two folks who have made these connections, but that I encountered this profound idea twice in one day is, well, pretty cool.

Footnote:

[1] Marvin Pontiac is a fictional musician created by the musician, painter, actor, and director John Lurie.

Balancing Act: Living (an Teaching) Through a Plague, Part 1

The self-serve coffee bar in my classroom at Washington High School. The decorated mugs were a gift from one of the Washington Literary Press staffs.

Tuesday, 11 February 2020

Last Friday, my decision to retire from teaching went public (on the Cedar Rapids school board agenda). I had already talked with my department chair, Adam, about this, and learned he was in the process of requesting a one-year leave of absence. After school on Thursday, I spoke with Julie, one of our instructional coaches and a close friend. Those conversations reminded me how bittersweet this decision is. I count Adam and Julie as two of my closest colleagues. As is true of so many of the teachers I’ve gotten to know over the last fifteen years, I have tremendous respect and admiration for them. I’ve witnessed teacher after teacher draw upon a seemingly bottomless well of empathy and compassion in order to connect with and support their students.

During my prep period on Thursday, I also stopped by to share my retirement plans with John, our principal. The conversation was as strange as many of our conversations have been. He asked if there was anything he could have done to keep me here, offering me an opening I gently stepped into. Already sixty-five years old, I had planned to teach one more year at most, but yes, his inability to address the everyday needs of his staff played a role in my decision. If he didn’t know that already, he’s even less astute than I had thought he was. At one point, he reminded me that his “laser focus” has been on helping our students to be academically successful. I reminded him that if that focus on students means that he ignores and fails to support his staff, to the point where their low morale affects their work in the classroom or persuades them to leave the profession, well, then he’s a pretty lousy principal. I don’t know if he heard what I had to say, or heard it but is incapable of changing himself.

Adam and I shared our news with the rest of the English department on Monday during lunch. After school, six of us gathered in the hallway and talked through our feelings. I’m trying to offer my colleagues some perspective: even though the two of us are veteran members of the department, they’ll forge on without us. If the school is able to hire someone like Tiphany, a first-year teacher who has been doing amazing work with her LA 10 classes and the Journalism program, they’ll be fine. After I went public with my retirement plans, during separate conversations with John, Julie, and Tiphany, their eyes welled up with tears. This surprised me. I don’t consider myself specially kind or thoughtful, but that reaction tells me I’ve had more of an impact on them than I might suppose.

Thursday, 13 February 2020

For teachers, snow days can be a gift. Yes, I’m annoyed that everything I wanted to do with my students today won’t happen, and my week’s lesson plans have been thrown into disarray. But I can let go of that. I’ve been reading Steven Levine’s book A Year to Live. A poet and teacher working in Buddhist traditions, Levine offers readers guidance in “how to live this year as if it were your last.” This snow day has allowed me to work on what he describes as a Life Review. I’ve started this chapter a couple times but keep setting the book aside. It’s a challenging and difficult step in the process. As I read the chapter, my mind dredged up memories, most of them weighed down by regret.

Levine eases us into this tough work, advising us to start with gratitude. My seventh-hour class knows they can get me off-track by nudging me to tell stories of my youthful adventures, hitchhiking stories about the kindness of strangers who helped me land on my feet when I was tripped up by adversity or my own foolishness. Levine then says we should turn to painful memories and offer forgiveness to those who’ve done us harm. For me, this is a fairly short list. Yes, I’ve experienced small offenses, but few that I’ve nursed over the years. One that stands out is the mistreatment I endured from my neighborhood pal Mark H. That I remember his name says something, since I haven’t seen him since high school, and we stopped hanging out by fifth or sixth grade. He would exploit my trust in order to make me an easier target for his verbal and physical bullying. As I write this, I imagine running into him some day and revealing this harm I’ve harbored. And in that imagined moment, he apologizes, admitting his youthful failings. Levine writes, “Forgiveness finishes unfinished business.”

The last step of the Life Review is the hardest – the litany of regrets. The Brett Kavanaugh hearings this past year caused me to look hard in the mirror. Ten years younger than me, he too attended an all-boys Jesuit college-prep high school. His breezy abuse of women (alleged, but I have no doubt) led me to recall how we talked about and treated women then. As Levine writes, “I discovered a youth full of distrust, self-centered gratification, and emotional dishonesty.” While a girlfriend and I waited in traffic after a concert at Blossom Music Center, my inebriation and blind lust led me to make advances despite her repeated requests that I stop. Something kept me from doing the worst, but the next morning, I was steeped in shame. And yet, I never apologized to her. When a girlfriend from Ohio University came to visit me in Kentucky, I was cold and rude, perhaps because I feared her visit signaled a level of commitment I wasn’t ready for, but that’s all bullshit. I never explained my feelings to her, in part because I barely understood them myself. I’ve searched the internet for her, wondering what she’s doing now, wishing I could reach out and apologize.

I wasn’t always the best father, particularly when the kids were young. I inherited my father’s impatience and anger, aspects of him I abhorred. Levine reminds us, “There are moments in the life review for all of us when the going gets so tough we have to keep remembering to come back to the heart the way a mountain climber returns to an oxygen mask.” In recent years, I’ve apologized to my kids. Their nonchalant responses indicated either their readiness to forgive me or the insignificance of those incidents. 

Over the forty-five years that I knew Pat, I hurt her many times, but she was good at calling me on it and not letting me off the hook. Out of necessity, I learned to own my mistakes and apologize, to wait in the doghouse for however long was needed until she was ready to forgive me. And I became a better man because of those apologies. Levine writes, “It really isn’t the act of contrition that sets the mind at rest but the intention not to repeat actions that cause harm.” I’m grateful that over the last ten years of her life, from her first open-heart surgery to the final two years of her cancer, I was perhaps the best partner I ever was.

Levine quotes the Hindu epic Ramayana as a way to describe the Life Review: “It’s like something I dreamed once, long ago, far away.” This brought to mind the Grateful Dead song “Box of Rain” and Robert Hunter’s lyrics: “It’s all a dream we dreamed/ One afternoon long ago.” As I listened to the song and sang along with Jerry Garcia, I was ambushed by a powerful blend of regret, forgiveness, and joy, and my eyes welled up with tears. “Maybe you’re tired and broken/ Your tongue is twisted with words half spoken/ And thoughts unclear/ What do you want me to do/ To do for you to see you through/ A box of rain will ease the pain/ And love will see you through.”

Saturday, 22 February 2020

There are raccoons in my attic. I’ve been hearing them most of the winter, frequently insisting to myself I need to go up there and ask them to leave. But then I’d forget about that task until the next time I heard them pitter-pattering around. The only official access point is a hatch in the garage ceiling, although I’m guessing the raccoons have gained entry through a rotten board in the eaves I’ve been intending to replace. I envision a showdown. The raccoons are surely nesting, if they haven’t already given birth to a little brood. It’s not easy to be nimble up there because there’s no flooring. I wonder if this is a metaphor for something in terms of my Life Review. Are there memories scratching around in my head I’m not addressing? It can be awfully easy to be untruthful with myself, to admit the easy truths in order to conceal the darker ones.

I climbed up into the attic, expecting to find a raccoon family unwilling to be evicted from their home. Yelling out as I crawled over the rafter beams, hoping to scare off the animals, I discovered no critters. Sometimes, harboring fear or anxiety is worse than facing dark truths. I replaced the rotten board in the eaves, hoping to discourage future uninvited boarders.

Later, I went for a long run. Running is one of my favorite meditative practices. I become conscious of the cadence of my breathing, the alignment of my spine, my hips swiveling, my arms pumping, my hands relaxed in loose fists, my feet hitting the pavement, heel to toe. Sweat drips from my eyebrows, even in 50-degree weather. Eventually I find a rhythm and stop thinking about my body and go into my head. Afterwards my skin tingles. That sense of well-being lingers for hours.

Saturday, 1 March 2020

A beautiful first day of March. While folks stroll together or walk their dogs or bike the trail that connects Court Hill and McPherson parks or play basketball on the new court at McPherson Park, I take a midafternoon run. We know more winter lies ahead, but we want to revel in the warmth while it’s here.

I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s essays. In “Self-Respect,” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she writes: “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”

Saturday, 14 March 2020

Spring break in a time of pandemic. I’m trying to obey the quarantine, practicing “social distancing.” I just filled the bird feeders, and now I’m watching the nuthatches and chickadees and juncos and purple finches stopping by for snacks. I’ve been reading (and loving) Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, an entry or two each night at bedtime. I admire the book’s concept – a year-long commitment to write a daily essay praising and embracing some small wonder – and I’m charmed by his digressions and veerings. Last night, his “Joy Is Such a Human Madness” piece resonated with me. (The title is a  quote from Zadie Smith’s essay “Joy.”) Gay is drawing a distinction and a connection between pleasure and joy (or delight). He proposes that joy is “being of and without at once.” Working from Smith’s essay, Gay offers this conundrum: “The intolerable makes life worthwhile.” Gay goes on to describe the joy of parenting as “terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of the bridge, very high up.” That is, we can’t truly experience joy without having experienced some profound sorrow – suffering or loss or pain or misery. It is the contrast that transforms a pleasurable moment into one of true joy.

I’ve been more aware of this feeling lately. I cultivate it and nurture it. I think it could carry me through most hard times. At school, during these dark days of struggling with the obstacles laid down by an ineffective principal, I’ve tried to spread joy among the students and my fellow teachers. Although High-Five Friday has been temporarily canceled because of the Covid-19 threat, I love joining other teachers at the school entrances to greet our kids and wish them a good day.

Sixteen months ago, my wife, Pat, died. I wonder if this explains my increased awareness of these moments. Losing her, that continued loss, the empty place that had been filled for almost forty years, makes me grateful for all the sweet moments that feel that much sweeter. I’m listening to Joni Mitchell’s album Blue. In the title song, she sings, “Everybody’s saying that hell’s the hippest way to go/ Well I don’t think so,/ But I’m gonna take a look around it though.” Would the joy of paradise mean as much to us without the dark alternative of hell?

Cambiando Futuros en Guatemala[1]

Our crew before heading out on our first day of work.

It was the last day of our service project – to build a home for (and with) a Guatemalan family – but I don’t think any of us were ready for it to end. That morning we were working on the final touches – Byron and Manuel, our two Guatemalan crew leaders, our jefes; the student crew of Miles, Josie, Maddie, and Azul; and Ofni, the young father of the family who would soon move into this house. We installed two sliding glass windows and a solid-core wood door, and grouted the beautiful terracotta floor tiles that had been laid the day before.

Meanwhile, Ofni’s mother-in-law was making lunch on the stove we had installed. A pot of rice and finely diced vegetables was simmering on one burner, while tomates, chiles, and sliced cebollas were roasting on another. In short breaks between tasks, I kept an eye on the progress as she blended the roasted vegetables with cilantro, parsley, and toasted pepitas and sesame seeds to produce a sauce in which chicken pieces would be stewed. As a midday rainstorm moved in, we covered the tools and hauled a makeshift wood plank table into the house. Serenaded by the gentle staccato patter of rain on the sheet metal roof, the ten of us – our work crew plus Ofni, Maria, and their three-month-old baby Arleth Verenice – sat down to a delicious hot lunch of pepián de pollo, a traditional Guatemalan Mayan dish. We ate and smiled and laughed together, dry and comfortable in the warmth of good company.

Lunch in the new home of Ofni, Maria, and their baby daughter.

For the past ten years, my friend and colleague James Burke, a Spanish teacher at Washington High School, has been leading spring break service trips to Antigua, Guatemala. I’ve always been interested in this project, drawn by both my memories of a week spent in Antigua some forty years ago, and the enthusiastically positive demeanor of the students when they returned. James and I had been discussing the possibility of me joining a trip, but I couldn’t commit because of my wife’s health. In the fall of 2019, a year after she passed away, I was finally ready to do so, only to have the Covid pandemic shut down the trip just as we were getting ready to go.

James and I stayed in touch after I retired from Washington in June 2020, and when he told me this past October that a new trip was being organized, I enthusiastically said, “Count me in!” So, in the early hours of Sunday, March 12, I met three other adults and thirteen students at the Eastern Iowa Airport to fly to Guatemala City. By three in the afternoon, we were being greeted at the Aeropuerto Internacional La Aurora by Alexis, Eddie, and Gregorio, the three full-time staff of ImagininGuatemala (IG), the local NGO we’d be working with. We clambered into a 20-seater charter bus, navigated the Guatemala City traffic, stopped for dinner at Pollo Campero, and then headed on through the city and over steep mountains to Antigua, forty kilometers and two hours away. Antigua has all the charm that Guatemala City lacks. The city of 50,000 is a UNESCO World Heritage Site – cobblestone streets and narrow sidewalks border the brightly painted stucco walls of homes and businesses. We were dropped off next to a basketball court in Colonia Candelaria, on the northeast edge of the city, near the crumbling ruins of a church destroyed in the Santa Marta earthquakes in 1773.[2]

We fanned out to our nearby host families. James, Ceci Cornejo (a young paraeducator recently hired at Washington), and I stayed with Dina Cazali, a warm, generous woman who operates a small pension out of her home. Five private rooms open onto a second-floor walkway overlooking a central room on the first floor, all of which is under roof. The second floor reaches out to form a rooftop balcony filled with potted plants and clotheslines. My two companions are far more bilingual than I, but as we chatted with Dina, I realized she thoughtfully adjusts her speech to the needs of her guests, and I was able to easily follow the conversation. 

After an orientation meeting that evening at the IG offices, we returned to our lodgings. On this Third Sunday of Lent, some of the churches were holding processionals. We could hear music in the distance, mostly horns and drums, somehow sounding both festive and mournful. As I walked up the hill, I passed un viejo, hunched over, maybe five feet tall. “Buenas noches,” I offered. He replied in kind, warmly, enthusiastically. Even to the many gringos who intrude upon their city, los Antigüeños son muy amable.

On Monday we were given time to get familiar with the city and its culture. I awoke at dawn to the sound of great-tailed grackles speaking a language different from the one birds speak in Iowa. A tinny church bell was struck, over and over, in no particular pattern, perhaps the repetition making up for the lack of resonance. We spent the morning on a guided walking tour of the city, starting with a hike up nearby Cerro de La Cruz, from whose heights we could admire a vista of the entire city and the ominous Volcán de Agua on its far side, and ending at the beautiful baroque facade of the Iglesia de La Merced, gleaming gold and white in the sun. That afternoon we traveled to nearby San Antonio Aguas Calientes, a Kaqchikel Maya town known for its traditional textiles, where we met the family of IG staffer Eddie and watched his wife demonstrate weaving on a backstrap loom. We bought textile items she and her neighbors had woven and then helped make (and eat) tortillas negras cooked on a portable comal.

View of Antigua and Volcán de Agua from Cerro de la Cruz.

We began our service project on Tuesday. We had been split up into three crews, each one led by two local housebuilders. The goal of each crew was to build a home for a family in need of better housing.[3] We loaded a large water cooler and our lunches into the back of a camioneta, and then clambered aboard, sitting on the sidewalls of its bed, arms wrapped around its rack, and traveled through the city of work. The house site was ten kilometers away on the edge of San Antonio Aguas Calientes. After meeting Ofni, Maria, Arleth, and Maria’s mother and sisters, who lived nearby, we lugged the toolboxes and the first six 50-kilo bags of cement from their porch and got to work.

Byron and Manual gave us instructions in Spanish. Thankfully we had studied our housebuilder vocabulary. Hammer is martillo, nails are clavos, pintura is paint, and the four-by-eight fiberboard sheets are láminas. When Byron said, “Quarenta bloques!” we knew how many cinder blocks to carry from a nearby stack to the 12-by-16-foot trench that was the footprint of the main room. Meanwhile, some of us wheelbarrowed sand to a packed dirt area between the outdoor sink and shower and the chicken coop, under the shade of a carob tree. After shoveling the sand and cement until it was well blended, water was added, and then more shoveling and mixing until it was the proper consistency for mortar. The walls went up, seven courses in front, eight courses in the back, with the second and last courses laid upside down so the cinder blocks could be filled with rebar and mortar for greater stability, and large bolts could be inserted in the wet mortar of the top course. Ofni worked alongside us, always a smile on his face. “David!” he would call out to me, just for fun. Maria, carrying sleeping Arleth in a sling tied over her shoulder, brought us a mid-morning snack – a bowl of freshly sliced pineapple.

On the ride back to Antigua that afternoon, I looked around at our student crew and thought about how much I was enjoying getting to know them, seeing parts of them they usually don’t share with their classroom teachers. Miles and Josie were excitedly comparing their lists of top ten breakup songs. Maddie and Azul called out to dogs lounging beside the road, to dogs assembled on a street corner by the mercado, seemingly living in their own worlds. As we rumbled through the streets of Antigua, we felt exhausted but happy, and somehow changed. We had proved ourselves in the crucible of a hard day’s labor. We smiled and shook our heads at the U.S. tourists wandering around in short pants and skimpy tops, oblivious to or in glaring opposition to the culture of the Guatemalan people.

Our second workday was just as challenging. I noticed that Ofni had carefully tied up some of the low branches of the carob tree. Our heads had been bumping into the large green bean pods as we worked on Tuesday. As we prepared to begin our work, I stopped to look up at the surrounding mountains, where carefully tended campos clung to even the steepest slopes, and directly overhead, where the pale wisp of a crescent moon was dissolving in the morning sun. We cut all the four-by-fours and two-by-fours that would frame the house, and drilled holes for the bottom plates of those walls. We prepared to pour the floor, again mixing the cement by hand – trece carretas de arena spread out ten inches thick, seis sacos de cemento poured over that, and for a top layer, siete carretas de piedrin.[4] We sifted and mixed the dry ingredients by shoveling them into a peak, como un volcán, then shoveling the entire volcano five feet away, then shoveling it back to its original location. We leveled out its peak and created a depression in the middle, adding water, mas agua, mas agua, como un lago, then formed an irrigation ditch around the lake, letting the water soak in until it was ready to be mixed into concrete. 

Our mid-morning snack was a bowlful of sliced papaya. Ah, the taste of a fresh, tree-ripened papaya – the fruit all but melted in our mouths. And there was enough left for a dessert to go with our lunch of sandwiches and chips. Byron was ready to get to it after lunch. Maddie, Josie, Azul, and I formed a bucket brigade from the wet concrete into the house, while Manuel and Miles rapidly filled our three-gallon buckets with wet concrete. As soon as we supplied Byron, he emptied each bucket and troweled the concrete to a smooth level surface. When the interior room was done, we poured a six-by-twelve-foot slab adjoining the house for the outdoor kitchen. We were able to knock off at three o’clock, just as a light rain began to fall.

At the end of day two, with Maria’s mother and nephew Mateo in this photo.

On our third day the workload began to ease up. We framed the rest of the house, nailing the wall studs and top plate and rafter beams, adding frames for the windows and door. We tacked down the sturdy fiberboard láminas we had painted a bright turquoise color, cutting out space for the windows. Ofni brought us 16-ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola, which we decided to store in the water cooler so they’d be ice-cold at lunchtime. Maria’s mother made us a lunch of spaghetti with vegetables, a kind of pasta primavera. And for an afternoon snack, Maria brought us a Guatemalan treat, rellenitos de plátano – mashed plantains stuffed with sweet frijoles, deep-fried and rolled in sugar. We worked until five o’clock, laying the twelve-by-twelve-inch floor tiles and installing the high-efficiency wood-burning Chispa cookstove.[5]

Friday was our last day at the house. After that wonderful lunch with the family, we wired the house for electricity, putting in three overhead lights and three outlets, and installed a plaque beside the door that announced the owners of the home and our role in constructing it. We gathered inside the house for a formal handing over of the keys. Byron gave a little speech, and Ofni expressed his heartfelt thanks, with bilingual Azul translating so we’d know all that was said. She didn’t need to translate the part when he told us we were now their lifelong friends, and were welcome in their home any time we wanted to visit. When we gave the house keys to Ofni, Maria, and Arleth, there were few dry eyes.[6] I was moved by the gratitude of the family, but also impressed by the students, who are struggling to shape their identity in a world fraught with social media, who at a tender age weathered a pandemic, with its social distancing and sheltering in place. They were fully in the moment. They understood the part they had played in this extraordinary kindness, this most human of acts.

That morning as we were loading up the camionetas, a man who lived next door was standing in his doorway watching us. He said something to the drivers I didn’t catch. Azul smiled as she turned to me, translating, “He said, ‘Take good care of those gems.’”

Footnotes:

[1] Cambiando Futuros (Changing Futures) is a slogan used by ImagininGuatemala, the charitable organization we worked with. I encourage you to visit their website and click on “how you can help.”

[2] After those earthquakes, the capital of the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala was moved to present-day Guatemala City. The city that was eventually rebuilt became Antigua (as in Old Guatemala).

[3] Ours would be houses #181-183 built by the ImagininGuatemala NGO.

[4] Our concrete formula was 13 wheelbarrows of sand, 6 bags of cement, and 7 wheelbarrows of gravel.

[5] See this website for more information: Chispa Stoves / Clean Cooking Alliance.

Fatherhood & Sonhood

In 1995, at my sister Julie’s wedding - Dad, me, Uncle Dick (Dad’s only sibling).

“How can I try to explain?/ When I do he turns away again/ It’s always been the same/ Same old story/ From the moment I could talk/ I was ordered to listen” –Cat Stevens, “Father and Son”

As is true for many, my relationship with my father was complicated. Starting when I was a high school freshman in 1968, he and I would argue over the path our country was taking. Usually stirred up during dinner, these arguments often became quite heated. The MyLai massacre, anti-war protests on campuses and civil rights protests in cities, the cultural revolution of Woodstock and the Summer of Love, feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights and the Stonewall demonstrations, Chicago police cracking protestors’ heads at the Democratic National Convention, National Guard shooting students at Jackson State and nearby Kent State. All these became the bases for our generational clashes of opinions, him defending the status quo, me demanding change.

Although neither of us ever admitted it, we were stimulated by this long-drawn-out contest of wills. At the same time, we disliked each other for what we became when we argued – obstinate, relentless, self-centered. One of the rules of our supper table was that we had to ask to be excused. I now want to take a moment to apologize to my nine siblings. Unable to get a word in edgewise, they were often forced to bear witness to these protracted altercations fueled by our mutual stubbornness.

One of the first poems I wrote in high school, later published in a pamphlet by Brother Al Behm, a Glenmary friend.

Of course, life with my father wasn’t all contention. In particular, I admired his ability to enjoy his life. I have in mind a picture of him dancing with my youngest sister, Christina, at her wedding reception. It was the last summer before his death. Battling liver cancer and undergoing chemotherapy treatments, he somehow looked robust and vigorous in his tuxedo. Fully in the moment as he guided his daughter around the spotlight of the dance floor, he had a style distilled from the simple pleasure of living in this world.

John David Duer was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1924. His father, Johann Baptiste Duer, had immigrated from Hard, a small Austrian fishing village on the Bodensee. With his brother Adolph, he started a construction company that still exists today. But he died before his younger son had turned one year old.[1] My grandmother moved back home to East Bernstadt, in rural eastern Kentucky, where she raised her two sons with the help of her brother Willie.

When John finished high school, the family moved back to Akron, into a three-story brick duplex my grandmother had inherited from her husband. John started taking classes at the University of Akron and working at the Firestone Tire & Rubber factory,[2] but soon enlisted in the Air Force. By 1943, he was flying missions over Western Europe from England, a tailgunner in a B-24 Liberator bomber. Their plane was shot down once, but he survived unharmed. Like many vets, he never talked about his war experiences.

After the war, John used the GI Bill to earn a business degree from Marquette University in Milwaukee. Soon after he returned to Akron, he landed a job as a liquor salesman for the Seagram Company. It was a good match for my outgoing and voluble father. He took an interest in the people he encountered during his workday. The job entailed visiting restaurants and bars in his Ohio territory, schmoozing the owners and bartenders, and persuading them to put his brands in the well. When he was successful, the martini a person ordered was made with Wolfschmidt Vodka or Burnett’s London Dry Gin, the manhattan was made with Carstairs White Seal Whiskey, and his sales numbers rose.

I sensed that he enjoyed those bachelor years. He had a number of cousins in the Akron area who were lifelong friends. When he hung out with them later in his life, I’d sometimes hear them refer to him as Schwing. I never knew the origins of that nickname, and this was decades before the movie Wayne’s World popularized the word, but I always wondered. In any case, he met and married my mother in 1953, and I was born one year later.

John David Duer and Rose Marie Trares, married in 1953.

My father was a notoriously halfass do-it-yourselfer. He never balked at doing any car or house  repair project himself. In those days before YouTube tutorials, he might’ve asked for advice from a friend or the guy at the hardware store. More often than not, he just figured it out on his own. The results were less than impressive. When he fixed a toilet, it would flush, but only if we jiggled the handle three times beforehand. He built a shower in our basement laundry room that consisted of a two-foot-high cinder block wall, a flimsy shower curtain, and a wood pallet floor that grew slimy over time. Uncomfortably spartan, it taught us to be adaptable to a wide range of living conditions.

He usually expected my help on these projects, an assignment that mostly consisted of me watching him. He thought I’d learn something from that, but I was just bored. It felt like penance for a sin I didn’t remember committing. I hated watching him stumble through these repair projects, and he often ended up yelling at me and banishing me from the work site, which suited me just fine. And yet, in my adulthood, I became an equally determined and even-more-hapless do-it-yourselfer. But every time I change the oil on my car, I tip my cap to Dad. And my daughter, Emma, who has proven to be twice as handy as either of us, claims I showed her how to confidently take the leap into some of the amazing DIY house projects she’s pulled off.

Starting in fourth grade, I became aware of another side of my dad I could appreciate. A scrappy hard-nosed hoopster, he played pickup basketball well into his mid-forties. I often tagged along for those weekday evening games at the grade school gym.[3] He was five-foot-ten, but never hesitated to mix it up in the paint with bigger and younger players. He had a two-handed set shot that was anachronistic even then, but accurate. I was only five-six in my junior year of high school, but played a lot of neighborhood hoops. When I finally grew up, to six-foot-one, I became a decent baller. During the winter, on Wednesday nights, you could find me at the West Branch Elementary School gym, playing pickup games into my mid-forties, often with guys half my age.

Eventually, my father and I began to broker an uneasy truce. When I was seventeen, after reading Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and meeting the character Willy Loman, I began to develop a new sympathy for Dad’s life, and for the incredibly short fuse of his fiery temper. However, distance played a role in that truce – I lived with him only twice after high school, once for two months, another time for five. I gave him credit for not badgering me about my vagabonding and my hippie ways during those years. But we still butted heads. When I was on my way to Europe in the summer of 1981, Pat gave me a ride from Iowa City to my family’s home in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Although she and I were not married, it was clear that Pat, Sierra, and I were a family. My father barely disguised his opinion that she was too brash and outspoken, traits that he felt were “unwomanly.” He pulled me aside during that visit and said, “You should not marry that woman.” I was caught off guard, so surprised I didn’t know how to tell him I wasn’t interested in his opinion or advice. When I proposed to Pat six months later, I promised her I’d be a better husband and father than he was. When we were married in a small ceremony in Iowa City, he wasn’t invited.

Over the years, my dad’s low opinion of Pat never seemed to extend to me; however, he struggled to be a good grandfather to our children. He seemed to think it was his job to parent them, instead of unconditionally loving them. But he did eventually recognize the generous heart that Pat kept protected behind her prickly personality. When he was hospitalized in 1997 with stage-four liver cancer, we drove to West Virginia to visit him over a weekend. The kids needed to be back in school, so I drove them home on Sunday, but Pat (who had become a geriatric nurse by then) stayed to nurse him and advocate for his care. She was by his side when he died that Friday.

Twenty-five years later, as my sisters and I cleaned out our mother’s house, we found boxes of promotional novelties left over from Dad’s liquor salesman days, everything from clocks and highball glasses to beach towels and sponges, the kind of stuff once ubiquitous in our home. We divvied up those treasures, those mementos of our youth, that curiously poignant legacy.

Footnotes

[1] I sometimes wonder about the impact this had on my dad. Among other things, it denied him the benefit of having a model for fatherhood.

[2] The four largest U.S. tire companies were then headquartered in Akron, the Rubber Capital of the World.

[3] By watching him, I learned the unsung value of setting a hard screen, making a crisp pass, getting an offensive rebound and kicking it out.

The Kids Hike the Vosges

A view of the Château du Frankenbourg ruins, and the Vosges, from a mountain peak just above it.

21.juli.1981 – I was ready to go, the heavy summer air wrestling with my yearning to move, to dance, to ripple in the sun. At the time, I was reading D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, which may have influenced my mood and how I portrayed it in my journal.

Two weeks earlier, I’d met up with my good friend Jim Prchlik in Kassel, Germany. He was staying at a communal flat with his friend Albert Riesselmann. Since then, I’d been hanging out in that city of art and culture, breaking up my stay with hitchhiking excursions to West Berlin and Amsterdam. Jim and I planned to do some hiking and hitchhiking together, but were awaiting the arrival of the third member of our team, Jim’s friend Nancy Faunce from the University of Michigan. When she joined us that evening, our circle was complete. She and Jim had been romantically involved and were still close friends. They’d worked the vendange together the previous fall and then wintered in the Canary Islands off the Moroccan coast before returning to the European continent. At first glance, Nancy appeared delicate, with fair British features, but she was an excellent hiker, strong and energetic. She had a finely calibrated moral compass, attuned to the value of random acts of kindness, sharing her extra pfennigs with anyone who asked, picking up every small bit of trash she came across.

We began to refer to ourselves in the third person – The Kids – characterizing ourselves as playful, light-hearted compagnons de voyage. Our destination was the Vosges, a low mountain range that defines France’s eastern border with Germany. That evening, with our heads full of hash and Peter Tosh's reggae beats, we scurried around, organizing our belongings, loading up our backpacks, preparing for weeks of hiking and camping. We hit the road the next afternoon, grabbing a bus to the autobahn, and as luck would have it, flagging down the first car to pass by, a nice German couple going to Freiberg, who took us within 30 kilometers of Strasbourg, the starting point for our hike in the Vosges.

We met steady rain that day, but as we were being dropped off at a rest area, the setting sun cast a double rainbow across the sky over the Schwarzwald to our west. Our eyes followed the arc of that rainbow as its colors cascaded down to its foot in the valley below us. We set up our camp in the woods and prepared a hearty soup and sandwich supper enjoyed inside the shelter of our orange polyester polygon tent.

In the morning, after hobo coffee and a few slices of good German Roggenbrot,[1] we found ourselves languishing, one exit short of a straight shot to Strasbourg. We traded stories with other hitchhikers, as one often does when the hitching goes slow. So, when a woman dropped off a hitchhiker while we were taking a lunch break, and the others learned she was going to Strasbourg, they told her about us, hailed us away from our lunch, and away we went.

Located on the French side of the Rhine River in the Alsace region,[2] Strasbourg was a lovely city, what we saw of it. We bought baguettes and camping gaz. We searched for a map of Vosges hiking trails but were unwilling to invest 25 French francs in the one we found. Strasbourg’s Cathédrale Notre-Dame was beautiful – delicate reddish brown sandstone spires piercing the sky. Inside, the stone arches and vaulted ceiling harmonized with the bright intricate colors of stained glass. Above the entryway to the church, a rose window proclaimed the Roman Catholic version of a mandala. In one of the side naves a strange contraption – an astronomical clock – displayed seemingly everything,[3] the product of some Renaissance mind. Alas, the mystical peace of the interior seemed to be lost on the herd of tourists tromping through the sacred space.

We left the city, hiking through a couple of adjoining towns until we reached the open road, the foothills of the Vosges in sight to the west and rays of sunlight boosting our spirits. We caught a lift to Barr from a Moroccan drywall installer, and tried to pick up a trail from there. We hiked another four kilometers to Andlau, a town along the Route des Vins d’Alsace, still hunting for a trail, finally camping in a wooded area near a stream west of town, below the medieval ruins of Château d’Andlau. It was raining again, but we were happy to be camping. We quickly set up our tent and fixed a big batch of spaghetti, which we ate with gusto.

Next morning, we sipped strong coffee while packing up, leaving behind the mysteries of stone ruins, rails, cable lifts, never knowing what it was all for. The Kids finally found a trail with a red blaze and decided it was as good as any. We followed those blazes up into the hills, wild raspberries and strawberries along the way, crossing logging roads, past high meadows filled with purple lupine, to a mountain peak (elev. 1,000 m.) from where we could see the Rhine valley to the east and cloud-shrouded valleys and mountains to the west. But we also encountered more rain, cold winds, clouds flying swiftly past us. We pulled out our rain ponchos and hiked onward, getting soaked as we stumbled down the narrow trail, weighed down by our backpacks, our pant legs drenched by wet brush. Jim slipped and took a hard fall, but we all recovered, setting up our tent as more dark clouds settled in. 

We closed up the tent, lit a couple candles for warmth, and changed into dry clothes. We soothed ourselves with a multi-course meal of green salad with a yogurt dressing, rice with a hot curry sauce, bread and camembert, the orange that had been serving as our hash pipe, and a taste of milk chocolate. Even with all the cold and rain, it felt good to be there with two friends, laughing at our miseries, sharing our pleasures. It was a moment of grace – a simple life that transformed commonplace comforts into exquisite luxuries – companionship, camaraderie, and the vagabond life, carrying our food and shelter on our backs.

We moved slowly the next morning, letting our gear dry out in the sun. Coffee warmed us while we lingered on the edge of a designated “zone de tranquillité.”[4] We ended up staying that day near the top of Mount Ungersberg (elev. 901 m.). The skies cleared by the afternoon, and the sun wrapped us in its warm arms. I wandered off to pick a mess of raspberries to make a stovetop cake that didn’t turn out as I hoped but was still tasty, savored after the lentil stew and mackerel salad we made and the bottle of wine Nancy had cajoled from a local forestier. I could’ve lived this way indefinitely, but soon Nancy would be leaving us for the fog of London and Jim and I would be continuing south toward the sun of Italy. 

The Kids awoke to an early morning rain, but the skies cleared by the time we finished our breakfast of coffee and scrambled eggs, and we were on our way. Down through woods and past vineyards into a valley, we came upon Villé, one in a series of charming Alsatian towns of narrow cobblestone streets and medieval half-timbered homes. We bought camping gaz and foodstuffs and found a good trail map that helped us ascertain our location and route, and then headed for Château du Frankenbourg, located atop a mountain (elev. 750 m.) about 12 kilometers away, a steady uphill hike. As the sun was dipping toward the horizon, we arrived at a 12th-century ruin with a stunning view of surrounding valleys and mountains. We pitched our tent and made a campfire inside the decrepit walls of the château, rewarding ourselves with another of our fine meals – pasta, heavy on the marinara.

Jim and I at our Château du Frankenbourg campsite. Photographs by Nancy.

After a hearty breakfast, we proceeded south out of the hills and then up again towards Haut Koenigsbourg. We stopped for lunch at a convenient picnic table along the trail, the sun pleasantly blazing, and took a bit of a siesta afterward. When we continued our climb, we discovered Haut Koenigsbourg was a hot tourist spot and so made a quick detour. By late afternoon we were back in the woods, heading down the mountain. We came to the town of Thannenkirch and walked about a kilometer beyond to a mountain stream tumbling over rocks. Tired from the heat and the hike, we set up camp there beside the trail. I wandered off to pick the wild cherries – small, sweet, deep red – that abound in the region. They made a delicious fruit salad with yogurt and wild mint, and also spiced up our mushroom and curry rice dish. The night grew chilly as we gazed up at a sky overflowing with a Milky Way of stars.

Wednesday, my 27th birthday, our tent turned bright orange in the morning sun. I received birthday kisses from Jim and Nancy. We sipped our coffee, bathed in the mountain stream – first bath in a week – and lazed in the sun.[5] I stirred up a swarm of bees while picking raspberries, and that woke me up. Off we headed on our trusty red-blaze trail, reaching Château Ribeaupierre an hour later, from whose tower, still standing above ruined walls, we could survey where we’d come from and where we were going. We hiked down into the town of Ribeauvillé, where Jim and Nancy went off to buy groceries and supplies while I reviewed a trail map at the mairie.[6] We decided to head for a refuge a two-hour uphill hike from there.

Sure enough, we found a little hut with a picnic table at Colline du Seerlacken (elev. 633 m.) beside a meadow clearing in the pine forest. While Jim and Nancy gathered firewood, I picked a shirtful of raspberries for dinner. I diced an onion, half a zucchini, and six teeth off a huge head of garlic, stirred that into a flour batter, and pan-fried vegetable fritters over our fire. Nancy made a mushroom sauce, and Jim a hearty salad. Jim pulled from his backpack a bottle of wine they had bought in Ribeauvillé. The next surprise was a box of French waffle crackers and a jar of pâte à tartiner au chocolat noisette.[7] While digesting our dinner and relaxing by the fire, one last marvel was produced – a tall elegant bottle of Gewürtraminer. As this memorable birthday celebration wound down, we sipped the sweet regional favorite, fed the fire, and talked late into the night under a star-speckled sky. 

The front cover and inside page of my lovely two-by-three-inch birthday card.

By the time we awoke Thursday morning, Prince Charles and Lady Diana were married. We could sense the excitement even there in rural France. We set off for Kaysersberg, a brisk six-kilometer hike, luckily catching a quick ride from there to Colmar. We went straight to the gare, where Nancy had just enough time to buy her train ticket and join us for one last lunch together. We saw her off with kisses and hugs. Pared down to two, missing Nancy’s spiritedness already, The Kids prepared to push off for the other side of the Rhine. We would continue south toward Italy, traveling together for another month.

Footnotes:

[1] Hobo coffee is made by boiling loose grounds in a pot of water. Roggenbrot is rye bread.

[2] Alsace was the homeland of my maternal grandfather’s line (Trares).

[3] Not only the time of day, but the date, the current zodiac time, and the relative positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets of the Solar System.

[4] According to a sign posted there.

[5] Or as Whitman might say, we leaned and loafed at our ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

[6] City hall.

[7] Chocolate hazelnut spread. Think Nutella.

Le Avventure Italiane di Jim e David

Il Colosseo e l'Arco di Costantino a Roma (the setting of a film festival in the summer of 1981)

11 agosto 1981. That Monday morning Jim and I left Venezia – actually we left Camping Mestre, a short bus ride across the Via della Libertà bridge from Venezia. We’d cooked up a breakfast of scrambled eggs and veggies, scavenged a half-dozen packets of dried soup and a pound of rice from a vacated campsite, packed up our tent and gear, and headed for the Autostrada 57 pedaggio.[1]

Jim Prchlik has made numerous appearances in these stories. We both discovered Jack Kerouac’s writing in high school, and were attracted to his Beat vision of The Road as a venue for ecstatic joy and discovery. The summer after we graduated, before Jim started classes at the University of Michigan, we hitchhiked from Ohio to Cape Cod and back. Over the next nine years, our paths frequently intersected – his Ann Arbor home became my travel hub, a place to reenergize, a springboard to new journeys. Like me, Jim had been sandwiching semesters of school in between trips. Completely fluent in three languages, both adventurous and able to go with the flow, he had covered the entire Western Hemisphere, from the Trans Canadian Railway to Argentina. 

By the time we met up that summer in Kassel, Germany, at the apartment of his friend Albert “Cruiser” Riesselmann, Jim had been vagabonding around Europe for a year and I’d been there for six weeks. We were now three weeks into our first trip together since that summer after high school. Jim had devised various strategies for extending his stay in Europe – the previous fall he’d worked the vendange[2] in France, this summer he was selling leather pouches he’d made from scraps scored for free. In addition, we reaped the benefits of tourists’ wastefulness and the high aesthetic standards of open-air markets by scavenging lots of fresh food.

That morning, we quickly hitched a ride to Bologna. As we climbed into the back of the step-van, we met another hitchhiker, Sergio, a university student from Roma. We immediately hit it off. When the van driver dropped us off at an area di servizio, Jim and I pulled out our food supplies and shared a lunch with Sergio, who in turn bought us espressos at a nearby bar. When we parted, Sergio gave us his phone number and encouraged us to visit him when we came to Roma. He continued southwest and homeward, and we headed southeast toward the Adriatic coast. 

We caught a ride to Rimini from an Italian who spoke excellent English – he was a liaison interpreter between the American military police and Italian carabinieri. On first blush, Rimini was a crowded, boisterous beach resort, an Italian version of some Jersey Shore town. In Italy, everyone takes their vacation in the month of August – all the campgrounds were packed – but it took us a few bus rides and a good bit of walking to learn this. We headed downtown so Jim could try his hand at selling his leatherwork items. Rimini street life was noisy and garish, mostly Italian vacationers, with a sprinkling of French, Germans, and Brits, the kind of outlandish nouveau-riche characters who might appear in the background of a Fellini movie, which was an apt connection because, as I later learned, Fellini was born there.

Jim made no sales that day, but we did meet another street vendor, a young jeweler from Bologna, who offered tips on Italian beach towns farther south more laid-back than Rimini. We found folks camping on the spiaggia libera,[3] so we pitched our tent among them for the night. The beach was free to use but not to camp on, we learned the next morning when the police rousted us, but not before we’d enjoyed a hearty breakfast cooked over our campstove. We spent one more day in Rimini. After a storm blew through that evening, I pitched our tent in a field and waited for Jim to return from his street vending efforts. He came stumbling in, a bit tipsy from a half-bottle of wine he’d found and drank, bummed out by the polyester scene and lack of sales. I cheered him up with a dinner of rice mixed with a can of mushroom ragu found under a bridge while I’d been dodging the storm. We made a good traveling pair – the yang of Jim’s dynamic risk-taking balanced by the yin of my even-keeled care-taking.

Awakened by more rain the next morning, we caught a bus packed with heavy-lidded Italiani to the Rimini train station and then hiked to the autostrada pedaggio. We caught one short ride to the next area di servizio and then a 350-kilometer ride from Rosano, a soft-spoken Veneziano working in München as a fashion model, who was headed to Lecce, near the tip of Italy’s heel. We were tempted to go with him but resisted the impulse, wanting to reach Rome soon, where we hoped mail would be awaiting us. We asked Rosano to drop us off in Lesina, near the Promontorio del Gargano. We hiked ten kilometers out of town, past a couple of campgrounds, along a strand of beach separating the Mare Adriatico from the brackish Lago de Lesinà, on the northeastern edge of the Parco Nazionale del Gargano.[4] Once we found a secluded spot that would serve our need to chill for a few days, we returned to town to buy supplies – bread, wine, candles, matches, cigarettes – and lugged them and four liters of water back to our camp. 

Our cigarette of choice at that time, a nonfilter Italian brand.

The next morning, we enjoyed a breakfast of hotcakes and coffee. Afterward, alone for a few minutes, I felt my body and mind go into one of the brief slow-motion fugue states I’d experienced off and on since I was a kid. I could feel each heartbeat, the blood rushing through my body, both helpless and hyperaware as I stepped out of myself and into the delicious intensity of each passing second.

We were writing, swimming, letting the sun tan our bodies a shade darker and bleach our hair a shade lighter. Reading the first volume of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, I was inspired by her writing to be precise and honest in my own journals. Gathering driftwood on the beach for our fires, I found ouzo bottles imprinted with Greek letters, a good black ink pen, the plastic leg of a babydoll that we mounted atop our tentpole, a kind of amulet. Sitting around our campfire, we watched a storm far out at sea, lightning reflecting off the water, a full moon hanging overhead. A bottle of wine, cigarettes, and good brotherly talk.

We camped four nights on that beach, staying until we had depleted our food supplies. Sunday morning, more good luck hitching the autostrada – north along the coast to Pescara, then west into the Abruzzo region and the dry western slopes of the Apennines. We stopped for lunch in sleepy little Pescina, the midday sun intense but the air comfortably arid as we rested on a stone wall beneath the shade of the piazza’s only tree. We got a ride to the last area di servizio before Rome, where we hoped to call Sergio, but all the phones were out of order, so we camped in an adjacent field.

Early Monday we hustled up a ride to the outskirts of the city, caught a bus al centro and walked to an American Express office near the Piazza di Spagna, where a letter from Pat and three others were awaiting me. We drank espressos at an outdoor cafe, read our mail, felt the rush of connecting with lives back home, and promptly wrote responses. Rome was the first address I’d given Pat to reach me, and her letter was an eight-page outpouring of her and Sierra’s feelings for me: “I find myself becoming selfish sometimes, wanting you to come home. But I want this trip to be special for you. And I want you to want to come home to me when it’s done.”

By two that afternoon, we were ringing Sergio, who responded warmly and gave us directions to his apartment in the Monte Sacro quarter. We arrived in time for the final course of a long leisurely lunch – dolce i caffè. Sergio welcomed us, introducing us to a group of friends snugly gathered around a long table in his kitchen – Gianni, Roberta, Grazia, Gino, Jordi, Valeria, Natalia, Ana, Marco. We filled our stomachs and heads with good things. That evening, refreshed by our first hot shower in weeks, we joined the group to catch a movie at the Maxentius Film Festival, some American western dubbed in Serbian with Arabic subtitles, projected simultaneously onto four screens in the open space between Il Colosseo and the Arco di Costantino. A wondrously jarring experience – watching a movie and then turning to notice the walls of a structure that has withstood two thousand years of history.[5]

Left, Sergio’s friends sitting under La Madonnina in Piazza Sempione, the central square of Mante Sacro (photo taken in the late ‘70s). Right, Sergio hawking the left-wing Rome daily Il Manifesto (photo taken in 1974-75).

We stayed a week with Sergio, who had opened his house to not only us but also Roberta, Jordi, and Gianni during their August break from studies. I grew to appreciate the style of our amici italian – their generosity and natural intimacy, the abundance of kisses and embraces shared every time we met or parted. One evening, a group of us gathered in a quiet bar on the Isola Tiberina, in the middle of il Fiume Tevere in the middle of the city. For hours, we drank beer and discoursed on art and politics, conducting the melodious words with our hands.[6] As Gianni said, “How else to act with that much history resting on your shoulders.” Our group relocated to Massenzio, where films played all night, free after midnight. A spina was fired up and passed around, and we danced loose and crazy to a Bob Marley concert movie. By 3 a.m. Sergio was driving us homeward through the empty streets, the spotlit buildings, monuments, and ruins whizzing past like a dream.

Tuesday afternoon, Roberta took me shopping for a new pair of shoes. I was looking for a pair of espadrilles like the ones worn by many young Italians. They looked so comfortable, just canvas and jute with rubber soles, but I struggled to find a pair that fit my size 45 feet, so I settled on a simple pair of sandals. The best part of the shopping trip, though, was Sergio letting us use his Fiat and Roberta letting me drive it through the streets of Roma. Ah, the thrill of merging into the roundabout encircling the gorgeous fountain-filled Piazza della Repubblica.

On Wednesday, we made dinner for our friends. Gianni took us shopping for supplies. I delighted in the many stops we made at shops and stalls in the open-air market, la lingua del mercato, red and green peppers bursting with dolcezza, aromatic garlands di aglio, black olives swimming in barrels of olio d’oliva, pomodori San Marzano, grown on the volcanic soil of Vesuvius.[7] I made a frijoles con queso casserole with cornbread crust.[8] While Jim and I were out earlier that day, he discovered a sizable chunk of hash in a Piazza Navona trash can – perhaps intercepting a drop or salvaging what some nervous lad fearful of being busted had jettisoned. In any case, he donated it to the communal stash.

Thursday afternoon, Grazia and her sister Analisa took Jim and me to the countryside northeast of Roma. Grazia and Jim had made a good connection and spent the previous night together. She was fun and likable – a vivacious bundle of energy and fiercely held opinions. We went for a swim in Lago di Bracciano, and then lazed in the last hour of sunshine. In nearby Trevignano, we met up with Gianni, Jordi, and Roberta, drank beers, went off to smoke a spina, and reconvened at a trattoria where we were served massive plates of pasta at a long outdoor table. Later, we drove to a villa owned by Roberta’s family, a rustic farmhouse set against a terraced hillside and surrounded by a courtyard garden. Under the stars we shared another joint of hash and talked  feminist and Marxist politics until I wandered off to a bed of straw in a grape arbor, the fruit hanging overhead like the eggs of Bacchus. My thoughts turned to Pat and Sierra. How I missed the rich entanglements of our home life. But oh, how I cherished the constant novelty of this vagabond life.

On Saturday, we bid a heartfelt farewell to Sergio.[9] Grazia hosted us at her house for a last lunch. We met her mother, equally attractive and lively, and then helped Grazia prepare a tasty pasta dish with plum tomatoes, mozzarella, fresh parsley and basil. We enjoyed that with a salad and a bright chilled Tocai from the Veneto region, prolonging our meal and delaying our parting with un bicchiere di vino santo[10] and an espresso. By midafternoon, Grazia was dropping us off at the nearest Autostrada 90 area di servizio. More kisses and hugs goodbye. So we left Rome and, by nightfall, landed in Perugia.

Footnotes:

[1] Highway 57 tollbooth. The Italian national highways are toll roads.

[2] The grape harvest.

[3] Free public beach.

[4] We had entered Puglia, a region in the Mezzogiorno, literally the sunny, sultry “midday” of Southern Italy, the more rural, less industrial, and hence, poorer part of the country.

[5] Thanks to the Roman technique of hot mixing lime, volcanic ash, and sand aggregate, which resulted in an amazingly durable concrete.

[6] We talked about an anti-terrorism conference held two weeks earlier, a gathering of artists, musicians, and poets on the first anniversary of the neo-fascist bombing of a Bologna railway station that left 85 dead and 200 wounded.

[7] The language of the market … bursting with sweetness … garlands of garlic … barrels of olive oil … San Marzano plum tomatoes.

[8] Drawing upon my memory of Mollie Katzen’s recipe from her The Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook.

[9] I was fortunate to reconnect recently with Sergio Cesaratto, an author and professor of economics at the Università degli Studi di Siena.

[10] Literally, a glass of holy wine. A sweet dessert wine from Tuscany.

Finding My Place #2: Communal Life

The dogs of Governor Steet House - Sam the Samoyed, Shalom, GD Walker, and me.

In June 1976, I became part of a communal household. My friend Pat had recently moved into a big house at 308 South Governor Street. The other four house members (three of whom were named David) had completed their academic studies and were leaving town or getting ready to do so. I replaced one of those Davids. Despite that, we never called it the House of David; it was always the Governor Street House.

I was following a path blazed by many others in the late sixties and early seventies.[1] We were joining rural and urban communes to build a culture that challenged the superficial and materialistic one of our parents. The house became a learning lab where we explored alternatives to that mainstream culture, and its mindless pursuit of money and status, its increasing isolation into detached nuclear families, its overreliance on technology that denied us the joy of working with our hands, its misguided belief that nature existed merely to serve our needs.

The house itself had been built in the American Foursquare style, with a full-length front porch, a front bay window with patterned glass, a hipped roof with three hipped dormer windows, and Craftsman-style oak woodwork inside. It was laid out in the typically efficient Foursquare style: From front to back on the first floor: foyer, stairway, and kitchen on the left side, living room and dining room on the right side. On the second floor, a bedroom in each corner and a centrally located bathroom and stairway. The attic was unfinished, a single large room with plywood flooring and the dormer windows admitting light.

My first meal in the house was memorable. I’d spent the afternoon getting familiar with the general layout and rules of the house. Pat and one of the Davids made a huge salad, using produce from the garden that filled our small backyard, and another David had baked bread that morning. As the sun was setting and the night insects commenced their chorus, we sat around a small wooden table just outside the kitchen’s back door, on a porch sheltered by a roof and an east-facing trellis thick with vines. I was charmed by it all – the beautiful spring evening, the hearty salad, the fresh-baked bread, the company of like-minded folks who offered the promise of a family.

Over the course of the summer, we recruited two housemates – Bob and Mary – friends we knew through New Pioneer Co-op. We were committed to living communally: sharing the costs of rent and utilities, and the duties of shopping, cooking, cleaning, and gardening. We baked our own bread and made our own yogurt. The refrigerator always contained a gallon jar of alfalfa or mung bean sprouts that we’d grown from seed. We were learning the practices of sustainable living: “If it’s brown, flush it down; if it’s yellow, let it mellow.” Although we had different work or class schedules, we ate together as much as possible and held weekly house meetings where we coordinated the work of housekeeping and addressed the tensions that arose from living together. We’d remind each other to put peanut butter on the shopping list when the jar got emptied and turn down the stereo after eleven o’clock.

Although we saw this as an idealistic exercise in creating a community based on collectivist principles, living together also offered more pragmatic benefits. Depending on how many people lived in the house, each person’s rent obligation was between 50 and 75 dollars. Sharing household duties gave us more free time and sharing expenses allowed us to hold jobs that perhaps offered no more than subsistence wages but were fulfilling and compatible with our politics.

Living in town, however, wasn’t always compatible with our politics. Across the street stood the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. During fall rush, we’d sit on our front porch, loudly deriding the silly recruitment skits and cheers they performed on their lawn. A sorority is definitely not a commune. We also had regular run-ins with our elderly next-door neighbor, Mr. Deming, who’d call animal control because we let our dogs hang out on the front porch unleashed, and the police because we let our babies hang out on the front porch unclothed.

For the next two years, the Governor Street House served as my home base. After returning in April 1977 from six months in Mexico, I moved into the attic. In the summer I sprawled out in the middle of that space, but in the winter, I hunkered down by the south dormer window, in a corner closed off with heavy plastic sheeting and kept above freezing by a space heater. Many people whom I still count as friends were part of the Governor Street House’s revolving door of housemates ‒ Pat, Mary, Bob, Steve, Sharon, Mara, Michael, John, Paul, Patricia, Maggie, Willow, Jim, among others.[2] The ceramicist Jean Graham moved her pottery studio into our basement and pitched in twenty bucks each month to help with rent. When we realized we had to pay a fee whenever we changed the utilities to someone else’s name, we had all the bills permanently put in the name of GD Walker, Pat’s Australian cattle dog.

On a cold night in February 1978, the Governor Street House became multi-generational when Pat gave birth to her son Sierra in her northwest corner bedroom. Four people gathered in that room to assist Pat with her labor – Mary, our housemate; Zap, the father; and Sharon and Amy, trained midwives associated with the Emma Goldman Clinic. Bob and I waited downstairs, hovering on the edge of that excitement.

Pat at Governor Street House one week before giving birth to Sierra.

The previous year, Ina May Gaskin’s book Spiritual Midwifery had been published, encouraging women to regain control of the birthing process and instructing them on the practices of natural childbirth. The book advocated for the end to unnecessary hospital births for the convenience of male doctors – the end to unnecessary general anesthesia, forceps deliveries, and episiotomies. In 1971, Gaskin[3] and her husband Stephen had led a bus caravan from San Francisco, eventually settling in rural Tennessee and starting a commune called The Farm. She established one of the first out-of-hospital birthing centers in the United States. Women traveled there not only to give birth to their children but to learn the skills of midwifery.

Pat’s contractions had started on Wednesday, slowly building in intensity over the next four days, although without causing any cervical dilation. On Friday, to distract herself, she went to a movie and did some shopping. The midwives arrived at 9:30 on Saturday night, and Sierra was born six hours later. I was deeply moved by the experience, which I tried to express in this poem.

We Surround Ourselves with Mysteries

in every window

a lit candle stands

burning the vapors of our vigil

atmosphere soaked in stillness

barely swirls

in a leaden cloud of expectation

the midwives arrive

and their female strength is felt

sure hands and sure hearts

outside a fog distance and

the lights of a parked car

its engine running

holding the bone of drama

we watch from outside the circle

sterilize instruments bring hot compresses

inside woman is a fierce muscle

pain lays its hand on her forehead

warm blood the color of life

the door to the universe slowly opens

enough for us to glimpse its magic

as the babe slips out a first cry

sunday morning two hours till dawn

he sleeps a new life

the center of a ring of adoration

today i swear an allegiance

to be aware of every moment every detail

filling the vessel of my body

The household had a new shared responsibility, and we all did our best to support Pat and help with childcare. We cherished Sierra, even though he was colicky those first few months. He wouldn’t be the only child raised in the house ‒ Patricia and Paul’s Dylan and Willow’s Sienna later lived there.

Governor Street House wasn’t the only communal house in Iowa City at that time. Two houses directly across from each other on the 400 block of South Johnson Street, one on the corner of South Dubuque and East Court streets, one on the corner of North Dubuque and Davenport streets, one at the end of East Washington Street, one at 811 East Market Street, and a house on McLean Street on the west side of the river.[4] A couple of communal farmsteads had also been established within twenty miles of Iowa City. Most of the house members were part of the tight-knit New Pioneer Co-op community, and many worked at either New Pioneer, Blooming Prairie Warehouse, Stone Soup Restaurant, or Morning Glory Bakery. 

In 2009, inspired by memories of communal households they’d lived in during their youth, a group of people began meeting to plan an alternative to traditional housing in Iowa City, based on the Danish cohousing model. They envisioned a socially and economically diverse multi-generational community that makes decisions using the consensus model, and shares jointly owned common space and resources while inhabiting separate living quarters with small carbon footprints. The last of the 37 units of Iowa City Cohousing, settled on 7.3-acre Prairie Hill, just off West Benton Street, are now being completed.

In August 1978, over two years after first moving in, I left the Governor Street House just as Pat and Sierra were also relocating to their own apartment on the southeast edge of town.[5] But in May 1980, after a four-month trip to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, I rejoined Pat, Sierra, Steve, and Mary in the Market Street House. After finally finishing my undergraduate studies, and then spending another four months traveling around Europe, I returned to Market Street and moved into the attic. Sierra’s bedroom was at the bottom of the attic stairs, and I’d often come down at night to get him up to pee. Two months after I returned, I asked Pat if she’d marry me. And on December 6, 1981, Pat, Sierra, and I bound our lives together at the Market Street House, exchanging vows among a close group of friends, many of whom we’d lived with at one time or another.

Footnotes:

[1] It’s been estimated that in the U.S. as many as 3,000 communes were founded during this time, inhabited primarily by disaffected white, middle-class kids.

[2] The camaraderie and physical intimacy of commune life sometimes led to spontaneous liaisons. So much so that, years later, when six or seven of us were reflecting about those days after a meal together, we suddenly realized that, at one point or another, most of us had slept with nearly everyone else at that table.

[3] Ina May Gaskin grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa, and in the early sixties, earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Iowa.

[4] Formed in 1977, River City Housing Collective carries on this tradition. Three houses offer a cooperative alternative to the tenant-landlord relationship – Bloom County House at 935 E. College St., Summit House at 200 S. Summit St., and Anomy House at 802 E. Washington St.

[5] Meanwhile, Zap was getting ready to move to Santa Cruz to pursue a musical career, and began to play an increasingly smaller role in raising Sierra.

Finding My Place #1: A Response to the Climate Crisis

Washington High School students & staff caring for the star magnolia in the school arboretum.

“Bioregionalism teaches us of emergence, interdependence, and the impossibility of absolute boundaries. As physical beings, we are literally open to the world, suffused every second with air from somewhere else; as social beings, we are equally determined by our contexts. If we can embrace that, then we can begin to appreciate our and others’ identities as the emergent and fluid wonder that they are.” – Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

In the early 1960s – I would’ve been eight or nine – the city of Stow, Ohio, installed storm sewers on our street. Six feet long and three feet in diameter, the concrete sewer sections sprawled in our front yards along the street for the better part of a summer, and all of us neighbor kids climbed atop and through them, honing our acrobatic skills. When the road crew buried the storm sewers and repaved the road, they installed a curbside sewer drain directly across from our driveway. I can’t tell you how many baseballs got away from us and were sucked down that drain, but we’d pry up the manhole cover and climb down to retrieve the balls. 

This might involve chasing a ball that had begun to roll down the sewer’s slope. A few times, either on a dare or for the sake of adventure, I stayed down there and crawled through the 600 feet of storm sewer to the end of the block, blind in the subterranean pitch darkness until I reached the creek in Wetmore Park, a two-block-long greenspace bordering Kent Road (State Route 59) that influenced my expanding awareness of the natural world.

My grandsons Oscar & Linus hiking Mud Lick Creek in Roanoke, VA.

Going with the Flow

Perhaps I was eleven. This is what kids did in the summer. For my next-door neighbor Pat Flowers and me, the creek that ran through Wetmore Park at the bottom of the street we lived on became a splash pad and field lab. We learned its little pools and rocky cascades. We walked its grassy banks and splashed through its shallows. When there was a downpour, we’d race the half-block to watch the creek flex its muscles. It turned into a rushing torrent on which we raced makeshift rafts piloted by spiders.

One day we decided to follow the creek out of the park, through the culvert under Kent Road. We carried nothing with us, not even sandwiches or candy bars. The creek quickly took us out of town and into wilder places, where it grew more tangled, more complicated, as it widened. We waded in the water, gathering lumber scraps caught in branches along the banks of the creek, lashing together a raft the two of us drifted on, poling with the current. We followed the breadcrumbs of that creek until we felt far from home, on a great adventure, facing the demands of nature.

Back when we were kids, the river introduced us to a world that seemed unfamiliar and fascinating. Looking at a map now, I know we’d gone not much more than a mile. But there, we discovered, the creek fed into the Cuyahoga, a Mohawk word meaning “crooked river,” which five miles on would sweep over a series of falls and then a few miles farther would take a sharp right turn north. 

Thus I began to learn about watersheds and my place in them. I lived in the Great Lakes Watershed. If I didn’t retrieve that baseball, it would roll into the Wetmore Park creek and follow a riverine trail that eventually meandered past the steel mills of Cleveland, which turned it into an industrial drainage ditch, and emptied into Lake Erie, where I swam every summer on our family vacations to Marblehead Peninsula. When a spark from a passing rail car set the river ablaze in 1969, I felt a communal responsibility for the pollution that caused it.

Here was the bioregion of my childhood. I became friends with the trees in our yard – the prickly seed pods of the sweet gums, the greenish yellow blooms of the tulip poplar, the sticky resin of the Eastern white pines, the sweet icicles dripping from the sugar maples’ broken branches. My friends and I knew when to raid the gardens and trees of the neighborhood for rhubarb, cherries, tomatoes, red raspberries, apples, pears, plums, chestnuts. Pat and I would walk or bike the five blocks to the eastern shore of Silver Lake, where we fished for perch, bluegill, and smallmouth bass. In winter I’d meet up with classmates to skate that frozen lake, a quarter mile wide and a mile long, out to the postage-stamp isle in the middle, where bonfires blazed at night to warm us.

Our one-third-acre yard was an adaptable playground. The site of many impromptu kickball and tetherball tournaments. My friends and I made one log cabin after another, using the long splintery rails left after a zigzagging split-rail fence marking our yard’s boundary had been dismantled. In our imaginations, the undeveloped lot behind our house became a patch of wilderness where we reenacted scenes from Davy Crockett, a Disney mini-series about the pioneer, congressman, and folk hero. I had my own coonskin cap. When I sang the catchy “Ballad of Davy Crockett,” I’d change the words: “Davy, Davy Crockett, king of his own backyard!”

Since 1975, I’ve lived in or near Iowa City, in the Upper Mississippi Watershed. I’ve resided in my present home since 1998. One of the two branches of Ralston Creek runs through my backyard, as it does through seemingly half the yards of Iowa City’s east side before emptying into the Iowa River near the U.S. Highway 6 bridge. Deer browse along the creek. A doe and her two fawns kept my garden’s hot pepper plants pruned all summer. An eight-point buck was seen heading upstream this morning; other days a red fox might scamper along that trace, bushy tail flat out behind him. The busywork of beavers – saplings gnawed down to their stumps – can often be spotted. Fat lumbering woodchucks used to lived under my garden shed; now our neighborhood’s two feral cats make their home there. A few years back, I sighted a mountain lion sunning himself in a backyard across the creek before he stole out of town. In winter, red-tailed hawks and bald eagles perch prominently in the top branches of bare trees. When I open my windows in spring, I welcome the nightly calls and caterwauls of the barred owls.

And I still love to forage. Serviceberry trees next to Mercy Hospital’s emergency room parking lot. Mulberry trees everywhere one turns. For a potluck this spring, I made a cheesecake topped with a sauce using tiny Nanking cherries harvested from a neighbor’s bush, as much pit as fruit but deliciously tart. I’ve foraged for black raspberries, blackberries, and gooseberries in Hickory Hill Park and the woods around the ACT campus. I now welcome the spread of wild raspberry canes around my compost bin, freezing two quarts of berries this summer. An apple tree in the First Avenue Walgreens parking lot yielded a tasty batch of apple butter. When the pawpaws hanging from a stand of trees along the creek in Court Hill Park ripened this fall, I shared that rare treat – the most tropical of Midwestern fruit, custardy with hints of mango and banana, sometimes called Quaker Delight.

Pawpaw tree in Court Hill Park, pawpaw fruit, chestnut harvest, monarch on a Mexican sunflower in my backyard.

September Foragers

I’ve been gathering chestnuts from four trees that occupy a quiet corner of the college campus. I scour the ground beneath the trees for the dark brown nuts. With a few gentle shakes of the limbs, I petition them to let go of their prizes. I cautiously pry open the spiky green husks that have yet to give up their clutch of two or three nuts. My only competition in this foraging of free food seems to be the deer. Have others never tasted the sweet, buttery goodness of chestnuts roasted over a fire?

My bag full, I hop on my bike and head home, stopping downtown to sip a latte in the late afternoon sun. Next to the cafe patio, a calamint filled with small pale purple flowers is being worshiped by a dozen honeybees. Burnished by the sun, these drunken bees buzz the plant, flitting from blossom to blossom, gathering nectar, distributing pollen. They are shot through with sunlight and streaked with a gold like that used to mend and emblazon cracks in pottery.

The rights of bees and the rights of flowers. The rights of chestnut trees and the rights of deer. The rights of all men and the rights of all women. The symbiotic dance that repairs us, that makes us whole, that makes us familiar rather than exceptional. This, perhaps, is what love can be.

Although I take comfort in the possibility of an Anthropocene epoch – that the extinction of humanity is imminent, and the planet will prosper from that loss – I also refuse to give up hope that we can address our climate crisis. Though it can be easy to read headlines and despair, Rebecca Solnit’s Not Too Late project offers many great ideas for taking individual action. Like most folks, I take small steps to shrink my carbon footprint: recycling and reusing, bicycling rather than driving, cloth instead of plastic. When an August 2020 derecho destroyed 65 percent of the tree canopy in Cedar Rapids, I began working with the Washington High School Green Team to plant and care for a 29-tree arboretum on campus. 

This year I got to work with some great people and organizations – co-teaching the class Creating in Nature at Scattergood Friends School and Farm, co-leading the workshop retreat Writing from Nature: Practices in Ecopoetics and Slow Seeing at Prairiewoods Franciscan Spirituality Center, fostering a crate of pawpaw seedlings for Bur Oak Land Trust. All these local organizations do important work to model sustainable practices and ways of living in respectful communion with nature.

Through all this, I can trace a line of inspiration back to that creek of my childhood, and the joy of exploring it, that has helped me find my place in the natural world.

Baker (Jobs of My Youth #5)

“When I cook, another body comes alive. Not the body of walking or typing, not the body of sitting or talking, certainly not the body of driving or TV-watching, but the body of cooking: a body alive to flavors and fragrance, a body ready to touch and be touched, a body which eats with eyes and nose as well as mouth….. Hands awaken, boundless with their own knowledge, picking up, handling, putting down.”  –Edward Espe Brown, The Tassajara Bread Book

When I moved to Iowa City in the fall of 1975 to start classes at the University of Iowa, I immediately discovered I could stop by Stone Soup Restaurant at lunch time, wash dishes for an hour, and get paid with a hot lunch. Stone Soup was a cooperative natural foods vegetarian restaurant located in the basement of Center East, a square three-story brick building on the corner of Clinton and Jefferson streets.

I was drawn to the idealism and activism of the people involved in the food co-op movement. Stone Soup had become a gathering place for vegetarians, artists of all stripes, hippies and nonconformists, feminists and left-wing politicos. One could get a “home-cooked” meal for a couple dollars and stick around to meet and talk with interesting folks. As a regular volunteer, I was invited to a staff meeting where a proposal to add a night baking shift was on the agenda. When the staff agreed to do this, I expressed interest in one of the baker jobs and was hired on the spot. The easiest job application and interview ever.

I did have some baking experience. I started baking bread when I was in high school, often giving away my loaves to friends or bringing them to parties. My girlfriend at the time still fondly remembers the loaf I left on her front porch with a romantic note. And when I started hitchhiking, I cultivated the habit of baking bread to thank the people whose home I was crashing at.

Of course, the Stone Soup bakery operated on a larger scale, but it retained that sense of reciprocity. We were baking for not only the restaurant but also New Pioneer Co-op, then located less than a mile away on the corner of Gilbert and Prentiss streets. Our shift would usually start at ten o’clock, just as the dinner crew was finishing their cleanup, and wrap up at five in the morning. The two or three staff signed up for each shift would bake up to 100 one-pound loaves of bread, ten or fifteen pounds of our two types of granola (regular and deluxe), a batch or two of cookies, and on some nights, ten dozen beanburgers, made from a recipe featuring cooked and mashed soybeans.

The core of the bakery staff were hired in short order. We each worked three or four shifts a week. Pat had just blown in from the Santa Cruz Mountain community of Mount Hermon (population 715 hippies, less one).[1] Cheryl grew up in a Mennonite family just south of Iowa City, raised to value practices that support environmental sustainability. Edith, a university student majoring in science and minoring in studio art, had an array of kitchen skills learned from her Italian American mother. Michael was a jazz clarinetist studying composition in the university’s School of Music. Nancy was a native Iowa Citian and an avid organic gardener. I had a crush on all the women I worked with, and six years later, I married one of them – that woman from Santa Cruz.[2]

Center East was the former home of St. Mary’s School, which served grades one through twelve from 1893 to 1968 and then was sold to the Newman Catholic Student Center in 1975. The Newman Center staff was repurposing the building as a community space. Stone Soup Restaurant rented the cafeteria kitchen and a small adjoining dining room for a nominal fee. The large basement cafeteria was occasionally transformed into a space for benefit dances[3] featuring the Magic Goat Band, which was mostly composed of New Pioneer and Blooming Prairie Cooperative Warehouse staff. Upstairs was the Free Store, where one could address their clothing needs or grab a sweater on an unexpectedly cold day. Clemens Erdahl and Sue Futrell helped set up an office for United Tenants for Action, offering free legal aid to oppose predatory and deadbeat landlords. Barbara Welch, working on a doctorate in Communication Studies, had converted a classroom, with its tall windows and dark woodwork, into the Iowa City Yoga Center.

The restaurant had inherited the school cafeteria’s large gas stoves and acquired a used industrial  bread dough mixer. We religiously followed the recipes in The Tassajara Bread Book,[4] written in the late 1960s by Edward Brown, a student at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Retreat tucked away in central California’s Los Padres National Forest. We’d mix lukewarm water, yeast, honey or molasses, milk powder, and whole wheat flour, forming a sponge the consistency of a thick slurry. We’d give that time to rise and then add oil, salt, more flour, and other ingredients particular to the bread we were making. 

We always made a batch or two of Whole Wheat and three or four other breads, such as Swedish Rye, Sunflower Seed, Challah, Oatmeal, Poppy Seed, Cinnamon Raisin. At the beginning of the shift, we’d check out the dinner leftovers, on the chance that they’d inspire us to concoct a new bread recipe. My favorite was “pizza bread,” made by sprinkling a thin layer of marinara sauce and mozzarella over the dough before rolling it into a loaf.

When the dough had risen to twice its size, we would punch it down and begin to pinch off one-pound hunks, using a kitchen scale to measure. Then we’d get to it, loafing on the two long low countertops that filled the center of the kitchen. It was work that felt like play, work filled with tactile joy. We all developed similar methods for shaping the loaves: kneading the dough, flattening it into a large square to remove any remaining air bubbles while flipping and patting it to smooth its surface, then folding it once, folding in its ends, rolling it into a loaf shape, and pinching the seams shut. We’d drop the loaves into seasoned pans strapped together in groups of four and set them atop the warm stove to rise one last time.

Joy of baking - Cheryl and Pat at the Stone Soup Restaurant bakery.

As the night wore on, the sensory stimuli would become more robust, helping us power through the wee hours. We’d start pulling steaming bread out of the ovens, removing the brown loaves from the pans and putting them on cooling racks in the dining room. While the loaves were still hot, we’d run a stick of butter over the top crust. Some granola might also be cooling, some peanut butter cookies, perhaps a batch of cinnamon rolls.

Because the restaurant was rarely closed and one could get a meal for working in the kitchen, it drew street people, many of whom were named Rick – Rick the Hobo, Red Rick, Crazy Rick. The bakery’s aromas also attracted attention. My friend Tony, who lived nearby and kept odd hours, might stop by to hang out and share a new poem. The basement kitchen’s windows were at sidewalk-level along the route from the downtown bars to the eastside dorms. In the summer, a few weak box fans would move the heat around, and we often stripped down to the minimal amount of clothing (although we at least kept our aprons on). A lot of foot traffic passed by at two o’clock, after the bars closed. When the windows were open, we’d hear our share of catcalls. Believe me, we gave as good as we got.

The restaurant had a portable record player and maybe twenty well-worn albums, most of their edges decorated with dried bread dough. Those albums provided the soundtrack to our work – Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses, Jackson Brown’s Late for the Sky. After the baking was done and the loaves had been bagged up with their handmade labels, we’d sit down at one of the dining room tables and pull out a runt loaf. We’d slice thick hot chunks of bread, slather them with melting butter, and enjoy the flavor of our work. We’d talk about the night, or the approaching day, while listening to songs like J. J. Cales’s “After Midnight” or Bonnie Raitt’s “Nothing Seems To Matter.”

After my shift, I’d usually go upstairs to the yoga studio to sleep. Greeted by the lingering scent of incense, I’d lie down on a yoga mat and snooze until someone from the breakfast shift came up to wake me for my nine o’clock Intro to Philosophy class that fall semester. I held this job for a full year, until I left for Mexico the next fall. When I returned in the spring, the bakery was being relocated and revamped as Morning Glory Bakery. I helped its staff move into two classrooms upstairs, lugging out all but two of the heavy slate blackboards, power-sanding those buckled oak floors down to their light brown grain, removing 75 years of Catholic school memories. In their place, we offered a passionate energy inspired by the aromas and traditions of baking bread.

Footnotes:

[1] After her ’67 Dodge Dart ferried her cross-country, its passenger seats were removed so the car could haul baked goods to New Pioneer and 50-lb. sacks of whole wheat flour, brown rice, etc. from Blooming Prairie Warehouse.

[2] Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three other married couples who either worked alongside each other or met at Stone Soup.

[3] To support non-profit community organizations such as Emma Goldman Clinic, Free Medical Clinic, Dum-Dum Daycare Center, Willowwind School, as well as the restaurant.

[4] Except that we multiplied the ingredients by 8 to achieve economies of scale.

Un Americano a Milano

The Piazza Mercanti in Milano. On the right, the loggia steps referred to in this essay. (Photo by Jakub Hałun)

We all know the pitfalls of social media – the reduction of every meaningful experience to a shareable post, the obsession with other people’s status and our own competitive urge to impress, the unholy merger of envy, anxiety, and distraction. How often have we responded to a beautiful moment by whipping out our phones to document it, calculating how much it will boost our status, and in the process ceasing to be in that moment? But occasionally, social media can rise to all its promise of connectivity across space and time.

Three days ago, I opened a “message request” on Facebook. It was from Luca Garofalo, who was not a Facebook Friend: “hello, are you the David who traveled to Milano Italy 40+ years ago?” I straightaway responded, “Ciao, Luca! Yes, your family generously hosted me for a few days, and you let me hang with you & your friends. A sweet memory.”

And it was. My path intersected with Luca and his family amid four months of wandering the European continent in the summer of 1981, what would prove to be my last big hitchhiking trip. After earning my Bachelor of General Studies degree that May, nine years after graduating from high school, I had persuaded my folks to give me a graduation present (partly by reminding them I’d paid my own way through college) – a round-trip ticket from New York to Brussels with an open return date. I had saved up $700 and planned to travel as long as it would carry me.

On June 29, my one-person Army surplus tent was pitched in a campground near the Piazzale Michelangelo, just across the Fiume Arno and outside the old city walls of Firenze.[1] I had been there for three days, enjoying the art, architecture, and history of that beautiful Tuscan city. I was tempted by the sunny morning to stay another day, but I decided to pack up and move on. My campground neighbors, a friendly Brit couple, asked me where I was off to. When they learned I was planning to hitchhike to Milano, they told me they’d be passing by there and offered me a lift. Such good sports – he a prep school Latin and Greek teacher, she a chatty librarian. We loaded up their VW van and headed north toward Bologna, through the lush green hill country of Tuscany and out onto the open plains of Emilia-Romagna’s Po River valley, and then northwest through the auto manufacturing city of Modena and the cultural and gastronomic center of Parma.

A week earlier, while hitching along the Italian Riviera, I had met Raffaele, who gave me a ride from San Remo to Genova and, when we stopped for lunch, invited me to crash at his apartment if I came to Milano. I was about to take him up on that offer. My British friends dropped me off five kilometers outside of the city, so I decided to hike along the shoulder of the autostrada until I could catch a bus going downtown. But before long and unexpectedly, a car stopped, a woman and her two young adult sons. The mother, Giulia, drove me into the city and to her home, inviting me in for an espresso and conversation. 

Her 22-year-old son, Luca, had just completed his obbligatorio (year of compulsory military service) and was enjoying his newly reclaimed freedom. About to head out to do errands, he offered to accompany me downtown. We caught a bus, and Luca helped me find the tourist office so I could pick up a city street map and work out directions to Raffaele’s home. Before we parted, Luca shared his phone number, suggesting we meet up again.

I tried reaching Raffaele by phone but, upon learning there was a Dire Straits concert in Milano that night, concluded that’s where he would be. Should I call Luca and ask to stay there? Should I spend the night in a pensione? I chose instead to locate Raffaele’s place and wait. When I finally knocked on the door of his apartment, a neighbor told me he was in the hospital. Che peccato![2] I tried calling Luca, but it was late, and I wound up leaving a short incoherent message with his father. I decided to do some impromptu urban camping, sleeping comfortably nel prato tra la ferrovia e l’autostrada.[3]

The next morning, I called again, spoke with Luca, and asked if I could stay with his family for a few days. We made plans to meet later that day. To stay with una famiglia italiana was an honor. In my years of traveling, I’d learned this truth, which applies in any language and place. Ennio, il padre, worked in the largest commercial bank in Milano. Giulia was a warm, vivacious, and intelligent woman who spoke fluent English. She showed me to her studio, where I would be able to stow my backpack and sleep. Its double French doors opened onto a balcony overlooking their garden. Luca was an excellent folk guitarist, in the style of John Fahey and Jorma Kaukonen. The rest of the household consisted of his three younger siblings – Isabella, Nicoletta, and Paolo– all in their late teens or early twenties.

During the day, Luca and I bicycled around the city as he showed me the sights. We visited Santa Maria delle Grazie to see da Vinci’s remarkable fresco The Last Supper, painted on a wall of the monastery’s dining hall. When Luca visited a friend to give a guitar lesson, I tagged along. Afterward, as we smoked a bowl of hash, I pulled out my cassette tape of the Iowa City band I played in, Pink Gravy, and we listened to a few songs. Another afternoon, Luca and I met up with a friend who fronted a punk band, her hair dyed a stunning crimson, and went to her flat to listen to Italian new wave bands Decibel and Krisma. That evening we ate, drank, and conversed with a big group of friends at a trattoria and bar that specialized in la musica folklorista.

It was a pleasure da mangiare all’italiana con la famiglia Garofalo.[4] One night was special – the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Paolo’s feast day. First, spaghetti al pomodoro, then bistecca alla milanese, followed by a plate of salame piccante, thin slices of pecorino, and arugula, tutti in olio d’oliva,[5] capped off by a transcendent dessert of gooseberries and raspberries in whipped cream atop a shortcake. Il miglior vino, e certo, molto parlando e apprendendo l’italiano.[6] 

My last night in Milano, Luca and I went to a concert in the Piazza del Duomo, the city’s main square. The music was not memorable, but to hear live music in front of a stunning fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral, its tall white marble spires and pinnacles spotlit and ghostly against the night sky – that was memorable. The scene was crazy crowded, so a group of us wandered off to a quieter spot nearby. In the Piazza Mercanti, the square of merchants, emblematic of the city’s position as a financial center, we were surrounded by beautiful palazzi, some dating back to the thirteenth century. It seemed somehow right to sit on the steps of a loggia and roll spliffs of tobacco mixed with hash and get molto sconvolto.[7] 

A tanned, wiry-haired guy carrying an artist notebook under his arm walked by, then stopped to ask if we wanted a caricatura. —No. He was insistent, looking each of us in the eye. “Per un caffè?” —Still, no. Willfully disregarding our wishes, he crouched down, pulled out a sheet of paper and a charcoal crayon, looked at Luca’s friend Renata, la ragazza più bella del nostro gruppo,[8] and began to sketch her. I grudgingly acknowledged his dogged intensity, his swaggering braggadocio. The drawing was not remarkable, but when he again asked for coffee money, we all dug deep for spare 100-lire coins. It was his style, not his artistic skill, we were paying for. After sitting with us for a while and sharing stories, he looked at me and asked, “You speak English, yes?” I nodded my head. “American?” I nodded again. “You don’t look at all like an American.” I took this comment as the highest of compliments.[9] Then he strolled off, forse per un caffè, ma non lo so.[10]

I haven’t yet heard back from Luca. But if I never do, knowing he reached out, knowing a connection persists that we made over a few summer days forty years ago in Milano, that’s enough for me.

Footnotes:

[1] In my last year of school, I studied Italian, a lovely language. As it did in my travel journal, some Italian will creep into this essay. And it feels right to use Italian for Italian places such as the Arno River and Florence.

[2] What a shame!

[3] In an empty field between some railroad tracks and the highway.

[4] To eat in the Italian style with the Garofalo family.

[5] Spaghetti in tomato sauce … breaded and fried steak cutlets … spicy salami … pecorino cheese … all in olive oil.

[6] The best wine, and of course, a lot of speaking and learning Italian.

[7] Literally, very shattered.

[8] The most beautiful of the women in our group.

[9] I was in one of the hate phases of my love-hate relationship with the land of my birth, ashamed we had elected Ronald Reagan as our president the previous year. His “trickle-down” Reaganomics policy would prove to be both ineffective and deceitfully mean-spirited.

[10] Perhaps for a coffee, but I don’t know.

Hod Carrier (Jobs of My Youth #4)

Hod Carrier (Handlager), c. 1927, by the German photographer August Sander, from his “People of the Twentieth Century” project.

“Capitalism couldn’t really take hold, [Max] Weber noted, until people became convinced, one way or another, to make more money than they needed. That would seem an easy sell today, but it wasn’t in 17th-century England, when many commoners still earned money only occasionally, lived mostly by subsistence, and felt that they had enough, much to the frustration of the landowners, who wanted them to do steady work for wages. ‘A man [or woman] does not by nature wish to earn more and more money,’ Weber argues, ‘but simply to live as he [or she] is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.’”  –Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

After spending nine months building houses with Brother Ralph and Jon and Mike in the Pennsylvania mountains, I returned to Ohio and, by the beginning of June 1973, with my dad’s help, landed a job as a rough carpenter with a small construction outfit. But I was a little over my head; I missed Brother Ralph’s gentle mentorship. 

We were transforming an old barn into lawyers’ offices in Peninsula, a quaint village located in the middle of what would later become the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.[1] One task involved climbing high into the loft of another old barn to salvage the sturdy oak roof timbers. I was straddling a beam atop the wall of the barn, trying to drive the pegs from the mortise and tenon joints that held the bones of the barn together, admiring the view while being scared shitless. That barn was being torn down to make room for the vast parking lot that would surround the Richfield Coliseum, then being built for the new Cleveland Cavaliers pro basketball team. The coliseum served as the Cavaliers’ home from 1974 to 1994, but (I’m pleased to report) it was demolished by the National Park Service in 1999, and the land was converted to meadow.

My father may have overstated my carpentry skills to my boss, who was clearly less than impressed with me. I tried to make up for my lack of experience with my willingness to work hard, but I lasted less than a month at that job, fired for literally “not having all the necessary tools,” although I took the meaning metaphorically as well. I shrugged off this setback, deciding to travel the rest of the summer – back to McConnellsburg to help Brother Ralph build another home, then to Vanceburg, Kentucky; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Provincetown, Massachusetts; Mount Katahdin, Maine.[2]

My month of wage labor paid for one edifying semester at Ohio University in Athens. Then I decided to do another volunteer stint with Glenmary Home Missioners,[3] this time in Butler County, Kentucky, and supported by Glenmary’s $450 monthly stipend. By May 1974, I had completed my commitment to Glenmary but decided to stay on in Kentucky. I had fallen in love with my living situation – I was renting a four-room farmhouse at the end of a dirt road seven miles outside of Morgantown, the county seat. The house was heated by a coal stove and had electricity but no running water. The west door off the kitchen led to the back porch and the well; the kitchen’s east door provided access to the outhouse. I had already planted a garden between the house and the tobacco barn – long rows of corn, tomatoes, and green beans.

I found work on the assembly line of a wood pallet factory on Sawmill Road, but after a week of that, noticing that nearly all my co-workers were missing one or more fingers, I decided to look for something safer. I met a young bricklayer named Oval Clark, who had recently parted ways with a crew to start his own business, and was in need of a helper. Oval was a bit moody and habitually disgruntled, but I needed a job and liked the idea of returning to house construction. 

I soon learned Oval had a drinking problem. When it started raining at a job site, we’d retire to the nearest bar to shoot pool, and Oval would start drinking. We’d never make it back to the job site that day. (If nothing else, I became a decent pool player that summer.) Most mornings, I’d hitchhike into town to meet Oval at his house, knocking on his door to wake him up, usually hungover, sometimes still drunk. His sixteen-year-old wife would answer the door, wearing an oversized Butler County High Bears t-shirt, grumpy from lack of sleep and vexed by it all. I could see her coming to the slow realization that this was the life to which she’d said I do.

Since we weren’t finishing any bricklaying jobs, I wasn’t getting a paycheck. For suppers, I was either resorting to a big pot of green beans from my garden or shamefacedly stopping by to visit my good friends Walt and Betty Essex around supper time. One morning, after a couple of weeks of this, I walked from Oval’s apartment to the Farm Boy Restaurant, the meeting spot for Oval’s former brick crew, and asked the boss, Wavy Romans, for a job. Familiar with Oval’s tendencies, Wavy had already let me know his outfit could use another worker.

The rest of the summer, I worked for Wavy and his son Ronnie, becoming their number-one hod carrier. I assembled the scaffolding and carefully leveled it with wood scraps, adding a second level as we worked up a wall. I made the mud (i.e., mortar), mixing the correct proportions of sand, cement, and water in a large tub with a hoe, and then kept the bricklayers supplied with fresh mud and made sure it maintained the right consistency. Using brick tongs, I delivered twenty bricks at a time, ten in each hand, to whoever needed them. As we finished a wall, I’d use a joint raker to clean excess grout from the mortar joints and then wash the bricks. And at the end of the day, I’d carefully clean the trowels, hoes, and mortar tub.

We worked all over Butler County and neighboring Ohio and Muhlenberg counties. Sometimes our job sites were rather rudimentary; on one job, I had to draw water from a well by hand to make the mud. Every day was a workout that included lugging mortar blocks or tongs full of bricks and buckets full of mud, often lifting them above my head to reach the 2 x 10 scaffold planks. My upper body became as ripped as it would ever be in my life. At the end of the day, I’d arrive home exhausted, walk out to the back porch, strip down, pull a pail of bone-chilling cold water up from the well, and pour it over my head. Nothing had ever felt quite so good.

I enjoyed working with the crew, which usually consisted of four bricklayers and two hod carriers. Driving to a site with our equipment, we’d shout, “Brick job!” – our voices charged with pride and delight – whenever we saw a house under construction, as if we could claim it by exclamation. We’d stop for lunch at one of the grocery stores found at many country crossroads. At the small deli counter, sandwiches could be made to our liking and pickles fished from a ceramic crock.[4] Head cheese sandwiches were popular, but I always passed.

By the end of September, Wavy was talking about training me to lay bricks. Although the idea of becoming a bricklayer appealed to me, summer was fading, the wind was changing, and my wanderlust was calling. At the time, I tended to agree with Joni Mitchell that “all that stays is dying and all that lives is getting out.”[5]

In retrospect, I can say that hod carrier work was hard labor that didn’t pay well, but it wasn’t a “bullshit job,” a job like telemarketing or fulfilling orders in an Amazon warehouse. It felt meaningful to make homes, especially ones with some durability, ones that could protect a few little pigs from a wolf. After four months working for Wavy and Ronnie, I’d saved enough from my paychecks to buy one of the Volkswagen Beetles my friend Walt had rebuilt, with enough cash left over to roam for the next three months, first driving out to Iowa, where my family now lived, and then hitchhiking to the West Coast. It was as much as I needed, a fair exchange for my labor.

Footnotes:

[1] Located on the land of the Erie and Kaskaskia peoples, the park was designated in 2000. It follows the Ohio and Erie Canal and the Cuyahoga River, which caught fire in 1969, and it includes what was once the most contaminated dump site in the U.S.

[2] For more on that trip, read my blog post entitled Carpe Diem Days.

[3] You can refer to my blog posts An Alternative Education, Part 1 and An Alternative Education, Part 2 for more details.

[4] And if we were particularly hungry, bags of Mikesell’s Bar-B-Q chips.

[5] From her song “Urge for Going” (1966).