In Minnesota the trains run on time. Usually. Or there’s a good excuse. This goes for passenger trains, which are few and singularly urban. Freight trains are anybody’s guess, as they run on their own private timetables, day and night.
Minnesota has a reputation for cold winter. It’s true. It’s not true winter lasts ten months. They say if not for the legend it’s so winter here our population would rival Mexico City because it’s so nice to live here when it isn’t winter — I’m not sure true that is because you can’t prove a negative. It is nice to live here though almost all year long.
I live in Minneapolis, the state’s largest city of barely a half million souls. Next door is Saint Paul, the capital city, the other twin of the Twin Cities, with a slightly smaller population. The Twin Cities are surrounded by a seven county radius of suburbs with about a million more people combined, forming a sprawling, prosperous metropolitan community embedded within a region of small, medium, large and very tiny towns, cities and villages among the farmlands, forests, bluffs, prairies, lakes and rivers of the verdant landscape of this land in the middle of the continent.
Why should you or anybody care? Being obscure and modest is Minnesota stock and trade. We’re almost Swiss or Dutch in that way. Our culture is heavily salted with European immigration from the 19th and 20th Centuries peppered with migrants from colorful origins since the second world war, so our people are a mix and a blend of that society devised by our forbears of the eastern states and colonies since the 1600s. Not but two hundred years ago mostly occupied by Ojibwe and Dakota natives, the place now known as Minnesota — a loose approximation of Ojibwe for Water Reflects the Sky — was secured by the federal government in Washington and attracted waves of moneyed entrepreneurs from the eastern states as well as pioneers and settlers looking to prosper in an undeveloped territory. What exists today is a highly functioning American example of America.
Nowhere is perfect. I can think of at least one city that calls itself Eden (Prairie) but look closely and it falls short of a garden of paradise. I already mentioned Minnesota’s greatest flaw, the subfrozen winter. Any whiner can come up with lists and litanies of pet peeves against Minnesota, all legitimate in the whiner’s eyes. Who refutes there’s too much crime — does anyone anywhere complain there isn’t enough crime, especially in the cities? The debate goes on: are there ever enough civil liberties? Atonement for trespasses of the past tries to address future trespasses before they happen so as not to stick ourselves with unforeseen consequences. Such is the mess of secular democracy.
Minnesota is a pretty good place to come from, and a good place to be. There’s barely enough interesting history, and most of it archaeological and paleontological. As I said, western cultural settlement didn’t spread until the middle 1800s, so what passes for state history comprises barely a few generations of enterprise, migration, production and socialization to evolve into the prosperous aggregation of commerce, philosophy, tradition, labor, agriculture, science, art, environmental stewardship and common courtesy embedded in the interdependent institutions that frame daily life in this place where architectural monuments that emulate styles of the ancient past are buildings only a hundred years old. Our civilization is young, though fast aging.
You could say we’re mature. As one measure of prosperity, Minnesota is home base of fifteen Fortune 500 companies. Medtronic started here. Hearing aid technology emerged here. Multinational companies locate here. We’re global. Not bad for someplace only known a hundred years ago for forestry, flour milling, mining and rustic recreation. And that’s just big business. Small business drives local economies. Entrepreneurs can make a go of their mercantile visions. The region is known for its educated workforce. The standard of living is high and unemployment rate is low. Poverty is on a steady decline. All in all an optimist could look at Minnesota and see a place where humanity realistically achieves opportunities to aspire to its most ideal goals.
As Walter Brennan used to say on that 1960s Western TV show, no brag just fact.
Minnesota is an important concept — or meme, as they say — because our governor is now running for Vice President of the United States. His character and likeness reflect our state to the world, and the world needs to know where he is coming from.
His name is Tim. Easy to pronounce. Walz, as in four walls. Call him Tim Balls-to-the Walz.
Born and raised in Nebraska — which, if you know America and very little about Minnesota, is even more the middle of nowhere — he comes from the so-called heartland of rural America celebrated as being the root homesteads of normal, everyday Americans. After graduating state college he took a stint teaching English in a middle school in China at a city upriver north of Hong Kong, then ended up in Minnesota with his newlywed wife (both educators) where he taught social studies and geography and coached defense for a high school football team which won a state championship. He served 24 years in the Army National Guard, retiring as a master sergeant to run for congress in Minnesota’s First Congressional District, a rural, predominately country-town district, which he won as a moderate liberal and got re-elected five times before being elected state governor. He is in his second term.
In his first term as governor Walz served through the covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. He issued a declaration of peacetime public emergency five days after the first confirmed covid death in the state. The emergency lasted sixteen months. As the infection rate and the death toll rose, Governor Walz imposed strict shutdowns to commerce, education, public gatherings and social life, all to as he said “flatten the curve” of the rampaging disease. Every day he and his public health and economic staff addressed the state on TV offering statistics, hope and encouragement — full-faced leadership — to define to the people the facts of the situation and every citizen’s duty to make the effort to stop the disease for the common good, in the spirit of We’re All in this Together. By and large the strategy worked. Test kits were shipped to homes upon request. When vaccines were approved they were shipped to vaccination centers and then to pharmacies. Gradually the infection rate declined, restrictions were eased and the governor relinquished emergency powers.
Critics and resisters to the governor’s lockdowns call his actions anti-democratic and dictatorial. What I saw was pragmatic and decisive situation management focused on a greater good and broadest well being of the citizens. Governor Tim Balls-to-the Walz acted with the best interests of everyday people in mind. He expressed genuine compassion for the sacrifices he asked us to make and mustered as much relief and compensation as a state could make to mitigate such a dire, unforeseen situation. Under Governor Walz the children got meals.
All was not rosy that lost pandemic year. That spring George Floyd got killed in a slow death by a police officer on a street in Minneapolis, caught on video, and the social reaction erupted with outrage. You might be familiar with this episode of Minnesota history. Thousands of demonstrators and protesters assembled in the streets and commercial corridors connecting the place where Floyd died and the 3rd precinct police station where the lead cop who killed Floyd was based. My house is somewhere between those two locations, so traffic in the neighborhood bustled, vehicular and pedestrians, people going to the demonstrations. Governor Walz reminded the demonstrators and protesters of their duty to remain peaceful. And not forget to wear face masks and keep safe social distance.
After nightfall the day after Floyd died the protesters obeying the curfew left the neighborhood and a new bunch took their parking spaces and headed to the commercial corridors to stoke more protests. Some carried jugs of milk to splash in their faces as an antidote to the tear gas they expected that night. Some deployed commercial grade fireworks for ammunition. Looting broke out, then arson, and eventually the 3rd precinct police station was at siege of a mob determined to break in and burn the place down. The cops stood up to the mob. A fight to the death looked imminent. The cops in riot gear resisted the taunts and threats, hardly in a position of sympathy for their treatment of George Floyd just one day ago. There was no question who would have won in a bloody clash between the police and the mob. The cops could have mopped them up like rags. Instead the authorities sacrificed the precinct building plus blocks of retail and office industrial to destruction in the prevention of loss of life. The police evacuated and surrendered the precinct. It was ransacked and torched. Helicopters broadcast live video from overhead.
At the formal request of the mayor of Minneapolis the governor called out the Army National Guard to station troops in the city to reinforce law enforcement and firefighters to establish order and enforce curfews. The rampage of riots ended. After a scary night left ashes from the nearby arsons on the neighborhood lawns a grim stability settled over the city as the citizen soldiers in beige cammies stood guard and kept peace in a community dazed against itself.
Critics say Governor Walz hesitated and slow-walked deploying the National Guard to prevent the riots from burning Minneapolis. Some say with his emergency powers from covid he could have acted faster, even though there are protocols in place to legitimately deploy citizen soldier troops, known of course to Walz being a 24 year veteran. He called up the troops as soon as he could justify the threat.
If Governor Balls-to-the Walz made a mistake in not ordering the National Guard before the chaos broke loose his mistake was to place faith and trust in the citizens exercising their constitutional rights to peaceably assemble to express their outrage over the murder of a black man by a white police officer over an arrest for passing a phony $20 bill. Walz recognized the public’s need too vent and to grieve and he believed in the right to peaceful protest. Since his younger days teaching in China he has been engaged with their democracy movement and inspired by the courage of the demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. In Minneapolis after George Floyd he put his faith in the better angels of Minnesota. He expected us to police ourselves. And by daylight, according to published itinerary, you saw masked protesters marching up East Lake St spaced paces apart, chanting maybe — you couldn’t read their lips — blocking traffic, such as any cars could get through the roadblocks and detours created by the city to accommodate the peaceful protests. After sundown the masks came off and all pretense of a peaceful vigil for the fallen George Floyd disappeared in lawless disrespect.
Maybe Walz could have predicted the riots and called out the Guard a a precaution. Walz knew that was a bad idea, expressing the wrong message of a state distrusting its people. It’s a shame Walz was proven wrong. Too bad the peaceful angels didn’t prevail. The Guard arrived to provide checkpoints to backstop a metropolitan coalition of law enforcement scrambling to catch bold and reckless criminals taking advantage of cops calling in sick for the rest of their careers at the Minneapolis police department.
Ultimately only two people died during the riots. Both were adult men. One was shot by a proprietor defending himself in his shop against an aggressive intruder. The other was found charred in a burned out retail store where he was apparently overcome by his own arson before he could escape.
The property damage exceeded half a billion dollars. Damage to the economy sabotaged efforts to get ahead of the curve of coming out of the pandemic. Even so, by the end of June, 2021 the governor gave up the emergency powers. The curve of covid infection in Minnesota had flattened enough to justify reopening a restless society, and for all the frustrations of that lost sixteen months Minnesotans emerged from the pandemic with feisty resilience. In Minneapolis, National Guard long gone, rubble shoveled away (except for the charred remains of the 3rd police precinct left as a scarred urban monument to bad behavior), the city did not implode but actually resurrected itself as a vibrant urban community, defying doomsayers who predicted it would spiral into a hellhole. It should be noted that rioters refrained from damaging residential blocks, not that it excuses the devastation of commercial properties though it shows a decent amount of clemency among mass deviants on a binge of destruction.
Two years later Governor Walz got re-elected by a wider margin than the first time. It means at the ballot box a majority of voters approved the governance of the policies of the administration of Tim Balls-to-the Walz. Also elected that election a majority from Walz’s party in each house of the state legislature, which enabled liberal legislation favoring consumers, families, students, health care and sundry progressive objectives, signed by Governor Walz. Nothing radical, mind you. Good sense legislation enabling greater good. Functioning government. It’s difficult to picture Walz radical. He is the face of practicality and consensus.
The face of Minnesota.
Easily mocked, Walz embodies an everyman of the middle of Middle America. A futurist mind in a throwback body. He speaks plain, concise eloquence in a throaty husky voice and talks fast in rapid cadence, not in a flamboyant or deceitful tone but as somebody respectful of the listener’s time and attention. Like a well-written owner’s manual He has a high school teacher’s method of explaining. He talks with his voice, his face and his hands. He can be funny and dead pan serious. Not a fancy dresser, he can be mocked for black and red plaid Paul Bunyan wool shirts, he owns a blaze orange deer vest and knows how to step into a pair of waders. He cleans up well, though, in a suit and tie when appropriate. He wore his army uniform proudly in his day but never showed off when he was on duty. Incidentally, Walz is white, as is about 74% of the state, and male, which is, you know, about half.
He’s the governor of a state that guarantees free lunch to every kid in public school. Not to mention free menstrual supplies in every public school. And guarantees freedom for all women’s rights over their bodies and reproductive health. Where personal freedom and rights balance with government’s capability to act on behalf of the public good. As an educator alone, much less a soldier and public servant, Tim Balls-to-the Walz recognizes a duty to invest in actions that benefit humanity like early nutrition programs to nurture healthy kids and environmental regulations to safeguard the habitat of all citizens.
He genuinely practices politics with joy. He really thinks public service is enjoyable. I’ve never heard him speak about his religion but he strikes me as a John Wesley kind of guy, doing good as much as he can, often as he can, many ways as he can, good for the sake of good. He led the state through the lost year of the covid pandemic with aplomb and forthright optimism, and when it was done he kept reopening the doors of society to make the most of opportunities to bridge people. Unlike other politicians who are in it to piss you off, Tim Walz is in the profession to make you happy.
When you drive across the state line on the interstate highway there’s a big sign: MINNESOTA WELCOMES YOU.
There’s an implicit promise to treat you right. All of you. Singular and plural.
There is a great deal of diversity here, and not only in its mixed cultural and racial exponents this past century or so. The natural landscape itself is an array of different topographies, geographies and biologies. It’s called the land of ten thousand lakes, but with classic modesty it numbers more than fifteen thousand. That includes the cliffside coast of western Lake Superior, the biggest freshwater body of water in the world. There’s the Boundary Waters wilderness on the forest border with Canada with its chains of endless waterways in the pristine woods. Further south the timber lands cede to inhabitants amid the woods and lakes, and farms where the woods yield to the prairie landscape, farms and flatlands of row crops and waves of tall wild grassland. Where lakes are more scarce there are chains of rivers and streams, The Red River on the border with North Dakota flows north to the Arctic Ocean. The main artery the rivers and streams of Minnesota flow into is the Mississippi River, whose source fittingly begins in a lake in the north woods and following gravity inches ever slowly downhill, south through the body of America to the Gulf of Mexico. The land formations within the state offer towering lookouts and exposed petroglyphs. There are 644 state parks in Minnesota, a national park along the northern border with Canada and a national monument at the sacred pipestone quarry near the prairie to the sky, not far from South Dakota and Iowa.
There are no mountains in Minnesota, just high hills. No deserts either, unless that’s what a winter snowscape looks like. No ocean beaches or ports of call, just some sandy lake shore, and Duluth harbor on Lake Superior suffices to link Minnesota to the Atlantic by way of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. To borrow again from Nebraska, maybe it isn’t for everybody.
It’s a good place to come from though. Judy Garland. F Scott Fitzgerald. Prince. Louise Erdrich. Suni Lee. Bob Dylan. Amy Klobuchar. Sinclair Lewis. Gordon Parks. Paul Wellstone. August Wilson. Hubert Humphrey. Roy Wilkins. Those are just a few who come to mind. Now along with Tim Walz.
Kamala Harris showed a lot of moxie choosing Walz to join her ticket to succeed Joe Biden and her in the White House. It has been, as Dylan himself sang it, a Simple Twist of Fate that has coursed this upcoming election for the American president through Minnesota as Harris takes charge of her campaign to earn the heart and soul of the United States. Her deference to Minnesota bespeakes wisdom in seeing character within and above the crowd of crats — bureaucrats, technocrats, aristocrats and democrats — to find a vice president to help manage the office of the toughest job on earth. Tim Walz is a great choice.
There’s joy in hope. Take heart. Electing Kamala Harris president is a wise, healthy choice for America. The alternative is like a self-induced stroke to the brain.
I have matured to the status of patriarch of my clan, the eldest male Kelly. Eldest male Sturgis. I am patriarch to a matriarchy, if not a simple feminarchy. Most of the women in my family are indeed mothers, but not everybody. My grandkids, all three girls, aren’t moms yet. My one and only daughter is a mother. I have childless nieces. All my aunts have kids, all younger than me. With the feeblest wisp of primogeniture, the first born Kelly grandchild of one Donald J Kelly happens to be male, me, in a world dominated from day one by women. My whole life I’ve lived in feminarchy.
It goes without saying what a pussywhipped husband I am. Wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s been my supreme pleasure to serve Roxanne’s happiness. She is my true love, the love of my life. We’ve been married over fifty consecutive, uninterrupted years. She believes in fairness. She’s an honest, honorable and faithful person of reasoned judgment to whom I’ve deferred for every big decision. She’s the boss of our household. She forgives and she gives permission. I get my say but Roxanne decides what’s best. I know she loves me and respects me. Somehow I fulfill a role of Man of the House without any obvious dominance. I’ve been a good partner for her and her curiosity about the world. She has kept me just under the top in my personal approach. We may disagree, or we may agree for different reasons. Happy wife, happy life goes the old axiom. And one means to being a cool grandpa is being attached to a cool grandma.
My life in a feminarchy got going long before I met Roxanne and maybe prepared me for her. My mother was a charismatic, dominating personality. My father had no true authority or credibility in our family. Looking back a generation beyond them, my Grandma Mary, my dad’s mother, raised him as a single mother from his youth around World War II, his parents splitting up when my grandfather Sturgis went off to war. In my life I only met my grandfather Sturgis twice. His parents were long gone, but Grandma Mary and her sister Aunt Winnie both say Grandma Sturgis was the brains of that outfit as well. Mary and Winnie’s mother, Great-grandma Stoner to me, lived to be 97 and outlived their n’er do well father by several decades and there were no Stoner men to so much as carry on the name.
Grandma Mary went on to marry a younger man in John McCormick after the war and had my two uncles. They lived in Indiana and we saw them about once a year. Grandma Mary would stay with us when our mother was in the hospital, either to have a baby or a nervous breakdown but over the years grew more distant and further apart from us kids, especially after our parents divorced. Grandma Mary had her own family to dominate in Indiana. John McCormick never asserted himself as a grandfatherly patriarch to our clan but left behind two sons, my uncles, who have their own clan legacies to work out separate from us Kellys. Without Grandma Mary — or Aunt Winnie — there is no link of authority to our kinship to the Stoners and the name is extinct. The Sturgis side too is virtually extinct since our mother went to court to have us all declared Kelly. 23 and Me, the ancestry service tells me I have scores of DNA relatives on the Sturgis side, very likely descendants of the predecessors of the clan who settled in southern Minnesota, many of whom still live in the old country or migrated west to Seattle, but all these shares of genetics wherever in the world most probably are dominated by females of their respective clans.
I can only look to my own clan, as stretched out as far as I can see, and women and girls comprise the power and the glory forever, amen. Only Donald Kelly, my mother’s father, the only true grandfather I ever knew, holds any distinction of authority and credence in our family history who was male and could be considered a patriarch of his clan, until he died at 59, when I was eight. And even so, he was succeeded by his widow, my Grandma Kelly, my mom’s mother, a terrifyingly mean woman of vile temper and solicitously sadistic vocabulary who doubtlessly tormented Don Kelly the self-made rich patriarch who worked extra hours to get out of the house, and she has been more than rumored to have driven him to his heart attack and early death — she was what they used to call a shrew. She and my mother clashed like raging tornadoes until grandma banished her and us kids from her house and cabin (an estate really, at a prominent point on a popular lake) after grandpa died, and grandma ceased to have any leverage over mom’s family, us, or to express any interest in our lives and welfare for the rest of her nasty narcissistic life.
Mom had three sisters, and each in their way paid a curse to remain in a semblance of good grace to their mean wacky mother to sustain her through an eventual marriage to a closeted gay gigolo fifteen years her junior and move to his hometown in the San Francisco Bay area where she succumbed to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. My aunts, all younger than my mom, babysat me and my sisters when we were little and looked after us when they were in high school until grandma kicked us out. Losing connection to the youngest two aunts hurt because it felt like a More For Me exclusion. They kept up visitation to grandma’s cabin well after grandma herself deeded it to them before she died.
I felt abandoned by my mom’s youngest sisters. They meant my golden years to me. Grandpa Kelly was Don Kelly, alive and in charge. At Christmas. At the lake. My aunts taught me to swim and water ski. And dance. How to smoke Winstons and read comic books. Best of all they owned copies of every top ten 45 rpm record from 1954 through 1961, and a good portable record player the size of a suitcase and they trusted me to play their records and gave me unlimited access. For this alone, the unlimited access to the earliest hits of rock and roll songs, I am grateful to my aunts because it represents my romantic inclinations about life and love. From those aunts and their friends and cohorts, frolicking, water skiing, drive-in movies, cruising around the lake in boats and partying, dancing, all I wanted was to be a teenager — or as Dion DiMucci put it, a teenager in love. Didn’t happen for me, not at the cabin up at the lake. Years have gone by, decades and generations, and I have never been invited there to visit, not so much as a day trip, not even lunch. The property is still in my aunts’ family, more or less, though nobody named Kelly. My aunts’ descendants swim and water ski and teach their kids. I am of an outside clan.
The eldest child of Colleen Kelly who happens to be a male is the only pillar to make me a patriarch to my clan, but it’s an illusion. I’m the oldest of ten. Seven are sisters. I had four sisters before one brother was born, and then three more before another brother. There was never any way I could get special privileges for being a boy. I did housework chores, washed dishes, vacuumed carpets, scrubbed floors and toilets. They were chores of survival in a chaotic household where our mother the matriarch could not govern coherently and we were saved by the steady guidance of our beloved housekeeper, Eula Pratt.
Today I am a survivor in this world in some ways due to feminarchy. It certainly hasn’t hurt. My gradeschool teachers at St Simon of Cyrene were all female, as were each of the two principals. I always took the nuns more seriously than the priests. High school I remember two significant teachers, both women. At least half my college professors were women. Most of my bosses and supervisors at work were women. None of this seemed revolutionary or unusual at the time.
Eight of the top ten and fifteen of the top twenty in grade points of the high school class I supposedly graduated were girls. It was not surprising. They were all very smart. Three tied at 4.0 and had to play Rock Paper Scissors to get too give the valedictorian speech. They are probably doctors.
This is not to disavow any consciousness of male chauvinism in my lifetime, making my awareness of feminism and acceptance a conscious choice as much as my feminarchical upbringing. It seems as much a shock today as it was some time in my youth to realize women didn’t have the right to vote in the USA until about a hundred years ago. Today the rights of women worldwide don’t match up with their proportion of the population, where they cannot vote, or work, or own property, and whose bodies are held as chattel to this day. I am gifted to live in a society which, however belatedly in human history, offers equity and equality to women of all gender and persuasion. Even the right wing political parties of Europe are led by women. Even wing-nut leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene can project a voice in America. Both US Senators from my state of Minnesota are women, as is half the state’s congressional delegation, more than half the Minneapolis city council and all seven members of the city council of St Paul. Several key state legislators and federal and state judges are women, as is the newest president of the state land grant university. Four justices on the Supreme Court are women. The Vice President of the United States. This is not exceptional or extraordinary. This is what it is.
When Clara was little, around seven, at yet another tour of an art museum, she asked me why there was so much art by men and why so much women as subject matter. I didn’t have a ready answer. The historical record supported her question, both parts. Art history too supplied the answers. Most of history as we know it was written by and for men of patriarchal societies. What apparently pleased men the most was artistically rendered human figures of the female form.
To answer the first part of her question I began to compile a list of names of women artists I have encountered through their works in museums and galleries I have moseyed through the past thirteen or so years in Europe and North America. There are about two hundred names in the Word file Known Women Artists ranging from Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe to Judy Onofrio and Olga Volchkova. The list is not in alphabetical or any genre or chronological order and may include a duplicate name or two. I leave it to Clara and Tess to add to it of their own volition knowing these name make a good start if ever seeking examples to study in their spare time. I am done collecting such names, unless of course I see something stunning.
To the second part of the question I leave unanswered the pose of the human form for Clara and Tess to discover and determine on their own. They have likely sensed that I personally approve of female figures in art — clothed and unclothed — but it is not for me to direct them to appropriately appreciate these figures. I leave it to them to critique and draw their own conclusions.
I am an American white cisgender male. At age 72 I am the oldest living person of my clan, but I am not in charge, except of course of myself and my own conduct and so forth, but nothing of the sort of a chain of command of familial legacy. I have no birthright authority. I am not the dad of The Lords of Discipline or Purple Hibiscus, to offer two extremes. As an oldest brother I’ve tried to avoid Big Brother is Watching You — our mother did enough familial meddling to take an extra generation to untangle, and I don’t need to get entangled in the untanglements; her legal last will was clear, we split the assets ten equal ways and I acted as executor, I didn’t try to tell anybody how to spend the proceeds. Further, I’ve never expressed judgment in my sisters’ choices of boyfriends or husbands to influence their choices because their romantic lives are truly none of my beeswax. That goes for nieces and nephews, brothers and grandchildren.
This does not mean I don’t have my opinions and feelings for other people, I’m just not the family boss. I offer advice if asked, even if in the most subtle or passive aggressive way — one of my career talents as a banker — but I hedge a lot even so, sometimes I can be wrong. As I have matured and aged, even if my above techniques to avoid asserting pretentious authority over my siblings guided me well to mind my own beeswax when we were all younger, the lessons of a longer life have only reinforced what I learned to live and let live. My paternal guidance of my kids and grandkids is founded on my example to them in every interaction, and if my entire life — not just their lifetimes — might not be the best example of judgment and behavior, I am shy (not modest) and would rather impart the lesson than reveal the long story of how I learned it and why.
As it turns out I’ve led a very safe existence. No assassination attempts, not even those of character. A metaphor describing my life would be that I never served in the armed forces. Never enlisted. Never drafted. If I got something out of high school it was the compassion of a vice principal who agreed my antiauthoritarian attitude and military discipline would benefit nobody, not the armed forces, not me, and seriously not the nation, and wrote a letter to my draft board supporting my petition to be classified as a Conscientious Objector, and I am guessing his letter had some sway because I was granted CO classification. My lottery number never came up and I was spared ‘Nam. Spared peacetime service too. Spared military discipline. Spared veterans benefits and the GI Bill too. Spared all that and still lived through reverberations of the Vietnam war, the generation of veterans, anti-war heroes and resettled refugees who shaped some of my culture since I grew up.
I choose not to blame my mistakes on nobody mentoring me to function respectably well in this very real world, and instead admit and own to a self-guided arrogance compounded by my young ignorance that led me to make stupid choices and wasted use of my time. Fortunately I did not go to prison but I did spend a few hours behind bars under the clock at Hennepin County jail for a rash of unpaid parking tickets. I have been fired from a couple of jobs, and looking back have to admit, rightly so, I was a bad fit for the position. Gradually it seems I caught on to ways the world works and learned I wasn’t all that smart, special or clever or anywhere near as gifted as my mother asserted when I was a child.
Fortunately I was younger than middle aged when I discovered my power to squander the insight I could gain by dropping pretending I was the coolest guy on campus, the hippest fan at the concert, the smartest dude at the ranch. I resented Harvey McKay but learned nothing about outswimming sharks. Or Zen: Japanese management or motorcycle maintenance. I was 26 (Roxanne 25) when Michel was born. I wasn’t ready — most people aren’t — and still had trepidations about bringing a new human being into a world fraught with so much crazyass shit, but at the heart of the matter I wanted to be a father to have someone to love and nurture as a good person. I took it as a bonus that my first born was a daughter — a beautiful surprise — today almost every expectant parent learns a baby’s sex in utero, but believe it or not back as late as the early 1980s most parents didn’t know what sex their child was until he or she was born, and Roxanne and I didn’t really care. I saw having a daughter, looking ahead into the next generation, was riding in the shotgun seat of destiny and being privy to the future world. Title IX arrived for her just in time. Having a daughter was poetic justice. Through Michel I learned to back off and observe and let her run ahead of me to see where she would lead or come back to take my hand. Being a father taught me humility. I was 30 when Vincent was born and having a son (again we didn’t know until) added balance, harmony, conflict, abrasion and synchronicity. Fathering them reignited my curiosities and fascinations about life. I hope I have reflected well upon them what they taught me to learn.
When I first held Clara my first grandchild she was a few minutes old and I was 53 and I saw in her eyes the vision of the future I wanted to see. Tess was born almost three years later to save Clara from the fate of an only child. My only grandchildren were girls. My daughter’s kids were girls. Clara and Tess lived in Europe for four years and the benefits of visiting them are beyond esteem in my life and have paid me forward in their lives in ways I will try to forever repay. They have lived in Minneapolis over six years and I chronicle here and elsewhere my grandfatherly participation in their family upbringing. Let’s say I’ve had my chances to mess with their heads.
Neko is my son’s daughter, an only child. She will soon be six, a first grader, born when I was 66, already retired and on Medicare. For several reasons she is a special child. I love Clara my firstborn grandchild with a special bond of mutual originality. I love Tess for her eccentric willpower and loving sincerity. I love Neko as my last chance to impart my legacy of love, peace and happiness to the world. Maybe it’s because I am retired and more available to lend child care now than when Clara and Tess were little, or maybe it’s because Roxanne and I live within ten-minute proximity of Vincent and Amelie, and much of it because of pod arrangements getting through the covid-19 pandemic, I have spent more time with a kid her age than any I recall since Michel and Vincent. It’s been strange getting to book club status with the two teenager grandkids and starting over from la-la-la with the third but it’s been fun and funny starting over from the beginning. Okay, maybe I’m not as limber for playing at the park as I was with earlier kids in my care, but I try.
I began this essay musing about finding myself by default the family geezer. This is not a problem. It’s not a cause for lament. Or panic. It’s a fact. I have three namesakes of sorts — my daughter Michel is named for my middle name, and her two daughters share their mother’s name for their middle names — which hardly counts as birthright legacies from a patriarch. The Kelly name from my mother’s clan will likely pass away with Neko, Vincent’s daughter, my six year old granddaughter, who, regardless of whether a marriage changes her name would not likely pass to her children the Kelly surname, if she has any children. Regardless, after Vincent there are no more male Kellys. My brothers Sean and Kevin’s children are all daughters. My nieces and nephews no matter their sex bear their fathers’ surnames except my dead sister Molly’s daughters, whose kids include two boys both with their fathers’ surnames. Two of my sisters are legally Kelly, Leenie and Heather, but all their kids aren’t. My mother’s sisters have not been Kellys since about 1965 and thus none of their kids, my cousins, are nominally Kellys — in a way no wonder they all resented my mom so much. Even at the top of the chain, within a few years of the death of Grandpa Don, Grandma Grace got married and surrendered her Kelly for the surname Cole. I am not the last Kelly, just the oldest living Kelly male.
Forget my father’s side. The Stoner name went extinct with my great grandmother, who lived to be 97 but didn’t pass the surname. Her two daughters married and assumed new names naturally enough. Far as anyone knows, Thomas Stoner, Grandma Stoner’s inept husband was an only child. The Sturgis surname of my father more or less disappeared from the Earth in divorce court when my mother’s petition to rename all her kids Kelly was granted. My grandfather George Sturgis I met only twice I recall, though he lived in Florida well into his deep 80s. It is said Grandpa George (as we kids referred to him when we prayed our God Bless litany before bed) had some brothers but they remained obscure and invisible. There was a Charles Sturgis who my dad referred to as Cousin Chuckie, who established a communications firm of such success he became known as rich and an influential philanthropist, who died recently survived by a brother and a daughter and son named Kevin I’ve never encountered in person or in the press. One time Roxanne and I took a road trip down south of Rochester to Stewartville, roots of the Sturgis and Stoners. Both family farms have passed from the families. At the cemetery we located several gravestones of Sturgises. My dad has two brothers by his mother, who remarried after Grandpa George, but those uncles go by McCormick, live in Indiana and have little to do with us surviving Kellys, they have their own clan to care for.
Without a namesake or coat of arms to rally them in the future I rely on the court of my lady offspring to carry on. They will be more effective than I am. Beyond laissez faire, I’m just plain lazy. I’m not good at organizing picnics. I let things organically fall into place, what will be will be, knowing if human planning and intervention is warranted, the females in my family will make it so. As Shakespeare’s Juliet says, “What’s in a name?”
Little is said about Thomas Kelly, my great grandfather. Grandpa Don Kelly was the youngest of 13, ten of whom were girls. Thomas died when Don was 3. The family had recently moved to East Saint Paul from a small central Minnesota town called Bird Island. Their existence in Bird Island is murky. No property records show any land in their name. Small town talk recalls a Thomas Kelly of dubious reputation likened to a horse thief who was run out of town around the turn of the 20th century. An Irishman who appeared out of the mist who said he was from Ohio married one Kathleen Kelley of Bird Island, Minnesota, apparently worked the local farms, fathered 13 kids and for some reason — if nothing else perhaps the allure of a job with the railroad in the Big Cities — moved his brood to a big old house in a working class settlement on the eastern fringe of St Paul, where he summarily died, we are told, of natural causes.
The true hero of the family saga is the surviving widow Kathleen, for whom my sister Leenie is named, who raised her 13 kids as a matriarchal mastermind. She put the elder kids to work until the younger ones caught up and until the youngest one actually graduated college and attended law school. It was like the family ponzi scheme for the Kelly siblings to support young Don, and by accounts of a couple of sisters who survived him, my mother’s aunts Kitty and Madge, Don used proceeds from his early success as an attorney to provide for their aging mother and generously recompensated those sisters and brothers who helped him get his education. The mother Kathleen passed away in her eighties, when Don was around thirty — yes, Don was a late child, my mom would tell us, and there was the risk that a child born to a woman of 50 was at risk of being retarded, implying the opposite, the child could be a genius. My mom never knew her grandmother, who passed away before Don met Grace, but spoke about her as an icon of motherhood and discipline. I never heard a first person account of what kind of charisma Kathleen Kelly possessed to manage to almost create a dynasty around a patriarch in the person of Donald J Kelly.
That would have been ironic. As it turns out nobody of either sex inherited his mantle, his law firm or commercial real estate portfolio or seats on boards of tech companies. Yes, his widow and daughters inherited a substantial estate, all held in trust until grandma’s death. By then the bank that administered the trust, faithful to grandpa’s impeccable will, preserved the principal assets but left the heirs, my mom and her sisters, no enterprise or company to carry on. This of course liberated each sister to capitalize her assets and establish a brand of her own, which none of them ever did. No matter.
I of little ambition in the first place recognize my place in the great scheme of things, and at my advanced age find myself content in the material world. Don’t infer this confession to mean I’m satisfied with how this world adds up today. I expect better from humanity, but with some familiarity with history I can see a lot of evidence we are getting to be what we can be. Much of my contentment derives from my fortunate material well being, a comfortable middle class American retiree. The rest of my outlook from this comfortable perspective sees progress and opportunities for good, even in view of atrocities, sadness and tragedies. One trend of light that generates my hope is the normality of the influence of women in the course of human events.
The most powerful marketing force the world has ever known is named after an ancient tribe of women warriors. From Princess Diana to Isabel Allende my generation has been shaped by women of our time. We name-drop Harriet Tubman to cite our historical credentials but whether woke or unwoke, DEI or not, liberal civilization depends on the participation of its women to survive in generations beyond the Baby Boom. You don’t need to empower women. They got it already. To try to take it away at this point, to silence the voice of Margaret Atwood, for example, invites what it takes shy of real world Lysistrata conspiracy in retaliation.
Blame Women’s Lib, I don’t care. Today’s world feminacracy will be tomorrow’s best path towards peace and prosperity across the planet. This is a way bigger effin’ deal than drivers licenses in Arabia. If democracies prevail it will take the leadership of women like Ida B Wells and on in America to shunt aside strong man dictators and patriarchal diktats such as ISIS and Taliban. In western democracy women can try and fail just like men, and try again and perhaps prevail at the ballot. Europe and the UK illustrate thus, left and right.
The United States staggers on to elect its first woman President, having muffed the chance in 2016. Kamala Harris exemplifies all I’ve been saying this whole essay.
Retreat to chauvinism at great peril. That’s my advice to wannabe patriarchs today. Like the Ice Queen sings it in the movie, Let It Go. Any superstitious pretense of machismo power will be challenged. You will have daughters. And nieces. Sisters and wives. They will probably be better educated.
So as I get older and older by years, day by day I come to clearly realize I don’t care about my forebears very much any more. I’m interested in my descendants. Almost all of them are female — son Vincent the sole genetical holdout, and his sole child is a girl. If seeing them run loose in this world isn’t vicarious heaven on this earth then I would have no faith to guide my love. I look at both my kids, and their kids, and at Roxanne, and I want to say I couldn’t have planned it better. This is a moment to savor like a summer evening in July around sundown.
Our family is permanent, said Tess. We tend to prove it true.
I usually rise in the morning before sunrise. I can’t help it. I’m done sleeping and my mind awakens to the day. StarTribune and coffee. July morning on the front porch.
From this lucky vantage I can gather a humble wisdom. I can look back and reflect all I want and it all adds up to this, and I’m happy. I’m happy it’s not over. I project new memories, future things. My life will be much like it is, but new things will happen. I’ll see something new. The more you see the more you know the more you see, my son in law Sid recited to me a lifetime ago, which he got from a professor at UM Duluth. For me it keeps adding up.
I’m 72 now and there’s no hip cryptic fancy slogan to go with it like my last one, my Summer of 69. Nothing like 63, That’s Easy to Remember; or Hey, I’m 64; and Gettin’ Kicks on Route 66. The pandemic lost years of ZOZO had no slogans either, which was why my Summer of 69 was supposed to be my butterfly coming out party. Which it was, but for all the unintended lessons from events in and out of my control, a year of death and mourning, reckoning, repentance and self-aware conciliation. It’s funny to get over the pandemic distancing and not feel awkward and vulnerable in crowds. I’m tempted to invoke, Screw You I’m 72, but that would be wrong.
Much as I make a gift of being this old, I can celebrate without claiming entitlement. The universe is indifferent. Getting used to that idea goes a long way to contentment. No use getting cranky and giving the world the finger. I owe a lot of respect to you thousands of readers around the planet who attend my lyceum of the soul and somehow empathize with this middle American baby boomer. It shows me we share common perceptions and aspirations wherever we live on Earth, even if we don’t share exactly the same origins or conclusions. I warned you all from the beginning I wasn’t taking any hemlock.
Angela Davis was a philosophy professor at the University of California Los Angeles from the 1960s. She articulated the entangled issues of civil rights and social justice and got under the skin of then California governor Ronald Reagan. She was an espoused Marxist, and though I reject the abolition of capitalism, I admired Angela Davis for her critical exposure of the truths of underlying corruption within socioeconomic systems that suppress human rights. I named my daughter’s middle name Angela after her, though I tell some people it was after Angela Cartwright, an actress and other cultural icon of the boomer generation, but emphasize it was definitely not after Angela Lansbury.
Angela Davis explored a different passage towards serenity when she said, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
We slept in. Even I who usually rose before the sun to take in the newspaper in the foreglow of civil twilight instead this July Saturday slept deep until after seven when nature called. Even so the morning was forgettable except for how easily we lost track of time. The prior three days on the road weren’t like our typical travels. Roxanne and I usually pass through other people’s worlds at our own pace in our own time and mostly at our leisure but this expedition we submitted to not just other people’s worlds but to other people’s preferences — by choice, of course, but still a different modus — and returning home where we left off seemed more foreign. Nowhere to go. Nowhere went. Fresh food in the house. We did laundry. Putzed in the yard and garden. Michigan seems like a dream to me now …
Roxanne touched base with her sister and reached out to our kids that we were back. Safely. No symptoms of covid-19. Vincent texted back right away. Michel not so soon. It was mid-afternoon when she called. Until then Roxanne fretted being ghosted, still a little shy from the hangover of our falling out in Colorado, something she didn’t mention the whole car trip but came up after Vincent touched back via Face Time from their back yard where Koki indulged her kiddie pool and Grandma came away assured life was as normal as when she left it. Reassurance came at last when Michel phoned at just the most opportune time, while Roxanne held her phone in hand and was saying for the second or third time that day, at least I reached out.
I was always confident Michel would call, and when she did I knew it was in her own sweet time, when she spared herself some time to recline and relax and have a good chat with her mom. To my great relief they hit it off again, like old times, and from my perspective hearing Roxanne’s side it sounded perfect. Michel apparently asked about our trip and Roxanne summed up saying things kind about “Dad’s relatives” and being loyal and paying respects. Then Michel talked while Roxanne listened and uttered affirming things and laughed and I admired their rapport. Michel was confiding in her mother again, like old times, and they dawdled in conversation like before the rift at the continental divide. Roxanne relaxed, stretched out on the couch, her body language expressing comfort from realizing the estrangement was ended. I’ve said before, I’ve often envied the unending conversational relationship between mother and daughter, as fraught as it can be. They were close and knew each other very well, and for the moment I walked away concluding life was good, all trespasses forgiven and concluded Roxanne would fill me in later with the synopsis of the day to day details.
Just then Roxanne startled. What’s wrong? she said. I could hear Michel say I’ll call you back.
What’s up? I asked, concerned about the concerned look on Roxanne’s face. I don’t know, she said. She got a call or a text she had to attend to. Said she had to go and she’ll call me back. The first thing we assume is it’s our kids. Clara was on a bus somewhere south of where we came from just yesterday, coming home from the Appalachian church mission camp. Tess was on a weekend camping trip to Whitewater state park with a friend from school and the friend’s parents. So Roxanne recounted. Michel and Sid were enjoying an empty nest Saturday. There was something wrong. Radically wrong in Roxanne’s intuitive estimation.
Michel called back. Roxanne cried out wordless. Oh no, she said and looked me in the eye with tears. Okay, okay she said, is there anything we can do? Okay. Call. Go.
“It’s Erin. They think she might be drowned at a lake by Waconia. They’re performing a search and rescue. Michel and Sid are driving to the scene to meet Natasha. Isaac’s there. They’re boating with a neighbor. That’s it. She’ll call.”
Erin. Isaac and Natasha’s daughter, their elder child, Sid’s niece. Tess’s lifelong best friend, both 13. A good swimmer. A smartass not beyond playing hide and seek. All we could do is speculate and almost will a positive outcome. We waited. Must be some mistake. A misunderstanding. A mixup.
Hope gave to despair when Michel phoned from the lake. Isaac and his friend from the neighborhood each had boats and two kids the same ages and they launched on Lake Minnewashta for the afternoon and found a nice spot to cast some lines and the kids could swim. Between the two boats they connected with a Lilypad, a kind of dock platform made of kevlar for the kids to use as a jumping and diving platform. One minute the four kids were jumping and swimming and the next minute Erin was missing. She was not wearing a life vest.
Sid and Michel arrived at the beach parking lot near the scene of the search area ahead of Natasha, Erin’s mom and Sid’s second elder sister. The lake was only about a twenty minute drive away from the city where Sid and Michel live, whereas Natasha was not coming directly from home, which was a suburb not far at all from Lake Minnewashta, but actually in transit coming back from a girlfriend weekend midweek special up north at a resort at Bay Lake and was being driven directly by a girlfriend. When Natasha arrived at the beach Michel had to go. Roxanne’s squinched face translated the anguish in Michel’s hushed tones. Not optimistic.
We couldn’t imagine Natasha’s state of mind. Or Isaac’s. Michel’s or Sid’s. We didn’t want to believe what was happening. Uselessly helpless we sat by the phone staring out the windows and each other trying to hope the next call would say they found Erin floating exhausted in the reeds (like Moses, I quipped for a twist) and she was being whooshed to hospital and she was believed to be able to make it. Roxanne relayed Michel’s descriptors and they left off unhopeful. Michel recognized Erin’s not wearing a life jacket as her stubborn self-confidence. Roxanne and I began anticipating the search for fault and blame — not that we would judge but somebody else might. A coroner’s inquiry could look for criminal negligence — don’t say that! We were actually looking after guilt measured in other ways. We realized that if the worst proved to come true there would be widespread tremors throughout Erin’s family. This included us. And all we could do for the time being was sit tight and wait for information. We could speculate.
You may ask why didn’t I pray? I may reply that’s what I was doing, in my way. Asking a favor from the Master of the Universe to favor one 13 year old child and her loved ones, special consideration to spare us the pain and grief this time around that all mortal souls encounter someday. Come on Lord, I could say, don’t stop with Lazarus.
When Michel called again she reported the county search team was still diving. Sid’s younger sister Tracy arrived to comfort Natasha, who was understandably freaking out. Isaac and his friend the other dad had been frantically diving in the waters around the boats but now were on the beach monitoring the search from land, requested to stay out of the way of the deputy sheriffs. Tracy came alone. Michel said she was making a point of looking after Nate, Erin’s ten year old brother, who seemed to be lost in the commotion standing next to his dad, still wearing his lifejacket, not knowing what to do. Stacy said to Michel she planned to take Nate to her place for the night to give Natasha and Isaac time alone and connect Nate with his cousins, her sons Cisco and Lucas for consolation.
Michel was on the phone with Roxanne on yet another call when they found Erin’s body and brought her to the beach. They said later she was in about thirteen feet of water. She was pronounced dead. Isaac and Natasha identified her. There were no apparent bruises or signs of trauma. Deputies kept the crowd away and she was covered by a sheet on a gurney and rode off in a county ambulance. No siren. I could hear the heartbreak in Michel’s voice. Roxanne and I began to cry. Michel had to go be with Sid and his sisters.
She called back within the half hour. She and Sid were on the road towards Whitewater state park, about a three hour drive, to find Tess at the school friend’s campsite. Michel said they didn’t know how they would tell her about Erin. This was going to about kill her.
Foolishly I volunteered to tell her, which was absurd: no way her parents would delegate such a role. But there was only so much nothing I could do, and if there were anything a good grandfather would do I would face dear Tess and break her heart bearing the news her best friend and cousin drowned. I did not want to be the one to first tell her but I compulsively volunteered because I was willing to accept the pain. No need to explain, Michel didn’t comment. She and Sid were on their way to Whitewater and didn’t think they would make it by sunset. Roxanne suggested they could get assistance from the park service or the state police to locate Tess at the campsite once they reached the campground — there was probably a website with a phone number.
Was there anything we could do? Michel said we might get a call from Clara. Sid reached out to his eldest sister Valerie, who was aboard the missionary bus as an adult chaperone at the camp. One of her sons, Clara’s cousin Carlos was also at the camp and riding the bus. Sid and Michel called Clara directly while her aunt Valeria stood by. It was hard for Clara to deal with it from long distance, being in transit far away from her parents. They knew she needed someone to talk to at home so they suggested she call me and Roxanne from the motel where the group would be staying overnight in Normal, Illinois.
Except Sid en route with Michel to Whitewater, and Valeria in the church camp bus, the Kysylyczyns planned to gather at Norb and Gloria’s. Isaac needed to see his parents and sisters. Everybody needed to absorb the shock. Tracy had Nate, who would be with cousins Cisco and Lucas. How were Norb and Gloria? How can anybody be doing okay right now… Michel needed to make other calls and spend time with Sid. This was not the time to break confidences or talk out of school or lose anybody’s heads but a time of terrible grief, individual and shared and she and Sid needed time to be alone, to talk to Clara and to confront and compose what they would tell Tess.
When we left off with Michel that sunny evening we expected it might be the last we might hear from her that night. Roxanne and I were frozen in place and couldn’t hold still at the same time. It had been about four hours since something was wrong. The conversations with our daughter weren’t lengthy except the sobbing and sorrow. I could imagine stoic Sid at the wheel. We learned the basic facts and the story’s ultimate conclusion, but how Erin happened to drown, and why — everybody’s inevitable question — was unknown. Maybe unknowable. For Roxanne and me the shock and disbelief wasn’t mitigated by being in-laws. We knew Erin since she was a baby. We half expected her to ride with Sid, Michell, Clara and Tess to Colorado. She was Tess’s best best best friend. Forever. The four years they were in Switzerland you could almost say we saw more of Erin through Norb and Gloria than we saw Clara and Tess in person. Almost. Just a week ago Erin called me her third grandpa.
We watched the six o’clock news and only one local station ran a brief breaking story about the search but identified nobody by name, just a thirteen year old girl. In this day and age, Roxanne observed, it’s a wonder Tess hasn’t found out already on her own.
I remember the day my Grandpa Kelly died. I was seven going on eight. It was summer, August, and everybody was Up the Lake. A Friday. All three of my mom’s sisters, including my widowed aunt Margaret and her two sons, and my future Uncle Bill who was going steady with Aunt Donna, and my youngest aunt Renie, around thirteen then and accompanied by her best friend Tuny. Grandma’s cook and maid Rosie was there. My mom and my workaholic dad were there, and sister Kerry was the baby. Everybody was there except Grandma and Grandpa Kelly, who were due by cocktail hour, the cheese and crackers and salami time before dinner. When Grandma and Grandpa didn’t show by mid-afternoon my mom and Margaret started getting anxious, I could tell — early on I learned my mother was a moody soul. Grandpa was supposed to leave work by noon and pick up Grandma and hit the road for the three hour drive to Eaglewood.
Up the Lake at Grandpa’s cabin on Bay Lake came with two distinct conditions: no TV and no telephone. Radio and record players were inevitable, but even though the console in the main living room had a TV it couldn’t get so much as a ghost of a signal on any of the thirteen nominal channels, and an antenna wasn’t considered worth it, not in 1958. The ban my grandfather imposed against the telephone was his conscious renunciation of the imposition of the outside world by means of technology upon his private life and family, so there was no land line, not even with an unlisted and unpublished number connecting the Kelly family to the outside world. How quaint that seems today in the age of obiquity and the cell phone, but when I was a little kid it seemed perfectly fine for Grandpa Kelly not to need a telephone at Bay Lake, even with a household of teenage girls.
The Friday he was overdue my mom talked my dad into taking the boat across the channel to Hansen’s store to use the pay phone to call Grandpa’s house or his office to find out what was going on. I rode along. Hansen’s carried comic books and I had some dimes in case a new Batman was on the rack, or a Superman. I browsed while Dad used the phone. Before I could give the rack a full rotation or ask for a Dreamsicle Dad swept me out of the store and across the road to the dock and back into Grandpa’s speedboat, cast off and gone. All he said on the way was, Son, we gotta go.
Dad said nothing all the way back through the channel and across the bay all the way to the cabin. He was holding something bad back that he had to save to tell Mom first. He left me to tie up the boat and ran to the cabin. By the time I got there the people were in chaos, especially my mom. We were all told to pack for home. Grandpa had a heart attack and may not live through the night.
I remember it was raining on the ride home. Usually a three hour drive to the Twin Cities, it seemed double. Mom was saying the rosary in tears, my sisters Leeny and Bernadette cried and prayed along, little Molly and baby Kerry just cred, and I kept wondering if this was all real. Then the cops pulled us over somewhere after Anoka, red lights and siren. A highway patrol officer escorted my mom and dad to a second car where Aunt Margaret got out and hugged my mom and told her Grandpa was dead.
You knew! She screamed at my dad. You bastard, you knew all along.
That day changed my life. Not the first death in the family I remember but the first profound passing of resounding significance. It affected me in such a way that a few years later when JFK was assassinated I felt prepared for it, I had already gone through widespread and universal mourning for a legendary figure. Before that, when I was about four my Aunt Margaret’s husband who was an Air Force fighter jet test pilot crashed his plane, and I remember it was a closed casket and they gave him a twenty-one gun salute at Fort Snelling.
My dad knew on the phone at Hansen’s store Grandpa Kelly had a fatal cardiac arrest at his law office on the fourth floor of the Midland Bank building and was pronounced dead at the scene. Of all the things my mother held against my father in their life, my mother never forgave him for lying that my grandpa was still clinging to life, that he didn’t have the guts to tell her he was dead. I’m not sure my father was ever sorry or recognized that it would make any difference, the end was the same to him. All these years later I have to side with my mom, Dad was chicken.
Roxanne called Vincent. Since she did not Face Time I did not feel obliged to crowd alongside Roxanne to be in the picture. She called on the phone to speak privately with him and not be overheard by his child. I made my presence felt as a background voice. It was almost as well it wasn’t Face Time because I could hear the heartbreak on his face as he gasped and choked while his mother told him the story of what happened to Erin.
“We’re calling to tell you something bad,” Roxanne said to our son at the outset after hello. ”You probably want to hear this in private.”
Vincent listened to what his sister had told us. One of his first questions must have been what about Tess because Roxanne explained that Michel and Sid hadn’t told her yet and were as they spoke driving down to Whitewater state park to tell her and bring her home. Vincent must have commented how far it was to Whitewater. Roxanne said she had no first person contact (with whomever, likely Sid’s family, Erin’s mom and dad — Vincent, Amalie and little Neko knew Sid’s family, especially Erin) only that she heard from Michel that it was presumed the family would gather at Norb and Gloria’s. Cause of death yet undetermined. She was underwater about three hours. No visible trauma. Yes, an excellent swimmer. No. No lifejacket. (Back to the family) nobody knows yet (when the funeral will be) because they don’t know when the coroner will release the body. (He asked what county) Dad doesn’t know. Could be Dakota, could be Carver, probably too far for Hennepin. I expect (an autopsy). No, no there’s no suspicion of foul play — why would you think that? I know, we’re as blown away as you. You want answers, and hopefully it will all come out. Nobody is talking about it yet but everybody seems to think she had an epileptics seizure.
That was my theory. She was diagnosed with epilepsy with a history of seizures. Everybody knew. She was on medication and her condition didn’t attract much attention any more since she was diagnosed at seven or eight and because the frequency and severity of her episodes diminished to near zero on her meds. She playyed her heart out at soccer, got good grades, swam and dived in her grandparents’ pool, romped at water parks, fished with her dad and lived a perfectly un-handicapped normal life. I could see her resisting wearing the life jacket while playing in the water between the two moored boats because she wasn’t doing cannonballs she wanted to make elegant deep dives and the jacket would be too buoyant to let her go deep. She was an excellent swimmer. Her dad was there. Her brother. The neighbors. With all the cocky confidence in the world she did a pencil dive or maybe a back flip and didn’t come back up. Under water and for what ever reason she had an epileptic seizure. Her automatic, involuntary nervous system kicked in and she inhaled the lake.
My theory.
Roxanne was still commiserating with our son when my phone purred and it was Clara. Hola, I said. Ich liebe dich. Grandpa Kelly, she said, I don’t have any idea what is going on. How is this happening? How am I supposed to be here in this random hotel motel in the middle of nowhere in a town called Normal when nothing is normal anymore. Why Erin? I don’t see how it could happen. Granpa Kelly can you tell me why on earth this happened.
I have no conclusive answers, baby. I’m sorry. I’m sad like you. And shocked. Not fully accepting the truth and the facts. I’m so sorry, Sparkles. I can’t imagine how much this hurts for you.
And poor Tess. She still doesn’t know. I feel so apart. Right now I’m alone, it’s like nobody wants to be in a room with me.
Probably to give you privacy. Where’s Valeria? And Carlos?
They’re together. For a while she was working with some of the church people to get us on an overnight car rental to get us home quicker but they talked her into a night here in Illinois and an early ride home the rest of the way tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Sunday, right? I wish I were home.
Where’s Coretta? (Clara’s eldest cousin, Valeria’s daughter.) She stayed behind at MountainTOP to participate one more week and then she’ll drive home. All by herself? With a couple other counselors from her church. That’s probably changed. I haven’t talked to her yet but she and Val and Carlos are being in touch, along with Grandma Gloria. Have you talked to Grandma Gloria? No, not yet. It’s early yet, and I’m sure she’s got a lot going on. She knows I’m here. I wish you were here too, but you’re not. Know that there is no explanation for what happened that will ever make it easy to say goodbye to Erin like this. Remember the words of your sister Tess, our family is permanent We’ll get each other through this together
We have to, Granpa, because there’s no other way, just take it from me, I feel so alone, and it bothers me the name of this town is Normal. Nothing and nowhere is normal right now.
History lesson. (Really Granpa?) The town is named for its founding feature, that being the location of an ambitiously big state teachers college: back in the olden days teachers colleges were all called normals. Thus they named a town after the campus of the state’s biggest. Just think of all the kids in Illinois who were schooled by teachers who studied there. Do you want to spend four years of college there? No. Where then? Vermont. They have a physical therapy program. My dad and I plan to check it out.
Sobbing silences functioned to comfort us between the unsayable sadness and powerless passion. I let the silences go unfilled. I learned that saying nothing was better than saying stupid things that made no sense.
Ultimately the topic came around to coming home, being home with everybody and anybody connected to Erin. What’s Grandma doing? She’s here. Talking to Vincent on the phone. How are they doing? Just like us. Bad but talking it out. Consolation will take time. You really aren’t alone, Clarabella. A lot of us loved Erin. It will be everybody together to get through this. And we will. You expect to be home by tomorrow night? Hopefully. They’re saying dinnertime. America is a lot bigger than it looks. So true. I’ll let you go now, I love you Granpa. My love to Granma. I’m going out to check in with Val and Carlo. I think there’s going to be a prayer circle. I love you too and you can call me back if you want to talk some more. Or not talk. See you when I see you.
Back to just me and Roxanne. Being on call. Waiting for cues. Who should we tell? We should wait until we knew more. There would be no rush for a quick funeral, and how could anybody plan until the county authorities release the body. Here she was, Erin, the body. In custody. Her sacred remains subject of public inquiry into the cause of death. A young teenage girl innocently pursuing happiness dies for no good reason. We think. The medical examiner, coroner, whoever makes these judgments will decide the cause and Erin’s corpse will go to the funeral home of the family’s choice to be dressed for the funeral as much as maybe a week away — who at this juncture was thinking ahead that far? Who would step up to organize the plan? Sid maybe.
It was hard for us to sit around and stand by. It would have been wrong to crash the gathering at the Kysylyczyn’s uninvited. Our liaison to Sid’s family was Michel and whatever Michel delegated to us was whatever our role, until or unless otherwise appropriate. We realized we would probably be left out of the inner circle and might have to improvise our role in the milieu. No matter, we were far from outcasts and foresaw ourselves preoccupied with Erin in our familial tremblors for the foreseeable future. This was a horrible, terrible big deal.
It made the ten o’clock news on at least two of the local channels. No names were released and the facts matched Michel’s account. On one newscast they also reported about the Aquatennial fireworks display over Nicollet Island and Roxanne and sighed at having missed it and hissed at how TV couldn’t do the pyrotechnics justice even in this age of HD. It was funny how a thirty second story about Erin on TV equaled almost eight hours (what used to amount to a work day) of real time almost exclusively seizing our attention. What else happened that day?
It would be difficult to sleep but we went to bed anyway, talking in the dark. All we could say was you never know. We were exhausted from our road trip and now the blindside emotion over Erin and in a familiar summer embrace of caresses of good night made of fresh meaning we dozed asleep. Roxanne’s phone went off well after midnight. It was Michel saying they were home safe. They found Tess’s campsite with help from a state trooper and a park ranger.
Roxanne listened silently in the dark as Michel spoke in a virtual whisper. They were only connected a minute or so when Roxanne expressed her sorrow and said good night and they would talk tomorrow.
How’s Tess? I asked.
She said, “I’ll never be happy again.”
Chapter 19
I kept thinking about Neil Young’s song about Keep On Rocking in the Free World, the lines about a kid who never got to go to school, never got to fall in love, never got to be cool, and it seemed so inappropriate to equate the passing of young teenage Erin Peterson with the poor baby dumped in the song, but the chorus refrain rang true, we keep on rocking in the free world. In the real world.
The Carver County authorities wasted no time certifying Erin’s death as accidental drowning. There was no evidence of trauma or foul play, or negligence for that matter. The question of her epilepsy playing a role could not be addressed by any autopsy, and so can never be answered but remains my private theory as well as the subject of speculation among anybody searching for a cause for the accident. Fault was another matter which the authorities offered no opinion but some of those who searched for a cause looked closer to blame, and among the family the civil guilt accrued like usury and secret debts.
I couldn’t figure whether to take Tess’s summation that she would never be happy again as an expression of existential despair or as an oath.
That first night it was hard to sleep with this on my mind and I’ve pondered it ever since. Those first days it was permissible to spend hours in a room alone weeping because that was how some people grieved. A common phrase that year was everybody grieves in their own way, and so a variety of entitled precedents were set for protocols dealing with loved ones among the Kysylyczyn family, some quite understandable. Natasha, Erin’s mom, withdrew into total isolation at her home the first two days and then only received company a few minutes at a time. Isaac watched over her in solemn rectitude, guarding his wife’s remaining sanity until she could get enough grip to reach out past the crushing walls of her pain to allow others to enjoin her to share the pain all around. Natasha had a hard time with that, Michel reported, because she blamed herself as the cause of Erin’s death and thus the pain shared by all. In a while Isaac, who carried a load of guilt of his own, persuaded Natasha to come to the living room to visit with Tracy, then Val and Sid and eventually her parents, but that week she didn’t leave the house except to dealing with the funeral and did not go to Norb and Gloria’s even though that was where the rest of her family convened to form the plans for Erin’s funeral. Plans were finalized at Nat and Isaac’s house.
The neighborhood Washburn McReavy would make the arrangements. The visitation — what we used to call the wake — would be held that Thursday evening at the mortuary’s chapel at Dawn Valley, a cemetery in wooded west Bloomington not far from Bush Lake and near where Erin lived and went to school. The funeral would be held Friday at 11 am after an hour visitation at the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, a grand old gothic classic turn of the 20th Century mansion of holiness located at the fringe of downtown Minneapolis. A procession would form at the church after the service to convey Erin to interment at a plot back at Dawn Valley Cemetery in west Bloomington. An obituary would be published in the StarTribune but it was too late to make the Sunday paper, obviously.
I called my sister Murray in case she saw it on the news, which she had but didn’t connect it to our Erin. She knew Erin, or mostly of Erin through family mingling through the years. She was horrified and deeply sad. I didn’t feel like calling anybody else so she said she would pass the word. Kerry would want to know. Macushla. Maybe Heather. Hannah. Jeff (her ex husband) of course. Norton (her son) didn’t know her, or brother Kevin, but she would pass it on just the same because they would feel sympathy. She asked about the Kysylyczyns and I said I didn’t have much to tell, I hadn’t seen them yet but as she could imagine the reports were grim. There was no candy coating any of this.
We had just returned from John McCormick’s funeral in Indiana and death was too top of mind. Murray mentioned our mother’s axiom that deaths come in threes and I said, stop! I mean it, she said, already once a widow herself (before Jeff, her ex), it could be me, or you. Hug your kids.
Roxanne after a restrained interval called Gloria on Sunday and they talked a few minutes. Norb was having a hard time, she said. She herself felt wretched and numb hearted like she was stabbed but couldn’t die because she had to be there strong for her kids and grandkids. Natasha was a mess, to be expected, and poor Nate was practically orphaned, staying with Tracy and the boys. She couldn’t imagine what Ike was going through, And the Aragons (Valeria’s family). Valeria was due back at the Woodbury church on the mission bus later that afternoon and the family was gathering at her and Norb’s house to plan. At the time Gloria expected the county to release Erin to the mortuary later that afternoon. It was all too terrible to fathom. Her sister Janet and husband Larry arrived that morning from Winona. She had to go. Somebody else called on the land line. Roxanne described Gloria’s voice as calm emotional chaos. As expected we were not invited to participate in the planning sessions to come.
Which left us with spare time to commiserate on our own. We put it out there through Michel and to Gloria we were on call and available to help out in any way to support everybody to get through this, but other than Michel who relied on phone relief with her mother nobody took us up. So we fell in line, monitored the grapevine and anticipated the wake and the funeral. Keep on rockin’ in the free world.
The extent of the effect of this calamity blew my mind in ways never tested before and I decided it was good that I was not in charge of anything to do with managing any of the proceedings like funeral arrangements or the official obituary or testimonials, much less to convene all the tides of grieving personalities around any common theme that was free of guilt and recrimination. Those who knew Erin best needed to be in charge. I felt a need to stand back and stand by, stay out of the way, lay in the weeds and see how things unfold and be available in case there was anything at any given minute I could do or say to help. I learned from talking to Clara on the phone how powerless I was to save the day, much less to offer the right words of assurance to make everything okay. If I felt short of my expectation of myself to rise up heroically and explain away everybody’s pain I could only imagine the failure others felt for falling short of coping with their own feelings being exposed so raw.
No one who knew Erin would ever concede she was gone to a better place. Even those who believed she went to heaven would admit in earthly terms Erin lived a bountiful life. Smart. Cute. Athletic. Popular. By every measure Erin enjoyed success at life. If maybe she could be accused of being spoiled it wasn’t by guile or deceit, though I always suspected her of being a subtle, clever con sometimes she seemed to have transparently innocent motives, and it wasn’t her fault she belonged to a privileged class and benefitted accordingly. From the get-go Erin’s fate diverges from the baby in the dumpster in Neil Young’s song, and I feel like apologizing for thinking of them congruently. Neil Young’s forgotten child who never got to grow up lost out on love and respect from their first breath and Erin was a cherished person from the day she was born, though both died before fulfilling potential except maybe Erin fulfilled as much as a lot of thirteen year olds — whatever means potential. Erin’s tragedy is its irony. We all looked at it as a murder. As bad as an abduction or random bullet or victim of a drunk driver. The truth was just as hard to accept. Accidental drowning. A beautiful life cut short for no good reason. She wasn’t sick or suffering. She wasn’t a victim. She was a superstar. In some ways she was in heaven already, there was no reason to be in any better place. The most people of faith could agree was that God took her too soon. But why?
God’s Plan was sure to come up in the coming days. God’s own inscrutable Plan which plain souls like you and me are not privy to because God doesn’t need to confide in you and me. And if you can’t figure it out you aren’t alone because great theoretical theologists throughout time have spent centuries of thought trying to figure out God and in the end defer to the faith that it’s far too complicated for mere humans to understand. To say she was taken too soon presumes our selfish human timeline, by the way. Why did God let it happen? What is the lesson here?
I don’t speak for God. I don’t think anybody does or can. I think it’s the wrong way to look at the world, second guessing a god. Second guessing basic human morals. Following doctrines and creeds leading to absurd conclusions based on inscrutable myths. I can’t endorse the conventional explanation of what happens now to Erin’s soul, so it’s best for me to be quiet about my dissociative relationship with religion and my fascinating admiration for its symbols and respect for its place in human culture and history.
It seemed imperative Erin rest in peace in the most peaceful and peaceable ways possible, and it was gratifying to get reports from Michel through Roxanne nobody in the family was going shitfaced loony at Gloria’s camp and by and large the committee of siblings and Gloria’s sister composed a neat obituary for the newspaper once the mortuary and church were scheduled, which of course needed to be agreed by Natasha and Isaac. The take-away food flowed between Apple Valley and west Bloomington — Olive Garden in aluminum pans and so on. Gloria never skimped on catered meals.
Natasha was eating but not much. Michel saw her at her house and confirmed she looked a mess, but what would you expect? She was calling herself a bad mom. She didn’t take the epilepsy serious enough. She didn’t relate a recent recurrence of seizures that might be related to puberty. Erin had an appointment with the doctor but not for another half a month, before school starts. Natasha says she should have paid closer attention, should have pushed harder to see the doctor sooner, been with her at the boat on the platform on the lake and watching her dive. The spiral always leads to spasms of sobs. She doesn’t want to hear she’s a good mom. It doesn’t get through. She’s convinced she’s a fraud. It’s sad. She needs help but so far she isn’t seeing anybody, as if one day she expects to get up and all this will fall into place and make some kind of sense and she can go back to work and live some kind of life with Ike and Nate. But right now she feels like she doesn’t deserve to get over this.
The kids and the cousins were collecting icons and photos for a tribute collage at the mortuary visitation. Clara and Tess were charged to pick out the dress for Erin in the casket. It would be the purple one. It was her favorite color. It was a dress she borrowed frequently from Clara to wear to church. The kids weren’t holding back they weren’t taking it well but at least since Sunday night they were together, since Clara came home.
The choice of a suburban mortuary and cemetery was based on neighboring proximity to the family home but the choice of a church in downtown Minneapolis to hold the funeral was entirely based on Erin’s joining up with that congregation about the same time as Michel and Sid and their kids after repatriating back from Europe. They church shopped Minneapolis and nearby suburbs for a congregation where they felt they might fit, preferably Methodist because that was the faith Sid was raised from Gloria’s parents. They found the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church to their liking for its purposeful mission doing good in the city and attraction to the pastors who led the congregation. Sid, Michel, Clara and Tess became members. Erin spent enough Saturday night sleepovers at their house to attend church services with them on Sundays to join too. She went to Sunday school with Clara and Tess. They sang in the young voices choir. Along with Tess she played the hand bells. It seemed a common ploy to get me to attend church by luring me to see the kids sing, read liturgy and play hand bells. Sid was already baptized Methodist as a child but Roxanne and I attended the service the day Michel, Clara, Tess and Erin got baptized into the faith, full members.
The pandemic radically changed the dynamics of church congregations. The grand hiatus of live in-person congregated worship services relieved me of having to attend such things in person since the kids didn’t perform — nobody did. Services were still conducted via the livestream channel the church operated on the internet only without a choir or congregation or hand bell ringers, so I would not bother to tune in just to hear some readings and a sermon no matter how eloquent or pertinent the theme. I had to hand it to the pastors at this church for their sincere enthusiasm for their mission to inspire people to do good in the world.
There is a large stone plaque in the common entry to the church framing a quote attributed to John Wesley, founder of the Methodist religion in the 1730s:
“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
Before Angela joined the Hennepin Avenue church I knew little more than John Wesley’s name. I didn’t know John Wesley from John Wesley Harding. This quote piqued my interest. As long as I hung around I couldn’t help but analyze the institution in light of those words, and in short I came to conclude that this particular congregation functioned as best humanly possible to genuinely minister to its community. Of course it preached the gospels to the believers and the faithful but didn’t oversell salvation and didn’t condescend to fears or insecurities to engage people in the stories from the sanctuary. The services featured lovely music from the choir of dedicated singers and young voices like Clara, Tess and Erin, sometimes a brass ensemble, sometimes strings and piano, hand bells, a pipe organ of regional fame, and for the music alone it was worthwhile to sit through the inevitable worship words I didn’t believe (and in an earlier phase of life would have ridiculed) except now I accept and respect religions as choices people make to seek ultimate answers. This church emphasized seeking.
I was accustomed to seeing churches try to seize control over peoples’ lives, not setting them free. This congregation propagated hopes and dreams, not fear and loathings.
Michel was impressed from her first Sunday visit, when the theme was the parable of the Good Samaritan. She later told me the way the pastor told the story evoked in her such empathy for the victim she almost wept when the Samaritan stepped up. Samaritans, she reminded me, were considered low class in their society, almost lepers. The story got to her. This impressed me. I had about eighteen years of serious Roman Catholic education and someone had to take a deep dive into the Bible or the church canon to cite stories I was unaware of, and this is a commonly known parable of Jesus. That it came upp prominently in my daughter’s search for faith opened me up to paying closer attention to her character and inner life. She never received religious training growing up. Her secular life resulted in a healthy moral personality, and now as an adult she wanted some faith as a force of rescue, doing good. She had it pretty well in this life, and it impressed me that she wanted to better herself through channeling energy into doing goodness.
I deliberately avoided churches and religions when my kids were growing up. Michel’s mother-in-law Gloria was shocked and almost outraged when I admitted at one of her pool parties that Michel and Vincent were never baptized, not even Catholic. I said it was important not to commit them to any creed and to give them the freedom to discover and to choose for themselves as free agents. In that same conversation Gloria got me to admit I’m a nonbeliever, and we’re still friends. Obviously I behave myself in other peoples’ churches.
The Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church is located in the heart of Minneapolis, near Loring Park at the foot of the downtown. The 19th Century was rather kind to Minneapolis, founded in 1855, before Minnesota was a state, and by the turn of the 1900s the flour and timber milling along the Mississippi drove immense prosperity drawing immigrant populations from Europe, and congregations of the wealthy families who lived in beautiful mansions in the hills overlooking the emergent city established lavish European knockoff gothic and romanesque cathedrals of every popular denomination. The Methodist church is a beauty with its spire and vaulted walls and stained glass windows and when the music takes hold it’s nice to peruse the icons in the colorful windows where Jesus is in heaven and the arches reach high above the nave and the sanctuary is lined with fine woodwork. The pews are cushioned. The balconies are suspended effortlessly. It’s obvious the building has been cared for without hesitation. Its clean limestone understates the building’s size. Additions were constructed seamlessly to connect its campus. It’s obvious there are people of deep pockets watching over this church the past hundred or so years, but the average people in the Sunday crowds are mostly just that — average.
The city itself changed in the 20th Century. In my lifetime the rich old moneyed families moved away from the city and gradually new money bought the mansions on the hill and around the Lake of the Isles. Jesus told us the poor was always with us, and that may have been true about the community in the multi-housing apartment tracts around the edges of downtown all along. My Grandpa Kelly was a landlord in that neighborhood. A few luxury condo high rises have gone up to replace tenements around Loring Park, but the residents of most blocks surrounding these mini-cathedrals are low income. When they come to church they want to be accepted as average.
What I learned quickly was how earnestly Michel’s church engaged the neighborhood without preaching about it. They sponsored immigrants. Referred the homeless to shelters. Fed the hungry. Counseled the lost. Hosted seminars, workshops and social groups at meeting places within the campus. Supported BIPOC minorities and the LGBTQA. All were welcome. They were woke and diverse, inclusive and equitable in a humble and conservative way, with a focus on optimism and hope against the acknowledged perceptions of nihilism and despair in this world.
Lead Pastor Judy Zabel embodied the soul of the congregation. She had a contemporary preaching style and brought to her sermons something deeper than Christian talking points and greater than rote theology by posing questions to the meaning of the teachings. In her sermons she seemed to be still pondering what she composed for that week, exemplifying the unfinished dynamics of soul searching and relying on faith in the Holy Spirit to guide the way.
One particular Sunday Roxanne and I were there with Michel when the theme was Matthew’s gospel accounts of what Jesus said about hypocrites. ”Like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean… So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others… When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret. Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
Pastor Judy’s sermon resounded with Michel, Clara and Sid (Tess and Erin were busy in the east balcony getting ready for an interlude of hand bells) and Roxanne and me so profoundly we talked about it through Sunday breakfast at Curran’s and the topic kept coming up as recently as our vacation in Colorado, the acts of doing good for performative reasons to get credit and glory, even if in a passive aggressive way. The Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church existed as the nexus of good, giving, visibility and hypocrisy. Donor names on plates defined spaces on the campus, hinting at the sources of the impeccable upkeep the organization has to finance and sustain. It is no small endeavor and the church spire stands up to proclaim its existence proudly in the skyline next to the park. They otherwise do not advertise what wonderful people they are.
At Halloween they sponsored (until pandemic) an event called Trunk or Treat. On a Sunday afternoon in late October volunteers parked their cars in the church parking lot, opened their boots and decorated the trunks with scary stuff and gave out candy to neighborhood kids. I helped Michel, who favored puffy spiders, give out candy every year along with her girls, Erin and Roxanne. I would take warm breaks in the building and sip hot apple cider and visit the church’s gallery of European religious paintings from the 1300s through the late 1800s. All are exquisite and priceless pieces by unknown and obscure painters. My usual favorite for gazing is a tall canvas by a French artist named Albert Matignon titled Bread of Love. It reminds me of the style of Jules Breton. It tells the legend of St Elizabeth, Princess of Hungary ca. 1227, famed for defying the aristocracy by smuggling bread to the poor.
Most of the rest of the paintings in the gallery depict events in the life of Jesus, including sweet nativity renderings from medieval Flanders and northern Italy. Besides this discreet gallery, the church hangs and displays religious themed contemporary paintings, prints and figurine sculpture throughout the public spaces outside the sanctuary. Inside the sanctuary the stained glass. However all this is curated, I like the collection and realize there is an elite trusteeship behind the scenes who symbolize the power and responsibilities required in an ongoing basis to sustain the organization, do good and be true to a commitment to not be hypocrites.
The church’s stated mission is clear and simple, to make disciples of Jesus to transform the world. Their stated vision is to grow love of God and neighbor, welcome new people and heal a broken world. That’s pretty straight up to me, no hidden agenda. Then they post the church’s statement of practices: Radical Hospitality, Passionate Worship, Intentional Faith Development, Risk-Taking Mission & Service and Extravagant Generosity. It’s that last one that convinced me this outfit just might be for real. All the other practices seemed boilerplate enough, even the oddball Risk-Taking Mission & Service (ampersand included) but Extravagant Generosity, that is something of a practice that is abnormally virtuous and hard to conceal.
By the time covid-19 and conditions of emergency shutdown stopped all congregated church services indoors and there was no more reason for me to attend I all but forgot about them. Michel sent text reminders about their streaming Sunday stripped-down services but without the kids as performers and readers all the good in the world didn’t draw my attention and I didn’t really miss it. Michel’s belonging to that church seemed like a good choice — for her. Her search for faith I could take seriously without patronizing her or cynically criticizing spirituality, if she would just trust me to accept she can form her own spiritual thing with God without me having to approve or join the club too. There may be member perks but with perks come responsibilities and loyalties I don’t care for. I expected eventually Trunk or Treat would come back and I would help give out Tootsie-Rolls and Skittles to all the low income kids in superhero costumes once again.
Pastor Judy used to dress in a long black robe for Halloween, her gray hair tied back in a bun, a white lace collar around the throat of her robe, playing Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I expected to hear one day the confirmation classes would resume for Tess and Erin, and only a matter of time until the emergency would be lifted and gradually Pastor Judy would reconvene the crowds again, masks encouraged, and music would return, the kids participating, Sid serving as usher, Michel inviting us to attend the fifth anniversary of the hearing of the Good Samaritan and afterwards downstairs in the cafeteria there will be brunch, and either that, Confirmation Day or Christmas Eve would suck me back to church, even a good church like this one.
Never anticipated being rushed back for a funeral, and never Erin’s. And yet this was Erin’s church. Perfect sense. Sunday school and young voices choir with Clara and Tess. Hand bells. The Walker Art Center across Hennepin Avenue collaborated with the church to sponsor a mini-golf tournament on an artist designed course in a section of the sculpture garden. Erin won the inaugural tournament that prior year, awarded a faux bronze plastic life-sized portrait bust of John Wesley as a traveling trophy (every thirteen year old girl’s dream, right?). Everybody knew Erin. Erin came to Trunk or Treat. Pastor Judy knew Erin.
Michel related to Roxanne how she and Sid spoke to Pastor Judy on behalf of Natasha and Isaac to ask if Hennepin Avenue Methodist would please conduct the funeral for Erin and without hesitation Pastor Judy said yes, even if she wasn’t sure exactly how to put together the logistics and comply with the existing covid-19 emergency, she would make it happen. Thus the funeral was scheduled for Friday, the mourning visitation for Thursday, and the obituary published in the daily newspaper and social media. The mortuary would handle the logistics and coordinate the transportation from Bloomington to downtown and back to the cemetery. Natasha agreed to leave her house with Isaac to meet with Pastor Judy and her staff at the church Tuesday morning to plan the liturgy and music for the funeral. Michel, Sid and Valeria would attend the meeting, and Michel reported later what an ordeal it was to penetrate the fog of grief to get Natasha to pay attention and make decisions without breaking down and freaking out. Michel worried she would never find closure.
The obituary was composed by Gloria’s sister Janet with input from Valeria, Sid, Tracy, Michel, Clara, Norb and Gloria and met with approval from Isaac and Natasha. Before I even read a copy I felt myself wishing to get the funeral overwith. The limbo of inertia for me only postponed what I hoped would occur, a crescendo of consensus for what positive insight this event could possibly give and let us all get on with the catharsis.
Chapter 20
Death and its vocabulary get a lot of synonyms and euphemisms in our language. People meet their demise and pass away. Croak. Kick the bucket. Succumb. Leave us too soon. Get called back to God and meet their maker. Expire. You can go on.
Meaning no disrespect to Erin or her entire family — until I read her obituary I didn’t realize she had 16 cousins, until then not taking account that Isaac had four sisters — I wanted to rush through all the grief stages in one day and go straight to acceptance. Serenity. Erin was dead. There was no bringing her back. The waiting period before the wake between Saturday and Thursday seemed too long to say good bye. It was longer than our whole road trip to Indiana and Michigan.
I thought I’d had enough of death ruminations saying hail and farewell to John McCormick. I had it all figured out from my Summer of 69 perspective, even if I barely had thirteen hours at home to reflect upon my reflections on my ruminations when a whole new death happened. It was enough to behave appropriately when a grandfather figure passed away, salute him and entomb him with honors and lifetime achievement eulogies. This was death from the grandfather’s perspective of a child.
There was ironically no comparison. John lived to be 97. Beloved by all. Decorated by the military. Accomplished his dreams, far as he made known. Nobody expressed regrets at having known him. Nobody said he left too soon or seemed overly sad to see him go. Because he had lived such a full and rich life there was no reason to feel sorry for his loss because he had everything and everybody has to die eventually.
Erin was a child, her whole proverbial life ahead. A whole lot of life to be had to get to be 100, which was how old her own great-grandmother, Gloria’s mother lived. Erin was barely getting started. 13. That’s all. That’s the end of her story. Never got past middle school, no high school, no college. None of any of that stuff. Experiences. Accomplishments. Accolades. Some say she was on track towards such things in academics and athletics. She was popular at school and played on a top level soccer team in the Bloomington Athletic Association. She got good grades. She had a nice family, supportive and nurturing. Her parents were educated professionals, whose parents in turn were educated professionals, so Erin’s exposure to education was a no brainer. The kid had unlimited potential to do well in a long life that offers nobody guarantees. Sorry but all that potential is a guessing game of speculation that cannot be measured anymore, all slanted and tainted by everybody’s subjective perspective. Our projected hopes and dreams. We all wished the best. We’ll never really know. She’ll never grow up, get old. Outlive me.
She did not die of a drug overdose. Not a car crash or a bullet. She did not succumb to a terrible disease, not even covid-19. She was not abused, abducted or abandoned. Her house was not burned down. She was not hit by a firebomb or guided missile. Erin did not commit suicide.
She had epilepsy. It’s a brain condition of neurological activity like brain spasms or electrical eruptions that cause seizures to a person over a range of severity. About 2.4 million people in America have it, about 1.2% of the population, about 200,000 new patients diagnosed every year. About 65 million are epileptic worldwide. Erin was diagnosed by age 8. She did not have any shaking type symptoms like twitching. Hers were absence seizures marked by brief loss of awareness lasting several to several dozen seconds — spacing out. Petit mal. She told Clara and Tess sometimes she would get a feeling coming on, called an aura, and then it was over. She was open about discussing her condition, though she preferred not to be the object of medical curiosity. She was being treated by a neurologist and taking medication. The seizures were tapering off and did not disrupt her normal life. For some people the condidtion intensifies with aging. For others it may even go away by itself. Michel noted that for Erin the seizures took on some frequency with the onset of puberty, coinciding with the timing of her period. That development prompted Natasha and Isaac to schedule a check-up with the neurologist in the month before school started, but nobody thought it was a development of any urgency, least of all Erin.
The idea that they all guessed wrong spread panic throughout the family, even though these was no direct evidence that epilepsy played any role in the drowning. Without any prompting from me it was everybody’s best guess, however, and Natasha suffered the worst for guilt for not doing enough to pay closer attention to the potential harm — Erin was at least two years from worrying whether she could qualify for a drivers license. Erin was otherwise living la dolce vita. Maybe it was too much sugar. A full autopsy was not required and there is no known way to detect brain activity post mortem. No signs of trauma to her head, face or anywhere on her body. She drowned.
That she was not wearing a life jacket will always be a bone of contention. According to the law she was not required. The boats were anchored, not in transit. They were close to shore. Erin was an accomplished athlete and considered an excellent swimmer — I’ve watched her play soccer and learn to swim in Norb and Gloria’s pool — and all it took was one moment of inattention and she was lost like a three year old in the woods hauled off by a jackal.
The death of a child is an unimaginable loss and the cause of deep and abiding grief no one else can imagine or comprehend. By any means and by every possible misfortune, whether a prolonged suffering illness or famine or sudden as an electric shock or a bomb, when children precede their parents they leave an indescribable hole where an emerging person is supposed to be, and that carries over in waves to everyone who knows. It’s not the same as an elder passing with revered accolades and memories and maybe some scandalous asides and confabulated histories. A child is frozen in time, unfinished people in progress, a living dream of what can be, a missing companionship that was supposed to be a lifelong certain presence evolving through life who isn’t there any more to give nurture and unconditional love. Or to love back.
So I have been told, and so I have observed.
It hits hard. They keep saying each person grieves in their own way. So true. Grieving and appreciating death aren’t the same thing. Erin’s drowning evoked in me a deep sadness she was dead but provoked a need to accept the finality and get to the part about sharing the communal grief ceremonies and putting out a common perspective that Erin was gone and we all would somehow have to carry on. I concede it was easier for me to play the tough guy, a third-string grandpa in law at best in Erin’s pantheon, but as a whole in my life I have come uncomfortably close to death to accept it as one of those things. Nobody escapes. Someday Erin would eventually die. We don’t like that she died at age 13.
My dad Dick Sturgis used to say, none of us gets out of here alive. Whether he nicked that line off Jim Morrison of the Doors or some minds think alike, it’s a basic truth. My dad died when he was just barely 61 as if to prove his point in a similar fashion as Morrison. My mom died of a heart attack some fifteen years later in an emergency room in Colorado Springs. Speaking of heart attacks, there was Grandpa Kelly when I was eight, which upended my future but I survived. My earliest memory of someone who died and had a funeral where everybody cried was my uncle Bill, my mom’s sister Margaret’s husband the Air Force fighter jet test pilot who crashed when I was about four.
My youngest death of a peer was in sixth grade when Michael Gageby died of a ruptured appendix. I was just getting to know the guy. He was a new kid who joined our class that year with Mrs Dobmeyer at St Simon of Cyrene. Kind of a well dressed dandy, he wore Beatle boots and his blond wavy hair in a pompadour, Buddy Holly glasses, and braces on his teeth. He took a razzing from the school hoods and gave back pretty well. Turned out he took guitar lessons and had an electric Fender guitar — picked Guitar Boogie for me the one time I visited his house just a little while before he died. We hung out at the record shop sometimes. The Saturday before the Sunday he got sick we met up at the Southdale mall to hang out, check out the merchandise and follow groups of girls. On Monday our class was informed that Gageby was in the hospital for a ruptured appendix and we prayed for him. Seemed he complained of stomach pain on the bus ride to the St Simon of Cyrene part of town where we departed after Southdale, but who would have guessed appendicitis? Somebody had to explain it. Everybody in class wrote him cards at the hospital on Monday. Tuesday Sister Aquinas the principal came to our class to tell us Gageby had died of sepsis. The funeral was at the St Simon of Cyrene parish church. I and some of the guys we hung out with at Southdale were asked to be pallbearers. I remember how stricken his parents were, Mr and Mrs Gageby, clung to each other as if under an umbrella in a storm, their eyes anguished with grief. They were a relatively older couple, pushing 50. They thanked me for being Mike’s friend. He was adopted as a little boy. They had just relocated to the Twin Cities that year from suburban Chicago. We would have been approaching 13.
My sister Molly died at home hospice in Lead, South Dakota in a bone chilling January just over ten years prior to Erin. She had esophageal cancer made worse by alcoholism and I was able to visit her at hospice before she died. Among her last words to me were, You ought to come around here more often. She died while Roxanne and I were in Mexico.
A little over a year after our mom died my sister Murray’s husband Don died of melanoma in a hospital just a week after being diagnosed. It had spread to his liver before anyone knew. Being widowed so suddenly hit Morgan hard but the family rallied for her and over time she met a new guy and remarried.
Roxanne’s sister Cindy’s husband John went to bed New Year’s Eve and died in his sleep seven years ago, 2014 at age 64, convincing me to retire at 62 and not waste the rest of my life working if I didn’t really need to.
Somewhere before and after Cindy’s husband John, her and Roxanne’s parents both died, first their father in hospice care, then their mother in hospital for sudden acute kidney failure.
All these people except Molly I attended their funerals. I should add in Aunt Winnie’s and just the week before John McCormick. Other than these I guess I’ve been pretty lucky avoiding funerals. The longer I live, the more opportunities will emerge. One day the bell will toll for me.
Until Erin I managed to procrastinate serious anticipation of my own mortality, even if I told myself I accepted it long ago. As one accustomed to depression I certainly contemplated death at one time or other throughout my conscious life. I thought about suicide because it happens. I never wanted to do it because I never wanted to be dead. However bad or sad I felt I never wanted to be dead. Dead was dead. No more. No mas. There was no reconsideration and another chance. At about adolescence in my life, about the age when I recollect my depressions first made me self-conscious about feeling them, I entertained my first doubts about my religion — not just questions but serious doubt. In the years to follow, my adulthood, middle age, as an elder my early doubts evolved into cynicism, agnosticism, atheism and pantheism, paganism and borderline blasphemist infidel when it comes to my conflicts and coexistence with spirituality. Early on I rejected living with the prospect of Judgment Day and I posited that even if God exists it would be counterproductive to require every soul to have to believe the whole myth of Jesus just to get to heaven if God really loved everybody equal. If there were such thing as eternal life, then why wouldn’t God in infinite grace and mercy grant perpetual life to us all and let the secular world judge our civic conduct in this world.
None of my philosophical leanings or variations of theme searches ever answered what happens to us after we die. I am inclined to assume the worst, that is we completely cease to exist, there is no afterlife. Sorry. That’s the main reason I don’t want to be dead. I would rather it doesn’t end. Would I like to believe there is more? Of course. I would love to believe in an immortal soul made of consciousness and eternal energy that resonates throughout the universe, one with nature and physics. That would to me be a bonus, going to heaven. That’s the best I hope for, and how I have described my idea of the afterlife when discussing it with people I would prefer not to bum out and alienate by suggesting death was dead and that’s all she wrote.
After all, I could be wrong. With all the tides of afterlife rushing around Erin it seemed most prudent to go with the flow and be prepared to console everybody on their own terms of perpetual light and eternal life, and yet I could not escape into others’ grief enough to deny my own time was running out and I still wasn’t done. No, I could be done any day now. As my sister Murray’s current ex-husband Jeff said, it’s the fourth quarter. I had all the qualities of an elder’s life summarized in a five minute eulogy, and for all my life, all my years of experience, nobody will miss my consciousness and memories more than I will. Death is not a better place.
It’s sad to think of a eulogy for a thirteen year old kid. Winner of the Walker Art Center Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church first annual miniature golf tournament. Honor student at STEM courses in middle school (science, technology, engineering and math). Soccer star — aggressive midfielder. Loyal friend and companion to my grandchildren, Clara and Tess. Best friend in the world to Tess. Doting grandchild. Beloved daughter. Favorite among cousins. Adorable niece. Fixture among family. At 13 she was already a kind of institution.
The year Clara and Tess returned from Switzerland they created an online exclusive family magazine they called the Tessclara Monthly. They published photos from their iPhones and articles cribbed from social media such as a tiger attending prom in Florida or a man-made forest in Singapore, fun facts such as the average human brain when awake generates enough electricity to power a light bulb, and weird recipes under Tess’s Tasty Treats for concoctions like Spaghetter made of spaghetti, ice cream, cinnamon, sugar and whipped cream. The feature story each issue was Cousin of the Month. In June 2018 they profiled Erin.
“Every family has the cool kid,” either Clara or Tess wrote, their collaborative written style hard to distinguish. ”In the Kysylyczyn family that’s Erin Peterson. This multi talented ten year old goes to school, plays soccer, sings and does gymnastics. We have this interview with (let’s face it, EVERYONE’S favorite) Erin Peterson.”
Remember I described her as a little wiseass? Here is the text from June 2018:
Q:Erin, what do you think makes make people like you so much?
A: I’m talkative and I’m a good conversationalist.
How do you pull off your hairstyle so well?
I take good care of my hair, my mom helps and I get my haircut every few months.
What are your hobbies?
Soccer, drawing, reading, playing outside, and being awesome.
What makes you so cool?
I was born like this.
Do you think that you are the favorite?
Yes.
Who is your favorite cousin?
Tess.
How is your brother?
Bad.
What is your style?
Erin style.
Why do you think that you deserve to be the cousin of the month?
Because it’s me and I’m awesome.
What is something that no-one knows about you?
I talk to myself when I go to sleep.
So, even if Grandma [Gloria] won’t admit it, Erin is (and always will be) the favorite in all of our hearts. ”Erin is such a great person.” – Tess “Erin is really spunky and has a great style.“
Verbatim.
After a few more editions the Tessclara Monthly ceased production. Maybe they ran out of cousins who would cooperate with an interview — some of the younger boy cousins like Erin’s bad brother Nate were more inclined to be the anti-cousin of the month. School started. Maybe they moved on to other media such as TikTok. I downloaded and printed every issue.
June 2018 Erin was ten. Tess too. Clara pushing 13. What a happy trinity. Blessed. Last seen all together the 4th of July at Norb and Gloria’s pool party, diving after dive stick treasures with Coretta and the boy cousins on the deep end. Last saw Erin with Tess at the splash pool waterslide aquatic center in St Louis Park where they gave Neko lessons how to swim and dive under water, the day she called me her third grandpa. Reading back in Clara and Tess’s journal I can seem to always see Erin being there almost automatically, yet I hardly really knew her that well, even though for a while it seemed she spent more time at Michel and Sid’s than at home. I simply ignored her half the time, took her for granted and sometimes looked after her suspiciously but didn’t truly bond with her until that day at the water park with Neko, and I can’t say I knew Erin that well on an eye to eye basis. Rereading her profile in the Tessclara Monthly I can’t say I was ever that enthralled and awestruck but I realized how taken with her my grand daughters were, especially Tess. My skepticism of Erin as a little con artist arose from her milking my generosity for bomb pops and Dairy Queen, after soccer games and a dose of Dippin Dots at Mall of America, but sometimes I would fret for Tess that Tess was putting more into their relationship than she got back from Erin. Now I was really worried.
When Michel and Sid moved with the kids to Switzerland Tess and Erin each got necklaces with half amulets that fit together as a whole when pieced together, so much Tess missed Erin while she was away. After four years they were reunited. Five years after that, separated forever.
I had one more thing to live for, to somehow comfort Tess in her irreconcilable, inconsolable grief. I didn’t know if I could ever do that, an old geezer grandfather, I was learning, has very little influence over the feelings of teenagers. I had to hope I could try, or at least be ready with a clean handkerchief, a genuine embrace, a look of heartfelt compassion, and the presence of mind to say something wise and true to help her mind find a pathway to heal her broken heart, if ever I got the chance.
Michel was having a tough enough time. Besides supporting her own children Tess and Clara and mediating among the Kysylyczyns in their commiserations as they coordinated with the funeral home, the church and each other to plan the details of the Celebration of Life and Resurrection. The stress on the individuals coming to grips in their own minds and trying to extend support to one another not secure in their own grief was spreading paranoid vibes. Michel was hearing that Natasha resented Michel for stealing her daughter away and alienating her from enjoying mother-daughter time together. Michel said to Roxanne she knew that was a crock of bullshit and at first blew it off as more of Natasha’s emotional implosion, but now it was starting to get to her as a sign Natasha wasn’t trying to get better, just looking for more ways to escape self-blame. Michel said she felt Natasha was shunning her and her girls to shut out resentment by disassociating from people who meant the most to Erin besides her. In some ways nobody would blame Natasha for wanting to keep Erin’s memory private to herself for a while but Michel criticized the practice of sequestering Erin’s relationships and it was starting to be a trend, not talking about Erin any more because it made other people walk away and cry. Michel said Gloria was getting to be the same way, isolating from and exiting conversations about Erin because it hurt so bad.
Being respectful and minding a reasonable tradition not to speak ill of the dead I kept mute about my perception of the emerging blame game among various family to assume or assign fault for what happened to Erin. It seemed clear to me what happened to Erin was Erin’s fault. I didn’t want to invite arguments or incite anybody to call me out for blaming the victim. It was sad, bloody damn sad, a terrible, tragic accident. Whether acting all daredevil fancy shmantzy or just a simple pencil dive off the lilypad feet first, Erin chose to go into the lake. No mistake, jumping in the lake was intentional. All the kids were doing it, albeit the other three wore lifejackets, but we all know Erin was an expert swimmer and diver. She had arrogant self-confidence and decided she would dive without a jacket. To Erin’s own best judgment there was no risk in what she was doing. She knew what she was doing. Everybody trusted her. She wanted to dive in the lake. She dived into the lake. For whatever reason, by some unknown means, Erin inhaled the lake water and died. The last part was certainly unintentional — an unintended consequence of an act of choice, and that’s why it was an accident. But it was Erin’s fault.
That they could not find her soon enough down underwater only started the tsunami waves of tectonic faults and seismic tremblors caused by Erin’s drowning. I wasn’t sure somewhere out there Erin wasn’t reveling in the attention.
My son Vincent was concerned for his niece Tess. His best friend Trevor was killed two years before in a high speed head-on car crash with a wrong way driver on an interstate freeway west of Phoenix, Arizona. Vincent and Trevor were friends since grade school. Went through South High together. Remained tight into adulthood while Vincent went to university and Trevor served as a band roadie, sound technician and sideman guitarist before producing two excellent albums for Southside Desire, his singer-songwriter wife Marvel Devitt’s band in which he also played bass. People remembered him as a dedicated guy who, when he wasn’t playing a gig would be stage managing or working the sound at a local club or else home taking care of his and Marvel’s kids. He was cutting back his sound gigs at First Ave, the Turf Club and the Nomad to spend more time with Southside Desire. This was supposed to be his last roadie trip, driving an indie duo from the UK called Her’s on their first US tour. They had just left their penultimate gig in Phoenix, so it was past midnight and one can imagine their euphoria if the gig went well. A day or two before, to celebrate Trevor’s birthday they took a day trip to see Grand Canyon, all for the first time. Leaving Phoenix they got a jump on their final leg of the tour to LA, their last performance before flying home. The whole Twin Cities music scene openly broke down and cried. My son was overcome.
He had a hard time attending the memorials. His grief was too personal to share with a scene beyond his wife Amalie and some other close personal friends, Roxanne and me, so he kept it private and for quite a while trusted us not to bring up Trevor he missed him so much. At Vincent and Amalie’s wedding Trevor was the best man. Eventually Vincent brought up Trevor. The Southside Desire drummer Damian was another friend from school and he kept coming around. Vincent and Amalie had Neko and when he and I got together over the kid Vincent began remembering Trevor out loud, sometimes criticizing his faults mismanaging money, usually praising his talents as a good dad and caretaker of other musicians’ kids and as a musician and sound man. They texted daily. He confessed he was having the hardest time facing Marvel, Trevor’s widow, for some reason, but he was working it out
What he most missed from Trevor was that in all the world Trevor was his Go To Guy. His brother. There was no closer human being except Amalie. He expected they would grow old together. Between his gaping absence and the horror of how he died, Vincent sometimes talked himself into tears about Trevor, and I listened. I didn’t know what to say and usually said nothing, just listened. I saw it as a good sign when he commented how ironic it was, a band from the UK was killed by a driver coming the other way on the left side of the road in America.
When we got together during Erin we talked around her when Neko was around because he and Amalie hadn’t told the three year old Erin was dead, so we talked figuratively about Trevor. I didn’t know Trevor that well, maybe as well as I knew Erin, by reputation mostly. I liked him and I respected the close relationship he had with my son. Like I knew Erin the best through what she meant to Tess. Vincent knew his niece Tess well. He favored her since babyhood because like him she was a second sibling, almost three years junior to her elder sibling. Vincent expressed worry for Tess’s state of mind more than anything because if Erin reminded him this much of Trevor then Tess must be going through a hell of unprepared rupture of the universe. We wouldn’t see her until Thursday at the wake — the visitation, the obituary called it.
Memorials preferred to Epilepsy Foundation or Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church.
Somebody inevitably would start a scholarship fund. Valeria was already in charge. No GoFundMe page however. And of course there was no way to sue the lake for wrongful death.
When my father in law Roxanne’s dad realized in his relatively demented mind that he was dying he said to me, There ought to be a law. I knew he meant a law against dying and I was all in favor. He didn’t want to die. I didn’t blame him. I also didn’t bother to counsel him that there already was a law, Natural law, which says we all die.
When my ancient Aunt Winnie used to bitch and moan about still being alive I was offended that she seemed to regard life as cheap and was wasting it by wishing it away. Her life, of course. She was lonely, eyesight gone and shunted by her son, my cousin Ronnie, who likely bilked her of every asset she owned just to keep her in a cheap nursing home, so she had some kind of right to have a pissy attitude, but it seemed if she was considered by my family to be one of the wisest of our elders then I expected more creative hope from her endeavors to survive at her advanced age. For somebody who would rather die she lived a long time.
Old people who die get a kind word in emeritus told to a past generation. Memoriums to young people are expected to keep their memories going through the lifetime of their own generation of survivors but somehow into the future too. Either way only the living can remember. Even if Erin’s dying remains senseless and meaningless it will always be remembered. How she will be remembered was taking shape behind all the scenes and would blend together the obvious themes. Why she will be remembered is the real reason we all grieved her loss that last week of July 2021.
Chapter 21
The news that week reported Simone Biles withdrew from further Team USA competition in gymnastics at the Tokyo Olympics, citing mental health reasons. The House select committee to investigate the riot and insurrection at the nation’s Capitol January 6th held its first public hearing with testimony from four police officers injured on duty by rioters who stampeded Congress to stop the certification of the election of Joe Biden and sought to lynch Vice president Mike Pence on behalf of President Donald Trump. Our governor and state health commissioner reminded Minnesotans that the state of emergency still existed over the covid-19 pandemic, and though severe restrictions of behavior had been loosened, the spread of the new delta variant was being detected in wastewater testing and hospitalizations were again on the rise, so citizens were urged too keep observing precautions. Meantime fentanyl overdoses killed more people at local homeless camps. All the while north western wildfires vented haze over our sky.
Under such a copper tinted sky we drove to Bloomington for Erin’s wake. Thanks to a navigation app we easily found the mortuary at the focal center of a tidy cemetery in the woods not far from Bush Lake and Hyland Hills. The building a one story modern tan brick and demi chalet like a 1980s church without denomination, as institutionally neutral as a conservative government agency and moreso than a medical clinic. The tiny two or three blocks of land around the building all had flat gravestones, easy to mow. Some of the lawn was open grass. The cemetery wasn’t very ancient at all. The parking was scarce. A line of people extended down the sidewalk to the parking lot from the entrance to the building where small groups gathered outdoors in the evening light. We joined the line at the end. It moved along quickly.
It rather blew me away seeing so many people, lots of kids and their parents, a big turnout for Erin. We encountered Sid’s sister Tracy’s sons Cisco and Lucas with Erin’s brother Nate dressed up in button up shirts and pressed pants more or less chasing each other around the lawn outside the building, looking grim and still needing to burn that preteen energy. We asked them how they were doing and they shrugged and looked grimmer. We asked Nate about his parents. “They’re sad,” he said. “My mom cries all the time.”
At about forty yards from the door we were spotted by our own niece Macushla, daughter of my late sister Molly, who ducked into the building and emerged in a few seconds coming toward us and motioning us to cut the line, Michel’s orders, we were family. So we exchanged the hugs with Macushla and followed her inside to an open lobby where my sister Murray and her ex-husband Jeff were talking with Molly’s other daughter Hannah, and there was Michel, the first we’d seen her since before John McCormick’s funeral in Fort Wayne.
If there are certain times when you take deep pride in your child this was one for me. Never have I seen her more elegant and sincere. Always known for her beauty, there was an appropriate glow about her this evening, even with eyes of sorrow. Again here was my future hope, my daughter, my girl in a subtle purple and gray green dress and greeting her family with tragic truth, never prettier and never denying the reason for all this occasion truly sucked.
We embraced and patted each others backs and shoulders and shared tears and straightened up. Sid was nearby and hugged us. Clara came from the viewing chapel and hugged us. She offered to escort us to Erin, and she walked us into the intimate little room where the coffin displayed Erin in a purply flowery dress. Tess was in the room, off to the side so as not to obstruct the procession coming through from outside. In a way Roxanne and I and Clara were against the flow, but nobody minded. I approached Tess and called her by my nickname for her, Kitty. She hugged me tightly and said nothing.
Erin was dead. Looked dead. Kind of purple. Her favorite color. Seeing her bloodless corpse did exactly what an open casket review is supposed to do, confirm to every witness that the deceased is really dead. It’s important to human nature to be sure someone is truly dead, there is no mistake. Even when we most want there to be a mistake, our seeing is believing. Her face was peaceful. A soft purple sleep. Nothing contrived by the mortician made me feel less sad to look at her this last time. It was worth one last look though. I needed to be sure it was really Erin. Not that I doubted what I’d been told or gone into denial — you all know me by now — but seeing her corpse at the very end of her life was my means to teach myself that hers was not a trivial loss. The line out along the sidewalk forming the procession to view her body and say good bye said to the world Erin left a grievous hole.
Her BAA soccer team wore their uniforms, pink and purple. The rest of the kids in civvies probably schoolmates, neighbors, the church choir. I recognized faces from Michel’s church, not surprised. Away from the viewing room and into the deep lobby the adult crowd mingled towards the cafeteria tables and chairs set sparsely to a quiet room where a comfort dog named Gideon with baggy flesh accepted being stroked and petted by sad kids of all ages. Gideon’s sponsors gave away stuffed toy Gideons the size of beany babies to anyone who wanted to take one home. At the outer lobby the procession past the flowers to Erin’s casket entered back into the open lobby to a gallery of photo collages of Erin pictured in Kodacolor and black and white at every age with scads of cousins and other kids and grandparents and her dad’s family, sports teams and choirs and Sid’s family, past birthdays and pastimes on excursions with Clara and Tess.
When Clara escorted us back to the lobby when we were ready after viewing the body she said it was a dress of hers Erin wore in the casket, her favorite dress to borrow for church if she stayed overnight on Saturday.
So what did Clara think of Simone Biles withdrawing from competition at the Olympics? She was justified, she answered. Well being takes precedence over career. Suni Lee stepped up, another gymnast on the team, who came from St Paul by the way, and Team USA won gold. If Simone Biles says she needs time away from gymnastics to devote to her mental health, she should be taken at her word.
She left us in the crowd nearest the photo collages to go back in the reviewing room to look after her sister. Pale and ghostly, dark circles under her eyes emoting moats of sleepless sadness, Tess looked like a goth waif without makeup or jewelry. In a simple gray green dress with pale purple short sleeves she stood vigil over her best friend cousin and wept silently among the sprays of flowers. I wanted to go back in there with Clara to comfort her in her vigil but refrained because Tess needed these moments to herself, something Clara respected and kept her vigil over her sister and cousin friend at a distance, and Tess didn’t need over-attention from a well-meaning consoler and grandfather calling her Kitty, even me, not at this time. She knew she was not alone in her grief but for this time she needed to be alone.
Out there in the lobby where people signed the guest book it was astonishing to me to see so so many of my Kelly family mingling around with Michel and Sid and Sid’s family. I didn’t know why I was surprised by my family’s turnout except most of them barely knew the Kysylyczyns, or Erin, so I thought. So I was proud to see my clan supporting Roxanne’s and my extended family. Not far behind us, Vincent and Amelie showed up, got queued to the top of the line via Macushla who was lingering among talkers outdoors on the lawn, and soon mixed among the mourners, Kelly and Kysylyczyn alike.
First I found Isaac, Erin’s dad, straight and tall in an elegant gray suit, almost steely military, engaging guests. We embraced and I asked how he was. “I’m in robot mode,” he answered. I said something about not losing his humanity, and he said, “Never.”
The line to meet Isaac was never ending so I moved on. Natasha, Erin’s mom, was nowhere in sight, which didn’t surprise me from the reports I’d heard about her seclusiveness. Norbert and Gloria, Erin’s Kysylyczyn grandparents were not hard to find halfway deep towards the Gideon area, also steeped in sympathizers and mourners. We embraced on sight and consoled each other amid fresh tears. Nobody knew what to say. Words could not express the dumbfounded feelings about what happened and why it happened and what it meant to lose Erin.
No answers.
Erin’s other grandparents, Isaac’s parents Ernie and Bernie took up the rest of the lobby and vestibule by crowd density and virtue of Isaac’s five sisters, their spouses and children, Erin’s Peterson cousins, several of whom hung around in the quiet back room petting Gideon. We knew the parents, Ernie and Bernie from Norb and Gloria’s annual 4th of July pool parties. Ernie was typically stoic, a model man of emotionless ceremonial duty to act with impeccable dignity, and Bernie (Bert her friends called her) held herself bravely showing example to her daughters and grandkids and standing by her men, Ernie and Isaac, her frail eyes behind her granny glasses squinched with perpetual pain. All us elders looked twenty years older since July 4th but no one more than Isaac’s parents. None of his sisters or their kids participated in any of Norb and Gloria’s pool parties and we only met them once at Isaac and Natasha’s wedding, so it seemed extreme to acknowledge the breadth of Isaac’s family beyond himself and maybe once a year Ernie and Bert.
Isaac was a software engineer of considerable skill. The only boy of six kids he grew up Catholic in the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities. He liked fishing and camping and boating. Erin liked to fish with him. He liked to travel into Canada to fish lakes in Manitoba. Sometimes he brought along Tracy’s husband Joe Jones, who also liked fishing and camping. It was impressive to see Isaac’s Peterson family — Isaac nominally the only Peterson among his siblings, the others married and living under married names — there supporting him for Erin. Everyone looked grim. Ernie and Bert set the tone. This was not a night to celebrate a damn thing.
It wasn’t a night to get chummy. We found Tracy and Natasha with Valeria and Ted Aragon and their kids in the cafeteria tables area within sight of Gideon. I pocketed a stuffed Gideon for Neko. The kids we exchanged nods but among Sid’s sisters each embrace was embraced, and with Natasha it was like a handshake and a half. Tracy is an affectionate hugger. Valeria less so. Valeria’s husband Ted will hug Norb, but not Sid or me or Joe or Isaac, we’re all fist bumpers and handshakers. Gloria’s sister Janet was there and her husband Larry — of course. Norb’s two sisters and their husbands were there from Chicago. John and Sara Aragon, Ted’s dad and step-mom were there, glum and speechless along with his step-father Jim and mother Sandy. My sisters Heather and Kerry along with Morgan and her ex-husband Jeff and Kerry’s current husband Patrick, my nieces Macushla and Hannah, daughters of my dead sister Molly, both my kids and two granddaughters plus Amelie were there, but not Neko. Nobody had told the three year old Erin was dead.
So Roxanne and I circulated among the mourners exchanging hugs, fist bumps and handshakes as appropriate, but no high fives. As usual I tried to elicit comments by just listening but the silences drowned out any voices summoned by the shock. Erin’s older cousins walked among the elders mum and stern. A few people wore masks — not many considering the size of the crowd indoors in the air conditioning so soon after the lifting of covid restrictions — which concealed their face expressions except for their eyes, which ranged from glazed to furious with squinty gazes in between. Anybody who smiled required a reason related to hope.
Outdoors on the lawn the crowd thinned out and there was no more line to go inside. Tracy and Joe’s boys Cisco and Lucas cavorted lamely trying to entice cousin Nate to lighten up but Nate moped under the watchful eye of Joe. Several years ago I wrote about toy guns and in the story I described a girl with glee shooting her younger brother in Gloria’s pool with a Super Soaker water rifle and the brother crying, “Not in the face! Not in the face!” That little brother was Nate. The glee inspired shooter sister was Erin.
The kids on the lawn needed a ball to kick around. People hung out as they exited, giving the long Irish good bye even though they would meet again tomorrow for the funeral. The sun hung low between the trees in the copper sky.
I went back in to see Erin one more time before we’d go. Tess was still in there, nearer to the casket but still not alone, deferring space to those like me who visited for one last stare, yet never alone, a cousin or her sister at her back. In this instance me at her side. She tilted her head to my shoulder and I slanted my head to rest on her head. She wore french braids. There was nothing to say. She was getting tall. Way bigger than the little girl I perched on my shoulders at the Louvre to see Mona Lisa. Older now than the little girl who wrote in a Christmas card to her mother Michel, “Our family is permanent.” So much older and wiser than the young lady who declared just five days ago, “I’ll never be happy again.”
She straightened herself and made eye contact and deliberately tried to smile at me but the tears gushed hard and I gave her my spare clean white hanky. I put my arm around her shoulders and we gazed at Erin, blond and trying to look serene in Clara’s purple flowered dress, too obviously not content or even resigned to be dead. This whole elegant scene was wrong. It should not be happening, and everyone and especially Tess knew it. The look on Erin’s embalmed face said Erin knew it. Tess had placed in Erin’s folded hands the gold chain necklace Tess wore the whole time she lived in Switzerland, which was half a medallion, the other half on a necklace around Erin’s neck in the casket. Tess’s unfathomable pain from this unthinkable separation drenched her in a bottomless lake of sorrow she could not surface, chained as she was to a wrecked relationship as out of control as Erin’s drowning.
Michel approached to whisper that the morticians would be closing the casket soon. Tess asked for a few more minutes in private. Michel lingered at the doorway while Clara walked me out to the lobby by the collages, suddenly chatty, telling about the troves of photos she and the Kysylyczyns sorted through, printing several through Walgreens same-day service. She talked about choosing the music for tomorrow’s church service, assuring me I would like their choices. The cousins composed something as a statement of remembrance, which Coretta Aragon the eldest cousin would read. Clara was nervous how the funeral would go but trusted everyone involved would do their part, for Erin.
Isaac and Natasha were given notice of a final chance to view her alone before they closed up for the night and everyone in the lobby and the vestibule parted a way for them to proceed into the viewing chapel as Tess and Michel exited. Outdoors again as night began to fall into golden twilight I observed the clearing of the crowd and said good night to my sisters and nieces. Murray quipped again how we had to stop meeting like this at funerals. There was no reason for Roxanne and me to hang around late. The Kysylyczyns and the Petersons lingered for obvious reasons but Roxanne and I weren’t technically close family, and even Gloria didn’t invite us to join their commiseration, which didn’t bother us per se although we felt cut off from Michel, Sid, Clara and Tess. Otherwise we felt relieved to get away with no other responsibility than to show up again at the church the next day and again back at this cemetery to lay Erin in her grave. We were extras in the crowd scene. Friends of family. Nobody wanted to hear me complain how she always suckered me for a frozen treat on a stick after every park board soccer game those summers when she and Tess were in gradeschool because she was with Tess and knew I would pay — of course I would pay. Who would begrudge a kid a bomb pop after a soccer match?
In the collage Erin and Tess posed in team uniforms, at least three different years, 4th, 5th, 6th grade. Tess fresh back from Switzerland to southwest Minneapolis. Erin spending almost half her life it seemed bunking at Tess and Clara’s, joining their church and playing park board soccer at that massive set of pitches arrayed across that park near Diamond Lake. A guy always parked his ice cream truck along Portland Ave and that’s where Erin got her bomb pops and Tess and Grandma and I got dreamsicles. Erin kept playing soccer past the Minneapolis park board program and joined the Bloomington Athletic Association and from all accounts got pretty good at a competitive level — not surprising, though I hadn’t watched her play in at least two years. Tess stopped soccer after park board and also stopped competitive swimming and concentrated on gymnastics, where we attended meets watching her and Clara compete among gymnastic clubs across the state, my and Roxanne’s extent following our grandkids sports. Only lately they took up diving, which they could practice with Erin at Norb and Gloria’s pool, which had a deep end and a one meter diving board. Just that summer Tess attended a diving camp while Erin had soccer camp. The harmony and convergence of their lives deserved a better braid.
My heart broke for Tess. My Kitty. There was nobody in this world whose love I found harder to earn than her. Seemed she disliked me the night she was born and I held her at the hospital and she squirmed at me as if I arrived late for the occasion. She used to cry when I was put in charge of watching her. One year when she was about two Roxanne and I visited them when they used to live in Woodbury, before Switzerland, and we had just come home from our vacation to Mexico and brought Clara and Tess little trinket toys from there. Clara got a butterfly and Tess a ladybug. Tess didn’t like it and told me to “Get out of my house!” She kept saying it, crying, “Get out of my house!” Michel and Sid were embarrassed, Roxanne bewildered and Tess adamant. I was completely blown away. We left.
As she got older Tess and I gradually made friends. It seemed Clara and I hit it off at first sight the day she was born, and that may have been something Tess sensed from birth, being second. If I sensed this I compensated as best I could without conceding favor to Clara.
A breakthrough with Tess occurred on a family trip to Venice, Italy. Roxanne and I timed our spring visit to Switzerland to coincide with Clara’s school choir making a trip to Venice to sing at the Basilica San Marco. Clara traveled with the choir and the rest of us rented a condo for the weekend with a canal view. It was Roxanne’s and my first visit to the venerable city. It was also our first visit with Sid and Michel’s family to anywhere without Clara. Tess stepped up for her absent older sister to escort us through the city and entertain us as our official grandchild guide. Tess had already been to Venice once before and wanted us to feel secure navigating such a strange place of no streets but corridors and bridges tying together an island city of canals, which at the age of six or seven she assured us we had nothing to be afraid of, we would never get lost no matter how intimidating the passageways and open campos might seem there was a logic to it and she sometimes held our hands accompanying us to places like the Rialto bridge and the grand Piazza and the Bridge of Sighs to be sure she made us feel included and welcome to this interesting place of boats but no cars.
She had me convinced she really knew the place when she led me to a green space grassy park where she practiced cartwheels and round-offs, her early gymnastics exercises. She wore a blue dress and an opera mask that day. For the first time in her life I felt she was going out of her way to be nice to me, and I have felt with her a sense of privilege ever since. She sang for us the Skye Boat Song — twice, once for me and Roxanne when we first settled into the condo, and once more when Vincent and Amelie joined the vacation the second day — Tess and her gusto voce rendition of the Scottish ballad about Bonnie Prince Charlie’s escape, which she learned at school. That weekend Tess took over from Clara so Clara could travel with the school choir and not think twice about me and Grandma Roxanne. Tess proved she could entertain and enlighten us as least as well as her sister could at her age and I was impressed that she showed she cared that much about me.
A few years ago she and I were talking about how we didn’t hit it off so well when she was a toddler and I said I worried that she resented me because she thought I loved Clara more than her, which was never true. She paused to consider that theory and did not deny it might be somewhat true. In my mind it’s settled that I love Tess as much as Clara and Tess knows it. And I know Tess loves me and doesn’t have to prove it. We got pretty lucky as a family separated by geography to be together and experience things together during the girls’ elementary school years so there was no period of estrangement to overcome. No awkward adjustments. No sense of making up for lost opportunities. No guilt we didn’t do enough. I don’t know what transformed a cranky, grumpy little girl into an affectionate and charming young lady but it scared me to death she might regress beyond zero.
And now we set the example of how to grieve.
I feel Tess’s loss as if Erin were one of my own and I cannot reconcile for Tess or myself whether it was fair, or if we should have seen it coming, or if it means anything cosmic about the destiny of civilization. I cannot say whether Erin’s soul is here, there or out there, or what became of her memory and her personality, but her body is no longer alive. Those who profess to believe in the Resurrection will have to wait until Judgement Day for a reunion. Tess’s loss can never be repaid.
All I can measure are her words as we parted the night of Erin’s wake: “I love you.”
That told me all was not lost.
“I love you too, Kitty,” I responded. “See you tomorrow.”
Chapter 22
The morning of Erin’s funeral the sun rose without bold drama, the sky still stained with wildfire soot, so it took longer for daylight to assert firm control over the night. Once it did, though, it looked like another hazy summer day.
I knew it was Friday because it was the day of Erin’s funeral. Since I retired seven or so years before, many days I didn’t care what nominal day it was. Unless I had plans or an appointment I didn’t keep track. I trusted myself with free time. This was my Summer of 69, some kind of culmination year symbolizing freedom and survival. Since I stopped working at a job I took up the pastime of unhurried contemplation and meditative daydreaming. I read more. Learned kitchen skills. We toured Europe and spent more weeks in Mexico. Went to day baseball games. Stayed home. I wrote this blog. The pandemic and the lost year of ZOZO, the days of George Floyd and the menace of a government regime determined not to cede power seemed to happen out of nowhere to affect and alter my reality perceptions of where and how I lived but nothing actually stopped me from living well and being happy at my advanced age. Retired. No longer part of the Rat Race. No longer slave to the clock. No more dependence on the paycheck. All that retirement savings and matching so many years for this — freedom. A house paid for. No liens or mortgages. Taxes paid on time. Retired. Enough saved to get by in our senior years. Enough to travel again. Enough to afford to be with the people we love with no excuses like Sorry, I gotta Work.
There is no perfect perspective. This was meant to be a year of revelations but not so much for me as for everybody else, and once more it turned out the other way around again. A sad and depressed patriarch slow to learn from his mistakes expected to make even his legacy all in one summer like a merchant making up for pandemic losses all in one day. If I expected by Labor Day to win some kind of grandpa lifetime achievement award it disappeared in weed smoke in Colorado in June. John McCormick’s passing humbled me to recognize what a truly life well lived really meant in this indifferent world. And then Erin drowned. My life didn’t mean much anymore in the grand scheme.
Somewhere between old John McCormick and his time on earth encompassing almost a whole century of experiences and sequences of events, some more memorable and mostly mundane, and young Erin and her existence barely past a decade making sense of a world unmade as much as not of her own making, my life could not compare to either of them. I am a lost generational bridge. The runaway boomchild.
What have I done to advance the human race? I am a vain speck of dust in the macro cosmos. A sleeper cell who never quite woke up enough to challenge society to go after its best ideals. Whom have I befriended for life? In my own family I barely get by as a husband, dad, brother, uncle, and now grandfather, nothing to distinguish my tenure, my presence in the family tree. Sixty nine years old and still a self-pitying pirate, hitch-hiker, parasite mooching existence off a world of everybody else’s time.
Even this convenient flash of self awareness came too late to authenticate what came to this: sixty nine years is a millstone not a milestone. All that time telling myself I was seeking wisdom — for what? Self gratification. Near criminal justification. Vain confidence to gravitate to a corner to read any room if I could dare enter any room. Self edification — did I really learn anything useful? Self medication — to what cure?
My Summer of 69 would never come again, like the lost year ZOZO it would never end. Until the end. “We know not the day or the hour,” my mom used to say, fishing for a passage from Matthew’s gospel to summarize sudden death. My future summers were numbered, and this could end up my last one. I retired from the Rat Race to spend my end days of my end years deliberately at leisure doing or not doing whatever I wanted. Travel. Read and write. Spend time with Roxanne. The kids. Grandkids. Meditate, contemplate and think. Make new memories. Find personal peace. Serenity. Somehow this summer was supposed to mark a year when I might proclaim I reached my goals.
It would have been an easy reach to blame John McCormick and Erin for spoiling my summer when I blew it early in the Colorado Rockies. Didn’t blame either of them actually. John was after all a model civics lesson. Erin exposed my hubris. Looking around my house at all the stuff accumulated over about forty years of occupation only reminded me of one retirement goal grossly unrealized: divestment.
I have gone on binges cleaning closets and purging bookshelves, sorting photos and recycling appliances and so forth, but now the sheer volume of trivial mementos everywhere in my home overwhelmed me as I tried to devote attention to sorting, organizing and purging my stuff during the week of Erin’s funeral. Yes, some of this stuff should go. Why do I need these stones, they are barely pretty much less precious. A Rocky Colavito baseball card. A holy card of St Michael. Where to begin… the foreign coins, the statuettes. How many images of Eiffel Tower does one man need? A few grocery sacks of books I concede I will not read again and the library is still overstocked. Up in my loft I seek open wall space to put up another print alongside all the life works of Clara, Tess and now Neko.
Contemplating the array of watercolors and pen and inks and pastels made by the grandkids on the walls around my desk made me realize I really didn’t want to divest anything. Not so long as I’m alive. Not my Rod Carew baseball card. Not Rocky Colavito, even if he was a Detroit Tiger. Not the two stones from my mountain hikes, one for my right hand and one for my left. If any of this stuff had to go, where was the argument to keep any of it, why not get rid of it all? Because all this stuff would have to go somewhere else. CDs and vinyl records into the chain of used records, posters recycled, trinkets dispersed. I’m a living future landfill hill.
Even so, as long as I’m here this stuff gives me comfort. And joy. It reminds me of my life. It reminds me I am alive and I have lived. And each new thing I add to these collections keeps reminding me how rich my life is, like the post cards of Frida Kahlo and the Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. Transit maps of Paris. Erin suddenly taught me I can’t let go.
Remembering Erin is the only way to honor her life. She would want to be remembered like the collage pictures at the wake. Remembered how she was alive. Laughing, running, swimming, mugging and hanging out at the birthday cake. I had few pictures of her in my digital library, all with the Kysylyczyns and none in print. Nonetheless she was a vivid image in my memory who would live on as an eternal con girl and wiseass to be reckoned with in any crowd, who was especially kind to three year old Neko. And who was Tess’s best friend. I didn’t really know Erin that well but probably would have known her better as years went by, and that would not happen. When I thought of her in the context of the Neil Young song, how she was one who would never go to high school, college, vote, grow up and be a neurologist, fall in love and all that, the less the song appealed to my sympathy towards Erin. The more it begged my sympathy for the free world that keeps on rockin’ without her.
When I die I will no longer get to reflect on the meaning of anything. There will be no new experiences, no future memories. My life on this earth will freeze frame and go dark, for me. No more collecting souvenirs. No more sunsets. For me. Everybody who survives me will get stuck with their own messes to divest as they rock away their experiences and memories, presuming anybody really cares enough to reflect upon their remaining days and hours. My time gets shorter and here I keep accumulating stuff and divesting less than I vow to myself I will get rid of, and I started to figure out why. I needed this stuff to keep me reminded I’m alive. It’s my own proof of life. What’s that decluttering question — does this thing give me joy? Well yes. Looking at it, listening to it, touching it, reading it evokes the joy of the experience the thing represents. My overwhelming surroundings purposely served to reinforce my life. I needed this stuff to keep reminding me life is good. Every trinket and memento means something meaningful everywhere I might look — the Mona Lisa canister on the coffee table at my ZOZO pandemic couch giving me the hairy eyeball — you may fairly ask how many Mona Lisas does one man need?
Like an old style drunk on new year’s eve I resolved to keep culling and recycling and parting with stuff I could live without, but in my heart I knew somehow I would keep as much of it as I could get away with until the very end, as soon or later as that may be. That was because I wanted to keep my memories alive as long as I could, and I wanted to deliberately leave a bunch of stuff for those who survive me to have to sort out and deal with so they would have to know me and remember me. I wanted my legacy to be more than a meager liquid estate. I wanted Roxanne, Michel, Vincent, Clara, Tess and Neko to inherit the task of dispersing my remains, which are my memories and personal memorabilia. There’s got to be a Shakira album in there for somebody who loves to sing along.
This is where the week of mourning took me, to the fringes and to the core of my existence. A well loved kid dies out of the blue only to prove these things happen and the rest of us get to move on and get over it until it’s our turn. Seeing all the mourners at Erin’s wake jolted me aware how alone I felt in the shadows of her life and everybody else darkened in their souls for her loss. There was a magnitude I felt I was missing, on the verge of not taking it seriously, or just jaded. Nobody talked except to say how bad it felt, just hugged and made eye contact and bowed their nods, shook hands furtively and keeping an awkward distance spread apart by covid customs. I feel I’ve grown more introverted and shy at my advancing age and the pandemic isolation only reinforced and accelerated my inclinations towards hermit habits.
The morning of the funeral the wake was still on my mind. How wide Erin’s reach. Extended family. School. Athletics. Neighborhood. Church. Who knew. Her extended family alone outnumbered all the McCormicks and friends of John. What if Erin would have lived to be a 90-something old lady? She’d have outlived me. Grandchildren of her own? Never know. We are left with the next best thing, an opportunity to extend her life with our own extended memories, and by the looks of people’s faces and the reflections in their eyes no one would ever forget her. No one could seem to talk about her. No one could say her name. Everybody was there for something too painful to talk about. The thing most in common was shock. Who was I to be so cool as to feel askance to the suffering and seek some kind of vocabulary to put this event and Erin’s life into the pantheon of common memory, commemorating and celebration. I wanted to come out of my shell and offer a resounding toast. Only this was obviously not the time or place.
For the funeral we dressed in our Sunday best. Roxanne chose a simple navy blue dress. She wore her thin gold chain with the birthstones of our children and grandchildren. I put on a charcoal suit, pale blue shirt and maroon necktie. I buffed my shiny black shoes with the hairy brush. Do I look all right? she asks, and of course she looks elegantly understated. With not much else on our minds we drove to the church early so we could be around to help out in case we were needed. Roxanne drove. The route was simple, just aim downtown on Hiawatha 55, exit to 94, skip I35W, skirt the downtown ramps to Hennepin and Lyndale exit, before the tunnel, and just prior to reaching the bottom of that exit a quick right turn entered the church parking lot. It was mostly a high speed journey of freeways which could be hairy sometimes, but this Friday morning traffic seemed to usher us along with unforeseen ease, requiring no extra navigational guidance from me. We were there in seven minutes.
There were several cars in the parking lot. We found an open space a few spaces away from Sid and Michel’s GMC Acadia. Sid was huddling with the pallbearers under the shade of the old oak hovering over the pre-school playground next to the original parsonage. Michel was inside with Clara and Tess in the community reception room greeting mourners who like us had arrived early. They received us with hugs meant to last a thousand years.
When asked how they all were no one expected to hear they were good. The faces of my dearest people expressed it all, a determined sustenance against exhaustion from unrequited grief. Not a week gone by since the bad news and the loss still burned eternal and everything still seemed like yesterday, like it still was happening. Nobody looked well slept, not even little kids, but everyone appeared well kempt, a good sign. The toll this was taking on Michel supporting an emotional array of other people connected and affected besides herself, something we never prepared for as a family — somebody dying yes, but not this one or this way. Her composure made me reach for her to assure her I was there — the there that people mean when they say they’re there, if ever there is a there there, I was there.
Michel was there for Tess, and Clara, Sid, Sid’s mom and dad and siblings, and there for cousins and nieces and nephews and inlaws and me and Roxanne and everybody else who identified her as a personified link to our future together without Erin. For everyone even thinking about freaking out about all this there was Michel. She was not stoic, or alone. Sid was there for her, and Clara. Roxanne on the phone every day, day or night. And Tess too, whatever she could reciprocate. I only wish my own consolation was enough, as a father and a friend, to ease the pain in her heart and make her smile again.
She was a good nurse. Worked throughout the pandemic. Here she was, working through something worse, a personal epidemic of emotional despair all around, and as compassionate as can be Michel consoled everyone she faced and touched with confidence and hope for enduring peace with this abrupt, unfair new reality.
Pastor Judy entered the commons by way of the sanctuary. In her classic pepper pony tail like a gray rainbow of hope, and in long black robe with white lace collar, she wore the authority of the chief leader of this premises. Unmasked — a brave thing so soon, as maybe a third of the mourners showed up masked, while at the wake the night before maybe a tenth — she crossed the room at a confident social distance from everyone she greeted, some by name, and to everyone she smiled.
A smile of attrition. Not a smile of plastic joy. Not a smile of pride in knowing more or better than the sorrowful crowd making their way towards the sanctuary. Not a smile of silly delirium. Her smile directed uplifting respect to acknowledge each person’s presence, sincere eye contact and so forth, her sincere and authentic way to communicate with people who instinctively looked up to her.
She approached Michel and within earshot of Kysylyczyns and Petersons she said she wanted to meet briefly with the family in the small chapel in a few minutes privately. Roxanne and I went with the flow to the chapel and took a seat in the back. Being family of family seemed close enough to crash the meeting and I was immensely interested what Pastor Judy would say to this intimate group of over a hundred.
She entered as the last of us found our seats and closed the chapel doors behind her. She strode straight to the podium up front of the altar and spoke without a microphone to the silent family.
“We all know why we are here. We all want Erin back. In all our confused ways we want to bargain with God to give her back to us, but that’s not happening. He did not take her from us to teach us an awful lesson. God didn’t take Erin from us because he needed her, because God doesn’t need what he already has. We are given this grave loss and we all grieve our own way, and so I encourage you all to look around among you and know we are not alone. This is a time to all pull together for Erin. She was special. We want this to celebrate a special life. God wants us to celebrate her life and remember Erin.”
Without a cue or signal Pastor Judy exited the center aisle and out to the vestibule and gradually the chapel emptied and people flowed through the commons to the entry to the sanctuary where the front pews up the middle were reserved for immediate family. Roxanne and I sat in the middle pew in the vicinity of someplace we usually sat with Michel on a typical Sunday, someplace inconspicuous where I felt safe not to sing or chant the prayers. It had been more than a year since the last time I attended a service in this church, since the pandemic restrictions stopped congregations from congregating. This church carried on with services streamed over its internet channel, which kept Sid and Michel tuned in but offered little appeal to me on a Sunday if my grandkids (plus Erin) were not singing in the youth choir, wringing the hand bells or reading a lesson. I hope someday Michel will realize how much I respect her choice of religion even as I only choose to participate out of respect to her and Sid and the girls and she will respect my pagan ambivalence about the Holy Ghost.
Roxanne had learned that this was the first large scale normal funeral since covid restrictions were partially lifted that past month. We were encouraged to wear our N95 masks but not required. Most of the church volunteers did. We were encouraged to keep social distance and try to populate every other pew. Some drifted up into the balcony, and I was jealous — we routinely went up to the central balcony at Christmas Eve when the view of all the candles with the lights out dazzled when they all sang Silent Night in probable civil disobedience to the fire code for a minute — the balcony was the vantage I knew I really wanted but I was committed to Michel and Sid’s row in the floor pews, and they were reserved up front now, with immediate family, so Roxanne and I sat together apart from anyone we knew. From this vantage I had to look upwards to appreciate the stained glass glories of Jesus, Mary, the evangelists and the angelic luminaries brilliantly and thrillingly etched in colors shimmering in the sunlight of the morning hour. The invisible pipe organist trawled an ethereal prelude melody.
We all stood for the procession of the family, who took their places in the front pews, followed by the pallbearers accompanying the closed casket to its place at the foot of the altar. The organ prelude ended and Pastor Judy descended from her pulpit vantage to the center of the upper nave behind the altar and greeted everybody with as much humble sincerity as anyone might ask from a leader and host to a gathering so spontaneously ambushed by God’s Will. She asked us to sit. She did not apologize for no choir or assistant pastors or any fancy funeral pageantry, this being the church’s first open public funeral beyond close family since covid. She thanked everyone for attending and got right to business, reading from Psalm 139:1-12, as displayed on the video screens hung discreetly on each side on the walls above the exit doors to the sanctuary, screens showing the live stream of the service for those unable to attend in person, the psalm words like subtitles over lovely landscapes.
“You have searched me, Lord, and you know me,” it begins, and goes on to say there is no escape from God, not even in darkness because “darkness is as light to you.”
Next, too good to be true, my favorite hymn. A soloist from somewhere unseen in the building, high in a balcony perhaps, her figure and face on the video screen briefly as the scenic landscape montages of mountains and valleys, gardens and forests dissolved to the music of “You Raise Me Up”.
The chorus goes:
You raise me up so I can stand on mountains
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas
I am strong when I am on your shoulders
You raise me up to more than I can be
The first time ever I heard that song was in the chapel of a parish elementary school in a little town on the Italian mainland from Venice where Clara’s school choir sang a concert recital to the school kids and their nuns the time we traveled to Venice to see them sing at Cathedral San Marco. At almost the last minute Clara’s choir was scratched from San Marco — the repertoire not quite sacred enough or something — and the venue at the little town Catholic school on the Mediterranean mainland got substituted and we had to go by ferry to get the car, but it proved more adventure than hassle. We saw Clara’s school choir sing. The school was cute and the host kids very nice, the nuns and priest hospitable and kind. Fifth grade Clara so short in the front riser. Looked so happy singing, so into the moment. When they sang, “You raise me up to more than I can be” I wept, I remember well, being rather into the moment myself. And now at Erin’s funeral I wept again.
When the soloist finished, Judy stood at her pulpit to recite what the program described as the Litany. She read, “We come before you today God, in abject pain and anguish. There are no words to describe the distress of losing someone we love very deeply.”
To which the crowd responded, reading from the video screens:
Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.”
A litany is by definition a list. In church it’s a list of devotional prayers, and after each prayer the congregation responds aloud with an affirmation. Pastor Judy’s litany that day comprised seven distinct observances of Erin, each invoking the collective grief of the mourners, each invocation focused more acutely attuned to specific expressions of loss, of Erin in their individual lives, and with each successive invocation the congregation responded louder and with greater vocal conviction: Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.”
“Amen,” said Judy.
Next from a high corner of the balcony on the left side of the altar a pair of kids from Erin’s Sunday school performed an anthem of hand bells calling like a phone nobody could answer until the caller hung up.
Next eldest cousin Coretta Aragon and aunt Valentine O’Keeffe of Isaac’s side of the family each stood up and read statements of remembrance. Neither could go through the whole thing without sobbing but they walked us through Erin’s life and times and the reasons they so much admired her. They raved about her math skills and how she dreamed to work for NASA. Praised her inclusiveness and social conscience. Loved how devoted she was to her family and she loved to go fishing with her dad and brother. There were infinite ways everyone loved Erin. They pledged that we would all always love Erin forever in our memories and hearts.
After these two intimate eulogies there was a pause in the service for people to collect themselves a moment. The floor level of the church was not tiered like an amphitheater, not like the balcony, so I could not see forward enough to look at how Michel and the Kysylyczyns seemed to be doing. I would have liked to look around behind me to observe who the people were in those pews but it would be rude to turn around just to stare unless it was that segment of the service to get up and greet the people around for the kiss of peace, as it were, and it didn’t seem like this was the time and place to get chummy in that way. Another reason I wished I was in the balcony, above it all, this event perhaps the most attended gathering indoors since the lifting of covid pandemic restrictions it seemed weird to me how willingly (and wittingly) we would all risk a super spreader to make this happen.
Then we stood as Pastor Judy read from John 20:1-2, a couple paragraphs of the story where Mary Magdalen, before first light, visits the tomb of Jesus and finds it empty, so she reports back to the disciples that “they” have taken his body away.
With that the pastor paced away from the pulpit to center stage and asked us to all take a seat. When we were all settled she began by reminding us that Erin loved to read. Her current favorite, she said, was a fantasy series of tales about Percy Jackson, whom I never heard of until that day — could be the next Harry Potter? My bad — not relevant. Pastor Judy was not selling trends in young literature or posing as a literateur to appeal hip to the kids but put it out there Percy Jackson was interesting to Erin because he was named after Perseus, one of the few Greek heroes who lived a happy ending and died a peaceful death. She herself had not read Percy Jackson herself yet but expressed interest in them as interesting stories because, who wasn’t interested in a good story with a happy ending?
Every good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, said Pastor Judy. She said every good story has some conflict that seems like it can’t be resolved. “Each one of us has a life story that is unfolding every day. And like any good story, our life stories aren’t predictable. They have twists and turns that we just can’t foresee. There are moments of inspiration that take us by surprise when we discover something new about ourselves or the world, there are quiet moments of contented bliss when all things seem right in the world when we are out fishing on a lazy summer afternoon. There are moments when we are fired up to face challenges and opportunities, ready to take on the world. And there are other moments when life’s unexpected twists and turns almost do us in. You may feel Erin’s death is one of those moments. It seems like a conflict that can’t be resolved. It seems like a story that just doesn’t have a good ending. Today, we grieve, and we are not alone.”
Pastor Judy stepped forward one step down from the stage or altar area towards the crowd. She wore glasses with wide wire frames, not oval, round or aviator, just big, and she wore them as transparently as she could, as if they were a nuisance to wear but she needed them to see everybody. She looked at everybody, making eye contact throughout the church. She talked with her hands, making fists, spreading her palms, extending an elbow, nothing showy, and her body language leaned and swayed with her eyes in rhythm to what she said. She had a plain face with a kind of neutral expression veering towards kindness and good will and she spoke as if confiding to two or three people in a voice informal and persuasively assuring and friendly, her voice and what she said compensating for her plain face. She wore a headset mic — the audio visual team at this church comprised some of the best technicians of faith in the city — and she spoke without notes or any teleprompter.
Mary Magdalen arrived at the tomb to anoint the dead body of her good friend Jesus, Pastor Judy said. It was a custom to anoint bodies with oils and spices as part of the grieving process. Pastor Judy imagined she wept thinking of some of the funny things Jesus said. “Things that never made it into the bible.” She wept because she lost the one person who knew her best, who she could share her whole heart. The gospels, Pastor Judy reminded everyone, tell us that Jesus had loved Mary when other people mocked her because she had done some crazy things. People thought she had demons but Jesus saw somebody to love. And now he was gone. Dead. Silent. She was heartbroken. Traumatized. Sobs shook her body, Pastor Judy pumped both fists and her robe rippled. Mary made her way in the dark before dawn to the tomb.
“Did you hear the angels ask her? ‘Woman why are you weeping?’ Did you hear that question? That question … well, it kind of bugs me. Don’t you just want to answer, ‘Well, why wouldn’t you weep when your best friend has just died?’ What kind of question is that anyway?
“But you and I know , there are plenty of well-meaning people who will say, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be alright. This is part of God’s plan.’ Well. Everything isn’t alright. Not now. And some well-meaning and lovely people, who really do want to comfort us, will say, ‘God must have needed Erin more than we do.’ And I say hogwash. No! God, the creator of all things DOES NOT NEED ERIN PETERSON MORE THAN WE DO.”
It took some of us several seconds to exhale and sob and compose our feelings. Roxanne and I clasped hands.
Pastor Judy clasped her own hands and stepped a half step more forward. “Friends,” she continued, “don’t be afraid to weep. Grief and tears are not a sign that we don’t have enough faith in God. Grief and tears are a sign that we loved Erin. I agree with Nadia Boltz-Weber when she says, ‘Our grief is actually holy to God.”
Pastor Judy surmised that Jesus himself wept at the tombs of dead friends. She said she had faith in light of eternity that death is not the last word. “Death will ultimately have no sting because in the end there is no where we can go where God isn’t already there with us and holding us for all eternity. I have faith in God’s promise that God will bring us through this valley of death to the other side where we will come out into the light. I don’t fully understand God’s promise of resurrection life, but I trust it because I trust God. That’s what faith is. It is trust. But let’s just be honest. Today, deat stings. Death stings now.
“Maybe that question, ‘Why are you weeping?’ isn’t a silly question as much as an invitation to remember and celebrate Erin’s life and love — to remember her part in our sacred stories.
“I weep today because Erin’s story wasn’t supposed to end this way. Her death was tragic in a way that is different from an 80-year old, who dies after living a full, long life. We all know that our story on this earth will have an end, but it’s not supposed to end after only thirteen years. We feel cheated. We will forever wonder what Erin would have done and what she would have accomplished with her beautiful mind. She was SO smart, so wise, so kind, so capable, so ready to take on the world and change it so it would be a better place. She was ready and willing to live John Wesley’s call to ‘Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, to all the people you can, forever as you can.’ She was already living that out and there’s no telling where that kind of heart and desire would lead her as she grew older. We weep at the loss of what could’ve and should have been.”
Pastor Judy went on about Erin’s open love, how when she said I love you she meant it. She lived it. She loved the uniqueness of everyone, remembered birthdays and details of her friends and relatives’ lives. She said we weep because she loved being part of our story and we loved being part of hers.
“We weep today because nobody is promised another day. And when someone dies so suddenly, we are jolted back to that scary reality. Somebody has said that grief is the price we pay for having loved. And so, this grief we feel today — it’s holy and sacred.”
She then modestly credited her thinking to the influence of theologian Nadia Boltz-Weber, whom she quoted from her book Your Grief is Holy to God: “‘While there are some who would reduce the Christian Faith to moralism and delusional positivity — we know that the God we worship is not a shiny-toothed motivational speaker churning out cheerful memes in times of suffering. Because the God we worship is a crucified and risen God. Which is to say, we worship a God that is not unfamiliar with darkness. A God who comes close to those who mourn. A God who comes close to those who stand outside of tombs. A God who is not far off, but who is as close as the choppy breath that falters in your weeping.'”
Then she went back to Mary Magdalene, last seen weeping at the vacant tomb. “The unconditional love of Jesus had made her whole and changed the whole direction of her story. She weeps at the grave. They’ve taken him away. I don’t know where he is. Do you feel like that today? That is the mystery of death. Notice, the pastor confided, that Mary goes to the tomb while it is still dark. She goes there thinking that the tomb is the end of the story. But it is not the end of the story. Mary doesn’t find Jesus’ body in that tomb. The angels tell her to go tell the disciples that Jesus is not there. He is alive. Death could not hold him. Death would not have the last word. God had transformed death to life while it was still dark.
“Friends, God doesn’t wait to see if we can figure out this life and get our act together before God will show up and love us. God shows up in the darkest times of our lives to walk with us and raise us up and love us through the darkness and despair. God shows up when we are filled with so much grief that our hearts simply can’t hold any more pain and they break open , laid bare and vulnerable. God shows up to pour love into our broken hearts so they can be mended and made whole again. Death is not God’s plan. Life — abundant life is God’s plan. That has always been God’s plan — to love us to wholeness in this life and for all eternity.”
And that, Pastor Judy concluded, is why the story of Jesus is the greatest story ever told — even greater than Percy Jackson! she exclaimed with a face of surprise. Why? Because God shows up to defeat hate, defeat despair, defeat hopelessness, with the mighty power of God’s love.”
And so Pastor Judy knit the congregation closer and more intimately to Erin. It was our grief, sorrow and love. She gave us permission to own it. She invoked Erin’s love and our love of Erin. Erin will always be with us because we will always love her and remember her. Pastor Judy wove Erin’s life through the narrative effortlessly because she truly knew Erin and who Erin was and doubtless felt charmed by Erin in person. To the pastor’s great credit, she made an honest effort to know the people who hung out at the church and Erin would have been hard to not notice, even for the busy chief exec of one of the richest and most prestigious churches in the state. Having witnessed Pastor Judy’s style and rhetoric almost five years accompanying Michel, Sid and the girls to church I had a feel for her sincere pastorship. For as much as I was not a believer I respected Judy as an honest professional Christian clerical pastor and admired how she administrated her church and bore the responsibilities of providing religion to a more mixed than diverse urban congregation. The more she spoke of Erin the more credible her intimacy, which equated herself with the rest of us and lent more credence to her voice and gave voice to our own grief to validate and soothe our own confused sorrow.
Maybe we were shocked. Maybe we were taken unaware. But now we know it’s real. I understand it’s Pastor Judy’s vocation to favor an evangelical point of view but it impressed me how much she eulogized Erin and praised God without making it all about moral issues and redemption and holy behavior.
(Sid would later confide he could see Erin in his mind smirking when Pastor Judy compared her to Jesus.)
She ended the eulogy this way: “God meets us now, in the darkness of our grief and sorrow. Erin had hoped to work for NASA someday. She knew she would never be an astronaut because of her epilepsy but she was fascinated with space. As her brother Nate noted the other day, ‘Now Erin is in the stars.’ Her story continues — on for eternity, enfolded in God’s story of love that includes all of us. And while it is still dark, the light is breaking in and the darkness will not, shall not overcome it. God, who loves us all, promises that for every ending there will be a new beginning. There’s no greater story than that.”
She then led a prayer of Commendation and Thanksgiving, with the words on the twin video screens. In prayer they gave Erin to God, presented by her coffin.
“Receive Erin into the arms of your mercy,” began the last verse of the commendation prayer before Pastor Judy led them in the recitation of the perennial known as Lord’s Prayer, which began, “Our God, who is in heaven …”
A soloist somewhere deep in the balcony who had sung You Raise Me Up sang a closing anthem on the video screens called This is the Sound of One Voice.
The pallbearers assembled at the casket and Pastor Judy gave the Benediction:
“As we leave this place, let’s not forget: there is no where we can go where God is not. Everywhere we go, God goes before us. From the farthest ocean to the highest mountain, from the heights of joy to the depths of despair — wherever we find ourselves, God is already there. So go in peace, for we do not go alone.”
That was the last word until the cemetery. The seven male pallbearers, who included Erin’s uncles Sid, Ted Aragon and Joe Jones, escorted Erin’s coffin up the center aisle as everyone stood, the organist played a familiar postlude recessional, and out the old front door into the blue white sunlight her uncles and cousins carried her down the old front steps to the hearse at the curb, which would wait there for the rest of us to get into our cars to form the procession. Most of us filed towards the exit behind Pastor Judy, who followed the pallbearers, the coffin and the mortician outside to stand on the granite steps and watch them glide the coffin into the back gate of the black Cadillac for Erin’s last ride. There was a limo standing by for Isaac and Natasha, and a ride on the side for the pony-tailed pastor — probably her husband, an ex pastor himself I’m told. She carried a thick black book.
Given some attendees who exited the church the usual way through the modern entrance right at the parking lot, the procession line on Oak Grove towards Hennepin formed almost right away, while Roxanne and I moseyed around the periphery of the church campus to reach our car. We lagged behind Sid, and Norb and Gloria, and way back behind Sid’s other sisters, and Ernie and Bert and all the Petersons, and who knows who, a parade blocks long led by a motorcycle policeman — surprised such a duty still existed on a police force self-consciously understaffed since George Floyd. Still, most attendees knew the destination and had no problem following some other familiar car on a known route to Bloomington, 394 to Hwy 100 south to Normandale and 494 to Bush Lake Rd. We didn’t need a police escort and lagged back, took our time, we already knew the way and no one was following us that we knew.
In the car we talked. Roxanne was the first to say it was the best funeral sermon she ever heard. It was the most personal. Spoken by someone who really knew her. Wasn’t all contrived around Jesus and God’s will, at least I thought. Not preachy. I liked the story approach. I offered that for once the deceased wasn’t honored for serving God but God was honored for serving the deceased, and I added that I long admired Pastor Judy’s leadership in the scheme of things and the sermon that day for Erin convinced me — as if I was still a skeptic — Pastor Judy epitomized the ideal modern Christian church mentor. If ever I had a true crisis of the soul, I would trust to confide in Pastor Judy.
We kept in mind, this funeral was not only a spontaneous event, the components of the service came together spontaneously. There was no fresh funeral template. This was the first such full funeral since covid-19. The quality of Pastor Judy’s sermon and eulogy impressed me so much I requested a transcript,and she obliged.
We arrived at the cemetery almost late. We found a place to park the car down the lawn where future graves would go, and we didn’t advance much closer to the gravesite where the Kysylyczyns and Petersons gathered around the casket suspended at the crypt, waiting for Isaac and Natasha to emerge from their limousine. They wore dark glasses. From a distance we could barely make out the funerary prayers recited by Pastor Judy from her book, but it didn’t matter. Soon enough they lowered the casket, the circle tossed flowers and soil into the grave, the crowd gradually dispersed except that extended scrum of immediate family who were invited to a lunch at the home of one of Isaac’s sisters — probably the one who recited one of the statements of remembrance at church.
Roxanne and I told ourselves we were not hurt we were not invited. I for one needed a quiet catharsis. It seemed the whole month of July came with one epiphany after another. Our family is permanent, of that I was sure, but it wasn’t clear what form of a fixture we would mark ourselves among humanity. Two people, neither technically blood relatives but family just the same, departed this life like legends, each bequeathing legacies of hope and actualization it would be unwise and foolish to ignore and forget. My Summer of 69 got upstaged by a geezer and a thirteen year old in the aftermath of my own Colorado sabotage amid the new liberation from covid-19, and there was too much to think about to miss out at the lunch party after Erin’s burial.
Epilogue
Moving on is an earthly way of reckoning the way we imagine souls in the persona of ghosts go crossing over into paradise, heaven, nirvana or where ever. To the other side. Everyone agrees everybody grieves in their own way, in their own time. Maybe my fix was quick but the catharsis has taken a long time to catch up. I still encounter social situations where deference to Erin’s memory evokes discomfort and sadness, and it’s been three years. That itself attests to the endurance of the memories of Erin.
Sid recommended a book to help us come to grips with our sustained grief, The Beauty of What Remains by Steve Leder, a rabbi who counsels countless people for their loss of loved ones who found himself at a loss to parse the meaning of the cognitive decline and death of his own father. Confused, I borrowed The Remains of the Day, a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, which served the purpose of making me think deeply of my own life in the context of whether I fulfilled my duty to serve those who were put in my life by destiny. The rabbi’s book evoked the same introspective inquiry in terms of the legacy of memories we create along the way that is carried on by our souls on the shoulders of our descendants and those we have served. Everybody dies. What beauty there is in death is that it magnifies our love of life.
It should anyway. For Erin’s mom Natasha the sadness lingers like a curse. She excuses herself from family parties and celebrations because she sees all the cousins having fun without Erin and the vacancy torments her. And that’s the way it is. She’s a functional professional. She’s a mom and a spouse. She just can’t deal with reminders of Erin, the irreconcilable pain of her loss. To some smaller degree there are others who avoid mention of Erin or they begin to cry or get stiff and change the subject.
A scholarship fund in Erin’s name was started by her aunt Val and uncle Ted disbursing modest amounts to Bloomington high school students pursuing higher education.
Since Erin won the first annual miniature golf tournament sponsored by the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church at the Skyline Mini Golf course at the terrace at the Walker Art Center in 2019 — a course designed by artists — the church decided to name the tournament after Erin. The tournament skipped 2020 and was scheduled to resume in August. There was no word of the whereabouts of the traveling trophy last seen in Erin’s possession, the plastic faux bronze bust of John Wesley.
Pastor Judy retired from Hennepin Ave in 2023. She got the church back into its regular routine after the pandemic, though Roxanne and I didn’t attend very frequently, Christmas Eve and Tess’s eventual confirmation ceremony, and Pastor Judy’s final Sunday, just to hear her final sermon. She spoke of letting go of Jesus — it was Pentecost and past the Ascension and the disciples needed to get their acts together without Jesus being there. She reportedly went on a long road trip across eastern Canada to Nova Scotia with her husband.
Erin’s loss fell hard on Tess. Perhaps herder than on Erin’s mother because Natasha was a a grown woman, expected to cope with adult issues, life and death, whereas Tess was a young teenager, unschooled in the often unfair and randomly cruel ways of the world. Tess had so much invested in her friendship with her cousin it bankrupt her emotionally and she ached with despair. Gone was the syncopated personality who would make up songs over breakfast: Hey-ey, what cha going to do today, things have passed so long, life is like a song for both of us to share. Spontaneous interludes of thought like a poem she published in the Compas anthology when she was seventh grade. Now her moodiness bordered toxic attitudes Michel, Sid and Clara had to confront and to some degree tolerate because, you know, we all grieve our own way and in our own time.
Roxanne the eternal grandma learned the locally oldest and biggest cemetery in the city liked to open its gates to the public and conduct memorial workshops and celebration festivities. The place known as Lakewood situates parallel to one side of Bde Maka Ska (once known as Lake Calhoun) and within its many acres of monuments and woods is a small lake of its own. Roxanne enrolled us in a late afternoon of crafts, making lantern sailboats adorned with messages to our beloved dead ones. There was a big turnout. Sid, Michel, Clara, Tess, Roxanne and I took up one of the dozens of picnic tables of construction paper and markers. Some of us made more than one — I made one for my mom: Dear Mom, How are things going up there with Jesus? Please take care of Erin until the rest of us get there. At sundown we lit our lanterns and launched them int the lake. The breeze favored patterns of tiny ships drifting far from shore.
Later that summer Roxanne learned that Lakewood was holding a seminar on making mandala memorials for our beloved departed and enrolled herself and Tess for a Sunday afternoon class. Neko and I had nothing to do that day so we tagged along. While Roxanne and Tess took the class the three year old and I went for a hike through the headstones and monuments, checking out the mausoleums and vaults. Do you know what it means when people die? I asked her casually, and she replied, Only old people die. When I said sometimes kids die too she didn’t comment, in a short while made the conversation go away. Far as I knew nobody had explained about Erin and I wanted to tell her. I didn’t.
Eventually our hike found us back at the mandala seminar, where the participants were scrounging the grounds for natural materials to make their own mandalas for their loved ones. Neko caught on to the game and joined with Tess and Grandma gathering with glee. She had overheard the teacher say that before taking a sprig, or flower or pine cone, one had to ask permission to take it. Neko asked permission from the gardens and bushes and trees. She observed the others making their symbolic wheels of life on the lawn and kiped their ideas. I began to think we didn’t need to talk about Erin, that Neko somehow knew what was completely unspoken.
Tess, of course, made a spectacular mandala. Still, her mood didn’t brighten. She kept to herself as much as she could get away with. She was said to talk taciturn and nasty, reminding me of the little Tess I used to know who at Neko’s age ordered me to get out of her house. This was different though. I worried. Michel assured me she was slowly coming through, hadn’t severed all her worldly connections. Still practiced gymnastics. When school started she was attending a new school according to redrawn middle school boundaries. It was actually her second year at the new school but because of covid she spent almost all of the prior year remote learning from home. This particular year she didn’t particularly care that she hardly knew any kids or teachers. Yet as apathetic as she was towards her school she got A’s and B’s. It wasn’t until Michel noticed she was losing weight that Tess was diagnosed with an eating disorder. She wasn’t eating.
Argumentative and surly, Tess resisted therapy. As she continued to lose weight Michel took her out of gymnastics. Outpatient therapy didn’t work so Michel and Sid placed her in an inpatient setting. Most of this period she was incommunicado to us. Michel kept us apprised. We sent her a packet of note cards, envelopes and stamps and she wrote us a couple times. Notes of gratitude and abstract love. I wrote to raise her self-confidence. whenever we would see her if she was home on furlough she was meek but sullen. Michel and Sid measured her meals to deliver minimum calories. She resisted and questioned the measurements. Even so she stuck with the program and evolved back to outpatient therapy after about six weeks.
The nature of Tess’s therapy and the details of her disorder were never confided to Roxanne and me. We respect their privacy. We recognized the stress and strain Tess brought to her family and the efforts Michel and Sid put in to somehow find treatment for their daughter. I admired how seriously they took their daughter’s condition and dedicated they were in spending time to participate in Tess’s therapy. To our observation Tess was too skinny but not emaciated. She didn’t look undernourished, just creepy thin. Except for gray shadows around her eyes she had healthy skin and hair. Her hair she kept brushed down beyond her shoulders or wrapped back in a bun. She wasn’t letting herself go all to hell, but rather took care of her appearance, hygiene and style. Rox and I never saw the belligerent Tess described by Michel and Sid and occasionally Clara, but we did witness stifled tantrums and tears sometimes. When she gained enough weight and settled on a routine of prescribed meals she returned to gymnastics. Roxanne and I resumed our oft roles picking up or dropping off the kids at their gymnastics club, dental appointments, and in Tess’s case school and therapy. We never asked probing questions about the therapy. It seemed the kid was entitled to privacy. She spoke and acted as if her life was no secret. It seemed Tess knew we respected her privacy just as much as she respected ours, and she understood she could count on us and could confide in us if she ever needed us in any way. She took advantage of us because we loved her. It was okay because she loved us. She may have been a little hell at home for a while but Tess was always nice to us, grandpa and grandma, and for that we didn’t pressure her with a get well mentality.
She kept getting A’s and B’s. The teachers gave her a remote learning curriculum model to accommodate her absence while an inpatient. I wondered why she didn’t seem to understand that it requires a certain measures of food to stay alive. To exist. I wondered if Tess was on a hunger strike. To make it matter more she was already vegan and chose a plant based diet. When we dined out with her we often went to sushi places. When Michel allowed her to order for herself it was a sign Tess was retaking a say in what she eats. We took her to the St Patricks Day parade in St Paul because it was a nice day and she gave us all her candy from the paraders. She skipped school that day.
I wondered why the therapists treated Tess only for her eating disorder and ignored a connection to grief for Erin. I suppose there is no proven connection, cause or concurrence, but the coincidence looked obvious to me. No doubt the combined health insurance of Sid and Michel required specific diagnostic treatment codes to take the most care of their daughter, which by and large worked.
When I worried Tess was on a hunger strike I meant she was on strike for Erin, bargaining to bring her back. I asked Roxanne, does Tess know you don’t have to die to be loved?
A telltale meme all this time with Tess is how all along she never greeted us without a hug or said good bye without including I love you. Not the rabid babe who told me to get out of her house. Not the gracious hand-held child guide to the canal bridges of Venice either. She wanted us to listen to Phoebe Bridgers. If I am a proud grandfather who sees precocious things in my progeny, I could see Tess wasn’t falling apart. Maybe it was a coming of age. The older she got the more astute she got with her therapies. She was learning to play the game. Going to high school helped. All the while she hugged us and said I love you. It was un-faked. I could feel it. She was essentially okay. As long as she kept expressing her love language to me and Grandma it proved to me that Tess was true, she would endure and proceed to get better.
We always hugged her hugs and said we love her too.
We had no say in her treatment and therapy. That’s proper. Sid and Michel are her parents and it’s wrong to second guess their decisions — they’re the ones she lives with and who bear the responsibility of raising her. If Grandma and I acted neutral to to inevitable reports of how Tess was doing, we freely reinforced any and all affections and her own narratives of what she was doing. I ventured so far as to say I admired her for taking therapy seriously and hoped she recognized the knowledge and experience could lead to advantages early in her young life.
Her first year of high school she took art and produced an abundance of paintings and drawings. She got good grades in science and math. She hung more or less with a clique of nerds and athletes. Wrote for and edited the literary magazine. She tried out for track and field and did some JV diving. Her sister Clara was a senior so she had connections with kids in various grades. It was a blessing of good planning they lived a block and a half from their high school, an easy walk. She never missed school, even if she didn’t like her art teacher because he didn’t teach and told the students never to expect A’s, and yet she produced an array of canvasses and pages of sketches and drawings of stunning virtuosity that year. She decorated her room upstairs in colored fairy lights. She created a warm psychedelic space where she drew and painted. She showed me. It wasn’t the first time Tess amazed me with everyday arts. She used to have a keyboard which she could pluck melodies both familiar and original. She is an award winning state student poet. She sang the Skye Boat Song a cappella at a grade school talent show at the first school she attended in Minneapolis after moving back to Minnesota from Switzerland. I told you I look for precocious traits in my kids and grandchildren, and I’ve always seen them in Tess.
Maybe not so much as an athlete but she gave her best effort. Roxanne and I continued to follow her at traveling gymnastic meets when her club competed, and Tess kept at it and achieved personal bests at beam and bars, sometimes going to a podium in fifth or eighth place. That she competed one last season at her gymnastics club showed the world she was healing because it meant she was eating and maintaining her weight. She went on to compete at her high school.
In truth she looked well. Skin glowed. Circles gone around her bright green eyes. She joined the school choir. It didn’t hurt her morale to score tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras concert along with her sister. Tess needed no supervision but was worth noticing. She’s feeding herself and could be well trusted to eat. She could be heard saying she was hungry.
She took driver training and got her license shortly after she turned sixteen, though it required two tries. She no longer requires getting lifts from Grandma and me, or her parents, or sister — not usually. We see her at dinners at Michel and Sid’s, our place or Vincent’s. We see her at Gloria and Norb’s pool. We’ve met her friends. We hear she has a boyfriend who goes to De La Salle.
At Erin’s anniversary in July we offered to drive Tess to Erin’s gravestone and made a date of it. With her mandala skills she composed a mandala upon Erin’s gravestone. Roxanne and I helped gather components, always asking permission from the source of the flora. When Tess completed her composition she asked for a moment of privacy, so we took a hike and left her alone at Erin’s grave. In the distance I thought I heard faintly a song by Taylor Swift. I could not help but watch Tess sitting crosslegs reading a paper, probably a letter out loud. That’s as much as I spied. It didn’t take much, she hardly hid her actions, and I owed her as much space as could be paced off at this nascent little suburban cemetery. It felt right to be a witness, however. People need to know we need to know each other are okay.
Tess owes much to her elder sister Clara. Clara was close to Erin too, if not the same age, she as a cousin qualifies as a kind of big sister, along with her elder cousin Coretta. As her family quaked with the shocks and aftershocks of Erin’s death, Clara kept her head and spent most of her own grief consoling her dad and mom, and devoted a lot of attention to her stricken sister Tess. This is not to say Clara was slighted for sympathy or deprived her own grief. This is how she grieved, consoling others such as her Kysylyczyn cousins and aunts and her other grandparents, Gloria and Norb.
The last time I attended church at Hennepin Ave I noticed Clara lit three votive candles in the sanctuary. I asked her who she was praying for and she told me: Erin, Buggy, aka Aria, a classmate at middle school who died of suicide, and her great-grandmother and namesake Clara, who had only recently passed away at 100 years old. It was evident Clara my grandchild had a balanced perspective of death and the soul flame of memory, enough to accelerate her own maturity to meet the challenge of coping with Erin’s loss and consoling others apparently stricken worse and coping harder. Her enduring remembrance of her classmate Aria spoke to me about her capacity for charity, compassion and loyalty.
Sid and Michel took the girls on a vacation to the Pacific Northwest, Puget Sound and points west to the ocean. At the Olympic National Park at a flowing river that emptied into diving pools they witnessed a drowning, a middle aged man who could barely swim climbed a waterfall and got swamped over his head. They watched him wash by in the current and could do nothing to save him. This freaked them out. Helpless terror. The poor man. His terrified face. Flashbacks of Erin.
These fragments of reminders of their worst days scare them but don’t seem to veer them off their paths. I say I don’t second guess Sid and Michel’s parenting because they have raised their daughters beyond my sight with virtuous success. I would love to take credit for the girls perspicacity but their parents spent their years day to day raising them, whereas I am just the grandfather who hangs out every few days for a few hours. Still, in the deepest part of my grandchildren’s good fortune so far in their young years the credit should go to the kids themselves because they are ultimately, like you and me, responsible for their behaviors in this world and no matter how well parented a kid can be and no matter how kind and wise a grandparent can act, a child will make their own choices and choose their own story no matter how well programmed they may be by family or society.
Clara my first grandchild made me aware of so much about life from the day she was born that looking back I couldn’t believe what I was missing, what a stiff I was and what perceptions I could take in from the perspective of a new baby I forgot to perceive since my own babies grew up. Clara and I were best friends when she was little. Even after Tess was born we had a hand-holding bond. When they moved to Switzerland it broke my heart, they were just starting to sing in school pageants and play at gymnastics and make things at school and learn to spell words about ideas. To compensate Roxanne and I took plane trips to Europe every so many months to visit them, tour their schools, tour Paris and Lake Como. When Clara went off with her Swiss international school choir to Venice as a separate group from her family it was our first Europe excursion without her, and Tess stepped up and took our hands and led us around the bridges and canals because she had been there before, and not to worry without Clara she would keep us entertained.
Even so we followed Clara’s choir by accident running across them in their sky blue baseball caps filing through the same canal routes, bridges and campos of greater Venice, not to mention the great Piazza San Marco, and we would wave at her across the way as we walked around touring the great old city. We followed her on purpose to the mainland to the little town Catholic school like groupies to see her sing and hear the choir where Clara sang You Raise Me Up and a dozen other songs to a small auditorium of Italian school kids the same age as the choir, grades 5-8, and seeming to get off with the entertainment with little prompting necessary from the nuns and priest who ran the school. We got to hang out with Clara after the performance at the school courtyard for about twenty minutes, then she was back on the school choir bus. This was the day I realized my friend grandchild Clara was truly growing up, having her own adventures without me.
Made me appreciate Tess all the more. Now Tess makes me appreciate Clara all the more. For her birthday one year Roxanne and I took Clara to London to see Wicked, the musical play. We didn’t bring Tess though we wanted to, but Michel wouldn’t allow both kids to fly to the UK in case of something tragic — Michel despised aeroflight. Otherwise we strove to keep things equal between them and not favor one or the other, except for such loopholes as age — Michel tried to tell Tess she was too young to fly across borders with grandparents, and too young to go to Wicked. Eventually things even out.
I have learned to simply let go as much as I can of the very idea of influencing their heads. I guess I had my chance when they were infants and toddlers, but even then you can see what results I accomplished, getting ordered out of the house by a toddler-aged Tess and subsequently abandoned by Clara in Italy on a vacation taken simply to follow her participation on a choir adventure apart from the family. And now I’m known as the grandfather who smokes pot. Any credibility I have as a senior persona to their generation transmits from how I will treat them the rest of my life and not so much what I have tried unwittingly to teach them thus far about life while they were teaching me.
The past few years Clara has gifted me for Christmas copies of books she annotated in very tiny but legible handwriting comments in the margins and underlined passages. The first she gave me was Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. First her insights blew my mind, and secondly her voice in her annotations sounded so clear and personal it was like we were reading the novel together. I thought, wait a minute girl — if this physical therapist gig doesn’t work out then maybe you could fall back on being a writer. That sense of reading together kept up with a gift of collected works by Arthur Conan Doyle, which included The Hound of the Baskervilles. The latest was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I read each one and texted her notes. She sent me a copy of a paper she got an A on for a her English class on Frankenstein and how human nature doesn’t really exist. She expressed dislike for Holmes and understood the need for there to be a Dr Watson. But what of the Ramsay family in To the Lighthouse?
Clara graduated high school and enrolled at the College of St Benedict at St John’s University. She was recruited to the MIAC NCAA Division III diving team and came in eighth in her conference her freshman year. There are no athletic scholarships at St Ben’s. She did get some academic scholarship help, and a scholarship to sing in the choir. Her college is located only about an hour from the Twin Cities so we attend her diving meets and choir concerts. There’s less sense of separation than those years in Switzerland.
A few years ago, while Amelie was pregnant with Neko, we all took a family vacation down to southern Utah, rented a house in a town called Hurricane and visited Bryce Canyon. Sid and I and Clara and Tess hiked to the floor of the canyon on the Queen’s Garden Trail. On the switchback climb up the Navajo Loop wall I lost my stamina and felt compelled to rest at every layer. When I resumed the climb I took it slow as just about everybody passed me by. Sid went ahead at a brisk pace. Clara and Tess had the energy to keep up with their dad but were reluctant to leave me alone. Looking up I counted down the remaining switchbacks. Only four left I shooed them forward, assured them I would be along at my own pace. I trudged. I wasn’t really short of breath. My legs and hips and back ached. I wasn’t worried about my heart and I continued to rest at the crest of each switchback. When I counted only two left, from around the corner came Clara and Tess. They took me by the hands, Tess left and Clara right, and walked with me up the next incline, and the next, and let go of me and led me out of the canyon to relatively level ground where sweating Sid and the ones who didn’t descend the whole Queen’s Garden, Michel, Amelie, Vincent and Roxanne waited with picnic lunch in the park. The girls came back for me and however briefly held my hands like old times crossing the street, and those last two switchbacks were worth more than every previous step I ever walked in my life.
So much has come and gone since that vacation to the Utah desert. Neko is nearly six. Erin is gone almost three years. Clara and Tess have not suddenly emerged as talented kids compensating for Erin’s loss, yet the loss has not made a barrier to their activities. According to me, the attentive, doting grandfather looking for precocious traits, my grandkids are discovering how to use their basic talents at the things they love and matter to them to discover new aspects to pursue the future with confidence they can always bounce back if they fall on their ass because at the very bottom they can fall back on an elastic resilient family. Which includes me.
I remember when Clara might have been seven and I explained the concept of degree of difficulty — the harder it is the more credit you get for doing it. The context was probably gymnastics but I turned it into a life lesson. All these years later Tess got mad at her art teacher who didn’t offer extra credit for all the drawings and painted canvasses she produced her freshman year. They each miss Erin in their lives and will always hold a kind of grudge against the cosmos, Erin’s death will always be unfair. It cannot be undone. Not by deliberate overachievement. Not by hunger strike. Clara goes on making friendship bracelets out of colored threaded strings. Tess paints and draws but was through with art class her sophomore year — she joined choir instead. It presented a higher degree of difficulty. She sells vintage and retro clothes on the internet to make a little money.
The night of what would have been Erin’s 14th birthday the I35W bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis was underlit with purple light. This is the replacement bridge for the one that suddenly collapsed at rush hour August 1, 2007. The new bridge was outfitted with colored lights so it can be lit for special occasions and commemorations. Sid’s eldest sister Valeria works for the state department of transportation as a senior highway engineer. She persuaded somebody to allow purple light on the bridge the night of January 16, 2022 in honor of Erin’s birthday because purple was Erin’s favorite color, and it was granted because there were no other color requests for that day. It was a cold night but not the worst, Clara wrote — Roxanne and I were not there, we were in tropical Mexico. Clara, her mom and dad and sister Tess drove back and forth across the bridge that night and eventually got off the freeway downtown to park and walk over the Mississippi on the Stone Arch Bridge to view the purple bridge in the distance down river.
As Clara framed a photo of the tribute of the bridge she saw a pattern in the icy river. Below their bridge a pool of open water formed a heart within the frozen winter stretch of water downstream. She sent me the photo of the heart in the river and the purple bridge.
That was a thoughtful gesture. She can afford to presume, she and her sister, that I truly care and understand who they are and what they mean. I realize I’ve striven a lifetime to establish this much simple comprehensive clarity. To be like this is worth the struggle. Relatively easy. I am blessed and spoiled and lucky. And probably very naive. What I blithely and cavalierly called my Summer of 69 didn’t really end. It wasn’t bad as ZOZO, the lost year of the covid pandemic, but it seemed to last longer, like long covid. Not with brain fog but mental lucidity. I thought my summer of 69 would grant me exceptionalism at my advanced age and what happened was a purgatory tour of what the world would be like if I died. I got rid of a few tee shirts and used-up pants but made no headway divesting of the stuff I’ve accumulated all around me to constantly remind me I am alive and have accumulated memories and am still searching for somewhere to get more souvenirs.
Much of what I speak will be left to my family to sort and dispose. Sorry if most of it is junk. Maybe Tess can sell some of it as Boomer Retro. I truly resolve in my heart I will sort through all my earthly possessions eventually and purge my belongings, but that day hasn’t come yet. At the risk I will suddenly drop dead and leave all of it to my heirs, I’m deliberately procrastinating my project. Maybe here and there I’ll deliver bunches of books to Little Free Libraries around town. Maybe I’ll part with more sweaters I’ll never wear again. I’ll pick away, I suppose. But I am not driven and all-consumed to get rid of mementos of my life. To me it all adds up. Every map to a new and strange national park or UNESCO site of world heritage.
And is it so bad to bequeath to my grandkids (and kids) the archives of my life? Would it hurt them to sort through zillions of photographs, decades of notebook journals, hours of recorded music and volumes of tourist keepsakes?
When I look at my kids and their lives and the lives of my grandkids I see in them elements of the best of what I want to see in myself. I have seen goodness. It signifies my vision of what is good is true. These years since covid and since Erin have validated my faith in striving for goodness in everyday life and seeing goodness for its own sake, quality of life. Paying it forward and not giving up at the resistance of worry and depression. Keeping oneself moving against impulse to lay still and let stasis entomb you before it’s time for you to actually die.
There is a common refrain about needing a vacation to recover from a vacation. The few times I ever felt that way were when I returned to work with jet lag. Vacations are meant to relax the body, cleanse the soul and free the mind so when one returns to work, whatever work is, one is refreshed and rededicated. When I retired I stopped going to work, stopped working and went on permanent vacation — relax the body, cleanse the soul, free the mind full time. The idea being to continually refresh and rededicate to relaxing, cleansing and freedom. The more you see the more you know the more you see.
ZOZO and the pandemic gave new credence to being a homebody. Helped me realize I was a nobody. My mantra was nobody home. Taking that attitude on the road seemed a curious way to reestablish contact with an alien world but in a humble way it made sense. In truth everyone I made contact with was in the same situation, starting fresh with oversized expectations of what it takes to be normal in a society of conflicting radical paradigms. We had all just spent more than a year either saving our lives or wasting our time.
The delta variant of covid-19 was becoming the most prevalent strain of the virus across South Africa and the UK, causing a spike in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. No one yet knew if the delta variant was more virulent or less than alpha but there were more cases of infection among vaccinated people although the unvaccinated made up the vast majority of cases, serious sicknesses and deaths. The epidemiologists worried that the USA would eventually see the delta variant later in the summer and it would spread across the South where restrictions were few, precautions feeble and people would spend time mixing indoors with air conditioning when the weather was hot.
Home from Colorado tending my arid back yard and realizing our family summer vacation was over and summer itself, my Summer of 69, was barely ten days old and we had no more vacation plans. Harder yet to accept, my kids had a rift going that meant we might never vacation all together as a family again. That might not be the worst thing, I thought, with the complexity of it being the nine of us. It was the deeper divide between Michel and Vincent I didn’t want for a legacy if in any way I could help it.
Sid’s was the next family birthday. Would Vincent be invited to the party? Would there be a party? His mom and dad’s annual 4th of July patio pool party was a week away and Sid’s birthday a week beyond that, so there was no urgency to solve this overnight. Vincent and Amelie to my memory have never attended Gloria and Norb’s 4th of July yard party, which Roxanne and I have attended about twenty times. They are invited every year and each year politely decline to attend. Roxanne and I always hope one year they’ll go, especially now with Neko who would love playing in the pool with Clara and Tess and all their cousins, the kids of Sid’s three sisters. Things as they are we could be sure they would skip this year’s pool party. Sid’s birthday was different. We would learn their plans for Sid’s birthday at Gloria and Norb’s party. No rush.
Not only Vincent was in the doghouse with Michel but so was Roxanne, unreasonably for just being Vincent’s mother, but so was I, reasonably, for flaunting reefer under the noses of her teenage kids. Grandma Roxanne, whatever our daughter would ever say about her mother, would never fall from awe in the esteem of Clara and Tess. Looking at a good example Roxanne set the highest bar and it was inconceivable she would ever vary, and everyone loved her. The kids loved me too, but if ever they held me anywhere near the esteem they held Grandma Roxanne — ever, like when they were toddlers — from Colorado going forward Granpa Kelly came from the Land of Sketchy. My only support and vouchsafe for credibility was Roxanne by association — not the first instance either, I’m sure others would agree. O well, I told myself, it’s for the best. The kids eventually need to know me as I am.
When Michel was in high school she gave me a CD for Christmas she burned at school and bootlegged the album cover for the jewel box, The Perfect World by Freedy Johnston, featuring one of my favorite songs:
“I know I got a bad reputation, and it isn’t just talk, talk, talk…”
I never said I was a perfect man, but I do have a minor police record. It’s so minor nobody cares about it but me, and what some people may remember about me mattered far less on the criminal level as much as my personal experiences with these people in the fleeting events of life. What my daughter might have guessed or sussed out about my past before she was born she may not have considered me a hero but she never abandoned me altogether. Her gift of that album with that one song showed me love. Her fathers day gift of buffalo socks showed me love. Those times I wondered if she loved me I had no proof that she didn’t, it was always just a longing for something extra I felt I was missing, whether from an unrealized guilt, or paranoid insecurity, self-doubt of unworthiness, I eventually reasoned it out it was mental. My pet theory, that Michel, born premature five weeks and spending the first days of her life in an isolette in neonatal intensive care, alone in a heated incubator and not being held, cuddled or snuggled very much, could never be proven. But it helped me try to get into her head and her heart to know her. It was always important to me to feel close to her.
How she would hold my reputation to her daughters she would leave to me to reconcile and I would be given an even chance not to muff it. The first opportunity came in a text from Michel asking if we would write a character reference for Clara to the sponsors of her missionary camp in Appalachia. Michel forwarded us a kind of template for the content, a list of criteria to address Clara’s spiritual character. The more I read the criteria the better I understood the letter was meant to be a memento given to each camper on the trip but it would be seen and reviewed by the coordinators at the sponsoring congregation. Michel asked us to e-mail the letter to her and she would forward it to the coordinator. Deadline July 10.
After deducing we only needed to send one letter, not one each, Roxanne assigned it to me. She said, I don’t know how to address where this stuff is coming from. I mean I get what they’re asking us to say but I don’t have the words or the frame of reference to address it and I don’t want to blow it with Michel or for Clara. You do it. At least you’ve got the background.
In truth Roxanne was confirmed in the Lutheran faith, a church of the strict Missouri Synod, she wasn’t raised as a churchgoer, forgot most of what they taught about the bible, never belonged to any evangelical youth groups, came of age associating the name Martin Luther with Dr Martin Luther King Jr and came to know what the 95 Theses were all about from our travels to Germany and an exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Not that I knew John Wesley from John Wesley Harding until I was well into my sixties. Michel chose the United Methodist Church about six years ago when they moved back home from Switzerland. Sid was raised Methodist and they married in his family’s church in Rosemount, not far from his family’s homestead in Apple Valley. Their first dozen years they didn’t belong to any church. In Switzerland they attended services every so many Sundays, feeling a sense of obligation to introduce Clara and Tess to formal religion. So when I visited them and made priority efforts to visit European churches and shrines when we traveled together I felt obliged to explain what we were looking at. My upbringing was Roman Catholic, as I’ve confessed already. Somehow I have retained a significant appreciation for history including the impact of religion on the culture I know best, my own. It hasn’t gone unnoticed and I feel respected for knowing what I know about the Church even though it is also commonly known I am not a believer.
When they settled in southwest Minneapolis Michel and Sid shopped churches and chose to join the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist next to downtown instead of Sid’s family church because it’s a long commute to Rosemount but about fifteen minutes from their neighborhood to Loring Park, the location of the church on Hennepin Avenue. Instead of their neighborhood Methodist congregation, they chose Hennepin because they felt greater attraction to the pastors, two of whom were women and the youth pastor, a big chubby dude in his forties seemed to put a lot into his ministry more than a part-time job and they liked him. Over the years their family joined the congregation, Michel got baptized along with her kids and until the pandemic participated in most if not every endeavor the congregation engaged in, liturgical as well as multiple social outreach activities engaging inner city neighbors.
Thus Michel lured me to church to hear the kids sing and see them read passages and play the bells on special Sundays and Christmas and I believe she thought she sincerely could persuade me to devote my passionate quest for meaning and knowledge of history and religion to joining their congregation formally and start attending extra meetings but I’m plainly not a joiner. I leave a creased bill in the brass plate in the pew and in the basket at the basement breakfasts. It’s not the Groucho Marx excuse, that I wouldn’t be caught dead a member of any organization who would have me as a member. This retirement thing is supposed to be prime time for guys like me to volunteer. I like to see myself as stepping aside and out of the way from interfering in things simply by being involved. That and I’m unreliable — I might stop showing up. I wouldn’t want to embarrass my grandkids, or my daughter. With the church I cannot commit myself to its Nicene Creed. I’ll help out at the Halloween Trunk or Treat and the Christmas sacks under the tree drive when called upon by Michel, but otherwise I’m just a visitor.
As for this testimonial letter for Clara, I wasn’t about to wait until the last minute although I had more than a week. I wanted it in Michel’s hands with plenty time to spare if she needed revisions or a letter from somebody else.
This wasn’t going to the pastors at Hennepin Avenue. The departure of the beloved youth pastor (promoted to his own congregation further south in the city) and then the pandemic practically shut down Hennepin’s youth programs — Sunday school, kids choir, bells, confirmation class. So Sid and Michel connected Clara to the Methodist church way out in Woodbury, a suburb where Sid’s eldest sister’s family lived and her kids, Clara’s cousins, belonged to their church’s relatively thriving youth group. It was this church, called the Grove, who sponsored the camp in the Tennessee Appalachians to do community outreach work among the poor mountain communities. They called their camp Mountain TOP — Tennessee Outreach Project.
The instructions for the letter said to point out the student’s special qualities and characteristics, to give credit to the time, energy and commitment given for a 10 day trip like Mountain TOP. It suggests mentioning a life changing faith experience of one’s own. It said to emphasize the importance of belonging to a faith community like the Grove. It urged to talk about the benefits of a spiritual life and lifelong spiritual growth and to mention how people of faith pray with their hands and feet by serving other people and the world. It said not every idea needed to be mentioned.
I thought about it watching an especially crimson sunset into the trees and rooftops above the alley behind my nextdoor neighbors, made redder from the smoke of the western wildfires. A story formed. A composition formulated. I wrote:
Clara Kysylyczyn practices her faith by free will.
She is reinforced by a loving family who support her moral choices to fulfill herself spiritually through service to her community and the world, in her own words, as the hands and feet of God.
As a nuanced influencer Clara goes forth on volunteer projects such as Mountain TOP to act on her spiritual instincts to help others in the spirit attributed to John Wesley, to do as much good in as many ways possible. She is moved by the voice of the Holy Spirit and acts as Jesus taught, as if her left hand doen’t know what her right hand is doing.
Clara’s lifelong spiritual growth relies on belonging to a community where she is challenged to observe the details of faith’s impact on the behavior among herself and others. In her community she will encounter real world examples of mysteries of faith to sustain her engagements with people.
Grandparents
Buffalo M and Roxanne L Kelly
Did I miss any bullet points? Good.
You may ask, when did I start writing horoscopes?
The principal person I meant to impress was Clara. Asked to describe someone’s faith — faith — even Faith — to herself was a one time chance to — in the words of her icon superstar Taylor Swift — Speak Now. Asked to have a say, I had to say something true. Something she could verify. Since it was about her I felt obliged to e-mail it to her before sending it to her mother. Michel would have about a week to reject it or ask for revision. That included the 4th of July at her in-laws’ pool party when she might confront us about something it said she didn’t want. Its official disposition in the end didn’t matter to me, I just wanted to tell Clara what I thought her faith looked like to me. If Michel — or even Roxanne — didn’t like what it said it didn’t matter. If Clara didn’t like it then the letter would stop, but a dialogue would begin where she disagreed. That would also be true with Michel, Roxanne or Sid, but from them I might expect a discussion over semantics rather than Clara’s faith.
Nobody who asked me to do this thing directed me what to say.
After I showed it to Roxanne I sent it to Clara asking if it was okay. She wrote back the next day: “Yes I love it very much! Thank you so much for writing those nice things :)”
By then I had sent it to Michel and I heard nothing. Which was good. I expected no accolades. It wasn’t my faith on the line. I hoped my reference to Clara as a “nuanced influencer” would at least make Sid laugh, me sounding so hip to the current lingo, but what I wanted to remind Clara she was not invisible to this world and all her actions among the people she encounters in life she will have some subtle effect. I wanted to support her confidence in her freedom to choose to do the right thing when confronted by strange and stranger mysteries.
One reference to the Holy Spirit as a voice leading to navigating hypocrisy was meant to appeal to Michel, Sid, Clara, Tess and Roxanne based on the sermon one Sunday at Hennepin when we were all there in about the ninth pew except the kids who were either in Sunday school or participating as young voices of the choir, or playing the bells, which Tess and her best friend cousin were particularly good at. Probably it was an occasion before the pandemic which drew a big crowd but not Christmas or Easter, Pentecost maybe, and Clara might have been a young reader or a young voice singer and Erin and Tess were in the choir as well as in the bells interludes — it doesn’t matter except it was probably a notable occasion to get me to go to church. And that day the sermon by the head pastor Judy addressed hypocrites. Those who made a bigass deal about their largesse and make a show about their generosity to offer presentation of how generous they are. We went out for breakfast that day to Curran’s and got into hot discussion about what Jesus actually said — what he’s quoted to have said — about religious zealots who go all off bragging how holy they are when in secret they really aren’t. How it applied to people who pay lip service to hip causes and act out of presentational motives to publicize themselves as being righteous just to take credit. We could agree motivation could vary. One suggestion from either Clara or Michel or maybe Roxanne said some people who wore their ashes from Ash Wednesday all day could be hypocrites. From then on the conversation about hypocrisy was settled by Jesus when he said when you give to charity give in secret so that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. And vice versa.
That lesson from gospels affected Michel and I knew a little reference couldn’t hurt. I thought of referring to another favorite story of hers, the parable of the Good Samaritan, but it didn’t fit.
Michel’s mother-in-law Gloria was shocked and appalled one pool party with family to hear me say Michel never was baptized before she joined Hennepin United Methodist. It seemed unconscionable we could let a child go without baptism. I never pretended to be a believer, she just assumed I was, if eccentrically Catholic. I guess since I never ever challenged her beliefs and practices — faith — so she assumed I shared them, one and all. I don’t know if she ever noticed I never sing or recite the prayers at services. Gloria demanded to know why, if nothing else in case something happened to her she could at least be granted a Christian burial. Why would you leave her vulnerable? You’re not a believer, are you.
I defended my decision not to get my kids baptized, and Roxanne agrees though she was nowhere nearby on the patio sitting under umbrella getting grilled by Gloria. I tried to say I regarded oaths and promises rather seriously and I had a problem with making commitments I didn’t know she might not want to live up to, so I left it up to Michel herself to choose her own religion. I called it being the ultimate free agent. I said as if Gloria knew what I meant about my daughter, Michel would have chosen her own no matter what.
At the 4th of July party there was no talk of religion or faith this time. The first real Norb and Gloria 4th of July party since before ZOZO, everybody from the current extended Kysylyczyn family was there (except Norb’s two sisters in Chicago who visited sparingly anyway) all celebrating a worthy milestone of surviving the global pandemic. Everybody vaccinated and testing positive from visits to Walgreens and CVS or feeling symptom free — at home test kits were predicted to be available by year end. The was joy in sincere fist-bumping awkwardly around the tables of umbrellas along the pool patio and upstairs on the deck. The scene accommodated a lot of chairs. Including two high-top bistro tables the patio sat four tables and there was a large one up on the deck which altogether sat at least 25 people. When Roxanne and I started attending the crowd was at least that many, including friends of Norb and Gloria’s son and three daughters. Some attendees were friends who were parents of their kids’ friends, knowing the Kysylyczyns from the neighborhood or through school where their kids grew up together.
Over the years since we were introduced through Sid and Michel the attendees have changed. At our first visit Sid still had a sister in high school. Since then all the once rowdy hotshot guys cannonballing in the pool who were contemporaries of Sid were eventually off in the universe making a living. Same to say of the lady friends of Sid’s sisters. A couple of the better athletes were friends of Sid’s middle sister Natasha. The deep back lawn of the park that was the Kysylyczyn’s back yard used to be mowed to form a court and Norb installed a volleyball net and the young ones and a few of us frisky parents would face off across the net and have at it before and after dinner. In the garage a pingpong table hosted those so inclined.
Norb always sponsored a round-robin bocce ball tournament in his neighbor’s yard next door by removing a section of his fence and, always by permission, using the neighbor’s whole back yard as a bocce ball pitch big enough to hold two matches at the same time. Everybody age twelve and on was required to pair up in random couples (not spouses) to compete. I think one year paired with a lady who was a book retailer executive we made it to the semi-finals but otherwise I’ve always been on a team one of two and out. Roxanne has actually been on a winning team at least twice in those twenty-odd years. Norb refurbished all his kids’ athletic trophies from their youth and gave them out to the bocce ball champions and runners up, and I run across Roxanne’s trophies when I dust the loft.
Thus Roxanne and I came to know people we might see once a year. And they changed. As Norb and Gloria’s kids’ contemporaries stopped showing up, so did their parents. As their kids took spouses the new in-laws’ parents started attending. Soon Norb and Gloria had grandchildren splashing in the pool. Soon enough the yard where the volleyball net gradually fell to disuse came to life with kickball and soccer. Dogs chased tennis balls. Little boys peed behind trees.
The bocce ball tournament played on. Norbert himself refereed and supervised the brackets until about four years ago when he trained his eldest grandkids to take over and yet he never himself played. Gloria stopped playing somewhere along the way. The rest of us every year got cajoled to participate. One or more of the sons in law captained the gas grill and turned the bratwurst, polish sausage, hamburgers, turkeyburgers, veggie burgers and sometimes chicken. At dinner the kitchen island buffet offered the salads, beans, buns, chips and garnishes of pot luck. After dinner, at maybe four o’clock, the tournament winners received their trophies. Desserts came soon after with cupcakes with little Old Glory flags to celebrate Sid’s middle sister Natasha’s birthday.
This year’s gathering epitomized the soul of what Gloria and Norb established whenever this tradition started. Minus some old friends who had died, others who retired and moved away, and Gloria’s mom who had lived to 100, and less all the Kysylyczyn kids’ contemporaries, grown with families of their own and places to be and some who sent personal regards, the turnout brought together all the main characters from their extended family and a few flashbacks to the early days, former neighbors and old friends from Gloria’s work.
Sid was Gloria and Norb’s third of four kids, the other three girls. The eldest sister Valeria married right after her sweetheart from high school Ted passed the bar and they have a daughter in nursing college and two high school boys. Val is an engineer for the state highway department and both she and Ted graduated Marquette University. Natasha, next eldest, was last to marry and she and her mate Isaac Peterson were raising a daughter then thirteen, Erin, cousin and best friend to Tess, and son right behind her named Nate. Natasha earned her degree at Wisconsin Madison (which she defends arrogantly when razzed by Gopher alumni) and served public education as an elementary school principal and teacher in the suburb where they lived. Isaac was a software engineer of such high velocity nobody knew exactly what he did or how but he made a good living and made time to work, play with his kids and go fishing. Sid’s younger sister Tracy had two sons, Cisco and Lucas, roughly bracketing cousin Nate, with her husband Joe, a printer by trade. Tracy had a state university degree from the Winona campus and worked as an administrator for a health care firm.
Along with Clara and Tess, that bestowed Gloria and Norb seven grandchildren, not a nominal record by any means but nonetheless a bounty of progeny. Ranging from age ten or eleven up to twenty the cousins blended that day like sisters and brothers, not a shy one in the bunch except maybe the youngest, Lucas who checked out of the pool horseplay from time to time outmatched in the floatie battles with his brother and cousin Nate, not quite mature enough to compete in the dive games with the high school boys, Carlos and Grady, or with Clara, Tess and Erin. Now who can incite Gloria and somebody’s mom with a cannonball attempt to empty the pool … Erin nailed her brother in the face with the pump squirtgun, just like old times.
The eldest of Gloria and Norb’s grandkids, Coretta, the sophomore year nursing student, didn’t swim much or engage in the dive games of the other kids but hung out more at the tables under the umbrellas with us seniors and her parents, aunts and uncles. She drifted between her elders and cousins Clara when she wasn’t swimming and special surprise visits from twin cousins from Ted’s sister and her husband who were in town from Chicago. The twins I recall when they were high school basketball stars. Now college grads — one played DII — with careers, one was newly engaged to marry the following summer. Coretta pairing up alongside Clara that 4th of July signified to Gloria, Roxanne and Michel a bonding between them that the grandmas and the mom had been wishing for despite the for year age gap and the bigger gap created by Clara living in Switzerland. They barely knew each other. Coretta’s family the Aragons lived in Woodbury, far across the metro to the east beyond St Paul — 17 miles from my house, I know because Michel and Sid used to live in Woodbury befrore Switzerland and I clocked it — and that kind of distance made Coretta and Clara more unlikely to meet up than the basketball twins except at designated family gatherings such as Coretta’s high school graduation party. As I recall the past few 4th of July gatherings Coretta was absent or just breezed by to say hi to her grandparents, a young adult on the go. I’ve literally seen her grow up her entire life yet I hardly know her and it shocks me a little to observe what a grown lady she is now, halfway through her college degree. Her recent connection with Clara intersected through the church. The pandemic rendered the youth program down at Hennepin Avenue inert, but the Methodist church in Woodbury kept its youth ministry vital and enthusiastic through ZOZO and their congregation called the Grove was sponsoring the outreach camp Clara would be participating in the following weekend and for a week after that.
Seems some United Methodist churches adopt names to differentiate from each other in a similar market. One in our neighborhood calls its community Living Spirit. The one in Woodbury calls itself the Grove. Coretta was a recognized leader of the youth ministry at the Grove and a veteran of outreach camp at Mountain TOP. She would be a senior counselor this year. Coretta’s brother and Clara’s cousin Carlos would be attending (but not younger Grady who played in an elite summer soccer league) and their mother Valeria was going along as an adult guide and chaperone. It made sense Coretta and Clara would bond over this, and with Carlos too. More than gratified two or three cousins might bond or not I was gratified to know somebody would be watching over Clara in Appalachia.
The subject of the letter never came up. Hasn’t ever. Seems in my life the things that deserve the most severe criticism go unmentioned.
Because their father Ted Aragon had divorced parents who remarried, Coretta and her brothers technically had three sets of grandparents present at the party. Ted’s dad and spouse were John and Sara, retired to Arizona and late of Rochester, Minnesota. Ted’s mom was Christine and her husband Steve of Naples, Florida and Nisswa, Minnesota and sometimes Chicagoland to be near the daughter and twin grandkids. And not leastly there were Gloria and Norb of Apple Valley. I recall at least six or seven years back attending the 4th one of the years Michel’s family lived in Europe and were not present, I overheard Coretta refer to me and Roxanne as “Clara’s people.”
No offense taken. If once a year I get cred by association with Clara let it be. To their family Clara and Tess were primarily Norb and Gloria’s grandkids and Roxanne and I were as tertiary as the other in-laws-in law around the patio who could assume family credibility.
Usually at Norb and Gloria’s the people we see once a year ask us if we’ve been on any trips of late and this post-ZOZO 4th of July we could tell about our road trip to the Rockies and back, and if they seemed to care we would tell about being in Mexico just five months ago. Ted Aragon’s father John was a traveler who dragged his kids across Europe in the day with his first wife the brother and sister’s mom. He recalled what he experienced in Europe with his second wife after the kids were grown, at a mature age when at leisure we could appreciate where we were going. As we fit in with their age they assured Roxanne and me we didn’t miss anything by waiting until our golden age to tour Europe. Being the other grandpa of Valeria’s kids put him and his wife Sara within Norb and Gloria’s galaxy and John was like a charter member in-law from when Ted and Valeria were star-crossed teenage lovesongs. Having virtually two grandmas with one grandpa turns out a good deal sometimes, or so the Aragon clan might agree and ask, so what?
Being Michel’s dad got me my first back stage pass to Norb and Gloria’s hearts. We usually never got acquainted with parents or kin to Michel’s friends unless school or park and rec and that eliminated boy friends. Until Sid she never confided who she might be dating. We guessed it was serious when they arranged the four parents to meet and we agreed to dinner at the officers club at Fort Snelling on a shelf of terrain aside the approach to the south runway of the international airport MSP over the Minnesota River and crossing the state highways at the Post Road exit. Norb was a lieutenant in the US Air Force Reserves and after that first rendezvous Gloria started cultivating us and we met frequently at the Officers Club until the USAF and Navy decommissioned it after 9/11. By then of course we had a standing invitation to their pool and had been invited back in perpetuity to the 4th of July.
Not to exploit an open invitation rudely I would wankle a sweltering summer afternoon to escape to Apple Valley visiting Norb and Gloria just to beg a swim, and they never objected. Gracious people they were easy to befriend. Like their son Sid they couldn’t have been more perfect in-laws, people we would have gladly chosen if within our power and not decided by the fates of our kids. I’m told this is a lucky condition by people who have or know of in-law friction, and I can imagine how unpleasant that can be. Like knowing divorced people, you realize how frequently people are incompatible and don’t get along. Maybe it makes good sit-com drama. Like Lou Holz says, it’s good not to entertain drama. Gloria and Norb could easily be said to be an ideal American suburban married couple of our generation. They are a little older than Roxanne and me but not much. Married a couple years longer. Lived at their residence about 50 years. Both educated. Gloria a third generation educator who worked as a public school administrator when she re-entered the workforce after being a stay-at-home mom before the youngest kid entered school full time. Norb was a civil engineer who spent a career as a building inspector for HUD, the federal department of housing and urban development. There was no room for scandal or dysfunction in their lives, within I guess the normal parameters of middle class American behavior. I suppose there’s always gossip but nothing salacious enough to drive anybody out of town. We’ve in turn always respected their privacy and accepted boundaries of none-of-our business and expect reciprocal respect, knowing the nature of our relationship gives us each unwitting privy to learn things we don’t need to know and I’m comfortable with my reputation in their minds. I was certain neither Michel nor Sid would confide to Gloria our tiff in Colorado, thoughh I didn’t put it past Tess to tell Erin who might spill it to her grandma, who might think it’s funny and keep it to herself and Norb (who wouldn’t care less) until a proper moment to ask me or Roxanne.
And we weren’t the kind to confide. When Vincent and Amelie were seeing a fertility specialist to conceive who eventually became Neko, we didn’t tell people how it was going unless Gloria asked. When my sister Murray got a divorce I didn’t spread the news but Gloria always asked if there was a chance they’ll get back together. For a while in the early years Gloria seemed extra curious about my mother, whom she got to know as a mercurial and charismatic lady before she died. At the time I felt unenthused about telling stories of my childhood but for the sake of disclosure and our friendship I answered her questions honestly if sometimes circumspect enough to retain some mystery.
About the time Sid, Michel, Clara and Tess repatriated home to the USA we went on a European river cruise with Gloria and Norb up the Rhine from Amsterdam to Basel with Viking. Gloria’s idea, planned a year in advance. Then Sid’s company sent them home a few weeks ahead of our cruise which was supposed to lead us afterwards from Basel to Zug, where we would visit Sid, Michel, Clara and Tess, but instead they were all back in Minneapolis while we cruised Europe on the Rhine and had to fend for ourselves from Switzerland. Norb and Gloria flew right home out of Zurich but Rox and I caught the train to Paris.
On the cruise we pretty much had a blast. The ship’s crew treated everyone on board with charming sincerity and the hospitality was exquisite, the food and drink superb. The day trip tours — windmills, castles, cathedrals, wineries, forests, medieval towns — gave us authentic and efficient looks and feels for the sites and sights. The hiking was listed as not too strenuous but Gloria would differ, and she seemed unenthusiastic for some of the architecture and much of the art though she took the guides’ word for it that such things were important and didn’t just listen to my opinions. Norb just took it all in. Gloria liked the night life on the ship and seemed amazed and enchanted by Roxanne’s knack for socializing amid large groups of strangers and finding interesting people to share meals and hang with on the day tours. All then introduced to Gloria and Norb. When Gloria got home she raved what a great time she had, even though the field trips in the ports were hard on her feet. She then went through a couple years of foot surgery for conditions aggravated by walking too much on cobblestones and so forth having such a great time on that Rhine cruise.
Roxanne would admit the daily tour regimen required some stamina and we may have been too aggressive about getting our moneysworth when we signed up for excursions, but each one was first rate. If you like group tours of places you never been before. Norb just took it all in.
Gloria was careful to schedule surgery on her feet during winter months so she would be able to swim in their pool in the summer. Roxanne and I hardly ever went to their house if not for their pool, didn’t participate in their family winter holiday gatherings except maybe at a church. Mostly we kept in touch with Norb and Gloria by meeting them out for dinner, places Gloria wearing a boot cast could be dropped off at the door. Norb literally waited on her hand and foot.
At this 4th of July Gloria was spry and vivacious, the effervescent hostess. First big pool party in two years. Lovely summer day in the 80s. All her kids, grandkids, many friends, in-laws, a nephew, pinot grigio, nobody to rub her wrong, this was Gloria’s glory.
Michel meanwhile placed herself at an inner part of a table amid Sid’s sisters where she immersed herself among other moms and female contemporaries where she could observe her daughters. She apparently didn’t care to swim that day, content to hang out with the ladies in the shade sipping lemonade. Maybe we exchanged three words, inconsequential and nonchalant. No sign of animosity. Best yet she didn’t mention Clara’s letter or take me aside to criticize or reject it, so I let her be and relaxed chumming with Val’s husband Ted, Ted’s dad John, Tracy’s husband Joe and Natasha’s husband Isaac’s dad, Ernie. It was Isaac’s turn as son-in-law at the grill and Ike (we called him) loved to cook so he put himself into the role all in. Ike has won family chili cook-offs on both sides of his family. He was a precise and patient chef and everybody knew whatever came off the grill would be delicious. Meantime platters of chopped celery, carrots, colored peppers, cucumbers, broccoli, grape tomatoes and yes, cauliflower with dips and dressings and hummus and naan bread spread across the patio bistro bar with cheeses, salami, crackers, chips and salsa. Beer, soda and sparkling water abundant in at least three coolers plus the contents of Norb’s refrigerator in the garage. Even before Isaac began to slow cook the meats (and plant based grilled proteins) there existed a feast of finger food and drink. Hemmed in where Michel sat she relied on her daughters and Sid to cater to her from the buffet of crudite. Roxanne said later she and Michel hardly exchanged more than hello. With everything else going on around us there were too many stories to try to keep track of for anybody to notice irregular attitudes between us — I still kissed her cheek in greeting and at least hugged her shoulder and always always looked her in the eye. Not saying boo to each other at a pool party was not a big deal between people who actually share a permanent eternity.
I paid more mind to not be noticed for being shunned by Clara and Tess. In wet bathing suits they presented themselves to be fit and shapely young women — attractive young ladies — and now more mature and grown up, not just taller. Just as there seems to be an age when she loses track of when to hold grandpa’s hand, grandchildren gradually withdraw their physical affections appropriate to comfort. I do not expect to be sat on my lap. Clara routinely hugs me in first greeting and this occasion no exception, she just happened not to be in the pool when we arrived. Needless to say there was a time abiut a dozen years ago she used to run to my arms and I would raise her up for a hug my size. Tess yelled out my name from the deep end of the pool, Granpa Kelly, when Clara completed her hug greeting, which seemed to me getting clicheed and formalized but not insincere like Europeans greet with and embrace and kiss kiss, only not the kiss kiss — covid, you know. Tess’s shout out said enough to me.
All day Clara didn’t bring up the letter though references to Mountain TOP camp came up freely as well as to the Grove church and their bus ride the coming weekend among Val and Ted’s two kids and Michel and Sid with Clara. I didn’t get into much of it because I’d done my part to send her on whatever this mission turned out to be. It’s what Michel liked about the Good Samaritan, he just happened upon this beaten and wretched man on the road and without question stopped to help him, did the right thing. Clara was brought up to be prepared, like a Scout, to do the right thing. I would always support that. I may not say the prayers out loud with the congregation or sing even when the words are projected on the screens at the sides of the apse, but I could never tell somebody they were a fool for wanting to do good. I also knew Clara needed documented volunteer experience for her high school resume to show to the National Honor Society. I remembered when she lived in Switzerland and her English-style international school sent her on bus trips to maths and science camps in the Alps and on choir trips to the Mediterranean in fifth and sixth grade and we would be so proud how grown up she was. Two more years she would be in college. It pleased me to feel as if Clara and I still had a cosmic bond undeterred by her mother. I did not want us to resemble the family of the novel Purple Hibiscus, in which the adolescent girl protagonist is forbidden to visit the home of her grandfather because the grandfather is a pagan.
It could happen here, but not if I could help it, even by appealing to literature. Clara didn’t have to sit on my lap, drape her arms around me and hold my hand to show she still loved me. We had all summer to talk about the novels of Ngozi Adichie (and I promised myself to read Americanah my next opportunity) and discuss heavy topics. She would be leaving for Tennessee the next weekend. Not her first venture to Tennessee, she used to go to a gymnastics camp not far from Nashville with Tess and they toured Nashville as a family once. I would like to hear her impressions when she got back. I’d never been there and had barely a vague idea what she might anticipate, that best left to her aunt Val and cousins Coretta and Carlos. With the letter my work was done here.
I watched Tess frolic in the pool. Fresh back from gymnastics camp she jettisoned back into her groove with Erin, whom she hadn’t seen since before Colorado. They dived like dolphins competing with their boy cousins at some kind of contests retrieving small toys tossed into the deep end, outdoing each other holding their breath. Tess never seemed more extroverted. She zipped one line zingers between the ears of the boys to make Erin laugh — nothing bad to make them mad but funny enough to get the boy cousins to laugh along. Erin took a hiatus from playing in the pool to referee the bocce ball tournament — it was her turn this year, which meant she couldn’t play. Tess got out of the pool and dried off and got a plate of celery and chips and stopped by to say camp was good but it was good to be home. She asked how I was doing. I said I was pleased to report I was doing all right, getting good grades. No sooner her skin dried she was back in the pool practicing dives off the board, spins and twists only Clara would try but not the boys.
Erin would have probably attempted except she was busy being this year’s bocce ball boss. The hardest aspect was hunting down the people in the pairings and getting them going. Matching them in the first place was relatively easy. No spouses. Mixed gender always. Tess, eligible to play (minimum age 12) got paired with her uncle Ted. I got John’s current wife Sara. Roxanne ended up with Steve, John’s ex-wire Christine’s current husband. Norb still didn’t have to play. Erin got the first round going with two simultaneous matches. Once play commenced her job was easy. The players almost always conceded fairly and Erin was there with a yardstick to settle any disputes of judgment, her word was law. She recorded the scores and winners in the brackets on a sheet tacked to the fence.
The bocce yard was Norb and Gloria’s next door neighbor’s back yard, a lovely green gentle grassy knoll at least as big as theirs including the swimming pool and patio, shady from a couple of mature maples. Norb and the neighbor so kind and gracious always removed a panel from the stout fence between their properties which belonged to Norb and Gloria to legally fence off a yard with a pool. This neighbor never stayed home on the 4th of July apparently, I never met him at the pool party, but every year he generously donated his lush back yard to bocce ball. Eminently a big enough yard to hold two matches at the same time, the tournament proceeded apace.
Bocce ball is a game of rolling, lobbing, underhanding balls the size of an American softball only made of stained wood and weighing commensurately more aimed at a smaller woooden ball (called the pea ball) tossed by one team or the other at the start of every round of the game and points are awarded to the team whose tossed balls are closest to the pea ball. Teams alternate tossers. Ever since I tore my Tommy John in my right elbow I have been terrible at this game. My tosses are wild and random, out of control with no precise oomph. Alas even before I tore out my tendon I wasn’t all that good, just less erratic. Sara and I washed out against Coretta and uncle Joe, the eventual winners of the tourney. Erin’s dad Ike made a good showing with his partner Val while he minded meat preparation for the grill, he a skilled multi-tasker with help from Ted.
Dinner was never better. An epic feast. And those baked beans? Ted I would bet. Potato salad from scratch. Cabbage, greens and apple. Tuna and seashell pasra salad. Rox and I made rotini pasta, peppers, cucumbers, green onions and grape tomatoes in Italian dressing. There were tater tots. Kaiser rolls. Sauteed asparagus and stringbeans. Jello. Add Ike’s well tended meats and plant-based substitutes from the grill and it was a meal so filling Natasha commented we might have to enforce that old time rule about no swimming for an hour, which nobody obeyed anyway except the elders more by default.
I swam that day but didn’t dwell in the pool. It wasn’t a hot day and the deep half was a high-traffic cousin zone where treading water on a floaty automatically found turbulent waters. This was a day of zest and rave, not just among the kids but animating the elders too, who now numbered the middle-agers who seemed to be the kids just yesteryear. The kids seemed yesterday to require water wings in the shallow end. With no soundtrack, not even rock and roll, the rhythm of the patter reverberated around the scene in choruses of laughter and subtle verses chuckling subtly below the undertones of biased maturity. Eventually Grandma Gloria proclaimed a moratorium of hi-jinks by the kids and ordered them out of the pool at least for an hour to allow the elders (like herself) a relaxed swim. So the kids re-formed as a kickball diamond in the deep yard where the volleyball court used to be.
Clara didn’t play. She optioned to swim at leisure with Coretta and the grandmas, talking up her upcoming two week church excursion, answering the same questions and deferring to Coretta for answers she didn’t know. Near as she knew she would be assigned a child care role of some kind, as all the rookie girls did. It might take the whole first week to get orientated.
I watched the kickball melee. Soccer experience showed in the kicking and dodgeball experience to throw out runners. Otherwise it meant sheer speed on the bases. Erin had the most talent in all three areas. The boys each according to size and age varied in hand skill — something soccer didn’t stress. Tess played soccer and basketball before choosing gymnastics, swimming and diving as her seasonal sports. Clara had a bad ankle suffered at gymnastics and didn’t play land sports but also never tried soccer, basketball, baseball or any other common youth sport except track. Coretta was a competitive figure skater. Between the two ladies floating on doughnuts in the pool there was no yen to be in the fracas playing out in the back yard.
Hanging out with the guys at the bistro tables the conversation circled around the things keeping us busy the past two years, the patches and scraps of life sneaked sideways during the great abstention. Ike and Joe gone fishing separately and together so far that summer with glowing reports of timeless hours on the lakes. Sid and Ted exchanged views of the west between the Black Hills and the Rockies — neither had ever been to Devils Tower, or the Custer Battlefield. Ike turned to me and recommended I watch a movie called Searching for Sugar Man, the story of a guy named Rodriguez, an Americana folk singer of the 1970s who disappeared into obscurity except in South Africa where he became a legendary folk hero believed dead. He said he and Natasha heard a Rodriguez song on satellite radio in the car just last week and they thought of me. His dad Ernie and Ted’s dad John each lived their winters as snowbirds commuting to separate suburbs of Arizona and back when paradise season such as this transpires in the summer of Minnesota. The road in between has gotten harsher, they were saying. It made each destination seem more remote and each home more lonely. Ted, Sid and Ike all easily worked remotely — from home — whereas Joe had to always be on site at the shop. The rest of us retired guys had nothing to complain about. We could fish and golf and go to the racetrack to our heart’s content, right? Nobody seemed eager to share what we might be reading. Times like these I used to love to get into political discussions — mere mention of Sugar Man Rodriguez might be as political as we get in a large group as this. Gloria and Norb were stalwart Democrats, as were their children, but coming from suburban exurban Twin Cities you could never presume people’s creeds, so political banter didn’t come up at their 4th of July that I recall — this from a liberal home field perspective. Travel is always a solid theme for every conversation. Sid liked describing our Colorado vacation, especially the raft ride. I had to confess we had to give up Mexico last winter. John asked me if Roxanne and I had any future trips to the Old Country planned when restrictions get lifted, and I said Portugal.
Why Portugal? I compared it to a missing link in our exploring Europe. (I didn’t say it seemed to me a clever excuse to not attend the upcoming make-up for my high school graduating class 50th anniversary reunion postponed from ZOZO.) I’m hoping Portugal will open by September. On the other hand, recent reports see spikes of infection from the new delta variant in Portugal, so I’m not so sure.
Eventually the cousins overheated on their diamond and seeped back into the swimming pool. Gloria and the ladies rejoined the patio tables. Sisters Tracy and Valeria served up platters of flag bedecked cupcakes for Natasha’s birthday and everybody stopped to sing the happy birthday to you like it was the Star Spangled Banner. Natasha was much loved as a daughter, sister, wife, mom, aunt, friend and all around gal pal, and then there were cupcakes. The boy cousins engaged in some kind of hide and chase competition comprised of the whole house and entire patio and yard, while Coretta, Clara and Coretta’s twin cousins blended among the ladies (real housewives of Apple Valley) while Tess and Erin dived and raced unfettered in the pool. Hooray for sugar!
In a while the grandparents started the long goodbyes. We packed our bags and coolers and headed to our cars. Roxanne and I packed up the leftover rotini and circled the patio as close to embracing as we dared — body language in the covid age conveyed so much. Since one day that week Rox and I would be minding Neko she invited Tess and Erin to spend the day with us at an aquatics park and they seemed enthused about the plan. We agreed to text via Tess. Clara had high school things to occupy her and her job junior coaching gymnastics with little kids along with getting ready for Appalachia so she would not be joining us. See you when I see you, she said.
Chapter 13
Michel was certainly none too chummy, said Roxanne in the car on the way home. She was at the wheel. I said, Michel’s lucky to have married into such a nice family.
How you feeling? she asked me. In truth I had anxious moments, I said. I know we were outdoors almost the entire time but that was a lot of us in proximity, last year’s superspreader. Any time I cough I feel like a suspect, and rightly so. She answered, you should stop smoking cigars. And reefer. I know, I said knowingly. I’m exhausted. I’m not used to so much social activity going on all at the same time. Or am I just getting old? Sanjay Gupta says the key thing is to keep moving, she replied. I don’t think you’ve been swimming in years, at least since they closed the Y. Norb and Gloria would probably like it if we made a practice of coming around to use their pool. You have to get up and start getting out, babe. We’re fully vaccinated and boostered. Things are open again.
Not the annual fireworks at the Minneapolis riverfront. Closed for the second ZOZO year there would be no 4th of July fireworks over Nicollet Island and St Anthony Falls this year. This suited me fine. I had no desire to go downtown, park, walk and hike to the Stone Arch Bridge, find a niche in the crowd to watch fireworks and then reverse the hike and walk back to retrieve the car to get home by the backstreets, even as efficiently as we knew how to do it, it didn’t seem worth it even if it hadn’t been canceled for covid. I for one didn’t feel comfortable congregating on a bridge spanning the Mississippi River with hundreds of people — even if they were all masked — going ooh and ahh, not tonight.
Other municipalities and jurisdictions away from Minneapolis felt free to conduct fireworks. Apple Valley elected not to hold their public display again this year at the park near Norb and Gloria’s house. Bloomington, where Erin’s family lived, was having them and Clara and Tess were going to Erin’s house to watch from the crest of a hill in the public park across the street.
In my and Roxanne’s neighborhood when the sun went down around nine o’clock the atmosphere literally erupted in continual small explosions from every direction. Amateur night. Whether driven to fill a void left by the city canceling its official display or just more pent up impulses to create loud noises and fiery colors in the sky, from as far away as we could hear to the next block and around the corner the pops, bangs, whizzers and booms rocked and echoed in the streets. The darker the sky as twilight faded to night the frequency between eruptions increased. There was no predictable pattern except when set off in groups and sequences, each pyrotechnician waiting for the other to finish before starting another sequence, instinctively taking turns. This went on until after midnight, peakings around eleven and gradually spending its wads towards one in the morning. In my mind I could see the Nextdoor website blowing up with outrage at the insensitivity towards dogs, cats and autistics. Roxanne’s complaint was that it was almost all noise. In truth almost all the explosions came with light and color but for the mature arbors and two story buildings of the city and the sub-professional rockets in the hands of the neighbors so only at the right sight-lines over the trees and rooftops could anybody but the shooters see the dazzling colors above their street. Then again there is something to be said about a simple M-80 or a Silver Salute for sheer white light and a big badass boom. I sat on the porch swing some of the time and otherwise upstairs at the loft with the iMac making up a story of my Summer of 69 listening to the volleys and seeking a pattern, and there was none, total random syncopation.
So why wasn’t this behavior driving me crazy? Especially, you might point out, happening in my neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota a swath of urban residence and commerce blitzed by the murder of George Floyd and everything after, where fireworks were aimed at police during the riots and used as incendiary devices to create arsons. You might empathize with contributors to Nextdoor network’s complainants with PTSD. The police have a sensing device called a shotspotter that can differentiate a shot from a firearm from a firework. Many people can’t distinguish the two so they might assume fireworks are gunshots. Nights like the 4th of July must seem like torture. I think I can discern a gunshot from fireworks but I’d hate to be wrong. Nevertheless I hung around on the porch swing this sultry night looking for something of stray color to rise above the roofs and trees to go along with the noise.
It’s a lazy cliched figure of speech to compare someplace to a war zone except a real war zone, but people do it anyway. Earthquakes. Hurricanes and tornadoes. Floods. Riots. Disasters. People speak of 4th of July as sounding like a war zone. Hometown shock and awe. Or guerrilla war fought invisibly behind neighborly fences and alleys. Hatfields v McCoys. That family feud squabble described by Huckleberry Finn. All the audio of a war zone without the bullets, mortars and grenades, not so much as broken glass. In Minneapolis we have populations of foreign refugees from real war zones, so you wonder how the metaphor and the 4th of July make them feel.
For one thing most if not all the fireworks ordnance going off around us is illegal. Minnesota state law prohibits all the good stuff from rockets with red glare to simple Black Cats and Lady Fingers that flash and pop, and all the cherry bombs, M-80s and Silver Salutes in between — everything projectile and/or explosive is prohibited from sale or use in the state and from import from elsewhere. When I was a kid, no kidding in June I used to see cars coming in from Wisconsin getting pulled over by the state highway patrol on US12 and being searched for fireworks. Now the laws are virtually unenforceable unless somebody’s home or business accidentally catches fire — my main worry — or somebody gets hurt or killed. With our police force down around 300 cops since George Floyd the law enforcement pros have much more to do per capita than chase after complaints that Jack and Jane next door just blew off a series of bottle rockets obtained at a trailer lot in South Dakota.
This particular year after quarantines and shutdowns from ZOZO it seemed exceptionally explosive, as if fireworks aficionados saved all their pent-up penchants plus doubled down on fresh supplies to blow all their wads in 2021 because they could get away with it, as was proven time and again the past year on nights that were not the 4th of July. And using firearms instead. A new twist on the term Big Bang Theory. Bang for the buck. Possession of firepower. Fire and power. Aha, in the distance to the east did I hear a roaring internal combustion engine and repeatedly squealing and wheeling tires? Same mentality? More of that F9 adrenaline..
Foosh! Boom. Pow. Rat-a-tat-a-tatt. Boom. Fizz whiz whiz bang! In the brief quiet there’s a distant ambulance siren. Then pop pop pop and wham.
I have loved fireworks shows since I was a baby. My mom made a big deal out of attending. We used to go to Thomas Beach at what was then Lake Calhoun. Later Roxanne and I made fireworks shows part of our courting rituals, even randomly crashing a pyrotechnics convention at a city park at Gillette, Wyoming on our way home one year from Yellowstone. Minneapolis stages the best public fireworks display you’ll ever see, even better than Disney, once a year but not the 4th of July. The Minneapolis 4th of July fireworks over the Mississippi River at St Anthony Falls is always very good, one of the best. The annual show later in July at that same location that caps off the city’s summer festival the Aquatenniel is the very best, (usually) giving Minneapolis two fantastic fireworks shows in the same month. Judging from what we saw at that fireworks-makers convention that night in Gillette, what makes the Aquatenniel display more dazzling are the state of the art new innovations in color combinations, extensions of the bursts and new styles of shapes and dimensions in the Aquatenniel repertoire — more money put into production, sponsored by Target — compared to the more meager civic budget and patriotic theme of the 4th of July. The 4th of July display comes as a one-shot ritual, whereas the Aquatenniel show comes as the end of a week long festival celebrating the city’s lakes and river, a grand finale gathered at the city’s birthplace at the Falls of St Anthony, over Nicollet Island (pronounced hereabouts Nick-let) where the hydropower turned the flour mills that fed the world not that very long ago. The concussions of the bursts echo off the skyscrapers of the downtown side of the river and the colors flash reflect off the glass. The Target logo forms in red circles from a state-of-the-art burst. Observed from the Stone Arch bridge, now an open pedestrian causeway but originally build by James J Hill to carry his Great Northern trains, there is no grander view of what this city really means.
You view upriver to the obscure and dangerous North Side. Two bridges cross the river to link downtown to the other side, the Northeast. A cute suspension bridge at a distance entices the eye, whereas the utilitarian 3rd Ave Central bridge carries the load of traffic between the two Minneapolis banks of the river. This bridge usually gets shut down during fireworks so the pyrotechnicians can rig it to light up with a shimmering silver waterfall of fire as part of the Aquatenniel grand finale.
Look downriver the skyscrapers taper off to the mills, still preserved to some measure, some hotels and residences, others museums dedicated to the millers. Further away is the I-35 bridge rebuilt where it collapsed into the river in 2007 — another disaster compared to a war zone. And further down river there’s the commingling of the West and East Bank campuses of the University of Minnesota. But no, you can’t see St Paul.
Hanging out on the Stone Arch bridge among throngs of summertime revelers of all types and ages used to exhilarate me. The past few years got me thinking bomb threats and mass shootings but the thrall of the fireworks uplifting all our faces into the night sky kept me away from allowing cynical fears of improbable tragedy to spoil that outdoor urban exhilaration. Since covid-19 though the spell is broken. I imagine all that humanity shoulder to shoulder sharing microbes however well intended (like Times Square New Years Eve) inadvertently and carelessly scaring each other with infection, exhilaration canceled by paranoid phobia.
At 69 years old it was good I had memories. I could close my eyes sitting on the porch swing and see in my mind red and green and purple and yellow and blue starlet pixels in the sky above somewhere along water — take Menaggio, Italy on Lake Como — with every invisible throb and pound. Comes to thinking sometimes I may have seen as much as I’ll ever see and I should be so grateful to have seen this much if the end soon comes. As the summer continued it seemed more and more significant to have survived ZOZO, that lost year, considering how depressed I was. Day after day getting up by sunrise to pick the newspaper off the front yard to look for signs the pandemic was gone away just to find out everything was same as when I went to bed and there would be nothing again to do so might as well lie on the couch and meditate my life away and nap as much as necessary. To be clear, I wasn’t suicidal, never contemplated self-harm. Never want to be dead. Dread being sick. Just couldn’t summon the motivation to get up and go beyond the bare minimum of survival.
At the time maybe I thought I was dying, slowly giving up the ghost.
After all that happened and didn’t happen that year-plus, here on the 4th of July it seemed appropriate to consider starting over in the spirit of Independence Day by staying up late and outlasting the firecrackers. I didn’t reflect much upon the pool party at Gloria and Norb’s other than to assure myself I still possessed decent social skills. Spending so much time by myself made me not only used to my own company but dependent on it. A friend many years ago told me, the thinking man is always alone but never lonely. Ironic after more than fifty years later my friend’s advice would seem so pertinent. I wondered, did I always over-think everything this much, just so much less self-aware? That same friend was probably one of those who said, the unexamined life is not worth living, and probably, he who travels farthest and fastest travels alone. That all may be true except perhaps the last one, Roxanne my intrepid companion way more consecutive years than my friend remained a friend. What brought this to mind that 4th of July after ZOZO, as I swung gently under the springs of the porch swing as the eruptions diminished and ghosted further away, was the factual realization a milestone had been reached and maybe things were in progressive motion again.
That Trump thing that cost me my mind the past five years actually seemed to be eventually resolving itself revealing unassailable truths and maybe multiple indictments. The warp speed invention of covid-19 vaccines saved years of ZOZOs. The Great Mandala, the Wheel of Life was still rolling.
Roxanne turned the TV off after the news and came out to the porch to smooch me good night, she was going up to bed. Full day, she said. I said was going to wait out the firecrackers and refill my Irish coffee.
Like people who don’t agree when it’s too early in the morning to mow their lawns, some stubborn fireworks lighters don’t observe a curfew when it’s too late to keep blowing up the town. This particular 4th of July fell on a Sunday, so the next day Monday meant back to work for most people, including I would think the fireworks fanatics — fireworks last I looked weren’t cheap so people must be working jobs to afford them, obviously day shifts or else they would be back on the job already that night, right?
Around eleven the pace slackened again and the proximity seemed to recede away, retreat. The silences between straggling retorts bode peace at longer intervals, but the cease fire broke eventually and the silences weren’t really silences at all but echoes of white noise. The air smelled faintly of gunpowder. And tobacco. Reefer. Rubber? Few cars, some appearing to be lost, uncertain which way to turn at the corner. Towards midnight, coffee mug down to the last swig, the pops and bangs erupted like the last embers of a camp fire. Better that image than a dumpster fire, I thought. No barking dogs — where were all the hysterical howling hounds I read about? Pop. Boom boom. Crackle. Somewhere out there somebody lit off a whole pack of Black Cats, rat-a-tat-a-tatt. After midnight there was still somebody out there holding out to be the last one.
Satisfied most of the damage done I gave in and locked up the house, brushed my teeth and went to bed, where Roxanne had the windows closed and the air conditioner going, sleeping oblivious to a world reciprocally oblivious to us.
Chapter 14
The day we picked to take Neko to the aqua park was a perfect July summer day. I’ve read of a cerulean sky but could never picture what a shade of blue deeper than azure looked like until that day. Temp in the 80 degrees F. Light breeze. Midweek or no, it seemed every sane person on the West End would bring their children to the aqua park that day.
We picked up Neko first then Tess and Erin at Tess’s house, where Erin spent a sleepover. With Neko’s space capsule car seat the two thirteen year olds barely fit in the two remaining seat belts of the back seat. Here’s little Neko in her gargantuan protective gear and two young adolescents approaching their adult sizes sharing space in a car clearly purchased eight years past with no clear foresight for probable passengers — we might as well have bought a sports car. A back seat for passengers five, six, eight, nine years old maybe, but this 2013 Altima now fit badly like buying the kids clothes for their birthdays and Christmas two or three sizes too small — my gosh you’ve grown. In 2013 the Altima seemed like a big sedan. Maybe it was that we bought it while Clara and Tess lived in Switzerland. Even in Switzerland they drove a Skoda with more interior capacity than our Altima. Even so, nobody complained. Erin sat in the middle next to Neko and Tess sat by the window, everybody content and buckled in. The aqua park was about ten minutes from Michel and Sid’s, not far from the kids’ gymnastics club. The parking lot was not full but that was from some cars already leaving from the day.
As anticipated the facility was crowded but they sold us tickets and allowed us admission and we found space where we could spread our towels and leave our bags on a pair of lounge chairs on the concrete deck for the five of us to call home base. First priority pattying ourselves with sunscreen, especially Neko, the palest among us. Second an understanding nobody goes off by themselves, alone, including me and Grandma. (Okay, I was somewhat exempt because I was the only male in case I had to go to the bathroom, a point brought up by Erin.) The elder girls took to Neko the moment they got in the car and didn’t hesitate to follow her into the wading pool to splash around and get soaked. Erin took to Neko like a big sister. Tess didn’t assert seniority, just played along.
Neko and Erin barely knew each other and Neko found it strange Erin and Tess were cousins but she and Erin were not, but she and Tess were. The separation among families due to pandemic restrictions and cautionary restraints meant limited exposure to Clara and Tess until Colorado but hardly any activities involving Erin, especially since Vincent and Amelie didn’t attend the Kysylyczyn Apple Valley 4th of July. Roxanne and I observed how Neko made an instant new best friend and made mental notes to bring Neko with us to visit Norb and Gloria’s pool so Neko could meet up with her cousins and cousins’ cousin more often this summer. She being an only child doing a year-plus of ZOZO quarantine, still too young to vaccinate, I wondered if she could wander off the social spectrum of kids who didn’t know how to behave among other kids. Being around older kids was better than no kids at all. And her day care pre-preschool had just resumed. In this vast water pool Neko meandered further afield towards the deeper end where she found herself up to her chin and we called to her to turn back and stay amid kids her own size. Erin and Tess shepherded her back within our reach.
When Tess and Erin took time out to scale the water slides to carom and careen into the deep end, Neko naturally wanted to follow. She protested when we called her back the first time they left her behind but she turned meek and didn’t whine when she observed how high up even the low slides commenced and realized they all ended in deep water, nobody would be able to catch her and she knew she couldn’t swim. When the girls played with her they studied the basics, holding her breath and dunking herself under water. Paddling and kicking. We regretted not packing the water wings. Tess and Erin tried to show her how to get along without them in water up to her chin, and for deeper water she had Grandma and me. Erin had a lot of daredevil qualities but none of these slides posed enough danger to scare off cautious Tess and in a few rides they had mastered the thrills and come back to their fond challenge teaching Neko to swim under water in the shallows.
I envied the kids riding the slides and debated in my head rationales for getting in line on the staircase and not getting up there for at least one ride. There was no sign anywhere limiting the age of water sliders — I bought an adult admission to the facility like everybody. Down in Ixtapa I regularly took a ride on the corkscrew waterslide at the Krystal pool just to make use of a facility. I could claim as much at the aqua park, but I didn’t feel like standing out as the oldest man in line. Before the Krystal installed the waterslide of the monkey pirate there used to be a waterfall over the deep end of the pool which kids were allowed to jump off, so I tried it once and the security guard reprimanded me, said solo ninos, to which I replied, soy un nino, which made the security guy laugh and I never disobeyed again, though no such admonition came with the waterslide of the pirate monkey. Like these aqua park quasi-olympic style slides were open to anybody who joined the queue lines and climbed the stairs, I’d been to Wisconsin Dells and stood in line to ride some of the scariest waterslides available on the planet, so the allure to ride this local aqua park was a challenge to nostalgia. Here I had a salvavida mission in my role watching over Neko and Tess and Erin. Roxanne. And hundreds of other peoples’ kids and their mommies. A duty. The old Catcher in the Rye never retires, ever on the lookout for an opportunity to save some unwitting innocent from slipping off a grassy cliff. I decided my role of pleasure this day was not to participate as a kid or try to infiltrate the queue among the middle school teenagers and their K-8 wannabees to catch the latest lingo. More interested I was in observing how much younger and younger the moms of elementary and preschool kids kept getting, women in their thirties now approaching jailbait. Puberty was happening younger and younger. I needed to remind myself not to stare before Roxanne might remind me. My worst chill at being me is not innocently fitting the profile of a Dirty Old Man at girls gymnastics meets, but here even the moms and older sisters wore swimsuits. Yes, Grandma and I were deputy lifeguards of the milieu, and though there were patterns in how people grouped themselves, young, old, younger young and middle older, still attempting social distance, it was quite a crowd under the sun that day.
We took a break for lunch at the commissary. Hot dogs for me, Roxanne, Neko and Erin, and a cheesy quesadilla for Tess.
Our kids looked absolutely cute playing together and we wished we could have taken pictures, but photography was forbidden on the premises to protect the privacy of one and all. No personal souvenirs of that cerulean day, just vivid memories. As time progressed Erin and Tess turned on Neko in a loose form of hazing, initiation to horseplay, undermining her legs swimming under water dolphin style to sink her until she ran away under the fountain spouts on the splash pad to avoid persecution, laughing at getting such attention from the big girls. They taught her to dogpaddle. We applauded her Kitty Hawk incremental progress. “Go Neko,” cried Tess and Erin. “Dogpaddle to freedom! Dogpaddle to liberty! Then back at it again, imitating their under-the-legs attacks that defied retaliation until Neko found her place as the Monkey in the Middle. Roxanne eventually issued the ten minute warning, giving Tess and Erin notice in case they wanted some big kid time and serving as fair warning to the one who cared the least about time.
Toweling off, collecting our sandals and so on I thanked Erin for coming along on the outing and being so nice to Neko. She shrugged drying her hair. I didn’t mean to imply she might be mean because I knew her better, so I explained that she and I had an undefined relationship and I didn’t know how to appropriately show appreciation for everyday kindness. She said, I like to think of you as my third grandpa. To me that was the best thing she could have ever said. I was the very definition of the word chuffed.
I admired the unfailing loyalty between Tess and Erin. Born only months apart, theirs was a friendship of destiny. They played together as infants, toddlers. Not even yet five, separation when Tess moved to Switzerland almost broke the kids’ hearts. Michel bought them a pair of friendship necklaces, each with half a heart the mirror image of the other as though meant to be joined at their future reunion. Tess cherished that necklace. The four years Tess’s family were away she kept it safe. Each December they flew home for Christmas and they stayed with Gloria and Norb and the girls arranged series of sleepovers. When Tess was in Europe they arranged their family time to Skype over the internet. They wrote each other letters. It turned out to be only four years. Back in the Twin Cities together again they put their hearts together and picked up wherever they left off without skipping a beat.
In the five years back Erin infiltrated Michel and Sid’s family to the extent I was surprised she didn’t ride along with them to Colorado. Even though Erin’s family lived in Bloomington it didn’t pose a problem commuting between their households, ideally only fifteen minutes apart. Natasha Sid’s middle sister and Michel were close friends so there was always a reason to collude. Erin and Tess played their first two years of soccer on the same team in a Minneapolis city park board league. When Michel and Sid chose to belong to the Hennepin Methodist congregation Erin, by virtue of frequent sleepovers ended up accompanying the Kysylyczyns to services on Sundays frequently enough to join Tess and Clara in the youth choir, at Sunday instruction, join Tess in the bell choir, volunteer under Michel for the Halloween Trunk or Treat, the Christmas basic necessities drive Under the Tree, and eventually got baptized along with Tess, Clara and Michel. If not for the pandemic Erin and Tess would be enrolled in Methodist Confirmation already, though they were tentatively enrolled for the fall (if Hennepin would recruit a youth pastor) and poised to resume choir and Sunday school as soon as the church resumed routine services.
As for sports, Tess left competitive soccer after about two seasons but Erin showed a flair for the game and switched to a league in the famed BAA, the Bloomington Athletic Association, which was renown for quality youth sports from back when I was a kid playing in nearby Richfield. Erin’s mom Natasha was all-conference soccer in high school and still played in an adult club league, so if anything Erin and her brother Nate did not lack basic comprehension of the game and inherited Kysylyczyn athletic ability — besides Natasha, Valeria made all-conference before her and one of her sons was a freshman varsity player, Sid played both soccer and basketball, and Norb himself who grew up in Morocco was a soccer player of some skill, so people say.
I enjoyed those early evening park board matches down at Pearl Park. Tess was a fearless defender. Erin was fast, quick and aggressive. She wore glasses too, which made her look like a little professor dribbling the ball. I hadn’t seen Erin play since she switched to the BAA before the pandemic, but according to Norb and Sid and proud Natasha she was a team leader and showed some skills in a competitive league. Made me want to see her play yet that season. I remembered those old park board matches when afterwards Tess and Erin would guide me to the ice cream truck along Portland Ave to buy a round of Dreamsicles, win or lose.
I have to say I used to be skeptical of Erin and wondered if she took advantage of Tess’s affection. She seemed arrogant for such a little girl, though not disrespectful. I recognized it as traits of both her parents, both assertive and up front. Erin struck me as a wise-ass. A little bossy in an almost passive aggressive way (very Minnesotan) and very intelligent, good grades in all the STEM subjects. Roxanne credits her for being the first one to clearly explain what it means to be non-binary gender. The more frequently she turned up with Tess the better I got to know her and got used to her manipulations. One time we spent a day at Mall of America and rode the rides at the Nickelodeon Universe amusement park at the core of the mall, Roxanne, Clara, Erin, Tess and I. All but Roxanne favored wild rides. I accompanied the kids as if on a dare. To me these Nickelodeon rides paled to thrill rides I’ve endured at any age of my life hanging around midways, carnivals and theme parks, so it came to be an exercise of the three girls to prove their moxie, while Roxanne proudly declined to ride almost everything beyond toddler level except the log mill ride. One memorable trip to MOA Erin siderailed me on the walk between the spinning roller coaster and the flying turtle shells and conned me into buying her a serving of Dippin’ Dots, a novelty ice cream treat like swollen frozen vanilla BBs with chocolate shells. Nobody else wanted any, but I said, sure. She was my guest. She offered me some and I wasn’t impressed with the texture or flavors. She didn’t finish them. She ended up sitting in front of me on the log mill ride and on the final plunge down the skids I saw her duck backwards to let me get splashed, but I saw it coming and adjusted to stay mostly dry. Obviously the kid had been on the ride before. Then again Roxanne had been on the ride half a dozen times and she still screamed for the picture at the final plunge.
Yes, a merry lot we are, I thought, packing up camp at the aqua park and heading back to the car. Neko was high over the moon with her cousin and cousin’s cousin. It made sense to drop Tess and Erin off first but Neko didn’t want them to go, and if they did she wanted to go in the house with them. She wanted them to ride to her house. Erin explained she had to get picked up by her mom soon to go to her doctor appointment. Tess had gymnastics. They promised to all get together soon. All the hugging and glad happy farewell hrdly placated the little one and it was good she didn’t have the dexterity to unbuckle herself from her carseat. Nonetheless she couldn’t keep awake on the ride home to spend the rest of the working afternoon at our house.
On the way I asked Roxanne if there was anything new known about Erin, who was diagnosed a few years ago with childhood epilepsy. Her appointment that day was with her neurologist. Roxanne said she had not heard anything new. Our usual sources were Michel, Clara and Tess. We never addressed it directly with Erin, or her parents Isaac and Natasha. It wasn’t a covert subject, it was more a respect for privacy — hey how’s your epilepsy goin’? — from third party in-laws. If they ever chose to talk to me about it I would listen and learn, but they didn’t. Gloria might offer an observation based on her daughter and Erin herself, but I knew very little about Erin’s diagnosis or condition first hand. They said she started spacing out, having brief private moments of disconnection. Not long. Not often. I never witnessed one. No seizures in all those Nickelodeon thrill rides at MOA. Soccer matches. Punking around at Gloria and Norb’s pool. Matinee movies. For that nobody in the family played it up, and for Erin’s sake saved her from feeling stalked by gawkers. She apparently was getting diagnostic treatment and medication sufficient to live as if unaffected.
The experience had one tangible effect. Erin used to want to be a doctor but lately told people she wants to be a neurologist, which said to me she was learning a lot of things about her brain evoking more curiosity about brains. The brain. I decided to nickname her The Brain, even though it wasn’t yet appropriate to say it out loud.
It could be something to hold over her head for being a wise-ass.
It was sweet, the way Erin treated Neko, I remarked to Roxanne. Made a friend for life, she replied. She’s one of the club, Clara, Tess, Erin and Neko. Too bad they’re so much older. More like aunties than cousins. Godmothers, I said.
Chapter 14
Roxanne read it in Facebook. John McCormick, my quasi-stepgrandfather married to my dad’s mother, Grandma Mary, passed away. The posting came from one of my cousins, a son of one of my uncles who were my father’s half brothers by way of John McCormick and Grandma Mary. John was 97.
I put the word out via text to most of my siblings. To some of them he was the only grandpa figure in their lives. The grapevine came to life with condolences and plans to get to the funeral in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Kerry made it clear she was going, even if she were to drive alone. Oh no, said Murray, she would drive. Heather? Maybe not — she hardly knew the guy. Kevin was all in except he couldn’t leave for Fort Wayne until after work — his company didn’t allow bereavement for step-grandparents. Roxanne and I were prepared to go in our Altima. With Heather disinclined and Kevin delayed, we volunteered to fill Murray’s back seat and leave for Indiana in the morning in her Toyota RAV4.
So I called my Uncle Denis. He was a sobbing mess for a minute. He and his dad had only the other night gone to a baseball game. He was playing pool there at the rec center at the living center and suddenly he collapsed. On his face. Had to go in the hospital. They needed to put him on a breathing tube. Somehow he choked on it. Damage done to his face from the fall. The fall was some kind of stroke. I told him a bunch of us Kellys would be in Fort Wayne for the funeral.
That made him sob again. That means so much to me, he said as if he was friendless in this world, which he was far from. I told him I would call him when we reached Fort Wayne tomorrow.
Uncle Denis and I were born the same year, he nine months older. He’s the younger of Grandma Mary and John’s two sons. Denis’ brother Glenn is three years older. My dad was somewhere around seventeen years older than Glenn. Grandma Mary was about fifteen years older than John McCormick.
For a complicated family history, this serves as a start. Denis and I grew up together even though I only saw him about two weeks every year. The McCormicks lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana but they would come to Minnesota in their silver bullet Airstream trailer in August every summer. A few times I was sent down to Fort Wayne for a week or two in late July when I was old enough to fly there on an airliner. When he was in Minnesota Denis followed me around the neighborhood and I introduced him around as my Uncle Denis, which my friends found hilariously odd — moreover when they learned he spelled it with one N they rhymed it with penis (behind his back of course) — a lot of them had cousins around their age but nobody heard of an uncle that young. Plus his last name wasn’t Sturgis, if he was really my dad’s brother. And weirdest of all Denis, and his whole family, including Grandma Mary, called me Mike — in front of everybody.
John called me Mike. He and Grandma Mary hoped I would be a good influence on him to compensate for the predatory teasing he got growing up behind Glenn. With me he didn’t have to be on guard for taunts and sarcasm and there were times I felt sorry for Denis enduring a big brother so nasty. Taught me an enduring lesson on being a brother to my own siblings. Denis resented Glenn but didn’t take it out on anybody else. Except maybe his parents, but not for long. John and Grandma Mary somehow kept close to their boys despite the aggravation of the sibling rivalry. In the end hearing John and Denis just attended a baseball game together just about said it all.
Their father-son relationship endured deep into their lives in ways foreign to me. If I could have been close to my dad, from childhood and on to living with him in high school, we never got there. The last twenty years of his life we barely spoke by phone until the last six months of his life when he crashed at my house until he crashed at Aunt Winnie’s old folks apartment up in Brooklyn Center, where I tried to go see him once a week but mostly played Cat’s Cradle, bought time with reasons and excuses having to do with time management, mine, work, kids — Brooklyn Center was way up across town — all true. The guy was checked out of my life twenty-some years and suddenly needs bus fare from Miami. I raised the money. It turned out once he came back to Minneapolis I wasn’t all that glad to see him, or interested in where he had been or his future plans. He died that winter of a violent gastrointestinal eruption knocking down a bottle of Jim Beam with his aunt, Grandma Mary’s sister Winnifred, herself in her 80s then, and that was thirty one years ago. That whole time Uncle Denis and his dad John McCormick, barely five years older than my dad, spent time together, went fishing and to baseball games and entertained themselves with grandkids — both Denis and Glenn’s.
As sister of mine Heather put it when weighing whether to attend our dad’s pot luck funeral or commemorative meeting, I really didn’t know him that well. Or maybe I knew him well, just not that often. Not that much.
My nine year old son wept and lamented, What a waste.
John McCormick wasted nothing. Not his life, and as the song goes not the afterlife either. His passing was not a shock — the guy was 97. He came around Minnesota celebrating his 95th year. The summer before ZOZO Uncle Denis drove him on a circle tour from Fort Wayne around Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, down through Duluth and the towns where he grew up along the western Wisconsin border, down towards Princeton where Aunt Winnie and Uncle Lint had a cabin, and to Minneapolis to spy around the old town and get together with the Kelly kids one last time.
Along with celebrating his 95th, John had recently connected with long lost Wisconsin relatives through joining up with one of the DNA ancestry banks. His own father was adopted and never knew his birth parents, but through this late in life connection through the DNA bank he met up with other descendants of his father’s family at a reunion near Grantsburg, Wisconsin, not far across the Minnesota border where his father and he grew up. When he and Denis landed in the Twin Cities that summer in Uncle Denis’ Mercedes RV John was high on coming from that reunion and spoke of it with reverence and awe that DNA could trace people that well and enable them to form a network, and that all his newfound kinfolk were so gracious and treated him as the guest of honor. As did the Kellys, who had absolutely no blood kinship with him whatsoever but whose lives were affected by him by way of Grandma Mary.
For my siblings John was the only grandfather figure they ever knew. Even after our parents broke up John and Grandma Mary, even after Denis and Glenn were grown and no longer traveled with their parents, drove John’s green Olds 88 pulling their silver bullet Airstream camper up to Minnesota and parked it at the KOA up in Rogers (well north of Brooklyn Center) and host a Sunday picnic for us Kelly’s. For some crazy reason Grandma Mary and John had a strong affection for our mother and vice versa, so when Grandma and John came around it was a special occasion and everyone had to be there. When Grandma Mary got sick and no longer visited, they were missed.
After Grandma Mary died, sisters Kerry and Murray, who called him Grandpa, kept us in touch with John. And Uncle Denis, would periodically spend a visit to the Twin Cities to visit me and Roxanne, get together with Molly and her kids, Kerry and hers, Murray and her son, and bring the good will back and forth with John, who corresponded by email with an AOL account, always sent a Currier and Ives Christmas card and eventually went on Facebook. John accompanied Denis to Minnesota a few times. They would fish and drive around the old places, like Winnie and Lint’s cabin, which was obliterated and the lake property developed into condos. And the Kelly’s would hold a family soup night in Grandpa John’s honor, just like his final visit his 95th year at Kevin’s house.
So it was a big deal when we spread the word he died. Leenie in Colorado checked into air fare to Fort Wayne and couldn’t afford to go to the funeral, understandably. Roxanne looked into air fare and was appalled. Sean down in Florida determined the same thing. They sent condolences. Other sisters Bernadette and Nelly didn’t care. Kevin, Murray and Kerry were deeply moved and rolled out the plan to hit the road first thing in the morning for Fort Wayne, 568 miles and nine hours away. Kevin and his sweetheart Oleana would drive independently in her BMW, leaving later around noon when he could get off work. Roxanne booked a suite at a Fort Wayne hotel near the mortuary and cemetery for us and Murray and Kerry, passed the info to Kevin and told him to book his own room, so he did at the same hotel. I texted Uncle Denis our plan and extended our siblings’ feelings.
In the mix I texted Michel and Vincent the sad news and our travel plans. Vincent FaceTimed back and wished us safe travels and to give his best sorry to Uncle Denis. Michel texted back sorry for the loss. She cautioned us to take covid precautions, Indiana being a red state. She also called her mom and said as much the same. Both wanted to hear from us when we got back.
Murray picked us up around 6:30 in the morning, a Wednesday. Kerry rode shotgun. The plan was to reach Fort Wayne by mid-afternoon, check into the hotel and find out what Uncle Denis would like to do for dinner. Thursday was the funeral. Friday we would go home.
Saturday I planned to take advantage of a free document destruction shredding event sponsored by our Medicare provider. Ironic or not I intended to use this event to shred a couple boxes of documents related to my mother’s estate, such as financial statements and tax returns dating back the last ten years of her life. Fifteen years had passed since she died, fourteen since we settled her estate. I was her executor. The statute of limitations passed, and nobody challenged how it was executed — everything split ten ways. I hung on to the docs a little longer than required by law in case somebody like Kevin or Nelly (the babies) came up with an after-hours beef — after seven years they had no legal recourse but I still wanted to be prepared to defend any insinuations. Nothing happened. I looked forward to unloading mom’s files, getting them out of my house, no nostalgia or sentimentality, gone with the wind. I actually kept a file of her essentials — things her descendants might be curious about later on — and some souvenirs like her final passport, but I looked forward to obliterating the boxes of minutiae so much I wrote it bold on the calendar a couple of months in advance so I wouldn’t forget: July 24.
The sun in our eyes we headed east on I94 towards St Paul ahead of rush hour, gunning for Wisconsin and aiming to get through Chicago before the afternoon drive. All four of us wide awake. We were ready for a full day’s work. We were all chatty the first thirty miles getting back in touch after ZOZO terminated our family soup nights, stole Christmas and canceled birthdays and whatnot, leaving us practically a virtual family. Five of us lived in the Twin Cities. The rest of us ten lived scattered places hither and yon around the United States, or Molly, who was deceased. The five of us who lived in Minnesota all had kids living nearby, bunches of cousins including Molly’s two daughters. We were used to congregating, the legacy of a big family originating from our mother who thrived on big gatherings or why else mother ten kids? Murray and Kerry were middle-childs, Kerry elder, and between them my first brother Sean, who lived in Florida, who is seven years younger than me. Our youngest was Kevin, sometimes known as Petey, fifteen years my junior, who lived in the Twin Cities but sometimes acted as an outlier. Kathleen, known as Leenie, the second eldest to me, lived in Colorado Springs and liked to visit Minnesota in the fall, when she could lodge with Heather at Breezy Point with Heather at our mom’s old time share. Those are the hithers. The yons numbered the sisters who stayed so far out of touch they were more than outliers but almost ghosts next to Molly. These were Bernadette, late of Orlando, Florida but rumored to reside in the Appalachians of Virginia, our third eldest, and Nelly, the youngest sister and next youngest to Kevin, who is a known citizen of upstate New York married to a plumbing supply tycoon. The chatter in the car to Fort Wayne started out catching up with the siblings not there, if anything be known.
Kerry and Murray reported Heather had misgivings about skipping Grampa John’s funeral. Roxanne said, why didn’t you call me? She could’ve gone instead of me. No way, said Kerry and Murray, we would rather have you along on a road trip like this. You paid your family dues. You’s our sistah. Heather blew her chance. If she gets on her horse and starts now she might make it there by tomorrow if she rides all night. (This was a reference to Heather as a known equestrian.) Ha ha.
You could’ve called me and I would’ve stayed home, I said, and you could’ve made this a gal-pal-sistahs weekend. Oh no, they said. You’re our senior senior. You’re the fam’s prime connection.
As the terrain rolled off in green knolls of cropland and pastures so too the conversation drolled and lollied with the unpopulated horizon. Lush and green it was clear what the weather radar meant when it showed drought parched eastern Minnesota always losing the soaking rains to western Wisconsin. Where there was corn it looked easily like it would grow high as an elephant’s eye in another month. Cows grazed in the grass. Murray at the wheel picked satellite radio with a Bob Seger Boz Scaggs groove. Kerry was deaf and even with Cochlear implants couldn’t enjoy the music. She announced she was going on radio silence for a while to recharge her batteries. Roxanne brought an ebook on her iPhone in case of down time.
Murray and I ruminated family history from our dad’s side. It didn’t seem fair with Kerry tuned out but we talked about it anyway, and when Kerry figured out what we were saying she tuned back in so she could join. Roxanne recalled a surprising amount of detail for an in-law. And as Murray put it, I was our clan’s senior geezer and expected to be the archives guy having known personally many of the elders mentioned in the narrative.
We began with Grandma Mary and Aunt Winnie as sisters who grew up on a farm in Stewartville, Minnesota in the early decades of the 20th Century. They often said Betsy and Tacy had nothing on them. We could picture them as vivid personalities in a tiny town world. Both of them told me their best influence besides their mother was Grandma Sturgis, our dad’s grandma, who they described as a genteel, educated woman of sound sense and intelligence who encouraged them to read to expand their world. They said she was herself a descendant of the Rutledge who signed the American Declaration of Independence, Edward, a slaver of South Carolina and known reluctant revolutionary patriot, nobody any of us bragged about, almost as bad as being related to John C Calhoun. I never knew this Grandma Sturgis but I respected the word of Grandma Mary that someone on the Sturgis side of the family passed on an appreciation of culture (neither Grandma or Winnie ever accused Grandma Sturgis of racism) and literature. Both sisters, who remained best friends their entire lives, avidly read books — always had a book going — until their eyesight dimmed, and even then they fought hard with magnifiers upon big print books to the very end, literally.
Mary and Winnie Stoner lived on the farm kitty corner across the county road from the Sturgis family farm. Grandpa and Grandma Sturgis had five sons, the third or fourth being Grandpa George, our dad’s father. As Murray put it, we’ll never know what kind of romance drew George Sturgis and Mary Stoner together during the Great Depression. We knew from Grandma and Winnie the Depression wiped out their farm and they had to move to town. Nobody seemed to vouch much for Grandpa Stoner, Mary and Winnie’s dad. We forget his first name. He lost the family farm, a great disgrace. As a younger man he showed great promise as an adventurer in the upper regions of Idaho and the Rocky Mountains. Somewhere up in Alberta, Canada he met Mary and Winnie’s mother, Mary Muller, a seamstress migrant to Canada from Iceland, who became Grandma Stoner who moved her small children to southern Minnesota to take over her husband’s family farm. I remember Grandma Stoner because she lived to 97. Nobody seemed to commemorate the passing of her husband and I’m certain I never met him. After he lost the farm — as if a bet at a poker game with the bank — he fades out of the story when the family moves to town in Stewartville. There are whispers of drunkenness. Presto, yours truly comes along when Grandma Stoner is a widowed old lady in her 80s living with Aunt Winnie and Uncle Lint knitting all us kids scarves and mittens.
The Depression pushed Mary and Winnie to the Twin Cities. They got good jobs with Dayton’s and Young Quinlan. Sounds like George Sturgis followed Mary Stoner up to Minneapolis. There was talk of good times defying Prohibition with Grandpa George’s bathtub gin. Enter Lynden Ware, good buddy to George Surgis and squire to Aunt Winnie — Uncle Lint. Somewhere along the way Mary Stoner and George Sturgis got married, and so did Winnie and Lint. Grandma Mary and Grandpa George begat Richard George Sturgis, our dad. They raise him in south Minneapolis.
Fast-forward to World War II. Grandpa George and Uncle Lint go to war. They get back. Somewhere in there Grandma Mary falls out of love and divorced Grandpa George. Somewhere in there she meets and falls in love with young John McCormick after the war. Our dad was a teenager. Grandma Mary married John. Grandpa George remarried too and for a while our dad lived with his father. According to our mother and Aunt Winnie the new stepmother was not kind to him.
John McCormick and Grandma Mary started a business in Duluth selling accordions and John taught kids to play. Glenn was born in Duluth, and eventually later Denis. Around this time our mother entered our dad’s life at Minneapolis Washburn High School. The story goes Dick got farmed out to Stewartville every summer to work at the family farm, which was still run by his uncles. Our mom Colleen had a car and she would drive down to Stewartville to liberate our dad. In March, 1950 they eloped to Duluth. Married at the courthouse on St Patrick’s Day. Dick was 18, Colleen 16. Grandma Mary and John signed off on their marriage license application, somewhat illegally with regard to our mom. John explained years later he was somewhat against it but the Korean war was heating up and nobody knew if Dick might have to go and maybe not come back.
The forgery or whatever would have been just grounds for annulment, but nobody ever challenged it, not even Grandpa Kelly, an attorney, who refused to stop his daughter and allegedly said to Colleen, you made your bed so go lie in it. Dad never got called to Korea. They did move to Duluth after I was born, lived there about a year in proximity to Grandma Mary and John, Glenn and Denis until John closed the Duluth accordion studio and discovered Fort Wayne on his way to scout Pittsburgh as a medium-sized city like Duluth used-to-be to reopen the accordion business. After World War II Duluth went into a decline and John and Mary left town for Fort Wayne, Indiana based on their careful analysis of Fort Wayne’s prospects for their kind of business. They proved to be right because they enjoyed more than a generation of success. Our parents also left Duluth to move back to the Twin Cities, where our dad sold cars and they had nine more kids, we lived in a nice suburb and after all that they broke up.
John McCormick expressed no remorse for his role in our parents’ elopement. In his view they had as much potential for happiness as anybody. He and Grandma Mary were married over forty years. He lived another thirty odd years after Grandma Mary died. No man could be described as more constant. His disposition always stoically positive — seeing things in the best light given the circumstances. I saw him lose his temper a few times, always provoked by quarrels between his sons. Fortunately the guys didn’t like it when their dad got pissed at them, and Grandma Mary backed him up every time. (Her patience was thinner than John’s.) Mostly John was an easy going serious man, soft spoken who meant what he said and said just enough to be understood. Not a gabby guy, he was always genial, and if he had a dry way of telling a joke his punchlines were funny. For a guy from an older generation. The age difference between him and Grandma Mary didn’t show because John acted older than his age. Or should I say more mature. It wasn’t that Grandma Mary was some kind of cougar hottie, she always struck me as looking like she should be a spinster physics professor — a simile I can’t explain except coming from an era when smart professional women were expected to be plain and unsexy. John matched her in conservative dress, white shirt, suit and tie for work and canvas slacks and chambray at leisure.
My sisters referred to him as Grandpa John. Even if I knew him historically longer, they may have known him better, especially Kerry and Murray, who lived with him in Fort Wayne about a month when they were teenagers. When I was young my sisters and I were discouraged from even referring to him as our step-grandpa. It was explained he felt too young to be a grandpa. I recall the folks checked around for Uncle John but that didn’t catch on — not with Uncle Denis and Uncle Glenn. Somewhere around Molly and Kerry he had a change of heart and allowed himself to be called Grandpa John, around the time Glenn and eventually Denis begat his very own grandchildren. I never could revert to thinking of him as my grandpa, even as I now think of him as one of the best male role models of my life. To me he was Grandma Mary’s Prince Philip, consort but not the king.
Grandpa George never materialized as a grandpa figure in my or any of my siblings’ lives. I can remember meeting him twice: once at his garage at the alley behind his and his wife’s house in south Minneapolis, and once more at his work at the state highway department building in St Paul where he worked, both times accompanying my dad when I was very young, four to six. Mom always told us Grandpa Sturgis didn’t like children, which neither Grandma Mary nor Aunt Winnie contradicted. Our dad never defended his dad’s absence but implied he stayed away at the behest of Colleen, as if our mom was a witch and threatened him with a spell.
John McCormick passing made me philosophize about being a grandpa and it came to me I had no true grandfather of my own to look for example. To embrace John as grandpa at this late hour meant retrograding my whole life to rewire my memory to include him as more than Grandma Mary’s husband, with all due respect, and Glenn and Denis’ dad. It meant accepting a non-blood relative as shaping my life ungenetically, and now that John McCormick’s life was complete it seemed permissible to borrow him back from his own archives to recognize what a good influence he was on me, but I just couldn’t call him my grandpa. He said so, when I was little, and I can’t get past his word.
Grandpa Kelly was my one true grandpa, but he didn’t last long. Died of a heart attack when I was almost eight. He was 59.
My memory of him is vivid, almost mythological. At his house I sat on his lap watching TV and eating popcorn from a bowl. One at a time, he’d say. One at a time.
The first years of my life, until I started school, I was called by my middle name, Michael. Grandpa Kelly nicknamed me Michaelangelo. He also called me Michael Faraday. My mom explained Michelangelo was a great artist, but she was less sure of Michael Faraday. She assumed he was a famous attorney. Grandpa Kelly was an attorney and my mother assumed most great men admired by her father were also attorneys, if not great artists.
Grandpa Kelly paid attention to me. He let me ride shotgun with him up the lake on weekends when he ran errands to Crosby and Nisswa in his blue Buick and later his black Cadillac, before bucket seats. The Cadillac had leather seats. He wore a straw Panama hat up the lake, a shirt with palm trees always with a pocket for his hearing aid, and faded dungarees cinched with a rope belt. He called his leather shoes huaraches — probably the first Spanish word I ever learned.
My mom would dispute this despite candid photos to back me up but he was getting jowly and round in the tummy, white haired and balding. True he had twinkling blue eyes and handsome, wise smile. He enjoyed whiskey high balls, cigars and an occasional briar pipe. And blueberry pie a la mode. That he was an accomplished attorney and shrewd estate builder came clear to me years after his passing. When I knew him he was my grandpa, an unfailing kind and generous man everybody loved. What I loved about him most was that he never talked down to me. He always talked to me like I was a real person, not a baby, not a little kid, not a subject or some poor little fool.
And try as I might I didn’t understand half of what he told me. Riding shotgun with him on a boat ride from bay to bay on Bay Lake in his big wooden speedboat with the inboard engine he taught me how determine the channel for navigating on water. He also tried to teach me how and why to read a barometer and I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. He tried to teach me how to read a roadmap and eventually I caught on that the lines were roads seen from the sky and the dots were towns. He would riff with the lyrics yo that old poem: Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn / Apple seed and apple thorn / Wire, briar, limber lock / How many geese are in a flock? And he would stop there, look to me for an answer, and I would ponder for the answer. He looked like he expected an answer — the right answer — so I would guess. Twenty one? Thirteen? He would never tell me.
He liked to sing. Ain’t gonna rain no more no more, it ain’t gonna rain no more. How in the world can the old folks tell it ain’t gonna rain no more … might have been his favorite song — my mom wouldn’t let me sing it and gave her dad a hard time for teaching it to me because it used the word ain’t and he should know better than to teach me bad English. A more preferred song he liked went, East side West side, all around the town / the tots played ring-around-rosie / London bridge is falling down / Boys and girls together / me and Mamie O’Rourke / tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York. And then there was Dan Tucker: Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man / He washed his face in a frying pan / He combed his hair with a wagon wheel / Died of a toothache in his heel … There’s his blue eyes twinkling. For a while I got Dan Tucker mixed up with Solomon Grundy, another luckless soul: Solomon Grundy was born on a Monday, Christened on Tuesday, Married on Wednesday, Got sick on Thursday, Got worse on Friday, Died on Saturday, Buried on Sunday, And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.
(Which my mom would counter, Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go, Friday’s child is loving and giving, Saturday’s child works hard for a living, and the child born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe, good and gay — as if to say, take that Dan Tucker and Solomon Grundy.)
I guess Grandpa Kelly was not a hipster but had a kind of 19th Century taste. He probably never knew who Elvis or Ricky Nelson were. Not exactly a rock and roller like his teenage daughters, my mom’s youngest sisters, early adopters of the 45 rpm record. They say he used his hearing aids to tune out rabble and static and acrimonious crosstalk from his life. I never noticed. If anybody lived a serene life it would seem to be Donald J Kelly. I was a little kid, so what could I know about serenity? All I can say is whenever I was with him I never felt anxious. He was the most calming person I can remember. He could calm my mother. People said he was a great lawyer and he won a lot of arguments in court. He wrote elegant contracts and polished documents. Sorry I didn’t appreciate him enough in his lifetime, my interest in him at the time childishly selfish, I cherished him because he conveyed to me unconditional assurance that one day I would figure out just how many geese are in a flock. He promised me when I was old enough he would take me to New York and we would go to a Yankees game. The idea of going to New York City with my Grandpa Kelly used to make me imagine the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty and it seemed cool to get to see these things presented by Grandpa Kelly, who went to New York for his work being a lawyer. It never happened and the idea never matured. His sudden death and disappearance from everybody’s lives was an emotional hurricane on top of a volcano, and I got in line like everybody else to mourn and feel bad he was gone and wouldn’t be there to calm them, in my case make me feel unhassled and free by his side.
So it seems mythical now. Maybe I’m projecting backwards from the grandfather I’ve become to the grandfathers I never had. I make stuff up as I go along. No, I keep evaluating what I know and contemplating the reevaluations to try to be the mythical grandfather. Would I want to have such a profound effect on Clara, Tess and Neko as I want to take away from John McCormick and Grandpa Kelly?
All I can say about Grandpa Kelly is that I felt secure in his presence in a way I searched for to feel about myself the rest of my life. When it came upon me I didn’t even know. If there is to be a legacy to my grandchildren then make it serenity.
I’m not beset by fighting demons. Demons don’t challenge me. They know they cannot defeat me. My struggle is with angels. Goodness torments me.
In truth I didn’t know Grandpa Kelly very well at all. He was a busy man. Traveled to New York on business. Tried cases. Drew up mergers. Owned properties (i.e. rental buildings). And any time I spent with him was lucky. Coincidental. What it ended up were deep impressions of somebody who was nice to me every time. Somebody who took me seriously. Somebody who cared if I paid attention. So happens he was my maternal grandfather. Losing him was like a dress rehearsal for losing JFK.
Losing Camelot. The unraveling of my family after Grandpa Kelly died resembled a funny dynastic downfall of epic Liz Taylor Richard Burton prestige, sad to say, preserved at least by contract to the strict, unbreakable last will and testament of Donald J Kelly. My family in this unraveling refers strictly to my mom and dad’s brood, who flew off on a different orbit from our mom’s sisters and their mother after Grandpa died. Or ultimately our mother’s brood, as she set herself up as the heroic single mom against her deadbeat ex husband Dick Sturgis. When Mom registered her divorce decree with the court she changed all our surnames to Kelly, which for some reason perturbed her sisters, none of whom were Kelly anymore, more than it perturbed our dad, who may have seen it as a dodge to distance himself from association with Colleen, which her sisters preferred to do too, being also not so chummy with our dad. Alas. It was hard to accept but we were never invited to another Christmas at Grandma Kelly’s the year after the year Grandpa died. There were no more Christmases at the Lake of the Isles residence anyway, they off and moved the family tribe holiday party to the suburbs and didn’t invite Colleen and her kids. They stopped inviting us up the lake to Bay Lake about then.
I recall feeling a sense of indignant boycott of my aunties, an arrogant independence along the defiance of our mother against something she would never challenge — nobody ever guaranteed me a free week or two up at the Bay Lake cabin every summer at high summer the rest of my life. I suppose I’ve been boycotting my aunties maybe sixty years and it’s been as effectual as Cuba boycotting the USA. Mom’s been gone fifteen years and maybe we get a Christmas card from one sister — maybe they onerously rotate year to year and next year it will be Donna’s turn again. My belief is more sinister, that Mom’s sisters between pity and shame for all us kids feel scorn for us and keep their children away from us dysfunctional Kelly cousins at all cost.
By contrast Grandma Mary’s family, the McCormicks never gave up on us. Even after Grandma Mary died — again more than thirty years ago, long enough that neither of my kids and no kids of my siblings remember her — John and Denis stayed in touch. Even Glenn and his second wife Dee Ellen might turn up spontaneously for a quick visit on their way through town or drop a Christmas card some random year, or condolences when Mom died. John loved to fish Minnesota lakes, so sometimes Denis accompanied his dad. When John officially retired from the business after Grandma died, they used to travel with John and Mary’s silver bullet Airstream pulled behind John’s most current Oldsmobile 98, but sometime after the turn of this century they started traveling in Denis’ Mercedes RV, leaving the Airstream moored at a leased site at some puny rural Indiana lake where John could easily commute from Fort Wayne in his Olds. Denis lived in Michigan, where lakes were better, so John would pull his Airstream up to that southern region of Michigan they call Michiana. I’m told Glenn accompanied them one trip to Minnesota about a dozen years ago (I wasn’t always available to connect up every time they came through the Twin Cities) and ended up flying home early, driven mad by fishing and Denis. My kids at least have met John and Denis, and have heard of Grandma Mary and can say they’ve met Aunt Winnie and their grandfather Dick Sturgis.
So much for my children and their paternal ancestors — me. And Uncle Denis. My sisters and brothers. Zero grandfathers, unless you have to count that suntanned hobo who showed up that one summer from Miami and died in December before Christmas. On their mother’s side the kids were graced with Ed and Helen, real classical grandpa and grandma figures. On my side they had Mimi, my mother’s grandma moniker for all 20 of her grandies, as she called them — she herself rejected the name Grand-ma because it sounded old — was not classical but iconoclassical of a grandparent, which if nothing else gives them interesting stories to amuse the emerging generations.
My mother more than amused Grandma Mary and John, Denis and the ambivalent Glenn. One thing Grandma Mary would say, echoed by Aunt Winnie, Colleen always charmed the favor of their mother, Grandma Stoner, my great grandmother who lived to 97. She died when I was fifteen, which means my whole life she was an old lady with bad breath, white braided hair, wrinkled skin, the shakes, a rocking chair and stuttered steps. I remember her as a skeleton in an old lady dress. Aunt Winnie or Uncle Lint would drop her off at our house for an afternoon tea party with Mom from time to time. An added bonus Grandma Stoner was born in Iceland and our neighbor Mrs Maxner was Icelandic and the two would get together and talk. When as a family we might pack into the car and visit Aunt Winnie and Uncle Lint on a Sunday night when Grandma Stoner lived with them, and Grandma Stoner demanded some quiet so she could watch Perry Mason and Alfred Hitchcock, so we wouldn’t stay long. Up through the early days when she lived in the nursing home Mom would sign her out and take her out for lunch. Grandma Stoner not only knitted us kids woolly mittens and scarves she crocheted fancy doilies for Mom to place vases, lamps and statuettes on the tables and credenzas around our house. Those doilies survived and traveled with our mom from house to house more than those vases and knick-knacks.
Mom used to visit Aunt Winnie at her nursing homes too. Probably would have doted on Grandma Mary in her final years, when she and John didn’t Airstream to Minnesota any more, only Fort Wayne was too far away and a hassle to get to. Grandma broke her hip one time and never really recovered. Kidneys failed. Organs failed. She lived in a coma for months. At the time Denis’ wife Jane was expecting their first born, Chris. When Chris was born they brought her to Grandma Mary’s hospital room, and according to John Grandma smiled through her coma respirator. Two days later she wiggled her respirator out in the middle of the night and died. Everybody felt good she somehow knew Denis had a child at last. Neither Mom, Dad who was alive then, nor any of us Kelly grandchildren went to Fort Wayne for Grandma Mary’s funeral. Fort Wayne was too far away and a hassle to get to.
Funny how thirty years ago our excuses seemed so rational. Dad, and Aunt Winnie, were stone broke. Dad was virtually homeless and just started drawing Social Security at 62. Mom lived on a fixed income based on her father’s estate and didn’t want to travel alone, and none of us kids could afford to take off work or leave our kids alone. It was taken for granted Grandma Mary would understand, and for various reasons we presumed John, Glenn and Denis would give us a pass. And they did. Still, for all Grandma Mary meant to us, the guilt of abandoning their family in grieving the passing of someone so monumental to our lives by avoiding the funeral made me feel as if I disowned her. If anybody besides my mother and father should have gone to Grandma Mary’s funeral it should have been me.
It was John who assured me, and Denis too, that my grandma would have appreciated a visit to her when in hospital it would have meant seeing her in a state and condition she would prefer I did not see her, their way of saying they didn’t need our help or our fuss at that point where her demise was inevitable and her fate and reputation solidly sealed, though they appreciated our condolences. They didn’t come to Aunt Winnie’s funeral either. I can only compare their last days to my visit to my great grandma Stoner’s bedside at the old folks home on Xerxes Avenue near Southdale. I had heard she was dying and just happened to be in the neighborhood, hanging out at the super mall, and it was a nice day so I trekked past 66th Street to the Willows Home, where the nurse lady led me to a tiny room curtained in half with Grandma Stoner on her side under a sheet and blanket curved like a landau bar, skeleton with blue white skin and faint gray, not white hair, her eyes wide open and breathing with her mouth.
Mary, this is your godson, said the nurse lady and left us before I thought of correcting her.
I walked up to her bedside and touched her shoulder over the bedclothes and she did not stir. I said a few teenage words knowing we were alone and nobody would spy. I think I just said I wanted to drop by to say thanks for the mittens and I remembered watching Alfred Hitchcock with her at Aunt Winnie’s, and I loved her and I would remember her. Her pupils wavered and she blinked, and she breathed out a steady low wail. She did not stir or even shake. She did not shift her bony weight or offer a hand. After what I considered a respectful interval I said goodbye and hiked back to Southdale. I may have worked a shift as usher at the Cinema I & II that evening.
She died soon after. I didn’t tell anybody about my visit until my mom told me she died. I didn’t want to describe how ashamed I was to find the scene creepy. So dimly lit. The lady so renown in the family so lonely and frail. Wired to a monitor and linked to intravenous drips. Did she know I was there? What did she think? Not on life support or oxygen, eyes open and staring from a rictus face and breathing that sudden wail, so hollow and exhausting, a whisper from deep in her lungs, she clung to life in her fetal position, unwilling to let go of one more minute. Mom congratulated me for visiting her and assured me she probably knew it was me, who I was. Mom had kept current with Grandma Stoner through to the end, meeting up there with Winnie and Lint. She said they would be pleased to know I visited her before she died. I said I wished she wouldn’t tell them, as if I was bragging about it.
Aunt Winnie on the other hand used to go on about how she wished she would just die. She didn’t want to get as old as Grandma Stoner, her mother. Mary her sister was her best friend and she was gone. My father her nephew was gone and it was partly her fault for supplying the booze for his final binge, she might add. Linden, she called her husband, was long gone before he was gone, having been taken by Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in his sixties, and their only son, my dad’s and Denis and Glenn’s cousin, mostly ignored her from England, where he lived with his second wife even as he controlled her finances and made sure her rent was paid and she lived in a licensed home. Aunt Winnie wanted to die. She’d seen it all and done all she would ever do. She could hardly read. She was too old to make new friends she might outlive. Every single friend she ever made was dead. Yeah, she was a blast at the ice cream social. Still she hung on, still smoking cigarettes — got kicked out of her longtime nursing home for smoking in her room. (Her son found her another one, if a step down in quality.) And eventually she got her wish, got sick, sicker and died.
My mom arranged a very nice funeral at the nicer nursing home she got expelled from. They loved her there but rules are rules and she was warned three times. Winnie’s son Ronnie, my second cousin I guess, flew in from London to collect the ashes and dispose of his mother’s effects. He didn’t realize my mom organized a funeral, which was attended by friends even Winnie didn’t realize she could count on, and Ronnie fumed a little at Mom for going to extra trouble (i.e. his expense) and grudgingly thanked her for organizing such a special event. Ronnie was never known for caring too much about his parents. He hated my dad, his cousin Dick, and probably Colleen too if he gave her any thought, and their kids mattered less than his own kids in Cleveland, Ohio, whom he left behind for a corporate dream job in Belgium back in the day. His first wife was a mudhen anyway, Winnie would paraphrase Ronnie saying. His second wife, whom she never met in person, liked to go on African nature safaris and sent her a hand-carved, hand painted wooden giraffe, which Winnie bequeathed to me (What am I supposed to do with it? she asked me, gesturing to her tiny room.) Winnie was an unforgiving soul and made no bones about being ignored and disrespected by her son, but didn’t dwell on it. She loved her nephew Dick and see how that turned out. She was convinced she did the best she could for each of them. She did what she could. At the nice nursing home she got involved volunteering with challenged teenagers at a place in the neighborhood, efforts in sobriety. When she would tell me and Roxanne there was nothing of her life to keep living for it was no use to argue, maybe she was right.
Uncle Denis would always visit Aunt Winnie when he came to Minnesota but didn’t come for the funeral. This added to the casual feelings towards funerals and memorials for the recently deceased. Uncle Denis, Glenn and John didn’t attend my mother’s funeral either. There was no offense inferred. Yet this time for John McCormick we all felt impelled in Murray’s car to make the pilgrimage to Fort Wayne. Not just to honor the man who was the next best thing to a grandfather as we had as a clan of Colleen and Dick, but to honor what remained of Dick’s clan. And what remained, in the name of McCormick, turned out to be a band of decent people and solid citizens who deserved to be acknowledged and recognized for keeping the lights alive in the family.
My mother used to say, if you don’t go to people’s funerals they won’t go to yours. She stole that from Yogi Berra but would never admit it.
Chapter 15
Everybody in Murray’s car was a member of a club now, the official Sturgis ambassadors to McCormick. Around the town of Menomonie we pulled off I94 for coffee, snacks and a leg stretch, Kerry and I for a smoke. We still had hundreds of miles to go. The convenience store had a preserved quality, as if it had been wrapped in plastic and just reopened from winter. The postcard rack hadn’t been replenished lately. Fellow browsers examined the shelves like inspectors not customers. Half wore masks. Roxanne and Murray wore masks. The awkwardness among the people suggested we forgot how to behave, but not how to say excuse me. I wasn’t in any mood for Wisconsin kitsch and only entered the store to shadow my wife in case she needed money. We agreed to share a coffee, her kind with real dairy, which you’d expect from America’s Dairyland. We paid by no-contact card. Murray elected to get gas further along closer to Illinois, maybe Madison, anywhere but Chicago. The price at the pump in Wisconsin seemed in line with the national average, as did the price of a cup of coffee.
Southern Wisconsin hardly exists apart from its rugged land. Rock fissures and buttresses hold up flagged pine trees over peat meadows so the rock piles look like they’re mossy, rock formations like those composing the Wisconsin Dells minus the tumbling Wisconsin River. The Black River courses this territory on its way to the Wisconsin. Black River Falls anchors a niche in the rocks where old US 12 crosses east towards the state capital and there grew a town in the midst of a no man’s land of glacial rock debris and wooded glades agriculturally uncultivable and of dubious habitation for herds. A friend who was a child in Black River Falls told me there were parts of town where the rocky terrain surrounding some neighborhoods blocked all radio and TV signals and it was said to be like living in a black hole. My friend is a fan of Neil Gaiman and sometimes points to references to irregular and benighted locales in these parts in American Gods, like The House on the Rock. All I know is when traveling east or west on I94 through the middle stretch of Wisconsin there’s a vacant loneliness passing through these green badlands. There’s nowhere to stop. Exits the legal maximum distance apart go to places sight unseen. Even real towns like Black River Falls are miles from this Interstate because the people who live around there don’t rely on the freeway to get to where they usually go, there are county and state roads for that. And old US12. This ugly beautiful barren mossy land provided an uncontested stretch to build a beeline superhighway between Chicago and everywhere straight west, and for that it works well for the most part to get motor vehicles to flow quickly, efficiently and safely across half the continent. Looking out the window at such stony and green terrain it seemed irreverent to not honor the land for giving itself in service of this country.
Fort McCoy occupies some of this territory, around 100,000 acres belonging to the US Army as a boot camp and advanced artillery training center the past hundred or so years. The nearest town is named Sparta. Its Catholic church is named St Helen’s — not true, I’m just flirting with military irony (it’s the Church of St Patrick). Fort McCoy is where my father in law mustered out of the service in World War II. At 170 miles from home, he couldn’t wait to get back so he took a taxi to the Twin Cities.
As peat bogs give back to pastureland again the two Interstates across the great northwestern United States converge, I94 and I90 merge approaching Madison and stick together eastward until it comes time to decide to go to Milwaukee on I94 or Chicago on one or another version of I90 that goes into Indiana. This stretch includes the Wisconsin Dells, a tourist trap of a bygone era prospering off its name recognition going back to its riverboat tours of the geological shapes etched in the stone along the Wisconsin River to develop itself into calling itself the Waterpark Capital of the World. Indeed there are gargantuan water parks anchoring resort hotels all sides of the river. The quasi-sleazy downtown is still there with souvenirs and taffy for sale and a vulgar liquor bar on the main corner lit in neon called Nig’s. The sign says to come in for a swig with Nig. Up the street is the old time photo studio where Roxanne and I and Michel and Vincent posed as 1930s gangsters, and years later we all posed as a family before Neko as Wild West salooners, and years later yet as pioneers of the Great Prairie — Amelie pregnant with Neko.
Oh yea, we know Wisconsin Dells. We’ve been to Tommy Bartlett’s Water Ski Show on Lake Delton, on the river. We rode the Ducks, the amphibious tour vehicles crafted from refurbished army surplus amphibious troop transports from — you guessed it — World War II. We bought fudge, and doughnuts, and caramel corn. And of course sunned ourselves at Noah’s Ark and Wilderness Resort, reveling in water slides, wave pools and lazy laps, the modern day Jersey Shore of middle western North America.
I remember the Dells before the water slide phenomenon. First time was a trip with our parents on our way back from a vacation to Fort Wayne, when Murray was a baby. Seven kids and mom and dad in a Rambler Ambassador station wagon. We marched in double file on the main street shopping for taffy with Mom, got to look at all the souvenir junk we weren’t allowed to buy. Saw all the carnival attractions we weren’t allowed to visit like the Upside Down House. We rode the Duck. Saw the Piano Rock. The water ski show. The sign about a swig with Nig.
Years later Roxanne and I and our baby Michel were coming back from a Thanksgiving visit to our best friends John and Barb who were living in Elkhart, Indiana, when we encountered a snowstorm crossing middle Wisconsin and luckily found a motel off the Dells exit. In the morning the snow had put to bed a sleepy town out of season, the Nig’s sign sticking up like a beacon. Five or six years later with the same John and Barb we stopped at the Dells with our kids on our way home from taking a camper trip to the dunes of Lake Michigan. We camped in a commercial campground just outside the city of the Dells and went downtown for taffy and rode the Duck. Piano Rock was still there, but no water slides yet.
The three times I’ve been back since the age of the water park, twice have been with grandchildren Clara and Tess, and all three times with Roxanne and our kids, who were very young on the camper trip with John and Barb and don’t remember much except the Duck ride, barely. I can say I’ve ridden the most daredevil slides the Dells offer, waterslides that make you feel like you’re dropping through a time warp. Passing through this time with Murray and Kerry on route to Fort Wayne, even with a little prompting Kerry didn’t recall the family stay at the Dells in the 1960s, and Murray had no idea. Nobody voted to stop there on the way home.
I did half-heartedly suggest we visit the circus museum in Baraboo, on the way towards Madison. Nobody took it seriously, and I guess I didn’t either. We were on a mission. To celebrate John McCormick, console Uncle Denis and make it up to Grandma Mary.
Are we there yet? The existential question. Bob Seger sings rock and roll never forgets — or is it rock and roll never forgives? You can’t really see Madison from the Interstate or appreciate it as the state capital. Smart planners plotted the freeway a safe distance away from the city instead of plowing through the heart of town. Several exits will get you into the city if that’s where you need to go, the UW campus, State Street or what, and you can choose which angle you want to approach. Otherwise you glide right by preoccupied with choosing between Milwaukee and Chicago.
First you choose Rockford. The old Plymouth plant at Belvedere goes by and you realize you’re virtually on the edge of Chicago. Chicagoland. WLS, the Big 89. Cubs and White Sox — two teams! Rockford is 89 miles from Chicago but it feels like you’re already there. But you’re not. What you’ve entered is a web of freeways and the increased density of suburban sprawl, the archetypal America prophesied by Carl Sandburg and Sears Roebuck and self-fulfilled since the 1960s incarnate in such towns named as Skokie and Des Plaines, abutting one another once a safe distance apart now a quilt of commuters interchanging exits towards trunk highways bound towards a master freeway called the Dan Ryan Expressway. As the width of any freeway grows wider with more and more high speed (theoretically) lanes, it gets harder to sightsee and get a sense of the neighborhoods the other side of the retaining walls, and sometimes it’s only industrial rooftops with HVAC appliances. Maybe a Home Depot. Murray’s got her phone app tuned to her favorite Garmin GPS and for us bumpkins we could only stay self-aware of our whereabouts relative to the route we were expected to take and which freeway lanes would get us there. No time for exotic gawking. Credit Illinois for clear and timely highway signs.
From Rockford into Chicago and on to the Indiana border it used to be a game of how to avoid toll booths. We would map it out on our free Standard Oil highway maps. Today I cannot explain how we glided through the half dozen toll lanes divided into cars and over-the-road trucks, those with and without passes, always directed by the signage to keep going. Murray guessed they were tabulating the dues and would send her a bill based on her license plates or something, they just wanted to keep the lanes flowing, no chokepoints. Roxanne observed we were four in the car and should get a deal for carpooling.
My earliest memory of the Illinois Tollway around Chicago, besides the baskets at the booth where Dad let Molly toss the quarters, were the Fred Harvey Oases that straddled the freeway, restaurants where you could sit by the window and watch the cars and trucks go by underneath and enjoy your lunch. Accessible by special exits and entrances, the Oasis was isolated from all life off the freeway — I always wondered how the workers got to their jobs — and Fred Harvey served not just food and drink but convenience items and gas, serving the needs of travelers stuck passing through the northern United States. I’ve never stopped at a Fred Harvey. They haven’t been called Fred Harvey for a long time, but they’re still called Oases. I always regarded them as predatory priced, though I have never gotten off at an Oasis to check it out, it just seemed they would charge according to captive customers, like at the airport. My dad’s advice was to take a pass, wait to eat and gas up until after Gary. He and I did a weekend road trip to Fort Wayne when I lived with him in high school. I don’t remember much about that trip except as a routine check-in with Grandma Mary.
All of in Murray’s car were grandparents in a club paying tribute to a grandfather figure to our clan. Each of us could wonder what lengths our grandchildren would go for us. When we came into sight of what the locals call the Loop, the skyline of grand skyscrapers obscuring the lake and taking the surrounding cityscape and infrastructure for granted as the skyscrapers demand such fleeting attention because in truth they are some of the most exquisite buildings ever made. Somewhere in there was the Magnificent Mile of Michigan Avenue and a ride on the El to get there. No use rubbernecking to get a glimpse of Lake Michigan, it’s not there. Everybody collaborated navigating around the Loop to get to Indiana by way of Gary.
Kerry read a text from brother Kevin that he and girlfriend Oleana were cutting into Wisconsin a few hours behind us, and none of us wished them anything but patience getting around the Loop later in the afternoon, it was bad enough at lunch hour. We thought we were making such good time but in reality we probably wouldn’t get to our hotel until after dinner. After Gary we would depart the Interstate system and cross almost the whole state on US highways, mostly US30, and as good as Indiana’s federal highways might be, they aren’t Interstates and we lost a lot of time lugging bumper to bumper through Chicago as it was, we would never make up the time. Might as well relax and enjoy the scenery. Such as it is.
Tensions lessened as we shook loose of the Chicago loop following I90 towards the mills of Hammond and Gary, Indiana. Conversations drifted towards personal matters, mostly between Murray and Roxanne, though joined by Kerry when her batteries recharged. Murray’s son, Norton and his wife Adele were expecting their first child in January. Adele was at risk of miscarriage because of her obesity and had already miscarried once. Murray already had a grandchild by Norton’s first wife who was now eleven and hoped for a new baby to keep things going. Roxanne shared bringing up Neko after Clara and Tess. When Kerry wired herself back she chimed in with her seven or so grandkids, depending who was counting or who counted. In my usual way I withdrew into my own reverie only courteously listening, unconsciously connecting it all to the ongoing ontological history of humanity.
I thought about John McCormick setting out eastward from Duluth, Minnesota in about 1954 driving through and bypassing Chicago on his way to scope out Pittsburgh as a place he might relocate his music business. Duluth was going downhill. The barriers to entry too steep in the Twin Cities market. Chicago way too big. Contrary to Horace Greeley’s advice to a previous era, instead of west John chose to go east and he intended to investigate Pittsburgh based on what he and Mary had researched and some initial hunch John had guessed upon based on ideas he may have formed in the Navy during World War II. Somehow his route took him to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he took a look around and decided he found the place he was looking for, which reminded him of how Duluth was in his early days, on its way up. He convinced Grandma Mary. They liquidated everything in Minnesota, sold their house in Duluth to my mom and dad (who subsequently sold it to move back to the Twin Cities) and before I was old enough to know the difference Grandma Mary, John, Glenn and Denis migrated to a place called Fort Wayne where they established the Indiana Music Studio downtown and moved into a simple new subdivision of tract homes where Glenn and Denis grew up. They now call it mid-century architecture. Nothing fancy. Basic house, yard and garage, the American dream. And an Airstream camper. Every so many years a trade-in for a new Olds. Technically they were not wealthy, and from what I learned about being in business since then I am sure they struggled in their early years.
I for one thought it was gullibly preposterous to make a living selling accordions by enrolling kids into taking lessons and performing together in caped glossy uniforms, but that’s what John and Grandma Mary did out of a vertical three story warehouse with an alley and a cool freight elevator downtown through my childhood. This was the music of Lawrence Welk. This stuff was way too cornball to be true, but there it was before my very eyes, not just the 16mm movies John shot of his students performing recitals but on summer visits I would witness class after class, ardent solos and verdant combos of kids my age or so, mostly younger, squeezing billows and fingering keys and black buttons and knocking out familiar melodies on weighted vests strapped to their chests. Glenn and Denis both were enrolled and made to regularly practice, which made them compete and argue and motivated Denis to play better than his older brother, who I could tell was ready to age out of the program at thirteen if he could.
Glenn was into hot cars and surfer guitars. Corvettes, Mustangs, GTOs. Porsches! Beach Boys music. He was also into girls, a favorite subject of mine. He recommended novels like Candy and Lady Chatterly’s Lover. There was a record shop downtown near the music studio warehouse where I bought a copy of a new song I kept hearing on WLS — Fort Wayne was close enough to Chicago across flat terrain you could get the Big 89 in the daytime — and when I got it back to the house Glenn made me play it. It was Walk Don’t Run by the Ventures and Glenn was really impressed. He took me into his confidence and shared a look at his collection of magazine photos of nude women, and I never told Denis. It suited me to stay clear of their sibling antagonisms.
Glenn was clearly the cooler guy. He had a churlish handsomeness like an Elvis Adonis and the arrogant wit to go with it. One could understand where he got his intelligence but harder to pinpoint where he got his certain good looks. He resembled my dad enough to establish kinship through Grandma Mary, but John McCormick was not enough Cary Grant to make that much difference. Maybe there was a Stoner side of the family element overlooked in Mary, Winnie and old Grandma Stoner. Denis was moon faced and plain, more like his father, John. To me he resembled Grandma Stoner. He wore glasses. He lacked Glenn’s hip savvy and yet had his own swagger. He was a dollars and cents kind of guy. He loved farm machinery.
He taught me how to drive a car with a shift. He wouldn’t allow me to actually let me sit in a driver seat and work the gears — it was somebody else’s truck and only he had permission — but I sat shotgun and observed as he shifted the stick in concert with the left foot pedal and explained which gear he was in and then quiz me, “What gear is it in now?” Third. “How do you know?” It’s at the upper right. It was parked and the engine shut off, but Denis said he could start it if he wanted, it didn’t need a key, just a button, but we’d get in trouble with Carl, his step-grandpa.
We would spend at least one night at the farm where John’s mother and grandmother lived along with his mother’s second husband, Carl, who farmed some land north of the Twin Cities near Chisago City owned technically by the great grandmother, whom they called Little Grandma. Every summer when John visited his mother he brought us boys and Denis and I would run around the pastures and not harass the cows or step in the pies. One year they had a horse. One year we got to get a ride in the cab of the combine one sweep each of the field harvesting grain. Denis could also work the gears of Carl’s tractor, a three-on-the-tree, red, a Farmall if I correctly remember. Denis very much wanted to be fifteen so he could legally drive if he was on a farm. Said one day he would farm. He liked it best when their family vacation from Fort Wayne overlapped with the Minnesota State Fair. He loved browsing Machinery Hill. Uncle Denis was a cornball farm nerd.
Grandma Mary never seemed to attend when John would take us to the farm, even when we brought the trailer and stayed more than a night, even if Denis and I shared a room in the big farm house and Glenn got a chamber of his own in the Airstream. Grandma Mary would linger behind with her sister Winnie at Winnie’s cabin on Green Lake, located not far, maybe forty miles west of Princeton from that farm near Chisago City. It also seemed Grandma Mary respected but didn’t much care about John’s kinfolk at the farm. She had her own farm upbringing to feel un-nostalgic about. Grandma and Aunt Winnie both, and old Grandma Stoner while she was alive all found it curious that Denis wanted to be a farmer and they would kid him about it — Glenn would make manure shoe references (at the table) — but Uncle Denis laughed it off when the older folks warned him of a life of hard work and deprivation, and yet John McCormick his dad stuck up for Denis and his enterprising spirit, even as his brother Glenn teased him that farming today was a dying industry. This was, what, 1962.
It was plain how Carl and John’s mother Inez and Little Grandma lived a rather more primitive fashion from how I was used to, but it also seemed true they enjoyed a measure of privacy and freedom and spread out space that gave them and their Victorian era house and barn a sense of bounty on par with anybody in a three story house in Minneapolis, plus all the extra land all around seemed something of respectable wealth. If Carl was ruddy and crude it was virtually his barn, and if he always had some kind of chores it was his business to tend to and we could watch if it was easy for him, we just needed to stay out of his way. He wore denim and bib-overalls and a cap like a cabbie, almost like a jockey, made of striped denim, crushed and worn and laundered and worn sweaty again and again. It was always August, and he always smelled of b.o. except maybe in the morning but none of us got up early enough to know.
Inez seemed up all the time too. A classic farm grandma to Denis and Glen, always cooking, tending to Little Grandma in her chair, and working nights part time at the county mental hospital where she was a Registered Nurse. Plus she wrote a column for the Chisago County Free Press. And she by mid-day smelled of b.o. too. I never knew what to call her. She wasn’t my grandma. Inez sounded unrespectful. I never even knew their surname, so I couldn’t call them mister or missus. They called me Mike, just like the McCormicks. The awkwardness only lasted a few years, a day or two each time. Carl wasn’t much for tolerance for a suburban gawker like me, though with Glenn’s interest in engines he tolerated Glenn’s hard to disguise faux farm curiosity, but Uncle Denis got his attention with his questions of how many, and how big and wide and how long and how come aspects of the farm that Carl would have adopted him if he didn’t already have a family in Fort Wayne.
When he put us boys to work it was hustling bales up to the hayloft by ladder and stacking them neat, or sorting and stacking chopped firewood, ready for winter. One year he had three cows, one year five, one year none. We weren’t expected to get up and milk, but Denis did it anyway. We swept the stanchions once or twice, or rather Glenn supervised while Denis and I swept and hosed. Otherwise we were free to roam so long as we didn’t get lost. Glenn might lounge behind reading a paperback novel while Uncle Denis and I wandered beyond the barbed wire and the corn and grain growing along the dirt and gravel road and trails of grass growing up the middle between the wheel ruts.
Then it was back to Winnie’s lake. As the story goes Aunt Winnie came across an auction of surplus Korean War housing — double-wides left over from the war — so she went ahead and bid on one despite Uncle Lint’s stubborn reluctance, and when she won the bid she next had to find a place to park it. By luck at the same time she found a lot for sale on Green Lake, not far from Princeton, about an hour and a half north of Minneapolis, where she and Uncle Lint spent their summertime the next forty years. It was a shallow lake with a sandy bottom and few weeds, so a swimmer could walk two city blocks out from their dock and the water still only up to Aunt Winnie’s neck. She swam a lot. Wore a modest olympic style suit with white bathing cap. I swam too. Denis and John liked to fish with Uncle Lint in Lint’s AlumaCraft with its two and a half horse Johnson outboard, which Denis and I were allowed to commandeer when Uncle Lint wasn’t using it. We would embark across the lake to a dunes on the peninsula halfway across. From the hill above the dunes he and I hoped to spy on the girls camp on the opposite shore with Uncle Lint’s binoculars but we could never get a clear view except of their beach, so we got lucky if we timed it to watch their swimming class.
Aunt Winnie and Uncle Lint and several of their neighbors put a nine hole golf course in their contiguous back yards — everybody used four irons, there were no greens and the holes were soup cans in the sandy grass. There I got my first clues that golf was not my game. There was also a horseshoe pit where I was luckier. Still Uncle Denis or Glenn usually won when I played them at anything. John and Uncle Lint had a fierce rivalry at horseshoes and kept a running tab. Grandma Mary swam sometimes with Winnie, or they drank whiskey and read hardcover novels or played cards. And night they played bridge and talked politics. When Grandma Stoner was around she would knit and join in. She taught Uncle Denis how to knit.
Some of this trivia of my reverie about my relationships with Grandma Mary and her family came up in conversation in the car as we got through Indiana — Kerry remembered our family trip in the Rambler Ambassador wagon, but Murray was a little too young. Those two had their own Indiana adventures, when they were a pair of young teenage incorrigibles running loose in San Diego, California and our mom sent them to Fort Wayne where Grandma Mary offered sanctuary from Mom’s volatile household. Grandma placed them with Glenn and his first wife, Ginger and their young daughter Amy, but in a matter of weeks Grandma sent them back to California for skipping school and breaking the rules. It just didn’t work out, as Kerry put it and she and Murray laughed loud and hard.
We gassed up at Valparaiso. Murray’s ex-husband Jeff had a co-worker friend known to us all who Murray said graduated from Valpo with a divinity degree. Or theology. We offered to pay for gas this time but Murray said she’d bill us later, after the tab for the Illinois tolls shows up.
It could possibly be the same route John McCormick drove when he discovered Fort Wayne. Behind his and Grandma’s back Denis and Glenn and I called it Fart Wayne. Or Fort Wang.
I stopped visiting by the time I was twelve, before even Glenn had a drivers license. My memory of Fort Wayne was confined to their house and the brick warehouse of the music studio and a block radius of each, if that. Kerry and Murray had more recent impressions, though even that went back almost fifty years, mine about sixty. In that gap of ten years John and Mary gradually exited the accordion academy business into piano and organ. They still led the region in sales of Titano accordions, they became an exclusive regional dealer of Kimball pianos when they opened a store in each of the two new malls. Indiana Music Studio morphed into McCormick Piano and Organ. Not long and each of the brothers joined the business. Summer visits were skipped by Glenn — nothing new when he was in the army — who kept behind to run the stores while the folks were on vacation in Minnesota with Denis tagging along for a chance to visit the farm and the state fair. Behold, in a few more years Denis opened his own store in Grand Rapids and moved to Michigan. By then Glenn persuaded his parents to sell rock and roll instruments and gear. Under Grandma Mary and John’s management the business flourished. Their arc of success in this phase of their business spanned another twenty years, until Grandma retired after she fell and broke a hip and never quite recovered. John decided to liquidate and retire. Glenn found work as a stockbroker and financial advisor. Denis and his Grand Rapids store was last to go, but by then he had gone into business as a farm implement dealer so the transition didn’t faze him at all.
I lost touch with Grandma Mary more or less after Michel and Vincent were born. Grandma knew Roxanne and explicitly approved. She was exactly the kind of woman who would keep me motivated, she would say. Her worries for a long while were for Denis, who didn’t find a bride until he was in his late thirties. Glenn on the other hand was well into his second marriage and family by then. Grandma hoped Denis would find his Roxanne. Her hopes for Denis came true when he reconnected with an old Fort Wayne high school sweetheart, Jane, now twice married and divorced, married her and had their first son before Grandma died. Word of Grandma’s state of mind would come to me second hand after a while. My mom kept track by phone. My dad was not a reliable source. Kerry and Murray kept in touch with their Grandpa John. After her hip injury Grandma stopped touring but seemed to send Denis up north to check up on us, one time to introduce us to Jane. As I recall long-distance telephone charges between land lines weren’t all that cheap so phonecalls across country were reserved for special occasions, yet I still don’t remember my last phone conversation with Grandma Mary except she asked about Roxanne. And she cursed medical science for keeping her alive beyond her usefulness.
Denis and Jane’s first born, Chris, arrived while Grandma Mary was in a coma with kidney failure. They brought the baby to Grandma’s hospital room and they all say they detected a thin smile on Grandma as they presented him. Somehow overnight her intubation tube worked its way out and she died. And none of us Kelly’s (or Sturgis’) attended the funeral, nor even Aunt Winnie, whose son Ron, who managed her estate, wouldn’t authorize the money for her to travel to Fort Wayne.
Thirty years ago. Aunt Winnie lived at least another ten. Our father about four months. Here I was leading a remedial pilgrimage on a branch of the family tree left out hanging over our heads like a gallows with no noose, just a dread of an image awaiting us to arrive as if on horseback. Almost eight billion people in this world, all simultaneously busy acting out their existences until they survive no more and are replaced with infants who begin the cycle all over again, and any of us might know a hundred and fifty other people of this eight billion and may remotely be genetically related to several million and still each of us at a different age must account for every second, no matter how few, of conscious time aware of being alive.
It made me sad when Grandma Mary and then Aunt Winnie got older and older and began to express regret being left alive. I would say, don’t talk like that, be happy you are still alive, and they would ask why, there’s nothing left, all their friends were dead, their own bodies ached, trembled and barely navigated, their eyesight was gone and they could not read, and they were no fun to visit. You kids got lives of your own. They had lives of their own once too. Sad but true. So where was I with the transcribaphone of my era bugging them with questions about their heritage and their own coming of age?
For my part I recall overhearing bits and pieces of fragments of conversation at Winnie and Lint’s cabin over the summers about their origins. It was as if they deliberately spoke in front of us kids so we could recite enough ancestry to make a report for a grade school project, and be proud to have Icelandic blood and roots in southern Minnesota. Otherwise the attitude I thought I perceived was looking back at the hardships of farming as a lesson of escape from a primitive age to the nuclear age of opportunity and had few nostalgic words for growing up as farm children far out of town, even John. Especially Uncle Lint, most bitter. Mostly they liked to put their past behind them, and in some ways it seemed impolite, none of my business to ask personal questions about times they generally seemed to want to write off as hard times, like when Little Grandma’s farm with Carl and Inez had no running water or indoor toilet, as recently as just a few years before I made my first visit, when I was about ten. There was talk around the subject that John had a half brother in Carl and Inez but he ran away and never returned. Things like that.
How this all affected me as we rolled across the plains of northern Indiana on an impeccable US highway tells you how John McCormick’s death evoked vivid memories that invoked respect for the man who totally succeeded in his life and the true hero of this story if nothing more than because he never did anybody any wrong. He was a grownup goody goody, a professional good guy. Honest businessman. For all my boyhood perception of John as not only the squarest square of anybody’s dad role model (I take that back, Uncle Lint was squarer yet) and still for all his modest temperament and gentlemanly voice it was hard not to see in him an act comprising Lawrence Welk and Professor Harold Hill selling Titano accordions and providing lessons — recruiting teachers — to dozens and dozens of boys and girls all around the valley towns of Allen County north of the famous Wabash River around the bustling hub of Fort Wayne. That’s what he and Grandma Mary did for a living, and they made it pay.
And behold, by the time both their boys were in high school their business changed to pianos and organs. They became a Kimball dealer and opened a showroom store in a high traffic shopping mall and delivered top quality home musical instruments, still offering optional lessons if not band uniforms, keeping the old downtown studio building as a warehouse, and they remained one of the top national dealers of Titano accordions. John owned at least one and took it out to play at his house but didn’t take it on the road. At his and Grandma Mary’s house they had an organ, which John played after dinner and sang old sheet music standards from way before rock and roll. In Minnesota for a visit he might play piano at Winnie’s neighbor friend at the lake and Uncle Lint strum his guitar and everybody of a certain age joined in to sing Sioux City Sue. John downplayed his musicianship but he played well enough to sell instruments with a modest enthusiasm calibrated to generate confidence in the customer that joy could be had in their very own home. Grandma Mary ran the office and managed their financing.
Grandma earned her business skills working for Dayton’s, the Minneapolis retail department store dynasty that grew to become Dayton Hudson Corporation, which evolved to become Target Corporation. John came by his skills on the fly, no formal training, picking up musical licks and keyboard melodies living with his dad, who managed saloons in east central Minnesota and then a hotel in Minneapolis, places where he mingled with and observed itinerant musicians who played the speakeasies. John as a teenager played house piano and accordion some nights. His parents broke up when he was eight and he shuttled back and forth living with Inez, Carl and Little Grandma at the farm near Chisago City, or with his father, first on the desolate farm where Inez left him, then later in small towns along Hwy 61 until ending up in Minneapolis when John reached his teens. How he met Grandma Mary I do not know. Or when. They were an existing entity since before I was born and I never questioned how or why it came to be, but here was this divorced working lady with a teenage son, my dad, hooking up with the smooth talking piano playing young but seasoned John McCormick after World War II and starting a music business in Duluth, Minnesota, moving it to Fort Wayne, Indiana, some seven hundred random miles away from their roots and next of kin.
In an America established upon scores of such stories it was normal to accept given accounts of who people were and where their people came from as their existential identities and not bother to ask personal questions about things that were nobody else’s business. Like what happened to John’s half brother, Raymond was his name I recall — was he a criminal? Glenn asked John once when I was around and John said, we don’t talk about Raymond. I never asked about the juicy details of what attracted John and Grandma Mary when I was growing up because it didn’t interest me or seem pertinent to their existence. Now that I am an old man by TikTok standard time I get the luxury of hindsight speculation about the heyday of a couple who gave it a go the last half of the 20th Century and by all evidence ended up successful and happy, though their origins that brought them together and set their romance in motion was most likely of itself scandalous and obscene.
From what I could tell, Grandpa George, Grandma Mary’s ex, Grandpa Sturgis, my dad’s dad came away from the breakup unscourged and unscathed, scandal or no, and unbothered by any sense of legacy to his son Dick or my dad’s offspring. He was a hunting sportsman, I hear, and my dad said he once went to Alaska with a once a lifetime permit to hunt Kodiak bear (no, he did not bag one). He worked for the highway department and operated machinery. Retired to Florida with one of his many brothers from back on the family farm near Stewartville, where George met Mary Stoner and all the fun began. Uncle Lint was a friend of Grandpa George and sometimes stuck up for him when Mary, Winnie, Grandma Stoner or my mom said something nasty. They went off to war together to fight in Italy. They came home together. Presto, Mary and George divorce. Mary marries John McCormick and start a new family. George seems not to give a shit. Gets the house in south Minneapolis, the son, and apparently no loss for girlfriends. Uncle Lint implied he had not lost touch with George since Florida but they probably never held any reunion.
Not incidentally Uncle Lint got early dementia and died at a nursing home separated from Aunt Winnie. I hadn’t seen him since the mid-1970s when it seemed he was forced retired from Coca Cola where he was a route driver and trying to get a real estate broker license. Even then he seemed to rail about things all degenerating, men wearing long hair, bitter how life always gives him the shaft, how the Twins failed to compete in the American League, and his favorite rant about not being respected. How being called Uncle Lint was disrespectful. It demeaned him, like a speck of dust. His name was Lynden, and he insisted we call him Uncle Lynden — there was a president named Lyndon, Lyndon Johnson … nobody called Lyndon Johnson President Lynt. It seemed a reasonable request. From an increasingly cranky old man I preferred to avoid. When I heard from my mom through Aunt Winnie that he wacked out and didn’t know anybody any more, not even Winnie or their son Ron, I wasn’t surprised for some reason. It seemed like as long as I’d known him there was an antipositive quality about his attitude. I didn’t feel sorry for him how he sulked about being pussywhipped by Aunt Winnie.
John McCormick never suffered from that kind of lack of self confidence. He and Linden got along, played horseshoes, yard golf, bridge with their wives and neighbors at the cabin and went fishing in the AlumaCraft at dawn, including Uncle Denis. To me he and Linden were similar non-genetic relatives I honestly felt no warm kinship despite their marriages to my dad’s mother and my dad’s aunt, both who evoked familial bonds through mention of my mother, of all people. John McCormick got along with my mother and he always made a point of speaking highly of her, but Aunt Winnie and Grandma Mary were somehow in awe of her and they coupled their criticisms with veneration of her charm, intelligence and beauty, only lamenting that she and my dad couldn’t reconcile. They all agreed — even Linden — that when Dick was eighteen and Colleen sixteen they seemed made for each other.
So now that I’m a bona fide grandfather in my summer of 69 looking back on my family in the conscious of somebody who tried much of my life allowing my past to expire, finding it never goes away and it all adds up to who I am today. Today I jump in the car with my wife and two of my sisters and go on an overdue pilgrimage to join our uncles and cousins and stand up for their McCormick patriarch and honor Grandma Mary, at least this once. No excuses this time. Not even covid-19. On this home stretch crossing plain Indiana from Valparaiso to Fort Wayne in the tire tracks of John McCormick some seventy years later, it didn’t seem too late. If you don’t go to their funerals they won’t go to yours.
What else did we know about John McCormick? Your turn Kerry… His father was adopted. He learned of his real birth grandparents on his dad’s side just a year or so ago before covid. He and Grandma Mary lived a pretty good life at their condo on Truemper Way, built embedded in a golf course. Moved there after the boys left the nest. He was a solid, straight up guy. Took good care of Grandma Mary, and she worshiped him. Mur? He was always fair and listened to both sides. He was conflicted about sending us back to mom and California but he admitted he wasn’t fully in favor of letting Grandma Mary fly us to Fort Wayne in the first place. Looking back it was pretty absurd. But I came away with fresh respect for John and believed he really cared, stuck in the middle like that, and I felt bad we let him down, but we had no business being there. We got a Time Out with Mom, that’s about it. Grandma Mary gave Mom a Time Out. LOL …
Grandma Mary always felt ultra-guilty for our dad getting away like such a deadbeat, though she never interfered in any material way, I explained, until you two seemed to need sanctuary. Sorry that I as Big Brother was helpless watching over you, barely watching out for myself. Grandma was always careful not to cross Mom so it must have seemed dire for her to go against her over you two.
Well, we were heading for juvie jail. Us cooling it in Fart Wayne let Mom and Dad who was trying to move back in with us again, off the hook for a while to try to work things out, which of course didn’t work out.
Maybe that was Grandma’s and John’s way to give Mom and Dad some space to try to work something out in San Diego. Nice try.
By this time, the early 1970s, John and Grandma Mary were well off. Their sons were pretty much running the stores and they took time to golf and relax at their place near an Indiana lake where they kept their AirStream and travel abroad to visit Vienna and Rome, take the AirStream to Florida in the winter. They didn’t retire, just slowly let their enterprise run its course, went to Florida more often, until their sons turned their interests towards other professions and it came time for them to liquidate and completely enjoy their leisure.
Glenn took up investment analysis and became a stock broker and financial advisor. In his second marriage he had two sons and another daughter and they stayed living in Fort Wayne.
Uncle Denis’s music store, the last to open, in Lansing, Michigan was the last to close. Meantime he bought a farm east of East Lansing where he eventually renovated an old house and left Fort Wayne behind except for his parents. In Michigan he found a few acres along a highway where he established a dealership selling and leasing farm machinery. His marriage to Jane, who also came from Fort Wayne bore two sons. (He also had a stepson from Jane’s first marriage.) For a guy who didn’t go to college except a few classes at Fort Wayne’s local Purdue extension, Uncle Denis found his niche in the world and went after it and ultimately achieved success at a relatively young age. A millionaire, owner of a farm he rented out, living in a lake home with boats, a Mercedes RV, all his material aspirations fulfilled, his family life fruitful and content, his professional ego satisfied, his sense of the world at ease and self confidence sufficient to continue doing what he’s doing, one day at a time at his own speed and level of intelligence. Much like his mom and dad.
We nervously anticipated meeting up with the other brother Glenn, so named for the revered bandleader Glenn Miller. None of us had heard directly from him in decades. Uncle Denis would offer cursory, objective reports. By all accounts he did well in his second profession as a financial services provider. His second marriage produced two sons and a second daughter, all unknown to us. Kerry and Murray knew his first daughter Amy from their 1970s escape from California and she was a little girl then when Glenn was married to Ginger. I never met Ginger or Amy, but Roxanne and I met his second wife Dee Ellen but not their kids. Kerry and Murray never met Dee Ellen. I barely spent any time with him after he went in the army to avoid the Viet Nam draft, though he never went overseas and served a minimal commitment, it was a time of turning points in everybody’s personal history and Glenn turned out maybe squarest of all. Stayed all his life (except two years enlisted in the army in Georgia) in Fort Wayne the squarest city in the squarest state in America, somehow I worried how he would receive us after so many years of inattention.
We had a good laugh at a remark by Murray that we certainly weren’t on an expedition to find out if we were in John or Grandma Mary’s will, which Murray had to repeat for Kerry who didn’t quite hear the joke.
The flatlands of northern Indiana contrast with the flat plains of South Dakota by small towns along the way of cultivated fields of green beanery bordered by trees and creeks, much in common with southern Minnesota. Roxanne exclaimed wonder at the bean fields. These plains were not badlands at all, and the distance accrued going away from Chicago graced the land with a less and less urgent identity of its own, which tends to work backwards going west. If I ever passed this way before, with my dad when I was in High school or with Roxanne on our route home from our honeymoon to Halifax via Canada, I didn’t remember any landmarks. We talk about America’s interior as Flyover Land, this territory is Driveover Land, utterly nondescript and immemorable. Maybe feel that way about Minnesota. When I was farmed out to Grandma Mary’s as a boy John drove Glenn, Denis and me places into the countryside around Fort Wayne to go boating or swimming or fishing, and I recall nothing distinct, only that Indiana lakes and rivers seemed puny compared to Minnesota. I saw a highway sign to a route to the town of Auburn and I remembered that John pointed out to me one time the town of Auburn and told me it was once the home of the manufacturing plant that made the Auburn Cord, a supercar speedster of the early days of automobile design which went extinct before I was born. I was surprised to admit I could not recall my father, Dick Sturgis, telling me a story of the rise and fall of the Auburn Cord, but somehow I know.
Uncle Denis texted me when we were still at least an hour away asking if we would join the family for supper at Glenn’s daughter Katie’s house that evening. I said we’d love to but it was unlikely we would make Fort Wayne by suppertime. Kerry was unplugged and recharging her batteries but seemed to go along with the idea we didn’t want to hold up their dinner. We needed to check into our suite at the Residence Inn and unwind, get pizza and maybe hit the hot tub. I suggested to Uncle Denis we meet up tomorrow at the funeral parlor and asked him to convey our thanks for the dinner invitation but there was no need to hold dinner waiting for us to arrive, because we would be late and that would be rude.
It took a lot of pressure off us not to have to hurry, though we were disappointed we were not making as much time on the road as we’d estimated. Kerry got a text from our brother Kevin saying he and Oleana were just getting to the Chicago loop. They would be staying at our same hotel but didn’t expect us to wait up for them.
What time was it exactly? What time zone? If Indiana stayed on Eastern Standard Time instead of Daylight time that meant they were same as Central Daylight, same as us, right?
Only the sun went down earlier, got up sooner.
Does anybody really know what time it is, said Kerry, deaf to music now but with memory of lyrics. Does anybody really care, Murray concluded without apology.
Chapter 16
Coming into Fort Wayne nothing rang a bell. This was not our childhood home but it didn’t look much different from a first impression of any small American city in the so-called Heartland of the country, a loosely grouped geography comprising agriculture states between the interurban east coast and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and centered between southern Ohio and southern Illinois. In Indiana there’s no special architecture or style to distinguish its cultural contributions to the world. There is an oval race track for cars where the drivers go around and around for the equivalent distance of 500 miles once every year to show off the power and endurance of fossil fuel engineering and the cunning of high speed drivers. The event is staged in the state’s capital city, known as the Circle City, named in imitation of my Minnesota home town only more lame of a combination of Americana and Greek — Indiana plus polis, Greek for city, Indianapolis. Fort Wayne was named for a Union army general whose nickname was Mad — Mad Anthony Wayne. Indiana bred the Ku Klux Klan. Already mentioned the Auburn Cord. The small city of South Bend, just a few miles from Michigan, is home to a trifecta of interesting lore: the University of Notre Dame (nonaffiliated with the cathedral in Paris) famed for disciplined football involving a Gipper dude, another named Rudy, a mural of Jesus behind an endzone, and for one of its law scholars appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett; the city was once home to the world’s biggest producer of RVs, recreational vehicles; and it is the city which elected Pete Buttigieg mayor. Singers John Cougar Mellencamp and Axl Rose were born in Indiana, as was Michael Jackson — all celebrated escape. The kid who played Opie on the Andy Griffith Show who grew up to direct the movie Apollo 13 got his first good movie role in the story of Professor Harold Hill, The Music Man, when he played a little kid with a speech impediment who sang a song extolling Gary, Indiana as a haven of earthly virtue. Ex-US Vice President Mike Pence was born in Indiana. It is one of 24 states with an active death penalty. And the state’s residents are known as Hoosiers since the 19th century, a word bastardization of corn provider at one time, coined in New Orleans, but in the 20th Century came to represent a state obsessed with basketball, and the quintessential Hoosier of all time would then be Larry Byrd.
Uncle Denis used to refer to being left handed as having a Hoosier Paw, which I see now as also a pun on the phrase Hoosier Daddy — all I might say it’s an Indiana inside joke not funny to anybody else.
John McCormick taught me to properly shoot a basketball, but by the time I arrived at their cement driveway, bucket and backboard over the garage, I had too many bad shooting habits to overcome to ever beat Uncle Denis at HORSE, much less Uncle Glenn or John himself. Learning to dribble was out of the question, yet I kept persisting for several years trying to improve. John McCormick said you always improve anything by keep practicing. He was a gently assuring Dr Harold Hill, a music man for real who actually endorsed playing pool — they had a pool table in the rec room of their basement. (Another sport I was destined to always be a runner up despite my earnest effort.) No, he never tried to entice me to learn accordion, but if he would have told me I could have done it I would have tried, even if it was square.
John sang all the words to the song that goes, I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash, how I long for my Indiana Home. He sounded sincere, even if he was not born a Hoosier. His wife and kids were not born Hoosiers, though his grandchildren all were. Murray, Kerry, Roxanne and I represented the un-Hoosiers of the family, his pre-Hoosier past. We didn’t know Wabash.
We gassed up at the edge of town where Interstate 69 glances the city limits. It’s uncanny how reliant a route to any destination could be plotted on a Garmin type of GPS guided application on a smart phone and impeccably talk us into this city we didn’t know from Atom and end us up at our hotel without our need to recognize the neighborhood, which Roxanne had chosen for proximity to the mortuary, which was near the cemetery. Very nice accommodations. We had an L-shaped suite that could have slept six. Rox and I got our own corner on a fold out double at an angle to see the TV, and the sisters got their own doubles at the other angle at the TV. We ordered pizzas and sodas and settled in for the night.
For diversion Roxanne and I went to the indoor spa. The pool seemed a bit chilly but it only made the hot tub the more hospitable. Murray joined us but not Kerry. For conversation we reflected upon our reflections. Another family with two young boys who liked to hoot and do cannonballs came in, which livened the acoustics while the middle aged couple dawdled in the pool ignorant as bliss and biding time to take over the hot tub.
Back in our room watching the news about Jeff Bezos taking a space ride on his Blue Origin rocket we worried about more carbon spillage per dollar to partake in the ultimate thrill ride, how rich and arrogant can one guy be? I was glad the Milwaukee Bucks wrapped up their championship though I was the only one in the room who cared or saw the game the night before. The 2020 Summer Olympics were about to open a year postponed in Tokyo to a vacuum of enthusiasm because of the covid-19 coronavirus pandemic still freezing international travel. The delta variant was now 83% of new cases. There was a scare spreading among residents of high rise condos as to danger of building collapse like the one on the Florida coast. Wildfires raged across the west, the smoke reddening sunsets all the way to Maine.
Uncle Denis texted us good night, he would see us at the funeral parlor. He asked if we would like to follow him home after the supper afterwards to his home in Michigan, two and a half hours away. He wanted us to stay the night at his house. We could depart for home from there on Friday. He extended the invitation for all six of us including Kevin and Oleana. I put the proposal to my wife and sisters. To my surprise they jumped all over in favor of the idea. What’s another two and a half hours either way? We could still cancel our hotel reservation for a second night and save some mool.
Almost instinctively I opposed but I held back from saying so. I’d hoped one of them might be as homesick as I was and craved a pause and a pivot from this whirlwind of loose family ties before reversing course and making a beeline home. No, they all threw in game for more adventure, so I accepted the invitation and texted Uncle Denis we would alert Kevin of our plans. Kerry texted Kevin and Oleana, and added by Roxanne’s suggestion they might choose to cancel their reservation for the second night if they intended to follow Uncle Denis home tomorrow. Whoever wasn’t driving, probably Kevin, answered they were in for the sleepover at Uncle Denis’s and confirmed they would cancel their second night when they checked in, maybe an hour away. (Don’t hurry.) Roxanne went to the desk to cancel our next night. I realized we were all going to spend our next night guests of Uncle Denis. Once he got us and lured us to his lair would he ever let us go?
In case he tried to talk us into staying until Sunday I reminded Roxanne and Murray I really wanted to be home Saturday morning. What’s so important? It actually seemed too trivial to mention, so Roxanne answered for me: He wants to take advantage of a free public document shredding bee. To shred a couple boxes of your mom’s old tax docs. Murray laughed, Yeah that’s real life or death. You sure that can’t keep after, what, fifteen, sixteen years? Actually, I said, I’ve looked forward to divesting my home space of more useless archives I don’t need to save, all secure and free of charge. I can do it for you at home, free, said Roxanne, except it would take all day. My point. It’s only coincidence John McCormick’s funeral occurs the week of the Saturday I plan to further extricate myself from mom’s estate. It’s executed. That’s all. I’ll ditch the docs some other day if I must. I’m just homesick and don’t want to be stuck the weekend at Uncle Denis’s house.
I could console myself that we were together and not alone, we had each other. I didn’t want to cast obvious aspersions but didn’t anybody — Roxanne? — else comprehend — no offense — that Uncle Denis was the squarest and dullest person to spend any length of time with, in my opinion after spending days on end hanging out with him year after year growing up, and entertaining him on visits through our adult and grown up lives. It always results in him acting aloof and naive and at the same time the authority and adult in the room and directing attention to what holds his interest as some kind of logical conclusion as to what matters, what ever leads to making a profit to make a living. Bless his heart he was apolitical. Again naive. Not much in tune to pop culture, though who didn’t enjoy the original Jaws when it first came out? He wasn’t even a sports fan at all and it surprised me when he said he and his dad had just recently attended a baseball game. He wasn’t dumb by any means, just dull. Unexciting terms. Goes to the State Fair to spend all day at Machinery Hill. Completely unreligious. Almost unschooled. Left handed in a right hand world. Did not smoke or drink alcohol. Liked talking small talk, over and over. Never said anything radical. Always practical.
I recall one visit when we were in our twenties when he spent a whole day shopping office supply stores searching for a battery operated pocket calculator for a birthday present for John his dad. They were new phenomena then and he considered it a good deal when he found one by Texas Instruments for under $80.
Accepting his invitation to visit his house in Michigan did give me another opportunity for personal atonement. Back in 1985 — I remember because we were listening to the Live Aid concerts on the radio — thirty seven or so years ago Roxanne and the kids and I traveled on vacation to the Dunes Coast of Michigan along Lake Michigan with our friends J and B and their kids in J’s parents’ van pulling their family’s camper. While in Michigan within a certain radius I contacted Uncle Denis, then living near Grand Rapids where he kept his music store and we arranged one day to leave our campsite and take the van to rendezvous with Uncle Denis. He showed us around his farm. He invited us to stay the night but I declined. Roxanne and J and B balked at my reluctance but I quietly said no. Denis pleaded, almost begged, but I declined. I wanted to get back to the campground. I heard about it later, not just from J and Roxanne, but from Grandma Mary and Aunt Winnie. Years later Winnie reminded me of it, out of spite or in case I forgot, how heartbroken Denis was that I refused his hospitality. Heartlessly.
I felt it again this trip. The pull of Uncle Denis to demonstrate his success. My resistance to acknowledge his significance. My tolerance for the dorky relative. I was not jealous of him by any means. I thought of it miraculous providence that somebody so dorky and simpleminded could find a niche in this world where he could prosper and sustain himself so successfully as an effortlessly simple dork. It wasn’t my effort to deny his success or sabotage his authority, I like to think it was my way of disconnecting association or any superficial credit for how he turned out, where so many of our generation ended up unhappy and unfulfilled. Out-voted by my companions I thought it over and decided it best to go along and pay homage to the house of Uncle Denis and give him my blessings above and beyond my mere passive aggressive acceptance. This would break us even.
Here again a good example, a good role model, overlooked his entire life of simple virtue and steady work in and beyond the family business. What’s an extra five hours from home to make Uncle Denis feel good in his own Uncle Denis way. If consigned in my life to the stiff, semi-illiterate nuisance to be stuck tagging along, who knew nothing of rock music or DC Comics, he seemed to turn out a paragon of something undefined and affirmative, much more than to say he could have done worse. What’s an extra five hours in Murray’s car to pay extra respect to Uncle Denis? I for one may never go this way again.
He can use this occasion to quell Aunt Winnie.
Kerry and I slunk outside down to the parking lot to smoke. She brought some reefer and we smoked a bowl before retiring for the night. She expressed hope Uncle Denis would take us to Grandma Mary’s grave.
I didn’t sleep easily but even with the current left on and some feint of a stream of consciousness in my head I rested well. As we settled into sleep mode at the suite the dialogues got sparser after the news. Stephen Colbert was a rerun — Roxanne said the guy gets more vacation than Tommy Bahama. Kerry unplugged to recharge her batteries. Murray was bushed from driving the whole day and went mute after a few observations about steaming her dress in the morning and getting a look around town considering so far she recognized nothing. I snuggled Roxanne for warmth to balance the air conditioner and let her breathe at my collarbone a while as I dozed with my eyes open seeing a slit of parking lot light from a crack in the blackout drapes, reflected in a mirror near the door. Roxanne slept. The flesh of her back gilted my fingertips like rose petals and chocolate mud. I slept enough to waken enough to almost remember what I was thinking about when I last fell asleep. And to visit the loo. Dawn still didn’t come. Eventually I slept deep, enough to cede sentry duty to somebody or something else, or no one.
I’m not beset fighting demons. Demons don’t challenge me. They know they cannot defeat me. My struggle is with angels. Goodness torments me.
Morning came and still we had plenty of time. The “calling” as the obit put it would be for an hour commencing at noon, with funeral at one. Breakfast at the hotel commons featured scrambled egg and Jimmy Dean sausage patties. Coffee and orange juice. Toast. Bagels. Fresh oranges and reddened apples. Make your own waffles. With awkward innocence the hotel guests stayed out of each others way. The staff all wore masks, gloves and hairnets. Business travelers snapped their laptops and left early. We had until 11 to check out. Time to shower and groom. Dress and pack for the road. More coffee. Kerry and I smoked. We met up with Kevin and Oleana. He saw me in a suit and tie and commented, whoa, when you said you were wearing your Sunday best you weren’t kidding. Of course I wasn’t kidding. This was a serious family occasion, and as the elder of my clan I owed the most respect I could bring, even at risk of being overdressed. Himself he presented dignified and clean, slacks and tropical shirt. My sisters and spouse as always elegant in summer dresses, Oleana fashionably austere in a suit. It was a beautiful sunny July day.
Not too hot to wear a suit and tie. Relics of my professional life. Stoically sensible. Mature. Authoritative but not authoritarian. Respectful and respectable. Credible and credulous. Shiny black shoes. The banker.
In Murray’s car after we checked out the four of us traveling together drove past the funeral home to scope out the cemetery down the road to get our bearings while Kevin and Oleana drove straight to the mortuary chapel. We learned there was no chance we would get lost if we missed the funeral procession. Back to the mortuary we parked in a middle row and entered together, looking for Uncle Denis. We found him occupied with Kevin and Oleana. He reacted to us with outgoing arms.
“He seemed fine. Just last week we went to a baseball game. He was fine. Playing pool. Suddenly he just collapsed.”
Not a notably emotional man, Denis aw-shucked his tears and welcomed us expressing up-front his gratitude that we would attend his beloved father’s memorial. Jane his wife stood with him and greeted the passing well-wishers and condolence givers while Uncle Denis briefly focused on us, pointing to his sons and their spouses, and Glenn’s kids and grandkids among a fairly dense crowd of attendees of all ages. He encouraged us to mingle and browse the collages and exhibits and photo albums on the easels and tables before the ceremony or service would begin, and so we split up and toured the room.
John had been cremated, so there was no casket per se, just an oak box on a dais. There were lots of pictures featuring Grandma Mary, all variations of the 1950s physics professor. Hawk eye glasses. Prim suit and skirt. Gloves. Even when casual, shapelessly thin and plain, hair restrained, scarfed. Such a homely face really. Her nose wide and flat like my dad’s — the Stoner nose, Winnie had it too, and her son Ronnie. Oddly, not I or any of my sisters directly resembled her, though Kerry and Murray identified with her personally. Grandma Mary had a distinct complimentary look to John’s chubby faced Cary Grant with his sharply parted hair and golden rimmed glasses. There was a poster of them advertising the Indiana Music Studios. Pictures of young accordion players in satin capes and hats like nurses, John the maestro with baton. Vacations under palm trees. Venice. What looked like Germany but was probably Austria. Aunt Winnie’s lake. Aunt Winnie’s cabin. John at an upright piano. Glimpses of Uncle Lint and his ukulele (funny, in memory I thought he played acoustic guitar). Grandma Mary and Aunt Winnie with cigarettes and highballs.
Most interesting were displays of half a dozen canvas paintings, 8 x 10 to 16 x 20″ acrylic, attributed to John. Landscapes and lakesides. The largest and most prominent depicted a sailing vessel on an uneasy open sea. My favorite was a rendering of Aunt Winnie’s cabin as seen from the back yard, the red Coca Cola machine alongside the back doorsteps and the tarpaper shingles that was supposed to make you think the house was sided with brick, the lake shown off to the right with a tiny boat offshore with a figure fishing. There was a very honest approach to his composition and an expressionist’s style of perspective. All in all his color choices transcribed harmony. I’d heard he took up painting after he retired from the business but until then I’d never seen any pictures. Glenn came up while I was looking at the sailing ship and commented that there were a lot of good watercolors in storage as well. These were his best acrylics. Wouldn’t call him Grandpa Moses but he has a certain eye and certain touch for a primitive autodidact, we agreed.
Rather than embrace, Glenn and I shook hands. Long time, we agreed. Of any of us Glenn had aged the most elegantly, almost poignantly. His hair parted to accentuate its thickness, no hint of a combover, a faint blend of natural gray, his searing eyes and sneering smile same as we were kids, his sinister good looks embellished in a man of his seventies who carried himself with suave arrogance of someone living on his own terms as naturally as if he wrote his own script and still far from its ending as far as endurance and charm can go. He admitted what a great surprise to see us Sturgises and still so gratifying such a representative sample. He thanked me. Like his brother he called me Mike. As McCormick family elder he was being approached from all sides and he turned to greet Kerry and Murray and I caught up with Roxanne perusing a layout of photo albums on the dais. She showed me Denis and Glenn, said she was looking for something with me in it, but nope.
Maybe I really didn’t exist, I said. I don’t remember much.
I’m serious, I thought you were important.
Not that I recall. Let’s get a seat for the show.
Sensing the ceremony about to start, we found some chairs in a middle row and were joined by my sisters, brother and Oleana. Since John had no religious affiliation the ceremony was conducted by a chaplain recruited by the funeral home. And like so many funerals where the decedent is unfamiliar to the facilitator, the recitation of John’s life was a compilation of notes on a podium summarizing a rote anthology of facts and interviews with family and friends who actually knew him, and for that this chaplain pulled together a modestly heroic narrative of service and familial paternity, loyalty to community and indulgent in simple pleasures that belied his business success and sustained his long marriage to Mary.
Notable was the highlight of John’s service in the Navy in WWII, which I knew but forgot. He served in the South Pacific in a unit called the Seabees. They were construction crews assigned to build airfield runways, bases and infrastructure on strings of islands occupied by allied forces advancing across the ocean against the imperial Japanese. John brought his accordion in his foot locker to Micronesia and played it frequently at the island bases where he was assigned, entertaining his fellow troops and keeping up morale. Sioux City Sue. Dr Harold Hill serenading James Michener.
Another detail of John’s life I had forgotten was that after retiring the business he kept busy tuning pianos. For this he was lauded for keeping active into his advanced age and maintaining social relationships among many of the people attending that day.
What impressed me most about the chaplain’s eulogy was he didn’t supplant his personal unfamiliarity with John McCormick with religiosity. No substituting the Glory of God with the humanity of the man we assembled to honor. John didn’t affiliate with any religion and to the credit of Glenn, Denis and those tasked with organizing his farewell they skipped past even non-denominational evangelical tidings and nobody seemed to miss it, not even Kevin, my hyperChristian brother. No Amazing Grace. No Lord’s Prayer. It could be called a civil ceremony.
The chaplain introduced Glenn, who thanked him graciously for presiding. Glenn introduced Denis, who stood up from his seat in the front row with his sons, their spouses and Jane and made a greeting gesture to the crowd, which numbered more than a hundred. Denis took his seat and Glenn thanked everyone for attending. More than in passing he mentioned his nieces and nephews from Minnesota, whom he referred to as Kellys, which surprised me — we were always Sturgises before. Glenn spoke in front of the lectern instead of behind it, the chaplain’s microphone unnecessary, his words clear and his demeanor genuinely familial. Informal in a linen jacket, dress Dockers and silk shirt, no tie, his suave conversational appreciation of those gathered to express appreciation for his and Denis’s father, a square guy and honest role model, likeable soul and devoted grandfather to his and Denis’s children. And their children. All present in the room. Glenn intrinsically assumed to be elder of the McCormick clan at this ceremony, and as he tied his father’s life together along the chaplain’s outline he credited his brother, his family and whoever was there for enriching John’s life as much as John enriched theirs by just being John Glenn McCormick.
We were all invited to accompany the hearse about three blocks down the road to the cemetery. Everybody hopped in their cars and followed each other through the cemetery to its furthest corner, to a wall where the soldiers were interred. John’s casket box of cremains was hoisted up by a crane to an open vault on the top level, the third level on the wall. An honor guard was assembled from local and regional outposts and the Great Lakes navy base. They gave him a 21 gun salute — seven rifles, three shots each. It was after the recitation and the color guard flag ceremony a bugler blew Taps, and it occurred to me the ceremony until that moment lacked music. If this was the funeral of Professor Harold Hill, where was the music, man? Seemed fishy. Shouldn’t somebody be playing accordion? Piano and organ? Ukulele? 76 trombones? 110 cornets? Nope. Taps. Just Taps.
At that point only the cemetery workers stuck around. The younger McCormick kids and our uncles drove back to the mortuary to gather the mementos and displays. The soldiers and sailors saluted each other and departed in their SUVs. The assorted civilians who attended dispersed in their cars in random order and disappeared into the town. We, in two cars, Murray’s and Lena’s, followed after our uncles’ family and were guided into the city to our cousin Beth’s house, one of Glenn’s kids, who hosted the family gathering and catered lunch after the funeral in her back yard.
Here we were formally introduced to Ft Wayne, meeting all the McCormicks at once. The youngest kids wore masks, at least for a while. All of us had them but with food and drink before us we tucked them away. Uncle Denis implied everybody eligible was vaccinated (little kids still weren’t allowed) and there was no reason to think otherwise. The social occasion was awkward anyway, the pandemic not officially over and immersing ourselves in an overwhelming crowd of pretty much strangers with kinship connections. Outcasts and pariahs to our mother’s family, it never occurred to us how welcomed we could be by our dad’s half-relatives through Grandma Mary if we would have half paid attention all these years. All the cousins were younger than my own kids except Amy, Glenn’s eldest. Glenn also had two sons, John and Ian, and Beth the other daughter and at whose house we mingled. Denis had two sons, Christopher and Zachary, both married with no children although Chris and wife Katie were expecting in November. Glenn’s son Ian and daughter Beth had four or five small children between them but John was unmarried and childless though accompanied by his girlfriend Grace. These and their spouses and my uncles and their friends pounced on us like celebrities, as if they were the celebrities and we were common fans.
It was uncanny, something I’d never felt before. From every direction they came after us, my sisters, brother and girlfriend, Rox and me, introducing themselves by name, name by name, cousins and spouses by the yard asking who we were and how we figured in the birth order of the kids of Colleen and Dick. Being the oldest I got a lot of attention, and so did Kevin for being the youngest. Kerry and Murray seemed to get the most attention for being middle children and being girls. They already had a reputation in Ft Wayne, sustained by memories of elder cousin Amy and Uncle Glenn and his ex wives. Teenage bad girl legends who turned out cool, obviously. Murray chummed the cousin girls like a long lost soul sister. Kerry on the other hand went about a different tack. Three or four times that afternoon I would overhear her begin again with someone saying, “One day I woke up and I couldn’t hear a thing … “
It turned out our hostess cousin Beth’s husband was a health care practitioner who taught at the local Indiana campus. Beth herself was a nurse. They introduced their young children in a whirlwind of play in the backyard playground gear. John’s obituary said he was survived by seven grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren, and there they all were, all the little kids running loose. Never did catch Beth’s husband’s name, when Glenn’s son Ian came around to offer me a bottle of water. For a moment Beth’s husband stuck around while Ian and I struck up a basic conversation. Several friends of the McCormicks were in attendance who deserved attention and shortly Beth’s husband melted away in the crowd. Before Ian and I talked at any depth, Roxanne approached with Ian’s younger brother John, whom she introduced as a writer. He said he had a job at the university campus at Indianapolis but spent most of the pandemic at home working on a novel he called The Shopping List. We barely exchanged email addresses when Uncle Glenn approached and invited me to join him and his companion for lunch at one of the tables set up under a canopy tent in the back yard.
I sat across the table from Lana, Glenn’s companion. They were not married but lived together somewhere near Indianapolis, where Glenn recently moved from Fort Wayne. Glenn sat at end of table next to us where he presided the next hour or so as we deliberated over our fates and the fates of our loved ones. H recounted the last time he saw me, he and his second wife Dee Ellen spontaneously popped in at our house more than ten years ago, maybe twenty or twenty five, on their way back to Fort Wayne from somewhere else, and as recalled he liked our house and compared it to the neighborhood where his daughter Beth was living — which I took as too generous of a compliment but understood the architectural and structural comparisons, 20th Century American houses built before World War II. Beth’s family had a nice house, built in the late 1930s. An era of middle class Class known for its woodwork and built-in cabinets. “Denis and I didn’t grow up with any of that. We were raised in sheet rock and formica cubes in the burbs.”
I said I noticed his blue Porsche 911 parked out front. I’d heard after the dissolution of McCormick Piano and Organ that he became a stockbroker and financial advisor for Merrill Lynch. Yes, he said, and he had a good run. He’d been retired several years, and as I knew Merrill Lynch was acquired by Bank of America, but he still managed a few select clients. Said he moved towards Indianapolis just over a year ago to break away. It wasn’t so far to come back to visit his dad, but he was already looking past his dad’s lifetime. His kids aren’t that far away and John lives close by. “We’re all over the cabin, lake and boat thing,” he said, “and if we ever get nostalgic for that stuff it’s not all that far to go up into Michigan and see Denis.”
He offered no financial advice, which was good, I wasn’t looking for any. He didn’t ask about the George Floyd riots and I didn’t feel obliged to bring it up. We didn’t talk about Donald Trump or Mike Pence.
He asked about my other sisters, Leenie and Bernadette. Leen I could say seemed fine living in Colorado Springs, but nobody kept track of Bernadette since she got out of prison for kidnapping a newborn infant in New Mexico — a story he was surely well aware of. He expressed sorrow at the passing of Molly. He said he got debriefed by Kerry, whom he called his father’s most loyal correspondent — can’t say enough good things about Kerry, a genuine saga of perseverance. Murray too spoke for herself. Sean retired from the Air Force in Florida and lives well, plays acoustic bass guitar for a Hawaiian music band. Heather, I said, had to be known to be believed, and even then she was illusory, and Glenn took that to mean she was much like my mother. Nelly, the youngest sister, was a reclusive suburban housewife enigma in upstate New York, and Kevin, our youngest (fifteen years younger than me) was somewhere in the crowd at Beth’s house socializing and getting autographs of cousins.
The lunch was catered buffet style meatless Italian pasta in either red or white sauce with plenty of salad and bread sticks. Somebody’s kids, Beth’s or Ian’s, served us so Glenn and I and Lana didn’t have to get up and get in line. I had penne in white sauce and it was pretty decent, if cooled too much even for such a warm July day. We hung our jackets behind us on our chairs. Glenn didn’t wear a tie but I loosened mine. The wife of Denis’s son Zack, who orchestrated the kids who brought us food, made sure I had water.
Uncle Denis came over to give me something he considered special. Cleaning out his dad’s stuff he came across something obviously saved by my grandmother. It was an invitation with cute bluebirds in the design written to Grandma Mary and Aunt Winnie to my first birthday party in December, 1952. He also gave me a framed 8 x 10 high school graduation portrait of my dad. Two tables away my brother Kevin spotted the picture of our dad and right away came over to ask if he could borrow it to show Lena and Kerry and Murray, and I said sure, expecting he would never give it back. Later that lunch one of the little kids gave me a 4 x 6 photo album of snapshots of their Grandpa John McCormick taken in their lifetimes, meaning John looked really old — I could have done without the little album of old John, but the kid insisted saying everybody already had one and they ordered extra; I tried to give it to Kevin but he already had one.
Palavering with Glenn and lunch seemed like an opportunity to leisurely indulge in and exchange views of what’s happened the last fifty years. It seemed we could spend the whole afternoon and maybe the evening having a good talk in honor and emulation of his parents, who included the only grandma who took me seriously or showed me any love, and Grandma Mary’s sister Aunt Winnie, adults of our youth who shamelessly engaged in rational conversations about the grown up world where we grew up. We were definitely the grown ups now, and even our children were grown up. Our conversation could have gone on and on. For me it showed how the pandemic and the lost year of ZOZO clamped down on conversation whereas all around the social media sublimated all our speaking roles and left us awkward and atrially fibrilated, off beat and half hearted in our personal correspondence. If that made any sense to Glenn he’s a better reader than I thought. We had been blessed to be born into prosperous times among civilized people. We had passed on to our children’s generation a wealth of cultural identity and responsibility our generation worked hard to secure, so our place of lineage is secure, we can pass on. Children born today stand a big chance of outliving our lifespan by another twenty years. I said to Glenn I had already outlived my father’s age by about nine years, and he replied in my case the bar isn’t set very high.
As the lunch broke up Uncle Denis suggested we hit the road to Michigan soon. Glenn had other guests to engage. A fleeting moment of magic or just another summer brush with Uncle Glenn, as Glenn graciously expressed his farewell and thanks for coming, and in his eyes as he sincerely shook my hand and said he wished we could spend more time together, it seemed at the same time someday soon our dialog would pick up where it left off — wherever that was — or we would never meet again.
Roxanne found me and brought me to say hello to Dee Ellen, Glenn’s second wife, who told her she wanted to say hello to me before we left. She was a good natured lady with more laugh lines than frown lines who relished her three kids and said she was glad they finally got to meet the Kelly clan they had heard so much about all their lives. At first that hurt my feelings but I realized she meant no malice. We hardly knew each other — I’d’ve never recognized her on the street, as they say — only by reputation. Grandma Mary always credited Dee Ellen as being good for Glenn, a stabilizing counterforce to his fantastical inclinations, she would say, a sensible influence. I wouldn’t know. She seemed fun enough. His current companion Lana seemed serious enough and polite, but we are looking at people around 70 years old with chronic facial expressions practiced since middle age and shaped before that in the mirrors of growing up under strict enough guidance in the heart of midcentury middle America. If my family provided the McCormicks some entertaining mythology about a tribe of relations afar up in Minnesota who grew up crazy and lived to tell, well, most of us, if they weren’t ashamed to call us kin on such short notice, if just for one day, I for one felt grateful there wasn’t enough time to spend together for them to discover how normal and boring we really are.
Uncle Denis and Jane, in two separate vehicles, were prepared to depart, leading the caravan to their place in Michigan. Whoa, I said, not so fast. It was a ride of two hours and I wasn’t riding in a car that long wearing a suit. I asked for a place to change clothes and took some shorts and a t-shirt upstairs to a bathroom. I came out with my suit and dress shirt folded as best I could, barefoot with shoes in hand like an escapee and fled into Murray’s car waiting at the curb. I lay my stuff in the trunk and put my sandals on and donned my wide brimmed hat and waved good bye to a scattered handful of McCormicks on Beth’s front lawn.
In the meantime Kerry said whoa, not so fast as they worked out the orderly caravan out of town to the highway to Michigan. Kerry wanted to go to the church where they said Grandma Mary’s ashes were scattered in the rose garden. Denis agreed to lead the caravan towards downtown to the Plymouth Congregational Church, where his mother’s funeral had been. She refused to endorse the idea of being confined to a grave and left instructions for her ashes to be scattered at that particular rose garden. According to Uncle Denis, he, John and Glenn one fine morning surreptitiously complied.
It was a simple caramel brick structure with a steeple on a busy street. The rose garden comprised most of the grounds of the tiny front yard. Kerry insisted on getting out to enter the grounds and we all obliged, though nobody offered to accompany her. We were lucky enough to find parking along the curb while Kerry ambled through the churchyard gate circled among the rosebushes, stumbled back through the gate and fell down at the curb. Roxanne jumped out of the car to help Kerry back on her feet and escort her back into the car. Didn’t even scratch her elbow.
From the shotgun seat Kerry explained why she asked to be allowed to briefly walk among the rosebushes, not just to touch the earth where her grandma’s cremains reside but also to scatter some of the ashes she kept of our dad and brought along in an old film canister, mingling them among his mother’s. It was her effort to act cool about it that caused her to stumble on her way out of the churchyard.
Our caravan chugged through the city to a northbound entrance to Interstate 69 and we took off towards Lansing. Murray programmed the destination into her phone if we got separated but we hummed along behind Denis and Jane effortlessly. It would be about a three hour drive. To my mind this jaunt into Michigan for a sleepover at Uncle Denis’s was an absurd waste of time. I had already rationalized it as due payback for a forty year old slight I would rather have sinned again than endure the extra six or seven hours it would add away from home, and conceded to my sisters — and to my wife who would go just about anywhere to stay out of the house since Covid — a field trip to recognize the achievements of Uncle Denis wouldn’t hurt, we really had nothing better to do.
Along the way I learned Uncle Denis would have liked us to stay the whole weekend except the next day, Friday, his sons and their spouses would be arriving as a rendezvous prior to all of them going on a vacation together to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, flying out of Lansing on Saturday. Learning this only made this sleepover journey seem more absurd to me, but to Uncle Denis it probably presented the only foreseeable opportunity to show us his world, and it would increasingly unfold how important it was to him to host us if just one night. I didn’t complain. Didn’t sulk. Murray and Kerry hyped the adventure. Roxanne offered to drive but Murray didn’t want to ride passenger in her own car.
Kerry was the dominant voice for a while as we crossed the border out of plain Indiana into Pure Michigan it seemed weird to realize from her observations she was the deaf one. It seemed she met every McCormick and formed impressions of each, speaking of them as family and us as relatives, trying to make a distinction without seeming unsensitive. Not a few miles into Michigan Oleana’s BMW sped up in the left lane enough to overtake us in the caravan and wedge behind Denis and Jane, Kerry explained referring to texts from Kevin in real time conveying they weren’t getting good GPS since leaving Indiana and they were afraid of getting lost. Anyway, Kerry continued, she was satisfied the family of John and Mary had a good thing going among themselves. She was pleasantly surprised they all seemed to be liberals. Murray was not surprised. Mary and John were Democrats. All the more reason their offspring might rebel, Roxanne suggested, but Murray asserted that the McCormicks were not a family of capricious rebels, not that they were bland conformists. They were educated people — some educators themselves, Kerry emphasized, which she said raised her respect. We agreed that John and Grandma Mary left a legacy in Indiana of honor and dignity.
“Although I checked out Glenn’s Facebook page,” Murray reported, “and he put Druid as his religion. You suppose he’s being cynical?”
Of course, I said, trying to nod off. I felt as if I wanted to sleep all the way home.
In Michigan nothing about the landscape looked familiar. It did not remind me of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois or even Indiana. It could have been all those places but resembled nowhere. It was hard for me to place where we were on the face of North America, somewhere east of Lake Michigan and west of Lake Huron, lobbed beyond Chicago and aimed lamely towards the orbit of Detroit, the freeway ahead and off to the side a cement canyon through a canopy of woods. Somewhere in those woods lurked cave men plotting to kidnap the governor. Up the road past where we were going resided a city famous for poison municipal water. Another exit sign pointed the direction of the city known as home to a great cereal maker. Keep going north far enough beyond Lansing, the capital city, hours and hours north, the Straits of Mackinac knit the state where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet a hundred miles across the Upper Peninsula from Lake Superior, almost Canada, where we could not go if we wanted due to pandemic security. Murray and Roxanne riffed about taking the ferry across Lake Michigan to Wisconsin — a sea route homeward — skipping Chicago.
Kerry tuned out, removed her Cochlear appliance and put her battery onto the charger — I heard her say as much if anyone was listening. A song from the Silk Degrees album played on the car audio but Kerry was unaware. She would have liked it — used to like Boz Scaggs. When she talked about her condition she commonly told people what she misses the most is music. Now she was exhausted — she said so as she set the recline of the shotgun seat one notch back towards me. A tall lady, she stood out all day immersed in the crowds, her white blonde long hair and pale face distinct but above all her Cochlear gear singled her above and beyond her fellow guests at the funeral home, the cemetery and Beth’s with her headset like the Borg — yes, resistance is futile.
One day I woke up and couldn’t hear a fricken thing.
What she did not confide in public was she was already deaf in one ear since childhood. Mom always blamed the mumps but some blamed Mom for slapping Kerry around when she was a toddler. Kerry accepted both stories. The coincidence with Mom cutting back with the lickens and slapping us around could have been virtue of adviice from Grandma Mary as well as Eula Pratt, our homekeeper then. Being Colleen’s kids scarred all of us but Kerry got boxed in the ears once too often. She coped with one ear just fine. Never complained. Lived life. Made a career. Raised kids. Perfectly fine at the age of 58 one night and the next day woke up deaf in both ears.
Kerry had a good job with a good company with good benefits so she never worried about insurance coverage for the subsequent tests and attempts at treatment the next few years. Roxanne accompanied her to clinic appointments. She said she couldn’t hear herself speak. They tried hyperbaric therapy. Hearing aids of any designs did not work. She signed up for Cochlear implant surgery, the while seeing therapists and counselors helping her decide what to do about her condition since it appeared to be permanent. She uses tablets to communicate, and cell phone text. Sign language? Lip reading. White boards and markers. She kept working because she could do her job as well as ever because of computers. And cell phones. But she wanted her hearing back and no treatment restored it, so she asked for the next best thing and had surgery implant her head with circuitry to decipher sound waves and relay them to the brain as sound.
The results sadly disappointed her. Nobody promised she would hear the same way again but she expected better audio than what she described as voices like chipmunks and munchkins. And no music — it just didn’t register, and that was a shame, she was a big fan of Yes (“Close to the Edge”; “Owner of a Lonely Heart”) and Roxy Music. The audio therapist assigned to her case helped tune up her appliance for optimum effect and it was up to Kerry to make the best of whatever she could get to hear something. Kerry got a lot of support from family and work and friends. Our sister Heather kept an eye on her during zozo and the pandemic shutdowns. Then her husband Patrick had a heart attack and recovered at hospital, scaring Kerry and their kids and stepkids — Kerry and Pat are empty nesters with five grown kids and nine grandkids between them.
Patrick is retired on Medicare. Kerry isn’t old enough yet but when she is she’ll have a tidy 401.k. Pat supplements his union pension and social security selling tie-dyed apparel at farmers markets like an old hippie. As a couple they approach their golden years expecting a cushy ride into infinity not anticipating the setbacks to their health and psychology. Even so, here was Kerry persevering along spending her bereavement leave road tripping on a family mission to console our uncle Denis for the loss of his beloved father, John. Her kind heart extended to someone in need of repair more than her, and in her extra-compassionate sensitivity she designated Uncle Denis the neediest of the week.
By the looks of the scenery Uncle Denis had a lot to feel sorry for. Remarkably unelevated the terrain panned out from the freeway in endless monotony that probably seemed reassuring to the locals but left me unawed, uninspired and eclipsed my normal sense of direction. Absolutely nothing reminded me of our vacation with our friends in 1985, though our venture into Michigan (Michiana) then stayed along the Lake Michigan coast of pine woods and dunes. Here in the interior where Uncle Denis lived the landscape stashed itself behind hedgerows and row crops of uniform regularity, no mountains, rivers or deep forests defining the horizons like timeless stretches of no imagination and nothing to look forward to except the same. Or it was just me.
Why begrudge somebody their sense of security? Long as they aren’t hurting anyone. And who could be more benign than Uncle Denis and Jane? In their minds this journey between their home and Fort Wayne may have seemed like a routine commute. Don’t let me be one to hurt their feelings a second time (in almost forty years, before he married Jane come to think of it) over my ambivalent reluctance to accept hospitality.
Far as I was concerned my responsibility concluded when they hoisted John McCormick’s brown box into its mausoleum slot in the cemetery wall. Schmoozing among the relatives at my age seemed like a luxury indulged by a survivor with no real say in the outcome of all the stories to come afterward. Their patriarch out of the picture, they’ll create new memories looking forward to fulfilling their perceived legacies, and I wished them all the luck in the world knowing I would not only have nothing to do with their success but likely not live long enough to learn the outcomes.
Murray and Roxanne revived talk about a ferry boat ride across Lake Michigan to eastern Wisconsin to skip Chicago to get home. It’s a long boat ride, I said though I wouldn’t have minded for something different to avoid Chicago. It’ll cost a couple nickles, I added in case they got off with this romantic notion of a cheap boat ride across the great lake. Roxanne used her iPhone to find a website. She found it cost $85 per person one way, about $100 for the car. Left its port at Ludington, Michigan at 9:00 a.m. and arrived at Manitowoc, Wisconsin at noon — a four hour trip with a time change from Eastern to Central. Problem was the ferry was booked solid tomorrow and what looked like every day for at least a week ahead. SS Badger Ferry. Too bad said Murray, that’s not a bad price. How far is Ludington from Uncle Denis? About two hours. So that’s six hours, I said with my eyes closed under the brim of my hat. And from Manitowoc there’s the whole state of cheese curds. I imagine there’s not a lot of scenery crossing the middle of Lake Michigan. What do you care if you aren’t driving? said Murray. Keep in mind in the future to bring a deck of cards. Staterooms are available starting at $55, Roxanne added. I’ll drive home, I said. I’ll take Chicago.
I had once, after all, wanted to walk all the way from the United Center arena to our hotel on the Magnificent Mile after a Shakira concert. Before the pandemic. Before ZOZO when I got this get-it-overwith attitude, conceding eventualities such as the passing of John McCormick as the next checkoff on the list for the Final Countdown. Will I feel as obliged to attend Uncle Glenn’s funeral? If I in fact outlive him. He looked pretty healthy. Spoke lucidly. Had the self confidence he always had like he was immortal. What else would I have better to do? Go to work? Visit a dentist? Attend an investment seminar? Get free confidential document shredding from the Medicare broker? Maybe graduation day for Clara or Tess. Otherwise why not? High adventure in middle Indiana doesn’t occur every day. It might be interesting to see how he lived compared to his brother Uncle Denis. I somehow gathered Glenn, who once knew all the words to “The Good Ship Venus”, once had a lake house of his own.
At a certain proximity to the city of Lansing we followed Denis towards Grand Rapids. It seemed difficult to accept we might be approaching lake country, but that’s the urbanity of the American interstate highways and the proximity of cities. I was essentially lost hundreds of miles from home and yet I knew in my head exactly where I was on the planet. Jane left the caravan at the exit to Ionia. She texted Kerry for us to keep following Denis, she was stopping in Ionia to pick up chicken for dinner and would meet us at their house, which was in Orkeans, further up the highway. Somehow after all those miles from Fort Wayne Uncle Denis in his brown Mercedes lost us at the exit to get to Orleans amid fields of corn obscuring the country roads off I96. Aha, but Murray had his address on her iPhone and got her garmin to direct the approach of the final miles of rural road to Denis and Jane’s.
Except we missed it on our first pass. Groves of trees and hedgerows on one side of the road and a cornfield on the other obscured a view of a neighborhood of homes aligning a lake. Urged by Murray’s garmin to double back a few houses we found Denis and Jane’s shaded driveway and pulled into an ample gravel parking area next to Denis’s Mercedes sedan and his Mercedes RV camper. Several dogs barked from a kennel sequestered around the smaller of two garages next to the enormous house. Uncle Denis waved us in and greeted us proudly.
Roxanne and Murray followed him excitedly into the house whereas Kerry and I lagged behind to take a smoke by the woods. Kerry spoke like a monologue in a film. “It gets hard to keep it together,” she said. “Like back at Beth’s house, so many voices at the same time I can’t differentiate. I can’t take it and I have to unplug. I’m fine now but sometimes it’s a blessing to lose battery power.”
Within a few minutes Oleana’s BMW slowly and cautiously pulled into the driveway and parked next to Murray’s Toyota. Kevin was driving and Oleana had been navigating and neither seemed pleased with the journey. For one they complained they had a hard time getting AT&T cell phone service and thus struggled to coordinate the car’s GPS system with her Bluetooth, and for two she sensed one or more of the tires seemed to be low on air on the passenger side and she feared they might have a slow leak.
I walked around both sides of the car, finishing my cigarillo at the edge of the woods where I discreetly snuffed and buried it, eyeing the Michelins. They look the same, I said sounding calm, trying to reassure Oleana and Kevin away from apparent frenzy and panic. They look fine to me, I said.
The four of us gravitated along the landscaped stone footpath to the mansion’s entrance and assembled inside the atrium. As much as the house was to behold from the outside, the interior magnitude felt like being inside a palace only instead of feeling under guard at an institution there was a homeyness of lived-in comfort to offset the awe and to balance the grandiose to personal scale. It reminded me of the Mountain Forest Home where we stayed at Estes Park, it was at least a house that big only the architecture style not so much accented to western cabin but more along the lines of north woods colonial with archways. It reminded me of my brother Sean’s place in Melbourne, Florida, only Sean’s house was just the one level, although spread out within. What all three houses had in common were high ceilings, big windows and the allowance of abundant natural light.
Uncle Denis’s voice from somewhere beyond the entryway where the kitchen and the rest of the house conjoined, already giving Murray and Roxanne a tour in progress, resonated with exposition from the living room telling how the previous owner had been an amateur architect and designed this place and built it as his dream house. He confessed all the flaws and innocent design mistakes to Denis as he showed him and Jane the place when it was for sale, Uncle Denis was saying, but the imperfections made no difference. The vaulted ceilings, for example, were too disproportionately high, he said as if we could tell, but neither he nor Jane, or either of their kids seemed to mind feeling smaller than scale.
I caught up to the tour about then beneath the ceiling fan which recycled the air conditioning. Murray and Roxanne gravitated back towards the kitchen. Kerry followed me not hearing the narrative but spontaneously gushing what a nice house, followed by Kevin and Oleana still half deliberating whether one or more of Oleana’s tires might be or must be losing air. Murray and Roxanne found a coffee bar alongside the kitchen where they discovered a Nespresso single-serve coffeemaker. Murray, a coffee aficionado, couldn’t wait to figure out how to make it work, and Roxanne was wowed by the sophistication of the apparatus and variety of coffee selection pods. Denis wanted to continue the tour, however, and implored us to wait for Jane to instruct us how it worked.
Denis led us down a wide staircase to descend to a split level recreation room that faced the lake. A pool table centered the space, several couches arranged around the perimeter. Aside a catacomb zig zag corridor led to two guest bedrooms with a lavish full bathroom in between. Uncle Denis offered us couples the bedrooms (Roxanne and me and Oleana and Kevin) and sheepishly apologized to Murray and Kerry that they would have to sleep on couches in the rec room. No big deal said the sisters, like old times bunking it on the lam to Fort Wayne. Roxanne claimed the front of the two bedrooms off the zig zag and Oleana seemed satisfied to get the back one. Each had two queen size beds. At the other end of the zig zag the passageway looped around to a snack bar with refrigerated drinks and trays of assorted snack chips, pretzels and biscuits. Uncle Denis implored us to help ourselves.
Jane soon arrived with buckets of fried chicken, mash potatoes, gravy, biscuits and the works from KFC, but we did not eat right away but put the food to the side to bring luggage into the house, orient navigation between rooms and ultimately learn how to make coffee from the Nespresso. What was more Jane showed us how to heat milk with an attached wand for a perfect latte. The machine generated a fast fresh mug of coffee but only one at a time. We formed a queue, Murray, Roxanne, Kerry and me. (Kevin and Oleana were not coffee drinkers.) When it came to my turn I chose a blue coffee flavor — medium roast — and expressed willingness to forgo the hot milk just to get a taste of coffee but Jane insisted on serving me a complete latte like the others. I had reservations about this coffee brewing method using single-serve coffee pods but Denis and Jane, who like Kevin and Oleana weren’t coffee drinkers, seemed to think the Nespresso system was a state of the art coffee maker, and since it was the best cup of coffee I’d tasted in days I didn’t voice my concerns about high tech waste. It would have been conspicuously inappropriate of me to impugn their generousity and maybe they recycled the empty coffee pods for all I knew.
In Jane’s version of the tour she emphasized the abundance of snacks and drinks as a commitment to provide every guest the utmost hospitality. This of course included their kids and the kids’ spouses and extended to their cousins and friends, neighbors and anybody and everybody who entered under their vaulted roof. Uncle Denis went on a moment about how much his dad liked to spend time there. He gestured to the view of the lakefront, the docks and boats. The muggy sky leaned towards sundown with a red tinge of faraway wildfire, the water calm as rippled glass, nobody out there. No active watercraft. It was pretty and lonely.
Jane set the long dinner table and laid a picnic buffet of chicken and fixings. Along with mash potatoes and gravy there were biscuits and honey, tubs of cole slaw and potato salad. It was an indoor picnic. The themes of conversation bounced around the sentiments of the day and the take-aways of each participant. Uncle Denis dwelt on his father, who used to sit at the head of the table. Kevin worried Oleana was right and their tires were deflating as he dined. Oleana was more interested in Jane’s kennel of dogs. Roxanne and my sisters Kerry and Murray dwelt on their perceptions of the magnificent house and their impressions of the funeral and family gathering at Beth’s house in Ft Wayne. Silently I wished I was more hungry — all that rich food and me no appetite.
Jane required no prying or prodding to rhapsodize about her dogs. I am not a dog person, so the breeds and characteristics she described were lost on me, try as I could to pay attention, but to a professed dog lover Oleana the details only begot more comments and questions to entice Jane to elaborate about her joy for her beloved canines. A self-styled polymath, Oleana stoked Jane’s pride with observational tidbits of flattery towards Jane’s sense of organization and management, not just her kennel but the household in general, which chuffed Jane to own up to modest successes in what she considered ordinary life. It made them both happy talking about dogs and raising kids and having a nice house and enjoying retirement age and not worrying about taking a vacation to Florida because she had a neighbor friend who would look after the kennel the few days they would be in Orlando. Otherwise Jane said she rarely traveled but preferred to stay home and keep house. My wife and sisters at the table all complimented her housekeeping and the tasteful country style of her furnishings and landscape. Kerry kept up with the gist and remarked at Jane’s generosity with this meal as well as the abundance of snacks and beverages, to which Jane demurred to her basic desire to welcome guests and family and always have comfort at hand and ready for visitors at any time.
Uncle Denis at the same time reminisced about the countless times his father would visit when the sons were young and they fished and water-skied all summer long, their grandfather present throughout their childhood and a figure to look up to and count on as a role model and sage persona while they grew up, a stable influence to their family. Denis obviously missed him. It had only been a week when Denis and John had gone to that baseball game together; he collapsed while playing pool. John always had been a level headed judge of his entrepreneurial aspirations despite the devilish advocacy of his brother, recalling the time he first brought his dad and brother to the site he chose for his farm implement dealership to map out his vision, and Glenn said to their dad, “Good old Denis, trying to get us to invest in another business we know nothing about.”
It was obvious the investment paid off. Soon he too would be a grandfather. He glowed with admiration for his father John as a positive force in his life and the lives of all his grandchildren, including Glenn’s kids and by extension us Kelly kids (or Sturgis kids, whatever). Uncle Denis presented a modest humility about his estate and his legacy but naively exposed his pride and cunning in achieving the life he lived and was still living and made no secret he was happy. Besides this mansion on the lake he owned a few hundred acres of farmland and some buildings which he rented out a few country miles away towards west Lansing. He at one time herded livestock, mostly cows, but not for more than ten years. And in the present day he didn’t call himself retired but even after liquidating his machinery inventory and satisfying all accounts, subleasing his dealership lots and spending more time at the lake with his sons and father, even so Denis kept his hand in the game as a manufaturer’s rep, first selling a prefabricated grain silo, then a corn ear harvesting device and lately a scoop like a front-end loader that measures the exact amount of animal feed required per livestock meal. His territories spanned the north central states and lately included Minnesota. To promote his endeavors he created a website called Farm2Day.com, designed by his younger son Zack. His braggadocio came from a sincere, unapologetic conviction he was good at the few things he had undertaken and made the most of simple logic and modest effort.
Both McCormick brothers belied basic arrogance, Glenn with his geniality and Denis with a frank shyness from being too outspoken, more like his father and Glenn like his mother. Both in their seventies, they seemed to have more than lived up to their own aspirations — Glenn and his Porsche 911, Denis his farm and lake home — as much their parents had done, and who would say they didn’t get a good start in life and benefit from their parents? Either one of them could have squandered John and Mary’s legacy yet chose to conform to disciplined standards and manage the risks of life so far as to result in enjoying a lifestyle John and Mary would approve. Whether their half-brother my father Dick Sturgis and his behavior ever served as a cautionary tale to guide Glenn and Denis away from how not to behave if one wanted to live a good life, it could only be observed how irrelevant my dad was to his brothers and how rarely they spoke of him.
Unless you count his sudden DNA links discovered through the Ancestry database, John really had no other family ties than his sons and grandchildren, and Dick’s kids by extension. He had no living ancestors to emulate, or repudiate. What ever became of that long lost brother of his named Raymond no one will likely ever answer. People will remember him as the piano tuner after he is long forgotten as the accordion bandleader. Among his family descendants his memory will resonate vividly to his grandkids — one of Glenn’s sons is his namesake — and beyond that kept alive in lapping waves of rediscovery by great and great-great grandchildren who happen to care. We should all be so lucky to be so gently forgotten.
As our dinner digressed towards clean-up our conversation babbled and convoluted around the sunset view towards the lake, more lauds to Jane’s housekeeping and Uncle Denis rendering his autobiography as his link to a chain stream to the future. My brother Kevin kept circling back to fretting whether one or more tires on Oleana’s Beamer was losing air. Kerry and I slipped out back towards the parking driveway for a smoke under twilight and the tires looked fine. Uncle Denis assured Kevin he had a pressure gauge and an air compressor in his boat shed to at least get them to town and a tire shop. Oleana was beyond concern for the tires as long as there was the house dog to pet. On the muted jumbo TV the opening ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics now being held a year later because of the covid-19 pandemic looked digitally sterile being staged without audiences to keep up Japanese pandemic protocol — like a digital manga of marching international athletes — ZOZO Olympians, not really worth watching so nobody did.
We sat aound in the oval arena of easy chairs, La-Z-Boys and BardaLoungers, in the lofty living room over coffee and sodas and traded stories about our kids and dogs. The house dog, some kind of shepherd similar to Michel’s and countless other family dogs, roamed between those who would pet her. I forget her name. She was allowed in the house with certain barrier restrictions, whereas the other dogs stayed outdoors or in their garage kennel. Oleana later told me (and Kerry, who was tuned out) that Jane wanted us to do our smoking at a patio out front of the house facing the lake and not back by the parked cars where we might upset the dogs in the kennel. I never heard Jane say that so I disregarded the advice and preferred to smoke in the shadows out back. Oleana lacked credibility with me but I didn’t openly dispute or contradict her, said nothing to Kerry and simply ignored the advice pending Jane or Uncle Denis saying so. It’s possible Jane told that to Oleana but I thought Oleana was making it up. The dogs didn’t seem to notice us.
Kerry’s cannabis helped lift my cynicism enough to go back into the social circle in the living room more amenable to prolonged chitchat about familial matters of little interest to the world and worldly interests unmentioned in present company. Everyone had survived the pandemic without coming down with covid-19 except Oleana, who admitted never tested positive but was certain in her own mind her pulmonary hassles the past two years were covid. She had gone to the ER a couple of times for a collapsed lung but always tested negative and was treated without being admitted. Nobody on the McCormick side had fallen sick either, which seemed lucky given how many on Glenn’s side worked in health care. Everyone was vaccinated. Worked from home whoever could. Wore masks. Kept to a distance. Observed all the protocols ZOZO prescribed because the science was right and society needed to flatten the curve of the rate of infection, no regrets. Even now there was a new variant called delta causing surges in the south. For that Jane and Uncle Denis marveled at us traveling cross country just to attend the funeral of a 97 year old man. Of course to us all (Oleana by osmosis) he was not just any 97 year old man, though Murray and Roxanne conceded how strange it was to travel for any reason since covid.
Every single thing in everyday life was made more difficult by the pandemic, everyone agreed. Somehow coming through it intact seemed a miracle. Bringing their family to Disney World meant for Uncle Denis and Jane a defiant celebration of survival. A new start. A reward to their family for pitching in together. They planned it before John fell ill, but since he died they felt impelled to affirm themselves, have some fun together and look forward to the future. This would be at least the third time for Denis, Jane and their boys together but the first times for the son’s wives. Chris and his wife Katie expected their first child — Denis and Jane’s first grandchild — itself a sign of familial posterity, but the due date was four months away so Katie was not so pregnant the theme parks might be a hassle to navigate and Jane said they hoped the fetus might enjoy the pre-natal atmosphere, and they said Katie in fact influenced their choice of destination because she had never had the opportunity to visit Orlando before. Zack’s wife, whose name was Yamoor, was an immigrant from Turkey and likewise never had the opportunity yet and she voted for Disney World because that was one place in the United States every foreigner wants to visit.
We learned that Yamoor worked in Lansing as an au pair on a work visa when she met Zack. Unlike Chris and Katie who both worked as accountants at big firms, it wasn’t clear how Zack met Yamoor except they crossed paths while he freelanced as a computer network techie and were married about a year now. Zack kept on freelancing with different clients in the Grand Rapids area and Yamoor had a job there in early learning at a pre-school. Back at Beth’s house in Ft Wayne I noticed her though I didn’t connect her with Uncle Denis’s son or know her name until later, she impressed me for subtly directing and coaching Glenn’s grandkids to serve food to Glenn and me at the lunch at Glenn’s daughter’s house, so for some reason I associated the petite and vivacious black haired young lady as associated somehow with Glenn’s offspring, but no, Yamoor belonged to Uncle Denis. This intrigued me because she seemed like an interesting person and an exotic story with a better chance of keeping up with her in the future through Uncle Denis.
If I kept up with Uncle Denis in the future.
So, speaking of immigrants, Uncle Denis asked me in front of present company to explain once again how Grandma Stoner was born in Iceland and came to Minnesota through Canada. He got me started with a question: Is it that her mother was an English servant of Danish nationality who got knocked up by a lord of some manor? That’s what Grandma Mary and Aunt Winnie told me more than once. John McCormick knew this story too. The servant girl’s name was Mary Mueller. That would make Grandma Mary Mary the Third, as Grandma Stoner’s name was Mary too. Mary Mueller senior, pregnant and disgraced, was banished from her employer’s household and deported presumably back to Denmark and then exiled to Iceland where she gave birth to our Grandma Stoner, born Mary Mueller in about 1870. My daughter Michel has probed records kept in Iceland from that time and has found signs she was born in Reykjavik. At some point she migrated to Halifax, Nova Scotia. They say she had considerable seamstress skills and migrated westward to Calgary, Alberta, where she met up with our great-grandfather James Stoner, native of Stewartville, Minnesota, a self-styled outdoorsman and adventurer. They married and settled for a time in Mountain Home, Idaho, where Mary the Third and Winnie were born. They all moved to Stewartville, where Mary and Winnie grew up, when James was called home to run the Stoner family farm when his father died.
The big deal was Grandma Mary was a child of a bastard child who grew up in Iceland, migrated to America and lived comfortably to be 97. John McCormick’s father came from unknown lineage too, which seemed to amplify any point Uncle Denis might be trying to make about pedigree vis-a-vis fortitude, and add how farming was always in his blood. Never mind his father not enamored with rural lifestyle, and Grandpa Stoner known for his farming ineptitude.
This opened Denis up to talking about Glenn and how he admired his brother’s sharpness and knack for landing on his feet. Just out of high school Glenn faced the military draft and a likely deployment to the Vietnam War. He passed the physical and assignment too army boot camp. He learned before reporting to muster that if he could type 45 words a minute he could qualify for a clerical assignment stateside, so he taught himself how to type within two days. In boot camp he scored high on certain tests and qualified for officer training. But about a week before graduation from his first course completion Glenn got kicked out of the program for violating a curfew going off base, lured to meet up with Ginger, his eventual first wife. Next he was discharged altogether and ended up back in Ft Wayne working at the music store. Denis credited Glenn’s energy for taking the business into its modern age, which their parents may not have gone by themselves and which opened opportunities for Denis himself. Glenn’s second marriage and second career as a financial advisor did him well, in Denis’s estimation. And he didn’t have to go to Vietnam.
Denis and Jane showed signs of fatigue but kept up with their company by letting us entertain them by accepting their wishes we make ourselves at home and offering coffee and ice cream. Murray, Kerry, Roxanne and I kept the Nespresso machine going and warned our hosts we were running low on the blue colored coffee pods. Denis apologized again and again for the time squeeze afforded our visit due to the planned vacation to Disney Orlando but he really wanted us to experience his world, if just half a day. He regretted we could not stay the whole weekend — or into the next week ideally and they had to rush us away the next day when their kids were due to assemble for the night and travel together the next morning to the airport.
Of course we understood. It meant a lot to Denis to host us as if a once in a lifetime opportunity that might not come again, although he hoped now that we have been here we would make a return trip. We could take the ferry across Lake Michigan. Roxanne and Murray shared their research about crossing out of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and Denis said we could save money and leave the car in Manitowoc and he and Jane could pick us up in Michigan at Ludington and drop us back when it was time to go home — next time.
I for one was at least as tired as Denis and Jane. Hours riding in a car made me stiff and sore. Beyond that I couldn’t quite reconcile this side trip from Fort Wayne to Orleans, Michigan except to not hurt Uncle Denis and Jane’s feelings. Up to me we would have reclused to our hotel, hung out at the spa, the hot tub, maybe explored old Fort Wayne a little, found a supper club for a quiet fancy dinner. Or we could have headed home. I thought Uncle Denis was being unreasonable to in-effect force us to go extra miles just to visit his mansion on the lake for about fifteen minutes, but I could see my siblings and Roxanne’s point of view, we had nothing else to do on a Thursday in July.
Out back having a smoke with Kerry I used my iPhone flashlight to eyeball Oleana’s tires and they actually looked fine, certainly not flat. I rationalized my crabbiness smoking and pacing the driveway, which seemed to rouse the garage dogs who didn’t howl or bark but still might make me look bad in front of Oleana. The fresh summer darkness helped calm my anxiety. The nighttime warmth outdoors thawed my nerves opposite the chill of the air-conditioning of the house, not actually too hot of a day and I usually like hot weather. Since we weren’t talking Kerry went back indoors and left me out there alone, which semmed to distract and soothed the dogs and blessed me with a moment of serenity. With that came the rationale to forgive my guilt for trivializing my ambivalent feelings for my family. Stretching and pacing loosened my stiff joints and muscles and I longed to stretch out and relax. In truth it mattered to be gracious.
I said once that my observation of the sibling rivalry between uncles Denis and Glenn motivated me to become a better brother to my own siblings. Theirs was an aggressive meanness I never wanted to have to repent or overcome later in life. Our childhood was weird enough without us turning against each other. It meant not teasing them or belittling their qualities. Being the biggest big brother meant engendering support where our parents failed us without directing and intimidating the outcomes and bossing everybody around. Maybe I was a weak leader. If I were in charge would I have forced us to go to dinner at Beth’s house the night before and forgo this whorlwind tour of west central southern Michigan, I wasn’t sure how much free will and consent I owed this road trip except not to corrupt it for the rest of them, give everybody credit for good intentions. I knew I shouldn’t act like a big baby and spoil the party. Kerry, Murray and Kevin deserved to go after their own links to Uncle Denis, Glenn, John, Grandma Mary, Aunt Winnie, Grandma Stoner, our dad’s side of the family, as relatively deprived of exposure to them as children, they being the younger half of our family. It’s not their fault I was full of Denis and Glenn by the time I was thirteen years old, before Kerry was seven, Murray was three and Kevin was even born.
Back in the living room Denis was asking about the end days of Aunt Winnie. Kerry described the ice cream socials we (our mom and a sizeable delegation of our siblings) used to attend at the nursing home where she lived, where the entertainment was always a ukelele singer named Johnny Pineapple. Denis lamented not visiting Aunt Winnie during her final years but felt better knowing Colleen and her kids were still paying her attention to the end. Denis asked if Winnie’s son Ron ever seemed to come around and the response was no, and as I reentered the conversation Roxanne was saying Winnie acknowledged Ron almost never came to visit, and only to set administrative directives and sign papers. He was a bigshot with 3M in Europe, a very busy man. Last seen at Winnie’s funeral, which Roxanne emphasized was organized by Colleen, Ron found himself out of his element of being in charge, in Roxanne’s telling, he was almost humbled, but even that seemed faked.
Besides resenting Ron for how he neglected his mother, Aunt Winnie, Denis resented how Ron sold off his parents’s lake property to a developer who replaced the shabby cabins with lakefront condos. Denis understood the reasons to develop the property — Winnie acquired the squat, narrow prefabricated house with its tarpaper fake-brick siding for cheap from surplus former Korean war army housing and had it hauled and assembled on a lake lot she and Uncle Linden scraped to buy in the 1950s as a summer escape — it just seemed Winnie never saw a nickel of the profit. Denis recalled how, on a fairly recent visit to Minnesota with his father, they set out to locate the exact cabin location by reckoning and by backroads they remembered between the towns of Princeton, Cambridge and Spectacle Lake. He said once they determined they found it by proximity to a bridge over the Rum River they could hardly believe what now occupied the old row of cozy cabins. What Winnie and Linden bought for a few hundred dollars was now worth at least half a million.
Then Denis asked me about my dad’s relationship with Ron. They grew up in the same neighborhood and weren’t but a few years apart in age, so were they close growing up, considering how close their mothers were? Did they stay in touch as adults?
I was told that Dick and Ronnie grew up close as brothers. Both Winnie and Grandma Mary said so. Ron got along with Colleen; they were more the same age. They all said Ronnie looked up to and worshipped Dick. When Ron went into the army after high school he entrusted Dick to look after his prized possession, some kind of 1940s Ford painted candyapple red. Ronnie wasn’t in boot camp before Dick Sturgis sold the car and pocketed the money. Ron never forgave him. Ever. And it never really mattered. Cousin Ronnie went to college on the GI Bill and got in on the ground floor of a multinational corporation and hustled his way up high, ditched his homely American wife and kids in Ohio to marry some kind of duchess of Belgium, he smugly out-hustled his cousin Dickie in life and surely enjoyed his own revenge for the candyapple Ford.
Nobody knew exactly how or exactly when Ron died, we all just seemed to find out through Colleen, who passed it on to John McCormick — how she learned about it was probably obviously the newspaper obituary, but I for one never read them A to Z. Nobody seemed to mourn. Kerry, Meaghan and Kevin barely heard of him, Roxanne, Denis and I didn’t like him and the rest never knew him, or for that matter knew Aunt Winnie. Ron died within two years of his mother. Nobody knew where he might be interred. Uncle Denis again expressed his gratitude and respect to Colleen and those of us kids for visiting Aunt Winnie in her last years, especially after she got evicted from the residence where they eventually sponsored her funeral — kicked out for continuous and flagrant flouting of the rule against smoking cigarettes in her room — and poor Ronnie had to fly back from Brussels to relocate her in the cheapest place he could find that would accept her, far as anyone could tell who kept visiting her that final year. Uncle Denis seemed to feel as guilty as I did for forsaking Grandma Mary in her fatal years. Our elders disappeared before our very eyes and we ourselves prepared hourly for our own demise.
On that fatalistic note Denis announced to his guests he was going to bed — to go to sleep, he needlessly added, saying at his age sleep was his only reason to go to bed. Jane too excused herself and they encouraged us to stay up as late as we liked, use the TV, play pool, help ourselves to beverages and snacks and leftover chicken and biscuits but they were off and away to their master bedroom off an upstair tangent of the house apart from where we toured and inhabited.
As of our last smoke together that night Kerry announced she was tuned out, time to recharge batteries and anyway she’d had enough trying to keep up with the chatter. Me too, I said.
Murray and Kevin talked Kerry into staying up to play some pool, so they got sodas and chips and racked up. Roxanne and Oleana both retreated to the respective bedrooms to prepare for sleep. Kevin wanted me to stay up and play pool but I begged off because I honstly needed to recline and sleep.
One thing before I went to bed Kevin wanted to observe: Uncle Denis calls you Mike.
True, I answered. Mom used to like to call me Michael, my middle name. I didn’t have to go by my legal name until I started school, and to the family when I was little I was known as Michael and with the McCormicks it stuck — Grandma Mary, John, Denis and Glenn. Aunt Winne. I guess I don’t really notice. Grandpa Kelly used to call me Michelangelo. It’s similar to calling you Petey from when you were Peter, before mom decided your name was Kevin.
I always had an uneasy relationship with my baby brother. Fifteen years between us, we were never close. Most of his childhood I was out of the house. To me he was an obnoxious little brat. As an adolescent he was disrespectful and antagonistic. Alcohol and drugs didn’t help. He partied his young adulthood picking bar fights (usually getting his ass kicked) and getting girlfriends pregnant (3). His marriage to a jealous, paranoid, manipulating psycho got him a third daughter in three years and as a wife egged him on against his family, Kevin joined AA and joined an evangelical christian church. AA helped him slowly reestablish bonds with his sisters and mom who got alienated by his wife. When his wife died in a reckless backroads one car crash a lot of people felt truly sorry for Kevin. Their daughter was three. Kevin’s church helped him cope. It hit him hard when our mom died, as one might expect, but his siblings supported him in his grief and his antagonism rekindled in his behavior. I didn’t like him and didn’t trust him, always wary when he acted nice, and waited for the eventual insult.
Fifteen or so years later my defenses are mostly down. We still aren’t close but my philosophy of tolerance has yielded practical results as far as peaceful relations among my siblings. I still think Kevin is a knuckleheaded mook but don’t show it in his face, and he treats me with overdue respect for never condemning him or shunning him for his foibles. One could say he paid his dues, stayed sober and held a steady blue collar job. Raised his daughter through high school, albeit with the help of various cohabiting girlfriends of nice character who subbed adequately for the dead mom, not to mention several of his sisters and some female cousins. He remarried one time, for a minute, to a babe significantly younger who worked in the hair styling trade and who divorced him soon after they conceived his fourth daughter. To his credit he faithfully paid child support to each and every mom except the mom of his first born who suddenly disappeared, stole away back to Honduras for some reason, took the child and left no forwarding address when the kid was about seven. He seems to have put away a wise portion of his inheritance from our mom. He stopped going out of his way to offend people to get recognized. He somehow learned basic humble manners and gradually earned back his welcome among our clan. Still, I never expected to see our father’s 8 x 10 portrait again.
Oleana was not only his most recent romance but a reignition of a torrid cohabitation that ended with recriminations when they were barely in their 20s now together all over each other in their 50s. It was hard for me to figure if Oleana was some long due reward for becoming good or just more dues to pay. They parted without children in common but now she and he had separate grown or near grown kids. She seemed to be a good influence on him now, as opposed to when they used to physically fight and beat each other up. More liberal, she seemed to have persuaded him to rethink his attraction to Donald Trump (a fractious affectation limiting his camaraderie with his kinfolk) and mellowed some of his religious self-righteousness and intolerance of liberal ideas. I have already said I don’t know about Oleana or her strange history, but she seemed to be a good influence on my youngest brother and a harmless family companion, liked and trusted by my sisters. In some ways I wondered why somebody as worldly as she was interested in a mook bumpkin like Kevin, but then I wondered if I overestimated her worldliness, she just seemed to act as if. In any way, they were none of my business. I wished them nothing but happiness.
So on this night at the house of Jane and Uncle Denis I left Kevin, Kerry and Murray playing pool and followed Roxanne to our assigned boudoir. The soundproofing was uncanny though the clack of pool balls has a sonic penetration one feels more than hears. Voices uncoherent, laughter without context. Did we wish we were out there, part of the party? No, not really. It was enough for one day. Who knew Michigan was so large? Neither of us played pool — we knew how, of course, but were never any good. As for family gossip, we both needed to set ourselves aside. We weren’t missing a thing. I needed sleep. For some reason the mattress of the bed seemed to resist how I wanted to recline and it required adjusting my posture to begin to relax at all. There was something sinister about the central air conditioning and the white noise of the chilly airflow. Roxanne cuddled me until I made her too warm and she turned to her other side. Good night. Good night. Love you. Love you too.
Chapter 17
If I woke up a lot in the night maybe I never really slept at all. Roxanne snored away but I kept checking the slit in the curtains for signs of daylight. There was a clock on the bedside table too far away for me to read without glasses. The night passed quickly so maybe I slept more than I credited myself. When dawn came I was ready. New day. New attitude. Let’s go home. Taking a morning smoke I checked Oleana’s Beemer. The tires still all looked inflated.
I wasn’t the first one up. That was Uncle Denis. He was not a coffee drinker but enjoyed Diet Coke any time of day. By then astute with the Nespresso machine I brewed a latte from the blue pod, milk from the fridge. He was fully dressed and shaven, plain Polo shirt and Docker slacks and scrolling his tablet and tending to personal matters. His phone buzzed and he checked the text. We exchanged good morning. He lamented we wouldn’t have enough time to take out the pontoon boat, or even go for a ride in the speedboat. His kids were coming that morning. Zack and Yamoor were bringing their dog, which would board along with Jane’s dogs while they were in Florida. They would all ride to Grand Rapids airport in Jane’s Lincoln Navigator tomorrow morning and catch their flight to Orlando. Jane got up next, then Roxanne, then Murray, Kerry, then together Kevin and Oleana. Uncle Denis insisted we all go to breakfast before we started home at a place he liked in Greenville, a nearby town.
While us guests freshened ourselves and organized our baggage and Jane tended to her dogs, Denis guided me upstairs to the loft rooms which comprised his office, a gym room with weights, a bench and treadmill, a music studio with electric guitar and bass, keyboard and mixing boards, amps, speakers, cords, pedals and headphones along with dozens of small gadgets — Denis explained this used to be Zack’s room and he still came around sometimes to use it. Chris’s old room was currently bare.
Downstairs back at the kitchen Denis showed me a metal lunchbox saved from childhood in the likeness of a yellow shool bus with kids and the driver seen through the windows. His parents had saved it. The paint was barely scratched and colors hardly faded and the embossed bus contours without a dent. The latch intact. He hoped the found invitation to my first birthday party, if not that portrait of my dad meant as much to me as this lunchbox to himself.
And then he held up his phone and said, “Glenn called me this morning. Said he was checking in, he’s on his way back down to Cicero and he appreciated my help in Fort Wayne, whereas he and his kids did most of the heavy lifting, and wanted to wish us a good trip to Disney. And then before he hung up he said ‘I love you’. That’s the first time in my whole life he’s ever told me that.”
I handed him back his lunchbox. Congratulations, I said sincerely. At the ending of one of the worst, saddest weeks of his life he’d realized a golden emotional jackpot and his sharing that with me privately underscored how much joy Glenn’s declaration meant to him. Characteristically whether happy or sad or pissed off or probably in pain he showed unemotion, a bumpkin pokerface. His voice did not waver but somehow his eyes emoted his stunned realization and shock to what it meant, and I was glad for him. A milestone of his life, it was an accidental coincidental honor to share the moment with him.
“He never told me he loved me before.” He repeated it much like he did about going to a baseball game with his dad just before he died.
I said it was something he could take with him to EPCOT.
We concluded the tour around back behind the garage serving as Jane’s kennel to an outbuilding larger than a garage but smaller than a barn, where alongside his own Mercedes RV camper he kept his parents’ venerable airstream travel trailer and John’s final 1996 gold firemist Oldsmobile Ninety Eight. He lamented again how short our stay and that he wished there was time to visit his farm where he kept some more equipment, his tractors and a work truck. (No livestock anymore, not since 2012.) And he really was sorry we didn’t get a boat ride.
Kevin met us around by the parked cars. He asked Uncle Denis if he had a psi tire gauge and of course he did in the glovebox of his own Mercedes. While they checked Oleana’s tires I went back indoors to help Roxanne complete our packing and loading Murray’s car. Denis and Jane’s kids started to arrive, first Chris and Katie, then Zack and Yamoor and their dog. For a short while we reconvened at the arena of easy chairs in the living room to make nice and everybody wish each other a nice trip. Oleana acquainted herself with Yamoor’s dog. My sisters and Roxanne complimented Katie about her pregnancy, how healthy she seemed, how positive, how fleurescent (Murray’s word).
My interest dwelt on Yamoor. Pretty and vivacious, I would have liked to have asked her about Turkey, her background and history, her education, why and how she came to America, but instead I quietly observed her, and even at that I consciously avoided staring at her, all reacting to a certain paranoia she evoked that I might be accused of flirting with her. Such was my old man crush.
This apparently would be their first full family vacation including both Denis and Jane’s sons’ wives, but not their first family vacation. They told about the time a cornhead picking machine manufacturer Denis represented flew them all to visit the manufacturing plant in Italy, and thus they also visited Paris and discovered crepes — they lived on all kinds of crepes on that vacation They loved crepes.
Which triggered Uncle Denis to rustle us Kelly travelers to muster for the breakfast caravan. Jane, the sons and their mates remained behind to ready for their trip, so we said appropriate good byes. Promises were exchanged to stay in touch, more or less. Thanks was expressed to Jane’s hospitality. Oleana and Kevin decided to ride along with Uncle Denis to breakfast and go back to the house. Oleana didn’t trust the reported findings of the psi gauge test enough to expose her car to the highway without inflating the tires with Uncle Denis’s air compressor he kept in the main garage, so they would do that after breakfast and allow them more time to mix and bond with the cousins and Jane and the dogs, and maybe squeeze in a pontoon boat ride before heading home in the mid-afternoon.
Murray again behind the wheel we followed Uncle’s Mercedes on backroads away from the lake and into the fields, county roads, beans and corn and pastures, to a highway that led into the town of Greenville. More than just a few blocks long and three blocks wide, the downtown was a relic of its five and dime heyday, not really dead but not the way it was. We parked in a lot behind our destination off an alley adjoining the antique store. We approached Margo’s cafe on main street from the storefront entrance. Uncle Denis negotiated our position on the wait list and we hung out about twenty minutes looking up and down main street before they had our table ready. Vacant storefronts were one thing but the converted ones not yet leased promised the best aspect of gentrification, the restoration of perfectly sound buildings for public habitation.
Margo’s itself was a good example of sustainable use of downtown space. We got a round table for seven in the front room. It had the vibe of a dive diner only squeaky clean. The aroma of the waffles and bacon and home baked muffins streamed pure away from the kitchen. The main feature of the decor was an array of shelves of painted ceramic cookie jars like still life characters guarding the ramparts. Denis was there for the strawberry waffles, though he recommended the blueberry waffles too. I went for the so-called farmer breakfast of eggs over easy, potatoes shredded and fried, bacon and sausage, wheat toast and a single buttermilk pancake and coffee, please. Some followed Uncle Denis. When the food came it was classic. No mixups. No over or under-cooked oatmeal for Oleana. Fruit and berries all plump and flavorful. Fresh coffee. Muffy muffins. Extra butter for Kerry. Everybody got something they liked.
Conversation synced up the links of the previous two days. As much as I wanted to cuss him out for dragging us hundreds of miles off course for no good reason I thanked Uncle Denis for his and Jane’s hospitality, complimented his kids and their wives and said he was family to us, assured by Murray, and we said a fond good bye. Denis insisted we come back — as soon as before the end of that summer — and we all pledged someday we would return (at least we all implied to pledge so). Kerry whipped out her plastic card anticipating the check but Uncle Denis had it in with the servant to pay the check. Kerry protested but Uncle Denis prevailed, and no one else challenged him.
Later on the road Murray remarked at how Uncle Denis never seemed so generous. He’s a millionaire, I said. Doesn’t he have a reputation for being cheap, Kerry said. Yes, I answered, but he really isn’t cheap, just thrifty. Frugal, said Roxanne. Murray reminisced about times during her and Kerry’s stay in Ft Wayne when they were junior high exiles and would ride along when Grandma Mary gave Uncle Denis money to go to the store, and Uncle Denis would always keep at least some of the change as his cut. Uncle Denis always took his cut.
Advised the best way to circumvent the traffic of Grand Rapids, we skirted the city west towards Lake Michigan and south on I196 towards South Bend, Indiana. Two hours later we were still in Michigan. No such thing as Small World. It did me no good looking out the window but I did it anyways until I scrunched into the folds of the seat and tried to close my eyes wishing I could make the trip in suspended animation. Much as I hoped the mere exodus from Uncle Denis’s house would automatically relieve my resentment, instead my anxiety multiplied as I realized there was a whole civilization going on out there but nothing to look at out the window. If this was the biscuit basket of the American midwest there should at least be some kind of aroma. No longing vista of the great inland sea. To have come this far for nothing and have nothing to look at or to look forward to looking at for about seven hundred miles rung like that awful Leonard Cohen song Death of a Ladies Man — “I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.”
Trying not to pout I assumed a neofetal posture, and as I said, tried to tune out this world and catch up the peaceful sleep lost this whole road trip and to recapture my Summer of 69.
My companions chatted about Uncle Denis, of course, his good fortune and limited influence on our lives. Murray observed what a stiff he was, almost joyless in his demeanor, mostly humorless; Kerry wondered if he might be autistic, or else somewhere on the spectrum. Or is it from growing up in Indiana, Murray asked rhetorically. Something they could sort through if they got to know him, and that would entail a return visit, which could facilitate a ferry ride fro Manitowoc to (what was the name of that town?) Ludington. “We’re see,” said Kerry, her classic malaprop.
Not me, I thought. Not trading a few hours on the landscaped highway for a dull couple hours aboard a ship with nothing to see except the sea. Not exactly like the scenic intercity ferries of Lake Como in Italy, they were talking Lake Michigan, at a premium price and not saving time. Fact was I felt no compusion to make the trip back there by highway, or airplane, or for any reason.
Some things should be considered settled for all time, even steven, quid pro quo, all square, nothing more to say. Then who was I to discourage my sisters? They hardly knew this uncle and it might benefit their sense of family tree to adopt the McCormicks for their entertainment and amusement. To fulfill something like tias they didn’t need my facilitation. My wife might lean susceptible to said future adventure across the Great Lakes but I felt I could sway her towards more compelling scenery than just some bare ass lake, knowing she jonesed to keep traveling and get away from being stuck in the house. Roxanne was familiar with Uncle Denis through me, and she and I were married about fifty years so she knew my kinship with him in adult life and may have known him better than my sisters who afforded almost a generational distance while Roxanne kept up year to year. If would not seem difficult to persuade Roxanne to forgo a return to the world of Uncle Denis in favor of someplace like the Apostle Islands or the coastline of the Upper Peninsula if it were merely a matter of exploring somewhere alongside a great lake.
I never thought Roxanne liked him very much but put up with him because I had to put up with him, which was another example of her faithful acts of love.
When I bothered to lift my eyes to the landscape I saw a road sign making reference to a Blue Star Highway, which I remembered from our 1985 camping trip with our friends John and Barb. It didn’t look familiar or strange, or evoke deja vu or conjure alien vibes or arouse curiosity for exploration. Nothing tied to geography. A road sign referred the town of South Haven, which might have been a landmark from that vacation or might mean nothing. I remember acres and acres of sand dunes above the beach near the campground, and Lake Michigan was warm enough to swim, some said a byproduct of a nuclear power plant a few miles down the coast. I remember listening to Live Aid on the radio on the road. Vincent was three years old and was into Phil Collins — “Sussudio” was number one that week on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. The Twins were playing a series in Detroit that week and we listened to the games on the Tigers radio network, the great Ernie Harwell doing both play by play and color commentary unassisted. Such flashback memories almost made me sad because I remembered them so seldom and until that moment didn’t care about looking back upon a piece of the historical fiction of my life that could have bonded me to my family and friends for life for all I knew then, it was more than thirty years ago. I said nothing to Roxanne to draw arrention to the vicinity of the 1985 vacation to the Michigan dunes and apparently she didn’t notice on her own and cared less than I did to remember the trip for its geographic or sentimental merits. What was important about retrieving memories appropriately forgotten?
What was that line of James Faulkner about the past not really passed, or something like that?
Approaching the Michigan Indiana line the discussion turned to getting gas in Michigan or Indiana and how to get past Indiana into Illinois and Wisconsin and skip Chicago. To our collected memory the gas was cheaper in Michigan so we stopped at a truck stop emporium inside the border to fill the tank, go potty, buy doughnuts and coffee and a post card of Michiana for our niece Macushla, a post card graphomaniac, and for me and Kerry a chance to go off beyond the pumps in the parking lot for a smoke before reconvening at the car to plot an easy way home beyond the anticipated tie-ups of Chicago.
Murray steadfastly at the wheel Roxanne and I each queried our iPhone garmin apps for recommended routes west through Gary, Indiana. The directions seemed to conflict, even contradict, but we found ourselves heading south on a main thoroughfare. This seemed wrong but we proceeded along for a while until I opened a fresh garmin query and the app then directed us to go the other way and we found ourselves going east back toward Michigan. When we found ourselves routed into a highway construction zone detour we knew this wasn’t right and Roxanne opened another new query, which sent us westward at last toward Illinois on Gary’s main east-west avenue through the breadth of the city.
Gary is not a pretty town but it’s far from unwelcoming and derelict, contrary to its reputation. There are pretty aspects, nice brick houses with lawns and trees. Nice cars in the moderate traffic spoke of a busy local population. If the storefronts and shops looked shabby the streets and sidewalks were clean. Zig-zagging and cris-crossing the town we got a reasonable tour of the neighborhood arterials. Small strip malls might offer a liquor store or dollar general with the adjacent spaces neatly boarded up. You could see economic struggle. Black lives mattered. It was once a steel shipping harbor and home to labor recruited from the Deep South in the 20th Century to work the mills, transports and refineries along that sock toe of Lake Michigan abutted by the border of south Chicago. Today it could be the western edge of the Rust Belt. GGary isn’t big enough to get lost or to linger enough to compare it to cities like Sterling, Colorado hard enough hit by history and changing times to show scars of deterioration along with signs of resilience and survival.
My old friend John of that 1985 vacation used to say everybody’s got to live somewhere.
We drove west through Hammond, Indiana and crossed into Illinois at Calumet City. Reading a Google map I tried to set a destinatioin for a town of Harvey, just past Dolton, where we could catch I294 aimed northbound in the general direction of Des Plaines and the northwest passage to Rockford and the Wisconsin border. The low rise urban communities outside of Gary seemed to get denser and more urbane in a modicum of prosperity the further we cruised into Illinois on the urban main roads. It became clear: there is no way to go from where we came to get home without going through Chicago. Or drive five hundred miles out of our way. Murray was getting grumpy trucking through Hammond and Calumet City and so I promised at Harvey we would rejoin the Interstate freeway system for the rest of our journey.
At least we didn’t have to go through the direct Loop, I said, though we might as well have for all the putzing around through Gary, Indiana and Calumet City in search of a leg of Interstate to connect us into the inevitable orbit of Chicago. There is no escaping Chicago. Except maybe the Manitowoc Ludington ferry.
It was about mid-afternoon by the time we caught up to the freeway traffic flowing west by northwest towards Wisconsin but away from Milwaukee. Every exit a new town or another freeway connecting more towns outlying Chicagoland, and if you didn’t feel before that American population occupied every square foot of earth in North America it only becomes most evident in a journey through Chicagoland, a territory as vast as it is dense with intertwined, interdependent municipal communities explicitly positioned to support the city of Chicago, which is positioned geographically at that crux of Lake Michigan which is the crossroads between Michigan, Indiana and Ohio and Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas — unless you go across Canada, or across the waters of two Great Lakes. Chicago gets a cut both ways, coming and going. By the looks of the traffic in the three or four lanes coming the opposite direction it seemed an even flow, which seemed odd to me considering it to be a Friday and I would have thought the traffic away from Chicagoland and towards the hinterlands for the lakes recreation of Wisconsin and Minnesota would favor more people traveling our direction and getting out of town.
Signs that the pandemic was ending. Semi-trailer trucks cruised the right hand lanes going both ways, passenger cars roared by faster on the left, and on it went. At least, I thought, we escaped the gridlock of the downtown Loop. It occurred to me halfway to Rockford these freeways through Chicagoland used to be tollways where you used to pull up to a booth every so many miles or at an exit where you tossed loose change into a basket. It used to be a navigational art-form to traverse Chicago without taking toll roads — so that’s where my instincts to get off the freeway at Gary came from, escaping the Dan Ryan Expressway. So much for my instincts. At least our sense of continual motion eased Murray’s frustration at not getting anywhere fast and we cruised with the flow escaping Chicago’s field of gravity.
Her music of choice from the 1980s rocked her mood. When the conversation lagged she sang along modestly with Bob Seger, Culture Club or Huey Lewis and the News. It beamed down from a satellite I guess, but the way Murray and the songs synched suggested a soundtrack algorithm targeting my sister’s emotions, and if I were more paranoid and less savvy I would have suspected some kind of sensor giving feedback to the radio station in real time, I knew it was random coincidence. I also knew how uncanny marketing can fill niches waiting to be created if we only get reminded what makes us happy.
Kerry tuned out to rest and recharge her batteries and withdrew from dialogue and couldn’t care less about the music. Roxanne you could tell could go either way, with or without conversation, the music more a background option. She had an e-book in progress.
Murray crooned along with Boy George — I know you’ll miss me blind — caroling her way upstream the vast river of concrete, gliding into whichever lane to match her pace, her beat, her groove. It didn’t matter to her she sang alone because whoever the artist on the radio accompanied her just fine. Didn’t bother me, I’ve traveled with Murray before and didn’t find any of her preferences to object to, including music. The time we drove down to Albuquerque to support our sister Bernadette who was in the slammer for kidnapping a newborn infant we listened a lot to The Cars. When we toured Ireland it was Van Morrison. Here bopping along the interstate at 75 miles an hour through northeastern Illinois it fit to groove to Huey Lewis and the News — Hip to be square. Even if I didn’t agree with the sentiments, I wouldn’t argue the sentiments any more than maybe a parody of a chorus — Become a become a comedian …
Murray and Bob Seger sang his ode to Fire Lake. Near the Twin Cities is a town called Prior Lake where Mystic Lake casino, Little Six bingo and the Canterbury race track are located, which made the town well enough known to substitute its name for the one in the song — Who wants to go to Prior Lake?
Who wants to break the news about Uncle Joe? You remember Uncle Joe, he was the one afraid to cut the cake. Who wants to tell poor Aunt Sarah Joe’s run off to Prior Lake.
Murray was in a good mood and didn’t need me distracting her with questions about why Uncle Joe was afraid to cut the cake — is this about fear of aging, of getting old, and saying fuck this shit I’m heading out for one big final long shot gamble to get laid down so fast before I die and whatever else Bob Seger tells me I am entitled to? Later in another song he sings, Come back baby, rock and roll never forgives. At least that’s how I hear it.
Content Murray required no further guidance from me to get to Rockford I resumed my neofetal pose, closed my eyes and simulated suspended animation. A favored method of enduring long space travel in DC comics, suspended animation always proved somehow more intteresting than looking out the spacecraft window at nothing but vast everlasting space. Green grass aside, and landscaped planted trees, warehouses and exits, this part of Illinois could have been deep space, someplace to skip unless you got business to stop along the way. Or actually lived there. It occurred to me I might be traversing the most populated middle of nowhere in North America and not be able to define it.
Roxanne posed a general question. Isn’t this stretch of interstate supposed to be the Illinois Tollway? Where are the toll booths? How do we pay?
Technology, Murray answered. They know we’re here. They know who we are. When they send me the bill I’ll let you know what each of you owe. They can’t afford to stall traffic like this at toll gates like the olden days when you two back there were young.
Murray was nine years younger than me but those nine years difference in our lifetime fully underscored the historical technological changes over time. A short span of time. This got Kerry plugged back in, the music muted and the three women vocalized their perceptions of which ways the world veered weird. The covid-19 pandemic amplified what’s been crazy all along. If anything the pandemic put a halt on the madness to evaluate what’s most important but it’s clear we haven’t learned anything. Trump intended to run again in 2024. Roxanne compared the trajectory of the country as going to hell in a picnic basket. So much despair and no antidote.
Suspended animation, I thought but did not say.
Their conversation took on substance addiction, a topic top of Murray’s mind. Professionally she worked as a managing nurse at a recovery and treatment center which happened to specialize in treating people of the LGBTQ community, which may have a higher percentage of addiction to the general straight population, this due to higher stress. Kerry didn’t participate much, she vulnerable to criticism for her cannabis and nicotine habits and sensitivity about her gambling addiction (Who wants to go to Prior Lake? Kerry). Both Kerry and Murray — and brother Kevin and sister Heather for that matter — belonged to AA and claimed alcohol sobriety for several years, decades perhaps. Murray explained to Roxanne, who admitted she had trouble understanding addiction not being a confessed addict, her opinion that the core of substance abuse comes out of a person’s attempts to hide their feelings, to escape feeling feelings.
While they mulled over feeling feelings I listened quietly, as did Kerry recharged and plugged in, for any personal inferences, which never came.
To my mind they had it backwards: I enjoyed substances like cannabis to bring my feelings forward and release them, not suppress them. But I didn’t volunteer my point of view out of deference to Murray’s expertise and because I didn’t want to waste the rest of our journey in a debate I would never win or even reach a stalemate. I knew I couldn’t speak for other users, especially those whose liveslong traumas bedeviled them to seek respite and relief from a world of meanness and failed deliriums. Problems we experience through art and journalism but rarely and thankfully seldom first hand except like Murray in an institutional setting. We know these issues exist and plague individuals and society, and we are expected to fix them with consensus and money. Roxanne might say the road to hell is a picnic basket of good intentions. Personal liberty in a viable democracy complicates solutions. Where is personal responsibility in all this liberty, Roxanne asked after Murray confided that a high percentage of residents at her treatment center were ordered by the court. My personal fallback for when I’m confronted with contradictions of politics and public policy is to defer to the Serenity Prayer and own up to my own fault and responsibility and no more, and try to be wise enough to recognize the boundary where it’s not in my control.
Thoughts like that and the thing attributed to John Wesley about doing all the good we can, wherever we can, whenever we can graced my mind while our car coursed middle America and didn’t speed too fast, just average, keeping up safely at 77 miles per hour and everybody involved in this traffic procession for miles and miles both ways held a stake in each other’s calm acceptance of responsibility. Beware the impaired. I get that. This was how far afield my mind wandered those last few hundred miles of Illinois until that final pinch between Rockford and Beloit. When I saw the big idle Belvedere auto plant loom like a fortress on the plain and recede behind us under the horizon I realized how gar from home we truly were and how far we still had to go. Crossing the border into Wisconsin only reminded me we were still another state away, we would never solve our world’s problems and I had run out of anything to say.
If this excursion to Fort Wayne was supposed to bring me some kind of closure or cloture to my own life it was dangerously close to backfiring, not that it could produce profoundly chaotic results but more that it would produce a profound nothing. Tracing John McCormick’s lineage barely accounted for a smidgen of my personality and none of my genes. He was somebody’s grandpa but not mine. He was a kind and honorable man. He lived to play pool one last day. His remains hoisted into the upper mausoleum wall, a round of Taps and so long, it’s been good to know you.
My kids never knew him, barely knew who he was. They never knew Grandma Mary, and barely Aunt Winnie. Is it my fault for not obsessively drawing the family circle close? For deliberately allowing the bonds to lapse and letting us to drift apart on purpose? Am I an example of an anti-family generation, denouncing my parents and forebears for setting me up to get by for merely showing up, no skills just dreams, raised on incommunicable deliriums and promises proven untrue and sold as gospel, so willing to break from the past to live in peace no longer looking backward at the family tree?
The gnarly, knotty family tree, bark nicked and blazed. How can it be that I exist genetically to be this person conscious of being this genetic person? I am the grandfather now. Did I skip past being a father? No, but it passed too fast to record it much less live through the times, the 1980s and 90s. I see myself in the best of myself in the lives and personalities of each of my kids and feel proud of who they are and grew up to be, but deeper yet I recognize what they have inherited from me genetically and have to deal with existentially on the molecular level. I like to think Roxanne and I have passed on some good traits to our daughter and son, who have passed these good traits to our granddaughters, and I realize nobody is going to thank us. (Well, Roxanne maybe.) I for one offer no nominations from my Sturgis or Stoner kinfolk for saintly admiration, certtainly not my dad. And as for the Kelly branch, that and five bucks’ll get you a cup of coffee.
My offspring inherit from me a certain neuro-intelligence which also manifests forms of depression. I feel sorry for passing on these genes but I can help by being around and looking after trends I might have seen in my younger self if I were looking. Now as a senior citizen it seemed hard not to surrender to blame for the fates of Gens X, Y and Z. Of course it’s my fault. I passed on my genes, including a susceptibility to depression. But I passed on high intelligence and capacity to learn, or so I thought. So I help guide my offspring through life, or so I think. Maybe it’s all behavioral, regardless of genetics. Maybe it’s cognitive.
Cerebral tangents were not new to me but on this trip weren’t leading me any closer to a desirable outcome. At a truck stop in Wisconsin the far side of Beloit the crowd seemed a little more awkward than the savvy patrons of our last gas up in Michigan where pandemic behavior seemed so passe. Social distance still a courtesy norm at this Wisconsin crossroads where masks were worn by the service workers behind the walls of plexiglass, and it seemed a step back, as if the coronavirus were making a comeback.
At our next tribal council we brought up whether to find a place to spend the night. Murray offered to keep going. I conceded that there was no reasonable way I was going to attend any free document shredding event tomorrow morning, so I said I was neutral about going straight home or finding a motel to sleep. Kerry voted to keep going. Roxanne offered to drive if we kept going but neutral about stopping somewhere. Murray conceded that at this hour already on a Friday we would be paying top dollar for a room all the way from Madison, the Dells, all the way up through Eau Claire to Menomenie — if there were any available rooms. Since we’re getting that close we might as well go all the way home. This consensus made me happy but I went along as if I were neutral.
And so Murray got behind the wheel once again and we embarked on our final leg of I94 west. I estimated another five hours. Too bad, I thought, if not for the geographic distance the whole rite could have been performed in one day and I could go back into my intimate habitat as easily as crossing the threshold of my home, where I could reflect and analyze this whole frieze of family history from my comfort zone and bias and almost no skin in the proceedings, at my leisure. Instead it entailed a long and tiring journey to attend a very simple ceremony and a lunch. True, we could have flown in and out, which would have cost more and involved connections via Chicago’s O’Hare or Midway, or Detroit — we checked. Road trip was cheap. Not exactly equitable with sharing the driving, but Murray didn’t want to be democratic about driving her car and at this era of my life I really didn’t want to drive even if it would be stimulating to have to pay strict attention to the freeway with the setting sun in our faces, Murray with the visor down and wearing wraparound shades sang to Boz Scaggs’ Lowdown.
The “Road Trip Road Trip” aspect of the past couple days either soaked in (or baked in) the nature of the interaction between us four travelers too nice to each other to quarrel or quibble or else gave each participant their own take away. Kerry reported texts from Kevin and Oleana telling that they were stopping for the night at Des Plaines. They got a late start leaving Uncle Denis’s — took a boat ride. Tires seem to be okay. They still complained of erratic service on AT&T wireless within the Michigan border. (That’s nice.) Murray got her way singing more Boz Scaggs bonus tracks, and Roxanne had her e-book. The four of us more or less settled into our own separate, individual variants of catharsis. I took it to mean we were comfortable with each other enough to respect each other’s private inner space.
I was grateful for this. I didn’t want to talk, or sing, or read or scroll on my phone. In a short while it would get dark and there would be no verdant rolling fields and pastures to gaze upon aimlessly as the parallax of the horizon drifted by like a watched pot that never boiled. I would have liked to have slept but my mind wouldn’t cross over into freefall enough to choose (or make up its mind) whether to go after the things that bothered me or to let all of it go and procrastinate to a time when those things no longer bothered me or bothered me enough to contemplate them until they bothered me no more.
What bothered me most was that the events of the week did nothing to satisfy my craving for peace with my own mortality. Sixty nine years alive on this planet I expected by now to be aware of what this all means to see the end coming and all this go away. All this what? Until John McCormick died my biggest plan of the week was to get up Saturday morning (tomorrow) and drive to some office park in the suburbs to finally dispose of a few boxes of tax returns and related financial and confidential records of my mother and her estate at a mass shredding event sponsored by an investment and insurance brokerage soliciting my business by offering free confidential document destruction and paper recycling. Roxanne was after me to get rid of those boxes for years though she really didn’t need to remind me the statute of limitations had run out on probate requirements quite a few years ago now and it was time to let go, nobody was going to sue me over the execution of her estate, it had been about fifteen years. Fifteen years. How many do I have left? And fifteen more years after that will Michel and Vincent, maybe Clara and Tess handed down to Neko the last of my CD music collection (probably her namesake Neko Case) and a raggedyass spiral notebook journal from when I had neat penmanship? No doubt Roxanne would see to it the recycling would commence the day I gave up the ghost.
The irony of keeping my mom’s records another how long postponed by John McCormick’s funeral and a side trip to Uncle Denis’s lake house in Michigan kept me awake enough through the evening sunset over rolling meadows of green, a red ball hanging vintage over Roxanne’s shoulder out the window like a lantern. Wearing shades the sunset looked even redder than normal given even the faint smoke haze from the western wildfires, which were a given that summer. Heading home he were traveling west on I-90 from Janesville and joined I-94 west outside Madison, but by the compass we were actually traveling north several hundred miles before arcing slightly west halfway up the middle of Wisconsin before making a beeline west to the Twin Cities. So the sun set for us more or less out our left windows, given the angle of the earth at our latitude so soon after summer solstice, when the sun sets after nine. Here was my Summer of 69 and I was feeling impelled to lace my loose ends together in a celtic knot, and no, I had no such artistic control.
It’s believable John McCormick died happy. He lived to an old age in rather good health. He could be satisfied — even proud — of his accomplishments. He was beloved by family and respected by his community. Modest or proud, he must have known his own intrinsic value and felt pleased how his life worked out. He may have realized he had no more unfinished business.
My mom probably did not die happy. Much as she professed to be ready to meet her Lord Jesus in her heart and soul, and as much as she had her estate in order and a recent last will, she wasn’t ready to die and her final moments must have been torment. She had unfinished business. She said she lived as if God could call her at any moment — we know not the day or the hour — but she didn’t want to go. There were too many of our lives to meddle with to live and let live. Maybe the way she lived she could never tie all her loose ends and never be wholly happy. She carried the gene my generation recognized as susceptible to depression. She mated an alcoholic. Her mother was mentally ill in an age when you had to be crazy in secret. My mom had a baker’s dozen good reasons to be unhappy and still made a face at being happy and carefree because her soul was saved and her mortgage paid ahead, and tomorrow was another day of living easy parrading her charismatic personality of entitlement. It must have made her very unhappy when she realized her heart was about to stop and no amount of charm would keep it going.
It mattered to me to die happy and I would not be happy to die. I was not done.
One day the eventual will meet the inevitable. I just don’t want it to happen. I don’t want to be dead.
Depressed with life as I have been in my life I never wanted to be dead. I’ve wanted to be more alive. I’ve been grateful to be alive. I’ve been amazed at still being alive and still dread being dead. Somehow I got into the frame of mind this homage to John McCormick would guide me on a pilgrimage of loose ends to knot like a crude rosary and be done, salvation achieved like that step in AA where you make amends. Only finding amends are open ended. Until the end.
I could die tonight, I thought. My life legacy sealed. Who do I owe? Did I love my children enough? Did I show it? Am I a hypocrite — all false public virtue but corrupt at heart? Or just not so bad.
Compared to John McCormick my virtues will never be as memorable. Instead I’ll be remembered as the grandfather who smoked marijuana on vacation in Colorado the year after ZOZO. Remembered as the dad who betrayed his daughter’s trust by serving as a bad example and enabler of her brother’s bad habits. It would not satisfy me to accept death just yet, if ever. I haven’t found world peace yet. I have not written something worth reading or done something worth writing. I still had opportunity to influence my grandchildren for the positive the longer I lived.
My real grandfathers did nothing of the sort for me or my siblings. My dad’s father, Grandpa George Sturgis kept his distance. I recall only meeting him twice; I was younger than eight and didn’t find him very nice or friendly; Mom used to say he just didn’t like children. Her father on the other hand, Grandpa Don Kelly could have been a classic grandfather when he died when I was seven. I was the only one of my ten siblings who actually knew both of them and how much their total vacancy from their lives matters I can never know, but I actually knew these guys as grandpas and lost them both. All my sisters and brothers knew as a grandpa figure was John McCormick, and as a figure he ultimately remained — except for a few weeks with Kerry and Murray, the runaways from San Diego, John extended no tangible grandpatronage to any of Colleen and Dick’s kids. As I’ve said, with me and even Leenie, Bernadette and maybe Molly he had his chance when we were little but he preferred to be Uncle John, too young yet to be a Grandpa. I guess he was a fine uncle. As fine an uncle as could be expected who lived hundreds of miles away and only came around once a year. An uncle where I got farmed out to for a week in the summer. A kind, generous and sage uncle with a busy life of his own, not my grandpa.
No hard feelings. In fact I wished I could lay all my faults and failings on somebody or other who let me down, but as Jimmy Buffett sang, it’s my own damn fault. No one progenitor was obliged to take care of me, I was never grandfathered into anything, and likewise I was never promised anything and never received special treatment (other than common white privilege) no matter the deluded pretensions of my mother. Perhaps I could have made more of opportunities I encountered without elder guidance had I a dedicated elder looking after me. More than sixty years since my Grandpa Kelly died and maybe I’m the last one to get over it.
Instead of a summer of rejuvenation this Summer of 69 made me feel old. Made me recognize how old I was and know there is really no such thing as getting younger. Mortality was assured. You don’t need an actuary to know which way the wind blows. What better occasion than John McCormick to draw a circle around my life and compare my accomplishments. As a grandfather. Look at it this way, I never had the opportunity to be a grandchild, good or bad. I take that back, I was a grandson of Grandma Mary, whom I ultimately failed and why I felt obliged to make it up with Glenn and Denis through homage to Uncle John.
Some of the good I witnessed on this trip might be the whole point of the trek. Uncle Denis telling me his brother Glenn told him for the first time he loves him. For Uncle Denis to spontaneously confess that to me took a lot of guts. What struck me in the gut about it was probably true, Glenn likely never told Denis he loved him, never before, and both of them were in their seventies. These are brothers who came of age in the 1970s and seemed to escape the New Age post-Aquarius vibes when expressing love between men became common who never conceded to the other sibling they loved one anther — I had to wonder without asking whether Uncle Denis ever told Glenn he loved him either. Come to think of it I’ve never told either of them I loved them, nor recall telling John McCormick or even Grandma Mary. But my sisters and brothers, yes, even Kevin. Maybe our mother required it of us. In our family it goes without saying, so it struck me as sad that Uncle Denis never overheard Glenn accidentally admitting he loved him and made me happy he heard those words at last directly from his older brother because it meant so much to Uncle Denis.
Assured that Glenn loved him in his senior years what would he need from me? Especially since he welcomed me to his mansion.
Against the faded twilight in front of us the full moon snuck up almost behind us on the other side of the car. Round and red from the atmospheric smoke in the ether it was suddenly there outside my window hanging above the shadow greenscape and distant trees of the woodsy farms going by at a parallax rate too slow and deliberate to count for progress. It might simply illustrate Einstein’s relativity to observe how slowly time seems to pass on an interstate freeway when in fact you are whipping along at least 80 miles an hour and making good time.
Likewise an analogy can be made about the perception of time and aging: hours seem to pass as hours and days as days, but in retrospect months and years can seem like minutes. Memories in sheer seconds.
It might be most healthy to live in the moment and be mindful of the experience of the present — it’s certainly a trendy approach — but when the immediate existential moment offers little value to hold attention the mind can provide a lifeline of memories, logistics and imagination. This was mindful living for me on most of the tedious cruise across half of Wisconsin that night in July the year ZOZO ended, my Summer of 69.
Remembering my Grandpa Kelly I could only imagine what might have been. Had he lived as long as I had he could have actually taught me how to read a barometer and a road map but maybe lawbooks. He was an accomplished lawyer. When I say I have a fundamental intelligence to pass genetically to my offspring I offer not just the native street smarts of my parents, the practical sharp logicalness of Grandma Mary and her mother Grandma Stoner, but to the brains and mind of Grandpa Don Kelly for setting the standard for intellectual achievement in my heritage. As a mentor another ten years or so he could have accelerated my engagement with the world. When I was a kid I used to say I wanted to be an attorney when I grew up, because of Grandpa Kelly. It seemed that being an attorney was the best profession in the world. Nobody explained why except lawyers kneew the law and could explain it in case you got in trouble and were innocent. All the rest of my life my mother was after me to go to law school and be a lawyer. Like her dad. After Grandpa died I didn’t have a clue, didn’t know where to begin or whom to ask — certainly not my mother. To her being a lawyer like her father was the ultimate profession because it was a golden stepping stone to true success. If somebody wasn’t at least a lawyer he was at best just a hustling guy who needed one. Grandpa Kelly used to call me Michael Faraday and my mother approved because she thought Michael Faraday was a renown lawyer. She is forgiven, but she thought anybody her father admired must be a lawyer in some way.
Grandpa Kelly could have been a great help to me had he lived another decade, not only maybe pointing me towards electromagnetism but providing guidance and literacy to my upbringing and preparation for challenges of education. In my mind he would have continued to be a relationship with me, one to one. We would have gone places. He used to promise me that when I was old enough, maybe ten, he would take me with him on one of his trips to New York and go to a Yankees game, and I believed him.
At his house he had a desk in a small open office outsude his and Grandma Kelly’s bedroom on the second floor. From his cushy leather desk chair I could see out a big front window to the street and across to Lake of the Isles. Grandpa gave me permission to sit at his desk and use his typewriter, so when Grandma wasn’t anound to annoy with the clatter of the keys I was allowed to practice writing, picking out the keys and pecking a letter at a time on a single piece of typing paper I kept in a drawer he didn’t use that smelled of fresh wood. When I didn’t type I could draw on paper on his blotter. There was a ballpoint pen in a pretend ink stand. Grandma kept fresh cut flowers in a vase. I never saw Grandpa actually work at that desk, it seemed rather ceremonial. He was better known for working late at the office or in meetings somewhere with his bulging briefcase. I would get up from whatever I was doing to greet him at the kitchen door when he came home when I was around and I would sit with him as he ate a late supper, then watch TV and eat popcorn “one at a time” he used to say to try to teach me not to gobble a handful.
The seriously most helpful thing he could have done by living another ten or so years would have been his effect on my mother’s mental health when I was growing up between the ages of eight and eighteen. There’s no saying she wouldn’t have gone crazy anyway but knowing what I’ve observed he would have been a guiding figure to her as always and enabled her to channel her intelligent energies and emotions in ways that didn’t abuse or abandon her children and kept up a quality of life in our upbringing that we lost as a family those years, even if it wouldn’t have saved her marriage to Dick Sturgis. (People have insinuated that Grandpa Kelly didn’t like my dad but it’s true Grandpa never did anything against him.) Mom was about 25 when he died. She was entering her prime. She had five kids — Kerry was a two month old baby — and five more after that despite a deteriorating capability to mother us. Grandpa’s sudden death triggered profound grief and a breakdown in her mind that she never overcame and failed to address or acknowledge well into her forties and fifties and by then she only swapped deniability for immunity. Her estrangement from her sisters without the unifying grace of her father certainly deprived me and my siblings of enjoying and taking advantage of the social status my aunts have conferred on my cousins, their kids, shutting us out of any type of family gatherings they host or sponsor among themselves at Bay Lake, Jacksonville or Grand Cayman where we are never invited.
I remember a time up at the lake when I rode shotgun with Grandpa in his black Cadillac running some errand to Crosby or Ironton on the Cayuna Iron Range and we stopped someplace where he showed me an open pit iron mine. It was a big, terraced hole as big as a lake. At a souvenir shop he bought a jagged rock the size of a waffle with a reddish brown streak he said was iron ore. I don’t know what happened to it. I used to keep it on a shelf of my headboard next to my radio. Five or so years after he died I mostly took the rock for granted but I recall picking it up and feeling its rough terraced edges and examining the veins of pigment as if maybe gold had grown into the seams since last I looked. After the divorce and everything degenerated, imploded, exploded and reloaded within my family I lost track of most of my personal possessions from childhood, which included my radio and Rawlings mitt autographed by Tony Oliva. Some jaggedyass rock ranked last in priorities to salvage what we could of our belongings and follow our mom into the inner city to be renters instead of suburban homeowners. In truth it was kind of an ugly rock but for a while it stood for something like the promise of a Yankees game in New York City, and its memory serves every bit as well as far as the outcome.
Ultimately I have benefitted from Grandpa Kelly. My mother’s tightly managed inheritance of her share of his estate abruptly passed to me and my siblings when she died, and even at one tenth of a quarter of the estate’s worth at the time of Grandma’s death, which closed the lawyerly provisions of the trust crafted by Don Kelly twenty years earlier than grandma’s demise, it was a nice gift handed down through the generations in an almost uncorruptable way.
The full moon out my window made me think of the Simon and Garfunkel song “America”. The moon rose over an open …
Pit mine.
The song describes a journey on a Greyhound bus. Michigan seems like a dream to me now. To connect with his traveling companion in Pittsburg the singer tells us it took him four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw. At least now I have a better grasp of excactly where Saginaw is and how it connects to the rest of America. The travelers make fun of their fellow bus passengers — he speculates that a man in a gabardine suit is a spy. Why else would a man in a gabardine suit with a bow tie be riding a Greyhound? What is gabardine cloth? Do they even weave it anymore? Do they still call it gabardine? It sounds like an old-fashioned fabric.
The singer finds himself lost, looking out the bus window while his companion sleeps. He feels empty and aching. The moon rises and he counts cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. I am not lost at all, nor am I looking for America because there it is: to use an appropriate popular term it’s ubiquitous. If I’m empty and aching I know why: I’m hungry and I’ve spent too much time sitting in the back seat of a Toyota. No, I’m not looking for America, and America isn’t looking for me. We are not mutually hiding. We are in each other’s plain sight. I am America. The angst and alienation of the pretty song makes it end sadly, counting cars on a famous freeway aimed at New York implying this stretch of territory of fellow travelers all come from somewhere to look for something or somewhere called America which is essentially everywhere, and we are already there — here. Interstate 90 west meeting up and merging with I-94 north of Madison, Wisconsin served for me a surrogate sample of cars for the counting, and I would guess all qualified as looking for America too, as defined by the song of fifty-something years ago in the 1960s.
Looking out my window I looked at the moon, full and busty faced riding alongside the freeway and gradually rising as if the landscape were gradually descending. After the density of Chicagoland the lonesome scarcity of population along the freeway route actually belied the abundance of small towns scattered far and wide past the horizons of hills and woods and fields. Given the opportunity to enjoy a major national superhighway going near their towns the transportation planners and citizens of rural America generally set distances apart from any populated communities from interstate highways if it could be helped, sometimes designing routes miles from capital cities like Madison on purpose just to maintain a buffer between the residential population and the constantly transient traffic passing through. The interstates in such places were designed on purpose not to be involved in a community’s commuter traffic if could be helped, but served the region and its towns through arterial highways linked to arterial highways linked to the interstate freeways at truck stop exits. Passing by the exits to Madison you can see the main city away in the distance and gimpse the dome of the state capitol telling the world hello from a safe and comfortable distance if anybody bothers to look.
Thus America can look obscure from the view of the interstate freeways. The four of us in Murray’s car agreed we would stop for gas and food after Madison but before Wisconsin Dells, a span of about sixty miles. We stopped at a Wendy’s at a truck stop exit after we filled up the gas tank. If we were taking turns it was mine to pay at the pump. The convenience store at the gas station appeared closed, if only to discourage business after dark. At Wendy’s half the dine-in area was taped off and the remaining tables were limitted to every-other one, like the pandemic. The kitchen was understaffed and they had no drive-thru service. We went inside to use the washrooms. We ordered variations of Dave’s Special, essentially the best franchise California cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato and pickle in the whole wide world except Culver’s we totally agreed. We ate at the available tables. We were the only diners (though a couple of hipster teenage girls showed up who met up with somebody in the kitchen staff and knew the night manager who ordered chocolate shakes) and the place seemed desolate, over lighted and air conditioned too much for the cubic space. I ate my burger too fast in order to go outdoors to get warm after a while in the restaurant, and to have a more leisurely smoke in the parking lot before we got going again. Moon or no moon, this scene at a neon LED strip along I-90/94 seemed so desolate the pandemic had levelled everybody off. The atmosphere was nonchalantly spooky.
When we returned on our way after only a few half dozen miles we passed an exit to the town which offered the original Culver’s, and we all went, Awwwww! Except Kerry, who went, Doh!
My grandfatherly introspection carried me the rest of the way into the night across the vast invisible land of Wisconsin. Except for the full moon the only lights were dots of distant farmhouse yard lights and the temporal glow from towns beyond the spooky, floating boreal horizons. Look for America? Been here all my life. The vacant scenery evoked no nostalgia for the two years I lived in Wausau and endured the legacy of Curly Lambeau and hated high school. Life since then has been an evolutionary liberation, I could say, a slow, deliberate refinement of a liberal personality seeking joy and sustainable happiness in passing through a world of contradictions and confusion, challenges and confabulation. And a lot of beauty and clarity. Sort through the platitudes and aphorisms bombarding the mind with wisdom and truth to guide the actions of life, my first choice at this time would be the core principle of the Hippocratic Oath — first, do no harm. Everything else comes after that, including the Serenity Prayer.
With two grandkids in or around high school it’s been my practice to conceal my nefarious ways from them and focus towards current experiences in life and distract them from my past towards their futures. It gets harder to obscure my shady history the older they get and the off chance they catch up on the past seven years of this blog, which is still probably unlikely given its format and its own obscurity. And like my behavior with Vincent in Colorado I make revealing mistakes like smoking weed on the porch of the cabin.
On the whole I would say I have been honest and honorable with my kids and grandkids about my history and familial connections. To be honest there’s nothing horrific involved, just a mundane and sometimes needlessly sad saga of an American boy who somehow grew up to be a man confident enough of his own integrity to try to live right and let live and humble enough to accept he doesn’t know all the answers, and sometimes has guessed wrong. I offer my memoirs as confessions of life lessons my successors need not experience the same way to get the point. If anything that night on the interstate it looked clear that this saga of my life was long past the era of experimental improvisation and naive awe. Not so much tying loose cords in the celtic knot of my life as connecting the loose wires, etching the final microchips. If there is any time to be concise and unequivocal, now is the time. Time to synthesize and summarize what I know when asked, and to live the code of conduct contrived over lifelong practice of trying to live up to something and not live it down.
My time was short. I was old. Nobody wanted me dead but everybody expected me to die. What would be the rest of my life needed to count towards the sum of what would remain of my reputation, and I would have to live being satisfied it is what it is. It would not be difficult. Deep in my heart I believed I was good.
Roxanne is a witness. The inside angle at being a good grandpa is being with a good grandma. For me I have a sure place. I’ve often confessed Roxanne confers me with measured credibility in all sorts of social situations and that surely extends to family, including my siblings and nieces and nephews, and originates between my own children and then to their kids, our grandchildren. People respect me in part because Roxanne respects me and everyone loves Roxanne. She is a fantastic grandma who enables me to be a good grandpa, just as she helped me be a good dad.
Not perfect, but admittably good.
I’ve held them in my arms since they were a few minutes born. I have fed them. Played with them on the rug. Changed their diapers. Helped them crawl, and climb, and stand, and walk. Reach. Run. Talk. Listen. Question. Sing. Color. Read. Play. It was never babysitting. We took the grandkids to Nickelodeon Universe at Mall of America when they were big enough, just as we brought our kids to Camp Snoopy at the same age. We took excursions to tree farms and orchards. We visted state parks. We attended the school choir concerts and Clara’s first tumbling recitals at gymnastics and Tess’s first dance recitals.
When Sid and Michel relocated to Switzerland with the kids Clara was seven and Tess was four. They were gone almost five years. Roxanne and I visited them seven times by invitation, stayed in a spare room and hung out with them at their daily life, and went on vacations and excursions across Europe. We have ascended Eiffel Tower with Clara and Tess, more than once, seen the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, walked Omaha Beach at Normandy, strolled the English Garden and the Marienplatz of Munich, toured Lake Como by ferry, explored the bridges and canals of Venice, and indulged in both Paris Disney and Parc Asterix. We visited their school, met their friends. We did not allow the distance to make us estranged, even before we retired and had even more time to travel. Between our visits we regularly visited over the internet via Skype. When they finally came home and resettled in Minneapolis not many miles from our house there was no awkward reacclimation required, no reconciliation, no estrangement or alienation to overcome. We grooved into school activities, gymnastics, choir, birthdays, holidays and (up until Colorado) more family vacations. Clara and Tess have been blessed with grandparental devotion and unconditional love.
Not to mention $50 a month each to their college fund since the day they were born. Same for Neko, their almost four year old cousin, who has been at day care at our house most of her life, practically has her own room. The biggest ache about grandparenting has been the separations imposed by the pandemic, and even so, we have kept together. I have commissioned acrylic on canvas paintings by Clara and Tess for Christmas gifts to encourage them to practice art. There is no limit to my love and what it means to me to help them be and develop themselves as quality human beings without carrying unnecessary baggage. I know I cannot live their lives for them or protect them from every danger or choose for them every healthy advantage. But I can try to teach them ethics, and kindness, and set a good example of integrity and good will.
So far I was very proud of them. I saw in them the best qualities I saw in myself. I felt responsible for who they were, for some of their genes and attitudes. I taught them big and tiny things along their way and observe reminders of the possible consequences of what they might learn or imitate from me. First do no harm. First I try not to corrupt them so that when they are older and become adults they will recognize and resist corruption. The ideal is to help them be independent people and teach them in the meantime to keep learning to navigate their lives through the wild, weird and wicked world when I’m not around, or Grandma, or their parents. We succeed when they do these things on their own, even with our help. So far I saw them as good people. Accomplished at school and extracurriculars. Social. Respectful of others and customs and institutions. Inclusive. Good companions. Interesting conversationalists. I like them and admit I am biased to see their goodness. I don’t claim total credit of course — they have good parents first of all — but I enjoyed seeing my influence had not corrupted them, far as I could tell.
That basic native intelligence I believed I inherited seemed to me to have been passed on for my part to my offspring, along with some susceptibility to depression. Mental illness watchfulness will always be among us, but for the most part I had enough faith in our family’s general sanity to worry someone might slip through the cracks. The conversation in the car revived along family mental health the hours between Tomah, where the westbound interstate freeways split (or join going east) at a blaring, glaring oasis of arc lighting where I-90 bends a sharp left westbound straight at southern Minnesota aimed at South Dakota parallel to the Iowa border, while we kept arching north on the eventual westbound I-94 towards St Paul, talking about our mutual concerns.
We were all grandparents. We knew each others kids and grandkids. Roxanne and I shared ours, of course, and knew Murray’s son and granddaughter, and knew Kerry’s kids and stepkids and most of their kids. Our kids, however, didn’t seem to mingle as adults, at least since Mimi died — Mimi is my mom’s Grandma name, which Murray, Kerry, Roxanne and I still refer to her as along with all her grandchildren. An exact count of Mimi’s grandchildren depends again on adoptees but mumbers 25. (That of course includes Kevin’s four daughters.) Mimi always lived in the biggest house she could afford so she could have everybody over for a party — much like Gloria, Sid’s mom and Michel’s mother-in-law — and at Mimi’s house the cousins used to mingle. Mimi’s last townhouse had an outdoor community swimming pool, and we drew complaints from members of her Association for letting too many guests. Black sheep family strikes again. Since Mimi died nobody sponsors family gatherings on the scale or frequency she did. Those of us Roxanne refers to as the Core Group — present company plus Heather, Molly’s two daughters and lately reluctantly Kevin — managed to congregate hither and yon at somebody’s house for a family Soup Night some night, and sometimes Michel and Sid and their kids might attend, might not, and the same with Vincent and any of their cousins, and sometimes those of the Core (Corps) are unable to attend. Does that mean we are fraying and falling apart as a family?
Yes, I said, answering the rhetorical question, but that’s not to say all is lost. Not to say all is doomed. It just may be impossible to impose family allegiance over a widespread population. Without a Mimi, Murray interjected just before Kerry quipped the same thing. And even so, it took her funeral to get us to get together — her 70th birthday, Kerry corrected — yes and before that you couldn’t get Nelly or Bernadette, or Leenie or even Sean to make a visit up here even for a holiday. Speaking as the one who organized the 70th birthday, Roxanne reminded us it was like drilling teeth to get all ten of her kids to the party, one and all at the same time, first to the family banquet and then the picnic at the lake. She died in less than three years and nobody’s seen Bernadette since. Nelly’s been back maybe twice on a couple of liquor binges. Leenie’s gotten chummy lately since she got away from Duane, but she’ll never leave Colorado. Sean would rather we all came down to Florida. That leaves us. The Corps Group. We either watch over each other or risk not seeing each other enough.
Murray and Heather were too young to go to mass, and Nelly and Kevin weren’t borned yet
Still, we concluded by consensus, that our familial loyalties could never be established by charter or high command — I certainly wouldn’t enforce one, being the eldest and reigning geezer of the clan. Our filial connections had to grow organically, if at all. There’s no reason to stick together unless we chose to. Murray went further to say things might work out best the less we stray into each other’s business. Hear hear, said Kerry and we all had a good laugh.
Most of the way from Eau Claire to Hudson on I-94 the talk drifted to retirement. Kerry had only four more years until Medicare, the benchmark when she could quit her job and relinquish her health care benefits, take her pension, take Social Security and access her 401K. Murray had longer to go and didn’t care to speculate what it would be like for her to not go to work. Roxanne told about how it took a while to get used to even working part time to ease back when she turned 65, and how hard the pandemic was to be cut off from remaining social contacts at the university and activities outside the house. This road trip she said was a godsend just to get out and socialize. My sisters agreed to that. Murray reminded us that John McCormick lived a long and prosperous retirement, playing golf for a while with Grandma Mary and Glenn, fishing with Denis, taking up painting and keeping busy as a freelance piano tuner. Kerry was his friend on Facebook and remarked how he kept up more or less until the end, that’s how sharp he was. He always sent cheerful Currier & Ives Christmas cards addressed and signed in his own hand. He was a good man. Sincere. He made the most of a long life. We all could take lessons in retirement from John McCormick.
And so on. The synopsis was that we were thankful we and our kids turned out as well as we did on our own with such minimal upbringing and few reliable role models. Our self-congratulations extended to our effort to pay homage to John McCormick, our uncles and their clan at Fort Wayne, whether it may make new ties or reaffirm old ones, the trip did us all good.
I didn’t want to bring everybody down being a cynical misanthrope so I didn’t say how happy I was it was almost over and I could get back to my ZOZO couch reading the London Economist. Murray changed radio channels as we approached the border to Minnesota. Border city Hudson lit itself in white and streaked neon attracting no traffic to the parking lots on the strip both sides of the freeway leading to the bridge humped over the St Croix River. Murray picked a contemporary music satellite station and cranked it up when it played a duet by Camila Cabelo and Shawn Mendes called “Senorita”, a dumb romantic song that made no sense and barely rhymed but sounded so pretty, sung so well and arranged so delicately it lit all four of us up, even Kerry who somehow sensed what song it was before she went deaf, and Roxanne who usually could care more or less about music, pop or otherwise. So we sang along the part that goes ooh la la la, it’s true la la la, us four senior elders enthralled by passions expressedby nineteen year olds, shamelessly. A Bruno Mars here and Foster the People there, Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar. and Taylor the hell Swift, and we were swooping through downtown St Paul in the concrete swirl pinched between the Capitol and the Cathedral. Lit like a ballfield the domed white capitol edifice looked like a close up version of the Wisconsin capitol in the way off distance from the edge of town, and in fact they are of twin design by the same architect Cass Gilbert. The St Paul Cathedral on the other side of the canyon hunkered in the dark on a hill as high as the government dome on the opposite bank of the concrete feeway river. The deep shadow of the Italian style Gothic brooding cathedral and its own sweeping dome almost passed for invisible against the city lights where the roadway straightened out straight west in three or four lanes, a beeline out of downtown St Paul towards Minneapolis. I could almost count the exits.
And before her batteries might die off, Kerry wanted to make a big deal out of Roxanne and offered in effect a dry toast. She testified how Roxanne went with her to visit her audiologist and ENT doctors and advocated for her in her clinical treatments for her deafness. What a loyal sister she’s been all the years married to me. What a good influence she was on Mimi. What a good friend she is. And thanks for organizing the trip to Fort Wayne. John McCormick should be proud to have her as a granddaughter. In law. Or whatever.
Murray concurred and went further to add what a personal sister Roxanne was who always came through in the simplest ways and offered wise, reliable advice. Always there. Easy to talk to. Truly understands our family and offers a sane balance. Opinionated but a good listener. And a great trip planner.
Roxanne acknowledged her recognition with a big laugh and said, “Tell that to my kids.”
And so we said goodbyes and promised to meet for dinner or plan a soup night soon. Rox and I thanked Murray for driving and apologized for not hijacking the wheel and forcing her to ride in the back seat, but Murray made it clear it was her car and her wheel and she had no regrets. We made her promise to text us when she dropped off Kerry and again when she made it home. She lived in Chanhassen, a southwestern suburb on the way to Prior Lake. Kerry unplugged somewhere around the Mississippi River and we exchanged hugs and brief, concise words and gestures of love, gratitude, peace signs and namaste.
At the street alongside our house Roxanne and I retrieved our stuff from the car and the trunk and hugged Murray at the curb. Thank you for making it home tonight, I said. I really feel like I need to be home, I told her. She seemed to get it and accepted my thanks. We agreed if there were any tolls or CCTV speeding tickets to pay to be sure and let us know and we would chip in — promise. She waited in park until she saw we were securely inside the house before she pulled away. It was 2:04 am.
For some reason I craved a cup of coffee. We justified it by waiting for Murray’s texts though we knew we could prepare for bed in the meantime and even doze with the phones by the bed. I for one felt a burst of adrenaline at being home. everything as it was. I sorted laundry from the luggage and hung up my suit and tie. The mail was stopped until that day, and the same with the paper, I was so hopeful to be home by Saturday. And here I was.
Murray texted from Kerry’s at 2:21, which made good time and coincided with our coffee. The text she just walked in the door at her place came right at ten minutes to three and I sent her back the smiley face emoji wearing shades.
Roxanne went upstairs to bed as soon as word came from Murray. Coffee or no coffee she was bushed — pooped, she said. I lingered in the dark on the front porch suspended on the porch swing and taking in the warm, arid night. Full moon over 22nd Avenue. Caffeine, nicotine and cannabis. Safe at home. No harm done.
Unless one of us caught covid at a truck stop it all went well. No hurt feelings.
It troubled me to find myself living in a vacuum, an echo box of my own perceptions. For someone who had gone so many places and seen so many things I felt there was still so much more I might be skipping because I’m too self-cloistered to experience or at least observe that much more. I do not regret not pursuing rich investments like Grandpa Don Kelly because I am satisfied to have have had a productive middle-level career of productive worth that enabled me to save a modest means to stop working. One thing I would rather no inherit from Grandpa Kelly is his heart disease, which killed him suddenly at age 59. My mom had her fatal heart attack at just shy of 73. At my age of 69 it was important to be satisfied I hadn’t overlooked any joy on the way to happiness.
Looking back I could see myself a cynical misanthrope overlooking beautiful, elegant and simple opportunities and virtually talking myself out of them for any number of irrational reasons. It was now most important not to infect Clara, Tess and Neko with the cynicism that still informs my perspective of the world. They deserved a chance at an open perspective. Perhaps their fresh and open perspectives could keep opening mine. The kind of perspective I relied on them visiting Europe. With Clara and Tess I used to philosophize that if I was nice to them growing up they might take me out once in a while when they’re grown up and I’m in my 80s to see live music. More than ever I realized what was left of my future relied on my grandchildren.
It did not seem unfair to rely on them to sustain my life’s happiness as long as they were unwitting beneficiaries of my faith, hope and love. One day they may figure out, for example, that all along I’ve been an atheist. It’s not supposed to matter, and if it does, it will be time for them to think about why it matters and what it means. This next phase of life should be interesting, I thought. Getting back in good graces with Michel would give both Roxanne and me peace of mind, sooner the better, but I was sure I would not be named taboo and banished from my grandkids like the grandfather in the Nigerian novel Purple Hibiscus Clara referred me to read.
I had no idea that night on my porch swing how much more suffering those hearts of my family would endure in the coming days. I was set on celebrating my Summer of 69. It was still July. Time didn’t seem of the essence. I scanned the northern sky for an offchance peek of an aurora borealis, though I knew better against the funny charcoal gray of city light, I just hoped the aurora would make a miracle appearance just for me. Stimulated as I was I felt a deep sense of peace. Serendipity and serenity. Our house welcomed me home as it always did when we returned from Mexico, Europe and every trip away the past thirty nine years we’ve lived here. We go away and come back and find the homestead just as we left it, and we pick up where we left off. The continuity of such security gave me a pensive moment of profound gratitude for being so lucky.
If I die tonight, I thought, I will have lived well and at least broken even with my loved ones. My last realizations would rest with satisfaction I gave what I could while I could and my kids and Roxanne and the grandkids and my clan would live on without me, uncomplicated by things belated or undone and no recriminations for things I never got around to atone for.
Gently swaying fore and aft on the porch swing to rock myself to resign to go to sleep I remembered the words written by Tess in a hand drawn handwritten Christmas card to her mother Michel when she was about six: “Our family is permanent.” It was a Christmas when they came home from Switzerland for their two week visit. Such a simple sentiment elegantly stated, and so true. As much an article of faith to this man of no other creed, that concise affirmation penned with such innocent conviction by Tess to her mother on Christmas day, some eight years later on a lonely, dry summer night made sense to everything that mattered to my existence to date — not only to date but seeing ahead towards the unknown I would never know yet somehow rest assured I would live on in the fates, genes and collected memories of people like Tess who sense relationships so basic as anything as classic as the point of John Keats: beauty is truth and truth is beauty, that’s all you need to know.
I slept well that night, windows open, the ceiling fan fluffing the loft, Roxanne unclad in the sheets just close enough not to overheat, not quite touching. Safe at home, as they say in baseball. Checked my phone before I put it on the charger and checked on the Twins, who rallied in the 8th to beat the Angels 5-4 — still in 5th place in the AL Central. Life goes on. The Aquatennial fireworks on the river were back that tomorrow night after the hiatus for ZOZO and covid. The Aquatennial fireworks were the best on earth, far better than the 4th of July, and Roxanne and I would always go, finding a place at the last minutes of dusk in the throngs on the Stone Arch Bridge looking at St Anthony Falls. I drifted to sleep planning our car route to parkinng with quick egress downtown. Neko might still be too young to bring along. Clara wouldn’t be back from church camp yet, and Tess was going camping with a frend’s family. Just me and Roxanne again, our vestige of permanence and eternity.
Venus. Earth’s twin. Approximately the same size. Comparatively located in a temperate orbit around the sun.
Earth’s evening star. The brightest object in observable space besides the sun and moon. A glowing beauty named for a Roman goddess. Namesake of one of the best athletes of all time.
Uninhabitable planet. The atmosphere consists of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. The mean surface temperature is 464C (867F). The cloudy miasma reflects romantic light upon the Earth like ice cream of the cosmos. From this distance we bask in the planet’s companionship of albedo light when we face the darkness. Science says Venus is dead beyond rehabilitation and any interest in its history constitutes an astronomical post mortem inquiry into what in geophysical hell made it evolve so wrong and how long ago. Somehow in its clouds and acid muck it hides its evidence of demise, but some proof exists at high altitudes that long, long ago Venus could have sustained life as we know it.
In measures of millions of years a few millenia here and there unaccounted for could make or break a planet struggling to balance an ecosystem struggling to sustain against abuse by one or more life forms competing for survival. Nobody wants to explore the surface of Venus for evidence of past civilizations long extinct. It’s a sci fi projection of imagination to suggest sometime long ago when nobody on Earth was keeping track a civilization such as the human race once emerged on a verdant planet we now call Venus and over the course of a kind of anthropocene period and runs of bad geological luck the planet went to hell. Look how it is now.
Earth has endured its own evolutionary kicks. Who would have taken dinosaurs seriously in the days of the Holy Roman Empire, but today we project back to a whole age and era when such creatures may have dominated all wildlife on the planet until an asteroid smacked prehistoric siberia or the mexican yucatan and crashed the weather so badly the climate wiped out enough dinosaurs to create coal and petroleum over the time it took for mammals to arise and rediscover its place in the universe.
In the 1980s there was a song called The Final Countdown that sang “Oh, we’re heading for Venus” which I used to think was a clue the band, Europe they called themselves, didn’t know what they were singing about because no sensible space emigrant on Earth would aspire to Venus. But now I hear that song as a warning. Maybe they were saying the direction human civilization was headed in its treatment of the planet was Venus.
Here on Earth we quibble over temperature increases of fractions of degrees, whether the variations are realistic measures or hard trends. Sea levels rise in inches. Forests burn by the mega acres and it smokes across the land. Rain withholds itself. The mammals who try to keep order haven’t far to point out crises of existential significance. Earth’s dinosaurs didn’t care if Venus was a democracy or dictatorship. Firearm crimes alone undermine people’s trust in the next guy. How bad did the people of Venus let themselves go before they passed a tipping point? When did their air and water get so bad it couldn’t be saved? What worldwide catastrophe sealed the destiny of Venus? If their civilization’s technology was advanced enough to bring about its planetary destruction, did they consider colonizing space? Could they have come to Earth?
I noticed it was missing from my hand while Roxanne and I were making dinner. In a panic I retraced what I’d been doing all day. The first place I looked was my faithful ZOZO couch. I tore off the pillows, cushions and shook the Afghan stagecoach blanket. I ran my hands within the creases. Surprisingly clean, no pocket change, no gold band.
Next I went upstairs to inspect our bed. The floor around the bed. I checked my desk, the wastebasket, the floor. I surveyed the whole loft, the corner with the stereo and CDs, certain book shelves I’d so much as touched that day. Drawers I picked out a handkerchief or handled paraphernalia. I could not put a finger on exactly when I had seen it last. I was sure I started the day with it, or at least went to bed with it on. It seemed impossible to have lost it the day before, but even so I didn’t go anywhere that day either. Downstairs I checked the couch again, then the floors of the living room, dining room under the table, the tv lounge, coffee tables, bathroom floor behind the toilet, the shower deck (we use a tight drain overlay to catch hair before it clogs the pipe which would have kept the ring from going down the drain) and under the fixtures and the radiators (Roxanne lost a bra for two weeks this summer until found behind the bathroom radiator) and every windowsill and cabinet, then surveyed Koki’s play room even though the kid was definitely not responsible, hadn’t come for day care in three days. (Even so, if she’d found it she would bring it to me, and she certainly would never extract it from my hand and hide it. She’s clever but devious.) No ring.
I turned my pockets inside out. Again and again. Checked the couch from separate disparate angles. Surveyed the built-in buffet where knick knacks and paddywacks accuminlate. If was as if my current life was passing before my eyes.
Midmorning that day through noon I had assisted Roxanne at a project to restore grassy growth to places in our yard burned crisp as chaparral by drought and glaring summer sunshine from loss of mature maple trees a few years ago due to disease. Roxanne hacked and dug out the matted dead grass, I raked it for clumps of dead thatch, and we manually grabbed up and shook the dead clods (and weeds) off the soil and disposed them into a regulation-paper yard bag to get picked up at the curb Monday. Roxanne generously re-seeded the sites, fertilized and spread fresh dirt and then patiently spread tattered sheets of burlap across the sites pinned down with bent sections of coat-hanger wire to keep away birds and squirrels. I helped scatter the seed, fertilizer and soil. It’s September and the right time to do this. Roxanne has had success with this method.
While I dug through the refuse in the lawn bag Roxanne stripped off the burlap and gently probed the soil and seed for the ring. I manually divided half the clods, weeds and dead turf into a second lawn bag, sifting the contents of each back and forth frantically feeling and peering for my ring. In the end Roxanne replaced her burlap and I set the two lawn bags aside the garage empty handed. We washed up and proceeded with dinner, not quite where we left off.
Until sundown I paced around the yard anywhere I might have walked. It will turn up was the mantra. I was certain it was somewhere on the premises. I was obsessed with mortification.
Men I’ve known of who lost their wedding bands were often suspects of misbehavior. I’ve looked upon it as at the least a casual disrespect of the sacred.
This was my second time. The first about four years ago happened at the AMC Southdale movie theater where Roxanne and I brought Kitty and her best friend cousin Erin to a movie around Kitty’s eleventh birthday. An age-appropriate film called The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, it was a lavish live-action fantasy about a young girl on a quest which never lives up to its lavish production values. Out in the lobby as we were leaving the theater I noticed my ring missing. I checked my pockets. I checked the rest room. I looked and rooted (a little) around the waste container where I tossed my empty popcorn cylinder and Coke cup. I gave the rest room a thorough look-see. There was something shady about the Dyson air-dry machine, a perfect device to suck a ring off a skinny finger. I checked with the lost-and-found. Nobody had turned it in. I checked back at the theater every time we saw a movie there and my ring was not among the keys and bracelets and wallets kept in the unclaimed box back of the box office. I would keep checking if I go see a movie there again after covid. I swear I lost it that day at that stupid movie.
I’ve had about four years to kiss that ring good-bye. I wore it more than 45 years. Roxanne and I bought his/her matching plain gold bands at a mom and pop jewelry shop on the main street (Excelsion Blvd then) in downtown Hopkins in 1973 for $37.50 apiece. I wish I remembered the shop’s name. The elder lady behind the counter was very nice to us. We had our initials and our wedding date inscribed inside. If you come across a gold wedding band with my initials and 3-31-73 engraved inside, it’s mine.
Roxanne bought me a replacement. We were at ShaneCo to pick up a repair of the gold chain necklace I bought there for Christmas for Roxanne that held a horizontal row of five birthstones, each for our children and grandchildren: Michel peridot, Vincent aquamarine, Clara aquamarine again, Kitty citrine and Neko sapphire. The chain broke when baby Neko inadvertently gave it too strong a tug. It was the second time but under warranty ShaneCo made the repairs free. Still Roxanne meant to keep it away from the baby’s hands without declining to wear it, she admired it so much, and it almost seemed like a show piece collector’s item after we noticed one of the exact style worn by the CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins. As we inspected and signed off for the repaired necklace Roxanne asked if they still sold old fashioned yellow gold wedding bands for me. Oh yes. A guy measured my finger, went away and came back with a band exactly my size exacly like the original, minus initials and date engraved. The price was significantly more than the original but Roxanne insisted we buy it. It was like she begged me to marry her all over again. Though I felt unworthy I ponied up the credit card and wore it home.
Losing this one humiliated me more because it could have been predicted and prevented. Just the day before — when I last clearly remember noticing I was wearing it — a wedding ring gets to be part of the hand, taken for granted as certain as a digit or knuckle — I felt a gap and a slippage and looked at how it slid around my finger so loosely I could barely detect a white tan line, telling me it was loose enough to fall off like oversized pants without a cinch. I made a deliberate note in my mind to take it off and put it somewhere safe until I could fatten up my finger again.
How my finger got so skinny is not a mystery. I have ruled out excessive typewriting. It’s not compulsive gardening. My manual digital skills are minimal. Overall I lost about 15 pounds early this summer when I developed an abscessed tooth requiring a root canal which led to a gastrointestinal infection that laid me so low I lay for days on the ZOZO couch worrying whether I was past the point of requiring medical care or I might die, which I didn’t, and which I didn’t want. All because I refused to sit a long time in a waiting queue seeking urgent care — I calculated I could suffer more comfortably in my own living room if all it meant was acetaminophen and water until I could stand to take food. There was no respiratory infection. I tested three times that week with one of those home test kits for covid promoted by the governor, Tim Balz-to-the Walz, and each came up negative.
Gradually I got better. Appetites returned. As they say, my stomach shrunk and it doesn’t seem to take so much to fill me at one seating. But I am eating regularly — probably the most regularly of my entire life of merely eating when hungry and not by a clock of meal times. It’s been all the rest of summer and if I must admit my stamina is at about 90% what it was before I got sick my weight is down 15 pounds and fluctuating upward. Roxanne is skeptical about my health and doesn’t see my weight loss as a good idea, but it is what it is. If my fingers have shrunk a millimeter it seems my body has downsized appropriately and there’s no sign of swelling or inflammation — just that old guy bruising that goes with sun scars. As for my overall body mass, I’m satisfied my skeleton is supporting its weight in tissue and muscle proportionately enough to carry me upright as much as need be. I need to be more active, I know. That’s why I take an assistant role in Roxanne’s simple and arduous landscape project. Plus she and I are making plans to at last visit Portugal, someplace we’ve never been and Europe’s missing link for us and a curious destination throughout the travel stoppage. It requires stamina to enjoy travel and I’ll need to be in shape enough to carry my weight. I’m glad I haven’t gained 15 more pounds than my historical average. But then my fingers might just be a little thicker and my wedding band would not have fallen off like clown pants.
We were convinced the ring was lost and could be found on the premises. Every inch of the property was under search. Roxanne suggested we rent a metal detector. They rented by four hours or an all day rate. They were closed Sundays, which was okay, we could search every possible where in the meantime. It could still reveal itself in folds of a sheet or pillowcase. If not found by Monday we could rent a metal detector and run it across the yard, especially the site of the old chaparral. Meanwhile by Sunday we planned to empty and sort the twin bags of refuse she had hoed up and dug to expose plain dirt. She suggested laying a tarp on the ground in the yard and emptying each yard bag onto the tarp and sifting it as we put it back in the yard bag for pick-up Monday.
Sunday came and no sign of the ring. No culprit Gollum Smeagol emerged. My faith it would be found never stopped but my confoundment how well it concealed itself cast doubt the hiding place would ever reveal itself. Roxanne got texted to play pickleball at their club and I spread the tarp from the basement, a former shower curtain stained artfully with drips and mistakes painted in colors somewhere around the house. I dumped the entire first sack of dead sod and weeds and clods of earth. Handful by handful I sifted loose soil. I recalled when we undertook the removal the yard sack weighed more heavily from moist soil but after three days the dirt shook off dusty. Crisp grass flaked off. Hand by hand I parsed off the clods. By the time I replenished the roots and dead shoots into the yard bag there was a significant pile of soil and ground organic dust but no gold ring.
So I repeated the dumping process of the second sack. I liked how good I was getting at shaking the dirt loose and fraying through the roots and tangled matter, satisfied so far how meticulous my search was. And there it was, my ring, in a clump in my left hand, freshly unearthed and revealed. I put it in my pocket. Safe. Gave thanks to the silver sun in the southern sky. Finished the yard bag clean-up and shook out the dirt and crumbs in the woods behind the garage and hauled the yard bag to the curb. I consolidated the two bags of yard waste into one by just shaking out more soil.
I texted Roxanne in CAPS the news of the find, which she read and responded after her pickleball session concluded. I wanted to share the immediate joy of finding the ring and solving the bummer. When we talked later we decided not to rent a metal detector Monday, even though we had nothing else to do. We could go prospecting at the beach, I said. We could, she said, humoring me. Do those things really work? According to advocates and users, I could safely say. Personally I can think of other ways to entertain us. I’m just so glad to find it. I’m relieved of so much guilt and shame. What kind of schmuck loses his wedding band? Twice…
“Our family is permanent.” So affirmed my granddaughter Tess on a Christmas card when she was five. She’s now 13.
There are nine of us: Roxanne and I; our daughter Michel, her husband Sid and their daughters Clara and Tess, the Kysylyczyns; and our son Vincent, his wife Amelie and their two year old daughter Neko. Currently we all live here on the south side of the city in separate residences within a few miles of each other. Both Roxanne’s and my parents are deceased. She and I as well as Sid and Amelie come from extended families, and we mix casually and frequently. It’s easy to see how Tess would infer family durability as a self evident truth.
Our nuclear family vacations epitomize all the dynamics composing who we are, maybe more so this year than any other. We have convened in northern Minnesota, of course, and also southern Utah, Normandy in France and Venice in Italy while the Kysyslyczyns lived in Switzerland. Not all together every year, as it’s hard to get simultaneous time off for the working kids. Family vacation in fact revived itself as our kids matured and took a greater interest in spending time with Roxanne and me. We used to go camping and sightseeing around the region when they were little kids. For Michel’s 13th birthday we took a road trip west to Los Angeles, saw Grand Canyon, Disneyland, Hollywood and Compton — it was 1991 and I used to say for that birthday I gave her the Pacific Ocean. Vincent got the Caribbean, Cancun and the Yucatan at Chichen Itza. The teenage years, high school, then college, significant others, jobs, independence leading to an empty nest nurtured a gap in spending extended leisure time with parents. Before Michel married Sid we took an extended weekend to Wisconsin Dells and lived in a water park, rode the Ducks and got an old timey family portrait. I’ve always wished they would come down for a week and stay with us at Ixtapa, but that’s another story. The family vacation revival emerged while our kids grew up and seemed to notice we were still rather viable people who liked to go places and do things. This coincided with the advent of grandchildren, along with the grandparents having the means to front group excursions, and as products of opportunity and common prosperity the family vacation evolved towards tradition. Vincent became an expert at finding cabins on lakes near the Canadian border. Roxanne and Michel collaborated to find accommodations at cosmopolitan destinations or near national parks.
Last summer we planned a week in late June near Rocky Mountain National Park. Roxanne booked a home-away rental at a town called Allenspark, near the Beaver Meadows entrance to the national park. She booked it about seven months in advance and we had until April to cancel and get our deposit back. Last year was ZOZO, the lost year. The covid-19 pandemic wiped out not only that vacation but practically shut down Thanksgiving and Christmas and all our birthdays and most every occasion we took for granted as commonplace. It seemed we saw more of the Kysylyczyns when they lived in Switzerland. Back then we used Skype. During ZOZO it was FaceTime. We formed a pod with Vincent and Amalie so we could sometimes watch Neko, who was out of day care, while Amalie worked from home and Vincent looked for work. We wore masks. We got tested at least three times. We knew well before April there would be no vacation in Colorado that June.
No sojourn to Mexico for that matter.
ZOZO, the long lost year of deprivation and sacrifice, anxiety, loneliness, disconnection and a massive disruption of society as we simultaneously erupted in a great clamor to survive, eventually evolved into a new year of hope and aspiration. In the depth of a petulant winter the vaccines arrived.
Roxanne polled the family and we decided to try again for Colorado. She picked a commodious rental in the town of Estes Park, nearer to the same entrance to the national park.
Spring disinfected the terrain and brought the earth back to life like Lazarus. Construction displaced demolition where the riots of ZOZO burned. Our governor, Tim Balz-to-the Walz, a reasonable and pragmatic, plain-spoken leader who, when he erred he did so out of compassion and too much trust in people to police themselves, lifted significant public restrictions related to the pandemic although he did not terminate his emergency powers just yet. Shyly and tepidly we emerged like kidnapped tourists with blindfolds off at the light of dawn. The numbers were really going down. Despite an unbelievable cohort of yahoos bent on self-destruction through self-delusion and self-centered misinformation, somehow the politics of all being in this together was working, people could actually see that all the cooperation through ZOZO and the self-sacrifice we put in was paying benefits in disease mitigation. Mitigation of the economic impact by the new liberal administration in DC, administrated through our state, kept the wolves from the doors and cracks from swallowing whole communities. Much as people resented the prohibited aspects of the big ZOZO shutdown it was vividly evident this spring that most of us were lucky, it could have been so much worse if we had done nothing. In a predicament where it seemed assured everybody was going to take a haircut, some of us only seemed to take a trim — and got an extra $1400 to go to the mall, soon as it opens. And now, with the numbers going down, we had vaccines.
Three of them. They were the Andrews Sisters of Mercy, all named Maxine. Maxine Pfizer, Maxine Moderna and Maxine Johnson. When Maxine debuted ZOZO was over.
Leaders who predicted herd immunity in the USA with 70-80% eligible Americans vaccinated by the nation’s 245th birthday, July 4, seemed to be setting an easy target. If there was enough Maxine to go around — and Roxanne and I (senior citizens) got both our doses by late February — there seemed no way every eligible person in America would not be vaccinated by the 4th of July. It seemed so simple.
I looked ahead to summer when the governor would terminate his emergency powers and turn to his adversaries who called him a tyrant, and say, “There you go.”
As Minnesota opened up this spring, so too the rest of the country. Some places bragged they never closed — they’re lying but that’s another story. Some places closed more than we did and opened slower. All around I read about local economic rebounds. Word about hiring increases and worker shortages, blaming generous pandemic unemployment benefits for the inflationary wages now demanded by employees. Work from home — or anywhere — succeeded so well the fate of gray flannel suits who worked downtown in Henry Miller’s air conditioned nightmare office towers is in doubt about inhabiting those buildings again. Vincent got a job with the same company that laid him off, not management, less money but pretty good, working from home. The company agreed to let him take vacation time to go with us to Colorado.
The Kysyslyczyns planned to drive. Their family car is a GMC Acadia SUV, suited to a family of four plus luggage. Ground transportation gave them an opportunity to explore. They had never been to the Black Hills (not even Michel) or Wyoming, and the kids weren’t familiar with South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa. They had a few days at both ends of the Colorado rental period to bracket the vacation with a road trip across Middle America with stops along the way.
Roxanne and I first considered making it a road trip too. We used to drive all over the place. We spent our honeymoon camping east across Canada from Lake Superior to Nova Scotia in a VW Beetle. Then we recounted our last experience that we qualified as a real road trip, when we flew down to Atlanta, rented a car and drove from there down to Melbourne, Florida, which is on the middle Florida coast, for my brother Sean’s daughter’s wedding. On the way we stopped in Savannah, Georgia, and on the way back Charleston, South Carolina going to Atlanta to drop the car and fly to Minneapolis. We remembered it as a great road trip but recalled complaining of the long, tedious distances and the fatigue of driving and riding long intervals between destinations. In 48 years since our honeymoon the road lost some of its wonder over time, which as too bad because it was the first time we visited the Deep South. We could say easily we’d driven across Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming and South Dakota enough times to expect long hours of nothing much just to get to the magnificent Rockies and back home.
It wasn’t that we don’t have a reliable, comfortable car. It’s an eight year old Nissan Altima with gravity seats. At about 58,000 miles it almost qualifies as a little old couple who only drives to church and the grocery store cars. It certainly wouldn’t hurt it to go to Colorado and back just to blow the carbon out of the cylinders. (That’s an old gearhead joke from the ’70s.) The more we thought about it the less we wanted to drive. We were admittedly not fond of long hours on boring roads. We could skip all that, fly into Denver and rent a car.
Air fair was really cheap. Aviation was trying to get passengers to trust air travel again as Maxine kept driving down the occurrence of covid-19. Masks were required on all flights, vaccinated or not. It was only about a 90 minute flight, and in Denver we would gain an hour on Mountain Time. The problem was in looking to book a rental car. Roxanne saw rates from a couple of thousand bucks a week. We knew we would need two cars to haul around the nine of us. The Kysylyczyns would bring their Acadia and we would need one more — with a car seat for Neko. Our Altima practically has a built-in car seat as much as Vincent and Amalie’s do. They drive a Nissan Rogue, a compact SUV in the style of the Acadia.
They, however, had no intention of driving to the Rockies and back — not with a two year old only child. Neither Vincent nor Amalie could take more than a week off work, meaning they had no time in the budget for leisurely road travel. They intended to fly to Denver and expected to connect up with Roxanne and me providing ground transportation with a car seat to ride with us to Estes Park to rendezvous with the Kysylyczyns.
Roxanne and I knew we had to either bite a big bag of boo and pony up for a suitable rental car with a baby seat or otherwise drive cross country ourselves and getting to Denver in time to pick up Vincent, Amalie and Neko at the airport. In searching for a rental car in Denver Roxanne learned that the rental car market crashed at the pandemic and all the companies sold off their fleets for cash and there was a gross shortage of cars. The weekly rental rates seemed to increase daily for the week we desired. She heard vacationers were booking U-Haul vans for leisure travel because they were still cheap by the day and sufficed to transport a couple of tourists determined to visit.
So it seemed our faithful red Altima would come to the rescue after all. (Bless me, Altima, I’ve been heard to say the past eight years.) Given sufficient lead time Roxanne and I would drive west and rendezvous with the other Kellys and Vincent et al at the Denver airport. At least we would have two cars to caravan the nine of us or go in different directions at Estes Park. It was too bad our Altima sedan would seem so cramped in the back seat for two adult sized people and the car seat, but maybe Clara and Tess would ride with Neko, me and Roxanne. The solution to that was to swap cars with Vincent and Amalie and Roxanne and I take off for Denver in the more spacious Nissan Rogue. This way they could send their luggage with us instead of hauling it on the plane.
So Rox and I resigned to another road trip after all. The Rogue would be a nice car. Newer than ours. Has a navigation system, which ours doesn’t. It might be nice to take a closer look at what’s inside the back roads of our neighbor Iowa. Just where are those bridges again, so famous for a while about thirty years ago, those covered bridges? Madison County. Maybe we could go there, have a bread and cheese picnic thing on our way to Lincoln, Nebraska. Hey, maybe, being late June the Nebraska fields might be kind of green with row crops instead of hundreds of miles of flat black dirt, or mud if it had been raining. Neither of us relished driving at night. Used to be I liked making tracks through the night but now we made a plan to get to every destination before sunset every day. Roxanne chose lodging in towns within a day’s drive without pushing it. We told ourselves we owed it to ourselves one last time to mosey through this geographic heart land of America and gather our observations. I say one last time because I am 69 years old and don’t really care to travel this route again by car unless I really have to.
Chapter 2
I didn’t know what to expect. I anticipated possible encounters with hostile forces, Trump fanatics, anti-mask anti-vaccination militants and right wing white supremacists bounty hunting liberals. (This from a guy who once not long ago wanted to walk miles to our hotel across Chicago after a Shakira concert.) Pandemic isolation fostered in me a new paranoia. A comfort zone of introversion. Agoraphobia. Lost confidence in social graces. Depressing lack of esteem for the human race. Palpable fear of facing baskets of deplorables. The lost year of ZOZO sucked away just about everything except raw hope our culture can grow back its exceptionalism.
News of a new sars-cov-2 mutation called the delta variant ignited a wave of infections across India and the UK. Sure enough it made the news as sweeping into the United States via the unvaccinated Deep South. The CDC, NIH and WHO concurred the three Maxines stood up against the delta variant in preventing severe infection, hospitalization and death, even if conceding a 25-30% chance of contracting a mild or symptom-free case. Even so, as the nation gradually opened up to hospitality and commerce in the spring the political posturing kept up its nasty haggling. The debate over the efficacy of masks, vaccinated or not, veered into demands for liberty, the right to common protection, shame and scorn on both sides and showed no sign of truce by next school year without going to court. Our family took note and commiserated.
Further worry about mountain wildfires hexed our planning. The Mountain West was parched. Drought prevailed. Uncontrollable fires already broke out in California and Oregon, also Canada. So far nothing yet where we were going, Colorado, Wyoming or the Black Hills, but it’s happened before — we watched daily.
June was hot and sultry like it was deep July, but it didn’t rain much. Rain clouds passed over us and nested east into Wisconsin and leaving us deeper in drought, Minnesota the land of 10,000 lakes and a zillion rivers. A retreat to higher elevation seemed like destiny so the family voted to keep the plan. Unless covid spiked suddenly nationwide at horror movie numbers like a national superspreader, we assured each other we could follow common sense and science as if we always do and could travel safely and enjoy time together on vacation in the Colorada Rockies. Michel is a licensed working nurse and she saw no reason to opt out. Tess, 13, just got her second Pfizer and would be considered fully Maxined by her arrival at Estes Park, leaving only Neko the 2-and-a-half or so year old the only one of us nine unvaccinated. Vincent and Amalie made plane reservations.
Roxanne said even if all the kids canceled we would go and use the rental home ourselves as long as we were paying for it. I looked forward to being in the Rockies again. I’d never been in Denver or that part of the Rockies. It would be the first trip to the Rockies for Clara and Tess and I anticipated asking their observations comparing Colorado to the Swiss Alps. I missed going on adventures with them, almost jealous not going with them to the Black Hills, where there is so much to discuss.
The week before our rendezvous in the Rockies a heat wave broasted North America like a chicken. Pacific northwestern states used to rainy temperate summers like Oregon and Washington underwent serial days with temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as sites in western Canada. In Minneapolis the temps roosted in the 90s. There was a general alert to look out for the vulnerable and everybody seems to know what that means. Roxanne and I got covid tested for the road — negative again. Same with Vincent and Amalie before their flight.
The Kysylyczyns left for the Black Hills the day before Roxanne and I for Lincoln, Nebraska. That afternoon before we left we swapped cars with Vincent and Amelie. Neko objected. Insisted she wanted to keep her own car. We argued lamely. I left it to her parents to explain how it takes two days by car to travel the same distance as two hours by airplane. My parting advice to the child: Look out the window; it will all become clear.
We left home in the early morning with a full tank of gas. Roxanne drove first shift, Interstate 35W south. Beautiful day. No sign of rain. In our absence we asked our closest neighbor to water our flowers if no rain in two days. Other than our flowers we harbored no concerns left behind. We told ourselves we had all the time in the world yet it seemed like we weren’t getting anywhere. Roxanne expressed disappointment Iowa’s fields didn’t roll the way she remembered and I said wait until we passed Des Moines, the topography would change, though I really didn’t know what I was talking about.
When we saw signs for Clear Lake, Iowa I got out the iPod and plugged it into the Rogue’s Bose system and cued up “That’ll Be The Day”. Was there any reason to exit? Any special place to pay our respects? The Surf Ballroom? Is there a corn field within a few miles where there is a marker like Flight 93 so people can mourn? It’s never lost on Roxanne in any discussion of this that the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper happened on her birthday, though she was only 6 and unaware what that meant at the time. It adds to her legend along with the Police song of her name. People assume she has all kinds of rock and roll karma, which in a way she does — she’s got me.
We stopped for gas before Des Moines, which is just past the middle of Iowa and the place to head west towards Denver. I would drive now. Barely mid-day the temp was 100 degrees F. West on Interstate 80 the young corn and beans seemed to crackle with sweat. It was funny, every few miles there were many towns but at every exit only gas stations and fast food, never a real town. We ate at a Subway shop at such an exit. Operated by a crew of teenage boys who lived however far away. Outside the air conditioning we wilted like lettuce. No way as the temp reached toward 105F would we enjoy hiking around Madison County checking out lovely covered bridges on a day like this. It didn’t feel right. We drove on towards Omaha.
The Nissan Rogue drove like a chocolate smoothie. We had good reasons for choosing the Altima in 2013 but the Rogue caused us to reconsider. For a bigger vehicle it handled like a sedan in the elegant way we were accustomed from Nissan. Riding a little higher but not exaggerated as a truck the road panorama looked more harmonious to the steering wheel. Getting in and out at a climb rather than a descent seemed easier for our aging hips. Its seating capacity compared to our Altima was the reason we were driving it to Colorado — and back in 2013 we had two grandkids aged 8 and 5, plenty of room in the back seat then for two, we weren’t looking very far ahead back then; with its permanent carseat for Neko the Altima might as well be a sports car. Ah, but it’s paid for. The Rogue being a few years newer came with features like a blind spot alert and built-in GPS navigation system but in over all design and function the Nissan hadn’t changed in quality in those years.
We were west of Omaha heading for Lincoln with Roxanne at the wheel again when she noticed the dashboard alert for an oil change. We made mental note. Since western middle Iowa the scenery tumbled to humble wooded bluffs approaching the border to Nebraska at the Missouri River. I got us across and through Omaha. We anticipated a hassle through the big city but we glided through hassle free. Seemed the last time we drove this way through Omaha the entire freeway system through the city was under construction, lane diversions past half-cast concrete and piles of graded dirt marked by orange barrels and diamond shaped warning signs through miles and miles of the city. That memory tainted my whole approach to traversing Omaha, which transpired almost twenty years ago. This time the traffic was seamless and Omaha looked like a whole different town, there and gone in the blink. By the time we passed the SAC base and stopped to take a whiz and switch drivers the horizon was flattening out and the freeway cut unbroken lines into cornfield eternity.
After Omaha, Nebraska is the epitome of building the interstate highway a safe distance away from populated towns so you can’t see where people live. Lincoln comes sooner than you might think. Past Lincoln a new day where the horizon stretches wider and the invisible towns hide behind stretches of faraway nothing.
At our hotel in suburban Lincoln we got our first real encounter with the grand reopening of America. The swimming pool was still closed but the restaurant had just reopened, limited in menu and short staffed. All employees wore masks, and we did too except while dining. Only a week or so ago this kind of thing was practically illegal. Being fully vaccinated made us feel bold but not reckless. The fettucini in cream sauce with chicken and mushrooms was surprisingly flawless and I probably undertipped.
That evening and before we checked out the next day Roxanne texted with Vincent and asked him about the oil change alert on the dashboard. He protested, no way it should be due. Maybe by calendar but not by mileage, though he could not recall when the car had last had an oil change. During the pandemic nobody drove many miles. In the morning Roxanne inspected the windshield for a sticker from Midas and learned the recommended mileage indicated an oil change. So we programmed the GPS to guide us to a Jiffy Lube in the heart of Lincoln. A disciplined crew of young tattooed misfit and sketchy individuals in beat up uniform overalls and ball caps cocked forward and back performed the service routine while we sat in the car above the service pit. Checked the fluids. Tire pressures. Windshield washer fluid. There were three vehicles in the garage at a time and the crew performed like a crack squad. They were all white, none as old as twenty five and some as young as eighteen. They all looked shady and Roxanne quipped what I was already thinking, they could be jailbirds. Potential Charles Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugates averted by gainful employment and automotive maintenance skills.
We chided ourselves for our judgemental attitude along the way through the old downtown to a side of the city where we could catch an arterial to an entrance ramp west on I80. A sturdy brown brick city constructed in a commercial grid bridging railroad yards and bracketing a state capitol that sticks up as the skyline’s only high rise like a naked corncob. Named Lincoln you might surmise the capital city and the state of Nebraska dates after the Civil War, which ended in 1865, and the old bones of downtown testify to a bona fide cultural foundation rooted more in the 19th Century than the 20th. The original name of the city was the village of Lancaster and it was renamed Lincoln after Nebraska was admitted to the union (in 1867) and the city was designated as its capital in 1869. There is a flavor to the city that it wouldn’t mind regressing back in time to re-live its heritage. We got gas and beat cheeks out of town, Roxanne at the wheel.
The rest of Nebraska is about guessing how far away the Platte River is according to a tree line on the horizon. West of Grand Island exit there’s a spurt of greenery where the Platte courses underneath the freeway and runs parallel south of the highway beyond the cover of vaguely distant aspens. Further westward the topography gets plainer, as if it’s possible, and as row crops give way to pasture and chaparral the obscure towns named on the exit signs meekly diminished like dropouts from high school. About two hours west of Grand Island the Platte crosses back underneath the highway near the town of North Platte and exiles itself back into hiding somewhat parallel to the north. You get the impression North Platte could be the last real city until Denver.
It should be noted the Platte River actually flows east and we were figuratively driving upstream. It originates in marshlands of the Rocky Mountain foothills as two distinct rivers a few hundred miles apart, the North Platte and South Platte, which merge around the town of North Platte and flows northwest in a loop across the rest of Nebraska until it joins the Missouri River south of Omaha. All the way upriver when you get a look at it the water is so muddy, the current so slow and shallow you can’t really tell which direction it’s flowing, or if it’s flowing at all.
After North Platte I80 traces parallel to the route of the South Platte River, which originates in Colorado. The landscape gets thirstier and it’s hard to believe there is really a river out there except for the vague tree line. Harder yet to believe people might live out there. About an hour after North Platte the interstate diverges and we continued tracing the South Platte on I76 into the northeast corner of Colorado.
Somehow I thought once we left Nebraska for Colorado it magically got better and suddenly the majestic Rockies would appear on the horizon like salvation. It actually got worse. The topography got asymmetrically rougher in places and the soil sandier, but it was still the desert plain with sunburnt skin. Gravel pits and oil derricks popped up among the scrub brush. Exits ceased to designate town names, just numbers or local roads. We passed by several scenes of acres and acres of cattle shoulder to shoulder in corrals, thousands of steers and heifers with nowhere to go. Even with the air conditioning in the Rogue the cowpie stench penetrated our senses and our consciences.
At the exit to the town of Sterling we pulled off to get gas. The town of course was a few miles up the road from the exit. It wasn’t assuring there were no chain store truck stops along the freeway, but we were low on gas with Denver about 130 miles away. Over a hill and around a curve Sterling came out of hiding. A sad and shabby looking town, it wore its resentment of being looked down upon and passed by with practiced indifference to its shame. It summed the region of brown soil and dust living at the brink of ghost town. The first gas station had mittens on the pump handles of its 87 octane gas. A Sinclair station had a couple pumps functional. A hand printed sign said they gave a 3% discount for paying cash. I bought $20 worth and the sullen, maskless cashier punched up the 60 cent discount and slid a receipt, two quarters and a dime under the covid window with a grimace and no eye contact like she never wanted to see me again. I didn’t wear a mask either and maybe should have. Body language works both ways. Maybe it was the Minnesota plates. Maybe it was that I only put about five gallons in the tank. Or perhaps it was nothing but my own awkward self-conscious brooding for people stuck in my judgmental impression of low yield lives.
Fertile ground for nothing more than resentment and prejudice towards conspiracy gossip to rationalize resentment, Trump acolytes thrive like nightshade in such communities who find themselves at the bottom of society with no escape and need somebody to blame. It’s moot to try to explain how Trump victimizes them. Certain themes play well. It might be a hard sell for the Green New Deal in the land of petroleum and red meat. Where are the wind turbines and solar farms? If Joe Biden’s big Infrastructure deal goes through will it matter to the citizens of Sterling, Colorado?
From there the plateau rises ever slightly towards the Mile High City. At about the same time you see a glimpse of the snowcapped crowns of the Rockies on the horizon ahead you sense the gravity of the orbit around Denver. Sparse excavation and construction sites promised future factories and warehouses. A future hotel. A convergence of highways loomed. A route to the international airport beyond the boondocks begged for speculative developers. You could sense a development boom in the offing but it might be ten years away. Closer and closer to Denver the construction sites multiplied until highway construction took over and dominated the landscape. New entrances, exits, wider lanes and bridges in varying stages of completion terraced our route. You may recall my recollection of driving through Omaha several years ago and encountering a whole city of freeway construction. Denver was ten times that, but with clear signage and miles of orange safety barrels we found our way.
Credit goes to the in-built navigation system, programmed to the address of our hotel. I refer to the navigation system as the Garmin, though it’s probably a different brand, I just like Garmin for an ad campaign they ran a number of Christmases ago and because they sponsored a bicycle racing team at Le Tour de France. Anyway, there was not much for sightseeing on the freeways of Denver and not much to see. Traffic bunched and whizzed by. ‘Twas rush hour. No time to gawk at the football stadium or admire any architecture downtown. Any residential neighborhoods hid behind tidy buffer walls. The Garmin guided us to an exit to a commercial boulevard where we found our hotel amid a row of office skyscrapers in the suburb of Lakewood.
The hotel staff wore masks. We were not required because we were vaccinated. The bar and restaurant were closed for lack of staff. Colorado had just reopened that week and the hospitality industry needed a little time to reorganize. Covid protocol restricted capacity at the swimming pool so reservations were required but the pool was booked for the night.
Our room on the 11th floor faced west and we could see the white crowns of the Rockies peeking over the golden foothills. From our window we could look down on Union Boulevard where there was a restaurant decked in a Mexican motif called Jose O’Shea’s. Roxanne checked them out online and they were taking reservations. She booked a slot for us within the hour. The walk took ten minutes including long waits at the crosswalks. We still arrived a little early but the host brought us to a table on a mezzanine right away. The service, the food, the margaritas, the atmosphere all converged as blessings at our table. From the mezzanine we could see the ambience of half the restaurant, the second floor loft above and the main floor below, and all around a general sense of joy flowed through the place. After a day — two days — on the road we let ourselves relax and take our time. Even the chairs were simpatico.
Reminded me of my favorite restaurantes en Ixtapa Zihuatanejo. Jose O’Shea’s was authentic as an American restaurant can be.
A good meal always settles anxious agendas. It took more than a year to arrive at this place at the door to the Rockies. To savor the success of this leg of the trip we ordered a second round of margaritas. No more driving. The hotel maybe two blocks. Our first ever night in Denver — we passed through several times before and stayed in Colorado Springs — and tomorrow we intended to explore, after we picked up Vincent, Amelie and Neko at the airport. The day after that we would go through that door into the Rockies and rendezvous with the rest of the family in the mountains. It was a good summer night (almost, it was two days shy of solstice) to let loose and express how much our family meant to me, the people I loved most in life, how happy and rich they have made me and what good company they have always been, how proud I am to know them and for who they are, all without weeping. We toasted cheers and agreed eye to eye we are blessed.
Chapter 3
The Denver airport is deliberately an hour or more out of town. It exists as far away as it can from the city to suck traffic and congestion away from downtown and remove airplanes from the urban equation. It serves as a major connecting hub between the eastern and western United States such that many passengers who pass through its terminal neither originate nor end up in Denver for Denver’s sake. It’s as much a feeder airport as a destination. If you’re starting out or ending up in Denver or the surrounding Colorado community, the extra commute factors into the anticipated distances within the region as a territory of blank spaces on Mountain Time. Otherwise it’s just a layover on your way to Honolulu, LA, Fairbanks or Green Bay.
Denver airport has its own freeway. Miles and miles away from the city and its network of highways to the mountains, the airport freeway leads straight into the parched plains, half back towards Sterling and half nowhere. It may be the perfect place to locate an international airport, unobstructed flatland, uninhabited and undeveloped, uncherished, and easy to get to if you build a modern highway. Along the way the highway engineers made arrays of giant slanted spikes for snow fences to arrest the effects of the windswept prairie wind burying the roadway. This being the day before the first day of summer the slanted spikes in neat rows among the parched prairie grass and sand could have been redundant minimalist sculpture. There was little else to look at. To me the spikes resembled the pikes erected in the French countryside by the occupying German army they called Rommel’s Asparagus, meant to impale paratroopers in the invent of an invasion such as at Normandy. In truth the closer to the terminal the more desolate the location and the more the territory took on the feel of a military base, only no checkpoints. Not yet. The signage was explicit and left no doubt we were going the right way. Ripples on the plain obscured where the airplanes came and went. It seemed easy to imagine the neighborhoods, shopping malls and offices that would infill between metro Denver and the airport the next generation or two. You could feel the hope the airport might suck the urban sprawl this direction, away from more precious land bordering the mountains. But it would not happen soon, no land rush here except Holiday Inn Express. Not even an exit to Denny’s.
Symbolic perhaps, the main terminal comes into view as a group of white cones at the end loop of the freeway like a long driveway to a gated community KOA. The airport is almost twenty five years old but seems brand new and four times as old. The white cones are a series of big tents over the roof of the terminal, suggesting teepees or Bedouin dwellings. A city of transients. Gathering of circuses. It was very easy to find Vincent, Amelie and Neko at the curb for arrivals.
Neko was both nonplussed to see Grandma Roxanne and me drive up in her family’s own car and vindicated to reclaim her own car seat. Vincent drove because he knew the territory, Amelie took the shotgun navigator seat, Grandma buckled into the back middle seat next to Neko and I got the window seat in the back, we exited the airport loop and cruised back to Denver, Lakewood and our hotel. Before being laid off during ZOZO the year of the pandemic, Vincent was a western territories marketing manager for a hearing aid company and he had several retail audiologists in this region he visited on the job. This and both his and Amelie’s travels through the west in their thirty-something years of life well qualified the two to chauffeur us senior aged rookies through the Denver metro and up into the Rockies. In truth I’ve grown accustomed to being a passenger.
Vincent admitted he had never seen so much highway construction in a concentrated area. He hoped it was all on the plains side of the city and the route west into the mountains would be work zone free. Back at the hotel the kids checked in and found their room on the same floor as ours. Grandma Roxy offered to take Neko to the swimming pool but there was no time. Vincent arranged to spend the afternoon with a friend and ex colleague named Tyler at his house with his family. They took the car. Roxanne and I figured out how to ride the light rail downtown to catch a baseball game between the Colorado Rockies and the Milwaukee Brewers.
The desk guy in the manner of a concierge steered us to a walkway behind the hotel to reach a sketchy shortcut to the light rail platform. We made mental notes to come back the long way via the main lighted street after sundown. The rail platforms formed an end of the line square on a barren tract of plain I learned later used to belong to the army. It felt as if it used to be fenced off. There was room for a park and ride but few cars. A few scattered riders, everyone masked.
The trains were like we have at home — built by Siemens. We bought all day senior tickets. Practically had our pick of seats. Within a few stops the cars began to fill. I was beginning to forget this was Colorado’s first week of reopening after the long pandemic restrictions. Among people again there was an up tempo euphoria to the back beat of getting by. It was Saturday. I tried not to gawk and remembered not to stare. My first true look inside the legendary city of Denver. Unlike cities with subway mass transit, where you pop up somewhere in a neighborhood and didn’t see how you got there, street level light rail escorts you block by block, station to station and everywhere in between and offers a street level sample of what the city is made of. (Chicago offers an elevated view.) As a rule the most elegant accommodations of any city are not built along rail corridors, so the view from the tracks gives an honest look at the community’s cohesion. It was hard to define Denver on one ride. Thus far it offered little personality to substantiate exceptionalism. Lots of middle class ranch style bungalows.
Downtown had a whole different feel. Lots and lots of 19th Century brick and stone. Here was a city built of substance and purpose. Union Station is the fort that holds down the fort. An edifice at least a block square, it’s a temple constituted to last the ages, not a mere temporary depot to reconstruct another time. There is no waterfront to anchor Denver so Union Station stands as its gateway. Off the light rail, we made note of where to return to catch the train back to Lakewood and followed the crowd wearing baseball shirts through the terminal. Most of the dozens of gates were deserted but here and there rope lines formed anticipating buses to come. The bus passengers observed us pedestrians with little interest, their pending trips preoccupying their masked psyches.
We could not keep up with the baseball crowd — that is, yours truly the dawdler fell behind the pace of the people we were following — my excuse is always blaming my deliberate sense of wonder and curiosity though it seems to slow down Roxanne sometimes to the point of annoyance. No worries as we exited the back end of the terminal we joined the flow of more baseball fans and within a few brickhouse blocks we found Coors Field.
Being in downtown Denver unearthed an accidental milestone for my life. Half a century ago or so I read the confessional adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity told by Jack Kerouac. On the Road chronicled continuous back and forth across America between Greenwich Village and San Francisco in the early 1950s, and its geographic checkpoint between east and west was Denver. Specifically a place called Larimer Street. Which is only two blocks from Coors Field. Here was every urban renovationist, preservationist, repurposist — gentrificationist’s — dream. What I heard second hand when I asked around about Denver in my teens and young twenties (“What do you want with Larimer Street for?”) described Larimer Street as Skid Row. A bum slum. It figures. Kerouac was hardly the prophet of the bourgeoisie. Yet today Larimer Street is an open arcade of outdoor dining and pedestrian only zones among bulb lit warehouse patios and apartment lofts. You can see what used to be but it’s clearly not like that anymore.
Coors Field in its iron and brickwork fits its footprint inside Old Town as if on the outside it’s like another neighborhood repurposed rugged old building. Inside it’s a timeless baseball park. Our seats were on the second deck, which meant we had to climb a ramp of stairs. Roxanne’s biggest concern this vacation was altitude. We were now a mile high. She gauged her stamina based on our moseying around Old Town and climbing staircases at the ball park. She reported feeling okay but was glad she didn’t have to climb another deck. We had good seats behind the on deck circle on the third base side, the visiting Brewers. We were outdoors so nobody wore masks. We fell in with a guy in his young twenties, his mom and stepfather. Locals. Fans since the 1990s (i.e. before the young guy was born) the young guy rued the day the team let go of shortstop Troy Tulowitzki. The mom told us why the team mascot was a purple dinosaur (not a dragon) because during excavation to build the ball field, right about home plate, they unearthed the skeleton of a dinosaur. Set stadium completion back a full season (they played at Mile High, the football stadium). The lady said the mascot’s name was Dinger, but I thought she said Digger. No, Dinger! Seemed obvious to her. Digger, seemed to me more obvious, the subject of an excavation, but never mind. Roxanne was making social contact.
(Dinger is baseball slang for a home run. Due to its mile high elevation, Denver became a haven for home run hitters. It led to a policy of keeping baseballs used at Coors Field in a humidor to try to keep all things equal to the rest of the major leagues.)
It was dawning on me how much Roxanne missed social contact during the pandemic. I would have been content to watch the game for its own sake. Roxanne used it as an occasion to cultivate conversation with strangers. It reminded me of Mexico, where people know me as Roxanne’s husband. Of our countless tours of Europe, where Roxanne engaged random travelers and residents alike while I would have minded my own business or observed from a comfortable distance. Long gone the days when I was the outgoing one and she was shy. I could see how the pandemic confirmed my inner introvert and gave me license to retire to an asocial comfort zone in my advanced age — not anti-social, just indifferent to whether I fit in among social groups. Roxanne turned into a virtual gadfly, asking innocent personal questions and following up the answers.
The Rockies held the lead late in the game but the Brewers rallied in the ninth and shut the Rockies down 6-5. We took our sweet time moseying back to Union Station to catch the train to Lakewood. It was Saturday night in the Mile High City. The first Saturday night since the opening of covid-19 protocols. The sidewalks melded with the rope lines queuing to get into the clubs. Dance music and neon pulsed in the streets. We took the outdoor way around the depot to take in the street ambience. At the light rail platform we learned — confirmed by a transit officer — the last train going where we needed to go left twelve minutes ago.
So much for our all day senior tickets. Who would have thought there would be such a thing as a last train in a formidable city such as Denver? We looked around to get some bearings, street names, looking in vain for taxi cabs. Out of hand we decided not to call Vincent. Much as he said he knew Denver we presumed it would be a stretch to ask him to find us efficiently — and man, would he be crabby. It looked like we had no choice but to bite a big bag of boo and book a ride with Uber. At $84 it cost us more than twenty times the light rail ticket downtown. But what a story for the next morning.
Chapter 4
Our Uber driver found us at the designated intersection. A personable guy he hardly registers in the story except as our paid rescuer. If aware of how dependent we bumpkins were he didn’t act like it. The topic of the ride was Colorado’s cautious embrace at reopening since the pandemic. Roxanne remarked people didn’t seem all that reluctant by all the partying underway downtown. Pent up demand, he called it. Getting justification for all the sacrifice. When he learned we were headed to Estes Park he urged us to check out the Stanley Hotel, which served as the setting for the movie of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. (“Here’s Johnny!”) On our way he urged us to check out Red Rocks, the famous open air concert canyon where he said even the Beatles played (which I doubted but did not dispute — I would have been wrong.) At our Lakewood exit the ramp was blocked by road flares and cop cars, lights flashing red and blue. Uniformed cops with flashlight torches waved us away. The exit was closed.
“Probably a fatality,” the driver said and adjusted his speed to proceed to the next exit. “It’s been a bad year for traffic fatalities.” I asked if legalized marijuana took the blame. He said no, he thought the fault lay with the state legislature for not passing a law prohibiting texting while driving. That and the drop in traffic from the pandemic dropping inhibitions of reckless drivers going too fast.
We could see the cop car lights at the top of the exit from our hotel. We could even see the lights flicker in reflections off the boulevard from our hotel room. Roxanne remembered on our honeymoon (as it were) we were on a lonely straight stretch across Quebec on the national highway where we encountered a scene of a massive collision involving at least a dozen cars and a flatbed semi-trailer truck all gnarled and wrecked on both sides of the eastbound freeway in the middle of nowhere, during afternoon daylight, rescue crews putting bodies on stretchers, cops directing eastbound traffic through a creepy crawl between highway flares defining the scene. Yes, I remembered. At the time we tried to calculate whether we could have been in the scene of the crash if we had not stopped to eat at the last town — at a cafe where they charged for each serving of coffee, no free refills monsieur.
Safe in bed high above ground in the mile high city, lying awake on my back in a luxe king-size bed while Roxanne sprawled and snored gently like a white noise machine of the sea, I didn’t mind ruminating in the almost dark. Hotel rooms invariably provide thick light tight window drapes. I like window light to keep my bearings, often moreso than bathroom nightlights. Eleven floors up I felt secure against peeping toms so I cracked the drapes open. Classier hotels like this Marriott include a gauzy inner curtain, and even through the opaque gauze the ambient street light pulsed pale red and blue milk reflecting on the ceiling. A far cry from Larimer Street 1956. I would have been five years old.
My next birthday I’ll be 70 years old. This was supposed to be my Summer of 69. Whatever that idiom means beyond being 69 years old doesn’t matter, it’s the only summer of my life I will spend being 69 years old. The song by Bryan Adams came out in 1984, when I was 33 1/3 and Bryan Adams himself was 25 — in the year 1969 he would have been ten, way too young to have all that romantic adventure, even for a Canadian. Nonetheless, that year I was 18, perfectly old enough to relate to the rock and roll masterpiece that came later in the year of George Orwell. If as Adams hints the title phrase means a latter-day sensuality, it should be observed beyond the snickers that such a deal requires a mutual commitment that seems exotically arousing to some couples in concept but not so appealing to intimately fulfill, particularly standing — on anybody’s mama’s porch.
That said, my Roxanne partner 48 years sleeping close by, barely touching leg to leg, my mind was divided whether the 69 year path my life has gone added up to a life well-enough lived or amounted to extraordinary luck to have lived so long. ZOZO the lost year of covid-19 could have ended it all. In addition to curtains the windows could be cracked open to bring in the local air, but there were no sounds coming in with the lamplights. No sirens. No motorcycles or growling semi trucks. (Lorries they call them in the UK.) It was not a priority to come to a final conclusion that night… heaven forbid, you might say… the idea behind the prayer Angel of God My Guardian Dear… my next seven, eight, nine days were mapped in front of me among my beloved.
It brought to mind a bronze paper weight my elder granddaughter Clara gave me for Christmas the same year Tess wrote Our Family Is Permanent. The paperweight was a cast sculpture of a stack of ballpoint pens with an inscription on the base attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
So I try… Attempt. Essay…
Morning light lured me awake enough to start coffee. The western sky looked gray but not rainy. Roxanne texted Vincent to let us know if Neko would like to get breakfast with us while he and Amelie woke up. What a nice grandma. Neko of course took her up on it and we walked down to the light at the intersection leading to the freeway exit which had been closed last night and crossed over the boulevard to the Denny’s, promising pancakes. Our timing was very good, we got a booth right away just minutes ahead of the morning rush of the church letout, and shortly there was a waiting line. Staff wore masks and most diners didn’t. Tables were spaced further apart than the usual floor plan. The servants seemed naively cheerful for their efforts. They may have been short staffed and it was Sunday of the first week of the post-pandemic reopening and yet Denny’s made no excuses and acted as if this wasn’t the first rodeo. Just the same we ate up our eggs, pancakes, hashbrowns and sausage patties and toast and got out of there as the wait list swelled and Neko’s attention span spun and she ate what she was going to eat and it was time to hit the road. “Time to mosey,” Roxanne said.
Neko asked to be carried and we said no. It was too bad we didn’t have a stroller with us but it was only a little over a block back to the hotel — most of the time waiting for cross lights — and at almost three she was a kid who knew how to hike. She also was not one to whimper and whine. As a reward for walking we allowed her to wander off the sidewalk onto the lawn into the shrubbery around the office park near the hotel while we watched that she didn’t stray alone into the parking lot. At the hotel she wanted to go exploring so Grandma Roxy escorted her up the grand staircase to the second level to look at the pool while I hung around the lobby like I was casing the joint, as if there was anything to steal. Our fellow guests consisted of the usual riff raff and bumpkins with any excuse to be away from home. Wedding parties. Soccer teams. Young couples just like me and Roxanne only decades younger. Young moms and dads with small children a little older than Neko. Met a guy in his fifties staying there in the interim while placing his belongings he couldn’t take with him into storage after liquidating the rest of his property before embarking by van to Costa Rica tomorrow, where he was starting up his own swimming pool construction company. This guy stood out because he was the only fellow traveler who spoke to me at the Marriott when Roxanne wasn’t there.
If ever there was a time when strangers avoided other strangers it was obvious it was the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic. There was a new look in people’s eyes, even masked people, that seemed to say hello but I gotta go, not making any new friends right now, sorry thanks — and those were the expressive few who made eye contact.
Checkout was as efficient and unsentimental as technology and quasi-sterile conditions can contrive. We loaded our luggage, snapped Neko in her seat, buckled up and hit the road, Amelie at the wheel, Vincent shotgun. We passed the freeway ramp, the scene of flares and torches where we presumed somebody died, and there was no evidence of mishap. No scars on the pavement. Roxanne of course by now relayed the story of our night out. Funny, she said, something bad can happen one night and the next day it’s like life goes on.
The kids talked about their visit to Tyler and Cissie’s. Their kids got along — they have two, one older and one younger than Neko, a girl and a boy. They have a jungle gym in their back yard. They have a nice house in a nice neighborhood not very far from the hotel. Tyler is still employed by the hearing aid company but he and Vincent are no longer colleagues in the same organizational structure. Cissi was a national sales rep for an eyeglass manufacturer until covid, but apparently does not miss the rat race. It’s interesting to listen to our kids talk about their friends and peers as they reflect what they want us to know about their generation. Vincent is 39, Amelie 38. Millennials. Old millennials. Almost can pass as young Gen X.
Late with child, Neko, they are themselves ironically the babies of their families. Married eleven years now, Neko is a sincere, prolonged effort to make a baby and thus have a family. After several and several more cycles of clinically trying, including a heartbreaking miscarriage, it seemed surreal when Neko was born at term a perfectly healthy baby girl. A miracle child. Yet so normal.
The kids met at South High. Graduated a year apart. Dated off and on through their college years and moved in together after they each completed their degrees, Amelie in four years, Vincent in six. Vincent graduated the College of Natural Resources at the local U of M and his first job after college was as a senior counselor at a Boy Scout camp for the Boy Scouts of America in northern Wisconsin. Amelie grew up camping with her folks and spent summers at a girls camp called Menogyn in the northern Minnesota wilderness near the Canadian border, where she metamorphed from camper to counselor to leader of group canoe expeditions into Quetico Provincial Park. She landed a job with the regional council of the Girl Scouts, where she directed the logistics of their annual cookie drive for a number of years. I joked at their wedding that the boy scout married the girl scout. Their mutual enduring love of the outdoors outlasted the joke.
Their careers changed, as careers do. Amelie found a liking for non-profit administration and joined the management of an org that provides crisis child care. Vincent left the Scouts after one season. For a while he worked as a concierge at a suburban Marriott, where he came in contact with people in the hearing aid business at their corporate headquarters nearby. Over time he networked a job at one of that company’s local retail stores and after that managing their national call center, which launched him into marketing and landed him a big western territory which included Colorado before the pandemic upended the company’s entire retail business model and Vincent was furloughed, then laid off. Amelie on the other hand was an essential worker as the pandemic squeezed the stress levels of parenting and she worked diligently from home to keep the crisis nursery viable to meet increased demand from harried parents. Vincent returning to work meant Neko returning to pre-school day care three days a week and one day each with grandparents.
Vacationing with these three — and just the two of them before Neko was born — was nothing novel. At least once a year they invited Roxanne and me to join them at least a few days at rental cabins on lakes up north near the Boundary Waters. We swim and hike, kayak or canoe, hang out, bonfire, cook and eat. They’re good company. During the pandemic and the lost year of ZOZO they were our closest friends, almost our only social life. While the Kysylyczyns lived in Europe they were our only local kids. They looked after us, in an after sort of fashion, independent as we are. We couldn’t ask for our son to find a mate more conducive and complementary than Amelie.
Leaving Denver, Amelie at the wheel, the highway climbed off the plateau into the arid foothills. Vincent narrated the way, which passed the famous outdoor concert venue Red Rocks and he recounted seeing LCD Soundsystem there on a business trip. He liked them so much he came back for a second concert the next night. Amelie signaled to turn into the Red Rocks entrance to check the place out. Vincent was all for it. None of the rest of us had ever been there so Amelie drove into the park entrance for a quick look.
An older African American man with a deep suntan sat on a ledge of rock called out to us to say the park and amphitheatre were open for visitors and waved us towards a parking area. Come on in, look around, he said. How the man was dressed he could have been a park employee or a day hiker. Either way we waved thanks and took him up on his invitation.
The scenery around Red Rocks Park is gorgeous, a perfect lift into the echelons of mountain strata. An abutment of buttes and cliffs in a glimpse of painted desert, all red like rosy rust that never sleeps, striated and etched by centuries of wind and sand, the aura of the place radiated a gateway to eternity. Amelie did not find a parking spot on our first pass through the lot, so she offered to let me and Roxanne out at the amphitheatre entrance which was open free to visitors, no show going on. Roxanne had to use the restroom. Vincent stayed with Amelie and Neko. We said we’d be right back and they said they’d hover.
Up a wide staircase and a ramp (and probably an elevator) the ampitheatre entrance opens to a spacious mezzanine at the back of the bleachers, which descend down to the stage in the canyon. The canyon walls enclosed the seats with intimacy as if this were a room and not outdoors with the open air above liberating this room without a ceiling from inducing tunnel vision. I could only guess at the acoustic effects. I did not hurry. I noticed Roxanne among the crowd taking a look around, she couldn’t resist having come that far to go to the bathroom. More than one other spectator I overheard informing his companions how the great upheaval of what are now the Rocky Mountains, about 75 million years ago, tilted the existing horizontal rock bed and turned it vertical. Most people were not masked, which left me thinking we were vaccinated. People browsed at a social distance. On a kiosk back by the beer stand near the museum gift shop I read a plaque dedicated to the Beatles, who played there August 26, 1964.
So then I ran into Amelie standing out in the crowd overhearing a guy explaining the tectonic upheaval that tilted the sandstone rocks when the Rockies formed. This was her first trip to Red Rocks too. She found a parking spot and left Vincent and Neko there to get a look at this iconic place, and her impressions confirmed I was not alone feeling it was worthwhile.
And then she turned the conversation to the Zombies, the rock band from the middle-1960s. She said they went bankrupt and broke up over the release of their first album because it initially didn’t sell and they couldn’t cover the production costs. They had to reassemble the band to go on tour once their songs caught on. It took a new single “Time of the Season” to break even. I didn’t know any of this. “Tell Her No” and “She’s Not There” to me were seminal records in the British rock canon, and I asked, where did you learn all this? She said one day she was scrolling the internet and came across a story about the Zombies. I did not ask if she was doomscrolling and checking for the latest on the zombie apocalypse. Why would somebody her age care about a 1960s English rock band? Then again, Amelie grew up with a copy of an album called Buddy Holly Lives! Roxanne joined us as we headed to the exit and I split off on the way out to take a whiz.
Back on the road we wound our way to higher elevation with gradual subtlety. Beyond Red Rocks the terrain terraces from plain to valley to peaks without majestic awesome vistas so much as a constant flow of unsurprising pretty landscapes. Tidy towns. Rolling ranches. All accompanied on the horizon by rocky peaks. Didn’t look at all like a bad life.
At the city of Boulder we cruised the main boulevard through town. Saw the campus of the University of Colorado, the shopping and commerce district, if not Old Town. Via his iPhone Garmin Vincent navigated Amelie to an address near a midtown strip mall where we parked in an alley behind a low rent storefront. A marijuana dispensary. Roxanne stayed behind with the snoozing baby while Vincent, Amelie and I entered the premises via the back door. There was a No Smoking sign on the fence where we parked.
Inside we were greeted in an austere anteroom by a guy behind covid glass who asked for our ids, scanned them and asked us to wait. In a few moments we were ushered behind a security door to the cannabis showroom, where a guy behind a glass display counter welcomed us noncommitally and gave us our ids back. The kids did all the talking. I tried to take in what was said and studied the merchandise. My frame of reference was Amsterdam and its smoky cafe reefer bars along the canal. This being America there was seemingly infinite product variety and no consumption allowed on the premises. The aroma of the place smelled of fruit candy and fresh herbs. Amelie and Vincent asked questions about edible gummies and the properties of different kinds, such as sleepiness or simple anxiety relief. The guy behind the counter seemed to warm up as he answered their questions and described what someone might expect with the products they asked about. I eavesdropped at the display counter next to us where a regular customer placed his order and the guy helping him measured it out from the glass humidors behind the counter. There was a printed sign on the countertop saying if anyone spoke a word about taking the product out of state the transaction would be terminated and the customer asked to leave. (It seemed obvious we were from elsewhere by our id cards but I didn’t expect anything to be left over at the end of the week, and nobody asked.) Amelie asked for some combo CBD THC gummie edibles. Vincent ordered a measure of a certain kind of flowertops, some fruit flavored THC gummies and a few pre-rolled joints. I didn’t technically get anything for myself but was factored into Vincent’s order — and he asked me for $40. The guy filled the order, tallied it up and got us what he called bagged and tagged — everything in a paper bag with the receipt stapled to seal it. At the end we exited the showroom directly to the street out the front door. We had to walk around through the alley to get to the car, where Neko was awake and asking where we been.
Next we drove to the strip mall around the corner where Roxanne, Amelie and Vincent shopped at the liquor store. I hung back with Neko. I said we went to the store to buy supplies for the vacation. Grown up supplies, like beer and Coke. Say, when you were on the airplane, did you look out the window? What did you see?
The airplane wing. Clouds. The sky.
Another hour up into the hills we arrived at the lakeside town of Estes Park. Obviously a vacation town, a tidy central business district decked out for visitors like the Hallmark Channel and outskirts arranged discreetly to veil the residences beyond comely commercial buildings and thickets of Aspen trees and tall red pines. We drove up the driveway to the Stanley Hotel, as Amelie put it, to get it overwith.
Stately and sovereign like a massive Southern antebellum mansion it anchors a wedge in the valley facing downtown like the town’s own White House. Even from the outside you can x-ray see in your mind long white corridors of doors and an endless scarlet carpet. What I recall from the movie (which I’ve never completely watched, and the book I’ve never read) is the hotel is located in a site so remote the winter snows isolate the place so desolately and for so long it drives a man mad, so he goes on a homicidal rage against his wife and kid. You look at the real life hotel and it isn’t scary and you wonder why Jack Nicholson just couldn’t shovel his way out the front door and snowshoe downtown to hang out with guys at the brew pub to watch the Lakers v Nuggets.
Our home-away rental cabin was easy to find. Garmin guided us to the address, which was on an urban like grid off the main road. The landlord named the place Mountain Forest Home, apropos enough. All the way up the extensive driveway we heralded Roxanne, who did it again, booked the nicest, finest, most awesome, appropriate accommodations. More chateau than chalet it was a mansion made of logs and stone. Lofty, split level main floor with a lower level bedroom and lounge and play room, there were four bedrooms in all, three bathrooms and sprawling open kitchen and dining area. Front deck just off the big bedroom, back deck off the two back bedrooms and the kitchen. Picnic area on a patio with beach lounge chairs next to the hot tub.
At the kids’ insistence Roxanne and I moved into the main bedroom and they and Neko claimed the one downstairs. Of course Neko wanted to go in the hot tub. Amelie and I walked her down to check it out. Amelie worked back the hood and showed her child the buttons to push to turn on the bubblers and what not to touch to change the temperature, which was preset. She wanted to climb in but we said not without a swimsuit. She offered to be naked, and we said no. Amelie and I watched over her putting her arms in the whirling water and the mom asked her to push the button to stop the jets, which she did, and then pushed the button to turn them back on.
Here’s the first rule of the hot tub, I said in my grandfather the narrator voice. Nobody goes in the hot tub alone. So Koki what’s the first rule number one of the hot tub? Nobody goes in the hot tub alone. Always only with a grown up, added Amelie, or your cousins.
It turned out Neko didn’t cotton to the hot tub all that much. She found the jet bubblers a little intimidating and the temperature too hot. Content to fiddle around on the stairsteps with her arms up to her shoulders she played with the floating saucer cleaner whenever somebody lounged in the tub, which held six, if four comfortably.
First mission on move-in day was the grocery store. In the weeks leading up to the trip the meal planners coordinated through Roxanne to compile a grocery list, and with said list Roxanne took the car and the Garmin to town while the rest of us made ourselves at Mountain Forest Home waiting for the Kysylyczyns.
Chapter 5
All the while on the road Michel kept in touch with Roxanne by text. We knew they had good weather, if burning hot across South Dakota. They were safe. The Corn Palace was not open to visitors in Mitchell. Visited Crazy Horse monument. Saw her very first herd of bison at Custer State Park.
The iPhone and its internet capabilities have linked our family long-distance almost ten years. Daughter and mother kept close dialogues while the K’s lived in Europe and while we toured Europe. I admired their intimacy with the kind of jealousy that arises from respect for both their personalities who mean so much to me. My observation in life is no good comes from mothers and daughters who feud. When I consider how strong each personality I thank my lucky stars Michel and her mother get along so well. To my benefit I get privy into my daughter’s life and insight into her soul. Being close to Michel is important to me and cannot be delegated, but during times when I’ve felt distant I’ve relied on Roxanne to keep me attuned. Hence the jealousy. I remember times I wondered if Michel loved me, but I know better now and don’t think that direction anymore. I wonder how much being her dad may have embarrassed her, and if so how much courage she mustered to consort with me with nuanced pride and introduce me as her father. I wasn’t a bad father, like I wasn’t a bad husband, or a bad worker or bad citizen, but always eccentric and flawed. I’ve often credited Roxanne for keeping me from going over the top by keeping me under the top. To that I’ve tried to be a good father, and as well as I’ve done I can credit Roxanne their mother for helping me expose them to a good life of quality and to step back as they made their way in the wide wide world.
Michel sent a text estimating they were half an hour from Estes Park. In the meanwhile exploring the terrain with Neko, examining the pine cones, along came a young doe followed loosely behind by a young buck grazing their way through the yard under the red pines. We watched in awe together as they moseyed past the hot tub into the neighbors’ properties. When the deer were gone Amelie and Vincent called to us from the back deck: Did you watch the deer? What’s the under-over on the wildlife this week?
The Kysylyczyns arrived before Roxanne returned with the groceries. We greeted them and helped unload their baggage from the car, showed them into the house and the two unclaimed rooms on the backside of the house. The teenagers got the room at the end of the hall and went about trying the lights and the ceiling fan. Sid and Michel took the room at the head of the stairs, though Michel questioned why Vincent, Amelie and Neko automatically got the basement. And where’s Mom? Michel asked why I didn’t go with her to the store.
Not that I was needed at the house to greet them. Not that Roxanne wasn’t a big girl with skills who almost exclusively did the grocery shopping since the lost year of ZOZO. It came to mind to say I wouldn’t have witnessed my youngest granddaughter observing the deer with enchanted stillness a few moments ago. In truth, as Roxanne drove away it occurred to me what Michel was now thinking and I quick stepped into my sandals and chased after her out the front porch and lamely waved after her halfway down the driveway before she took a left and drove to town. So I agreed with my daughter and described how I had a second thought and followed her down the driveway, but she got away.
You didn’t try very hard, said Vincent, who observed my half-assed effort. He explained his option for the basement bedroom because they had Neko.
Michel presented me with a gift bag and a hug. Happy Fathers Day. Should I open it now or save it for a ceremony? I opened it. Hand drawn cards from the girls. iTunes gift cards worth about fifteen songs. A Happy Buffalo milk chocolate candy bar from the gift shop at Custer State Park along with a tiny stone sculpted buffalo the size of half my thumb and a pair of socks printed with bison grazing beneath mountain peaks and pines, also from the Custer gift shop. I was touched. At that moment nothing meant more.
Sid and the girls discovered a clogged drain in one of the bathroom sinks. There were burned out bedroom light bulbs so we began a household hunt for spare bulbs and such, inventorying the small appliances and compiling a list of things we might call the landlord about after Roxanne got back. Sid himself fished open the clogged sink drain with a wire coat hanger (a rag?) so now it was down to sundry light bulbs.
At one point I thought I saw Roxanne pull up in the driveway so I mustered everybody to help with the groceries but it was a false alarm. Both cars were black SUVs and at a glance out the picture window I mistook Michel moving her car in the driveway to a parking space at the front staircase landing. I thanked everyone for their prompt response.
Roxanne’s grocery list was a compilation of advance meal planning by Roxanne, Michel, Vincent and Amelie, who have been collaborating to feed family vacations and holidays as long as we’ve all been together. When Rox arrived Sid watched the little one while the rest of us hauled in the bags. We packed the fridge and the pantry. To make the first night easy Roxanne improvised and bought a couple of rotisserie chickens. Boiled rice. Salad. Broccoli. The teenage girls ate vegetarian, so Grandma brought them plant based chicken nuggets. While we pitched in to lay the table and lend a hand with the food, Roxanne directed tasks with too much urgency, still buzzed with adrenaline from showing up at a full house as if the rest of us wouldn’t have a clue what to do without her.
Can I mix you a gin and tonic, babe? We feasted. This goes without saying, as a family we always eat richly with no shame. I say this boldly because it’s true and it’s a given, our family can count on itself too feed ourselves. At the dinner table it’s all for one and one for all. Unwritten rule number one is Feed the House.
We celebrated a couple of things. It was exactly two weeks since Tess’s second dose of the Maxine. Now all of us were vaccinated except Neko, who was still too young. Ahem ahem, why didn’t anybody explain Neko had a cough, Michel asked around and the rest of us didn’t notice because three year olds are expected to get sniffles as they adapt their young immune systems, as Michel a nurse and mom knows, and besides she wasn’t back to pre-school yet and only spends time with her parents and grandparents. We toasted Tess as testimony to how lucky our family has been the past 15 months to evade covid-19.
We celebrated a toast to Fathers Day, to Sid, Vincent and me. We toasted to our safe travels. The topic turned to the Kysylyczyns’ sojourn in the Black Hills. Their consensus was first impressions of beauty that made you question its isolation, how a place so pretty and serene can seem so alone and ignored. As Minnesotans we grew up giving the Dakotas the fish eye, and still for the sake of teaching our kids kindness, tolerance and open-minded inclusion and diversity we try to keep our criticism civil and expect our progeny to figure out for themselves to trust their own observations in light of what the elders say. Clara and Tess were conflicted over their impressions of Mount Rushmore — not conflicted against each other but innerly conflicted to themselves over the enormousness of the project by the sculptor and its success and the idea that the mountain was sacred to Native people and stolen to sculpt giant busts of white patriarchs. They’re three years apart in school but keep each other up in the ways of the world that sustained them as bunkmates in Switzerland four years, resulting in an alliance of kinship and sisterness, empathy and sympathy bonded in immortal gold. Which is not to say identical twins, though they share the same dialect if not the same point of view. In this instance neither meant any disrespect but the mountain and history could have done without another portrait of George Washington and if they ever commission an additional face it better not be Youknow Who.
On the other hand they saw the monument in progress to Crazy Horse, a different sculpture of a man on a mountain of a different color stone. When finished it is supposed to be the largest sculpted mountain in the world. It will show Crazy Horse on a horse pointing to the sacred heart of the Black Hills. What troubled them about Crazy Horse was the monument completely controlled by a white private family who shared the fame and the proceeds with the Lakota nation at their sole discretion. Sid texted me a link to a story in The New Yorker — “Who Speaks for Crazy Horse?” (2019). Started in 1948 by a guy who had worked on the Mount Rushmore project it’s long from done, and severe critics accuse the family of perpetually milking it for profit with no end in sight. The chief’s face is clear and you are invited to imagine the shape of what will be his body, his horse and his outstretched arm. At $30 per car the Kysylyczyns considered it a stretch value except when they got there somebody let them go in free when they circled to drive away.
The teenagers wanted to bring Neko to the hot tub before sundown, which was still nearly two hours away. Tess asked if the hot tub might attract bears and Vincent answered that it wasn’t the quality of water wildlife prefer to drink, and there’s no fish. Amelie re-stated rule number one of the hot tub, nobody goes in it alone and offered to go with the girls. While the rest of us cleaned up after dinner we encountered our first conundrum.
We made a pot of coffee, which according to the measures at the side of the glass pot there should have been about twelve cups. At the end of the brew it only came to about eight. It was an automatic drip maker like Mr Coffee only made by Braun. Nothing complicated. I in fact made the brew, and I know I filled the pot all the way to 12 and poured it into the reservoir. Sid asked if maybe I skimmed a fast early cup off the first of the brew, but I swore there was no tampering, in the pot it made only 8. Which was sufficient for the five coffee mongers after dinner.
I ventured to suggest maybe a djinni lived in the wall behind the coffee maker below the counter top who extracted a portion of every pot of coffee as a kind of cosmic tax. Nobody really heard me.
Instead the weather seeped into the conversation. Sid and Michel said South Dakota east of the Badlands was a desert of humidity. With temperatures approaching 100F from Minneapolis to Wall Drug it seemed the freeway was an air conditioned tube across a muggy green plain steaming under the sun. At the Black Hills the rise of elevation seemed to lift them out of the soup, and for that Custer State Park was a nice place to stay at a rustic cabin. The drive down through Wyoming only proved the cooling effect of arid higher elevation. Roxanne and I agreed. Here in Estes Park the high temp barely cracked 80F, and even so, the humidity was so low the breezes swept clear your perspiration. Vincent made clear he despised hot weather and these alpine conditions delighted him to mix up a fresh gin and tonic to toast our coffees on his way out to the hot tub.
My parting words on my way to dress for the hot tub were another toast to Roxanne for finding us this vacation mansion. I invited her to accompany me to the hot tub but she deferred to stick around the kitchen island and discuss plans for tomorrow. Maybe later, she said, and besides it might be rather crowded down there. The teenage girls were just getting out and drying off when I arrived and they were the ones who told me Neko didn’t like being in the hot tub and that’s why she knelt on the top step leaning into the first step down into the tub and up to her shoulders just her arms stirring the water. The elder girls were simply done. How was it? Good. I excused myself over the little one and joined her mom and dad in the tub, now not crowded at all.
It was hard to judge sundown as red light faded and shadows turned purple and blue sky only got bluer as it went away not quite night. The hot tub was conceivably the top of the line, jets like shiatsu massage and an over the shoulders waterfall at the back bench. Each corner featured jets directed somewhere else at your back, or feet as it were. I lay back and floated under the waterfall. The spray mist landed cold to my face and chest, which made me immerse more to keep snug. Roxanne showed up in her bathing suit and took her turns in the jet rotation. Neko showed signs of a shiver and when even Grandma couldn’t lure her into the tub on Grandma’s lap, Amelie volunteered to bring her baby indoors to get ready for pajamas and Vincent belatedly offered to take Neko in but Amelie was already committed. Roxanne had just arrived and me too, so we promised to shut down the tub apparatus and secure the cover when we left, and nobody would remain alone.
Vincent and his mom and dad. It was one of those Truth and Soul moments with him when he frankly thanked us for being good parents. Every now and then he does this, and not in an intoxicated I Love You Man way. He sincerely wants to acknowledge his gratitude for his upbringing, how his mom and I raised him morally and provided him with security and opportunity and intellectual stimulus to live an interesting and fulfilling life. He was that succinct. Rox and I feigned no modesty and said he was welcome. I said my greatest fear was to have one of my children on a psychiatric couch complaining about me. As he was learning, fatherhood isn’t an automatic easy, he said, the responsibility enormous and the stakes, a person’s life and way of engaging the world. We did it in the name of love, we say. We love ya, man.
What he needed was reassurance that he was a good father, and he was. He told how good Neko was on the airplane, wore her mask without fussing. The pandemic offered Vincent a golden opportunity to build a father daughter bond few dads in this world ever get and few dads get to choose. I envy him. With Michel and him I had to struggle to satisfy my need to spend time with them when they were little against a work ethic demanding strict dedication to a job and job culture. My true worst fear was ending up like the dad in the Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the Cradle”. Plus there was contending against my own selfishness, expressed today in what they refer to as Me Time, which included whatever I was writing at the time. For all that, it pleased me Vincent was fond of how I turned out as his dad. For a while in my life my sixth biggest fear was ending up like a different guy in a Harry Chapin song, “Taxi”.
There was a time when I didn’t think I wanted to be a father. I wasn’t convinced it was right to bring children into this badass world. Roxanne helped convince me, and forty-something years ago we took responsibility to foster offspring and try to engender a generation of good people who would do the world some good. I decided I wanted to be a father so I would create someone to love.
Michel and Sid did not join us at the hot tub. The air was pine crisp and chilly. Lights from surrounding homes suggested nobody occupied them. The next to next next best thing to being alone in the mountain woods. We spoke in low after-dark tones in case somebody was really out there, respecting the neighbors. Sound didn’t seem to carry far anyway. No stars so far but it seemed an air traffic route approaching Denver flew above us too high to hear, beacons pulsing. Definitely this was not wilderness camping. Back in the house dried off we talked plans for tomorrow and the rest of the week. Roxanne got us reservations to enter the national park at one o’clock. Sid had been looking on the internet for river rafting excursions and we elected one for Wednesday. Tuesday seemed like a likely day to go to town at Estes Park and get our family portrait taken in an antique style.
Down at the basement level Neko found a Smokey Bear doll. Smokey’s hand permanently held a shovel, but he was missing his classical hat. This doll became a familiar companion. Neko also discovered a little pup tent downstairs, nylon light weight, which she dragged upstairs and installed at the fringe of the living room, which nobody seemed to mind. There she assembled her playthings, collecting knick-knacks such as moose and bear to accompany Smokey and the dolly she brought from home. Neko settled in. Home base.
Sid curated our music through his iPhone and a JBL while we all played UNO, a card game of matching, divestiture and attrition. Even Neko joined us — the game maker wisely included a set of bogus playing cards, but it wasn’t a few rounds before the little one figured out her cards didn’t affect the game and her attention turned back to her toys and tent. With eight of us around the table we thought we would play through quickly and have time for several rounds but the game lasted over an hour. Up and down, almost each of us at one point declared “UNO!” and ended up fattening up on discards in the deck. Being so nearsighted and unwilling to put on my glasses, the playing table so large for eight of us, I had to stand up and lean in every time it was my turn so I could read the card in play. Whenever I couldn’t play a card in my hand and ended up stoking from the draw, Tess who sat across from me would taunt, “Keep pickin’, chicken.” Sid eventually won, thanks to Clara who before him played the exact card he needed to go out.
And so the happy family of Kellys and Kysylyczyns adjourned to the cushy chairs and couches of the living room to relax before retiring. Most everyone scanned a hand-held device — phone, pad, tablet, laptop. It was Sunday night, and even though on PTO Vincent was obliged to compile a report for his boss for the cursory Monday morning meeting. The teenagers each wore earbuds, the new white ones without cords which resembled little meerschaum Swiss mountain horn pipes. Michel and Roxanne could have been checking Facebook or news feeds. Amelie snuggled Neko to calm and cajole her towards sleepy time while playing some simple graphics game of shapes, colors, vegetables and animals on an iPhone. At times like this Neko liked to relax sucking on her nuk. Sid shopped the net for a river rafting expedition Wednesday — morning or afternoon? In the background the big screen TV played by some kind of random consensus the Game Show Channel, which this time of night — every night — ran a couple of hours of back to back to back episodes of Family Feud hosted by Steve Harvey. And everybody except Neko in the room adept at multi-tasking, especially the teenagers, kept up with the questions — you know, 100 people surveyed, top seven answers are on the board…
Mountain time.
Let me say, if I ever see Steve Harvey on TV again it will be too soon. As game hosts go he’s probably one of the best, but game shows don’t entertain me (not even Jeopardy) much and the household consensus to default to the Game Show Channel before bedtime left me a little alienated, if forgiving. The Steve Harvey show in prime time only paid the winning team (family) $5 a point and didn’t pretend to be a high brow show. Any TV network or station whose most commercial break advertisers are promotions for its own shows lives in a niche market and I resented this particular niche marketing itself into my family vacation, but I let it pass without comment (until now). For one thing I didn’t want to challenge a consensus that seemed to be working alongside everybody else’s interactions and personal distractions.
My preference would have been CNN but I was aware how exhausted we all were from fierce political clashes and relentless coverage of the covid coronavirus (no longer novel) pandemic, and I with my very own big time iPhone could follow any of that any time I wanted on my own, and that was the point. As the week went on the Steve Harvey network gave over to TBS, a different Steve and the NBA playoffs, themselves whole other kinds of game shows. If there were a Gymnastic Channel either Clara or Tess would have found it. Default seemed to land at Family Feud where the contestants took turns guessing other peoples’ answers and playing foil to Steve Harvey and risking the XXX buzzer of three wrong answers.
In this light it was my prerogative to leave the house and go outdoors to smoke behind the garage. I didn’t expect to be missed and mostly I was right. My role in this enterprise was symbolic. Neither of my teenaged grand daughters sat at my lotus feet saying things that began, Pray Tell, and asking for my situational wisdom regarding the situation of the world. Unasked, I get to keep a lot of things to myself. What troubadour Bob Seger referred to as What to leave in and what to leave out. My official duty as grandfather to this family has evolved to being someone like the Holy Ghost. I have no oppressive authority as a patriarch. Maybe I could if I asserted it, but there’s nothing I would invoke to make it any different from how things go without me pretending to be boss.
Maybe I’m a nuanced whisperer but I behold no influence like Roxanne. I do not exaggerate, the world largely knows me as Roxanne’s husband, and so with my own family I am Dad by grace of Roxanne being Mom, Grandpa by virtue of Grandma Roxanne, and even among my own siblings they treat Rox like their own genetic sister almost like I am the in-law. My grandchildren don’t ask me questions about when I was young — maybe they’re afraid of what I would reveal. Up to a point my own kids expressed very little interest in who I might have been before they were born, and I might have fostered that point of view by treating their lives as being the beginnings of my life. Grown up now, lives of their own, I feel privileged to have honorary access to their existence. In Neko’s instance I participate in shaping her mind and character by minding her a day or two a week, but Grandma’s my boss and Neko can tell. Vincent and Michel can tell. It rubs off on Sid and Amelie and gets inherited through Clara and Tess. It’s not that my heritage counts for an interesting legacy. I am becoming translucent by transparency, almost invisible. I do not fret about being ignored or forgotten and take a measure of pride at being taken for granted, as if my work is done.
Outdoors that first night at the mountain home I think I was looking for shooting stars and actually saw fewer stars up through the pines than I wished. Again I saw air traffic on the overhead flight path to Denver. The next day, Monday, would be Summer Solstice. My dead mother’s birthday. First day of summer in the northern hemisphere of the planet. For some reason the night was not dark enough.
Some people say there’s nothing like a good cry. For me there’s nothing like a good cough. A good rough cleansing of the lungs and hearty blowout of the airways of the chest. I’ve had a cough most of my life. It’s a liberating act. I credit smoking for the impetus to clear my breathing. I know it runs counter to medical science and I would not recommend it to my grandchildren but inducing a deep cough has sustained me from suffocation and ennui. This night I hoped it would scare away bears.
Being outdoors alone gave me a look around the land surrounding us nobody noticed or cared about from inside the house. Despite the density of trees the visibility through the wooded properties went a long way in every direction by virtue of the straight bare trunks with no limbs at eye level until high into the canopy above the rooftops. The neighbor houses seemed even closer in the dark with their yard lights on and strategic interior room lights of nobody home. Alongside the garage a two car dumpster reeked and I hoped Monday might be the day the sanitation truck came to pick up what was in it. There was an iron bar with a latch across the lid to keep it secure from bears. With bears in mind I went back in the house, where nobody seemed to miss me.
Chapter 6
In the morning Michel made coffee. She carefully measured the water to the 12 cup line in the carafe. The net result again eight cups. I advanced my theory of a djinni living behind the cupboard who exacted a cut of the proceeds. Eventually Vincent elegantly explained the physics of how the atmosphere at this altitude absorbs boiled water at a higher ratio than where we live. Something about his delivery irritated his sister, who didn’t doubt he was right. I’ve lived with their sibling rivalry all their lives, about forty years, almost before Vincent was born, so this kind of buzz didn’t faze me, raise any red flags or blip my radar. The morning began where the night left off (minus Steve Harvey) only the sunlight shone bright through the pines and lit the log walls through the curtainless windows of the kitchen and living room.
Sid was first up, naturally, and went for a run into town and around the reservoir. His shoes on the ground scouting report gave this neighborhood of Estes Park an excellent rating and he quipped hope we weren’t considered the riff raff, not just tourists. Vincent was up with Neko, letting Amelie sleep in. Michel and the teenage girls got up about the same time as Sid, is why Michel made coffee. Neko came in our room to wake up Grandma.
The place had excellent wi fi. I did my morning banking and scrolled the news from the eEdition of the StarTribune over coffee and a raisin cinnamon bagel with cream cheese. The others ate breakfast and scrolled their phones and tablets too, engaging the wide world through those narrow portals we access to amuse and edify ourselves via the refined metaverse of what God has wrought. Sid booked us a river rafting expedition for Wednesday near Fort Collins. Tess liked Tik Tok and kept up with her best friend and cousin Erin. Clara watched music videos wearing earbuds, occasionally whisper singing softly to herself. Michel could have been checking texts or newsletters from the schools or church or the parent associations including the gymnastic, swim and diving teams and whatever else pertained to her citizen participation. Same with Amelie when she came upstairs. Roxanne double checked our reservations to enter the national park. It was a snapshot of family on a Monday morning. The big TV on the wall was off.
Our reservations were for eleven o’clock. Covid-19 protocols required visitors to make reservations at national parks to try to provide social distancing among the crowds. As we cleaned up after breakfast we prepared for the day trip. In the cabinet below the coffee counter the house came stocked with water bottles so those who hadn’t brought their own could bring water, which Vincent and Amelie reminded us was essential to well being at this altitude. They packed goldfish crackers for Neko. It would be colder and windy up the mountain. Michel reminded us to apply sunscreen and everybody have a mask, just in case such as trailheads and visitor centers.
We took both cars. Rox rode with the Kysylyczyns and I with Neko in the back seat with Amelie at the wheel and Vincent shotgun. We split up that way because Roxanne and I each have lifetime Golden Eagle senior passes to all US national parks, meaning we and our companions in each car got into the park free.
The park entrance could have been the back door out of Estes Park. We joined a line of about a dozen cars. More than half were turned away because apparently they had no reservations. Some you could see arguing with the ranger, who calmly withheld the map and day pass and waved them around the entrance hut, and a few of those gunned their engines on the way out but everybody obeyed. In a few hours the park would open to visitors without reservations at an attrition basis as reserved visitors left the park. A separate line of cars would soon form on a first come basis. We were waved in with smiles.
The two lane highway beyond the park entrance curved and curled as we climbed the timber cushioned canyon to the crossroads at Bear Lake Road, where led by Sid we attempted to enter. Our reservation did not include Bear Lake Road, so the ranger at that station waved us around to go back to the main road, which we did with smiles. We actually already knew our reservation didn’t include Bear Lake but Sid was of a mood to test the system; we’d heard Bear Lake was a cool destination and told ourselves nice try; the ranger reminded us as we departed this route would open to non-reservations at 3:00. We proceeded back to rejoin the main road US 36 to the Beaver Meadows visitors center, where we registered our tickets via Roxanne’s cell phone and we officially entered the park.
Tess put on her mask and went directly to the desk to register for the Junior Ranger program, get her booklet and a pencil. She knew what to do, she already had badges from about five other national parks. Clara passed on the opportunity, in her mind had aged out of the program and preferred to approach the experience like an adult tourist like her dad — no offense to her sister, whom she generally assisted anyway in spotting flora and fauna to complete the answers to the booklet.
We chose an easy place for our first hike, not far off the road with gradual uphill ascent near a rushing stony stream. Neko immediately made for the water’s edge, drawing a slew of guardians all around. The rest of us meandered up the stony hill, scattered to stake out preferred vantages.
That morning I’d read a blog by my friend Thom Amundsen about a hike he took up a mountain in Minnesota. He recalled advice from a friend for hiking steep terrain, pick up two stones about palm size and clasp one in each hand and hold them as you walk, transfer energy with the stones with every step. Two stones on the trail I walked volunteered themselves. They did not match in color or composition. One was rounder, the other slimmer and oblong. The rounder one suited my left hand for volume and the other fit tight between my knuckles and palm. Right away I felt a surge in my steps generating from my hands. It was a sense of propellant up my shoulders and back down to my hips. It wasn’t the first reference I’d heard regarding stones in hands — Thom’s friend could have been Fernando from Zihuatanejo — but his most recent reminder served as a cautionary consideration for myself as to whether I had any business hiking up mountainsides.
The lost year of ZOZO cost me more stamina than I could count. Months and months confined to my very own big time psychiatric couch did nothing for my muscle tone. Like it was one big long Lent I practically gave up swimming and walking. The YWCA was closed — beside a pool they’ve got a big field house with an elevated indoor track for walking laps when the landscape outdoors offers slippery risks or it’s just too cold. Didn’t walk the beach or swim at Ixtapa — didn’t go. Didn’t meander Mall of America. Even when weather conditions allowed safe passage I remained reluctant to go outdoors even to mosey through the neighborhood much less avail my city’s opulent lakes and parks except to please Roxanne, who fought stir craziness with exercise and warned me against rot if I lived this leisure life on the couch. I knew she was right but couldn’t rise to the urgency in a world where it may not matter and didn’t make a difference and I actually lost six pounds. Thus I drew what force I could from the two rocks I carried up the stony trail, one step at a time, one foot in front of the other.
Roxanne caught up to me and questioned her own stamina at this altitude, which was at least 8,000 feet. I told her about Thom Amundsen’s method and showed her my fists. She readily found her own two stones and passed me on the trail to catch up with Tess and Michel. Sid and Clara led all ascenders. The view was not spectacular but it was enchanting. Down by the creek Vincent and Amelie coaxed the little blond kid uphill among the rocks. So this is why they call it the Rocky Mountains.
We drove our little caravan further up what twisted and curved above the canyons to emerge to Trail Ridge Road above the tree line. The views ranged from enchanting to evocative to hypnotic. I was so happy not to be driving. Where we pulled off the road to wander and look, Tess brought her booklet and kept her eyes out for wildlife. I asked Clara how the Rockies so far compared to what she remembered of the Alps. She said similarities aside, the Alps seemed more densely peaked with steep valleys between, where the Rockies seemed more spread out and contiguous. Along the ridge Tess, whom I call Kitty, sidled to me to observe the view, a rolling cushy valley of tundra descending into a dark abyss that rose rocky and sturdy on the other side.
“Don’t you wish we could just roll and roll down that hill Grandpa? Doesn’t it look almost fluffy?”
“It’s a long long way down, Kitty. We’re seeing illusions of perspective. That green lushness down there is actually prickly treetops.”
“Even so, it looks entreating.” She had already identified a marmot and a tiny pika, a bighorn sheep and a white-tailed ptarmigan, a tundra bird that looks like a grouse. Or so she told me.
We reached tundra where the plant life exists like inch-high sprigs like succulents, too fragile to allow wanderers to trample. Signs posted at the crest of Kitty’s rolling hill prohibited foot traffic, and the slope of Kitty’s hill looked deceptively gentle enough but the tundra vegetation would be too slippery to climb back up, so the prohibition was probably more for the safety of humans than flora.
Near the top of the ridge we parked near a visitor center where a trail led up through the tundra to the peak of the mountain, over 12,000 feet. The ascent up the bare-ass tundra looked gradual enough. There was a rock formation like a fortress at the top. I joined Sid, Clara, Kitty and Michel on the hike to the top. Neko was cranky and otherwise too little for this trek for trek’s sake. Her mom and daddy and Granma Roxy stayed behind with her to savor the view from the edge of the ridge.
I had my two rocks in the pouch pocket of my hoodie, and when I carried them in my hands the rounder one still fit my left palm, the narrower one firmly clenched in my right. The trail was a bee line path bisecting an asymmetrical panorama of mossy prairie all the way to the horizon, which seemed further away with every step but at the same time a finite place in time at the fortress of stone. Soon I could see beyond that were other mountains peak with snow. The wind was gusting stiffly so I had to adjust my wide-brimmed hat and lace the string under my chin if it blew off, though the wind was at our backs going up. Thus I found the ascent surprisingly facile. Even so Sid set the pace ahead with his daughters. Michel escorted me much of the way, but along the way I tend to dawdle anyway and lag behind, a shepherding tendency as well as the advanced age prerogative to not hurry a new experience.
I knew I wasn’t alone. If needed I knew Clara and Tess would come back for me like they did a few years back on vacation at Bryce Canyon, when they, their dad Sid and I did the whole Queen’s Garden Navajo Loop trail, a magnificent descent to the floor of an effervescent desert canyon oasis and a captivating climb along the walls of timeless red rock which eventually climbs to about a dozen final switchbacks which seem eternal when looking down deeper backward into the canyon and realizing there is no going back, and up is the only way back to the real world from the surreal. When the guidebooks say the Navajo Loop going up is strenuous, take them for their word. The final dozen switchbacks are not suited for leisurely rambling conversation. Clara and Tess kept up with their dad, who was way ahead of me, maybe two switchbacks by the time he emerged. Yet the girls still took turns doubling back to walk with me and even hold my hand part way until I made it within the final two switchbacks. Compared to Bryce Canyon this tundra was a cakewalk, even three years older, this my summer of 69. Holding hands with stones.
At the top the horizon curved such that you couldn’t say we reached a peak but just and egg shaped dome. The stone tower was a formation of irregular stones that arose in staged crags about twenty feet tall and fifty feet across on the spongy tundra. A group of five or six boys, mostly strangers to one another, climbed the windblown crags and stood at the top flats and sat among the jutted rocks like this was their territory, not menacing but cocky. Their adult companions meandered across the dome of tundra. The presence of our teenage girls seemed to motivate the boys to recede to the shadows but the girls didn’t take up the invitation to climb.
Surveying the horizon edges around the slope of this giant, fuzzy egg it struck me that there were no posted prohibitions to walking on the tundra itself off the path up here. Except for stepping from the rock fortress to the paved trail I felt guilty walking on the tundra turf. At the same time the turf looked no worse for wear from the soles who meandered to explore beyond the path. There were no big crowds at any park mainstays, likely due to the reservation policy and the crowd mitigation of the park service. At this place there wasn’t a whole lot to explore, but I recalled Roxanne’s and my first and only visit to Yosemite, where huge crowds overran every square inch of available ground at every mainstay where people elbowed each other for grand vistas. Yosemite was the most egregiously crowded tourist attraction we ever saw, perhaps because the valley and canyon offer such critically limited space to share such immense natural beauty. I could complain about all the attractions I’ve been for the crowds, from Grand Canyon to Eiffel Tower. I feel guilty for my selfishness to wish to savor for myself and my intimate companions the glorious majesty of compelling sites without sharing the worthy experiences with thousands of strangers distracting my vision and crowding my space. The guilt comes from the reality of the public places, which are established to share the grandeur with everyone, not just the elite and privileged, especially wonders of nature but including works of humanity. Most times while touring I take the approach of people watching to see what they might be seeing, a sort of crowd bonding of not only sharing space and time but purpose. There’s a duality I can live with, like visiting the Greek agora in Athens to treat agoraphobia. At Yosemite we got a close up look at overpopularity threatening the park’s very existence, its sacred availability to the public domain allowing overpopulation by humans to erode away its natural environment, the reason it is so popular. As Don Henley sang, “Call someplace Paradise, kiss it good bye.”
Not so much this first day of summer at Rocky Mountain National Park, beautiful if not paradise and well shy of crowded. The covid pandemic which turned every public space into a potential superspreader kept a vacation like this unthinkable a year before, and this being the first weeks of official opening of institutional restrictions, it was still a sign that the habits and practices of the lost year of ZOZO were still with us high on the tundra under blue sky at 12,000 feet in North America in a stiff but not icy wind on solstice day and all the tourists scattered across the fuzzy horizon keeping relative social distance like a Stonehenge of people on the plain.
Even on the walk down slope to the cars I came in last. Every hike I take, no matter how fast I feel I’m going I always fall behind. Is it my shepherding tendency? The wind at my face was almost cold but I had my rocks in my hoodie pocket to keep me warm. My hat blew off but my chin lace kept me from having to chase it up the tundra. I never said wait for me, did I?
We regrouped at the parking lot. Neko napped in her car seat. Having reached the top of the ridge line we retreated back to our mountain forest home for lunch. Again I was happy to not be driving. Not that it was a harrowing or dangerous drive, it was simply too beautiful to keep my eyes on the road. Going back the other direction was not a simple repeat of where we came from but the unveiling of new angles and vistas revealed as if the mountain range rearranged itself behind our backs.
Outside the park entrance at the base of the valley, where a disciplined line of cars waited for a turn to get into the park as cars like ours left, Sid turned their car into the visitor center while Amelie drove directly through town to the house, where we laid out a spread of deli cold cuts, cheeses, hummus and breads on the vast island in the center of the kitchen. This center island served as buffet table and central meeting space the whole of our stay, the living room aside. After a look around the merchandise at the visitor center store, the Kysylyczyns and Roxanne joined the buffet. They said they saw a lot of interesting stuff but were too hungry to linger and buy anything right then.
Tess worked on her Junior Ranger booklet. She said she missed Erin, her cousin the same age and lifelong best friend. Two years ago, before ZOZO, Erin rode along with Sid, Michel, Clara and Kate on a family road trip to Tennessee, where they dropped Clara at a gymnastics camp outside of Nashville. While Clara practiced gymnastics at a camp with her peers they toured Nashville and the Great Smoky Mountains. At Smoky Mountain National Park Tess and Erin competed to complete their study guides to be first to get the Junior Ranger badge, which Erin won, Tess said by jumping the line. Erin spent a lot of time at her cousins’ house and hanging out with their activities and I half expected she would be with them on this trip to Colorado. I could see why Tess missed her, but they kept in touch by smartphone and their separation wasn’t that dire, not like the years Tess lived in Switzerland, and for me offered an extra opportunity to spend time with Tess.
Clara set up a shop of sorts at a portion of the big coffee table in the living room, arranged her array of colored threads and went about weaving bracelets, starting with Neko. The little one was fascinated and sat beside her teenage cousin and watched the process. She picked out the bracelet threads but otherwise didn’t interfere with Clara’s layout or procedure. For her patience she got a bracelet for each wrist and lessons how to create them herself whenever she ever felt so confident.
After lunch we got back in the cars and re-entered the park. The Bear Lake area was still closed to those without reservations until 3:00, and we had seen on the way down there was still a considerable line of cars, so we instead drove to Marys Lake, a tranquil little byway fringed by mountains at the edge of the woods with a level walking trail around the lake. Signs posted at the lakefront warned that swimming was illegal. Sid said he encountered signs like that posted around the reservoir in town where he ran that morning. The reason was, Victor explained, the water in this vicinity was typically so cold you could catch hypothermia and die quickly. Michel grew irritated whenever Neko was allowed to go the lake’s edge without close accompaniment and her brother countered that his little daughter had more impulse control than to worry about her. The lake was rippled but calm, no surf waves or tumbling rapids, and the edges sandy with reeds, grass and short trees of aspen and willow. Neko followed little blue dragonflies into the grasses. Tiny frogs hopped toward the beach and into the trees. Redwing blackbirds escorted us along the trail. This was yet early in the season for this ecosystem. No butterflies. Most wildflowers were yet to bloom. Eventually about four-fifths around the lake Neko started getting ornery and demanded to be carried. Victor and Amelie, Uncle Sid and Grandma strung her along and the girls said stuff like You Got This until it was clear, she would walk not another pace and her mother picked her up in her arms and cradled her and carried her the rest of the way, enjoying the blackbirds with red shoulders perched in the aspen along the marsh grass.
If I ever come back I would like to walk the trail the other way, clockwise around the lake. For the same reason to pay attention to the scenery both ways up and down the mountains because it’s different. Not that it’s likely I shall pass this way again, I don’t know why except that it was solely for the sake of my family I was there at all, not that I was drawn especially obsessed by Old West American History which by this time sailed right over my head, my focus more affixed by the geological and geographic history beyond the time of first humans and to admire it within the context of what humans have erected and created around such abundant natural beauty. This was where my family picked and chose to meet up and spend vacation time together for the simple sake of exploring a strange new place together or more simply spending time at leisure and recreation. We certainly didn’t have a family business, nothing dynastically commercial between us. There was no more reason to be there than simply wanting to be on a retreat together just to keep each other company exploring somewhere new, or at least new to somebody, and share whatever understanding keeps us, as Tess put it, permanent.
Everybody is presumed to want something from this vacation. Roxanne’s motives reinforce my own, to spend intimate special time with our kids and grandkids while we still can. Everybody includes even the three year old, who wants attention and affection no matter what, places to play and secure protection. The rest may be in it for lots of reasons. The teenagers because their parents said so, and after practically their lifetimes touring and exploring geography far from home, what Tess used to refer as real life, they overlap being exposed and exposed to places they may not ordinarily think about or come across at their ages except on a screen or in a book to being curious about the details of where they are. Sid and Michel travel as part of their nature and rarely revisit any given place except like Paris or Zurich, and go at it with destinations in mind and looking for excursions and collecting mementos. Rox and I have traveled with them, and given their life expectancies they will far and away go more places on this earth than I will, and already have. Their mutual attraction to travel vacations project onto their daughters awareness of a wider world which will continue to benefit them when they grow up and create their own real life lives. We all want our children to have a better life. Vincent and Amelie prefer to travel to obscure and wild places within North America, preferably near water, where they pass their wonder of nature to Neko. The adult kids all see vacations as paid time off work. Everybody might say this sojourn in northern Colorado was due for the reason of celebrating having survived the lost year of ZOZO, even though that long sixteen or so month year was barely over and this is more or less the same vacation we planned for a year ago before pandemic. Everybody had their own reasons to participate, lots of simple and complex motives of their own, none less than to accept Roxanne’s (and my) extravagant generosity.
Tacos for dinner. The kitchen island served as an excellent buffet for all the fixings. Around the table we could not stick to one topic. The new delta variant of covid-19 could overturn all the progress made against the pandemic just when restrictions were being taken down. Back home our governor announced plans to relinquish his emergency powers and call a special session of the legislature to finish appropriation bills. American vaccination rates lagged depressingly low considering copious availability of vaccines and it looked like President Biden’s national goal of 78% by the 4th of July would fall short. They called it vaccine hesitancy but we knew it was a polite euphemism for organized resistance. When Trump was president it was all about developing a vaccine at Warp Speed and now his supporters refuse to get vaccinated. So far the vaccines seemed to be effective against severe disease and death from the delta variant. In the coming weeks each of the teenage girls would be attending camps. It would take an overwhelming surge of serious infections and panic to bring back lockdowns, and even then the resistance would likely prevail and laissez-faire compliance render authority unenforceable. It seemed as if society was willing to let everything slide just when we were this close. Then again, we have been conditioned to accept dire prognoses. Dr Mike Osterholm’s name came up, our home town epidemiologist known for being too often right about his pessimistic predictions. We had come too far to let it get our goats.
In the hot tub with Clara and Tess as dusk eased its shadows under the red pines I asked them about this past school year, whether in fact they had become dumber. Oh no, not them. Clara had been a high school sophomore, barely a freshman year into high school society when distance learning kept her home attending classes over wi fi. She had no trouble keeping up her lessons and getting good grades. The experience only reinforced everything she learned about technology her whole life. Same with Tess — maybe more so. Clara missed social life being in a building in classes with rooms and students, even if she grew adept at group projects in virtual laptop sessions, such as choir practice and eventual concert, all shot from home. Homes. Tess said she didn’t miss going to her school and didn’t care if she returned to in-school learning (especially when she would attend a new middle school in the fall due to boundary changes) and didn’t seem to miss campus social life, she had all the social life she wanted without it. Tess was every bit as tech savvy as her older sister and also got good grades, and to her if that’s all that mattered for school she would rather go at it that way from home, her own studio.
I summarized with the chorus of a song I exposed them to when they were little: “I’m doing all right, getting good grades, the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.”
Don’t forget climate change, said Tess.
Poverty, added Clara. The murder rate.
Grandma Roxanne and Michel showed up and we made room giving them the corner jets. Grandma wanted to hear about their upcoming camps. They would forego gymnastics camp in Tennessee another year because of covid. Instead Clara would go back to Tennessee to a Methodist church camp in Appalachia to do social service work for a week. Meanwhile Tess would attend a diving camp at Gustavus Adolphus College in St Peter MN, an hour or so south of the Twin Cities. Clara and Tess both attended a diving camp the summer before the pandemic as an offshoot of gymnastics. All their lives they dabbled in diving off the board at the swimming pool in their other grandparents’ back yard. Clara made the varsity Southwest high school diving team her sophomore year and Tess hoped to make the Southwest junior varsity squad her upcoming final year of middle school and make varsity her freshman year. Tess was a year too young to attend the church camp and still hadn’t gone through confirmation at their church. Clara needed to contribute social service to fulfill church commitments made with confirmation and could add the experience to her resume of public service towards her application to the National Honor Society.
The girls had enough and went back up to the house. Grand Ma and Ma Ma continued dialog about the girls, summer plans and keeping them busy during school break. Sid and Michel always kept their kids busy. They were pleasantly surprised how they adapted to home learning when the pandemic shut down their schools. Gymnastics was Clara’s only sport since pre-school track and field until high school diving. She broke her ankle on a faulty dismount from the beam a couple years ago and never quite recovered despite two surgeries. Whether she continued at the high school level or not she would require one more surgery to remove bone spurs. The gymnastics studio she and Tess belonged to shut down for a while too from the pandemic — one of the coach’s spouses died from covid — and league competition stopped. Year ZOZO squelched the gymnastic season for the girls and closed their social club and cost Clara a part time job coaching little beginners. Tess had played basketball and soccer and competitive swimming before focusing on gymnastics as a year round discipline. At three years difference, the younger Tess all her life seemed to trail along behind Clara in sports achievement and in gymnastics she was catching up fast. Now Clara was on the edge of retiring or aging out of their gym studio club, and Tess was approaching a chance to make the high school JV diving team as an eighth grader. The two sports coexisted but their competitive seasons did not overlap. Now that school was out and there were no scheduled team practices Michel spoke of the stress of keeping her daughters occupied.
Grand Ma of course offered to take them places and suggested one or both of them and even their constant cousin Erin might lend hands on days we watched Neko. I lounged deep into the fluming waters, just my face above the churning surface so I couldn’t hear so well, much less see anything but the bright blurry purple twilight sky. The sprinkles of spray in the air trickled chilly to the skin of my face, so I stuck my head out a little more to feel the tingles on my scalp. The moon was high and nearly full, almost straight up in the sky. Was I tuning out the conversation of my wife and daughter? No. I was immersed in serenity.
Chapter 7
Next morning I was up right after Sid, who went for a run. He started the coffee before he left and I nursed it along about halfway through the brew cycle adding about four more cups of water to the reservoir to net out a pot of 12 to outfox the djinni. Vincent kept the cannabis up high on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet next to the coffeemaker. Nobody around, which is to say discreetly I extracted a fruity 10 mg edible cube and chewed it with savor like a vitamin diet supplement. Be it said that whole week I availed this stash day to day. This now the second day of summer, my summer of 69, the first summer since ZOZO, my heart was set on savoring this vacation as the pathway for the rest of my life. As it should be. I’ve had new beginnings before but this was not one. Even those old new beginnings were continuations, extensions, extrapolations of this same old charmed life. And being almost 70 I didn’t need an actuary to keep me posted that every year could be the home stretch.
The plan for this day was to go to town after breakfast to browse the shops and seek one of those old timey photo studios to take a family portrait. This would be our third since Amelie joined our clan, or kin if you prefer. The first two we had taken in Wisconsin Dells, where we spent long weekends at a condo at a water park, the first the summer Michel, Sid and the girls moved to Switzerland and the second the summer after they came back. The first one was a classic Old Western set at a public house with us men in broad brim hats and Wild West post-Civil War shirts and carrying long guns and the ladies primped up as saloon divas while the young girls in frilly dresses and wide hats and for some reason flashing straps of cash and cloth bags marked $. The second portrait set us back to the basics of the hardscrabble pioneers of the prairie with buckskin boys — Vincent even donned a raccoon cap and Sid a banjo — and all the womenfolk modestly homestead dressed, dainty caps and aprons, Amelie conspicuously eight months pregnant with would-be Neko, who was then oddly known as Frankie in the womb. Again I wore a wide brimmed hat and carried a long gun. If we were playing the same characters I at least wanted to convey continuity.
At breakfast Vincent seemed unusually grumpy and it grated his sister. Or maybe Michel was grumpy and Vincent was normal. Either way, I sensed the tension between the siblings and as usual didn’t do or say anything about it. He might have dropped a casual F-bomb within earshot of the kids. She may have been aggravated by by Neko running about unsupervised and undisciplined, not that she was into any mischief, playing in the pup tent on the landing above the sunken living room with Smokey Bear and a few wildlife figurines from around the house. I don’t know. The sibling rivalry as I said dates back to the day Vincent was born (maybe longer) and I’ve tolerated and mitigated it what seems like my entire life without solving it and life seems to go on. Maybe I even encouraged it by allowing them to argue. I never really shrugged it off or took sides except under extreme tempers, and they coexisted peaceably at worst and at best like best buds. I hoped the four year gap between them would narrow into adulthood but in time it was clear it wasn’t the difference in their ages or in the age they were raised but differences in their personalities. They tolerated and mitigated each other while unable to reconcile their similarities, which it seemed only Roxanne and I could see. This day it didn’t seem an unusual factor and I anticipated having another good day and ending up everybody copacetic.
Even so, Vincent was less than enthused about taking a trip into town, and not for covid reasons. He just had a skeptical attitude about tourist towns and if not for the importance of our vintage family portrait would have preferred to go back inside the park to poke around, or at least stay home. Everybody else was excited to take the picture and curious about the town. Michel found a photo studio offering what we were looking for and put a pin in it on her Google map. The women fixed their hair. Amelie tried to brush Neko’s flying tangled curls but the kid resisted. Nobody dressed up because we would all be in costume.
Downtown Estes Park was just far enough away to justify taking the cars but according to Sid it would make an interesting hike based on his morning run routes. All the while he was the only one who explored the area on foot. Apart from our activities within the park and our rafting trip, we explored by car. That way we covered a lot of ground. Off the main streets we found municipal parking downtown. A pedestrian walkway lined with shops ran along both sides of a creek through town. On the old main street we found the photo studio. We wore masks while we crammed into the crowded little lobby, which was occulied by another party ahead of us. The proprietor took our name and asked if we would wait outside until our turn, a reasonable request the first week away from covid restrictions. Out on the sidewalk we mingled with other tourists, some masked, some not. Michel stayed close to the photo studio for the signal to bring us in. Roxanne, the girls and Amelie checked out adjoining shops. Vincent ducked into the bar across the street. Sid and I hung out between Michel and the studio and the others and the shops. We walked up the block a little on the old main to eye the boutiques taken over the Old West storefronts and commented on their apparent relative prosperity after ZOZO the lost year. Further than we ventured I spied a music store that might sell records and CDs. I never got there — this mission was not to tie up vacation hours shuffling through music bins auditing recordings I probably didn’t need.
By the time the lady proprietor at the photo studio motioned for us to enter we were all assembled behind Michel at the door, even Vincent. As the previous group chose and paid for their pictures an older lady ushered us behind the curtain to the wardrobe and began choosing and distributing Victorian era costumes to put on over our street clothes. She dressed us in Sunday best finery. The women and girls wore high collar floor length brocade dresses and the guys suits with long coats and ascot neckties. The siblings’ couples stood in back, Sid and Vincent back to back like business partners, their wives at their sides like emerging grand dames. Next row the two teenagers looked like spinsters seated side by side below their parents, and Roxanne and I seated on the other half of the composition looked the matriarchal patriarchal part. Neko stood in the foreground in the middle. All the women and girls held folded parasols except Clara, who held a bouquet of flowers. I held a cane. Sid held his lapel. We all wore hats except Neko. Mine a medium brim gentleman’s hat, Vincent got a derby, Sid a serious wide brim, and the ladies wide brimmed, feathered and flowered. Neko’s wild blond curls rippled and radiated from the center of the frame. The floor was a carpet of an arabesque pattern of a mixture of leaves and the background a paradise wall of an Impressionist canopy of leafy trees.
The main proprietor lady posed us and framed us and took several shots. She was exact in her directions, almost autistically officious. Didn’t make small talk or joke around. Not unfriendly just unsocial. The session was over quicker than it took us to dress and undress. I learned from the older costume lady, more sociable, that she was the proprietor photographer’s mother, who taught the daughter the business, and she was just helping out getting the business restarted after the covid shutdown.
Through the modern technical miracle of computer photography we could see our proofs on screen right away and receive our prints in minutes. There were packages galore and Christmas cards. Each of our three households picked a favorite proof for an 8 x 10. I stayed behind to pick up the tab while everybody dispersed to the street. The proprietor saw my credit card and offered me a discount for cash. I happened to have enough cash to oblige her. In parting I turned back to the mom, putting the last of our hats away and commented how well the daughter learned the craft of the camera.
The portrait was in fact very good. We chose instead of black and white, or sepia tone like our previous two, to print this one in faux hand-tinted color. What the costumes and positions of the figures didn’t provide were conveyed by the postures and facial expressions of the people. Clara and Tess looked like spinsters because their faces are so innocently serious beyond their years. Michel and Amelie glare with fierce aristocratic elegance. Roxanne is forgivably smug as Grand Ma, formidable and graceful. I managed not to look feeble and daft with my cane and not a rifle.
Neko in the center foreground intrigued me by the way she was dressed. In a floor length black dress with a white lace hem and white lace collar and shoulders, she reminded me of Queen Victoria in mourning for her Prince Albert, or of one of those funeral portraits of a deceased child from the Colonial era. I was about to ask the studio ladies about this when, as I pocketed my change and thanked them both, Michel came back into the shop to see what was keeping me.
Out on the sidewalk and on main street the swell of late morning pedestrians caused need for the city to deploy a jolly traffic cop at the main corner to direct foot traffic and keep the walkers safe from the surges of cars from every direction. The crowds made Michel nervous and I was none too comfortable either. Most of our group had migrated to the third of fourth shop down the street, eyeballing t-shirts and earrings and Colorado memorabilia. I found the state flag interesting, big red C in the middle with a yellow sun circle in the C over a field of white bordered by two wide stripes. Nobody saw what they really wanted. Michel and Sid and the girls went on ahead seeking specialty coffee and ice cream. Vincent wanted to go straight back to the cabin. Amelie voted with Vincent on Neko’s behalf, as there wasn’t much to amuse the kid and what she did find interesting at the stores she couldn’t really play with. I and Roxanne were ambivalent. The outlook ahead appeared to be shops and more shops the likes we’ve seen since we were kids from Nisswa Minnesota to Niagara Falls. We would have rather gone back into the national park but we didn’t have a reservation and admission to the un-reserved was a few hors away, so I voted to go back to home base. Roxanne however preferred the back route to the car park along the patios on the banks of the little river. She found an ice cream shop on the way and thus some of us spoiled our lunch with dessert first. The downside of this elegant little scenic route was having to keep Neko away from the edge of the creek.
Carrying iPhones kept us all texted as to our separate whereabouts and cinched our rendezvous at Mountain Forest Home. Bread and cheese, cold chicken, cold cuts, peanut butter and jelly, quesadillas, Nutella, lots of choices and options awaited for lunch. Vincent mixed a gin and tonic and noted it was time to replenish. I decided to mix one for myself an found indeed the bottle of Boodles I’d brought from home had gone down rather fast. The Kysylyczyns arrived sooner that I would have thought, given how much further they ventured up the street. Nobody had any souvenirs. We all talked about feeling awkward among other tourists. Even with masks it seemed hard to make eye contact with strangers. Clara and Tess remarked they wanted to go back shopping at the national park visitor centers, having found nothing special downtown. Roxanne agreed.
While Amelie and Vincent took a trip to the liquor store I courted Neko. Out front of the house on the far side of the driveway a stand of boulders beckoned her to climb. Some as big as cars and trucks, the tallest was as big as a boxcar. Terraced and lumpy with a hollowed out bowl around the backside it almost seemed designed a monument to childsplay except it emerged from the earth like the natural pinnacle of some subterranean peak, even though it was the only rock formation of its kind in the neighborhood. Which meant if it was a landscape design it was not only perfectly executed but probably very expensive, if completely in keeping with the property. I tagged after Neko, who strutted and climbed up, down and all around, only hesitant to scale the dome all the way to the top.
While we contemplated whether she really wanted to try to crawl the pinnacle a muscular elk with a head of antlers crossed the far side of the property and paused to graze the fresh cut lawn of the neighbor. “Elk,” I grandpa-splained in nearly a whisper when I saw she saw. Both of us momentarily awestruck, the lovely animal paused and raised his head high before sniffing his march across the property borders and into the woods behind the house.
“Where is it going?” she asked as I gave her foot a boost up the craggy side of the peak.
“Into the woods looking for food.”
“Will it come back?”
“Probably not today.”
“Help me down.” She lowered herself to a ledge accessible to a plateau where she felt secure to tramp around and I could back off to ground level to observe sitting down on a rock. Not one old enough to appreciate catharsis her attention leaped to the next plateau whereas I fawned over my grandchild, her little mountain and the elk. How will she remember Grandpa Kelly? Even spending days like these with her at home at least once a week, how much of an impression am I making on her memory? The other two grandkids were mature enough now to know me as a vivid person and remember me in specific ways, but Neko got a late start, so much younger, even if she was more fun than ever to mess with her mind it would still take years and years to catch up to the level of value her cousins appreciate me.
Michel appeared on the deck of the front porch and asked where were Vincent and Amelie. They went to the store. So why was I letting Neko crawl all over those rocks? She’s a climber, I said. Climbers climb. I’m watching her.
The afternoon glided like two eagles riding air currents of summer so high and straight overhead you have to practically lean all the way back to observe them at all. The breeze grazed the trees and now and then a pine cone conked down on the needle spread turf. (Whenever out for a smoke and a cough I heeded the voice of Smokey Bear on TV when I was a kid: “Crush smokes out. Dead out. Only you can prevent forest fires.”) Next door, at the property in the direction where the elk appeared, a guy came out of the garage on a light riding lawnmower and gave the grass a run through, then went back in the house. Personally I liked the rustic look of the rest of the lots around us but conceded his pure green, level patch added visual repose under the high dry sun. The weather was perfect.
Indoors we kept the windows open and the ceiling fans circulating. We hung out on the front deck, back deck, the kitchen and the living room couches and easy chairs. Clara had a jag going with Taylor Swift’s album evermore on her phone listening on earbuds so no one else could hear but subtly singing along, murmuring in perfect pitch. Tess either read a book on her phone, scrolled TikTok or texted back and forth to home and her best friend cousin Erin. Sid and Vincent threw Rotten Tomatoes reviews at each other and quoted Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David — something about the time a guy named Poppy peed his pants on Jerry’s couch — I could better keep up with them when they used to reference The Onion. Michel fretted about what she read on her newsfeeds about the new delta variant of covid-19 spreading through the UK and India from South Africa. Not Amelie or Sid or Vincent (just rehired) had returned to an office worksite yet, all working from home except Michel, a nurse, and yet each of their employers were setting vague dates for them to return to the office at the end of summer — would the spread of delta variant upend these plans? It didn’t look like Joe Biden’s goal of 75% of all Americans vaccinated by the 4th of July was going to happen, but 68% by then looked feasible. The fear was that the unvaccinated will spread delta and incite reinfections and stress society and the health care system all over again and ZOZO the lost year would come back, which was a depressing topic for a family vacation. Here we were exploiting the new freedoms of the unlock-down like privileged citizens like we were part of some kind of underground compliance network of entitlements. It would be hard to surrender exceptionalism now after all we’ve been through. Michel, Amelie and Roxanne spoke of caution, toasted cheers and knocked wood to not jinx and spoil the sacrifices of the lost year.
Everybody had a mask just in case, even Neko.
Sid provided most of the soundtrack that week. In the house he live-streamed an app to the Minnesota Public Radio rock station, 89.3 The Current. They specialize in indie and alternative rock artists. That week the station celebrated its 15th anniversary on the air so they highlighted the tunes that lit up the listeners since they went on the air. These days I don’t spend much time in the car (trips like this one excepted) so I don’t listen to very much music radio, but when I did I could almost keep up with what was new and fresh listening to The Current. I could have gotten lazy and stale relying on my stock of CDs and my 859-song iPod Touche if not for the kids. Sid for one makes the effort to connect me with emerging artists with respect to my lifelong communion with rock and roll, back to the early 1950s. He came into Michel’s life fully literate in both Elvises, Presley and Costello (not that he’s a big fan of either — one deceased and the other not yet famous before Sid was even born) and passed on to me his own due diligence of emerging bands like Sun Kil Moon and My Morning Jacket. On this vacation I got to listen to the likes of Bon Iver, First Aid Kit, Trampled by Turtles, Lord Huron, Sufjan Stevens, Julien Baker and Lana Del Ray, whom I would not have taken the initiative to pursue on my own, especially in my depressed state of mind during the pandemic and ZOZO.
So Sid curated the ambient musical soundtrack, to no one’s objection. Without delusion Sid’s presence in the family tree fits like an eagle’s nest. Besides handsome and charming he possesses an intelligence strong yet subtle, the kind that engages without intimidation, gracious and inclusive, ingratiating without being loud or patronizing. Yet he isn’t humble either, carrying himself with an honest arrogance — a sincere arrogance — not borne of any righteous conceit but test based confidence. Thus he has become a leader at the company he works for, an international information firm, and they apparently pay him well, I can’t say because he keeps their family finances confidential between him and Michel, which I respect. I, coming from a corporate world the last two decades I worked, appreciate what Sid has accomplished in his career the twenty some years I’ve known him. The rest of Sid’s character bespeaks how much Michel my daughter loves him.
That Michel picked him, to me pays a high compliment. Daughters marry guys of all kinds for all kinds of motives, sometimes to spite their dads. There is no symbolic drama between me and Sid. Maybe that’s too bad and makes a dull story but I prefer the security and peace of mind of trusting my only daughter’s affections to a partner whose character I not only approve but admire. That he chose her only affirms my esteem.
Good husband. Dad. Brother, uncle, son. Neighbor, citizen. Friend.
Sid’s favorite inside joke about himself is if there’s one word to describe Sid it’s sports. In truth he’s the most actively athletic one in our family since Michel and Vincent played park board basketball, aside from his own daughters who practice gymnastics and diving. He golfs with his dad and brothers in law and skis with Michel and his girls. He has run half a dozen marathons and dozens of 5Ks. He played soccer and basketball through high school. He’s a fan of every sport to varying degrees (it took several seasons to get him to appreciate baseball) and being native Minnesotan knows the fatalism of liking good teams who lose big games. On this trip we looked forward to watching the Milwaukee Bucks take on the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA playoffs Wednesday night if we could pry the TV remote away from Family Feud.
The old patriarch, the new patriarch and the royal uncle would see to it, Wednesday night. This was Tuesday already, still, and as dinnertime approached each of us roused around the kitchen island stirring up and slicing. Roxanne had boiled a batch of ring noodles for tuna salad and put it in the refrigerator. My job was to cook burgers, weenies and meat-free facsimiles on the gas grill on the deck. It was almost a shame to spoil the alpine scent of the woods, even temporarily. To feed the family. Out the kitchen windows I could monitor the banter. It struck me that Michel’s voice sounded like my mom’s and Vincent’s sounded like my dad’s, and they weren’t even talking to each other. She was explaining to Roxanne something about absenteeism at work going up even as the pandemic got better. He was picking some kind of bone with Sid about a congressman from California of suspect ethos. One minute it sounded like the teenagers were engaged with Neko and the next minute Neko was on the deck with her mother. Amelie asked if I wanted cheese on my hamburger, and which kind. I picked Gouda. Amelie drew a graph of the array of burgers on the grill and assigned them by cheese.
While she made the map I got down on my haunches and spoke to Neko. “Koki,” I said. “When you go back in the house give Aunt Michel a hug.”
“For what?”
“She’s my daughter. If you were my daughter I would want my Koki to give you a hug.”
Soon as she and Amelie returned to the kitchen I saw Koki go straight to Michel and embrace her thigh. Michel bent down and hugged her back. No words. Then the kid ran off towards the teenagers and her pup tent, Smokey Bear and whatever. Amelie came back out with a cookie sheet of marinated asparagus for the grill. By the time the cheeses melted on the meats the asparagus was sauteed and the buffet ready to assemble. Amelie delivered the grilled goods to the kitchen island while I extinguished the grill and gathered the mitts, tongs and spatula.
It could not have been a more humble scene. My family. At table. Dinner. So simple.
I don’t know where the discussion came from or how it devolved but Vincent began to argue with Sid and Michel over the qualities of romantic comedies. Vincent asserted they were all essentially sexist, referring to something called the Bechdel Test (which I had vaguely heard of before but thought it was a metaphor for mercenary natural resource exploitation or something — confused with Bechtel) which measures if there are at least two female characters, whether they talk to each other and the topic of dialogue is not a male. Sid and Michel put up a few of their favorite movies and Vincent poopooed each one, and when it came to Love Actually, Sid’s proffered quintessential rom-com which Vincent called the worst offender Michel got upset and called him “a know-it-all who knows no boundaries of intellectual courtesy.”
Before he could challenge her and I could process what she meant, Tess quasi-frog marched Neko into the scene under arrest for discovering the remote control of the the ceiling lamp and fan in Tess and Clara’s bedroom, where Tess caught her playing with the buttons and creating light and fan speed chaos. Michel gave Vincent the this isn’t finished look as he took custody of the child and set off explaining respect of other people’s privacies, and the mood of the dining room migrated to commentary aligned with meal clean-up. Who wants the last bratwurst? Beans? Salad? Excellent salad, Roxanne.
About halfway through the brew cycle of our evening coffee I added about three more cups of water to compensate for the djinni, and it worked, in the end we had a full pot. I took mine with a spot of Bailey’s down at the hot tub with Tess and Clara to babysit me and be least interested in talking about Bechdel, Bechtel or Bertolt Brecht. Tess shared concern about bears and other roaming wildlife. I assured her that our obvious human presence — noise, scent — was sufficient to warn them away because none were predators of ours and would rather avoid than attack us. Made sense to Clara. Tess reminded us this was their habitat first. True enough, I said, but by generations gone by they have learned we are here and some kind of adaptive cohabitation has to happen if we are to coexist. This kind of win-win philosophy kept up my grandfather credibility for at least one more day.
“Granpa Kelly,” said Clara, and aside to Tess, “(don’t guess). What did the father buffalo tell his boy child when he dropped him off at school?”
Um.
“Bye son.”
Cracked me up.
“Haven’t you heard that one by now?” Tess teased.
“Actually it’s new to me,” I admitted naively.
“Was it ever awkward,” Tess asked.
“Growing up with your name?” Clara finished.
“Were you bullied?”
“Actually no, not really. The world was already filled with people named for plants and animals. Still is. Cat Stevens. Bobcat Goldthwait. Kat Perkins. Tiger Woods. Raven-Symone. Jay Leno. Wolf Blitzer — I went to high school with a Wolf Krause. There’s Dog Hammarskjold, great statesman, and Horse Buchholz the actor. Joseph Mallard W Turner the painter. Bee Lee, you all know, my neighbor. Lemur Kreutz, another kid from a different high school. Rooster Cogburn. Yeti Duginske. Robin Yount, Robin Wright, Robin Hood, Robin Williams and Robyn McCall, Leon Redbone, Leon Russell, Leonardo Da Vinci. Ray Bradbury, Ray Liotta, Ray Muxter, Salmon Chase, Rabbit Maranville, Wren Blair, Spider John Koerner, Mousey Tongue, Butterfly McQueen, Hawk Harrelson, Mink DeVille, Fox Mulder, NeNe Leakes, Bat Masterson, Bunny Wailer, Cardinal Newman, Marten Friedman, Moose Skowron, Seal, Deer Abby, and everyone named Phoebe …”
“Okay, okay, okay.”
“You don’t have to exaggerate.”
“Plus, keep in mind my first five or so years I was known as Michael, or Mike — not even Kelly but Sturgis, my dad’s name. Even when I went to school a lot of people still called me by my middle name, especially family. I was practically in high school when my mom changed my last name, and my life as Mike Sturgis was definitely a life of the past. Anyway, by that time of my life came around there was an expectation of respect for others’ feelings not being hurt. And like I always say, I’m rather proud — vain maybe — to be named for such a noble, symbolic creature, so mistreated and almost driven to extinction but survives.”
Philosophical points were never lost on these two kids. I’ve always leveled with them. It may be my reluctance to dumb down what I’m saying to kids or get caught patronizing them with kidspeak. Which is not to say I won’t explain things as simply as I can, I just won’t condescend. Like I recently told Neko, 3, I was going to talk to her like she’s a five year old. It’s one clear memory I have of my Grandpa Kelly, he never talked down to me. Most of the time I didn’t know what the H he was talking about but I liked that he talked to me as if I did. With Clara and Tess it’s always been conversations framed as widely as I can estimate, whenever I can get the chance. When they recommend books I try to read them (except, ahem, Harry Potter) and I’ll sometimes weave inferences into our conversations. One of Tess’s favorites is The Giver by Lois Lowry, and we’ve talked about cultural coercion and authoritarian society and how we expect to convey ethical behavior to future generations if memories of the past are forgotten by any people. Clara got me to read Purple Hibiscus, a novel set in post-colonial Nigeria by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about a family with a fetishly strict father. Clara wanted me to see the novel as an answer to Things Fall Apart, the novel by Chinua Achebe about the coming of British colonization to Nigeria told to my own generation of worldly readers. It wasn’t only Clara and Tess’s transcontinental displacement to Europe for four years that made time spent with them so precious, it merely made me realize time was precious spent with them whether they lived in Minneapolis or Zug, and it was up to me to get the most of every opportunity to get to know them. The pandemic and lost year ZOZO only made it so much more acute. The result is Clara comfortable using a word like contiguous in ordinary conversation to describe the Rockies.
The sun didn’t so much set as fade from a rosy passion to purple twilight. Smugly the comfort flow of the hot tub culled the catharsis of the day. Adrift within the confined currents it was easy to let it get dark without noticing and to bask in a waning moon already up there somewhere in the trees. The chilly sprinkles of spray caught in space spritzed my face awake and aware that I have reached my destiny, no greater comfort than the unconditional companionship of my family.
I looked for shooting stars. I saw an aircraft on high approaching Denver. The scent of pine resin again superseded cooked meat in the atmosphere, if a little tinge of chlorine — nothing’s perfect. (Olfactory events can be so transitory.) The girls talked about their summer plans. Tess would attend a gymnastics camp at Gustavus Adolphus College in the town of St Peter, Minnesota. Clara was headed to a church camp called Mountain TOP in eastern Tennessee. Tess seemed ambivalent about the gymnastics camp — as for skills development she would have rather gone back to the gymnastics camp she attended with Clara ttwo years ago, also in eastern Tennessee, except it was canceled again this summer due to the covid pandemic. She would have liked to go with Clara to the church camp along with a pair of cousins except Tess was not yet confirmed by her church (delayed by covid) and at thirteen two years too young for this camp. Her best friend cousin Erin, same age and circumstances, wouldn’t be attending the church camp either, so Tess was content with how things would be. Clara was nervous about the camp but reassured by her cousins, who had been there before, and her aunt, one of Sid’s sisters, who would go as a chaperone. I shared Tess’s ambivalence to competitive gymnastics — something fun to keep busy for a week hanging out with girls from the team. My support for Clara was more nuanced — not being a true believer in church evangelism, my enthusiasm focused on the adventure of participating in social service in Appalachia. I had no illusory expectations either one would be a star or a saint, I just wanted for them to be happy and well adjusted human beings.
Along came Sid and the kids indulged the inclusion of their dad until Sid got comfortable and then they excused themselves (literally) and left us to watch over ourselves in the spa. Without the kids the conversation simmered. Not that Sid and I had nothing to say to one another. Sid was easy to talk to, and he was just as easy to enjoy the silence, as Depeche Mode might say. No howling. The hum of the bubblers covered for small talk we didn’t feel obligated to make. It was understood we were in a moment of mindfulness. He in his early forties seemed humbled to be so proud of living a life of rough elegance, old enough and far enough into his career to recognize his fortune, see where he came from and realize where his life is and how it came to be that way and feel good about his chances. Likely he’ll be a grandpa someday. He never brags about his work, which leads me to think he’s satisfied enough with his job to feel secure inside the firm. He’s forever nice to Michel. Everybody loves him. It seemed an act of respect to a fellow Don to grant him the moment of mindfulness same as myself.
Such indulgent solitude doesn’t last, not in this world. We can hold our breath submerged under water for so long and then we come up for air and hear sounds and see light. We might make a sound, say a word. It might be a swear word. Expletive. God. A cry for help. A cry for love. Sooner or later we bump up to another person’s indulgent solitude emerging from their own inner self like ourselves. A moment Robert Bly, or Carol Bly would recognize. Even just to look each other in the eye is enough to set off enduring friendships. Eventually Amelie joined us in the spa and like good gentlemen we shifted our stations to allow her the best set of jets. It was not lost on her and she said as much. She also asked what Sid and I were talking about when she came down, and we both said nothing, we weren’t aware the other was in the hot tub. To which she retorted that we were technically breaking Rule 1 against going in the hot tub alone.
In short order we were joined by Vincent. Grandma, auntie and the cousins were watching Neko, ostensibly to get her ready for bed. Roxanne brought her down to the spa to say good night but she wasn’t having it. She insisted on playing in the water leaning over the top step up to her biceps, getting her jammies wet. This was the opposite of a contemplative moment. Sid was the first to declare he was finished, rose up and exited the tub being careful not to kick Neko on the stairs. Amelie and I stood up next, leaving Vincent alone in the tub looking stubborn to leave. Amelie said she’d take Neko indoors to put her to bed and Roxanne offered to stay to keep Vincent company though she was of no mind to go into the tub. I took a smoke while I toweled off, taking in the alpine chill. It seemed contradictory for the second day of summer to feel a shiver.
Call it a shiver of tranquility. Serenity. Elsewhere in America the heat indexes cooked drought parched landscapes and cities while wildfires torched forests regardless of habitat and here I stood in a perfect place. Together with my family we lucked into a sanctuary of good weather to exercise our privileges to celebrate this summer together, all healthy, all reasonably prosperous and content with our lives, surviving the worst pandemic in a hundred years to rest on our laurels and hardies and congratulations for surviving. It didn’t seem sinful to take pride in how life worked out. If I died that night I knew everything and everyone would carry on, I just wouldn’t be around to know the future, that’s all.
Back in the house Amelie and the teenagers wanted to play Telestrations, a game of making little white-board sketches of images of random words and passing them to the next person for decrypting the sketches, like playing glyphic telephone around the dinner table. I was indifferent to the game but said I’d play — more important to me to participate with the kids than quibble over the brand of activity. Sid said he was in. Michel said she’d play a few rounds and Rox suggested we play a few rounds for fun but not keep score. Vincent abstained to try to rock his naked baby to sleep. Since shucking her wet jammies to the dryer Neko declined to wear a diaper and continued to play in the puptent with dolls and figurines of deer and moose. Michel seemed annoyed at Neko’s lax discipline. Unlike at playing UNO Neko had no interest in playing a drawing game interpreting secret messages she could not read. She busied herself at the periphery of perception to the rest of us while her dad told her it was time for the night diaper. Michel commented the child was old enough to respect a regular bedtime, and Amelie and Roxanne agreed. Vincent credited vacation on top of pandemic irregularities.
“She’s wound up. Did you see her in downtown Estes? She’s never really been around that much foot traffic.”
True, but everybody knew Neko was a free-range child one way or another, acknowledged unapologetically by the parents raising her. Without being enrolled in pre-school day care she spent a lot of time in adult company — dad, mom, grandparents — in domestic settings or outdoors in pod isolation, distanced as we had been among the other tourists when we hiked up the edge of the continental divide the day before. Vacation with her dad’s family to Neko was the epitome of entitlement and she felt entitled to stay up late with the big kids and party. The jammies came out of the dryer warm and snuggly and Vincent seemed to convince her to at least curl up on the couch and relax and snuggle with him and a blanket and relax. That didn’t last. In a few minutes she was back circulating the dining table asking her cousins to show her what they were sketching while the salt in the egg timer sifted through the minute glass.
Michel seemed annoyed at Neko’s persistent reluctance to abide by bedtime. She expressed it as a mood subverting a fostered cheeriness, not by any indifference to the pesky child but to her gadfly brother who wasn’t really playing the game either yet haunted the peanut gallery. Uncle Sid indulged the toddler on his lap about a minute and at his wife’s intuition with a pat on the back and a Time For Bed as the kid rotated back to her mami, the most avid player at the table. Grandma came next to last. To me it wasn’t a matter of being whiny and bratty, she wasn’t. It was Neko’s vacation too, and if she was too nocturnally stimulated to surrender staying up late with the big kids it wasn’t as if we would be doing anything else once she went to sleep except maybe imbibe more wine and gin and beer, and even so not the teenagers, and didn’t completely prohibit her dad already. The kid was looked after by a competent collective of eight and it was no big deal. Neko didn’t come to me after grandma probably because she knew I would expect her to entertain me, not the other way around, and I was having enough of a time sketching stick figure icons to illustrate common nouns. It didn’t occur to me at the time to think any deeper into our family dynamics.
Vincent and Grandma eventually coaxed the baby to take another try at the second biggest couch in the living room where they snuggled under the big TV until Amelie took over once we completed a final telestration. After that the voice and attitude of Steve Harvey chuffing up the siblings and in-law aunties making up the teams getting quizzed mixed with Amelie’s soothing rock a bye philosophical persuasion of her new age daughter — forever we live in a new age after all — to save some of her energy for a new day and get some rest. Said logic affected both Michel and Grandma, who soon called it a night as well. Next the teenagers looking towards the next day going rafting. Still they lasted a few rounds with Steve Harvey: 100 people surveyed, the top five answers are on the board…
I stepped outdoors for a good cough.
Chapter 8
In the morning I woke up around sunrise and was surprised I was first, before Sid, who came out in his running clothes while I was making coffee and adding the extra water to make up for the evaporation tax to the djinni. We, along with Vincent and Amelie once she put the baby to sleep, outlasted the teenagers’ fixation for the Game Show Channel and once they went off to bed caught the last half of the late NBA game between the Clippers and the Suns. It was an especially close, intense, grinding, back and forth contest we acknowledged again the morning after, looking ahead to the early game in the East that evening between the Atlanta Hawks and the Milwaukee Bucks. We wanted to watch the guy they called the Greek who played for the Bucks. Our excursion to the rafting river wouldn’t be for several hours yet. While Sid went for his run I poured a cup, chewed a gummi from Vincent’s stash cabinet, took a smoke (outside) and curled up in an easy chair with the iPad to check the bank and read my hometown StarTribune while the rest of the family came out to toast bagels and nibble fruit and yogurt.
Two things I recall of interest in that morning newspaper. The first was more than one mention of the emerging trend of spread of the new delta variant of covid-19, the not-so-novel coronavirus. Having emerged in South Africa it was now spreading through the UK and may be detected in Florida. The delta strained was hoped to be milder and less inherently deadly as the original, and vaccination seemed effective against the delta in preventing severe sickness, but nobody knew. The current infection rate in the United States was slumping fast but flattening at a stubborn level where the curve met a ratio of the unvaccinated and so the science experts remained cautious about relaxing precautions like wearing N or KN95 masks in public places too soon. This prompted discussion whether to anticipate more virus variants in the future and updates to the vaccines, more boosters. Would this virus be always with us, as Jesus said of the poor, I wondered. Ironic to be contemplating this in Colorado, the setting of a novel by Peter Heller called The Dog Stars which features adventure in a world after a viral plague wiped out most of the population, it seemed as ironic to learn studying a park map that we were nearby a mountain peak called Mt Chapin and I had been thinking about Harry Chapin the other day regarding my life as a father and the song “Cat’s in the Cradle” and how my life could have been more like “Taxi” without Michel and Vincent.
The second stimulating thing I recall from the StarTribune e-edition that day was an obituary. I usually skip past the obits unless I’m looking for someone in particular, and this day on the iPad had to scroll through page by page to get through the B section to find Variety and Sports. The obit section midweek is usually pretty skimpy anyway. And there at the top of a page my eyes locked on a picture named for Florence F Habegger, the classic supermom of the parish school where I grew up, St Simon of Cyrene, a neighborhood mother of a couple of my childhood best friends. She passed away the past weekend. Just shy of 95. Natural cause. Services at St Simon of Cyrene would be delayed until October due to the pandemic. October 30. Far as I knew I had nothing else going on that morning, the day before Halloween and almost All Saints Day, Dia de los Muertos, and I might go. Mrs Habegger. 95. I was 69 years old now, my Summer of 69. Seeing her face even as an old lady there was recognition and instant retrospection of an underappreciated part of my life.
I didn’t mention it to the others — neither thing for that matter, not my occupation with covid variants as opposed to a cheery subject for breakfast. I mentioned Mrs Habegger to Roxanne in passing, which she thought odd since I avoid the obituaries. I said it just popped out at me and the lady was a neighborhood mom where I grew up, a dedicated church lady and trusted elder advisor to my mom — not that she always followed Mrs Habegger’s advice, she trusted it. Roxanne laughed. Since that past Monday would have been my mother’s 88th birthday it seemed fitting to reminisce about my mom associated with Mrs Habegger and her influence on the much younger and overwhelmed Colleen K Sturgis. This for me seemed my year of reflection as I approached age 70. ZOZO may have been a lost year but chronologically for me there would be no refund or deduction.
Cleaning up after breakfast I noticed next door at the lot where the day before a guy mowed the lawn, a group of people set up card tables on the lawn and brought an array of small items like statuettes and knick-knacks from the house and arranged them on the card tables. Looked like an estate sale. By the time we were loading Sid and Michel’s GMC for our day trip several cars pulled up on the road and people browsed the tables.
Roxanne was the last of us to get into the GMC. Amelie, Vincent and Neko didn’t go with us and at the carport Vincent and Roxanne had some kind of argument.
“Why is Vincent yelling at Mom?” Michel in the shotgun seat turned around to me sitting behind her. “He shouldn’t be yelling at Mom like that. Does he do that often?”
“N-no,”I answered, caught unaware and momentarily embarrassed.
When Roxanne got in Michel seethed at her, “You can’t let him get away with yelling at you like that. What was that about?”
Roxanne swept it away as she buckled her seatbelt. “Oh, Amelie asked me the key box door code in case they weren’t here when we get back and Vincent accused me of reciting it too loud so the neighbors could all hear.”
Then Michel said two words I’ve often used: “Even so.”
No matter. Sid had the GPS programmed and steered us around Estes Park up through a snaky two lane canyon towards Fort Collins and the headquarters of the rafting outfitters who would guide us down the Cache la Poudre, Colorado’s only nationally designated Wild and Scenic river.
Somewhere buried in the scenery that rolled like prairie and jutted up like spikes the outfitter’s compound appeared like an act of faith where the GPS voice said it would be. It sprawled a little like a camp, even had big nylon tents and a small amphitheater style bonfire ring. Ample parking. We disembarked and gathered at the check-in tent. The place bustled with maybe a dozen other excursion groups checking in or checking out. Sid got us set up. We signed the consent forms and were issued vouchers for wardrobe. I went with total wet suit and water shoes — no extra charge. It was a hazy sunny day, not expected to be hot and the river water would be predictably cold. No way I was going to jinx this adventure getting soaked and freezing my ass off in just shorts and t-shirt. Helmet and life vest were mandatory.
All the 11:00 groups assembled at the campfire amphitheater for orientation. The leader’s name was John, not Johnny, a wiry and wry guy in a broadbrim hat of indeterminate thirties with missing front teeth and eyes like he should be wearing mirrored shades. Like a boot sergeant he commanded total attention and drilled us with the basic rules of rafting. Number one was always wear a safety vest.
“This is not a life jacket. It is a safety vest. It will help you float. That’s it. How you stay alive if you fall in will depend on your actions in the water.” He proceeded to demonstrate how to roll on your back and ride the current until your guide got your raft maneuvered to pull you aboard the raft. “Don’t try to stand up.”
The other rule that stuck out with me was always hold your paddle with both hands. “And never, never let go of the knob or you might end up with teeth like mine.”
John introduced the individual raft guides, all in their twenties and obviously natural born river rats. They reminded me of surfers — John the Big Kahuna. We were assigned to Justin, the youngest of the lot. We boarded a school bus pulling a trailer of paddles and rubber rafts. Rafts were lashed to the roof of the bus. We rode the back roads deeper into the scenery while John periodically narrated non-sequiturs about the scenery and quips about the difficulty of winning navigation rights to pass between private properties. He reminded us the Cache la Poudre is the only official Wild and Scenic river in the state of Colorado. “Don’t ask me what cache la poudre means. I heard it means something like who stole my cat.”
A few miles from the launch site the road began to run alongside the river bank and we could imagine more vividly what our ride on the river might be like. The river was not wide or especially riven with rapids. Not too scary but not lazy. I sat near Tess on the bus and she was not nervous. Her mood was my baseline. She was a fearless type but not shy about expressing trepidation, not exactly stoic. Here she eyed the river for danger, noted the white caps and calculated the thrills. I’ve ridden with her on thrill rides from Wisconsin Dells to Parc Asterix practically all her life, including the zipline across the roof above the amusement park at our hometown Mall of America and a similar rafting trip three years before on the Sevier River in the Utah desert. She was a competitive swimmer, diver and gymnast and used to alpine ski, play soccer and basketball, so I’ve seen her when her adrenaline ran high. I’ve seen her sing solos on stage at a crowded auditorium. She was not superstitious or a daredevil. (Her best friend cousin Erin was the daredevil of the two.) I admired Tess, whom I call Kitty, for her measured approach to experience and straightforward grasp of what she was doing or about to do. I had the window seat on the bus and she gazed past me out the window and down the steep bank into the white caps determining herself safe and secure among the five of us plus our guide in a rubber raft riding down (all water flows downward, right) this agitated body of water in the gorge below. Her green eyed serenity jigsawed nicely to my own.
“You don’t remember I’m sure,” I leaned back and said into her helmet, “we went to Disney in Florida, you were about Koki’s age or a little more, and after a long day traipsing around and seeing the stuff and riding rides and the night parade and fireworks I got to carry you in my arms to the shuttle bus.”
“Oh I’m sorry Grandpa.”
“No, it was cool. And I remember telling you this within as close to your ear as I am now: I want you to remember this day the rest of your life.”
“Sorry again.”
We both laughed and I said, “This raft ride is going to be really cool.”
At a relatively flat landing along the riverbank the bus pulled over and we all got out to help unload the rafts off the trailer and the roof of the bus and lay them out in an order directed by Boss John on a patch of beach along a slow swirling eddy of the gushing river, the Poudre. Jason our guide assembled our crew as almost the last of six rafts. We were graded as semi-experienced. All of us in fact had rafted before, together in Utah on our vacation to Zion and Bryce. Going further, Sid and Michel had rafted rapids in Switzerland but not the girls. The girls on the Utah raft served as designated deputy coxswains counting out the strokes called out by our guide, but did not actually paddle. Even so, the Sevier river was graded a beginner excursion and posed no life and death plunges or boulders aimed at out heads, and that raft had two additional adults, adept canoists, Vincent and Amelie (before Neko.) Pictures (professionals assigned on the route) of Michel and Sid’s ride in the Swiss Alps depict almost constant whitewater drama, the two of them in the front row frozen still and grimaced, vested, goggled and helmeted with their paddle blades digging and swatting the churning torrents of rocky gorges.
So Justin inspected our chin straps and jackets, assigned Michel and Sid the front row. I sat behind Michel on the left next to Roxanne behind Sid on the right. Tess sat behind Roxanne and Clara behind me. Justin sat in the middle in the back — the stern — when he sat at all, where he called out rowing commands: “Give me four. Give me two.” And narrated a tour of the scenery. And reminded us (me) to always keep both hands on the paddle.
Before we shoved off I looked as far as I could upstream to get any impression I could of the river conditions at the higher elevations where even the advance placement excursions wouldn’t go. Ours was intermediate. Justin our guide introduced himself as an undergraduate in metallurgy at the university at Fort Collins. He grew up nearby. Been rafting the Poudre his whole life. A lifelong raft rat. Remarkably he learned all our names as soon as we embarked.
We weren’t ten minutes into the journey, at the edge of a mildly circulating eddy after a moderate three count paddle through moderate whitewater, Justin lost his balance and fell backward into the river. The girls immediately cried out and the rest of us turned around to look. Reflexively Michel and Sid backpaddled and Rox and I stalled our paddles while Tess laid her paddle across her knees to her sister, grabbed a supporting grip inside the raft and reached back with her other hand to grab at Justin’s jersey. Justin deftly rolled over on his stomach against the raft, braced himself gently on Tess’s arm, grabbed hold of the interior grip and hoisted himself back into the raft. Meantime Sid maneuvered his corner of the current to slow us down enough to intercept Justin’s paddle at the edge of the eddy, retrieve it and get it back into the guide’s hands in time for our next maneuver.
It was clearly the most embarrassing event in the young guide’s life. Besides thanking us for keeping cool and doing what we did, Tess for offering a hand and Sid for retrieving the paddle, he apologized and said that had never happened before and said he would appreciate it if we spoke of it no more.
We all laughed. Observing he was okay — not his first time getting wet, this river rat — who was he kidding this would become a family legend for the archives — hey maybe the hired photographer stalking us down the river to sell us the pictures back at base camp happened to get some shots — maybe the group of beginners behind us happened to witness it. What would the other guides say? What would John? Uh-oh. Justin’s job might be on the line. We could say he gave us a vivid demonstration of what exactly to do if you fall out of a raft. Yes, we thanked him for the lesson.
Perhaps to make it up to us he offered almost a league by league monologue of anecdotes about the river. Cache la Poudre comes from French explorers who hid their gunpowder from their enemies (enemies? French colonialists had enemies?) in the deep caves along the river gorge. Justin pointed to a narrow stretch flanked by aspen trees on both banks where dead squirrels turned up in large numbers along the banks downstream. To get to food sources on the opposite sides of the river the squirrels tried to leap from tree to tree to get across, often failing short and landing in the river. The local department of natural resources strung a cable high in the treetops to give the squirrels a tightrope bridge. And he spoke of the property owners along the river who fought the Wild and Scenic River designation and some who had erected barbed wire at the water line from bank to bank to stop public access kayaks and rafts. (That must have been nasty.) He showed us small sculptures of bears and elk fashioned from retrieved barbed wire displayed in the yards of some properties.
Mostly Justin called out paddling orders. Left side give me two. Everybody four. Right four, left three. Everybody give me three. Now two more. He did not bark his orders or shout. His command pitch resounded just above the sounds of the water and his cadence articulated a tempo to match our strokes. He yelled at me for taking my hand off the paddle knob for just a second to hike up the sleeve of my wetsuit. There was no time for socializing, though Sid got in a few interview questions Justin had limited time to answer. His fall off the raft seemed to enhance his authority and our respect.
The river did most of the talking. My whole life I’m fascinated to watch waterfalls and rushing rapid rivers like staring into a campfire or a red ball sunset. To be alive in the flow of such turmoil, splashing between jagged rocks inside the crest of the waves and somehow depending on my own interaction and my family’s paddling to keep up with gravity and balance our fate, moment by moment in throes of turmoil guided by a voice coaching when to stroke and silence when to abstain. No, it wasn’t all intense tension but it was no lazy river. In the intervals of placid drifting I reset myself, thigh braced to the hull next to the bridge, paddle across my lap to the ready. The day was perfect, the hazy clouds shading the sun from glaring. The cool spray aerosol was like living in a rainbow. Feeling in no way cold or uncomfortable, the wetsuit proved its worth. The long sleeves seemed a little confining but by sleight of hand I managed to hike the sleeves without untouching my paddle.
It was a blast. Around every meandering bend where a rapids appeared there was a rush of delusional anticipation madly fulfilled. All that jagged rock, all those pulsing rapids, all the velocity of dense gravity comes out all right when you act with the paddle as directed and poise your body crouch with the flow of the raft. Like every good pyrotechnic show on 4th of July this river ride had a grand finale. One last run of multiple plunges graced us into a flat sandy pool where we calmly drifted in a shallow eddy towards a beach where the other rafters ahead of us had gone ashore and either disembarking or already hefting their rafts on the bus roof or the trailer with their paddles.
We beached our raft and savored our catharsis in shin deep water when the final raft arrived. Our whole ride we never caught sight of the rafts ahead of us and the one behind never caught up, as if we had the whole gorge to ourselves. Sid, Justin, I and Clara dragged our raft up the sandy bank to the road and helped the crew raise it to the roof of the bus. We loosened our jackets and uncapped our helmets, mingling in the vague queue boarding the bus, everybody a bit giddy and frissoned getting their land legs back and breathing deep and stretching whatever muscles and joints got torqued. On the bus the rousing consensus raved about the trip and some said they wanted to go again on the next bus back, were it possible. If anybody didn’t enjoy the adventure they didn’t say, though a few seemed glad it was overwith. No reported accidents, though to some everything was a close call.
To the crew of guides it was a job and part of daily workouts for greater avocation, like surfers. They talked a few among themselves about an upcoming time trial kayak race they looked forward to doing in a few days. Back at the headquarters they broke into task teams to collect in effect the laundry, the helmets, jackets, wetsuits and water shoes for designated washtubs of disinfectants. Nobody said anything about Justin falling off the raft. Sid and I ponied up a cash tip we slipped to him discreetly after he finished his gig hanging life jackets up to dry.
We bought the digital download of photos of our passage. Spotted the photographer two times but couldn’t exactly wave at the lens or blow a smooch. We all look like we were getting our moneysworth. It was all Tess, Cllara and Sid could talk about once we closed ourselves in the car, Justin falling overboard on the first real spillway, and getting himself back on board, Sid picking his paddle, Clara braced and holding Tess, Tess lending an arm and leaning too give him room to grapple a handle inside the raft and pull himself over the edge too quickly get back in, his paddle waiting for him. There were no pictures of that, and no matter, even so, we were all there. We adults agreed a round of beers was in order, but we were also hungry and the pub fare under the beer tent didn’t appeal to the vegan teenagers, so we rode up the highway to Fort Collins to find a place Michel found on her phone from Yelp via Google and GPS called Slyce Pizza.
Fort Collins sprawls across a high plateau like a small Denver only more encased by peaks. Urbane, germane and suburbanite, it’s a college town and medical center. I heard once the university had a notable mental health department, or maybe I made that up. The GPS voice placed us in hip looking brick and mortar old town probably adjacent to campus. Nothing shabby in the neighborhood for the sake of shabby Slyce Pizza had a plank and glossy paint feel with ample window light. It seemed spooky we happened to be the only customers, though the kitchen staff seemed active. I guess it was early afternoon, mid-week, no classes, not ski season and just ahead of the summer tourists — and the first week being open to dine indoors since the covid pandemic — a reasonably slow day and a good one serving our family on such a gorgeous day.
Three young women about college age worked the front counter. One fulfilled our pizza orders and another our drinks. The third serviced take-out and delivery orders. Roxanne forgot to bring her drivers license and could not get a beer. So I ordered two. The pizza came in wide slices, about a quarter of a pie. They offered a wide variety and mix of ingredients, which pleased everybody. I was of a mind for a simple greasy pepperoni. Pizza is such a commodity most shops differentiate themselves by their crusts or their sauces. Slyce Pizza baked a medium thick crust with a toasty flavor, not too doughy, and a sauce not too sweet or spicy. Everybody liked what they got.
The camaraderie continued after lunch, tooling around residential Fort Collins and complimenting the tidy homes, then winding down to Estes Park. Sid played a satellite station featuring music from the likes of My Morning Jacket, the Cure and Likki Li. The terrain kept me busy, the sly slopes, spreading ranches, fir forests and edgy peaks. We backtracked the way we came but I recalled very little facing the other direction.
Never much for instigating travel conversations it occurred to me how lonely I got accustomed to be the past two years. ZOZO cost more than one year. Seemed ages ago Roxanne and I would regularly fly to Europe and rent a big Volkswagen and drive around the middle of the continent with Sid, Michel and the kids. Visited Normandy and Mt St Michel that way. Riding the rafting bus was the densest crowd (windows open) I’d mixed into and this vacation the furthest from home I’d been in years. Riding with my family again seemed like the commutation of a sentence. Could it be the pandemic was overwith?
All those hours, days, months depressed on the couch, I was surprised I didn’t ache more from the workout on the river. I looked forward to the hot tub that night. For the time being I could have used a nap but contemplated the scenery and meditated to the harmony of the voices in the car.
I remember our last dinner together at Sid and Michel’s before the first lockdown, when Tess confessed the kids at school were calling covid-19 the Boomer Killer. (“Sorry Grandpa.”) I remember their first family visit to our house when the lockdown started, they standing on our open porch like Christmas carolers in masks. At the time the separation we accepted as civic duty but soon the estrangement drove us to furtive pod behavior and guilt from technical violations and paranoia we might infect each other even as we tested frequently in front of planned clandestine reunions. It seemed worse than when the Kysylyczyns lived in Switzerland, when we kept in touch by text and Skype, and at least Roxanne and I could fly over there every six or nine months and we were free to mosey, mingle and congregate. Sadly the shock of social deprivation left me with cloistered and introverted habits and practices I grew used to and comfortable with but I missed Michel, Sid, Clara and Tess as they drifted away. Four years with effort I grandfathered the girls from afar and felt somehow to be keeping up with my self-assigned commitment to build a bonded legacy in their lives. ZOZO shorted the connection. They’ve been home about six years now, about twenty minutes across town. That first four years back we dined together at least once a week and visited each others houses for chats and coffee, took day trips and went out on outings, watched Sid run a couple of Grandma’s marathons, and attended games and meets. Roxanne, I or both would pick the kids up after school and drive them to gym once or twice a week when both Sid and Michel worked. We saw the kids as much as we wanted. Even when they outgrew day care necessity we looked after them and took them places. Then the pandemic.
Gone the continuity of the sessions. Furtive short visits crimped conversation. No movies together, no TV. Not enough time for a thorough lesson in TikTok or discussion about Purple Hibiscus and Things Fall Apart, or A Man Called Ove. No mosey (forced narch) Buffalo Kelly tours of the MIA or the Weisman. No gymnastic meets or diving meets. No swimming races to watch Kitty. No choir concerts or art exhibits. No shared meals. No drop by visits. I can’t remember the last time either of them asked me for help with homework. For all time’s sake I saw my old master plan slip away, my grandfatherly input into their minds wasn’t keeping up because I no longer had ready access to their heads.
They were teenagers now and needed their privacy respected. They were in an age when kids develop greater and greater ranges of independence anyway, which orbits further from grandparents as socio-familial relationships mature. It happens between children and parents too. Grandparents can be taken for granted. They may be prone to ghost a text of random Have a Nice Day. Clara would be a high school junior. Tess had one more year, eighth grade, in middle school plus she would attend a different middle school the coming year because of a redistricting of school attendance going into effect that year, pandemic or naught. Tess said she didn’t care where she takes classes if they have in-person school, and she still preferred remote learning on wi fi. Clara’s past two years had been the strangest high school years anybody knew.
So rather than pry, I rode along listening to Roxanne offering grandma philosophy and getting the girls to comment and project their thoughts. They weren’t controversial kids but weren’t sheltered conventional children either. What I could overhear in the car back to Forest Mountain Home impressed me how challenging their lives have seemed with the pandemic shutdowns, the virtual end of social life, or maybe not, their adaptations to their schooling, the strictures of daily routines. Lucky for them to live within a family with good household wi fi and cable TV with streaming, in a good (if imperfect) school district in a good (imperfect) city in a wider community of decency, with an extended family rich in love and character values that included me and their beloved Grandma Roxanne. I loved them so much all I wanted for them was a life of dignity, fulfillment and happiness.
Back at Forest Mountain Home Amelie was jealous and Neko ambivalent about our rafting adventure. Vincent seemed downright cynical. In response Michel seemed peeved. His attitude peeved me a little too, enough to remark, “We didn’t miss you one bit either.”
Keeping it moving Roxanne borrowed Amelie’s car key fob to drive into town to bring Neko to the Estes Park public park, kiddie playground with a kiddie pool and splash pad. Though it didn’t seem very hot even as the sun hung high, the air temp was around 80F. Grandma and Amelie put a new dose of sun screen on the fair baby girl before buckling her in the car seat.
In and around the house the rest of the afternoon the rest of us sprawled decadently. Michel napped in the big chair beneath the ceiling fan. The teenage girls, Clara and Tess, each read their phones, scrolling lazily at rest lounging as book end opposites on the big sofa. Sid and Vincent paced around the island in the kitchen crosschecking each other’s sources over a gentleman’s argument leading down some rabbit hole of absurdia I couldn’t listen to soon enough to follow, while Amelie anonymously unnoticeably curled in an afghan in the other window chair opposite mine intently reading articles on her phone.
At the mowed lot next door all the folding tables and display goods were gone, no sign of anyone around the house and no visitors. Nobody we should worry about bothering. Next day we had reservations to re-enter the national park to visit the moraine area. It would be our final full day together in Colorado. The Kysylyczyns were planning to depart Friday, the day after next, with the rest of us departing Saturday. It was mid-week already. It was only mid week. 4th of July still over ten days away. A lot of summer left. Of the Hundred Days of Summer, there were still 98 left. For me, who rounds up whenever I can, pulling summertime out of springtime on the last day of May and pushing summer’s end as far past Labor Day as we can dodge Jack Frost, my Summer of 69 had at least 100 days in the bank.
Across the rest of the country a heat wave grilled even northern regions with obscene temperatures to gin up the drought and fan the wildfires in progress elsewhere in the Rockies and Cascades both sides of the border with Canada. Our shangri-la of serenity in Colorado defied almost gravity. Talk about charmed life, I thought, stepping outside. To somebody else this might seem like End Times, the End of Days, End of the World, Apocalypse. We had earthquakes and volcanoes. Hurricanes. The AntiChrist. Nations rising against nations. Plague (pandemic). Famine. Floods. How many more signs would it take to ignite the Big Conspiracy Theory in the Sky to proclaim the End is imminent? Maybe eventually it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s been fundamental to human belief systems for ages. We’re doomed. And here we are, living the Life O’Riley as if everything determined to destroy humanity endowed us a free pass from suffering the chaos.
Out of kindness I suppose…
And yet, even so, why would malevolent forces extend kindness? No matter.
Enthralled to the benevolence of kindness among ourselves, my heart fairly rejoiced at our good fortune in the midst of mass misfortune. It was repudiation to the symbolic Stanley Hotel and its curses. It was testimonial to grace and how grace can be preserved and shared among people of good will. Proof of positive intent. Proof of life.
Roxanne returned with Neko. As Roxanne described how the little girl methodically rotated around the playground, climbing, sliding, swinging, then the splash pad and eventually the pool, Michel groused to me why her mom got stuck taking Neko to the park in town by herself all the time. I replied that I go to the park with them sometimes, knowing her real point was to impugn her brother and Amelie for fobbing the kid off. Nobody else volunteered. While Rox and Michel discussed it privately in the kitchen preparing to organize dinner, I escorted Neko outside to climb the boulders along the driveway. Roxanne would say it was an act of pleasure spending quality time with a grandchild. What she would not say is she spent time with Clara and Tess too and nobody accused her and Sid of fobbing. Michel might object to her mom being taken advantage of on her vacation, but Rox would say it’s Vincent and Amelie’s vacation too, and Neko’s.
Out on the boulders I tracked the little nimble toddler back and forth and up and down the crags and crevices like a shadow spotter, not once worried she would slip and fall off her mountain and still watching every move, grab and step knowing she could fall and I could catch her at least on the first bounce. Fearless but cautious she crawled sideways and triangular to cover the boulders in familiar patterns of approach, barely getting cagey with practice until she stranded herself at a sheer slope and said, “Help me, Grandpa Kelly, I can’t get down.”
“It’s okay, Koki,” I said as I reached to brace her abdomen and guide her extended foot to a stepping place, and instead of climbing down she pushed off into my arms and glided to the ground like a fairy.
Dinner and its bits and pieces of slow, deliberate preparation staged us in intervocal conversations giving us all an airing of our appetites and impressions. Clara and Tess confided their motives and satisfaction of being vegetarian in their daily diets the past two years. They drank oat milk and ate beans and greens. Michel downplayed the hassle of sometimes making different dinners as just another challenge to a 21st Century mom. She offered Neko a carrot, the kid spurned it and a celery stalk which caused Michel to muse after Neko seeming to have no meal and snack routine at all. Clara liked salmon, which happened to be this night’s grilled protein, my job. Michel’s specialty this night would be fried rice. Rox and Amelie the breads and salads, cut watermelon and cantaloupe. Neko spurned a thin slice of pear proffered by her mother, causing Amelie and Roxanne to voice observations that the girl ate too little. Still, she possessed energy, didn’t appear either emaciated or obese or show signs of malnutrition, and the opposite extreme would be a compulsive eater.
As I sliced the salmon fillets into portions I listened to Clara and Tess express their choice not to eat meat. Their epiphanies were inspired by exposure to views of Greta Thunberg, a teenage environmentalist, and by curricula at school that explored the science measuring the carbon footprint of raising meat for the food chain. It was a contribution they could make to the environment. No regrets. Seemed to them healthier. They weren’t prima donnas about it, not defensive or judgmental. Clara still liked salmon. They both didn’t mind eggs sometimes, which was part of Michel’s fried rice recipe.
Michel talked about work. Nurse at an occupational medicine clinic she worked the front line through the pandemic without getting sick. Granted, traffic wasn’t as busy but they kept the doors open, even though short-staffed. She told me a bible verse recurred in her head to help keep her going: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1.9
I seasoned the salmon with Montreal steak seasoning and drizzled them with olive oil and lay them on the gas grill on sheets of aluminum foil, left them to sizzle and went back into the kitchen to mingle while Michel fried the rice, fanning it with egg and finely chopped vegetables across the griddle while the others laid the table.
For no particular reason I said to her, “Do I ever tell you how much you remind me of my mom?” This caught her unaware enough to stutter the wave of her spatula. Likeness to her Grandma Mimi is usually regarded as uncomplimentary. “Her best qualities, fulfillment of her amazing potential,” I said. “She was smart and witty, charming and so perceptive and passionate. That’s what I mean, you’ve actualized the capabilities she could have been if she made better choices, organized herself, used her talents, developed emotional intelligence. You personify the best of her genes. Certainly you’re good lookin’. Got style and taste. Sometimes you even resemble her voice.” I felt obliged to hear her rebuttal but she seemed a little speechless for the moment as she sculpted her rice, and I had to go back to the deck to peek after the salmon.
Confident they weren’t done yet I went back inside to mix a gin and tonic and distract my daughter again a few seconds while she coordinated her rice in a bowl with the table settings, saying to her, “I didn’t mean to give you a scare.”
“No, I appreciate what you’re saying. I like to think I have Mom’s traits.”
“O you do. Actually your mom and Mimi shared more traits in common than either would admit. I’m just trying to say I think you’re quite a lady, more than a Hallmark card daughter, and I admire what a person you are.”
The salmon done pink and juicy, I shut down the grill and put them on a serving platter and thought about what I was actually saying to Michel was I was proud to have raised a better daughter than my mother — better than my mother raised me. This was not a subject to pursue over dinner.
Our mealtime banter bounced around like rafting the river, a main theme. Sid saluted Tess for saving our overboard guide. Tess saluted Clara for keeping her balanced that split second. Sid said he was amazed it ended so fast and effortlessly, at first he thought, oh no, here we go. From Vincent a crosscurrent of skeptical humor questioning the credentials and skill of our guide, but I seriously pointed out Jason’s lifelong familiarity with the river and added that he told me he was a third year metallurgy engineering student at the university at Fort Collins. Vincent suggested he might have faked it to teach us a lesson. Not ethical, Michel added, you weren’t even there. In any case, said Amelie, we passed the test. Roxanne confessed it happened so fast behind her by the time she turned around to reach for Tess Jason was back on board with Sid passing the paddle between her and me. That proved he didn’t do it on purpose, said Michel. He lost his paddle after all.
Vincent complimented Michel’s fried rice, which she did not acknowledge. Throughout dinner and into the evening Michel shunned him. Not a new attitude, as I’ve said. She’s early forties, he’s almost 40, I’ve seen their sibling friction since before he was born. I could never cure it, only hoped they would outgrow it, and by this time I was so inured to it and jaded by it I felt no compunction to mediate or intervene, just paddle along presuming this too shall pass, the two of them too civil to erupt into embarrassing confrontation.
As it was, conversation took no specific focus. It may seem ironic but politics did not provoke divisive debate in our family. All in all we were democrats, liberals. Unashamed of our ethics and integrity, we were wary of our surroundings in America’s volatile polarization and weary of the culture wars threatening repression in the cause of corrupting patriotism with big lies, finding comfort among ourselves to speak privately about our feelings. Sid supported Anytown USA. In the news it appeared that Congress reversed itself from its initial consensus to form a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol like they investigated 9/11. Instead the House with no participation by the Senate would form a committee to hold hearings. Meanwhile the coronavirus mutation called delta was surging in the vaccination resistant populations in the South, following a spike of cases in the UK. The US Canadian border remained closed by mutual agreement. China remained essentially locked down and container ships were compiling offshore at the world’s main ports since the Suez Canal got blocked in the spring. The repercussions of ZOZO the Lost Year were only being realized and clearly the pandemic and the aftermath of the Trump administration was not overwith. It seemed likely the CDC and FDA would recommend booster shots soon for the vulnerable, including senior citizens like Roxanne and me.
Vincent, Amelie and Sid still worked from home — lucky to be still employed even though Vincent was laid off quite some time — with no definite timeline to return to their firms offices. Not a bad thing perhaps, they said, though it posed a disconnection from classic organizational logic, as Sid put it, and disrupted the collegial human element of collaborative effort. Vincent said he didn’t miss business travel, or even the commute. Sid sort of did and would welcome at least a partial return to the office and trips to New York and London. Amelie missed being on the premises of the enterprise, providing nursery services for families in crisis — a facility kept closed due to the pandemic but whose mission made more intense finding alternative referral services while financing its budget all the while. And Michel picking up extra shifts on the front lines couldn’t work from home if she wanted to.
Clara and Tess benefited having their dad home with them while they in effect got home schooled on their laptops. Their iPhones linked their social life like digital play dates. Their gymnastics club shut down, luckily Clara’s high school gymnastics team and swimming and diving team somehow held closed practices and competitive events so they had activities out of the house to hang with other girls and exercise — Tess as a seventh grader made the high school junior varsity, such as it was, the city high schools weren’t famous for swimming, diving and gymnastics. Their church life was all but canceled — no Sunday school, no choir, no bells and for Tess (and her cousin Erin) no confirmation classes — no youth pastor. Tess ambivalently looked ahead to attending a new middle school for eighth grade, due to redrawn boundaries — from a school within walking distance to a school more than a mile away with no promise of bus service — and no promise school would reconvene for in-person learning the coming fall (though she could still participate in athletics at Clara’s high school, where Tess would attend as a freshman the following year.) Clara hoped for a year of normal high school, while Tess barely cared if she ever took another class in a classroom.
Neko barely knew life any other way than pandemic conditions. Resuming day care other than grandparents was envisioned as a means to socialize her with other kids as well as to reinforce social norms expected of her outside the family. Roxanne liked to describe her fascination with other kids at pools and playgrounds where she would watch them interplay, taught to be cautious and shy and to observe distance. Michel interjected a suggestion she might benefit from the discipline of regular meals and scheduled bedtime, which neither parent disagreed. For the time being the little girl enjoyed life as a free range child.
It was during after-dinner cleanup that Roxanne turned distraught. At first she wouldn’t say why, just kept scrolling her phone and saying she couldn’t believe what she’d done. Then she explained, she was doing a routine double-check of her emails and discovered she booked the wrong days for her and my lodging on our way home and now she found the dates she intended were no longer available to us at our intended sojourns. It was rare to see Roxanne so pissed at herself. I went to the road atlas and paged to South Dakota and offered to plot a revised series of stops. She had us at Hot Springs Friday night instead of Saturday and Chamberlain Saturday instead of Sunday. Frustrated finding no vacant rooms in the vicinities of those towns our intended nights — at fair prices — Rox sort of shut down a few seconds and rejected looking at the map, saying she would look at it in the morning. From what she could see on the internet, the weekend at her chosen spa towns were booked solid and a re-route was inevitable. She would fix it in the morning. She was counting on a visit to Hot Springs, and according to Michel the Chamberlain area along the great Missouri River was lovely. She deferred till morning to fix it but the rest of the evening she seemed crabby, even as everybody — even it seemed Neko — rallied around her: We all make mistakes.
Neko curled up on a couch with Grandma to snuggle and read books from home like the Very Hungry Caterpillar. Tess checked TikTok, worked on her Junior Ranger booklet in anticipation of our return to the park and texted with Erin back home. Erin’s soccer team was on a winning streak. Michel, Clara and Amelie went down to the hot tub. Sid, Vincent and I got some drinks and tuned the TV to TNT to watch the first game of the NBA eastern conference finals between the Atlanta Hawks and Milwaukee Bucks.
There were 16,000-some people in the arena in Milwaukee plus a crowd on the plaza outdoors, watching big screen TV as if this were game 7, fans of the Bucks long denied a championship and denied a season and a half of in-person basketball due to covid-19. They call the plaza the Deer District. Not a mask in sight. It seemed surreal until I recalled with Roxanne our venture to Coors Field and downtown Denver, when the crowds seemed surreal then too. Lifting restrictions let loose a vengeance of social activity enough to wonder out loud if we were begging for a delta surge. Roxanne said it again, it’ll never really be over, sooner or later everybody will catch it and it’s a matter of booster shots, tests, antibodies and personal responsibility. Still, the news reported the infection rates in our world dropping and dropping.
Obviously our culture craved normal. Better late than never the NBA kept up its part providing support for mass nostalgia and preserving the holy game of basketball by holding its annual playoff tournament. Our home team the Timberwolves didn’t qualify, let’s just say. Sid knew the league way better than Vincent and me put together, and even he admitted being distracted away from the game during the bubble season, so he didn’t have a favorite anymore since the demise of the Warriors and the Lakers in the western conference. Mention the Lakers and that’s my team going back to when I was a kid, Elgin Baylor back to George Mikan, and when Vincent was a kid watching James Worthy and Magic Johnson playing late on Friday nights on CBS. Michael Jordan succeeded Julius Irving. Vincent’s and Sid’s generation fostered Kevin Garnett.
When I was a little kid my first favorite basketball player was Wilt Chamberlain, known as the biggest man in the game. I was four or five years old. I thought he was a very important superstar because they named our local airport after him. Wilt Chamberlain Field. Then I learned it was really Wold Chamberlain Field, and after double-checking Wilt’s name in the newspaper concluded Wilt and Wold were different people. Now the airport is MSP, Twin Cities International.
So we came to watching the 2021 eastern conference final series with varying perceptions. Sid more recently saw the Knicks and Celtics at their respective Gardens, on business or visiting one of his friends from Switzerland. We went to some Wolves games when I used to have a shared season ticket (before I lost all faith and found other ways to spend entertainment money) and also of course with Vincent, and even Michel. But for me it’s been years since I actually followed the NBA on TV, much less cared who was playing who in the Christmas tripleheader.
This play date at Forest Mountain Home got arranged around curiosity of the team next door, as it were, the Milwaukee Bucks. In general the family consensus opinion of Wisconsin sports teams trends towards low esteem. Packers, Badgers, even the Brewers in the National League get boos. For some reason, though, we approached the Bucks with a kind of Swiss neutrality. Talk was they could win the finals. The last time the Bucks won it all was about fifty years ago with a team including Oscar Robertson, Bobby Dandridge and the former Lew Alcindor, Kareem Abdul-Jabaar. This year the Bucks featured a guy they called The Greek, Giannis Antetokounmpo — pronounced Yannis — Antetokounmpo, just the way it’s spelled and sounded out, pronouncing every letter and syllable like Spanish or Hawaiian, Antetokounmpo. He grew up (he is 6’11”) in Athens, Greece, born of immigrant parents from Nigeria. When Clara came in from the hot tub and saw us watching him play and learned he was ethnic Igbo descent and Greek she checked him out on Google and Wikipedia — she always loved Greece and learned about Nigeria from reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi — so she watched some of the first half with us.
The Bucks handled the Hawks by five points at the half. By midway through the first quarter Neko went down in Grandma’s arms. Amelie took her from there and put her to bed. Soon after Amelie returned to the living room Michel confessed she was tired and had a headache and was going to bed, after which Tess and Roxanne retired too. To me it seemed early but apparently they had a full day. At half time Clara turned in as well.
This was when the night got interesting and the vacation cascaded into another dimension. Vincent and I went out on the front porch and smoked a bowl of flowertop. On our way back to the living room we swung through the kitchen for gummies and beers. In the third quarter the Bucks went cold and the Hawks went on a run. Antetokounmpo had a big night with double figures in points and rebounds for the Bucks but the Atlanta point guard Trae Young scored 48 points and 11 assists to pace the Hawks past the Bucks by 3 — 116 – 113.
The furious nature of the third quarter stirred us into a mini frenzy. Frustration at the Bucks inability to hold off the Atlanta surge along with our awe at the Hawks guard Young’s determination to score drove our volume in the living room over the top enough for Michel to come out from her bedroom — storm from her room with vehemence to match us — to order us to keep it down for the sake of her headache and everybody else trying to sleep.
We tried. So did the Bucks but they couldn’t pull away.
During the long, drawn out final minute of time outs, commercials and shooting fouls, Amelie and Sid got into a discussion about managing workforces during the pandemic which endured after the game. Vincent and I mixed fresh gins and tonic and adjourned to the comfort of the front porch to smoke a bowl in the dark and talk.
He opened confessing to the wonder and humbling awe of being available to spend his days with his daughter during the lost year, to bond with her and guide her and get to know her and teach her at her most fundamental age. He knew he and Neko would always be close because of this. Fathering was his mission, his vocation, his holy orders. It gave him fresh awareness and awakening, new angles of seeing and understanding, all which he might have missed if he only got to spend time with her before and after work. Getting laid off from covid was the luckiest thing could ever happen. It might be time to send her to day care now but they will always have a special connection forged during the pandemic.
I asked him, how much do you weigh?
He wouldn’t answer and I didn’t guess out loud. He could’ve weighed 300 pounds. The reason I ask, I said, what I’m leading up to is a fear you might have a heart attack at 42, and you wouldn’t like that. He sighed. I apologized if it seemed like body shaming. He acknowledged he could do more for his own health but now was not the time he wanted to discuss it, if ever.
Next instead he asked me questions about myself, history he never expressed interest in before. He began with the Pratt family, how we connected and how awkward was it to have a black maid in the beighborhood where I grew up.
“To call Eula a maid sells her way short of who she was and what she meant — still means — to us. She was our foster mom during some very crucial years. As for what the neighbors thought, our family was light years from caring what other people thought about us. Still, noboody pulled any KKK shit on us the whole time, and she was with us at least five years.”
I sketched how my dad met the Pratts when he sold cars down near Lake and Chicago about 1960, when they just moved from Mississippi. Eula and Ezzie had six kids, most older than I was, some young adults. Dad needed somebody to help my mom, Mimi, who about then had six of her own. By the time Eula left we had four more. Mimi was overwhelmed when Dick met Eula, and sadly Mimi only got worse.
Why did Eula leave?
My dad couldn’t afford her. She made way more money at the Leamington Hotel and didn’t have to look after infants. My dad made good money in the heyday of Chevrolet but he and Mimi couldn’t keep up the payments. Eula of course would say she would work for free she loved us so much. She also said she left us for our own good because our mother, Mrs Sturgis had abandoned us to become too dependent on her, especially the youngest ones who practically believed Eula was their real mom. After Eula left you can guess who had to replace her, namely me, Leenie, Bernadette and Molly. Eula did what she had to do, for us and for her own family. If she wanted to force my mom into taking her responsibilities and opportunities and manage her own household, it did not work. Simultaneously my parents’ marriage collapsed as they tried to destroy each other. Eula didn’t need to be caught in the middle between Colleen Kelly and Dick Sturgis. I didn’t want the job either. At least before she left she taught us to cook, clean and do laundry, and look after Kerry, Sean, Murray, Heather, Nelly and Kevin. I guess when Colleen and Dick divorced we elder kids were not surprised but what was hard was how egregiously unprepared our parents were for the total collapse of our family.
It must have been hard for her all that long undiagnosed with the Kelly disease. What Vincent meant was our family history of depression.
O she was diagnosed, I answered. Had all kinds of opportunities to act to seriously better herself but all she wanted was to be somebody’s Barbie Doll. I couldn’t get over how somebody so intelligent and vivaciously gifted could act so stupid.
And Dick. What made you go live with him?
I wouldn’t have made it on my own, not in Minneapolis. Not at sixteen.
(You don’t know that.)
Well, the odds weren’t good. I had to get out of Colleen’s house, man. It was a zoo. Living with my dad was as good as running away from home. Chance to start over, get normal. Serious, I wanted a normal life. Look at me now …
We laughed loudly, prompting Roxanne to slide open the glass door from our bedroom to the front porch. She said to keep it down in an emphasized whisper and slid shut the glass door without waiting for an answer, defense or explanation. So we took our drinks, smokes and discussion down the driveway and camped at the foot of Neko’s mountain.
What were Dick’s issues? Besides the booze.
Not that I hadn’t thought about it as much as I considered my mother, but I hesitated before I answered. The way Vincent posed the question put it in a context asking for an elevator answer. Sometimes he wasn’t far removed from the regional marketing manager before the pandemic deposed him, so I formulated my reply as a synopsis of my dad’s character in true enough terms to his resume and express historical impressions pertinent to Dick as Vincent’s paternal grandfather.
I said, Dick wanted to be a made man, a wiseguy, an accessory to the boss. He always dressed the part — my mom tells that in high school he wore pressed trousers, shined shoes and cashmere sweaters. Yet life seemed to always find a way to undermine him of any true ambitions. He was Mickey Spillane imagining he was Ian Fleming and coming up aces and eights in some 19th Century saloon in Deadwood. In real life he was a world class car dealer who liked golf despite bursitis, liked bars and nightclubs, paperbacks like The Godfather, a genuinely genteel gentleman, lifelong lost love of Colleen Kelly, and a profoundly bad father. Even to me. He could’ve made a difference when he instead set a bad example. Living with him was living by the seat of my pants all over again, only without Colleen and the rest of my sisters and brothers we both in a way abandoned. My two years stuck in Wausau must have been penance for my selfishness. Old Dick sabotaged his career and social standing again, only this time without the direct inference of my mother, who had recently married a real estate playboy. Old Dick meantime messed his life and credibility not once but twice in Wausau involving two separate women, locals, ultimately dumping me and Bernadette in virtual foster homes for six months. Bernadette didn’t want to go back to live with our mother either. Bernadette stayed behind when Dad went to California because she had a good life going, normal friends, good grades, so she stayed with a girl friend’s family. Famously I went to live with the O’Leary clan — with a C.
So how did you get to know John McCutcheon?
Newman High School class of 1970, Wausau, Wisconsin.
Did you hit it off right away?
No. Yes. We both loved the same girl. She was his ex, and soon became my ex too. I think we both were really in love with her mom but that’s how John and I first connected. It so happened we were both new kids junior year. He had left the seminary school in La Crosse after two years and I came from the Twin Cities. His advantage was he grew up in Wausau and he and his family were well known, he had history, so he fell in with Newman easily. I was an outlier.
But after a standoff you bonded.
Between junior and senior year. The year his family moved out of town to a woodsy place they called the Livin’ End, at the end of a posted dead end gravel road. They had like nine kids. Like O’Learys. John brought me home a couple of times that summer. I gave him rides to visit his girfriend Butter. Even back then he was a proficient folksinger. He had a Peter, Paul, Mary and Barb group they called the New Jersey Turnpike after a song by Simon and Garfunkel. They were the first I ever heard sing Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and I recall they were very good and the song blew me away. He made extra money playing organ for wakes at a funeral home. One time, he says, he got bored of the scripted background sacred music so he played an ultra-slow version of the organ music from Procol Harem’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” thinking nobody would notice, but there was a teenager out there who came up to him and gave him the peace sign. I gave him rides to little coffeehouse solo gigs after the Turnpike broke up (Barb had the car). He wrote songs — says he composed while mowing the lawn at the big local cemetery. His old man got him all kinds of odd jobs. His old man kept him busy with odd jobs and sports and college classes at the university extension. Idle hands create opportunities of mischief. Did I tell you his dad never liked me at all … I think his sainted mother prayed their family would rub off a good influence on me. Maybe they did … Let’s say I got glimpses along the way of what normal, functional family life was like from my friends.
I’d say you turned out well, my son said, and I said thanks, acknowledging his affirmation without officially in agreement. I mean it, said Vincent. You’ve been a great parent, you have a solid marriage, a stable home. You’ve kept your head down, built a strong work history and saved your money. Bet your FICO score is way up in the eights. You’ve enjoyed your freedoms and your pleasures and now you’re grandfather to three divine females and can reflect on about a half century or so of good memories. Right? You still have heart. And soul. You survived with a personal life of happiness.
Here’s to me, I said. It’s my Summer of 69. And before I accept the award for laziest retired person may I thank the coronavirus known as covid-19 for enabling me to put all my affairs in order and be at peace with life. I’ve sacrificed risk for mostly mediocre rewards and vintage memories. Have I done my best? Probably not, but you’re right, I’m happy.
White man problems.
White man remorse.
We laughed a lot that night, especially freely once we moved away from the house. We went inside once to pee and refresh our gins and tonic finding Sid and Amelie engrossed in work topics as we slipped in and out like goofball shadows avoiding sight and sound. Outdoors Vincent and I from the foot of the driveway boulders left most of our filters and inhibitions in the woods and made each other laugh over mundane references to middle age advancing on a child of the ’80s, when I approached middle age. This was the same son at the age of 12 I gave a cassette tape for Christmas of Firesign Theater. Now he jokingly confided his disenchantment with his work life, even as he dreaded cranking out more and more resumes to find something fresh that might interest him, only to find other jobs probably as unfulfilling.
I confessed I was glad I wasn’t looking for work, and even more relieved I was no longer a corporate manager.
The news reported a bounty of unfilled jobs as the economy woke from pandemic restrictions. Pundits warned of a Great Resignation as the workforce woke from doldrums to change jobs while the changing was good. It made employment almost seem like a ponzi scheme to get in on the trend early. Quick before all the good jobs are gone. For a while last winter conservative critics blamed the shortage of workers for open jobs on generous unemployment benefits from liberal pandemic legislation, but when the benefits gave out the worker shortage stayed the same and nobody knows where the missing workers went. Was everybody getting picky? Are there no more immigrants stealing red blooded American jobs? Bad as the pandemic was they didn’t die off. Can’t be that many claiming disability, PTSD. Retirement (my bad). Incarceration? Not this year, no. Gig Economy? Entrepreneurship? The underground economy? Staying home minding the kids? Too many citizens working for the state, sucking the workforce dry …
That’s the thing about the world we would agree, inhabited or not the planet would keep spinning and orbiting the sun no matter what we humans choose to do in our meager lifetimes. What we can do is live moral lives and enjoy the pleasures life volunteers us. In ironic conclusion I tried to paraphrase the Serenity Prayer: Accept what you cannot change, have the courage to change what you can, and be wise enough to know the difference. Or what Angela Davis said, I no longer accept the things I cannot change, I am changing the things I cannot accept.
These and a few more self-serving adages concluded our discussion beneath the pines at the foot of Neko’s mountain, self-aware of our white male privilege and unselfconscious enough to keep passing the Truth Stick of our metaphorical Robert Bly campfire. Not the first such dialogue father and son but the first in a while, catching me up on fatherhood through my son’s eyes and seeing life fresh through Koki’s eyes as well as Koki’s dad, and being asked about times of my life nobody else usually cared about sort of evoked reconciliation with my life before he or Michel were born, an era unsurpassed in disinterest. I thanked him for it. Before we adjourned we toasted Barack Obama and sarcastically blamed the wildfires and scorching heat in the Pacific Nothwest on Al Gore for predicting it would happen.
We gathered our kit and stole into the house like ninja mimes, expecting Amelie and Sid still talking shop in the living room but they had gone off to bed. The TV was off and a floor lamp left on. Half giggling we bid each other adieu in the lamplight and he disappeared into the dark stairwell to the basement while I stowed the drinking glasses in the kitchen sink.
Roxanne stirred when I arrived for bed after I whizzed and brushed my teeth. Sounds like you and Vincent had a Yuk Yuk time, she said. I said no, we spoke of serious issues, but yeah, it was good spending quality time with my son. Well, said Roxanne, we’ll see what your daughter has to say.
That and Roxanne’s sleeping silence left me reeling like a mandala until I fell asleep, not intoxicated enough to doubt and double-question my serenity and sense of well being.
Chapter 9
In the morning I slept later than Roxanne. Not especially hung over I dressed and pointed myself in the direction of the aroma of coffee and toasted bagels in the kitchen, where I could hear Roxanne and Michel quarreling furtively but none too quietly. I could tell it was no morning for jokes about djinnis pilfering coffee.
Michel was upset and accused her mother of always defending Vincent’s behavior, enabling his dysfunctional ways, which Roxanne denied. You always defend him, Michel accused and Roxanne cried, I do not. You just did, Michel escalated, you just explained away his attitude and his dysfunctionalities as mere life style choices. Mom, he’s rude and arrogant and crass and he uses the F bomb in front of the kids.
Then as I got my coffee she turned on me. And don’t you try and skate through this. She was furious. You should know better. You’re his parents. I don’t know what to tell my kids. I expect you to be a good example, Dad, and I can’t trust you. You’re their grandfather and he’s their uncle. You left the living room lights on and didn’t even lock the front door! Clara came to me in my room — Mom I think I smell marijuana. Why did you have to smoke it right there on the porch? How could you? I have teenage children, and it’s for me and Sid to have that conversation with them — when they’re ready! I resent you forcing it in our faces. It’s inexcusable. They’re thirteen and sixteen. How can you set such a bad example?
I literally hung my head. She had me dead handed. The fury in her eyes conveyed how deadly serious she was and would not be appeased. She would tolerate no defense. Much as I wished I could make it a funny story, any plea other than mercy would have enraged her to cancel the vacation altogether by kicking me out of the house, if not the family. I took a deep breath. The only way she would ever forgive me and move on would be my unconditional surrender. Otherwise I could only see this dragging into the next generation between us, and the longer the bad blood lasted the deeper the wound and the susceptibility to infection and potential never to heal, and I wouldn’t risk that kind of alienation from my daughter. Not at my age. Not when I was wrong.
I’m sorry, Michel. You’re totally right. I behaved badly, and I’m sorry. Please forgive me and tell me what I can do to make it right.
You can stop favoring Vincent. You’re not supposed to be his friend, you’re his dad. You two always defend him and take his side against me. When will you ever correct him? You coddle and tolerate his slacker mentality, his void of motivation.
He’s an adult, I answered. He’s a grown up, said Roxanne.
No he isn’t, Michel pleaded, steadfast in her fury. And he’ll never grow up as long as you allow him to continually postpone his endless adolescence. Dad, you have to talk to him. Mom, he doesn’t respect you enough. You need to face up to him and call him on his shenanigans.
Well, I said, you need to tell him directly and to his face how you feel, not go through Mom and me.
Fine. Don’t stop me. He’s my brother and I love him, but I just don’t like him. This is the last vacation. I’m never going on a family vacation with him again. And for the time being I’ve had it with you two. You can’t seem to see and accept what’s obvious about Vincent and admit that you didn’t finish raising him.
Fine, I said, reluctant to engage in the very defense Michel baited us to consider. You tell Victor yourself.
O I will.
And last thing, daughter, I really don’t like it when you make your mother cry.
Michel exploded. Make Mom cry? Do you consider my feelings? Are my feelings less than Mom’s? Why should I suppress my feelings to appease Mom? Is that how Vincent does it? Hey, I’m done. It’s your choice.
I’m not dealing with this right now, said Roxanne with toasted bagel and cream cheese, took her plate, mug of coffee and iPad to the furthest seat at the dining table to be alone. I have to fix our way home.
The kids lounged in the bright living room, Clara immersed in her ear pods and Tess making sketches in blank areas in her junior ranger workbook. Neko and Amelie were outdoors already, hanging around the boulder mountain at the driveway. Sid apparently was on his run. Vincent emerged from downstairs and presented himself disheveled as if he slept in his clothes and before he drew his coffee Michel told him to meet her outside on the back deck. On his way out the kitchen door he looked to me and his mother and neither offered faces of hope and innocence, just endurance.
I could not hear the words Michel spoke as she laid into her brother with what must have been holy hell. Maybe conscious of being outdoors and earshot of the neighbors she kept her volume down but from what I could tell she gave Vincent a verbal beating. True to her word she said it all to his face. His stunned face. When she finished she allowed no rebuttal and awaited no apology but came back into the kitchen to serve up bagels and fruits and melons to share with Sid and her kids while Vincent stood dumbstruck out on the deck.
I never said my kids were perfect. I’ve only said they have no criminal records.
Eventually Vincent came back in the house. He went towards his sister and I heard him say I’m sorry. She rebuffed him and called her kids to come and make their plates. Nothing else to say he went outside via the front door to join Amelie and Neko. Sid got back from his run. Things went on as if it were a normal day. As if it were normal not speaking.
Before we packed up the cars to revisit the park Roxanne announced she again had reservations for lodging for our way home after we checked out of Forest Mountain Home. She blamed her error on somehow focusing on us leaving Friday the 25th instead of Saturday the 26th because Michel, Sid and the girls were leaving Friday, a day early, so they could bring Tess to gymnastics camp on Sunday in Minnesota. Thus mixed up, Roxanne had booked us near Hot Springs along by Rapid City in South Dakota Friday night instead of Saturday, and Chamberlain along the Missouri River Saturday night instead of Sunday, and now there were no rooms available at either location the right nights. So instead of Hot Springs we would spend the night Saturday night at Sundance, Wyoming, not far from the South Dakota border and near to Devil’s Tower. Sunday might we would sleep in Mitchell (home of the Corn Palace) South Dakota and go home Monday. For some reason just talking about it made me homesick.
The changes would cost us more. I could never attend Devil’s Tower too many times.
Rallied around Roxanne’s remedial success booking the rest of her and my trip the mood of the troop relaxed enough to resemble normal except clearly Michel and Vincent avoided each other. They would do so through the day and night until the Kysylyczyns left us in the morning. Their methods were so nuanced and subtle the disruption created minimal awkwardness and kept the matter between themselves and not for public discussion. In a way that was too bad but to me it seemed making it a topic for family discussion risked turning the episode into an intervention into everybody’s privacy, and Michel for one was in favor of dropping it while nobody else brought it up, not Vincent and not within earshot of his sister.
Rather we prepped ourselves for our time slot appointment to enter the park to visit the place called Moraine. The word moraine refers to land revealed by a retreated glacier. This part of the park fanned through a grassy valley hedged with slopes and fir trees under a wide open sky. A skinny, gentle creek wiggled up the middle. Foot trails flanked the creek’s bushy banks on both sides. We walked one trail in, crossed a foot bridge up the valley and walked the opposite trail out. There was no discernible slope on either trail, an easy, leisurely hike. There was hardly anyone else around so we spread apart and wandered as if we didn’t know each other, at least not very well.
The one I felt most sympathy for wasn’t Vincent, who obviously felt sad and embarrassed and maybe ashamed, because I was confident he could handle the pressure and emerge better off. We would talk later. I felt for Clara, who carried the body language of awkward adolescence like a beginner, not like her usual confidence and poise. She wore the mark of the squealer. She was the snitch. She ratted out me and Uncle Vincent and we got busted. Both of us tried to convey no hard feelings but that’s a lot to assume for a sixteen year old with no other frame of reference. She shepherded Neko on the hike along with her sister, keeping her out of the creek. She otherwise stuck close to her dad, walking ahead of our loose pack. Not surprising, Clara was a Daddy’s Girl. Her dad was the strongest bond in the world and it was right she would seek his emotional shelter at this paranoid time.
Tess approached a park ranger near the footbridge and handed in her junior ranger workbook. The ranger quizzed her a couple of questions and signed her book and gave back the book along with the prized junior national park ranger badge made of wood.
I conversed with the ranger moseying on the trail. I noticed about one of every five mature fir trees on the moraine was dead. Combination of drought and beetle infestation, the ranger said. Why every fifth tree? I asked. What spares the other four? Why not five in a row? Healthy trees obviously, he said, are in best positions to resist disease. Drought conditions expose vulnerable trees and the bark beetles take advantage. Nothing you can do but watch. Observe, I should say, he said. Everything changes. There used to be a glacier here. You hate to see a fire but sometimes that’s how nature cleans house. We don’t know how this land will look in a thousand years. Enjoy.
Sid had a saying, a mantra, going back to a favorite professor who would say, “The more you see, the more you know, the more you see.” It seemed appropriate after talking with the ranger and seeing Tess sworn in as a junior ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park to recite again the mantra to Sid, but as I did recite it to myself, my two walking stones in my fists, I could see Sid and Clara far ahead on the trail by at least a hundred yards, talking about something, perhaps the mantra attributed to the professor, a good example of some of the ancillary things you can learn in college. Clara would go to college in three years. It goes fast. The more you see …
After the Moraine we agreed to go our separate ways for the day and graze rather than meet for an organized lunch. The Kysylyczyns naturally drove off in their own car, ostensibly to go shopping, while in Victor and Amelie’s car we cruised around the mountain slopes, car moseying, until we ended up back at the house at Estes Park. Miffed that Michel didn’t invite her to go shopping, Roxanne asked if she could borrow the Nissan to shop by herself. Amelie and Victor in turn had old friends, a couple who lived in a town nearby who invited them to meet for lunch. Roxanne agreed to drop off Amelie and Victor to meet their friends, go shop, then pick them up in an hour or so, all if I would mind Neko.
No problem. My pleasure.
I offered to read books. Instead she wanted to play in her pup tent with Beba, her baby doll from home, Smokey Bear (still missing his hat) and various figurines of deer, moose, bears and elk. It seemed that the figurines were Beba’s pets and Smokey with his shovel served as an observer figure like a security guard. Neko apportioned me a bear and an elk who played roles as visitors to the tent, which was the doll house where Beba’s family lived. No room for me in the tent, I staged my visitors from the front porch. Apparently Smokey was Beba’s dad. The figurines were siblings and cousins. Abruptly but to no surprise Neko abandoned the pup tent scenario to climb and tumble on the stuffed sofas and easy chairs of the living room. Grandma and Amelie and Vincent hesitated to bring her with them because she showed signs she might need a nap. Clara and Tess ran her rugged through the grass of the moraine, which in places was ideal for summersaults.
I asked if she was hungry and she ignored the question. She climbed the steps into the kitchen for a look around what she could see for food on the countertops, maybe looking for sweet rolls, cookies or candy but finding bananas, apples and pears. She didn’t eat much so far as meals and didn’t default to food to keep herself busy. She had a solid little kid build, no signs of malnutrition or chubbiness. No concern of mine if she ate or not except my implied duty to provide nutrition or a snack on demand. I asked again if she was hungry and she again ingnored the question.
I knew she heard me. She was old enough I could tell this would be one of her traits, acting as if she isn’t listening. Is my voice invisible, Koki? I crouched down below the level on the countertops and skulked out of sight around the far side from her around the kitchen island. I could hear which way she was coming around and managed to crawl hands and knees whichever way to stay out of her sight, which she apparently found hilarious and didn’t try very hard to confront me. Then she stopped, stood still and made sounds of whimpering panic. I crawled to where I found her standing in a puddle of pee.
I scooped her up and brought her to the nearest batchroom and placed her on the potty and took her wet pants and panties to rinse. This was not a potty chair but a big potty and she looked a little overwhelmed hanging on. She began to cry. Hold on, I said, and go potty if you have any left. She cried harder. Neko wasn’t a crier. I wrung out her wash and scooped her up to carry her to my and Roxanne’s room to place her on the bed while I went downstairs to her parents’ room to find their suitcase of Neko’s clothes to at least find dry underpants — or should I diaper her? I chose pants. I dropped off the wet stuff in the laundry room. She was still crying when I came back to her sort of sideways fetal as I left her. She cried as I re-dressed her and while I held her in my arms and walked the floor with her up and down the hallway of the bedrooms.
It seemed to soothe her. She wasn’t a little baby any more. She was probably ashamed and embarrassed, so near to potty trained and to lapse. She lulled in my arms and I thought there might be a fifty-fifty she might fall asleep. As I crossed from the bedroom corridor towards the living room I crossed the landing above the front entry. The door swung open and Neko began to cry all over again at the sight of her mommy.
Oh honey, Amelie implored as she took her child and I explained why she was crying and the mom took it from there. As I said, Neko wasn’t known as a crier so it seemed a relief to tell my side of the story, whoever listened. Then Roxanne in the kitchen shrieked. The puddle of pee remained on the floor. The good thing about pee, I said as I mopped it up, urine is sterile.
Even so, Roxanne replied.
I went outdoors to my hideaway behind the garage for a smoke and a good cough.
Vincent joined me for a smoke. We couldn’t help but thinking along the same track. How could we have been so short-sighted? Bordering on stupid. Stupid. No air conditioning at the house, all the windows wide open. Smoking weed — and cigarillos — brazenly on the front porch, we were asking for it. We dared ourselves to get busted.
We couldn’t blame Clara. She smelled what she smelled and went to her mother for advice. She possibly didn’t suspect it was us. In retro, she never intended to get us in trouble. Now you can tell she feels bad she put us in the doghouse. It would be a delicate matter to approach her with her mother watching over her. And her dad. I don’t envy Sid for this. We’ve put him in a tough space. He’s good at improv, though. Yes, and …
We laughed reminiscing about when Vincent got kicked out of the DARE program at Seward elementary school. I brought it up. He said it was on account of his libertarian principles, he wouldn’t take the oath and sign the pledge. I recalled being proud of him then in a strange way. DARE meant Drug Abuse Resistence Education, ostensibly a worthy cause. Vincent said he didn’t like the cops’ attitude who produced the program. Said in retrospect they were recruiting a Secret Police for their deep state. We could laugh now. Was that the same year Vincent went trick or treating for Halloween as Ross Perot? Libertarian principles…
Returning to our current worry, neither of us could solve Michel. Vincent sensed her animosity worse than he considered fair for his mistake, and he realized I was in no position to take her on to defend him, which he would have asked under a normal everyday tirade by his sister. He frequently accused me and Roxanne of favoring her and all but pleaded with me to stick by him this time. I told her I’m sorry for what I did, he said, but I won’t apologize for who I am.
In the house Roxanne showed me a gray Rocky Mountain National Park hoodie sweatshirt she bought Vincent for Father’s Day. She wished she could give it to him, sort of as a ceremony that night while everybody gathered at the freplace to make smores on the Kysylyczyns’ last night, but given his status with Michel’s grievance she didn’t want to add more stress, so she decided to give it to him after they left for home. I couldn’t think of any therapeutic or redemptive value in making a big deal with the hoodie and suggested she just personally give it to him like on the sly, but of course there was a greeting card involved which I was expected to contribute a handwritten message and sign it for both of us.
When the Kysylyczyns returned from exploring and shopping Vincent was retired to his quarters for a nap. I myself dozed on a couch listening vaguely to CNN. A beachside 12 story condominium in South Florida collapsed vertically in half overnight with about a hundred people missing, as if Florida didn’t generate enough bad news. I thought I heard the US House of Representatives resolved to form a select committee to investigate the events of January 6 that year when the mob stormed the Capitol — that might be Witch Hunt number 9. And the Justice Department announced the number of people charged with crimes for that insurrection so far exceeded 500 — all fun and games until somebody gets hurt. Portugal and Russia reported alarming spikes of covid infections, which seemed odd, Russia reporting bad news about itself and Portugal making news at all. Here in America the western wildfires and northern heat waves gained ferocity as drought spooked the central breadbasket states. And President Biden might get a bipartisan infrastucture deal through Congress after all.
Not a perfect world, is it. Ever. Try to pull the edges of the earth together to bind it into a believable, comprehensive whole like Gaia and there will always remain seams, leaks and bubbles of daylight, noise and vapor escape and infiltrate the sanctity of the soul at peace.
The Kysylyczyns settled in without fanfare or fuss. Sid asked me if I minded if he played some music over the JBL while he did some work-related reading on his laptop, and I clicked the remote to mute the TV. He took an easy chair and asked if there was an update on the search and rescue at the Florida condo. Clara and Tess encamped opposite each other on the other big couch and took up their smartphones. Clara wore airbuds and breathed melodies from Taylor Swift’s new evermore album while scrolling. Tess checked TikTok and Instagram. I asked her if she was concerned about her private information being spied on by the Chinese Communist Party and she said no, what’s to know, I’m just another decadent westerner. Clara reported the death toll in the Florida rubble kept rising but the mission remained search and rescue. Scenes of the rubble looped in and out on the muted TV. No foul play suspected, Clara said. Sid added, as if terrorism would make it seem less horrfying.
Michel kept to herself in her room for a while, packing. Resting. Nobody talked about her in the third person while she was absent.
Tess asked if I had any paper and if she could borrow a pen to make sketches. I tore a blank page from my journal. Or two. This more or less affected isolation. Like Clara in airbuds. I wasn’t comfortable getting chummy with Clara enough to quiery her out of her trance with small talk about mundane things about being sixteen in a bad old world. I was a teenager once, and I remember it far too well. This was just the wrong time to invoke grandfatherly wisdom, my credibility on that score not keen. Best to wait them out, the two grandkids. It’s a shame to squander the bonding good dialogue can evoke, but I selected to sit tight and observe. Maybe all I could do is show that I would not disappear and be invisible — and that went for all the rest of them.
From what I could tell, Clara and Tess didn’t care for Facebook or use Twitter. They preferred Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok or You Tube. I didn’t know if it was by choice so much as parental supervision, a generational thing. They avoided long reads, which ensures they don’t read my blog. I’ve seen no evidence they’ve declined in literacy since they they acquired tablets, laptops and phones of their own, and in fact seem to read books more than I do. Tess was recently notified a poem she wrote on assignment for school would be published in the annual COMPAS anthology of poetry by K-12 students around the state of Minnesota, she from seventh grade. The text of the poem alone amazed me, but she also made a recitation video for a COMPAS podcast later in the year. They are both literate kids, no question. Even if they both seem to went to ee cummings and kd laing school of never using capital letters in everyday texts and emails (e-mails?) and still write grammatical papers for public school credit according to school rules and pass their courses with A’s. And after all, isn’t that the goal of every kid’s parent? When a kid hits those goals there’s respect due to the kid.
I would have liked to ask Clara to explain her upcoming missionary camp to the Tennessee Appalachians besides an obvious commitment to doing community service at an impoverished community. Without questioning her faith or the sanctity of the beliefs of the organization sponsoring the camp. Also without either of her parents coaching her answers. Matters of faith I leave up to the individual, and young individuals get guidance from their parents, their families. If I could guide Clara for when she is an adult individual and ask about her choices I would persuade her to be choosy about her core beliefs. Even if I cannot offer anything better than the afterlife heaven promised by religion. I suppose I am a mortal of low expectations of afterlife, though it is the one thing we all share in common equally, we all die. Is it worth all the propaganda to conform to a basic common morality?
Even so, here it’s impolite to remind anybody that I am a geezer of a certain generation in my family clan and as years go by the eventual will meet the inevitable sooner or later, the actuarial statistics narrow the time until I’ll die and no longer be a living person among them. Religion may help them rationalize my afterlife but it will do nothing for me.
It troubled me to consider myself selfish, whether I really cared about Clara’s spirituality and her commitment to public service or would I use my quiery about this organization in Tennessee to initiate a debate between doing good and doing God. Another time, another place, I thought to the tune of that line in the Dire Straits song, “Lady Writer” — in my head, not from anyone’s iPhone, Bluetooth or JBL.
Tess interrupted herself to show me what she was doing. Sketching succulents. Her deliberate pen strokes converged forming brazen visual echoes of the plants in a style I thought in common with Vincent Van Gogh, such as his olive trees, and I told her so. I learned long ago it’s not sufficient to say to a child, I like that, or that’s good, you need to give a detail or a reason to show you’re really paying attention. Usually self-deprecating she said nothing when I handed them back and went to work where she left off. She knew I would save them and look at them later and remember that moment with awe.
As in, awwwww…
Amelie reintroduced Neko to the scene after a lengthy hike through the neighborhood, which Amelie noted was mostly not fenced so they could meander through back yards and stay off the road. Neko came back with a stash of sticks, needles and pine cones which she showed off by littering the coffee table like a collage of forage. About then Michel came around offering to start dinner. Vincent emerged from hibernation mixing a drink and hovering at the fringe of the kitchen with no banter.
I would grill bratwurst, polish sausage and a hot dog for Neko (if she pleases) and plant-based nuggets for the teens. The rest of the nightly smorgasbord came together from leftovers in the fridge, even some chicken to go with your salad or fried rice. Tofu. Beans. At least three cheeses. Roxanne scrambled an egg for Neko with cheese and she ate about half. She asked for yogurt and ate about half, ignoring the fruit. Eventually she ate her whole hotdog — no bun, no condiment, just the lonely wiener — and about half a portion of cottage cheese. I observed she was at least eating something, even if not in sync with the rest of the family, what sync remained.
Somebody whispered as loud as she could: It’s a bear!
I was laying out the tray of sausages at the kitchen island before I even lit the grill when I heard the word and instinctively headed to the front door to discover the rest of the household scrambling to the back deck through the doors from the kitchen and Michel and Sid’s room. I joined them in time to see an enormous fat brown bear ambling on a straight path along the presumed lot lines away from us on all fours at a pace suggesting it knew where it was going and in no hurry to get there and expected no obstacles. Nonchhalant. Oblivious. We watched its big round butt and stubby tail and thick rear thighs disappear in the woods between the cabins downhill. For all the iPhones on the premises no one got a picture.
It gave us a whole new topic to talk about. Everything from what if somebody had been outside by the driveway boulders to why didn’t it just come in through the front door. How much danger were we really in? It looked like it might have been headed towards town — should we have called somebody? Will it come back? This offered Vincent chances to talk, offering his observances of bear behavior near Yellowstone, he basically assured everybody that if you leave them alone and not harass them they actually prefer to stay away from humans and mind their own business. Like bison. As we went about dinner reassuring ourselves we were safe plus lucky, the thrill of the sighting incited fresh mutual accomplishment. Tess added the bear to her list of animals seen in her junior ranger workbook even though she didn’t technically see it in the park and why expect a bear to respect park boundaries?
Was it a grizzly? Technically maybe not, said Vincent, its hair was too smooth. Anyway, it was one big brown bear. Everybody saw. Neko from the arms of her mother who snatched her out of the highchair at the first whisper to protect her baby like a bear mama. No cubs trailing this bear. Most of us guessed it was male. It looked well fed, but we reminded ourselves not to leave food on the decks overnight. Where did it come from? (That way.) Where was it going? (Town?) Why?
Enquiring minds.
Conversation around the dinner table did not easily deviate from the bear but distracted from worry over the victims of the Florida condo collapse and its implications for mass housing in that state. Absent was a nostalgic celebration of the effective conclusion of our family vacation, except for references to the bear and our river raft excursion. I could see Michel could hardly wait to leave. Sid seemed a little sad to depart but probably disillusioned that it had to end in dissonance and mixed feelings. The teens were teens, ready to move on and get home. Speaking of home, Amelie reminded us that tomorrow the court would sentence Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.
The clean up process took on a finality like a dress rehearsal for putting the dishes exactly back in their place, who might want shares of leftover grapes, watermelon and apples. (Chicken anyone?) Be sure to clean the coffee maker, including the brew basket. Since we deliberately kept recyclables separate from waste garbage, Amelie half-verbalized a plan she was working on in her head to personally run our bags of recyclables to the local recycling center rather than toss it in the big dumpster with the rest of the trash.
The sad closing ceremony arrived with the building of a fire in the fireplace to roast marshmallows to make smores. Amelie built the fire like a boundary waters camper. No way with the world we lived in would we risk an outdoor campfire, especially with Smokey Bear on the premises — maybe he doesn’t wear a hat in the house out of good manners. The kids gathered in a semicircle with Michel around the hearth like Christmas. Grandma outfitted each kid with the steel picnic wienie roasters brought from home with thick jumbo marshmallows stuck on the prongs. If one caught fire Amelie was there with Grandma to blow it out. Michel and Grandma provided the graham crackers and Hershey bars. And paper napkins. It was like fishing, once the kids marshmallow bait was set then Roxanne, Michel, Amalie, Vincent and Sid made up their own. Only I abstained — I don’t like marshmallow — though a graham cracker and a cold Hershey with a cup of coffee and a shot of Bailey’s appeals to me. They let the fire die down as interest waned from the teen girls basically trying to coach their three year old cousin how not to set the marshmallow on fire and Neko essentially rejecting the cracker-chocolate-melted marshmallow sandwich in favor of raw marshmallows and bites of chocolate and torching marshmallows for fun. Until her mother said, Koko that’s enough.
Michel directed her kids to get packed. Through the evening the Kysylyczyns positioned their family baggage adjacent to the front door. Vincent disappeared. From the back deck I found him down in the hot tub by himself. Quickly I went to my room and put on my swimsuit and grabbed a towel. In passing I told Roxanne where I was going.
Vincent was sobbing. Even as I approached he could not stop crying to save face.
You broke rule number one, I said as I slid among the burbling jets.
Why does she hate me? he begged. It’s been this way long as I remember, she’s hated me.
She doesn’t hate you.
Yes she does, and you allow it. You take her side. You reward her for it.
That’s not true.
Tonight — twice — I complimented her fried rice. She just ignored me.
That’s rude.
Dad, I just don’t know what she expects of me. Tell me, am I really that bad? How have I failed her? What expectations — what right, what self-righteous right does she have to impose her expectations on me? I know I’m not as successful as Sid but I do all right.
that’s none of her business anyway, I said. She does say you drop the F bomb indiscriminantly around the kids, including your own.
Well fuck that shit, he answered with the kind of sarcastic contempt that his sister objected to and didn’t think was all that funny. Like her kids live in a bubble world where nobody hears trash talk. Like marijuana — she tolerates it from Sid’s old pals from high school. Don’t they all get together with their wives and kids in the fall down in Palm Springs and there’s old Jeff and those guys, tokin’ away…
Discreetly I’m sure.
Vaping probably. If Michel wants to disown me on the character of my privacy she’s violating the privacy of my character. She doesn’t know me and doesn’t seem to really care who I am. Doesn’t respect me. I’ve made the effort time and again. I text her and she ghosts me. I try to be friends and she acts like she’s ashamed to know me. Doesn’t show any interest in my life, what I might be going through. Her life’s such an ideal. I’m her family afterthought. It doesn’t make sense according to Christian traditions. It’s not like we aren’t aligned politically.
In some ways, I mused, it’s worse than having a Trump believer in the family.
I don’t know what to do. I may have to believe we’ll never be close. I know, Dad, you’ve always said someday she and I would find ourselves eye to eye face to face more alike and akin and recognize we are the only two of a kind, well that day is highly impossible. She hurts me too much to reconcile and I can’t see her retracting her hate. Just please don’t facilitate her case and be her enabler. You and Mom shouldn’t suck up to her so much to prove how much you love her. You’re always doing things for her and her kids, I admit before Neko I wondered if you would ever pay half the attention to a kid of mine. Travel all the way to Europe a few times a year just to hang out. Pick them up and drive them around after school, gymnastics. For a while didn’t you used to cook them dinner? Yeah. I can’t see how she — or at least Sid — doesn’t see how much you do to prove you love her more than me. I know, I know. She’s older, your first kid. (That’s why I identify so much with Tess. Second children.) Some of her favoritism is understandable and maybe some of it earned but it’s never fair. If she’s an overachiever that’s her prerogative and I applaud her status even if I tend to criticize her as a social climber, it’s meant to be good fun. I think she’s a controlling parent but hasn’t steered the kids wrong, not yet, though you know what I think about church. You and Mom seem to overcompensate with her and her church.
Amen, I said. There’s been an appreciated pause in attending services through the pandemic. Appreciated by me at least. It’s set Tess back at least a year in confirmation training.
Too bad, said Vincent. Maybe she’ll figure out she’s being groomed by a deep state theocracy. Just sayin’s all. Sounds like they’ve already got Clara. I can see you making a face defending Michel for whatever and why freedom of religion but you and Mom condone it way too much.
It means a lot to her.
There you go. It’s okay, I know a lot of it is the kids’ performances, reading texts, ringing bells and singing and getting baptized and so forth. It just underscores how much extent you go to prove you love her and she takes advantage of it to try to undermine your love for me, which is plainly unfair. You seem to see it her way and I get leftover love.
That’s not true. Mom and I always rely on you for companionship and a place in your life, all along and especially now with Neko. We can’t help the Kysylyczyns took off for Switzerland for four years, but you looked after Mom and me day to day. And think of all the vacations we took up towards the boundary waters while the Kysylyczyns were gone, memories exclusively with you. The good parent favors neither child, you know that. Or you will know when you have another child. We love you both. I am determined that this will heal, though I don’t know just how. Mom has a lot of influence here and maybe she’ll talk her through it all rationally. Sorry but I got recused from the case with a clear conflict of interest, but I think in time, with Mom’s help I can convince your sister what a good soul you are.
We left the hot tub refreshed towelling off in the mountain air. We shut down the apparatus and covered it assuming no one else would use it that night — and if they did, well, they (plural) would know what to do. We adjourned our conversation before ascending the stairs to the deck and the kitchen and agreed to meet up again at the far end of the boulders along the drive later that night to continue our dialogue.
In the house in our bedroom where I went to change out of my bathing suit I found Roxanne crying on the bed. While I was in the tub with Vincent she and Michel had it out on the front porch over whether we loved him more and held her to a higher standard. Roxanne described the argument through tears. Michel accused her mom of laying the groundwork for her brother’s delinquency by waiving away his slacker behavior and later defending it as just a lifestyle choice. Roxanne said she denied using a defense of a lifestyle choice but Michel insisted that’s what her mother said that morning in the kitchen. It sounded as if Michel twisted what Roxanne actually said to justify a broader accusation that in our minds and hearts we let Vincent get away with anything he wants while she has to qualify for our approval. We never recognize her good worth while her brother gets approval for living less than his potential. She said we allowed him priviliged attention by paying less attention to his shady dodgy attitudes than by taking her accomplishments for granted. Roxanne was especially hurt when Michel accused her of virtually dropping everything to help Vincent and cover for him as if she never received equal or more attention. It came down to us loving Vincent more and Roxanne interpreted Michel’s final stance as for us to choose between them, him or her, but not both.
She even got on my case for us doing routine Face Times with Vincent while we were in Mexico. Nobody said she can’t Face Time too, but I kept gathering she’s too busy. I never realized she cared. Where does she get the idea we love him more?
He says we love her more.
I don’t get it. Who gets to keep track? Why does this have to come up now? I don’t know how to fix this.
Not by tomorrow.
I don’t like what I’m hearing from you. Do you think this is funny?
No, I said laughing a little at being accused. I do believe we will resolve this. Like Tess said, our family is permanent.
When did she say that?
She wrote it in a card she made for her mother for Christmas when she was about six years old. You don’t remember?
No but I’ll take your word. What are you going to do to mend this? You don’t have a clue, do you. You just think it will all blow over and we’ll all make nice again, well you’re not taking this as seriously as you and I need to, Mister Buffalo Man. Michel’s talking about taking a break. From us. I can’t believe she would put us in exile over so many misperceptions. I feel framed for murder. At least treason. You’ve got to talk to Vincent and get him to reach out to her to stick up for us for a change.
No rush, I advised. All this reparation and reconciliation could keep until we were all home at our own habitats. Good riddance to dear Michel tomorrow, sorry to say. Let her cool off. Sid and the kids will do her good. Somehow. I’ll talk to Vincent. Tonight.
So what are you going to say?
I’ll say he’s carrying the future of our family on his big shoulders and it will be up to him to walk the high road.
What’s that mean? Funny but both Roxanne and Vincent asked the same thing, and I said it means somebody besides me has to approach Michel with humble integrity to persuade her to listen to you.
Me?
Yes. Everyone loves Roxanne. From here to Zihuataejo we all rely on you to speak simple truths. Vincent needs to humbly steer the dialogue back through you, where it broke off. When it comes back I’ll help you with that.
Vincent’s take on my answer was less than wonderful. He questioned why he should look like he was hiding behind Mom. I could see that angle, I conceded. He needed to get his image away from being mama’s boy. He thought that was funny. We left the subject agreeing it would be nice if when we got home he would be open to opportunities to be extra nice to his sister, as if to kill her with kindness.
This while calibrating the breeze and our distance from the house to smoke cigarillos and a bowl, keeping our voices deliberately low and sipping beers. Full moon practically straight up in the pines. White pie in the sky.
What ever happened to the girlfriend befallen between you and John McCutcheon?
She married a local gearhead greaser, I answered as if to phrase the answer so as not to get sued.
And what about her mother?
She died the summer of our graduating class.
I’m sorry, he said. That must have been sad.
I guess, I answered uncharacteristically indifferent. I wasn’t there, I said. I was in Southern California. The summer before I met your mom.
So you say you had an alibi? For the ex-girlfriend’s mother’s death.
I got the joke and wondered at Vincent recalling the detail about the mom. Yes, I said, they tried to frame me for her kidney failure.
On the way to bed I made sure to lock the doors and turn out the lights.
Chapter 10
Thanks to Vincent I learned overnight how much more compensation I had to overcome among my selective memories to present myself to my grandchildren. Nobody ever asked me about my adolescence so I guess I assumed all this while they assumed they knew all about me already — as much as they cared to know — and there was no requirement for me to interrupt every program with bulletins defining my younger years or to stage series after series of lectures beginning with the phrase When I was…
I had no obligation to volunteer stories and impressions of my younger past or share memories of personal times and events gone by. I had every right to remain silent. Or to be selective of what I share. Yet I felt for the first time the night before, when Vincent queried me about some of my teen years, an obligation to answer every personal question put to me if Clara or Tess should ever think important to ask, like Vincent, or Michel, or Sid, or maybe eventually Neko.
Roxanne already has those privileges — I wouldn’t say she enjoys the privileges, but she knows my history for better or worse and always relies on true answers from me. To the world you might say my life is nobody’s business, especially now when I have no employer to embarrass if I do express deep thoughts of my own or act unpopular, free to compose what I want voluntarily to say in this space. To interview myself. The older Clara and Tess get the more room they will have for their own retrospection and the chances will increase one or both of them might read something their Granpa Kelly wrote and ask me to substantiate what I said based on my real life so they can relate it to theirs. I can offer good and bad examples. It’s the bad examples I would not want them to applaud or copy. I would not cheer for them to steal an evergreen to give a local convent a Christmas tree, for example. I don’t know why all this seemed to come to me as an overnight revelation but I woke up that Friday morning with fresh remorse for some of the choices I made between about 1965 and 1971 I hadn’t really even thought about or remembered or taken seriously in a long time and I realized I kept all that experience buried so deep in the past it didn’t count any more, as out of date as my first job on my resume, it didn’t matter — no one needed to know my past sins, I would never run for public office.
But my grandkids might ask why I got such bad grades in high school. Sure, I could lie and pretend I was straight A’s and maybe get away with it enough because they grew up already thinking I’m smart. They know I don’t have a college degree, though I am college educated, but they don’t know as far as I know that I actually technically shouldn’t have a high school diploma either.
I woke up thinking what my alibis would be by refusing to give straight answers to questions about where I was and what I was doing when I was young. Everybody is ready to blame the Boomers for letting the Dream die off and I’m of the defensive saying we tried to advance the Dream as best we could and now every generation comes of age and spotlights the failures to blame on the eldest living generation for not being perfect enough while we had the chance.
There are good reasons to keep quiet and to not brag about adolescent mischief, even if it was fun and got away with. A grandfather could get canceled.
I got up early Friday and made coffee thinking about this. In the novel Clara recommended Purple Hibiscus there’s a father so strict in his Anglican Catholic ways he abusively punishes his daughter making her stand barefoot in boiled water for visiting the forbidden home of her pagan grandfather and walking on pagan ground. That’s an aspect of the novel I would have liked to talk about over coffee in light of any taboo her mother might cast on me since this vacation. Another time, another place.
Sid I could tell was out for a run and had started the coffee just minutes before I came along. I added the djinni water. Tess was the next one to emerge, phone in hand and looking for a bagel and Nutella, then Clara with long, disheveled hair wet from a morning shower. Neko in jammies looking for a muffin and a glass of milk, which Clara obliged. Michel just as the coffeemaker matured, her hair tied severely in a bun, wearing her wide-eye glasses and working from a mental checklist, reminding her girls to strip their beds according to the check-out rules. She arrived with a bundle of her own sheets and pillowcases to make a pile in the laundry room. She acknowledged my good morning with an offhand burst of air and I approached and hugged her clenched frame around her shoulders and kissed her temple, then retreated out of her way, a gesture of only a second but something I needed to do to start my day.
Roxanne joined next, reciting a litany of foods — frozen waffle, grapes, cereal, yogurt, cottage cheese, toast, scrambled egg — to Neko in the high chair making a mess crumbling her muffin and dunking chunks in her milk. The child paid no attention.
At a moment when she poured her coffee and half and half and satisfied herself with a first sip, when Michel and the girls were busy or distracted, Roxanne said to me in a low voice that something strange just happened. She was putting on her capri pants that morning when for no reason she just fell to the floor. Her leg collapsed, she lost her balance and went down on the bedroom rug. Are you hurt? No, I don’t think so. I feel fine. It was so weird. I didn’t black out but for that one second I lost control and ended up on the floor. Should I be worried, we both asked as we hugged. As I held her I felt her back and hips for any twinges but she was rock solid as ever.
Might be just a fluke. I looked in her eyes, clear and tawny looking back into mine for a sign I saw or felt something wrong, and I did not. She said she felt no after-effects. Okay. Let’s keep this between us for now. I don’t want Michel to know, she said. She’ll either think it’s a ploy or send me to the ER.
Because why did you fall down, Grandma? Neko heard it all and got the gist.
We’re thinking it through, I answered, and Roxanne said, I don’t know why, I did not trip or slip. I’m okay. Do you want a banana? Don’t mix milk with the crumbs on your tray. Here, let me get a rag.
The idea of the ploy made some odd sense to me as much as keeping it mum made sense as an anti-ploy. I regret to admit when my mother had her first heart attack at barely 50 I suspected she faked it to get attention. My own heart filled with regret for having compared Michel to my mother the other night, mostly ashamed to now encounter personality outbursts of emotion like my mom’s furies of old. Michel had Colleen’s genes all right, just like I did and Vincent. Right now Michel didn’t need to know about Roxanne’s tumble putting her pants on or to travel home with her family thinking her mother might have had a stroke, or one of thse pre-stroke strokes, possibly caused by the anxiety of being yelled at unfairly by a daughter mad at her brother and dad.
Sid showed up jolly and jovial saying he really liked this as a running route. Just enough elevation and shade and variety of scenery to keep it interesting. And thanks to the djinni input the coffee for him was plenty. He showered while Michel and the girls began loading the car. Sid and Clara completed it when Sid was fresh. He hastily downed a toated bagel and cream cheese as the girls made their farewells to Neko, Amelie and Grandma while Michel solitarily and stoically sulked in the driveway. Sad.
When Vincent emerged from hibernation Michel was already seated at her shotgun seat. Her brother groggily made his way around his nieces for hugs and bien viajes, ending up in abrazo with his brother-in-law.
So I took Clara aside a moment to say: I’m sorry and I apologize for behaving badly. She was awkward and a little embarrassed but didn’t avoid eye contact much and acted as graceful as a beam walker, smiling forgivingly. Relieved that I broke the ice. I said I intended to read Americanah soon and reminded her we hadn’t really talked about Purple Hibiscus yet, my effort to show continuity. She recently had gotten off her braces and had a wise, mature smile and kind blue eyes — she would get along well in Appalachia. I’ll see you before you go to Mountain TOP, I said and hugged her. She’d grown into a tall, substantial kid. I love you, I said and turned her loose. You should listen to evermore Grandpa, she said as she picked up her grip. I think you’ll like it, it’s a really good album.
Tess seemed to be waiting for me by the door, standing with her backpack. We hugged profoundly. She too was growing into a solid frame. For some reason I offered her no apology, feeling as if I didn’t owe her one, as if she wasn’t offended. She said, I love you Grandpa, and I said I love you too. She smiled widely, broad with braces, her green eyes like water lilies. Have a great time at diving camp… Gymnastics, she corrected… and I’ll see you when you’re back.
Lastly I embraced Sid. I’m sorry and I apologize for behaving badly, I said. He nodded with a bemused smile half shadowed by at least a week’s growth of whiskers. I added, I don’t know how to elegantly solve what’s between Michel and Vincent. He thinks we love her more than him. She resents him for not reaching the full potential of his gifts and blames us for setting a low bar because we love him more than her. She’s always scared me, you know. He said nothing, just nodded. He had steely blue eyes like Clara, who did not have ocean blue eyes like me. I gave Sid one more abrazo for the road before he climbed into the driver’s cab. Good jouney and safe travels, I said and circled around to the passenger window where my Michel stared back in her big-eyes sunglasses like Jackie Onassis at the beach. I blew her a kiss and she wiggled her fingertips bye-bye.
Tess lowered her tinted window to wave extravagantly and cry out, Have a safe drive home, I love you, as the vehicle did a Y-turn and rolled down the driveway, me standing there waving after them like a Beverly Hillbilly. A Muswell Hillbilly at least, all conflicted into kinks.
Pathetic to say it felt a relief they were gone. Neko broke the spell like Harpo Marx swashbuckling across the front deck in her jammies and pineapple sunglasses wielding a long striped feather like a magic boa. Where di you get that, I asked and she held it away. I asked Vincent, what kind of feather could that be and he guessed it might be some kind of hawk. Did she find it in the house in some kind of semi-floral arrangement in a vase? She hadn’t really been outdoors yet, and it’s unlikely she would find it on the deck. (Unless a hawk actually swooped down to snatch her and lost a feather in the failed process — very doubtful since no startled cries or fuss, and too much action going on just about then in the driveway and Neko no chipmunk prey.) I let her keep it until she set it aside and discreetly found its probable proper place in a vase setting of dried flowers and sage.
Noo need to sneak around or wait until certain individuals went to bed to partake of flower buds and gummies.
Amelie announced the news to us from her phone source Derek Chauvin was just sentenced to 22 and a half years for the murder of George Floyd. Just sentenced, I asked, or just 22 and a half years? Both, she answered. I guess it’s safe to go home now, said Vincent. Consensus: that part was over. The killer was off the streets. Now what to do about the rest of the killers still out there.
An so we passed our true final day at Forest Mountain Home lounging and grazing and talking behind Michel’s back, so to speak. Vincent with sincere compassion introduced family mental illness into the discussion, and I have to believe he meant no malice toward his sister and sounded reflective over the passing of a day and a night towards coping with a familial trait common to him, me, Michel and Neko — Colleen Kelly’s genes. Mimi’s genes. With them the family craziness, to put it bluntly. That borderline condition on the edge of depression and sage insight. That place where you almost could be a genius but that might not be a good thing. Our anxiety propels us and lets us fly in a world mostly indifferent to our ultimate fate except bits and pixels of what can be monetized from what we Like. It’s natural someone would want acceptance for whoever they are or want to be. It’s a challenge to know who you are enough to accept yourself worthy. That chronic self-doubt cycle. One doesn’t have to be (air quotes) damaged to come undone and be broken. I don’t know why we just didn’t break down and have an old fashioned intervention. On which one of us? Good point. Roxanne’s probably the only one here from a sane family. Hold on, there’s subtle dysfunction there too in my family that’s probably genetic. Nobody’s family is perfect. Just permanent, right? What?
To get away for a while Roxanne borrowed the car and took Neko to the kiddie pool and splash pad in town, leaving me, Amelie and Vincent to worry behind her back whether she should be driving. She had confided to them her episode falling down and conveyed her confidence she didn’t feel any worse afterwards so it seemed a one-off thing, and probably related to her left leg more than brain neurology. It didn’t take much to get anybody to take Roxanne’s word. They came back in an hour or so bragging about having fun and getting good at mixing with other kids and saying, Hi my name’s Neko.
Lunchtime brough us back around the kitchen island for another smorgasbord of cheeses, coldcuts, salads, beans, greens and whatever remained in the fridge and shouldn’t be left behind. The remains of six days. Feast.
After lunch I asked if I could take the car back to the park to go shopping at the visitor center. Rox offered to drive. No offense, she said, but you’re stoned. On route I asked how she felt and she complained of soreness of her right butt where she landed, but not too bad. She was grumpy and couldn’t let go of the feud with Michel. She hardly said goodbye, Rox lamented. Might mean she’s not finished, I offered. You aren’t taking this seriously enough, she lamented. Yes I am, I said, I just know this will work out. How? Don’t know yet. But it will, the means will present itself, we just need to be alert for when it does we will use the opportunity to get better.
At the visitor store I liked two t-shirts. I found a ceramic coaster for my coffee table with the design of the state flag on it like painted on barn wood. And I bought a medium small Colorado flag on a stick. And a Rocky Mountain magnet. Roxanne could find nothing she liked enough to want. She didn’t wear t-shirts, didn’t feel comfortable with the tailoring. She asked if I was having some kind of tourist munchies with my sudden mad appetite for souvenirs. I get souvenirs everywhere, I said, which she knew to be true because our house teems with them. Colorado deserved honors in the galleries of mementoes. There was no shortage of merchandise on the shelves, upstairs and down, the store hyperstocked for the next 90 days of summer and the pent up tourist surge to come.
The 4th of July was almost ten days away. Lots of summer. No rationing, no need to hoard, there’s enough to go around. America was back in the world. I would remember Colorado 2021 for jump-starting something. Significant. My Summer of 69. In this rectangular state of the Union that keeps promising to make itself into a more perfect one I bought some stuff on my credit card at the visitor center store. The clerk lady thanked me appreciatively and charged me ten cents for the brown paper shopping bag. Roxanne bought nothing. Nothing to landmark this family vacation except that old-timey Victorian style family portrait which nobody seemed to like except me, and an XXL hoodie sweatshirt for Vincent for Fathers Day. Official summer was less than five days old. If Colorado would mean anything as a landmark of existential revelation or not really, I had a flag, a coaster, a magnet and two t-shirts to rah rah. Colorado gets its Andy Warhol fifteen minutes worth of silkscreens. The rest of my life I get to brag I went there on vacation and whether it matters as a pivotal key moment of my life would remain to be seen, but the chances it would matter significantly were minimal compared to most of my favorite memories. What ever this vacation jump started had strangely nothing much to do with being Colorado.
This final final night at Estes Park was left open as maybe a pizza night, but nobody really wanted to go to a restaurant or even drive to town for take-out. We still had a pack of tilapia we could heat up. Some sliced turkey and beef. Bacon, lettuce but no tomatoes — nobody but Roxanne and me liked tomatoes. Cheese. Even the last of the chopped rotisserie chicken. White bread and wheat bread. Salami! For the second time that day we scavenged the entire refrigerator with imminent gratification in mind and an eye for what Roxanne and I might pack for home in the cooler and what might go to the dumpster. Dry goods and canned goods of course didn’t matter. Tilapia on the grill took no time at all. A hotdog for the kid barely needed no heat at all but I scorched it just for effect.
We ate around sunset on the picnic table on the back porch.
Afterwards I scraped and scrubbed the grill, as per good manners. Made sure all the gas taps were righty tighty. Covered it with the shroud.
Into the evening we putzed around packing, tidying the house and persuading Neko to give up her puptent. Drained the gin and tonic water. Separated waste from food we would place in the cooler and made more ice in the freezer for the morning. Donated half a jar of mayonnaise, a quarter jar of pickles and half used squeeze containers of ketchup and mustard to the house and anyone who came after. There wasn’t much left to pack or dispose. Scraps of rotisserie chicken rated comic disdain as the least predictable waste item and the most durable in the fridge.
Amelie was concerned about our recycling. All week we took the trouble to separate recyclables from organic and non-recyclable waste. We figured out along the way the dumpster back by the garage was the one-stop depository for the waste hauler to take away, indiscriminately hauling all of it as waste. Seemed disappointing Colorado wouldn’t have a distinct recycling system, being such a nature state and all. Was it a presentational ruse, all this nature nature, Amelie pondered. So now her personal solution to the dilemma was unsolved. She had researched online the location of a nearby recycling drop-off center (like what they call the Oki Hof, where I went with Sid in Switzerland) but neglected to note the hours of operation. They were closed now and wouldn’t reopen in the morning in time for us to run the stuff there and make it to the Denver airport in time for Amelie, Vincent and Neko’s flight home. Like it or not, we were compelled to toss the recyclables in with the trash. Like some kind of priest at a burial I sort of blessed the corpses of bagged cans, bottles, cardboard and paper with hope somebody along the chain of custody would recognize what we did and sort it out and send it to the Oki Hof. We were going to have to live with our conscienses. I secured the heavy bar across the dumpster lid and coughed from the garbage odor. The bin had not been collected since before we arrived and raising the lid that much let out a powerful stench barely leaking when shut but strong enough to attract a brown bear. It was after sundown. A witching hour. I made clanging noises. I lit a cigarillo. Isn’t the true term the bewitching hour?
It was easy for me to pack because I never unpacked, just kept rotating clothes by attrition.
In the house Amelie had been admittedly doomscrolling and came across news that an estimated 600 bodies were found on the premises of a former residential school for Indigenous kids in western Canada. Schools were set up like these in several North American territories since exploration and colonization in the mid-1800s where kids were taken from their parents and villages to baptize them and de-Indianize them. The residential school method was also practiced in the United States through various missions and social services. In Canada they were mainly run by the Roman Catholic Church. Some schools were allowed to operate until as recently as 1970. Amelie’s sorrow was of course compounded by her professional field of providing facilities and services to prevent child abuse and neglect. She was enraged by the stories emerging about Indigenous residential schools and now there were bodies. Hundreds of bodies.
Another good reason to cancel the Catholic Church, I thought. Michel once asked me, Dad, if it weren’t for the priest sex abuse scandal would you still be Catholic? No, I answered. I have many reasons. It’s sad to see a lifetime of conclusions and convictions proven true when it comes to the worst suspicions about people institutions. Appalled, but not shocked.
If you think I’m woke then it must be a lifetime of caffeine. The ones who just woke up have some catching up to do, and the ones who oppose to be woke won’t be able to snooze through the atonement due and overdue for fundamental repeat violations of common decency. Denying a history of very self-evident white privilege and supremacy over BIPOC people only pressures more atonement. (Black, Indigenous, People Of Color — a new easy acronym, though when I first saw the term in a headline I thought the article might be about bi-polar people.) Stealing land from Indigenous people and campaigning to eradicate them and their culture from North America is historical fact which should be known by every educated man, woman and child, regardless whether it makes them feel uncomfortable or guilty. There are therapies for that, and I don’t mean acquiring firearms and joining a shooting range. Everyone also should know by heart that African imported slavery underpinned the mercantile and agricultural economy of American colonies and eventually the United States, where a war was fought and over 620,000 died to decide slavery illegal, and so ever since white people systematically placed loopholes, roadblocks, catches-22, criminality and violent repression to convince Black people to give up and go to hell. What’s wrong with admitting all that?
I feel better knowing my kids and their kids don’t have to un-learn or re-learn most of the propaganda of ignorance. Amelie comes from parents who nurtured her with liberal humanitarian values. Sid too. Roxanne and I are lucky our kids found spouses whose families support things we have imparted as virtues. It would be nice to invoke those virtues to help solve our personality problems.
Sociopolitical problems belonged in the realm of being beyond serenity. Content we swept the floors and placed our sacks and bags at the front door landing for morning loading to the car, Vincent, Amelie and I craved one last soak in the hot tub. Roxanne did not. She preferred to stay on the back porch to take the cool pine scented air. And watch Neko, who didn’t care to swim in the tub but played in the water at the steps.
Later we draped our towels along the deck rails hoping they and our bathing suits would dry enough overnight to pack in a suitcase in the morning. Soon the moon rose over the house, almost full. The back deck supported our hospitality this last night. We broke out our last beers — Roxanne and I shared one. Neko went down easy, landing soft from her weeklong flight of extended family aeronautics. Roxanne attended her iPad to double-check our route home and said the drive to Mitchell might be a stretch depending on how long we were at Devil’s Tower. Vincent added, I’d be tempted to stay there all day.
In light that we needed to leave and lock up by 8:00 to get to the aiport on time we kept decent hours. First Roxanne retreated, reminding us to plug our devices for charging overnight. Her phone was fully charged so she could take it to her bedstead and set the alarm for 6:30. Then Amelie retired because she was sleepy and uninterested in any more heavy conversation. Vincent and I did not linger long.
Father and son. I said I wanted him to know I loved him and was proud of who he was. He said I was a great dad and he loved me too. I remembered we hadn’t given him his present, his hoodie sweatshirt. Always tomorrow.
He said he was sorry about the thing with Michel but it was part my fault. I said I was sorry too but they both seemed to have the same issues and couldn’t accept they both had our full, unconditional love. I didn’t tell him his mother told me his sister seemed to put up an ultimatum to choose between them. What would I say, I choose him? Roxanne chooses Michel? Nope. I said again Michel would come around of her own accord. I said facetiously Michel can’t go a month without Mom.
What I want to get back to, I said, is what I said the other night about the weight you’re carrying. I’m sorry if it seems like body shaming. I am not. I am concerned about your heart, and I mean it. From my heart.
Say no more, he answered kindly. I’m contemplating changes. Neko keeps me busy but doesn’t leverage into adequate exercise, and I can’t wait until she’s big enough to cut by me to the hoop. And I shouldn’t drink so much. That’s in the Sturgis gene, right, what did in your dad and Aunt Molly and plagues your youngest sister Nelly, and why most of the rest are in AA, right? It’s a bitchen combination the Dick and Colleen genes, alcoholism and depression. When I contemplate what traits could present themselves with Neko I’m mindboggled.
Before you or your sister were born we tried very hard not to get pregnant. Even your mom was uncertain about whether to create a new life, much less two. When Michel was in high school she asked us, what if you have children and no matter how much you try to raise them right they go wrong? Fortunately that hasn’t been our experience. Short and simple, neither of you were accidents. After about five years together your mom and I decided to have a baby to give ourselves somebody to love. And again a few years later. If we then contributed to the future human race we were responsible for the quality of the learned behavior of you two offspring in our care, but the genes thing can be over-rated. Think of this: from Mom and me you got an array of good genes. Intelligence from both sides. Beauty. But you can’t rely on what you speculate about your genes, even after joining Ancestrydot com and 23 & Me. No. You are who you are in your own goulash of DNA and it wouldn’t really matter if you’re related to Einstein or Kurt Cobain. I’m pleased you’re related to me, if that helps. I do see some of my best traits in you. So for what it’s worth, Buffalo Ha, it turns out Michel decided to have children after all, and you can believe they will never let her down. So trust yourself with Neko. You’re fine. She’s fine. And if it ever gets hairy you can rely on Mom and me, we’re your Crisis Nursery.
When I got to bed Roxanne was still awake and she asked what our son and I talked about behind her back. Speaking of which, how’s your bum, I asked not risking to touch it. I told her what I said about worrying about his girth and his heart and what he said about his drinking. She said her butt was okay and as she got up to go to the batroom she asked if I mentioned smoking reefer. When she got back to bed I said, what kind of performative hypocrite do you think I am?
I awoke in the morning at first light through the curtains and got up fresh and rested. Made coffee. Skipped the djinni water. In a short while I heard the throbs of Roxanne’s phone alarm. Shortly she and Amelie joined me for some brew. The half and half people had to take it with 1% milk. Amelie let Vincent sleep in another fifteen minutes. Neko was out to the world. We started loading the car before Vincent declared himself functional, and about then the baby got up and needed greeting and tending and dressing for the airport. All what remained to load into the car was my and Roxanne’s travel bag and what Amelie and Vincent intended to take on the airplane. Roxanne’s and my suitcase and stuff were packed with the food and items belonging to Amelie and Vincent that didn’t need to fly home. Along with that Vincent asked me to transport the stash, what were remaining buds and a small cannister of fruity gummies, which he didn’t care to transport through international airports.
Referring to the fruity gummies he said, When you get within about ten minutes of Devil’s Tower chew a couple of these.
After a couple of final run-throughs we locked up behind us and put the key in the lock box. Amelie behind the wheel, Vincent snoozing at shotgun and I, Roxanne and Neko across the back we headed back down the mountains for the plain and Denver’s airport. We joined the maze of tangled construction projects at the edge of the city and Amelie untangled us to the airport freeway for the tedious approach to the cone roofed terminal. She pulled up to the drop-off curb for their airline and everyone got out, unloaded their grips and embraced farewell. They thanked us for our generosity and we emphasized they were welcome. In minutes Roxanne was behind the wheel with the keys and I was settled in at shotgun with our go bag in Neko’s car seat and we were on our way out of the airport freeway and on our way to Wyoming.
It seemed fiendishly liberating without the kids, just the two of us again — we both confessed the same emotion. With a full tank since Estes Park she found cruise control and headed north on US85 towards Cheyenne and making a beeline for the border. We could have stuck with the Interstate freeways to go faster and debatably safer and unobstructed by staying on I25 from Fort Collins through Cheyenne and take it northwest through Casper up to the town of Buffalo, Wyoming, and then go east on I90 through Gillette to US14 exit to Sundance, a few miles from the South Dakota state line. That approach seemed needlessly long, however efficient as Interstates go. To elected to stay on US85 all the way north up an eastern ribbon of Wyoming bordering the western edge of the Black Hills.
The chapparal was parched but showed greenish signs it might have rained the past few days. The red sand had a porous sheen like wet gravel. Skies partly cloudy, partly blue. Cloud shadows cut sweeping contasts on the edges of the buttes where sturdy firs and pines guarded the cliffs and rugged reefs of boulders climbing the canyon walls. A lonely highway. Forgettable miles and miles without a homestead. Here and there a mobile home on a gravel driveway. Road signs for towns unseen. Here and there we would catch up to a truck pulling a trailer with a fishing boat. There was a turn off to a silvery lake or reservoir behind a hill. Flat valleys occasionally showed distant cattle. In its lonesomeness Wyoming seemed kind of pretty but not dainty. Nothing dainty about Wyoming.
Mystique yes. Hard to accept the concept of a whole state that size with a scattered total population smaller than just the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. It seemed so spooky to observe so much wild, open uninhabited space and imagine there were even fewer people than it looked, and it looked like nobody lived there. Stretches without utility poles and power lines. No railroad tracks. Good highway suface though. The state could not muster enough population to qualify for more than one seat in the House of Representatives, whereas Minnesota has eight. That sole congressperson was named Liz Cheney, conservative Republican with clout and not incidentally daughter of George W Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney, a powerful politician at the turn of this century when jihad wars came of age.
Liz Cheney faced fierce demonization by members of her own party for disloyalty to Donald Trump, voting to impreach him and consenting to serve on the House Select Committee to investigate the events of January 6 of that year when a riot stormed Congress to stop the certification of the state electors certifying Joe Biden president-elect of the United States of America. If would appear the Republican party would prefer to cover up the insurgency than let the truth be exposed that Trump revved up the crowd and set them loose sicced upon the Capitol to try to steal the presidency by fraud and insurrection including lynching Vice President Mike Pence. Congresswoman Cheney simply wanted to know the facts and to make the facts known, but her party wants to disown her for exposing the the brazen corruption of its de facto leader, a man who would be Fuhrer, exposing the whole party as a fascist facade to regain power at all costs behind Trump.
On TV dramas and journalism video Afghanistan is portrayed as desolate and remote with scary mountains and caves. Here in Wyoming the desolation has got to be way different if just as desolate. The only similarity between the two places other than unpopulation and undevelopment is a predetermined political outcome to favor an orthodox conservative point of view. There’s the Taliban and there’s the Trump Republican Party.
Liz Cheney was known as an arch-conservative foe of the creeping socialist left wing Democrats. Now she was known as a traitor to her party for sticking to bedrock fundamentalist conservative values of law and republican democracy. 2022 would be an election year. What would her voters do? Wyoming seemed like a calm and reasonable place, if lonely. As a state it practiced women’s suffrage first in the nation. There was no reading the face of Wyoming and compare its reputation for coal and the brutal murder of a gay college kid named Matthew Shepard in the late 1990s in Laramie. It has a city named Casper. Casper?
Somewhere midway to our destination there was a billboard: WELCOME TO WYOMING. DON’T DO ANYTHING STUPID.
It might be hard to describe what and where Wyoming is to a foreigner to the United States. It’s not really near anything, although Yellowstone National Park is wedged against its far northwest corner, next to Idaho, another place hard to describe. It’s out there in the wild wild west where almost nobody lives. There’s no Disneyworld. No Statue of Liberty. No Hollywood. There’s a town with the intriguing name Jackson Hole. A mountain range called Grand Tetons. A city name of Casper.
Who am I to talk, you rightly ask. I thought about the gas station back at Sterling, Colorado. I come strutting in to pay cash in my Keen sandals and cargo shorts, with my Joe Biden haircut, wide-brim Tilley hat and prescription shades in my Stafford pocket-t from JCPenney like I feel all sorry for the cashier stuck living in such a dusty, greasy nowhere town that can’t even support a Village Inn restaurant. No wonder I sense petulance from her behind the bulletproof glass that pre-dates covid, so old it’s almost green, as she counts back my change through the slot convinced I didn’t want to be there, couldn’t wait to leave and I’m never coming back. The difference between my white privilege and hers is a thousand mile diameter of sagebrush, chapparal, gravel and pity. At home I have blue earth, water and luck.
All through the strip of Wyoming from south to north nothing changed enough in the landscape to mark progressions or distance, as if we were riding a loop stuck in time. I could see why state politics could be conservative in an outdoor region almost perfect the way it was for what it was, no good reason to change. It might reflect upon the state culture, which is 94% white by population and numbers fewer resident citizens than almost half the casualties of the Civil War. They get two senators like every other state, but one member of the House, the bare minimum. Three electoral votes for president. No major league sports teams unless you count rodeo. First in the nation to let women vote. No water port, virtually landlocked against a continental divide. Home to one 2.2 million acre Indian Reservation called Wind River which operates the state’s only two casinos and houses about 12,000 Native American residents, mostly enrolled in Shoshone and Arapahoe tribes. Boasts to be the true Cowboy State and features a city named Cody dedicated to the memory of a dubious namesake of mine, Buffalo Bill, the greatest cowboy showman of his era and meat provider to the gangs of gandy dancers who built the transcontinental railroads. Those railroads haul coal from the mines around Gillette in trains miles and miles long of just coal cars and black tanker cars of tar juice petroleum, much more of what God’s grace has shed on thee taken for granted in the state of Wyoming, where every border state around it is a buffer zone and the nation at large thinks of it as afterthought sunk in obscurity. It seems so eerily self-sustaining and ambiguously self-righteous. Few billboards, as if they were illegal. Or STUPID.
The evergreens grew thicker on one side of US85 than the other and the terrain sort of tilted that way, to the east. To the west the pastureland rolled like buns with cattle herding far away up the slopes.
So how’s your rump? I happened to think and asked Roxanne. Didn’t bother me all morning but it might be getting stiff after this time in the car. Cruise control really helps. Can’t figure. All at once I was down. Are we close? Yes, in maybe fifteen miles past this coming turnoff to Newcastle we leave 85 at a place they dared call Four Corners, where we take a left on 585 for maybe another thirty to Sundance. How’s gas? Fine. We have another ninety miles, it says. Getting good mileage. Why didn’t we get a car like this?
As the terrain flattened the grasslands spread between the evergreens more evenly on a plateau of footlands to the Black Hills. The route to Sundance was scrupulously marked along with signs pointing the same way to Devils Tower. I almost suggested we keep going and get a gaze at it today, but sunset was coming soon and we both were hungry. It would be there in the morning.
We stpped for gas on the main straightaway into Sundance both because we needed it and it was cheap. Cheap as peep. Cheapest the whole ride. Must be an itty-bitty state gas tax, we figured.
We took the main drag downtown. At the central park the Sundance Bank had banners celebrating its anniversary and proclaiming a free ribs barbecue, and there looked to be musicians ready to play at the gazebo bandstand. The queue of people with plates lined up to the ribs tent extended in a bee line to the edge of the park and curled towards the playground. We found the Bear Lodge motel just bearly at the last second, its sign reflected off the glass across the street easier to read than on the mansard roof of its building. It had a drive-in awning entrance to the L-shaped motel with car parking inside the elbow and facing the backside of the motel next door. A teenage girl cheerily worked the counter with perfectly defined pigtails with a symmetrical part perpendicular to her bangs. She wore a Bulldogs hoodie vest. She showed us the wi fi password was Bulldog too. Breakfast would be served there in the check-in lobby from 7 to 9. The key to out room was a real key on a plastic tag with our room number on one side and a mail-back pledge on the other, in case we accidentally left town with it we could drop it in any mailbox.
Is there a nice supper club where we could get dinner? Yes, one block over at the Longhorn, she replied. But the bank is sponsoring a free ribs barbecue at the park and you and everybody’s welcome. We placed our go bag, suitcase and road atlas in our tidy little room and walked the direction Bulldog Girl pointed, finding the Longhorn Saloon and Grill on the next street, which bordered the park where the line for ribs moved rapidly but never seemed to shorten.
Inside the Longhorn it was busy but we got a table right away between the bar and the copious dining room. A sturdy rough-hewn place with bare timbers for wall studs and a lofty raftered ceiling, antique glass lampshades, oak tables and brass chandeliers, this was obviously the formidable establishment of the town. Reminded me of a resort supper club Up North without the lake. We ordered two Black Tooth brown ales brewed in Sheridan (approximately two hundred miles away). Not Guinness, it was a smooth, tasty stout. We each chose the same entree, the 10 oz top angus sirloin (Is this cattle country? Most definitely) with salad and baked potato. We even ordered the same salad dressing — ranch.
In the main didning room was a long central table seating at least a dozen people of what I noticed on our way in to probably be an extended family or families with a few young adults and a couple adolescent kids. My back faced them so I couldn’t watch them or observe who they might be. One man in his early fifties seemed to dominate their conversation. I tried not to follow his words because there was something unsavory about his sarcasm. Something charlataneque about his point of view and something pointing towards the Big Lie with his sociopolitical assertions, so I tried to tune him out.
A few cuts into my steak I could not help overhear him say something about “hellholes like Minneapolis and New York” and I fought the urge to turn around and give the guy a glare. I resisted, thinking he was looking right at me for a reaction, as if he knew who I was, and to deny him any satisfaction with a confrontation I ignored him and hoped somebody at his own table might talk him down. Roxanne said later she thought it might be an anniversary party. They broke up and left before we finished our meal, giving my nerves the night off and serenity for dinner, although I tried to get a look at the guy on their way out after I heard him say, “I married her because she was good in bed.”
I suppose he’s mayor, I said to Roxanne. Some people’s children… His wife didn’t contradict him, Roxanne replied. She laughed when he said it, seemed to think he was funny. Another reason he married her, I said. He thinks she thinks he’s funny.
It was dark in the sky when we went back to the motel. The street lamps of downtown lit all the pavement like shadows were illegal. The park hosted picnic tables of people with paper plates and a band with a steel guitar rocked country less loud than one expected on a Saturday night. We went around a couple of blocks, half the downtown, before surrendering to the motel. Nothing on TV but a repeat rerun of Blue Bloods. Vincent texted they made it home though the plane was stranded about an hour on the Denver tarmac, but Neko was an angel. Michel did not text, not where they were or how the day went. This troubled Roxanne but didn’t surprise me.
Chapter 11
Fortified with scrambledegg patties and Jimmy Dean sausage, toast, orange juice and coffee, we checked out midmorning for the road to Devils Tower. Half the motel was gone from the parking lot when we left, which nudged me with a strange anxiety we would be late to arrive, they would run out of space. We coursed the two lane road to the monument behind one RV and one camper pulled by a truck, which we caught up to behind a couple of passenger cars. Roxanne again drove.
The first few glimpses of the monument in the distance are brazen teasers obscured by forested hills in turn obscured by rolling plains distorting perspective that this landscape should not be able to hide such a unique thing. The closer you get the more obscure it becomes. There it is, and there it isn’t. At the park entrance you can’t see it at all, it’s just about too close.
We got in line facing the ranger booth behind at least a dozen vehicles waiting for attrition, for one car to come out of the forest to exit so one car could enter the park. There was a stoplight at the intersection of the park entrance connecting two competing trading posts, but what the semaphore said didn’t matter, you could either go into the park or you couldn’t. The line slugged along, surprising how many early birds already leaving.
Devils Tower National Monument is administered by the National Park Service and treated as if a national park. It was the first national monument designated in the US. Our Golden Eagle senior park pass got us admitted free again, and when we arrived at the ranger and he looked at our credentials he handed them back with a big smile and a map, waved us through saying, Come on in folks and enjoy your day, even though no car approached coming the other way.
From the ranger booth it’s still a few miles into a forest uphill to the base of the tower. Along the edge of the woods a plain stretches flat for a few hundred yards with no trees, just some holes where a colony of prairie dogs live. You can pull off the road and watch them. The road bends away from the plain and plunges up into the tree line. From the parking lots the Tower is still hidden in the canopy of pines until, from a short hike uphill it reveals itself whole and alone, about a thousand feet of fluted rock straight up into the sky.
It can take about an hour to hike around the Tower. The foot paths are groomed and maintained to minimize stumbles amid the rocky and rooted terrain. On the day of our visit the northern half of the trail was closed for maintenance and the southern half recently restored and reopened. The scent of the dry pine needles on the ground emerged in earthy aroma of alpine breeze as we hiked the south and westerly perimeter.
This was our third visit together, my fourth. Our last visit, Roxanne’s second, included Vincent, a wayward road trip the long way to my sister Leenie’s wedding to her second husband about nineteen years ago in Colorado at the Renaissance festival at Larkspur, near where they lived in Colorado Springs. Her first was with me on a sprawling trek across Wyoming to the hot springs of Thermopolis and eventually Yellowstone and the Tetons. That next time with Vincent Rox and I walked the full perimeter while our son scaled one of the verges as high as he could climb by hand. He said that was his third trip. My first trip was a road spree camping trip with my friend Jim, my first visit to the West except California and the desert states south of Oklahoma. With Roxanne I wanted to share the awe again and again like the rites of renewing vows. This visit renewed the awe and we found ourselves holding hands at certain viewing points and kissing.
The trail moves up and down and is no set path but a swath of walking room from the forest to the rocky base of the Tower, room to meander and gaze. It’s populous but doesn’t force visitors to form lines to navigate. Downhill from the trail we observed fallen trees placed strategically terraced parallel to the walking path to deter downhill daredevil mountain bikers from attempting a harrowing ride descending the slope through the woods, the landscaping scattered as if to look naturally non-threatening.
A couple of park rangers had a tent set up at the end of the trail with some card tables and chairs and bottled water, the place to turn around due to maintenance around the rest of the way. It left the view of that side like the dark side of the moon, at least for the time being, while the Park Service sculpted the terrace. This closed the true view from the back side of the Tower of the tumbling plain where the spaceship docked in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The day was kind of hot, more so than Colorado, and we hung out in the pine shade and refreshed with water. We listened in with maybe a half dozen other visitors as the two rangers engaged in a conversation with a bearded gray guy who said he was a metallurgy engineer, debating how the tower formed itself. The two main scientific theories agree it formed from molten magma rock of a volcanic nature. How it came to be exposed above ground and so different from the surrounding geology is not settled. The prevailing theory says it formed as the neck of a volcano gone extinct. The other more convoluted theory says it formed from a mass of igneous rock pushing up as a bulge in a bulge into sedimentary rock as the Black Hills and Rocky Mountains formed, only this an isolated mass within a flood plain. Both theories hold that the land around the hardened mass of igneous rock eroded away over 40 million years leaving the curious mountain structure stranded in a relatively flat terrain with nothing like it nearby. To me both theories sound alike and I left the rangers and the engineer to haggle out the geological details.
However it came to be and to reveal itself, as you walk the grounds there is an undeniable aura in gray that draws spirituality from the earth and trees and projects upward and outward an abundance of holy vibes. No wonder it is a Native American indigenous base of sacred feelings. A portion of the forest is dedicated to the placement of tribal icons in the trees made of ribbons, twine, beads and feathers, such as dreamcatchers. Native legend describes the origin of the Tower as a refuge from a giant bear who stalks two kids (one story says they were tribal princesses, another were young male braves) who escape the bear by ascending a magical butte rising alone on the flatland. The bear pursued them by attempting to climb the butte but on all sides failed to reach the kids, and the scratch marks of its claws remain the striations of the Tower walls. The bear is a central figure shared in the imagery of the monument among the people of the Arapahoe, Kiowa, Crow, Cheyenne and Lakota, who called it variously Bear Lodge.
The off-putting moniker Devils Tower was of course bestowed by a white guy, a government employee on a US Army expedition in 1875, who was misinformed by his interpreter that the Native name for it meant Bad God Tower, so indelibly on American territorial maps the site reads Devils Tower. Which is too bad. There’s nothing inherently satanic about the place or any of its legends and environs. One has to associate volcanic activity with hell or Native spiritualism in general to sinful pagan beliefs to twist together a tie to Lucifer, even if the bear is the bad guy in the stories — one which pitches the frustrated bear into the sky to become Ursa Major, aka Big Dipper — is there a Devils Constellation? Hell no. You don’t hear about NASA peering into the universe for a galaxy called Hades. There’s a big cultural aversion to anything suggesting Satan. For good reason, the devil should take the hindmost as the universally known maker of Bad Shit.
If Devils Tower wasn’t named for the Devil the place would attract triple the visitors every year and would be a National Park instead of a National Monument. People squirm when it comes to associating with anything to do with the Devil. They’re taught to cheer on images of St George and St Michael slaying the fetid beastly soul of ghoul. Yes, there may be some people attracted to the site because its name is Devils Tower, but that proves the point, they are people of suspect beliefs who most people who might like to go there would rather not associate with. It’s a subconscious thing, programmed into our fundamental notions most of us don’t think about but affect our preferences. Chocolate cake is delicious but call it devil’s food and maybe we’ll pass on dessert because it might not be healthy. Or another example, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball team drew hardly any fans and their ball team sucked until they dumped the Devil and changed their name to just the Tampa Bay Rays and wham the team got good and draws a big crowd. And of course in college basketball everybody who doesn’t hate Duke University cringes when they hear them called the Blue Devils. No Christian wants to own an appliance callled a Dirt Devil.
Defiantly Devils Tower stands 40 million years old, or since the flood of Noah’s time according to Genesis bible believers, a true miracle of nature alone in the loneliest state of the union near its loneliest border, shunned as an afterthought off an isolated stretch of highway, beloved by those who bother to go out of the way to get there and gaze in the awe of the transfigured.
Roxanne and I took a last gaze. Climbers dangled ropes like window washers a hundred stories high. People speculate what it’s like up there on the flat top. There’s supposed to be grass and rainwater and wildlife, especially birds, but no bears. We stopped at the ranger station at the visitor center to get a junior ranger guidebook and badge for Tess if she cared to graduate via remote class, and got a magnet for the fridge. A few steps down towards the parking it was gone, obscured by the pine canopy.
Why is it, we discussed on the backroad 24 to Spearfish, that certain places we visit almost for the purpose of knowing we may never go there again? But sometimes we return and think we may never go again, and go again anyway like Paris and Barcelona. Grand Canyon. Devils Tower. Minnehaha Falls? Nah. There will always be Minnehaha Falls. It’s our fallback. What about Niagara Falls? I’d go there again. If I was in Canada.
Roxanne still behind the wheel we motored east on the flat horizon to the South Dakota border. Before checking out of the motel I took the liberty of chewing four THC gummies. We were both hungry and as soon as I could get bars from a cell tower on my phone she wanted me to find a restaurant in Spearfish for lunch. No immediate change in the plain terrain, the highway surface changed exactly at the state line. No worse, no better, the asphalt changed color from reddish to slate gray. Then the trees came back. We crossed a creek winding back and forth, same creek, new bends and gullies. We entered the edge of the Black Hills National Forest under the town of Belle Fourche, pronounced Belle Foosh according to my sister Molly who lived near Deadwood several years. From Belle Fourche to Spearfish was only five miles.
On Main Street we chose Spearfish Brewing. Good pub food. The place was only reopened to indoor dining a week and the tables sparse and spread apart. Not a lot of patrons or staff but the atmosphere cheerful. No masks.
After lunch we elected instead of getting on the Interstate at Spearfish we should loop the alternate route 14 down Spearfish Canyon to Lead (pronounced Lede) where my sister lived, go through Deadwood and catch I90 at Sturgis, just to say we went to Sturgis.
Spearfish Canyon highway is well worth the trip, going up or down. The route skirts the flow of the tumbling Spearfish Creek amid thousand foot balconies of timber and rock so densely wonderful each switchback descent thrills the traveler with narrow peeks of splendor, no wonder motorcycling is so popular in these parts. But there is constant temptation to take your eye off the road to indulge the splendid scenery from top to bottom in the niches of the narrow canyon walls where waterfalls pop up like flashdancing.
At the bottom lies Lead, a one time gold mining town turned almost ghost town and brought back from the dead by tourism and a reclusive pioneer spirit. Molly used to jive us to move there for beauty and freedom and a lifestyle of acres of evergreens. Talk was either they were either going to start the old Homestead gold mine back up soon, or else some top secret physics lab was going to make it into a supercollider. Either way Lead’s proximity to Deadwood four miles away saved its bacon. Boosting its reputation as an Old West town of ill repute, and drawing momentum from a wild western TV series, Deadwood resuscitated itself by getting the state to legalize casino gambling within its city limits. There are about twenty of them now, none Native Anerican owned. Investors rebuilt downtown as a neon resurrection of Old West architecture and nostalgia with knockoff 19th Century facades all salooned and gartered around gaming parlors where you can walk a block from one emporium of slot machines and poker tables to the next, casino to casino without having to walk outdoors. The hope is to leverage the gaming attraction to promote itself as a music and entertainment venue to rival Branson, Missouri and maybe build a water park to rival Wisconsin Dells.
At the city border with Lead we passed by what looked like an old gas station and car wash which was the site of my sister’s attempt to start a cafe restaurant called Ms Molly’s Blue Moon Cafe. The sign still hung above the tin awning. She put part of her share of our mom’s estate and continuous sweat equity with her odd-job husband into shaping the land and building into a viable business. It never quite got off the ground beyond a few catering gigs. We visited it once and the potential and finished renovation impressed us. The bought all the kitchen stuff at auction and scavenged the tile. She served us broasted chicken. The decor was pop culture collectibles including guitars autographed by Boz Scaggs and Steve Miller, and a huge black and white poster of Marilyn Monroe with deep cleavage. The remodeling of the main dining room never came together. Molly got sick, stayed sick and got sicker, then died.
I never liked her husband Pauly. Our mom Colleen thought he was a great guy. Molly said he was kind and a hard worker. I didn’t trust him. To me he was not just ignorant but stupid. A barbarian with no pretense of manners. He may have been a good freelance carpenter, mason, electrician, mechanic and plumber but I knew him as a racist fascist neo-cowboy gigolo who lured my then middle-aged empty-nest sister into pursuit of a perfect country and western lifestyle. They got by. She head cooked at a nursing home facility. They bought and semi-fixed up a big Victorian manse veritably hanging off a cliff overlooking a yard of slag and scrap steel at the mining side of town. They collected antiques. He kept feeding Molly more booze until her pores overflowed and she could barely talk on the phone, and then he would drive her the 600 miles to the Twin Cities to drop her off with one of her daughters or sisters (never me) who would make some calls and get her placed in a treatment center. She would work the program, sober up, get a 30-day medallion and get herself released, go back up to Lead against all advice and go back on the booze and eventually get to the point again where Pauly would call our mom on the phone and say he couldn’t control her and Mom would get somebody in the family with AA connections to get Molly back into treatment. Rinse and repeat over about two decades. Throw in a stint in the state slammer for repeat drunk driving. Along with the booze she complained of diverticulitis, which nobody seemed to cure. She was sure she had colon cancer but it wasn’t diagnosed, so we joked around the family she had semi-colon cancer. She malingered. Rode a wheel chair to our mom’s funeral. Eventually she got her wish and got diagnosed with cancer, not of the colon but the pancreas which spread into her shoulder bones and liver. Hospice care was set up in her sunroom at home. Roxanne and I visited her there where her daughters and several family members besides most of our siblings gathered. Pauly kept trying to get her to eat. Our sister Murray, a nurse, administered morphine. We did not attend the funeral, Rox and I, which was okayed by Molly. We had airplane and hotel reservations to Ixtapa, and Molly said, Go. I would.
I felt guilty not attending, but not too much. Of all the brothers in law I didn’t like, Pauly wasn’t perhaps the worst but I still found it hard to be around him. The hour Molly died he kicked everybody out of the house and forbade anyone from taking mementoes and looting his stuff. Those who stayed for the funeral told of and extra cold wind blowing through their bones that January day. For a while I regretted not being there as our clan elder to stick up for my nieces and sisters who wanted to take home something dear to remember Molly even if they had to pay him, but her stuff was not for sale. For that I ignored his ask to chip in for her headstone. I haven’t seen him since before she died.
In Deadwood Roxanne pulled in to the Information bureau at the former railroad station and I asked the guy directions to the Oak Ridge cemetery and he drew some lines on the town Fun Map and pointed me down the road toward Sturgis. I texted my niece Macushla as to how to find the gravesite of her mother, who texted her son Hogan, who texted back to me a decent description where to look. Formidable headstone really. Kept rather tidy. Somebody left a dime. Who, Boz Scaggs?
Unless one prays there’s not much more to do at a gravesite than move on. We headed toward Sturgis, another accidental namesake of mine although as I have said our family has no ties to the town or to the fallen sergeant of Custer’s army at Little Big Horn for whom the town is named. The annual August gargantuan motorcycle festival defines the town’s identity and fame to the world, and if my mom hadn’t changed her and all us kids’ surname to Kelly in the divorce we could have basked in false acclaim wherever we went and dined on a pack of lies for eternity. Molly and Pauly used to set up a barbecue tent somewhere during the festival and sold grilled steaks, baked potatoes and boiled sweet corn to the bikers and the tourist wannabes. As I said, they got by. They seemed to assimilate into the culture, proud to live nowhere near a big city (excusing Rapid City, fifty miles away, as mostly just a place to go to the store) and living the Sturgis biker creed of freedom and good times every day, not just August. I have never been to the festival. When it first started out I was curious — like Hunter S Thompson maybe when he first heard about the Hells Angels — but I’ve heard enough stories about predictably crazy ass shit and on top of it the festival did not pause itself for the year of ZOZO and defiantly gave the finger to all covid-19 protocols and just about deliberately staged a superspreader event, crazy ass shit business as usual. An institution like this festival organization not acting sanely on behalf of its participants’ health as well as the fact that these bikers and fans come from all over and go back to wherever they came, the whole event doesn’t deserve respect and support from me, a tiny upside to carrying the surname Kelly.
We did not linger through the wide main drag downtown but found the I90 entrance ramp headed east and merged traffic easily ahead of a semi. To get home we had to skirt the edge of Rapid City on our way out of the Black Hills and it was suddenly way too bad to be a part of a commercial vector on the plain after such a cozy ride through the Black Hills and its blankets of pines. The Black Hills are not a mountain range with snow capped, rocky peaks. The slopes get the name black from the dense forest of evergreens that never lose their color or change with the seasons and both in sun and shadows make the landscape so deep green it looks black. In the snow the contrast is even more sharp against the white. No wonder my sister loved this landscape.
From the neutrality of commerce and traffic skirting Rapid City we left the forest behind and met the plains head on, straight and flat as poster board. The grassland looked yellowed, stressed for rain. The air temperature ramped up too but not as bad as last week, and we were windows up and running the A/C. Heading towards the Badlands. Another National Park. We did not enter even though for us it was free. We’ve gone through before, driven through, and it is an unforgettable sight. Mile after mile of what look like pyramids of bone white gravel rising out of sunken valleys of grit. Miles and miles.
Aptly named the bad lands the territory serves as a monument to the scraps the federal government left to the Indigenous Natives. A great example of the land treaties made and broken by the government, like the assignment of Oklahoma as Indian Territory only to take the land back when it was discovered to be good for agriculture, cattle and petroleum exploration, the Black Hills were granted to remain in Native possession for eternity until gold was discovered and the feds took it back. Seems the feds outsmarted themselves negotiating with the tribes when they offered what they estimated to be land nobody white would ever want, like lakes in freezing northern Minnesota, and then when the guess goes wrong and the white demand for the land goes up the deal with the Indians gets cancelled and maybe the feds can find them worse places to live in their sovereignty. Like the monumental gravel pyramids of the Badlands.
Just outside the western door to the park is the parking lot to the gargantuan trading post known as Wall Drug, an above ground catacomb of touristy foods and merchandise of all kinds not necessarily related to the Badlands, the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, Native Americans or even the state of South Dakota. Wall Drug gets pointed out here because its presence dominates the highway with signs posted for half the state going westward announcing where it is as if the whole world depended on going there at least once in their lives just to see what it’s like. Juxtaposed across the street: Badlands.
I offered to drive and Roxanne declined. With cruise control, light eastbound traffic and straight line roadway she said it was easy. How’s yerass, I asked. What? Oh, fine, no bruise, the hip’s good. Glad I have padding, I guess. Well, I said with lame sage levity, hips don’t lie.
Check what’s behind us, she said. I turned around and the light of the sun was yellow as neon mustard with a black cloud wedge overlapping the light towards the left of the highway and turning the blue sky into a race to escape to the eastern horizon ahead. A storm was chasing us. Looked like it could be fierce. The cloud and crazy light gained and partly overtook us like it was positioning itself to the highway to make a perfect pounce. We were just coming to Murdo, still almost two hundred miles from Mitchell, about three hours away from our hotel. Running a little late. We were still a little shy of a hundred miles of Chamberlain, our original intended destination for this night, and we might not get that far before dark. Then again, the original plan didn’t go to Devils Tower or Molly’s grave but skipping Hot Springs actually cost us time on both ends of the day’s trek. Again I offered to take the wheel the rest of the way but she said she felt pretty secure, the road was practically perfect and she didn’t mind keeping busy in the rain. When dark came if it was still raining it might be more of a strain. I said I’s ready. The darkness in the sky ahead pinched the horizon.
Then the rain poured down. All at once. No windstorm. No hail. No thunder and lightning. It just rained straight down like the sky was a lake turned upside down. It was not a good moment to notice flaws in the windshield wiper blades, but at full speed they were adequate, most of the blur on my side of the windshield and I wasn’t driving. There was a lull in the torrent though it continued raining hard the next hour with no sight it would let up. It was conceivable this weather could hover and stall over us overnight at Mitchell and follow us all the way home to Minnesota. Wouldn’t that be nice for the drought? After about an hour it let up enough so Roxanne turned the wiper speed to medium.
So we talked about our kids.
We forgot to give Vincent his fathers day gift, I happened to think. Shoot shoot, she said. Oh well, we’ll see him tomorrow.
Roxanne asked me to reach for her purse in the back seat and check her phone in case Michel sent a text. She didn’t. All I said was Vincent had a right to his lifestyle, Roxanne said, rehashing their arguments in her head. Maybe lifestyle was the wrong word, but she jumped all over me. I tried to explain my meaning wasn’t to defend his drinking or his reefer or confuse his personality or identity with lifestyle. I can’t say I agree with all his choices but he’s an adult and I can’t make his choices for him. That ship has left the station. And he’s not a bad person. In fact he’s good. We’re proud of him. I said, I’ve always thought she would eventually discover what a cool guy he really is and that he would figure out Michel’s depth and sincerity and they would grow old as good friends. They’ve shown spurts, Roxanne said. I thought they were close when he was in high school and she was at UMD. She used to invite him up to Duluth to hang out. I don’t know what derailed that road. She resented him since he was born — I added, I think she got too used to being an only child. Roxanne disagreed, I think she was ready to be a big sister, she just didn’t realize it takes a baby a while until they grow old enough to play with and she was frustrated, she expected him to be born ready to play. By the time he caught up a little she was way gone into her own things. She picked on him. Physically. A shove. A punch in the arm. It’s always the one counter punching who gets caught and gets yelled at. That’s why he says we always took her side. She used to goad him and tease him. He got on her nerves. Remeber how they argued over nothing? I felt like the supreme court. He says I always favored her. She says I’m biased for Victor. I really can’t remember the trivia that would get them going but when they each presented to me their opinions and facts, I recalled, as fair as I could decide who prevailed it never was supposed to determine the fate of the cosmos. And it’s not that they never ever got along. Hell, if they fought like that all the time we would have been in family counseling just to keep me myself sane, Roxanne reflected. I couldn’t stand it. Michel can be so mean, she doesn’t even call names, she just throws her baggage in your face. He can hold his own with her, I said. Sometimes, said Roxanne. He’s pretty sensitive and he sulks. She fumes. I suppose we’ve seen all this coming a long time. Question is, how will it end up? Nothing really ever ends up, Roxanne. I don’t want to hear that, she replied. I want it solved. What if it never is? What about Christmas? Birthdays? Neko? I can’t live with this, this dicotomy.
I didn’t want to discourage Roxanne’s pessimism with false hopes but I had to be honest. We don’t control the ultimate outcome, babe. They have to work this out themselves but we can help. We have our own issues to sort out with each of them, and in that we have responsibility to use this chance to show the best example of how to reconcile and get along. We raised them, Roxanne lamented, isn’t that enough? You wish, I answered. Ultimately there’s nothing to bind those two together except their own choice. Maybe they will some day realize that bond I’ve always hoped they would find — in our lifetime — and we’ll rest happy. Meantime we’ll love them both.
Michel said a strange thing, Roxanne said. She brought up us Face Timing so much with Victor when we’re in Mexico. Didn’t we used to Skype at least every week with her in Switzerland? We could’ve Face Timed her too if she expressed any interest. She said we pay more attention to him, and we’re nicer to him.
He’s always been nicer to us. Don’t tell anybody I said that.
The sun went down but we didn’t see it. The night simply went blacker beyond the headlamps, and the rain soaked the highway pavement ahead like a wash basin. At this latitude a clear sky can retain its twilight glow until after 10:00 this time of year. We had reached the Missouri River and the Chamberlain area while daylight was a pale gray and we could barely see what we were missing. After hours of relentless flat grasslands with practically one tree every square mile the land changes to smooth hills and bends with foliage and hardwoods and small towns within sight of the freeway. Except to cross it we saw nothing of the mighty Missouri just billboard references to river recreation, hospitality and entertainment. Past the river the bluffland gave way again to the great flats, these plains vaguely dedicated to tilled fields and pasture. Then it got pitch dark and only the highway mattered and distant strobes of faraway lightning to the southeast told us somewhere out there it was worse.
Steady at the wheel Roxanne got us to Mitchell where we checked into the Days Inn. A trip to Burger King still open on Main Street proved how desperately hungry we were. Roxanne lamented her mistake booking our lodgings. The mistake and re-route cost us extra time on the road. We usually paced ourselves to reach a sleepover destination well before dark. Granted we could have skipped Spearfish Canyon, Lead, Deadwood and Molly’s grave, but we didn’t know a storm would chase us, we figured the penance of extra hours on the road wouldn’t be but a minor inconvenience and we could make Mitchell by twilight and we would be that much closer to home the next day. What nagged her the most was the cost in dollars for having to cancel bargain hotel rates booked way in advance for last minute available rooms at double what we would have paid.
That’s what you call bitin’ the bag, I said at Burger King wolfing a double whopper with cheese. Sometimes you bite a big bag of boo.
At our room Rox got ready for bed right off, brushed her teeth, checked her phone and curled up in the king sized bed seious for sleep while I tried to adjust the air conditioner less cold if I couldn’t crack open a window. She expressed no desire to waste the TV and I figured we missed the local news anyway — back on Central time again — so I dawdled my way to bed with her, went out for a cigarillo and a good cough, washed up and brushed my teeth hoping I could just fall asleep like she did.
In hotels I like to allow a small opening in the drapes to allow sunlight to get in, which sometimes means letting street and premises light act like a cozy night light in a strange dark place, not as a distraction but a balanced lumination until daylight took over. It wasn’t the window’s fault I didn’t sleep right away. I would not classify it as insomnia but I couldn’t help thinking and keeping myself awake.
For a long time I used to wonder if Michel really loved me. Or if she just put up with me because legally I was her dad and married to her mom. I couldn’t put a finger on any time when she was in middle school or high school when she made me feel she was proud of me as her dad no matter how proud I was she was my daughter. Not that she acted ashamed of me, I was somewhat a ghost. Or an annoyance. An embarrassment. A nuisance. She never picked on me the way she did her brother or showed outright disrespect but rather an attitude of casual neglect, as if she hardly knew me or cared who I was even though I was always present in the household, always there for her. It bugged her I coached her middle school basketball team, an endeavor I got into from desire to play with my kid. In high school she utterly forbade me from volunteering to chaperone school dances — never said what she would do if I did it anyway but implied she wouldn’t attend them and I would be responsible for her unhappiness missing out on her high school fun.
Michel was born five weeks premature due to a low leak in Roxanne’s uterus caused we think by a traffic accident about a week before her water broke altogether despite caution to rest. Tiny Michel rested in an incubator under UV lights about a week, including three days after Roxanne’s discharge. We had to visit her in the infant ICU ward during strict visiting hours and bottlefeed her through a porthole in her incubator. The hospital allowed Roxanne to lift her out to breastfeed as needed. I got to take her out to hold her for an hour once a day. I wondered if that set a sad pattern of isolation between at least Michel and me. She wasn’t a daddy’s girl who sat on my lap or curled in my arms affectionately, and I missed that kind of attention. She wasn’t much for hugs, didn’t resist them but hardly initiated an embrace. Is this what I get for not giving her constant warm cuddles the first week of her life?
Much of the time when the kids were growing up Roxanne and I sort of tag-teamed child care around the kids’ clocks. That is, we arranged our work shifts as best we could to have one of us home when the kids were off school — even enrolling them in summer school programs. Here or there we put them in a latchkey program but largely relied on our own selves for child care. It was difficult to see how Michel related to her mother when I was not around but what I could observe was around the house Roxanne was boss. I could understand how Michel could have a tighter bond with her mother than with me, being female and actually spending more time with her at a stage when I worked a lot of evenings and weekends in the retail trade and Roxanne worked regular M-F hours. I have said before, I am jealous of the bond between Roxanne and Michel — or should I say I admire it reverently — and it pained me to see their relationship fall apart so bad it would make Roxanne cry.
When Michel was thirteen it was her surliest, nastiest year. Hypercritical of everything, school, friends, society, television, music, her brother, herself — her hair was never right, she looked dorky in glasses, she wore braces on her teeth and hated to smile, and her clothes were all wrong. Though she didn’t criticize her mother and me (much) she made sure she showed us her nasty side. When sulking silently or even reading a book she made sure she looked nasty. It might have been a little onset of puberty. Understandable. It was the 1990s. In many respects we’re lucky she expressed herself to us so honestly and without restraint. It wasn’t even crude, profane or obscene. On the contrary, then as now she made her point in plain speak. If rude sometimes, but big kids like us can take it, and dish it back. Maybe I let her sass me too much. I believed in free speech.
Once in high school she lit into me for us living in a neighborhood she called a ghetto, endangering our lives.
As she got older she got nicer, but age thirteen was tough. Still she kept her grades up and didn’t skip school. She used the phone a lot (the old family land line) which was fine because telemarketers couldn’t get through (and we had voice mail service in case anybody needed to leave a message). Her disposition improved so much when she turned 14 it was an unremarkable year. It seemed all the teenage years after that she got nicer and nicer. She flattered us with nice behavior as she aged towards driver education classes. Her Grandpa Ed and Grandma Helenn, Roxanne’s parents, were in the market for a new car and instead of trading it in or selling it they asked if we could use it, and Michel eyeballed it as her car, an ’80s Datsun Sentra hatchback, so she cozied up to us as she turned 16. Plus, the Datsun had a manual transmission and she needed me to take her out practice driving to suffiently master the clutch and the shifter — she was driven — and Roxanne had no such patience.
All along Michel wasn’t one to ask our permission, she would just tell us what she was going to do. Sleepover at a friend’s house. Mall of America with a friend. Get contact lenses. Take a job bussing dishes at the Mad Mad Mexican down on Lake Street one evening a week, her first job at 15. She switched from JV basketball to cheerleading soccer and dance line. With a car she took a new job as a clerk at a sporting goods store at MOA. The next year she worked at Snyder Drug in Highland. One spring break from high school she informed us she was flying to Nashville with a girl from school and her mom to go see the girl’s grandma. When it came to spring break senior trip down in Mazlatan without chaperones there was no doubt in her mind we would consent — she wasn’t 18 yet. By the time she graduated high school we could say she’d gone treating us sweet. We let her do whatever she wanted.
And she never got in trouble. Went to school, got good grades. Never broke curfew. Drove safely. Received a Wallin Scholarship at South High that paid half her four-year tuition to University Minnesota Duluth, where she met Sid. Took her Datsun hatchback to Duluth until we bought a Plymouth Neon to replace it, and it had a stick shift and clutch. She graduated in four years with a double major criminal justice and sociology, double minor psychology and criminology. First job as a claims invesyigator in the Mental Nervous department of a workers disability insurance firm. Years later studied nursing and changed careers. Raising two beautiful children. There are hundreds of reasons to be proud of Michel and be happy for her, praise her successful life. I can take some credit, I guess. Much as she ignored me, I did help raise her.
She was in high school when I published my first novel. She acted as if nothing unusual was happening those first weeks when I was famous. Negative reviews knocked it off the charts and I was fortunate to fall from acclaim through ill-repute to oblivion in less than ninety days. Michel was unfazed. All those nights typing away when she was asleep gone kablooie and she never acknowledged how sad it was for me to reach my dream of publishing a novel and then face rejection at a higher, more profound level. Her indifference depressed me. I could have used the consolation but she was busy being a teenager. It wasn’t a YA novel and I doubt she ever read it. If some of the personal criticism that the novel aroused ever got back to her ears, she never showed that either, which ironically made it easier to get normal at home after my literary failure.
Before sleep at the hotel I dwelt on my favorite time Michel got mad at me. She and Sid got engaged and announced it to us about midnight on a Saturday night after Sid’s eldest sister’s wedding. Got us out of bed to show us the ring. Woke us from a sound sleep. We were a little stunned but happy. Congratulations! Not only were we less than enthused enough, she accused me of being so unsure of their engagement I didn’t burn up the telephone lines that very minute to call my mom and sisters to spread the good news. Same with Roxanne. This the age of the land line, before the commonplace of smart phone texts. She took it as a sign we didn’t believe in her. She was never less right.
Could this have all been caused by isolation in an incubator the first days of her life?
When I see other fathers hugged and embraced by their daughters I feel sad and jealous. Like Clara, Tess and Sid.
I concluded Michel’s problem with Vincent was that he wasn’t living up to her expectations. That might go for me as well. I pondered that thought off and on the rest of the way home.
Daylight woke me through the breach in the curtains, a brilliantly sunny morning in Mitchell, SD. While Roxanne still slept I went out for a smoke and stopped in the breakfast lobby for coffees to bring back to our room rather than us messing with the in-room coffeemaker. She was awake and just starting to scroll her phone to begin the day. Still nothing from our daughter, not even a Facebook post of the kids. Vincent on the other hand texted us good morning and safe travels, which was odd since he doesn’t usually communicate until after 10. We checked out and loaded our bags in the car but didn’t depart before indulging the free breakfast, a semi-buffet standard at chain hotels, Jimmy Dean sausage and patties of packaged scrambled eggs. Orange juice and coffee. Roxanne toasted a bagel and frosted it with peanut butter. One could make their own waffle. They offered apples, oranges, bran muffins and of course bread for toast. All in all not bad if not high cuisine.
One wonders how much of this hospitality in the industry was suspended or restricted during ZOZO and the height of the pandemic. In Mitchell is was hard to perceive the restrictions back home and in Colorado were lifted just over a week ago and hereabouts it didn’t seem as if there were ever any imposed in this state. Except passing by the famous Corn Palace cruising through the main avenue, which was closed due to covid-19. We visited there once on a visit to my sister Molly. Inside it’s a museum of exhibits of all things corn, from kernal art mosaics to the glories of agribusiness and the history of pioneer farmers, homage to hybrid seeds and development of machinery. We were not disappointed to lose a chance at a second visit but we were disappointed at the blank facade of the building, which is traditionally inlaid with a mosaic mural made of corn which changes every year. No such. Evidence of the reach of ZOZO, I thought.
I insisted on driving the first leg and Roxanne gladly deferred. My thought was I could go the whole ride at the wheel marathon style like she did but she said we should decide that later in Minnesota, another 200 miles. We got gas before departing Mitchell on eastbound I90. It was a spectacular sunny day on the Dakota plain. I set cruise control at 79. The pavement was clean and smooth. Evoked a Tom Petty song.
Our kids grew up on Tom Petty. It was a shame he died the night the bump-stock machine gunner rained bullets down on an outdoor music show from an upper floor of a Las Vegas hotel — for a short while I wondered if there was a connection, not a conspiracy but like a heart attack out of empathy for the crowd and the musicians, but the two events were pure coincidences. Roxanne set up the iPod wired into the car stereo and I requested she play “Runnin’ Down A Dream” to begin the shuffle.
Along the way we caught up to and passed an odd vehicle. It was a white miniature hearse shaped from a PT Cruiser. That’s sad, I said. Must be for children, Roxanne said and reached for her phone. She said, I always wondered what that S-shaped design on the side of a hearse means. In a minute she said, they’re called a landau bar. Apparently… they don’t appear to mean anything or symboloze anything. To me they look like casket handles for pallbearers. But it says nothing about any functionality. It traces back to horse carriages with semi-convertible roofs. It mimics the hinge and frame design. It’s a carryover from horse-drawn hearses.
Enduring the endless plains as a passenger Roxanne found cell service but no messages. She read off and on from an e-book borrowed from Amazon she had been following all week. Off and on she inquired how it was going at the wheel.
I was thinking mostly to myself about the rift between our kids and how to help make it heal. The same alibi that they were adults and no longer subject to my influence seemed like an excuse to recuse myself from their lives. It was a pleasure to have an empty nest the past fifteen or so years but I couldn’t let go completely of my fatherly obligation to guide them through the world. If Michel thinks I let Vincent down because I failed to guide him to value achievement, then I have to examine all the ways I may have failed to guide him. Didn’t I take perverse pride in his getting kicked out of the DARE program?
He being a big guy, did I fail to encourage him to go out for the South High football team just to get him to get into a physical fitness regimen? As it turns out his decision not to play football may have saved him from CTE brain injury from contact sport concussions. Still, he’s a big guy, over six feet — people seeing us together at ball games or concerts have said to me, hey whose your bodyguard? As he enters middle age I worry about him going obese, being vulnerable to covid and cardiovascular disease. I tried to bring it up but he dismisses the subject the way he dismissed going out for high school football — he would make his own decision with no further discussion.
I could be at fault for his cavalier attitude about achievement. In middle school he was an honor student. He could get high grades in any subject if he cared to, even science. This carried over to high school, only his motivation to care declined until halfway into his junior year he got found out for frequent truancy — a biproduct of living a block from school — and Roxanne had to put him in a remedial program so he could catch up enough to graduate on time. An upside to his remedial path to graduation was opportunity to enroll in college level classes through the University at no tuition cost and the courses would not only count towards his high school credits but also qualify for college credit towards his freshman year at the U.
With Vincent’s obvious intelligence he could have gone far in academics as a professor or professionally as a lawyer or captain of industry. A political leader. Media influencer. Architect or engineer. I never steered him. Opportunities, yes. Instead he found his interests foraging through philosophy, comedy, history and natural science. His best friends were musicians and hipsters. Perhaps I should take responsibilty for giving him a Firesighn Theater cassette album for Christmas when he was 12. At least he did not become a master criminal — Michel would really pin me for that.
Michel perceived him a slacker. She expressed awe at his intelligence and lamented what he could have been. (Reminds me of me.) Of course Michel was every bit as intelligent and blessed with every opportunity as her brother — born in time for Title IX and benefit of recent decades of feminist progress, a good time to be alive for American women. Michel pushed and pulled herself through one accomplishment after another and wasn’t satisfied by just one goal and out. True to say she’s lived an exciting and fulfilling life and to anybody’s examination might set her apart as a living example of a good example — a mom everybody wishes they had, a true blue friend and confidant, a spouse beyond compare, village intellectual and professional esteem. There is no undoing this state foreseen in her future either, the way she does what she wants in life the way she always has she should succeed because she always puts in the necessary effort. Her brother apparently can’t take his big sister’s hints.
Defining success for Vincent depends on a different scale. I can’t take credit for motivating Michel to be an achiever even as I gave her license to make choices and do what she wanted without restriction and especially because she was a girl. There’s no denying her determination and stubborn discipline. She has faced few serious obstacles. Hers is not the story of a deprived and tragic ghetto girl of any color (no matter her suntan) rising above all odds to get where she is today in life. Whether it’s been easy or not is a wide survey of what it means easy. And what makes hard. Michel seems to think because he’s so talented his success should come so easy for him and he’s wasting his talents.
Vincent sees the limits of overachievement. Whether learned from me or not he sees the absurdities of the human condition and weighs carefully how much to get involved. Michel apparently lost patience with his Late Bloomer defense. He took six years too get his college degree — that with his high school head start. Always working part time, kitchen at Joey D’s, dorm custodian at the U, concierge at the Marriot. His first full time job out of the U’s College of Natural Resources was with Boy Scouts of America as staff counselor at one of the biggest scout camps in the country. He found his way into the hearing aid industry by networking some contacts he made while serving as concierge at a hotel near the headquarters of a major manufacturer. He worked his way up from managing their phone room to regional marketing manager until the pandemic torpedoed the marketing plan and they laid him off. Recently rehired in a lesser role, Vincent tells me he’s glad to be earning a good paycheck again but he’s ambivalent about the job. He lacks passion for it. He talks about continuing his career search for something he can get excited about but acknowledges he lacks hope that there is any job out there that will make him feel fulfilled.
Funny but that’s how I felt almost my whole work life. My father might say the same: You do what you gotta do. To try to convince my son there was some great rewarding career for him out there that would pay him more than money would be abject hypocrisy when I never could convince myself I would find anything of a vocation beyond a means of material well being. So if one has to work to get by or prosper one might as well fake enthusiasm if you have to, cope and keep at it with the best possible face because the alternative could depress you to death.
You don’t hear Sid complain about being trapped in a dead end job. Roxanne never complained, a research scientist at the U 43 years.
I thought it was high enough ambition to love and raise my two children to be upright human beings, to be good people. I thought I’d succeeded but it appeared I could not retire, my work was not done.
Michel said she loved Vincent but she didn’t like him. At least I could say I hadn’t yet failed. Love was how the whole thing will work out, I told Roxanne.
Sounds pretty vague, she responded, and it was. Vague. Love is vague. Even in that famous letter to the Corinthians St Paul could not pin it down but mainly described it for what it wasn’t. Like, on the other hand seems to have a clear definition in this world.
At least Michel didn’t say she hated him.
The Sioux Falls exits came and went without much notice. We were past and almost to the state line before I looked around to realize we had passed by the state’s largest city and couldn’t tell. The Minnesota border came on suddenly with a highway sign (Minnesota Welcomes You, no admonitions) across the culvert in a corn field. Not a river border, this borderline was a straight line up and down drawn by land surveyors when the states were divided. One side looked same as the other. Plain. And simple. To a point. Deeper into Minnesota there might be a few more trees, more buildings and more frequent towns, but not much more. We could have driven the interstate freeway the whole way home if we stayed on I90 all the way to Albert Lea, where we could intersect I35 and make a virtual beeline north to Minneapolis. I90 skimmed a straight line about twelve miles parallel to the Iowa border, so what land didn’t resemble South Dakota looked like Iowa. At Worthington, Minnesota we left I90 for state highway 60 to cut an angle northeast towards Blue Earth County and Mankato. The speed limit could be slower but Hwy 60 cut miles off our journey. The interstate offers speed and guaranteed safety in its limited access. The backroad offered touch with towns. The interstate in rural America is engineered to occupy land as far away from towns, homes and populations as possible and still benefit from coast to coast ground transportation. State highways like 60 link the towns who don’t need interstate freeways to go town to town to intersect. They don’t necessarily go through downtown but they show where to turn to go there, and usually don’t involve many stoplights.
From Worthington runs a long, straight runway of concrete across the plain with grain elevators and crossroads and a tree or two among the crops every mile or so. More than halfway home I asked Roxanne, Babe could you fish around and find me a dose of Tylenol?
Headache?
No, my arm aches. My Tommy John.
About twenty years ago, just after the turn of this century, in a rainstorm we had a flat tire on I394 in St Louis Park just west of downtown. It was a Sunday afternoon in early October and we were on our way to dinner with Roxanne’s family to celebrate her sister’s husband’s birthday. When I felt whatever I ran over blow the tire I kept going slowing down fortunately to a quick exit with a Holiday station store where we could use their pavement to change the tire. I got out the jack and the doughnut spare and jacked up the car a little, worked the lugs, all in the rain, no umbrella. Roxanne rain into the store to use the pay phone to call her sister to say we were running late. While she was gone I got the flat tire off and chucked it in the trunk. I got down on my knees to hoist the spare to line the holes with the lugs when a snap of elastic pain shot up my right arm from my inner elbow and I dropped the wheel. The pain in my arm remained consistent whether I used it or not, but the strength was gone. I managed to use it to balance the wheel enough to use my thigh and left arm and hand to line the rim up with the lugs. I was hand twisting the lug nuts when Roxanne returned and I asked her if she would please drive. Job done I rode shotgun to dinner rather dumbfounded from the pain trying to describe the pain and how it started. After dinner she took me to our network clinic and I was diagnosed as detached ligament. Like when a baseball pitcher blows out the ligament at the elbow. In baseball the surgery to repair the arm is called Tommy John.
Nobody ever told me I needed surgery. It did not get well and heal on its own. I got used to diminished strength in my right arm after the pain subsided and I gave it considerable rest. It didn’t affect my job, maybe slowed my typing. Ruined my already suspect bowling and bocce ball skills. I compensated with my left hand when I could. I didn’t want to go through life with a stiffarm like Dr Strangelove. I used my right arm like I do today, favored and allowing limitations. I don’t kid myself I could ever throw a slider but I tried to rehabilitate myself with reasonable expectations for an average man in his 50s and 60s. Most obvious to others might be my handwriting is erratic. My right hand trembles sometimes. The muscles in my arm and shoulder have adapted to compensate for no tendon and sometimes the arm gets fatigued and aches. I call it my Tommy John.
The occasionally shaky hand gets attention sometimes when it isn’t plainly caused by shivering temperatures. It does not impair my control but it’s a weakness I sometimes supplement with both hands. My left hand trembles too, slightly and not as often. What got me thinking was when Clara once asked me why I kept nodding my head for no reason. I answered that maybe I was boppin’ to some music only I could hear in my head.
Roxanne asked me to show my primary care physician at the annual Medicare physical a few years ago. He already saw me through the usual cognitive tests and observed my tremors and referred me to the clinic neurologist, who tested me, examined me, watched me walk and pour water from one glass to another and back until he was satisfied there was no Parkinsons. We met six months and then a year later to record and measure any changes, and there seems to be nothing progressive occurring of any significance. The neurologist recommended I relax and not worry, it’s normal for aging people to wiggle in the fingers, he said. He called such a condition Familial Tremors. He said Familial Tremors are common. If things change for worse or out of control I’m supposed to call him. I haven’t seen him since before ZOZO and I can’t say I’m worse.
The neurologist is also aware of my Tommy John condition, but that’s not his expertise. By now an operation to reattach the tendon might be considered elective surgery. It’s certainly not life or death. Seems now, as when I blew it out, not worth the hassle. No quality of life lost, no golf or even pickleball. Sometimes it aches when I use the arm, and sometimes it aches when it hangs idle too much. I hate to baby it. I struggle sometimes to remember I’m 69 years old. At almost 70 I might feel entitled to feel the aches and pains of life, but at my age there are many who have much worse than simple aches and pains to worry about and complain. I don’t want to be an old man who complains.
It’s like what I heard from Lou Holz: Don’t tell other people your problems. Half of ’em don’t care and the other half are glad you got ’em.
So Roxanne gave me Tylenol and some bottled water to wash it down and we decided to stop for lunch up ahead at the town of St James. She proposed that from there she would take the wheel home. I said, We’re see.
St James appeared to be a quiet town, but not distressed like so many towns with empty store fronts on the main. There wasn’t a lot to offer on the one street main but it wasn’t dead. It was the middle of a work day in a farming town, after all. At the outskirts stood a Golden Arches but we passed by to the heart of town where there seemed to be choices for something like home cooking. We picked the Home Town Cafe, an eatery that looked like it sounds. We parked across the street in front of a Mexican mercado grocery store. The cafe was spacious, moreso by distanced placement of the tables and chairs per pandemic recommendations left over from the emergency mandates. The staff all wore masks, so we put ours on too. The decor was simply what has come to be called mid-century, plywood, chrome and formica from the 1960s or so. The menu featured typical American cafe cuisine. The staff was all clearly Hispanic, friendly and fluent in English without Spanish accent. They served breakfast all day and seemed to have no trouble keeping up with customers, mainly elders from the surrounding area or like Roxanne and me just passing through.
We both craved the skillet breakfast and ordered two, with a short stack of pancakes to share, wheat toasts, coffees and a glass of orange juice for me. The platters arrived hot. The skillet included fresh sauteed green peppers and onions and freshly cut cubed potatoes, and the eggs were perfect.
So, did you have a good vacation? Roxanne asked as we divided the pancakes. Other than…
Other than that I had a blast. Really…
I can’t always tell. The pandemic made you such an introvert. You need to get out more. Just staying in and laying around the house every day isn’t stimulating enough for you no matter how much reading and writing you do and your household chores. They say there will be a vaccine booster for us seniors in September.
I realize, I said. You’re right. I’ve lost some muscle. Seem to’ve lost savvy for social situations, almost agoraphobic. Can you sense what it’s going to be like at Estes Park next week and the Fourth? Can you sense it building up? How about you, how is your vacation other than?
Fine. I’m not sure I’d go back to Colorado again, even Denver, but it was good to go there. To see the Rockies. Makes me curious about Montana and Idaho, but anyway it was good to get out and get away. I’d say overall I had a good time. I don’t know about a blast. We should look at where we can go next. Somewhere around here is a park of ancient native petroglyphs, and the Pipestone monument. I saw something on Facebook about Upper Michigan, a place on Lake Superior with painted cliffs — not spray-painted but with natural rock minerals. So how’s your skillet? Perfect, I said. So, she said, How’s your Tommy John?
I extended my right forearm parallel to the table as if blessing the food and the hand held still. I think it might be residual from the river rafting. I admit I’m out of shape. The acetaminophen eased the ache. How’s your you know?
Fine. Not a problem. I just can’t believe it happened.
How’s your mind?
Too clear. Wish I could forget about the kids.
You’re a classic mom, you’ll never retire. Trust me when I say their love for you will guide them through this. You keep being loving. I’m backing you up, I got your back. You be the good example. Love will mend and transcend this. And if you want to drive the rest of the way it’s fine with me.
I drove anyway. Pulling away through St James Roxanne said she used to come to this town in her earlier years at the lab at the U when her team made field trips to observe and sample soybean crops grown in the vicinity. All she said she remembered of the town was the giant grain elevator by the railroad yard in the center of town, still there. She didn’t remember there being a movie theater, which was obviously dated back to the 1940s at least. I pointed to the marquee and said: There it is! In plain sight, the inspo catalyst behind all the reckless high-speed driving going on these days: F9.
All through town were signs both subtle and obvious of a populous Hispanic community formed over a generation of migrant farm and animal processing workers who settled and raised families in the region and now operated commercial enterprises in town. The mercado offered remittance services indicating ties with families in the Old Country, predominantly Mexico I guessed. Made me wonder at the nationalities of the pioneers of the 19th Century who settled and cultivated the blue earth of this prairie and founded its tiny towns and started this place as a community attractive to immigrants to keep it alive and infuse its vitality another century, not a bad place at all to end up living, or being born.
State Hwy 60 hooked us onto US169 north at Mankato, the last leg home. Farms and pastures lolled amid tree lines at the various creeks and brooks of southern Minnesota approaching the valley of the Minnesota River as it arcs toward the Mississippi at the Twin Cities. Mankato may sound familiar as the historical location of the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men executed for insurrection in the Dakota Uprising of 1862, the largest mass execution in US history. The city also is the home town of Maude Hart Lovelace, author of the Betsy-Tacy books from the 1940s, nice home grown American stories. Rox and I know Mankato as the home of a super-competitive gymnastics club that competes in the same association as the one Clara and Tess have devoted so much energy into, and we have driven down to watch the rivals compete at several gym meets.
See, said Roxanne as we recalled our trips, not just Mankato but Winona and Willmar the past five years since they came back from Switzerland to support them at meets, sitting on end in uncomfortable bleachers through the routines of teams of girls we could hardly care about just to clap for our own — doesn’t that show how much we care? I’ve always bent backwards to keep everything equal between them. (I know, I agreed, you even keep tabs of the worth of Christmas presents.) I do! Birthdays. Anniversaries. If we seem to spend more time with Vincent it’s because of Neko, but we spent as much time as we could with Clara and Tess. We couldn’t help it they lived in Switzerland. And she can’t blame us for going up to the Boundary Waters or the North Shore with Vincent because he invites us. It makes no rational sense. (So let it rest and stop badgering yourself.) We love them equally. We raised them equally — same rules, same expectations, same consequences, same opportunities. Maybe it’s because she got out on her own sooner in life and he relied on our support a couple years longer.
I wonder if it was payback for leaving her alone naked except a surgical mask for a diaper in that incubator the first days of her life without snuggles.
That was sad, Roxanne lamented. I’d like to think we made up for it. I’m sorry she was born premature. Just think, if she had come to term she would have entered kindergarten a year later and graduated a class later and gone to Duluth a year later too, and may not met Sid in class.
Unless somewhere along she skipped a grade because she’s so smart.
Closer to home we noticed signs of recent rain. The air smelled of wet dirt, sod and tree pollen. Home. Familiar brands. Landmark towns like St Peter, where our Tess was at gymnastic camp, Le Sueur, home of the valley of the Jolly Green Giant, Belle Plaine with its sonoric French name as pretty as the Beatles song Micchelle, and Shakopee, pronounced locally Shock-ah-pee, named for a famous Mdewakanton chief from the 18th Century.
Spontaneously I told Roxanne a story from when I was a kid I went to Catholic Youth summer camp. One of the mess hall songs the guys liked to sing was about the Three Jolly Fishermen. It went, there were three jolly fisher men, there were three jolly fisher men — fisher fisher (half the hall called out) — men men men (shouted the other half in response) and so the song went. They sailed their boat to Amsterdam, they sailed their boat to Amsterdam — Amster Amster, dam dam dam. They ended up in Shakopee — Shocka Shocka — pee pee pee. Everybody loved to chime in on the response to that one.
Boys camp I take it.
Of course.
As traffic condensed closer to the metro area I braced for rush hour but it was too soon, early afternoon, just a busy business day in the Twin Cities. We joined the flow to the Crosstown and stayed put in the middle lane to go past I35W and hold out for the Cedar Ave exit by the airport runway and twirled around the cloverleaf towards Lake Nokomis and home. Except for orange cone street alteration out front of a construction project near the parkway, traffic on Cedar flowed our way at a cadence allowing us to coast through most of the stoplights. The city was still there, alive and pulsing, pretty with its lush arbor of boulevard trees. Turning into the neighborhood, so unchanged, the local park with its playground of day care kids, there was a sense of suspense, as if we would turn that last corner to find something radically wrong, like a hole in the corner lot where our house used to be.
No such ending. Our gracious neighbor next door kept our potted plants and baskets watered in a tray Roxanne set up in our back yard, and probably watered the garden too though it seemed to have rained overnight. The turf in our yard still resembled the chaparral of eastern Wyoming but with a light mow might not look so bad. We unloaded our belongings from the car and opened the house and turned on the ceiling fans. Later we would swap our cars with Vincent and find out how was Neko’s first day back at preschool, Tierra Encantada. For some reason the mail and newspaper delivery wasn’t scheduled to resume until tomorrow. It seemed almost too quick and easy to unpack. There was no jetlag. Eventually we had nothing to do except laundry. I found my two hiking stones in the pouch pocket of my hoodie.
Roxanne texted Michel we arrived home safe. Within perhaps an hour a reply came back, the Thumb Up emoji. That’s something, I said.
Meditating on my couch after watching the sun go down red from the window of the upstairs loft about 9:30, setting behind the rooftops of the neighbors across the alley bordering our western next door neighbors, setting at an angle about as far northwest on a western axis as it gets where we live. Not an ocean view, or a lake, or a mountain, but sunset all the same. Which I contemplated later in the twilight with no room lights, on my ZOZO couch musing and contemplating my mindfulness, grateful to be home.
This was my Summer of 69. Living for sunsets. Tonight the afterglow turned nearly purple pink. Roxanne made herself a snack and read an e-book in the TV room. On my couch where I spent the pandemic meditating through depression and talking myself through cognitive self-therapy to talk myself off mental ledges I wandered onto looking for a longer, deeper view, this night it seemed I might be trying to induce a depression just to get that old time ZOZO feeling again, solving all the dilemmas on earth I am not qualified to judge by immersing myself into twilight metamorphosis of free-range imagination.
Some depression sufferers say they fight or battle depression. Ever since I learned what it was I tried to learn to use it to cope meaningfully with the world and help me get insight into real life, if perhaps from a bottom level point of view at times. Depression calms me. Makes me feel alive. There were low times during ZOZO when I remembered my mom when she couldn’t make herself get out of bed she was too stricken with depression to face the day, and I didn’t understand how or why but I knew she was mental and she was unhappy. Every morning of ZOZO I woke up with hope the coronavirus disappeared itself overnight. When of course it did not I might nap away the day hoping tomorrow would bring relief. The difference with me at this time of my life (and I’ve gone through it before) I believed (and still do) I was (and still am) a happy person, and if I’m mental then that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
The next thing for me to work on to get off the couch is to change the meditation and mindfulness from relying on depression to stimulate a comfortable state of mind for appreciating life and engendering creativity. Instead of depression as my baseline for awareness and analysis I dwelt on searching for inspiration from alternate sources within my personality and from reflecting upon observations of other people, looking for an upside to the daily news and mustering the energy to get up off that couch and move around just for the sake of moving. Lethargy leads to atrophy. Yet the couch is so comfortable. So good to come home to. My Beautiful Reward, as Springsteen calls it.
We couldn’t stay away. We’re not getting any younger.
We booked our winter escape flight in July, got a good price from Sun Country. Booked our room at the Krystal using our loyalty coupons. This was just before the delta variant hit, before omicron. The hotel we could cancel with 24 hour notice but the airplane tickets would present inconvenience and probable cost to change them. Roxanne got us travel insurance in case things got bad bad. We got our booster shots and kept current with the covid protocols. We watched the trends and going into fall and winter it didn’t look good.
Neither of us nor did anyone in our immediate family get sick with coronavirus. The omicron variant was said to lead to milder symptoms among the vaccinated and less danger of serious illness, hospitalization and death. Roxanne said more than once, maybe we should just catch it, get it overwith and get on with our lives with more antibodies.
Our daughter Michel didn’t want us to go, but she’s a nurse and strict about covid awareness — she also worries about us getting kidnapped. Our son Vincent said to just go, you only live once. Michel realizes how much this midwinter getaway means to her mother and me so she gives us her qualified blessing. We promised to take every precaution. Still, two nights before our flight, after haggling with ourselves for months, we decided not to go. Too risky. Irresponsible world citizenship. Next day, after sleeping on it, we decided to go.
Are we glad!
From that first blast of subtropical air when we stepped out of the plane and those first dazzling rays of sunshine it’s clear why we choose to escape to this place from the cold, barren desolate ice and snowscape holding us siege at home in Minnesota in the middle of January.
It was good to be back in the heart of Mexico again.
My last words about Ixtapa Zihuatanejo Guerrero expressed my fondness in sadness anticipating what the future is doing to everyday life along this swatch of coastline along the blue Pacific, especially with the coming of the Covid-19 pandemic. We were last there mid-February 2020. Within three weeks the first cases in Minnesota were conformed. The lost year of ZOZO truly began. Looking back how serious the first wave of the coronavirus truly was it’s an ironic miracle it has been a mere two years to be vaccinated and boosted and trawled back into polite society already after such a public safety health risk. Pandemics like these tend to level populations at a large scale before the pathogen is identified and biologically contained. We would be mortified to think we might contaminate Mexico.
Whatever that means. Roxanne follows a web page called ZihuaRob to get a sense of impressions from winter expats from El Norte. To some contributors to the forums there is a link of responsibility to the markets in the USA for firearm culture and the appetite for drugs. Far as I know the guy who shot dead that kiosk vendor in the plaza hasn’t been caught or tried in court. The cartels and their wannabes who worried away the nice middle class gringo tourists were no match for the coronavirus in scaring away the bourgeoisie from North America. Nobody, it seems, wants to contract a severe case of covid-19 in Mexico any more than wants to get shot by a punk gangster in a public plaza.
Coronavirus panademia punched the pause button called ZOZO, the lost year. Pause and reset. The Mexicans endured a shutdown of their entire 100 days of vacation winter enterprise some of 2020 and all of 2021. Until the vaccines came out there were virtually no Norteno tourists. Somehow the community got by. The slogan of the city of Zihuatanejo employs the verb poder, which means to can, as in to can do, to be able, podemos, we can. It doesn’t appear to be a flagrantly leftist town or region, and it doesn’t have the feel of a police state either. Whatever social cohesion binds this community, it transcends politics and emanates from shared values of mutual survival and gratitude.
The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel takes about half an hour in Mexican minutes. The cruise through Zihuatanejo assures us nothing has really changed. The face of the city looks back in its authentic, homely way. Maybe a new coat of paint here and there. No pretense of urban renewal, no fresh monuments. The clock tower is still stuck at five minutes to one. Garage door tiendas open to the sidewalks along the streets selling what they sell — berries, furniture, tile — alongside car repair shops, scenes of time immemorial, not significantly different from how it looked the first time some twenty-odd years ago. If anything it doesn’t look any older, it looked this old all along, a consistent shabbiness of dignity and resilience and ultimate functionality. One of the newer landmarks, the Bodega Aurrera, the warehouse discount store on the city’s west edge (on its east side Zihuatanejo also has a Sam’s Club), has only been there about eight years and it too has that presence of being built much longer ago, nothing to suggest what used to occupy that block. Taxis and buses convene at its doors and there’s a pedestrian footbridge over the boulevard at the stoplight where the side street cuts out for side traffic directly in front of the entrance. It looks busy as ever. Only difference, everybody wears a mask.
The boulevard turns into a freeway as the roadway squeezes through a narrow pass going out of town and climbs along the steep jungle slopes hugging the coast and levels off at Ixtapa, the resort city. Along the transition out of Zihua and into Ixtapa the freeway overlooks the valley below the jungle slopes on the other side of the hills bordering Zihuatanejo, a residential neighborhood of tiled roofs and stucco walls. Up the terraced hills along the coast come the more exclusive hotels, condos and fine dining. As the roadway levels off and becomes a boulevard again there are gateways to neighborhoods like Casa Bonita on the in-land side of the boulevard, the soccer fields, the golf course and wildlife preserve (swamp). Nestled behind a fairway and a continuation of the wildlife sanctuary up against steep coastal cliffs on the ocean side of the boulevard begins the stretch of condos and hotels along the beach of Playa Palmar which graces the three-plus mile sandy shore of Ixtapa Bay, ending at a marina where another set of steep rocky cliffs cuts off the beach. Our hotel, the Krystal, stands about halfway on the beach.
“Tocayo!” says the voice of a bellman, masked and wearing a PPE shield on his face. He has the same name as me, only he spells his with one F, and so we address each other as Tocayo. It’s like we never left. Silver gray distinguished gentleman Alberto is still El Capitan of the bellmen. There is a new guy, Claudio, burly like Tocayo with a square jaw and similar complexion so that behind a mask and PPE he could be mistaken for Tocayo, who draws our taxi and totes our bags, leaving the real Tocayo a free minute for fist bumps and what short of abrazos we could express to see each other again, apparently safe and well.
From the beginning Roxanne and I were welcomed by staff people we knew and also from new staff persons, young, many who spoke little English. It came to me quick how much my Spanish lapsed in two years.
Add that to coronavirus restrictions at he hotels and commercial establishments and policies in force to keep the workforce disciplined and it seemed difficult to communicate clearly all the time, at least at first — five weeks got us acclimated, but it served as another woulda coulda shoulda reminder of more Duolingo lessons I could have done to resist depression on the ZOZO couch. Which reminds me, in my musing about Mona Lisa on the ZOZO couch I asked who wears hair nets anymore, and this is who: servants at the Ixtapa Krystal hotel. Men and women, everybody wears hairnets on duty like Mona Lisa. This is more a metaphorical symbol of restraint visible with the hospitality employees.
When I worked in corporate environs we talked about employee empowerment as giving workers responsibility and power to make decisions on the job based on their own trained judgment so as not to have to escalate every question to the next levels of management. The menu at the hotel restaurant is strict to nonexistent. Between covid and the trend towards all-inclusive the breakfast, lunch and dinner cuisines push towards the buffet, and since we do not go all-inclusive we tend to be selective of our meals and mind our budget and avoid the buffet unless it’s clearly worth it. Eggs and toast is usually enough — Breakfast Americano if there was still a menu — or a bowl of oatmeal (harina avena). Savvy veteran servants like Jaime, Martin and Jose remember the old menu. The chef, however, will not make their old chicken tacos for lunch — it’s buffet or nothing.
Jesus Calderon, all time master waiter and champion of service, retired during the ZOZO shutdown. Retired to his horses and cows farm in the hills. We missed his gracious authority. He was a philosopher and a gossip. I wondered if one day he might turn up, show up at the beach or hanging around the bar near the patio, just to check in. Nope. He would have been the one to turn to ask what’s going on, how did Zihua survive the pandemic and what will the future behold?
This for all vacationers who say they want to experience the Real Mexico: at any given hotel on the beach at Ixtapa your neighbors in the room next door are probably Mexicans. Twenty years ago, or even ten, the ratio of northern guests at the hotels to Mexican guests was about eight or nine to one. This year the ratio has reversed.
Ixtapa used to be the refuge of aging baby boomers from the US and Canada seeking relief and recreation from the frigid and rigid winter conditions up north. Government travel advisories from the US State Department warning of dangerous Mexican gangster activities scared a significant number of would-be tourists away — I’m sure a big portion of the witnesses at the plaza or who heard the gunshots at the murder in 2020, and those who heard about it second and third hand (there’s no official tourist blog or rag sheet at Ixtapa but word of mouth, for what it’s worth, travels wide and fast) and decided not to come back. Delta Airlines discontinued direct service between MSP and ZIH at least five years ago, and Ryan Air quit before that. Then the coronavirus pandemic all but shut down the world, and Mexico offering such iffy, dodgy health statistics gave the remaining would-be visitors more reasons to find less riskier places to winter (Arizona, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Puerto Rico, Hawaii) or go nowhere at all.
Hotels like the Krystal have adapted their target marketing to the domestic Mexican market, the emergent Mexican middle class. They offer two and three day packages attracting visitors fromMichoacan, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterey and towns down in Oaxaca towards the Guatemala border, attracting families, sweethearts, young professionals and gal pals and cool guys to a couple of days at the seaside — all inclusive. They arrive and depart on coach buses, drive their late model cars and family vans where they park at the hotel lot and along the curb of the driveway. Some fly in on regional airways. Families of grandparents, parents and kids. Mexicans.
Jorge, who for years I always hailed as Oscar, has a spot with a desk on the entrance to the pool patio where he books excursions for guests. For years he rented boogie boards, fins and snorkel masks. Now his booth rents kids floatie toys, water wings, circles and unicorns.
This is the Real Mexico. At the palapas on the beach playing Latin hip hop. Sometimes you need to ask them to cut the volume a little. They speak Spanish and sometimes seem to yell. All in all everybody blends. Everybody wears a bathing suit. We share the pool, the sand, the sun and the sea. And the restaurant buffet. Some of us stay for a month, so we notice the ebb and flow of guests from day to day, ever changing, while we establish our routine, invisible to the two or three day transients all around us. One can only infer that Mexican tourists just like gringo tourists bring with them their best manners, these being rooted in core humanistic values, and in this way vacationing side by side with real Mexican citizens is the easiest way to experience Real Mexico. Everything you van observe from them only adds to the discovery.
For example, there are at least three groups of troubadours who tread the entire beach, six miles back and forth, carrying their instruments in their hands seeking to set up and plays songs for people under the umbrellas and palapas to make a little money. They all wear cowboy outfits, hats, scarves, matching chambray shirts, jeans and cowboy boots. One guy walks solo in a nice western suit carrying his guitar, a handsome fellow we call the Mexican Leonard Cohen. Usually they are trios, a guitar a bass and a drum with cymbal, but sometimes violin (or fiddle if you will). This year one band had a woman drummer in her 20s, not too bad. Most bands are grizzled old guys. They know all the traditional songs. Their best audiences are the multi-generational families who like to hear the old stuff for grandma and mama. Sometimes young friends or couples will pitch in just to hear those old familiar tunes. Ay-yi-yi-yi …
To steal a line from Remi Boncoeur of Kerouac’s On the Road: there are sure a lot of Mexicans in Mexico.
And to be sure, there are many Anglos from El Norte who spend significant winter time along that Pacific coastline. Several stay in the condos or in gated communities. There is still a Club Med up towards Playa Linda. Las Brisas is a fortress unto itself amid the cliffs. People like us are peasant travel bumpkins counting coupons towards an affordable hotel room. We run into the other fellow boomer refugees from cold places in North America when we go out dining. Several restaurants in Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo attract fine dining clientele which generally do not attract Mexicans in large numbers but rather the Anglos who like to dress up to eat upscale food. I’ll even toss on a Tommy Bahama silk shirt to visit El Galeon at the Ixtapa marina wharf to taste the lobster bisque at least one time.
What passes for fine dining includes El Faro, Coconuts, Il Mare, Daniel’s and La Perla in Zihua, and Soleiado, Sabrina’s and Deborah’s in Ixtapa, and Bogart’s and Cinque Terre at the Krystal if you believe the hype. You could also include Casa Elvira, La Portena and La Sirena Gorda on the Zihuatanejo promenade, and Lety’s, wherever she is now, if you strictly went by food quality and forgave the casual surroundings. In Ixtapa Casa Morelo’s serves reliable recipes, General’s good sports bar food, and Blue Shrimp, once everybody’s ace in the hole, has to build itself back up from scratch after all its people left at the pandemic and only assembled a skeleton staff the week we arrived.
The biggest change in dining was at the back of the plaza where Sergio Toscano, known as the Old Guy, died leaving his Toscano’s Ristorante to his widow, who fired everybody from the old restaurant except the pizza chef. So all the old staff from Toscano’s took over a space around the bend from Blue Shrimp that used to be a struggling cantina called Calabozo (jail) and turned it into a sidewalk Italian place with some of Toscano’s old menu items, including pizza. The call it Buona Sera. Last seen the widow Toscano was again arguing with a customer, perhaps the only customer under her awning, while the people at Buona Sera, blessed with a street lamp at their corner of the plaza, sets up tables to the edge of the alley and does land office business — the spell of Calabozo is broken. They plan to expand next year.
Another fine place to dine in Ixtapa is the Tiburon restaurant at the Ixtapa Palace Hotel, an obscure full service hotel located about a block away from the beach boulevard toward the gated condos. In an earlier day the Palace was a swanky hotel next to a water park with complex water slides and recreational pools. The water park has been dry more than ten years but it still stands next to the Palace, which still retains its swank. If the family friendly trend continues, that water park could be the next thing to revive. Getting back to dining, the Tiburon is a hidden gem. Hardly any of the Anglo crowd dines there. An excellent place to order a whole red snapper, either garlic sauce or veracruz style. All seafood excellent at a remarkably fair price.
Back to Zihuatanejo, the old town put some effort into refurbishing its waterfront along the bay during the ZOZO pandemic year and it looks beautiful and sustainable. The new concrete pier is finished, started in 2019, extended and more solid than the old. The promenade that moseys from the pier all along the fishing boat harbor to the main plaza at the famous basketball court and along Principal Beach to Madera Beach and will eventually connect to a promenade continuation along Playa Ropa has been repaved with a wider walkway made of trapezoidal shaped paver blocks that forms a pleasing looking pedestrian path all along the beaches at the foot of the hillside residences and cantinas of the town. All the switchbacks and ramps along the old way have been restored and the concrete and asphalt patchwork of the old promenade smoothed with the pattern of the pavers. Dozens of bistros, cantinas, bars and restaurants line the promenade above the beach and the Calle Adelitas, the next street up from Playa Madera. The neighborhood has seen some restoration and refurbishing and brilliant new paint. The rentals and small hotels beckon with balconies. We moseyed the promenade after breakfast on a Sunday. The beige pavers reflect light across the plaza and the pattern entices walking. It had been at least twelve years since we first followed the old promenade to see where it went and how far you could go. The city has enhanced the landscaping since then and the new paver promenade is a handsome pedestrian parkway linking the beaches of the bay. New vendor kiosks have been built along the harbor to give the sellers roofs and awnings and well lit displays and shelves. Beachside restaurants like Daniel’s have big palapa shelters where they can put eight or nine tables under a thatched roof out on the sand and provide lighted dining after sunset.
Until this little walking tour we deliberately avoided Zihuatanejo as a place to hang out, taking covid precautions. As everywhere we found Mexicans more rigorous about wearing masks than measurable gringos, which gave us assurance and confidence the times we took a taxi to Zihua for dinner. The remake of the plaza and the promenade made a longer visit desirable, when we gave in on late Sunday morning. In light of day the urban beauty and town vibrance says come on back and stay a while and as we emerge at a familiar corner of commerce in Downtown Mexico to hail a taxi back to Ixtapa it occurs to me we might never follow the promenade and explore Madera after sunset except now that we’ve seen it in daylight.
Another consideration for masking and not masking is that almost everywhere is considered open air and outdoors. Places with roofs such as restaurants have high ceilings and open walls or tables in an open plaza. Ceiling fans. Stores on the other hand require masks. Some admit only one person per family to enter the threshold. The hotel requires masks everywhere except the pool and the palapas and while eating or drinking in a designated area, but otherwise masks are required everywhere on the premises — not including one’s guest room, of course.
Cubre tu Boca is a familiar mantra on signs everywhere. So is Respeta tu Distancia. Recommended social distance is 3.5 meters, or roughly five feet. Much should be said that we encountered these risk restrictions in mid-January when many restrictions were just being loosened again. Leisure travel was a precarious venture. Two years ago the virus stopped the world. Vaccines came along last year. The Delta variant of the virus picked up where the vaccines left off, so boosters were introduced. Herd immunity seemed just out of reach. The Omicron variant set everybody’s health confidence back and forth to the CDC, and after a while it seemed that following the science meant it was safe enough to take certain calculated risks in this world so several of our fellow human beings insisted on possessing freedoms to decide what risks to take and to take all the risks they could take because, after all, somebody’s going to die anyway.
So essentially we are on the Honor System with covid-19 now, practicing however one sees fit to behave with regard to public health protocols such as masks and social distance. The hotel posted an illustrated sign at the elevators saying the passenger limit per car was 4 people (excluding of course small children and of course whole families of six people). Hand sanitizer applications were required to enter the restaurants and hand washing faucets and sinks and sanitizer stations were available and obvious at the hotel lobby. Off campus and in the open air most people unmasked unless approaching a crowd. Covid-19 will be a constant factor in our social equations for some time, and at this point in midwinter 2022 everybody was still too freshly scared of letting down any guard and still so tired of being on guard.
Most likely not to wear a mask unless absolutely required are gringo men, including me but not for pride or politics but simply to be able to breathe better and feel less chafed, as well as wishing away the specter of the virus. There is a gringo macho attitude of identifiable traits among some guys too cool for school who don’t make much eye contact anyway. In social situations the eye contact is all there is to establish friendliness, but sometimes being unmasked can show a face not happy or friendly — sin simpatico. Everybody wants a free open air excuse not to wear a mask but guys who wear their faces just to flout the prevailing customs come close to flaunting and taunting the limits of good manners to make a point of being exceptional. There are women who act that way too but don’t give a wink that you might judge them whereas the men dare you to judge them — and their women.
Playa Palmar the beach of Ixtapa Bay has always been Vacation Nation, a free state of no politics. Populated as it is in numbers and as mixed as can be of random people, you don’t see political slogans or T-shirts with partisan sayings or MAGA caps. You see sports teams. Fashion. Beer. Cabela’s. I can’t recall the last time (if ever) I saw a T-shirt with a portrait of Che Guevera. Lots of NY caps, as political as that gets. No BLM. Some Bob Marley. PINK and P!NK. And lots of skin. Tattoos yes but nobody screaming Kill The Mockingbirds. It’s crazy to assume so many people can have no political opinions at all and abandon heartfelt convictions en masse to indulge in innocent apathy. Yet here at Playa Palmar, theater of the beach, people leave their grudges and fighting words at the door and they commingle at the sea, under the sun, everybody minding their own business and having a day without antagonizing anybody else.
Conversations, however, can get heated between parties who overhear parties speaking between themselves. It’s not that there’s no freedom of speech. At a restaurant one night I gave the Stink Eye to a guy telling the Big Lie across his dinner table just to let him know he wasn’t just being heard by stupid gullible people. People tend to express opinions like the Big Lie among their own or those who appear to be their own. Sometimes I can be mistaken for one of them, I suppose by my age or my clothes, so sometimes I get told some crazyass shit out of the blue like some guy going on about shooting the lead cow because then the rest of the cows don’t know who to follow …
The past five years the biggest buttinskis in political conversations on the beach have been Canadians telling Americanos how well off the world would be if the US were governed by iconoclast authoritarian conservative populists, as if they themselves would subject themselves to such a ticket. In the spirit of leaving political agendas out of Vacation Nation, I’ll set mine aside and say no more.
It is the beach, after all, that epitomizes what I seek in a winter vacation. From a chaise recliner under the shade of a palm-thatched palapa I watch the sea. All day. It swells and rolls and breaks and floods the sand with churning waves and stops and sucks itself back and swells, rolls and breaks again. There were several days of six foot breakers erupting like white volcanic lava. The thunder roared and rolled up and down the coast. All day. All night. The blue water beyond the breakers undulates and mimics the breeze. All the way to the horizon the blue flickers with sunbeams. Beyond the bay the sea meets the sky and bonds with dreams. The ocean looks like eternity and it brings itself wave by wave to the beach. My mind measures time in waves. Between me and the sea the population dances and whirls and plunges and crawls into and away from the froth and the surges and the ebbs. Young and old, they embrace the ocean in their own way. Each drawn to the water’s edge to decide how deep to go, if at all. The water here is always warm, the shock may come from the intensity of the splash. Boogie boarders are rarely disappointed. Body surfers can get carried away. We like to walk the hard, smooth wet edges of the sand where it comes up to the ankles. It’s a huge beach accommodating crowds all day long, all drawn to the ocean, and I watch them when they cross my view of watching the sea.
All day. We take our walks. Swim in the hotel pool. Go somewhere for lunch if we didn’t eat breakfast. Sometimes we swim in the ocean on our walk down to the Pacifica resort where the surf is most gentle in the bay. Some times we go get a massage. I like to take a parachute ride towed by a boat at least once a year on a windy day. Other than these things we pretty much recline at the beach under our chosen palapa in the shade. Mostly we read. Engage conversations. People watch. And I stare at the sea.
Everything else is extra. All the women in bathing suits. The music they play at the swimming pool. Food. Hospitality. The mixing with interesting fellow guests and being allowed to be familiar with the local hosts. The chance to experience a place different from my home but still planet earth. Even the hot weather. Essentially why I am there is to be on the beach to observe the sea.
They say the sea and the sun are natural disinfectants. I’m sure they both are challenged by what toxins we ask them to solve, but given a spiritual task there might be nothing fresher than sunshine and saline water to enlighten and wash the soul. Nothing more cleansing than the ocean on a sunny day.
The vendors traipse by selling sweets and crafts and nuts and sunglasses, wraps and shawls, shrimp and coconuts, silver jewelry, hats and waterproof cases for cellphones. Hector the wood carver lugs his backpack of inventory one way and back the other every day. This time there is a family of whales in his hands, his most recent big one. He has a family of sea turtles too. We’ve bought a couple of things he’s made: a baby buffalo and a coconut palm tree. We get him to stop under our palapa to show off his smaller single pieces. Little sea turtles, small whales and dolphins. We happen to like one of the small whales and buy it. He says people like the big family ones but they just want to buy one of the babies. The detail he puts into the family groupings is worth the extra price, he says, for the small ones as well. I agree 800 pesos is a fair price for the whale family ($40 USD) but I don’t have fair requisite shelf space, so we stuck with the one small thing. His carvings are shapely and smooth to touch, even where detailed. He polishes the ironwood with shoe polish to hew a deep tan. I’ve been around enough years and seen Hector enough times to realize there are Hector collectors all over North America whose kids and grandkids will inherit his work unawares.
Victor, who used to sell newspapers on the beach but now vends starstruck magazines in Spanish and soccer T-shirts. This year he got me to buy a Mexico Copa Mundo team shirt, magenta and black with shimmering flecks. This year at last we bought tamales from the beach tamale lady Margarita. Finally a couple times she came along with her blue cooler right between breakfast and dinner. Delicious. Rojo o verde. Genuinely wrapped in banana leaf. 100 pesos — that’s $5 bucks. USD.
Our favorite beachwalker at Playa Palmar is a guy named Benny. Big Ben. Pudgy cheeks and paunchy strut, he stalks Playa Palmar all day meeting up with prospects for his sportfishing business. He has three boats. His excursions don’t cost much and include a shore lunch at a cantina at Isla Las Gatas. He can also arrange for motor guides to places like Troncones or Petatlan, or just a boat ride up and down the coast looking for whales and dolphins. We’ve been on Benny arranged excursions a few times and always been taken good care of. We’ve gotten to know him well enough we don’t hide from him when we see him on the beach (we’ve gone fishing enough) and ask how things are going.
This year he was hard to recognize. Same Cabela’s baseball cap and tropical style shirt but so slim and trim. His face looked years younger. And his stature seemed to have shrunk a couple inches. He looked like a Benny Junior, or a younger actor portraying him, taking over his life
Had the covid, he told us. In hospital two months. Almost died. Sick six months. Grateful to be alive.
Having a good season, he said when asked how this Hundred Days were going. At least one booking every day. Considering there aren’t so many white people any more. (His term.) He says Mexican tourists don’t book fishing. He says he loves Minnesota people, they are the most loyal customers. He says this because he knows where we’re from and he’s consummate PR man, and we know he values the Canadians too and is conscious Minnesota people are competitive with Canadians, but one thing about Minnesotans they aren’t hard to get to pay in US dollars, whereas Canadians haggle over the cash conversion to USD down to the last loon and try to get it cheaper. Benny prefers payment in USD, even to pesos. It’s nobody’s business if he’s a currency speculator or what, he grew up on the dollar and stayed in the habit. When he was young the gringos never carried Mexican money, so going to the bank to change the money he got used to, along with figuring out the equivalences in Mexican pesos. He probably pays his agents, guides, boatmen and drivers in cash too, possibly cuts of the USD.
He says he learned at a young age the best way to make any money in the world was to know English, and he wanted to make money. He says his covid treatment cost him $10 thousand dollars and was worth every dollar. He says that as a way of boasting he actually had the money. What he means is he’s grateful to be alive, on the beach, and he says he isn’t so worried and tense any more because when you’re so sick you think you’re going to die and then you get well, it feels so good doing the basic things and being able to enjoy every minute doing what you love, making a living.
True enough he seemed becalmed and almost charmed, not that Benny ever showed stress. I’ve always admired him as a hard working savvy and honest entrepreneur and man about town. He seemed more than that this year. He had elevated himself unwittingly to guru of the playa dispensing wisdom and faith while greeting gringos passing by. He reminded me of Bernie Horowitz back home, namesake proprietor of Bernie’s, a delicatessen restaurant in St Louis Park, where he always seemed to be host, his own maitre d, a guru of hospitality. Playa Palmar was Benny’s Bernie’s.
The most visible greeters on the beach were still the waving women from the huts who offered massages. Up the beach from the Krystal, which is located at midpoint, past two other hotels, the dolphinium and two former night clubs now reinvented as daytime cantinas, a row of seven cabins side by side, each the size and shape of a one car garage and constructed of basic lumber materials with open walls stood at the inner edge of the beach. Between the huts, or cabanas, umbrellas shaded plastic pub tables and cheap plastic chairs where the masajistas could take breaks outdoors and shelter from the sun. And they could wave from their beach chairs and wave from the doorways of the cabanas at everybody walking the beach towards the marina. Each cabana had four massage tables. At least five women worked at each cabana. When the masajistas weren’t working a client or taking a break under the umbrellas they walked down to the water line, a decent fifty yards, to personally greet the beach walkers and offer their massages.
Every time I see this sight or walk into the reception line and greet them in return I think about what these encounters look like to observers who have never encountered the waving, greeting masajistas before. The scene reminds me of scenes from a western movie McCabe and Mrs Miller set in a mining town where the women of the brothel in shanties at the edge of town would come outdoors to wave hello at approaching cowboys. I am ashamed to associate Las Masajistas de Playa Palmar with porno in my own head but this reflects how I grew up. And it seems to occur to some browsers who hit upon my earlier essays looking for something juicy on the beach. The resemblance with the women in the movie ends right there. The masajista will escort you across the sand to the wooden stairway where she will wash your feet and talk you upstairs into the four table parlor, where she will direct you to lie face down on a table, without a shirt, hands at your sides, and the next hour she will massage your body, segment by segment, ask you to turn over and lays a cloth across your eyes so you can zone out, and a massage is what you get. An exquisite massage. Nothing kinky. Nothing obscene.
One full hour. Starts with the back. Neck, spine. Ribs, shoulders. Lumbar. Arm. Return to the back. Apply stones left in a basket in he sun to get hot left to cool off on the spine. Leg. More back. Other arm. Other leg (Get that calf again please). Back again — remove the stones. (The masajistas always seem to click the stones together before and after they apply them. It’s customarily quiet in every massage cabana, very little whispering, so maybe it’s a way to express rhythm.) At some point she’ll ask you to turn over and with a clean linen across your eyes she’ll work you over again. She’ll offer a facial.
All the while that hour the sea rolls in and out and the breeze through the open walls carries distant laughter from the beach and the quick conversations in Spanish outside the huts. If you are mindful of each compression and stroke and squeeze of your muscles and tissues you will find yourself enchanted by how much you are learning about your senses, especially touch.
We have been frequenting the beach masajistas since they first started, about twenty years. It first started in what resembled medical tents, and the third year they constructed the frame huts. Who trained and continues to train the masajistas I do not know. I will say, and Roxanne will back me up, we have encountered massagists who possess a gifted talent they have developed with skills and fused the science with art and provided consistently exceptional massages. Sorry to say we’ve had some who barely phone it in. We have been lucky. Over the years we have been sort of adopted by pairs of masajistas who claim us and make appointments for us and try to take care of us exclusively if we allow them. They charge 300 Mexican pesos. We tip 100 pesos. In USD that’s a $15 massage and a $5 buck tip. For a full hour. For in my estimation a massage every bit as good as any I’ve had at a classy spa back home (or at Disney World) costing scores more money and only lasted 45 minutes.
The conditions at Playa Palmar are sanitary. Always changing the linen for clean linen. Granted, they employ used towels and sheets but they launder them, you can smell the Zote soap.
This year with covid-19 we were especially timid about visiting the masajista cabanas, as opposed to our last habitation in 2020, when I feel we booked a massage just about every other day. We weren’t alone in our trepidation. Years past you might have to wait to get a walk-in or make an appointment in advance. This year even the known gifted masajistas might be available any time of day. My favorite the past few years, Isabel from cabana #2, was away on maternity leave, that is she was expecting a baby. A good year to take off and take care of personal things, I guess. Zuliema, the deaf mute with the gifted touch and her cohort Eva provided the bliss for me at cabana #7, and Roxanne says her massages were exquisite. They wore masks but we didn’t have to since we were either face down or face up for a facial. The end is near when they introduce the aromatherapy, a spritz of lavender, melissa and mandarin. Open your eyes and they wiggle their fingers to fan the aroma. 300 pesos. 100 pesos tip. Cash. For one solid hour of heavenly massage listening to the sea and Spanish laughing whispers in the air. Most times Roxanne and I were the only customers in the four table hut. For that and all due consideration we are grateful. There is high vulnerability in the intimacy of massage where so much trust is exact and vitality an objective at complete rest and surrender to manipulation. Las Masajistas de Playa Palmar rule the soul of Ixtapa. They are the convent of holy masajistas.
Next winter should be better. 2022 wasn’t bad. With certain mitigation we learned we can vacation and stay healthy and avoid spreading infectious disease. One hopes it gets better and better, which leads to a normal we can live with to everyone’s mutual enjoyment. The omicron spike has crested and abated. Always on guard for the next mutation, barring something so fiendishly lethal it defies all state of the art predilection it seems reasonable to think that SARS-COV-2 variations from here to Z will weaken against a fortified human immunity. Humanity will go along its course and seek its leisure.
Ixtapa Zihuatanejo still exists. Exactly where it left off.
Or more so, it never stopped. Look away a couple years and what seems like reassurance everything’s the same reveals how much everything has aged over all. The essence of a maturing generation of young adults among both the vacationers and the working population of the hospitality industry shows the turnover of ages. The gradual extinction of baby boom winter vacation residents is taken up by upswinging millennials seeking exotic havens to work from home. It’s a foregone premise my generation will fade from the planet, so there’s no surprise we unclutch the secret of Ixtapa Zihuatanejo as an ideal place to spend January and February of the northern hemisphere of North America.
Zihuatanejo as a city never ceases to evolve ahead of survival. The new waterfront promenade of pavers and landscape along the walkway and through the plaza infuses a new aura of yellow brick road between Playa Ropa and the new, fortified pier. They say it did not hurt either the paving trail or the building of the new pier that the current mayor of Zihuatanejo is a concrete and cement industry magnate. If he had any say in the design and execution of either project it certainly contributed taste and economy of scale. It frames the downtown seafront plaza in timelessness to last generations hence. The fresh look bespeaks a pervasive attitude of sustenance. There’s no pretense of restoration to an epic era, only organic touches of vitality showing the city’s best face as it faces itself, modestly and with confidence it will keep going. The new pier reaches into the rocky western heart of the bay to attract ocean cruise shoppers on day trips who can shuttle ashore on tenders from the mother ship — someday when the pandemic ends and ocean cruises are pleasurably less risky. The pier serves as a bridge over the bay to allow the sea to wash underneath to keep the water from stagnating either side of a wall. It was almost fortunate to complete the pier replacement and the entire paver promenade along Playas Principal, Madera and along the edge of Playa Ropa in one year — ZOZO, the year of missing time, the lost year. During this time which stood still for so many and sometimes crashed to the ground for others, Zihuatanejo kept going.
There is new paint. Restored brickwork. Modern windows. Nobody I overheard said anything about gentrification. It isn’t that groovy. Local architecture sticks to the basics of cement, stone and rebar. The Spanish colonizers left a penchant for archways and tile. Colors reflect a respect for the sun. The pavers respect the rainy season balancing runoff with absorption. Old Town spreads across the backstreets behind the promenade, tidy rows of tiendas, shops, cantinas and galleries go sideways and across the blocks to the markets and banks and farmacias of everyday commerce where the locals all live up close. It is safe to walk these back streets during daylight — as anywhere, Minneapolis or Paris, be aware of your surroundings — and likely after twilight as well, there aren’t pirates hiding in the shadows preying on pedestrian tourists. Even on the bleakest looking streets, it’s only bleak looking because it is so plain nobody bothered to design it fancy beyond functional, not scary ugly just plain.
Perhaps it needs to be pointed out how clean and sanitary a city it is. You don’t see litter or trash — no basura — in the streets. On the sidewalks. The promenade. The pier. Between the markets and the stalls. Vacant lots. No trash. Like the beaches. Clean. There are bins and receptacles for trash and recycling everywhere.
So there is nothing backward to visiting this place in Mexico. For a vacation it could be fun times at a remote beach resort, or it could be a sojourn to an exotic tropical town. Luxury is attainable at beachside condos and villas for rent through the usual website agents. All level of bargains for lodging can be found for frugal travelers. There are bakeries, grocery stores and a central fresh market if you get a place with a kitchen. Restaurants abound — more than I can know. Seafood is excellent everywhere, and so is chicken. There is cell service and wi fi. It’s a small enough city easy to navigate. The social hospitality is polite, simpatico and welcoming and at the same time people mind their own business. All the locals have cell phones — they pick up and say, “Bueno.”
When Roxanne and I started coming here we used to buy prepaid phone cards at the farmacia so we could call home from a pay phone on the boulevard to stay in touch with our kids. Then came email and we found a couple of cozy internet cafes where we could write the kids back home. Then came hotel computer stations. Then the hotel got wi fi, we got tablets and iPhones, wi fi at the hotel got good, then better, and we can text home, even face chat in real time. There is no sense of falling off the face of the earth being in Ixtapa Zihuatanejo.
Still, don’t expect glamour. It’s shabby in some ways without chic, but very tidy. There is no fabulous history connected tenuously to Spain. The ancient people kept a low profile and continue to prefer to be left undisturbed in the surrounding hills, where Spanish is a second language. Zihuatanejo takes its name from the ancient language as the place of the women. A legend tells that a king ordered breakwaters arranged from local volcanic rock to calm the waves at the beach at the cusp of the bay at a peninsula called Isla Las Gatas where the king’s several queens would sunbathe. Other tidbits about the past tell of quality hardwood timber being harvested in the hills and trekked to the bay to be shipped by the Spanish from Madera Beach. Otherwise the Spanish regarded the outpost as an afterthought with Acapulco harbor but a hundred miles away. The biggest event in the bay’s historic memory was the result of a storm in the 17th Century that wrecked a ship on the rocks outside the bay. The cargo floated in bales and washed ashore on the beach. In the bales were clothing and other textiles from Asia — some say India, some say China — bound for the European markets. The locals found the bales and picked through the garments until there wasn’t a stitch left on the beach. Thereafter the beach was named Playa Ropa, clothes beach, and the people of Zihuatanejo were the coolest dressed people in the western hemisphere in the 1660s.
Stephen King chose Zihuatanejo as Andy and Red’s place of rendezvous after getting out of Shawshank, but it was chosen by Andy because it was a nondescript fishing village on the sea and by King because it was a real place with a cool five syllable name. They say Al Franken’s movie about alcoholic love was filmed at a hacienda high on the hill above Playa Ropa, starring Andy Garcia and Meg Ryan.
Ixtapa on the other hand has no such history or myths and only existed as cropland, swamp and coconut palms until the 1970s when the federal Mexican government designated the coastline of the state of Guerrero northwest of Zihuatanejo as a tourism destination. All you see of Ixtapa is less than 40 years old. Most of it is newer. Unlike its counterpart in the Mexican tourist zone project Cancun, Ixtapa was not a runaway hit, but it built a sturdy economy. Proximity to Zihuatanejo — the big little city, Downtown Mexico — was an asset when the bedroom community along the beach hotels went to sleep, but eventually Ixtapa grew its own restaurants and clubs and for a year of so even had a casino. Finding night life was not a risky problem under most circumstances. Unrelated and sadly connected the casino attracted armed robberies and a gringo surfer got killed outside a stripper bar — in backstreets Ixtapa, not KISSES in Zihuatanejo — about 2:30 in the morning, where he came to call out a pimp for providing an unsuitable prostitute and demanded his money back — shot once in the chest, they say. This incident helped the raising of the risk factor in the advisories the US Department of State gave out to the public against travel to Mexico. We were there when the casino in every neon way was open for gaming, and then all of a sudden the second year the sign went dark and two or three cop cars were parked out front, police tape across the doors. Gradually the cops stopped parking there. The tape came off. The casino sign came down. It never reopened.
The son of Sergio Toscano, known as The Old Guy at Casa Toscano’s Italian restaurant at the west end of the plaza in Ixtapa, told us once about his big plans when he eventually took over: market Ixtapa as an eternal Spring Break party town destination, woo hoo. Old Sergio wanted none of that and soon dispatched his son back to Venice Beach, California. It’s not so much that Ixtapa isn’t capable of ramping up to raucous revelry — they say Eastertime the streets and plazas overflow with fun seekers as if it were the mirror of Mardi Gras. The sustainability of hyperactive fun risks behavior out of bounds with decency, and even dignity. Vice taints recreation to extremes offensive to average people. Loud fun finds its niche market in the background. The casino never attracted big crowds during its best nights, always lots of open slot machines, maybe a couple of tables playing cards in the glass enclosed room. It didn’t catch on with the tourists, most of whom came there for other reasons than to play neon games of chance. When the premises attracted armed robberies they shut down. Nobody will ever know if gaming could have changed the marketing of tourism in Ixtapa.
Fun is in the eye of the beholden. There’s golf — best tee off at sunrise and complete your round by 11, 11:30, it gets humid rapidly. The sea and the beaches offer fun all day. The General’s sports bar offers husband day care where wives can drop off their guys and go shopping and pay their bar tabs later when they pick the guys up. There are similar arrangements one can make at any cantina on the coast if it’s drinking you want. The hotels all have bars. You never have to drive. Most daytime fun takes to the water, pool or ocean. The Krystal sponsors organized beach volleyball, water volleyball in the pool, water polo, water aerobics and salsa lessons on the patio deck. The Krystal Kids Klub keeps the kid guests busy. I like to read under a palapa on the beach and walk the beach during the day. To people watch: tossing bolos, passing American footballs, young couples practicing pickleball, playing catch with frisbees and aerobies. Flying kites. Chasing surf. Pickup soccer matches. Joggers. The Girls from Ipanema practicing their Glamor Shots. The beginner surfers trying the waves down towards the marina. The people so pale who barely get outside in front of the condo to stand with their feet in the sand and stare out at the sea in transfixed awe. The ones who spot whales and dolphins in the bay. People who want to be by themselves, and people who like to be so deep in the mix they’re like Benny.
Of all the beach vendors my favorite is a guy named Rafael. All these years — longer than the masajistas — Rafael has managed a team offering parachute rides ten stories in the air towed behind an inboard speedboat back and forth along the beach within Ixtapa Bay. I met him when he managed the team located on the unseen seam on the beach between the Krystal and the hotel next door, the Tesoro. On the average there are four parachute sailing vendors operating across Playa Palmar and depending on demand there can be three speedboats floating beyond the breakers with tow ropes extended to the crews on the beach. Rafael’s crew was owned by a guy I used to call the Dutchman because he looked Dutch and his parachute was a big advertisement for Hollandia ice cream products. He owned at least half the parachutes on the beach and maybe all the boats. Rafael was the Dutchman’s main man and his crew in front of the Krystal was by far the busiest bunch on the beach, sometimes employing two chutes, rotating them in and out fast as Rafael signed them up and outfitted them in vests and harnesses.
I’ve gone up a bunch of times. I like to say every year but I’ve skipped a couple. Probably didn’t go up my first year or two — it cost 300 pesos then — but I studied it, how they took you up and mostly how they got you down. Last time around Rafael’s crew was named Lalo, Daniel and Ismael. They are always burly guys in their twenties with deep tans, except Ismael was a teenager. Rafael himself is slight and skinny and the deepest tan of all, his face almost crisp. Sometimes her wore so much zinc he looked like a mime. This year I went to where they launch. Parachute idle on the ground. Rafael wasn’t around. A new guy was boss of a new crew of just one guy. They said Armondo (the Dutchman’s real name) sold the business to the new guy and Rafael was gone.
Later on our first beach walk we found Rafael with a new crew at a new location alongside the Bayview condominiums and the Barcelo hotel. Abrazo, abrazo. The Dutchman had indeed sold his holdings in the beach parachute sailing business and the guy who owned this particular locating hired him for a better commission. The outfit also rented out rides on Jet Ski watercraft and tow rides behind the speedboat on a big water wiener, a giant yellow ducky and an easy chair called the Big Brawler. That day he said business was way, way down but they were getting by. That seemed true all up and down the beach, the aftermath of covid and the year of ZOZO.
Rafael told me his record day was 153 flights. I can almost remember that day, or ones like it, watching from under the palapa.
For the first few days, I might have said, Ixtapa was quiet. Timid. In a few days more, though, it got busier. More guests arrived, even some Anglos. Soon the national holiday Constitution Day weekend arrived and guests poured in. Fun resumed. People rode the parachute, rented the Jet Skis, and got towed behind the boats on the big wiener, the ducky and the Brawler — somebody always falls off in the middle of the bay and they have to remount and start over. Benny booked fishing trips, which include shore lunch of the catch prepared at a cantina at Las Gatas. He goes by Big Ben if you look him up on the web.
Nightlife fun is out of my ken. I don’t usually stay out late at night any more looking for entertainment. I will say the Senor Frog’s and Carlo and Charlie’s franchises have fizzled in Ixtapa, one because it hasn’t caught on with rube Americano college students and the other due to noise considerations in the hotel zone. There are no doubt some swinging night clubs in Ixtapa as well as Zihuatanejo, when they are open and free of covid restrictions. Next to the Krystal is a club called Christine which wasn’t open at all this year — it’s a completely enclosed premises (not open air) subject to being closed to all patrons. In past years it has been open on special nights from 10 pm until dawn and most recent years has had a food truck outside the patio serving tacos. Maybe twenty years ago Roxanne and I paid the nominal cover charge and the two drink minimum and went inside. Billed Latino Night, it was probably around 9, way too early for anything happening but I learned that Christine has one of the best sound systems I ever heard and I discovered a song called “Amargo Adios” (bitter goodbye) by Inspector, the best Mexican R&B song ever. I can see how Christine could be a premier dance club. And yet I cannot speak for night clubbing in Ixtapa or Zihuatanejo in general because we don’t go clubbing. It’s probably fun but by the time it gets going I’m done for the day. I know, I could take an old fashioned disco nap but that’s not how I roll. I’m 70 and partying all night has lost its allure.
There’s no shortage of evening entertainment. A handful of restaurants in both Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo provide musical accompaniment for dinner. They have tip jars onstage. Otherwise roving troubadours set up their mics and speakers in public spaces at the seams between outdoor cantinas to render short sets of songs and doff their hats to the patrons at the tables for tips. Singers, guitarists, Andes pan flutes, unlike the beach cowboys the evening entertainers mostly play medleys of Anglo pop standards, though somewhere comes along a classical guitarist or a voice of original songs. The talent ranges from annoying to competent among the troubadours and from competent to surprising among the restaurant gigs.
Hotels like the Krystal feature nightly entertainment at stages within their premises. The Krystal has a grassy lawn backyard they call the jardin where the Kids Klub plays soccer by day and at night they set up chairs facing a permanent stage where performers act out pre-recorded musical numbers in mime and dance three nights a week from nine until ten. The shows are themed and the theme is posted on the chalkboards in the lobby and near the towel shack by the pool. International, Pan-Mexican, Latin American and Disney are recurring themes. Lately the chairs are filled. One favorite of the crowd is a solo diva who performs lip-synching Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”. The traditional Latin American dances are choreographed lavishly and the costumes express flair. The Disney numbers are cute, all sung in Spanish. Other nights the Krystal at 9:00 features Karaoke or featured acts from the cream of the club and restaurant entertainers at the patio outside the bar adjacent to the pool patio and the Jardin (the bar like Christine an indoor venue was closed for covid protocol). The karaoke ranges from clever to entertaining and is always in Spanish. The musical groups rock out Latin dance beats and the singers belt Spanish ballads. It all ends around ten, although karaoke sometimes runs a little late. We’re usually upstairs reading and unwinding and we listen through the open balcony door and can watch the Jardin stage shows from the balcony.
One night the music from the patio intrigued me more than anything I had heard since “Amargo Adios” by Inspector on Christine’s sound system. A woman with a clear, melodious distinct voice and a relentlessly phonetic acoustic rhythm guitar with just a touch of percussion. Songs I never heard before. Songs like “Blue Bayou” I recognized but she sang in Spanish. Shakira’s “Dia de Enero”. I learned later it was a duo called Cactus, as we caught them again weeks later playing Valentine’s Day dinner at Soleiado. A black haired woman in loose black dress played her own guitar and sang with a kind of passion almost disaffected by self-consciousness of playing a patio of dinner guests. The accompanist wore a plaid shirt, his blond hair in a bun and a five day beard, a floor tomtom between his knees he muted with an embroidered dish towel and kept good time with a drumstick and wood block and tiny cymbal alongside the tom.
So I discreetly as possible approached the tom player between songs to learn the titles of two or three songs they just played so I could look them up later. At first the drummer said he didn’t speak English so he didn’t know how to reply, but the singer lady overheard me and answered. I ate dinner slower than ever that evening, and Cactus kept playing without a break. In the future I will make an effort to seek them out and not just wait by chance they return to the Krystal or Soleiado..
When I came home I researched the songs they told me and I found every one. What I had not considered but quickly learned was that as interesting as each song was, it was not interesting to me enough any more because it wasn’t sung and played by Cactus. And of course Cactus hasn’t got a CD — the cost of the rights to any songs they might record, even “Besame Mucho” would exceed the revenue of paltry sales to music rubes like me. So if I want to hear “Mi Grande Noche” or “Sabor O Chocolate” the way I remember, I’ll have to hear Cactus live.
This brings me back to thinking about the future of Ixtapa Zihuatanejo. We will go back. No dissuasion by government agencies or political persuasions have made us uncomfortable, and so far as we can tell we are sincerely welcomed by the locals as long as we want to return. The future of this place does not depend on me or Roxanne or what we think, or even what this community thinks of us. We are ambassadors of course, diplomats and informal delegates of our country spreading peace and harmony among our peoples, behaving with good manners and practicing the Golden Rule as we would at home, or in Europe, wherever we might go. We’re Americanos. This is Mexico. We are guests.
We’ll go back as long as we’re welcome because we believe there will be somewhere to go back to. There’s reason to believe Ixtapa Zihuatanejo will survive into the future as a center of hospitality. There is no bad reputation to overcome. It isn’t an overly famous reputation to live down or live up to. Like it or not the resort industry cannot completely fortify this community’s place as a regional economy of its own. Villages and towns all along the Pacific coast and deep into the hills and mountains depend upon Zihuatanejo as a coherent and stable center for merchandising, communication, education and civil politics. The networks of civic cohesion beneath the surface and behind the scenes keep this place alive and ahead of the curve beyond tourism. Stable and prosperous habitation is the weave that binds the culture that lives here. A culture that treats its own people well will welcome strangers and often let them become one of their own. A subtle underground expatriate citizenry has taken residency in abidance of local mores and folkways (a few might even describe themselves as ex-patriots) who seek refuge from more than terrifying weather seeking whatever it is Zihuatanejo means to its own people, that whatever je ne sais quoi is in Spanish, what ever bonds this community so cohesively from generation to generation exists invisibly uncommercialized inside the soul of modern small town Mexico using tourism and hospitality as ways to keep up with the world and experience a wholesome life.
If we have noticed changes in the 20-odd years we’ve visited Ixtapa Zihuatanejo it all seems to come down to age. Kids who were just born when we started to come down are coming of age. Their parents are now middle aged. Their parents’ parents are our age. Those kids we used to see in their school uniforms when we used to walk around and explore the backstreets behind the plazas. The high school in Ixtapa tucked back behind the old movie theater past the closed-down disco back where that enchilada place with the bathtub in the lobby … La Melinche I think … do high school kids know what Melinche means, or find it ironic to name a restaurant that? Where do the high school kids go afterwards?
The adult workforce, of course. Some via higher education. The military — Zihuatanejo has a navy base in the harbor which keeps a low profile. Obviously there are jobs in hospitality but not for everybody. Technicians are needed in keeping the infrastructure going. Mechanics maintain the cars. Storekeepers sell clothes. Carpenters and masons construct buildings. Everyone needs to eat. Fishers fish and haul their catch to the market. The vegetables come from fields somewhere up the highway. Rice and beans are universal drygoods. Flour. Chickens and eggs. Families extend together. Some send their kids to university at Guadalajara or Mexico City, say the taxi drivers who brag about their kids. Some of them grow up to be professionals. Like any home town it may seem hard to keep the best and brightest from escaping to greener pastures and skipping off from their haunts of childhood, though as it turns out as Mexico goes it might seem a much cooler place to be if they could take advantage of it to make their dreams come true.
It’s probably similar to feeling what it might have been like growing up in Wausau, Wisconsin or Freehold, New Jersey in 1969.
On the beach under the palapa closest to the shower Roxanne and I found a display of little palm sized amulets and brooches made up of tiny collages and mosaics, miniature visual tapestries, each unique though similar motifs and imagery. Several different butterflies. Tree of life. Modest 16th century faces of Italian goddesses. They looked so exquisite we wanted to touch them, arrayed as they were on a cloth on the beach recliner. A lady in her thirties came to us from the sea to show them to us. Her father made them. His studio was in a town of Queretaro, somewhere north of Mexico City and not far short of San Miguel de Allende, an art community I’d heard of. Her father moved there from Italy, Liguria, where she said she lived. (Cinque Terre? I asked and she said no.) We examined the amulets and she priced them, averaging 300 pesos each. We said we’d think it over. We didn’t have that much money on us at the beach anyway. As we packed up for the day and went to our room we talked about our favorite amulets and decided to go back and get two, one each for our teenage grandkids, Clara and Tess. We went back down to the beach and met the lady’s father, Rudi, the artist. We chose a butterfly and a tree of life, disagreeing between us at the time which one we would give which kid. Each amulet came in a dainty net bag tied with a ribbon and included a small certificate of authenticity.
Never know what treasures you may find by chance and what they might mean on vacation.
If doing the same thing again and again expecting a different result is insane then perhaps doing the same thing over and over expecting the same result is exactly sane. That’s how I feel about Ixtapa. Maybe I feel I owe something to this place for helping me get through some winters when I didn’t realize just how stressed out I was until I’d been there a week to thaw out. The weather is always hot and it hardly ever rains. Sometimes cloudy, usually not. Predictably red sunsets across the sea. Very good food almost everywhere you go the more you like shrimp or mahi mahi. Or something Italian.
Roxanne says if she were to open a restaurant in Ixtapa she would serve Mexican food. It appears the Krystal plans to show her up by turning the main floor space that was a bar and lounge into a restaurant serving Mexican recipes from eight different regions of the country. They plan to call it Paseo por Mexico, Restaurante de Especialidades. When we were there the bar was closed due to covid because it was an enclosed space — the Christine thing. It’s enclosed by glass — windows and doors facing the hotel lobby on the inside and the Jardin on the outside. Sort of soundproof against the bar entertainment from carrying up the open court atrium to the upper floors. The use of the space for a special restaurant will go well and I can’t wait to try the menu next year. The indoor bar, when it reopens will relocate behind the fancy wooden doors to the back room behind the atrium, where the sales office used to be located and currently the hotel medic conducts covid tests for those of us who have to pass one to go back to one’s home country.
Before going home I brought 500 pesos down the beach past the Bayview to see Rafael. I made an appointment with him on a walk the day before. He recommended 11:00, when the wind would get strong. He welcomed me with abrazo when I showed up. They weren’t quite set up yet. He had to send a guy into the water to get the tow line from the speedboat just past the breakers. The parachute lay on the sand like clothes washed up on the beach. I was obviously the first ride of the day. I was a little disappointed the chute he was using that day was not the one crowned with panels of primary colors and the words TE AMO BEBE. A guy closer to my age and older than Rafael unfurled the purple chute from the ride harness and letting the cords and cables stretch out with the breeze. He did the work of an assistant but his calm expertise bespoke a vested experience in the business. The chute said VOLT, so I asked the man what’s Volt mean, and he said it’s an energy drink — “You’re advertising an energy drink,” he said with a nod and a wink maneuvering the harness so I could step in while Rafael secured my floatation vest and I signed the consent contract. I read the part of the contract that said I was obliged to follow the instructions for landing and I remembered watching a guy riding from about this same spot who refused to follow instructions to land and the boat had to take him around three times while the ground crew yelled and waved flags and the crew boss blew a whistle and still the guy remained in the air. I recognized the guy helping Rafael as the main boss from that day the rider refused to land because he was pissed the guy kept forcing the boat to keep him in the air for another circle approaching the beach and the boss saw me standing there watching this and showed me the contract and said he was going to charge him for the extra rides even if he had to go to his hotel. This was the owner of the concession now outfitting me, buckling me in.
Rafael very patiently went over the procedure. The idea is to relax in the harness and enjoy the ride. Hang on to the straps but no need to grip it or go white knuckles. Enjoy the view. “Remember you’re not getting off at the Krystal. Watch for the Fontan, then the Bayview. I’ll have the whistle and the red flag. When you see me wave the red flag, you reach back with your hands to take the strap with the red ribbon annd pull it down to your chest, right over your heart. When you see me drop the flag, let go.
“Now walk to the ocean…”
One, two three steps and I was in the air. Not just gradually elevated above the surf but soaring high above everything. The shimmering sea below, the bay blue as the sky, breakers like white curls, people so tiny in slow motion. Higher than the rooftops of the hotels and condos the view skims the valley behind the residences beyond the plaza and the mountains terraced and folded green and wild to the horizon. In the bay the blunt domed rock islands gleam white from bird poop. The ocean horizon seems no closer but further away. The haciendas and villas built among the rocks along the sea like stacked hideouts. The boats in the slips at the marina neat and trim and idle. The way back hovers over the massage cabanas and I waved down to the masajistas who are all unaware I’m sure. Same to the beach inhabitants and the palapas at the Krystal and anybody else who might be looking. You can’t see their faces from that high. Nobody waves back. After the Krystal there’s the Amara, the Emporio … the Fontan stands out as the most populated beach and even tough it is only six stories, its balconies are painted bright blue and stand out like those travel photos of Santorini. Next the Bayview residence condos, the best looking architecture in Ixtapa, a twelve story wedding cake of archways, balconies and wrought iron. I spotted Rafael with the flag and heard the whistle, reached up above my left shoulder and took hold of the strap with the red ribbon, pulled it down to hold against my chest. For a second I hovered above the beach, I heard the whistle and Rafael dropped the flag and I let go of the strap and then slowly descended straight down. Rafael and a younger guy sort of caught me as my feet touched the sand. Wow.
“Nice job,” said Rafael as the young guy unbuckled me. Good teacher, I said.
When I bid somebody like Rafael good bye until next year it’s personal and I really mean it. These people have affected my life with a kind of unconditional love I only know as Ixtapa Zihuatanejo’s graciousness. I have come to their town a depressed, stressed-out mess and gone home to my real life much much less. Over the years and through time I’ve connected the people and this place to my life like I went to second grade here, as if here I return to review and renew my life and check myself for inhumane tendencies. Examine my conscience. I go into exile to meditate. No it is not exactly a mendicant retreat, I know that, but adjusted for inflation and given my pagan heathenism and middle class Americano white privilege and factoring my relatively bumpkin IQ there’s an awareness of a universality of inspiration to humbly hang out and watch the surf and contemplate how lucky I am to have a place like this to go to in my life which is always nice, simpatico, where I am nobody and respected anyway, and where I can practice life skills in appreciation of the dynamics of a culture of kindness among themselves as to strangers.
Roxanne and I are not celebrities and do not socialize among whoever pass for big shots along the Azueta coast. In all honesty, none of them have approached us or invited us to spend time with them or dine. It’s a lot like home. The people we’ve made friends with who are locals tend to be among the servants and members of the hospitality workforce. People we come in contact with every day we exchange words with and know by name. Conversations extend over years. Facebook unifies in this way. Emails link us. Some of us. I’m not on Facebook, and even so Roxanne is and we didn’t realize Jesus Calderon was retired until he wasn’t there — it would be nice to say good bye. Maybe next year we’ll look him up. They say his wife runs a taco shop a block up the hill from the foot bridge at the street across the boulevard from the Bodega Aurrera.
Hasta proximo ano, we say on checkout day. It’s all contingent on the world not ending, for any of us. The lost year of ZOZO gave us all a scare, but can safely say it’s 2022 now and we’re still standing and the accoutrements of life we have relied upon to gratify us and spring us onward on this mortal coil will await us into the foreseeable future. That’s the catch, the foreseeable, but if I might repeat myself, if doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is insane, then doing the same and expecting the same result must be sane. We will return next year anticipating el mismo, the same good weather, good food, good service, good graciousness and good music as there ever was. It’s safe to say it’s safe. Foreseeably.
This year two new restaurants started up on the plaza in Ixtapa. One is the Buona Sera created by the refugees from Old Man Toscano’s old staff. Another is called Casa de Abuela located deeper into the old plaza near the old hotel, where the famous chef Lalo moved House of Lalo after moving out of that seemingly cursed location up the grand staircase above the farmacia and convenience store that used to be the Lobster House, next to the disco. Casa de Abuelo serves home cooked meals. Out of Lalo’s old kitchen at the hotel they serve about a dozen tables in the open air under umbrella’s and a string of bulbs at an edge of the inner plaza. Hosted by Nemo trying to attract diners to the new place, which is run by Dany, formerly of the Blue Shrimp and father of Dany Boy, the youngest restaurateur in town, whose place Dany Boy’s was the new one two years ago and still somehow survives at the old space of Mama Norma’s. I look forward to dining again at Grandma’s house because I sense they want to be known for good meals. What bugs Roxanne about them is that one string of light bulbs doesn’t cut it for her to see her dinner after sundown, so I would implore Dany and Nemo to rig up at least one more string of bulbs for next year. They also serve lunch and breakfast. Their dinner menu lists its version of shrimp, mushrooms, cheese gravy sauce with butter and sour cream flambee for the chef inventor, Lalo’s Shrimp.
Lalo was a good guy. He deserves memorial.
Zihuatanejo has statues of bronze along its pedestrian promenades, mostly figures of women representing the culture, history or industries of the state of Guerrero. They remind me of the statue of Molly Malone in Dublin, very tasteful. One statue of public art however stands out as one of the most intimidating figures a town can offer, and it is placed facing the public pier where everyone arriving sees it. The figure is Jose Azueta, hero of the Battle of Veracruz, where he lost his life in 1914. He was a Tactical Lieutenant of Artillery in the Mexican Navy at the age of 19 when, in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, the United States attacked and occupied the seaport naval base at Veracruz to attempt to force a regime change in the Mexican government. Azueta manned a machine gun and faced the advancing American troops. Wounded in the battle, he died nineteen days later of his wounds. The official name of the city is Zihuatanejo de Jose Azueta. His image appears on the city coat of arms. The pier is connected to the Mexican navy base, so it is totally appropriate to place the statue in its vicinity.
The image and his pose stare straight down the center of the pier greeting everyone arriving by boat, a man in uniform with wild eyes and a mouth captured shouting, his left arm in the air in rallying motion and his right cranking a machine gun with a full belt of bullets mounted on a tripod and aimed down the center of the pier. Right between your eyes.
It sets the wrong tone opposite the true hospitality expressed by the citizens. The statue embodies wrath for indignities suffered from an America exploiting its economy in the era of Woodrow Wilson. Mexican patriotism today expresses scant resentment for past misdeeds. Its future emulates the USA in pursuit of the same life and liberty and happiness and recognition for its self worth as a sovereign nation and relevant culture of its own and an economy sustaining and supporting its emergent middle class.
The future of Ixtapa Zihuatanejo is the future of Mexico. The young adults now who were schoolkids not long ago are coming of age. It remains to be seen whether they will write off their old hometown as Nowhere, En Ninguna Parte, and go away to bigger cities for education, work, cosmopolitan opportunities. The community would suffer if the best and brightest kept emigrating, unless bright migrants from elsewhere moved in. In the age of the remote satellite work station there is no excuse for tech savvy Mexicans to forego this place to live and work. Nothing prevents it from developing its own art scene and entertainment venue. Seeing the dozens of dancers and performers in the hotel stage shows tells me there’s young talent. What’s more, the community will need doctors and other professionals. Mechanics. Retailers, wholesalers and tradespersons, architects and bus drivers. Teachers. Not just waiters and servants. Not just carnival workers.
They do not need crime or cartels — as neither does Minneapolis, Minnesota. (It’s unfair to superimpose ideals on another’s town you can’t live up to at home.) It’s up to the generation coming of age to determine the course of civility in civilization. The next generation could account for great reductions in violence, just as it could advance environmental sustenance and social justice. In a generation there could be choices made to put cartels out of business. From what I experience of the young ones of Ixtapa Zihuatanejo it will be worth it to keep going down there every winter to visit with their parents.
The believers believe and the unbelievers don’t and the nihilists believe in nothing. The greeting is beyond belief.
By definition the word merry means to be cheerful. Christmas is a season recognized throughout the western world and wherever on this planet Erf evangelical missionaries affected the telling of the human story, human history. There are places still where its celebration is forbidden, others where it is compulsory. The influence of the saga of a baby boy conceived out of wedlock has been bastardized beyond compare and so it’s irrelevant to debate whether it’s true fact or myth. My opinion it’s some of both, but I’m not out to cancel Jesus on account of the myriad of mistakes committed by scores of followers in his name or to apologize for the deplorable atrocities. Maybe I don’t totally let Jesus off the hook of history but all told I don’t denounce Jesus. It doesn’t seem a stretch to associate his birthday as a season to practice cheer.
It comes around every year when the northern hemisphere tilts away from the face of the sun as far as it goes and nights are long and there’s reason to believe our ancestors perceived these conditions as signs that the sun could possibly go down the horizon and never come back. Even after solstice the minutes of daylight don’t increase right away, there’s leeway trade offs with sunrise and sunset times for a few days, but by December 25 there’s a minute gained back.
Meantime during the dark long nights we light up the landscape in every way we are able. This way we resist the dark. Against the dark we gather against the cold with loved ones. We gather around fire rings. Tiki lamps. Electric smudge pots. Candles. I don’t know how December plays out south of Erf’s equator with it being the longest days and the advent of astronomical summer, but I would venture most people might already be in cheerful moods. The northern people just seem to need extra incentive.
So why not Merry Christmas. It is what it is. A season celebrated at the end of the retreat of the sun. A time of year of the coldest weather is to come but the light guides us whether it is worth it to get up and leave the house.
To wish somebody to be cheered seems a nice gesture to offer one another as we cycle the calendar again. It’s already called Christmas. And if you are faithful to the heart and soul of words then there’s probably a place in your heart for American precepts of liberty and democracy inscribed in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution still valued in the modern world. It’s a salutation pointedly seasonal that is positive at a dark time.
Whether it’s never been darker I cannot say metaphorically but there’s probably never been more electric light. A scary worldwide pandemic threatens to annnihilate the human population while advanced scientific perseverance tries to get ahead of infectious curves. Climate change is a wild card. Sociopolitical extremes and all those memes stifle liberal and conservative dreams but not the dreamers. Truth turns out to be really out there after all, but some of it is unseen yet in the world of the seen. We are lucky to live in a culture that still strives to outperform its propaganda. I seem to recall Superman could squeeze a fistful of coal and exert enough pressure to compress the coal into a diamond.
Take heart, people.
Seasons greetings, if you will. May the force be with you. Happy holidays. Thinking of you and it just happens to be the final week of the year. Be cheered. I’m cheering for you.
Several years ago, when we first became acquainted, I attempted to explain racism from the angle of vocabulary taught to the young, Naughty Words. In the essay I tried to come clean with my white boy impressions from the 1950s and 60s as if knowing a few Supremes songs qualified me as a baby boom Noam Chomsky. I was sincere and naive. Even if I was on to something I quit too shallow to conclude. I offered a separate peace, if I apologized I hoped to be forgiven, one on one.
To keep things simple, offering myself in a first impression, I understated my experience with race. It seemed more credible to describe it as aloofly as I had lived it without trying to take credit for exceptionalism and coming across as white boy knows all. Sees all. The master of omniscience. I think in that essay I wanted to establish my cred early on with the blog in case the subject kept coming back up, which it has and does in unforeseen ways. I was glib. Being careful to not misappropriate Black Experience I left out Black people I grew up with. Just so I wouldn’t cross the line of being patronizing I skipped over the unspoken general prejudices of the community where I grew up. They weren’t as enlightened as I portrayed, and neither was I. I regret my memoir supported the supposition in 2016 that interracial relations and social justice were, in the words of that song by Timbuk 3, “Things are going great and they’re only getting better.”
I did not foresee the Trump presidency, the covid-19 pandemic, the acquittal of the cop who shot Philando Castile or the murder of George Floyd and the concurrent sociopolitical and economic upheaval. If I’m coming at you all woke now, all preachy, you may have missed a few of my last 35 blogs. Even so, it’s not as if white Tulsa had burned Black Greenwood a hundred years ago and covered it up so nobody would know. It’s not like the 1619 Project is breaking news. It’s not as though my own city, Minneapolis, Minnesota has been rocked by riots simultaneously with increasing gun violence. I think of the court testimony of Darnella Frazier, the Pulitzer winning teenager who video recorded the death of George Floyd, who says she lies awake at night apologizing to George Floyd she didn’t do something to save his life. I feel that way sometimes, that I haven’t done enough to foresee and prevent the calamities humanity has befallen on my watch.
Nah I didn’t just awoke.
Maybe I’m just slow on the uptake. My 8th grade nun teacher at St Simon of Cyrene used to use that phrase — slow on the uptake. She’s the one who taught the class the definition of the word niggardly, to be stingy, just in case anybody had any ideas it might mean anything else. Our parish school — entire parish — was a hundred percent not Black, so literally all our liberal attitudes about race and civil rights were purely academic and shaped by a church which preached charity and social justice, John XXIII style. There was one Black family in our whole suburb at the time, and they belonged to St Richard’s parish, west and south of St Simon’s on the Edina border. Curious, now, that they were also Catholic. The Staples family. A son my age played football for St Dick’s, Ricky, a galloping halfback who hardly needed blockers; I played against him for St Simon’s as a linebacker; never knew him but wondered what it might be like to be the only Black kid in town. I wouldn’t have known he existed if we hadn’t both played football. I hoped people didn’t treat his family niggardly.
My childhood awareness and feelings about Black people were shaped by my parents, my grandmothers, and by rock and roll radio. My dad grew up in the inner city during the Depression and WWII. He had black friends. His mother was a social activist and proud fan of Jackie Robinson and Nat King Cole. My dad worked in the car business on Lake Street where Black people were as common as apples and sweet corn. They worked at Sears. They drove buses. My dad and mom used to entertain and go out for dinner with his friends from work and their wives. At the age of about three I learned from a Mrs Pullens it was okay for Black women to wear make up. She left a lasting impression on me. As I recall she was a good looking lady.
The respect and kindness for Blacks I learned from my mother bewilders me today considering the opinions and attitudes openly flaunted by her own mother, my other grandmother, who was from Missouri, considered herself a Southerner and expressed nothing but loathing and ridicule for people she referred to by the N word if she acknowledged them at all. Grandma and Grandpa Kelly had servants — cooks and cleaning ladies — and she refused to hire Blacks and went out of her way to find Scandinavian and Eastern European immigrants — Gypsies and Jews even — to keep away from hiring Blacks, even to do the ironing and gardening. My grandfather apparently had no say, though he was second generation Irish and likely held some opinion which influenced my mom, who taught me and my siblings in no uncertain terms there was absolutely nothing wrong with being Black.
As for Nat King Cole, he was great for that chestnuts roasting on an open fire thing, but my ear caught Fats Domino on the radio and I found my thrill. There was Chuck Berry. Frankie Lyman. Lloyd Price. Little Richard. Ray Charles. Johnny Mathis. Sam Cooke. Gary US Bonds. Jackie Wilson. All singing on the radio when I was a little kid. Nobody ever told me, don’t listen to them, they’re Black. I suppose if they had I’d’ve listened closer.
I was about nine going on ten when my mom got pregnant with Heather, the eighth kid. I was the oldest, then there was Leenie, Bernadette, Molly, Kerry, Sean and Meaghan. Leenie, Bernie and I, with a little help from little Molly kept up the housework and looked after the three youngest ones the best we could and kept up with school while our parents fought and our mother cracked up and went to the hospital, not for the first time. When she got out our dad introduced us to Eula Pratt, who would be coming to work for us to help our mom with the chores.
The short version of the story, Dad met Eula’s husband Ezra and one of their sons, Joe, looking up and down Lake Street for jobs. The Pratts were new in town from Mississippi and living in an upstairs half of an old house next to a used car lot, Eula, Ezzie, Joe, JD, Elsie, Melvin, Raymond and Raphael, whom they called Ralph. Dad met the family and interviewed Eula, who was looking for domestic work. Dad wanted somebody steady who would keep up the housework and help mind the kids because it was clear Mom couldn’t keep up on her own and Leenie, Bernie, Molly and I were growing up too fast while Mom regressed and we tried to fill in. Eula was a godsend.
The long version of the story finds the Pratt family in Mississippi. It’s 1960. For no good reason a middle aged couple from Minnesota were driving a dusty backroad near Grenada, Mississippi when they stopped in front of a shanty of a house where kids were playing out front. The couple approached the kids, met the parents. Became acquainted. The couple from Minnesota offered to help them move to Minneapolis if they wanted to leave Mississippi. The Pratts considered the offer and accepted the couple’s gracious generosity and moved to south Minneapolis, where the couple found them housing and schools and networking for jobs. The couple knew somebody who knew somebody who knew my mom and dad, and from their introduction and recommendation Dad discovered the Pratt Family. Eula came to work in white uniform as a domestic Monday through Friday, 8 to 5. Ezzie and JD came around once a week to mow the lawn and do landscaping. Joe or Elsie would drop Eula and pick her up. Sometimes Ralph would ride along, or Melvin — Melvin was a girl, just a little older than me.
Mom from the outset decided Eula’s name was Beulah, and that’s how Mom introduced her to us kids. Eula never corrected her, and the younger ones never really knew. She never insisted on being called Mrs Pratt.
Then again, Eula would slip and call Mom Mrs Sturgis decades after Mom divorced Dad and changed all our names to Kelly.
Eula was a tender loving woman of perpetual patience and immeasurable kindness whose soulful guidance nurtured me and my siblings through the most volatile time of our family, and even if our various outcomes haven’t always turned out lucky, things could only have turned out worse except for the soul and emotional intelligence of Eula Pratt.
Some people are gifted that way, I guess. She just happened to be Black.
Once in a while she would bring her son Raymond and he and I would hang out. Ray and I were the same age. I had a spare mitt my dad rarely used and Ray and I would play catch at the St Simon ball field across the street. We would walk around the neighborhood, climb trees at the Academy of Angels convent, hike around Augsburg Park or go to the library. Or play with stuff in my room. Listen to records. I don’t remember any specific conversations, only a mutual confidence tied to his beloved mom. I likely did most of the talking — I was a chatty young fella and Ray was the quiet type. I didn’t manage to introduce him to my neighborhood friends. All the times showing Ray around my world nobody came out to join up with us. Personally I didn’t mind, Ray was my friend and I almost preferred to keep him to myself, especially if nobody else seemed to care what was going on. I never brought him around to call on anybody.
Maybe I was too proud. Almost vain that I had a Black friend. Of Beulah. Nobody ever razzed me about the Pratts except one of my best pals, Micmac Murphy. “Sturgis has slaves!.” I didn’t answer. Gave him the silent hairy eyeball. He never apologized or mentioned the Pratts again. Nobody else asked about them.
I probably could have spoken up about the things I knew. My Grandma Mary, paternal, taught me about Jack Robinson. I saw the dogs, cops and firehoses on the Pettus Bridge at Selma on TV. I read the evening Star. I knew the Pratts were poor and came north for freedom and opportunity. I knew God created all men equal but some men uncreated other men unequal. And women. Ray and I never talked about any of that as if we were past it. And there was a respect for his privacy why I didn’t ask him personal questions. What he observed from me I hope was a sincere guy trying to be a real friend. Elementary respect. Later in life when we meet we center on asking if each other were doing alright.
Mr Pratt, Ezra, let us call him Ezzie. He mowed our lawn and tended Mom’s flower gardens and bushes and kept the white picket fence painted. His Mississippi drawl, thick as the river south of Memphis, sounded to my ears like he spoke in tongues. He’d say something or ask me something, like for a glass of water, and I’d ask him to repeat and repeat. “Pardon me?” He must have thought I was the dumbest kid he ever met.
The beauty of the Pratt family rests on an organic moral compass that guides their path through life making good of what they got. They wasted not.
A crass example of their success, nobody in the family got shot, and nobody went to jail.
Elder son Joe drove taxi and racked the Star and Tribune for several years. He became a circulation department legend as a territory manager for coin op paper racks. Son JD missed farming and hot weather and returned to Mississippi. Elder daughter Elsie also worked a career at the newspapers, first as VP managing the billing and collections department then the whole of circulation and customer service. She served on several boards, including the YWCA. Melvin had a career in HR, first with Honeywell and then as a recruiter for Medtronics. Ray also moved back south and made a career as Atlanta Fire and Rescue. Ralph the youngest took up computer science and last heard had a pension building up at IBM.
Eula left our family’s employ after about five years. My parents’ divorce shredded our household finances and we could no longer afford her services. She was ready to serve notice. She said she would love to stay on but she needed to separate from us for our own good, especially the youngest ones who seemed to think of her as their mother. So true we depended on her. She taught me and Leenie, Bernie and Molly how to cook stuff using canned goods and eggs, goulash, pancakes and pork chops. How to clean and do laundry. We already had experience changing diapers and shepherding toddlers but she taught us tenderness. As our mother came undone over Eula’s years with us Eula taught us kids independence and resilience as we clung to her to keep our family somewhat whole. Eula raised us to do the right thing. She said she would always check up on us as long as she was On This Earth.
She went on to the hospitality industry in housekeeping at the Leamington and Hilton hotels downtown. She was chosen as main maid when the King and Queen of Sweden visited Minnesota. Ezzie meanwhile made a reputation for himself as a personal landscape gardener and made a good living servicing rich properties. Together almost from the get-go in Minneapolis the Pratts pooled together and bought a house just the hairline above redlining in south Minneapolis. A young adult Elsie bought a house around the corner. Eventually they bought some land back home in Mississippi, where son JD lived and farmed. Melvin eventually assumed the original residence when Eula and Ezzie retired to their place in Grenada, Mississippi, coming back each year in the summer. My family kept in touch, as Eula promised. Through our mom we organized big family picnics at Minnehaha Falls when Eula and Ezzie were in town. Met the grandkids. Once in a while Ray made it back from Atlanta — man he grew up to be a sturdy guy.
My very first experience of the Deep South I was in my early forties and drove down I55 from Illinois to visit Eula at Grenada, when she was in her 80s. It was a February, after Ezzie passed away. I was unable to attend his funeral. Almost by impulse, almost a compulsion I took off solo in our old Oldsmobile at an opportune time for a few days visiting Eula where she actually grew up and started her family. Saw JD, met his wife Janice and Eula’s two surviving sisters. Ate catfish, cornbread and sweet potato pie. Shrimp. She baked me a loaf of her shortbread, the most delicious yellowcake recipe on the planet, which she knew I loved. We talked in her kitchen a lot, though I tried not to wear out my welcome. Her family seemed to be doing well. We watched basketball. She offered me assurances to feel more tenderness and compassion for my mom. She put in a good word for my dad, Mr Sturgis. Said he loved my mom, maybe too much. He had a good heart. I reminded her of him. It was a personal visit not a sociological expedition. Dad had been dead two or three years and I’d almost forgotten how well she probably knew him. My mom. Me.
Janice took us to the Piggly Wiggly and showed me downtown. It was a nostalgic antebellum town square with columns, oaks, grass and statue, hauntingly desolate, storefronts empty. Not the poster picture for the Go Go Clinton economy, though the month was February. Black History Month. Never gave it a thought until March, reflecting back.
Eula and I connected a few more times when Elsie or Melvin or JD would chauffeur her up I55 to I90 in Ezzie’s luxe vintage Lincoln to visit Minneapolis. She never seemed to get old, though she seemed more tired. She’d had both hips replaced, and we all know hips don’t lie. She’d paid her dues in life and as much as anyone deserved a comfortable retirement and golden years. Still she honored me every time with fresh made yellow shortbread cake.
When she passed away I went down to the funeral with my mom and sister Murray, the sibling most likely the one Eula referred to when she spoke about my youngest sisters believing she was their mother. Murray always referred to Beulah as being her Mama. (Not in front of our mother of course.) We stayed at the same hotel as most of the out of town Pratt families so we mixed a lot. Got to join the Electric Slide in the party and event room. Invited to go clubbing with Ray and JD. (Mur and I did, but Mom not.) The funeral service was held at a big church and packed to standing room. We were the only whites in the crowd. Whenever we went with the Pratts we were the only whites. Wherever we went where there were whites there seemed to be few if any Blacks. At the funeral none of us Kellys gave testimony, unless you count Mom getting in a couple respectful Amens during the sermon of eulogy. As if the singing didn’t move me more.
The procession to the cemetery was long and the route convoluted deep into the tangled countryside past scraggly cottonfields of late August. The graveyard itself was a gravel muddy trek among spooky, gnarly woods and Spanish moss. Most of the markers were little wooden crosses and tiny flat stones. Mere ribbons. Some upright gravestones. Ezra and Eula’s gravestone stood up like a monument in this poor and pathetic, shabby Black cemetery. When all was said and done we did not linger to be left behind. We’d rented a car at the Memphis airport and drove on our own. The atmosphere in the Mississippi countryside did not beckon as a place to delight in getting lost, so I gunned it a little to keep up with the car ahead, make correct turns to get back to town. The sight that the couple from the Twin Cities motoring on the backroads found of the Pratt kids seemed clear to imagine that day in Mississippi.
At the church supper afterwards we met cousins and aunts and uncles. The food richly sumptuous. Hospitality exquisite. Murray engaged one of the elder uncles and asked him straight up what it was like back in the day. “You don’t really want to know,” he replied.
In American history class we were taught about Jamestown and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. We never heard about the first slaves brought to Virginia Colony in 1619 or Juneteenth, not even at St Simon of Cyrene. Didn’t know about the Greenwood Massacre of Tulsa until last year. The murder of George Floyd kneed to death by a cop during a misdemeanor arrest in my home town, recorded in detail for just under ten minutes by Darnella Frazier, a high school kid with an iPhone, exposed me with shock to the realization that learning about racism never stops, it can come at me anew at any time. Time and again in my life I complacently allow myself to believe racism is solved and Blacks at last freely enjoy lives that matter just like us whites. Then something happens. Bad shit that can be traced back to slavery.
I read recently a theory there is no such thing as race. What gets attributed to race is merely a linguistic categorization of people by skin. A very popular categorization it seems. People like organizing things by categories. They recognize differences and like them defined. Somebody defined humans in groups by skin and after that came general attributions. Myths. Tropes. Stereotypes. Blocs. Monoliths. Pseudosciences. Slavery. All tracing back to a simple denial of subdermal commonalities among the human race.
Old as time, you say. Who keeps time? Forgive me for my naive optimism as a baby boom liberal to seek evidence racism is dead. Dead at last. Where else can it go, I ask myself. I imagine back in time when the European kingdoms explored the oceans, and then the lands which led to indigenous exploitation. Old Country colonization, the conquest of lands on the planet not in any way previously contiguous to the Old Country, the subjugation of its peoples and establishment of international boundaries, set the eventual table for subsequent armed political strife that continues through the modern day across Africa, where Black people originated in America. Slavery and colonization. My ancestors from my Old Country poached their ancestors from their Old Country and eventually dumped their population in a ditch with barely a clue what to do next. Never taught, never shared education. It is worth noting Haiti got no leg up towards utopia from originating as a slave uprising against a colonial power.
What makes me so sad about being re-woke and re-woked again is it seems to require the people who have lived the nightmare to live it again and again to keep people like me woke up. Once upon a time we sang We Shall Overcome but we never promised when, just One Day.
How soon can we start over? Never. Always something there to remind us. Always another wrong to remedy. One more sorry. Same sorries over again. History sometimes rhymes, repeats and is often redundant.
Race is a phony categorization of people. It will suit historians as a fabricated means to study past behavior but it has no future. Under rule of law alone it is programmed for extinction. Another hundred years and the international diaspora will undermine whatever remains of the privileges of skin. Heritages will be so mixed the dermal qualities that describe people will be irrelevant to social strata and gross demographics. Right here in the right now we got pending issues. The time is obvious. The syllabus is set before us. The dialogue is in progress. There’s no hypothetical debate. Accountability is inevitable. This is the age when the whole wide world sees a Black man die a slow death under the knee of a white policeman on real time video. In my part of town. In my precinct. Let’s lay it all out. If not now, when?
I don’t mean to suggest the Pratt family escaped any form of pain or oppression. (One could suggest working for my family was pain and oppression, or claim just living in my family was painfully oppressive.) It’s not for me to appropriate their family story. I only know them for their family loyalty and reliance and loving responsibility. What I see and admire in them looks like success to me in the kind of normal world I expected to live in when I was young and believed racial bigotry was on its way out the door. The Pratts aren’t the only ones, just the ones I know best, Black whose lives matter to me.
People whom I implore the world to consider in light of the obvious opportunities for reconciliation of society since we all been woke up. The Lost Year of ZOZO included riots that raged and trashed a perfectly nice commercial district and seemed to set off a crime wave of relentless gunfire gone unchallenged and unapprehended. As shots in the arm bring our society out of the covid-19 pandemic, gunshots in the city perpetuate the pandemic of urban armed conflict. No thanks to Derek Chauvin the police powers in the city are being interpreted as neutralized by the armed criminal element. The political movement to defund — defrock, doxy, deconstruct, dismantle — the police department demands a suspension of belief in violent criminality. Beyond reconciliation with the public, reformation of police standards and removing officers unfit to serve, the leaders of this movement imply the police are the cause of crime. As if police cause racism, poverty, ignorance and disregard for civility and human life. They ask you to presume that without police all the criminals would lay down their guns and stop robbing and killing and peace will prevail as citizens duly woke will practice model civic behavior and enforce the rule of law by policing themselves, an honor system backed by folk militia.
Sorry to put a downer on such a beautiful but wild and crazy dream. Anarchy seems so elegant sometimes. It’s made up of so many minute details it’s enticing to ignore all that granular texture and nuance and let it all crash and see what happens. We got a rare glimpse of what happens last January 6.
In Minneapolis we lived through an urban apocalypse last summer when thousands of peaceful protesters could not restrain the impulses of rioters, looters, arsonists and mob fiends who destroyed whole blocks of shops, stores and services at key corridors of the city, including East Lake Street where I live. Some critics say the mayor and the governor dropped the ball being unprepared to deal with the public reaction to the murder of George Floyd, as seen on TV. To think that way you have to back up because nobody in or out of government, in either party, was prepared with any kind of contingency plan what to do in case Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. It turned out, predictably enough, crowds assembled. Social media broadcast the times and places. From my house I watched them trek to the 3rd Precinct. It was on all the news. Cameras from helicopters. Hundreds. Thousands. A lot of them masked and sort of standing apart but all assembling on East Lake Street, in the shopping center parking lot, the avenues around 3rd Precinct police station, which was soon under siege. Speechmakers with mics and amps clearly denounced the police, the precinct, the whole stinking racist department, and what they had for evidence was an almost ten minute video from Facebook proving cops are wanton killers — the speechmakers, make no mistake, articulated deep and abiding loathing for the police. Still the rallies remained peaceful. Some of the crowds pressed close against the fence around the precinct and the cops in riot gear held them off along with the insults and chants.
At this point things could have gone either way. At about sundown, around nine o’clock most of the protesters, demonstrators and rally attendees dispersed back to their homes and cars they parked in the neighborhood. It was the governor’s expressed expectation that all vigils for George Floyd and related demonstrations would be conducted peacefully and there would be no need to jack up the police presence when in fact the police were the subject of all the grief. The governor and the mayor made decisions to minimize police confrontation, let the mob walk all over them to a point just to keep the peace and avoid an explosive situation whereby the police would potentially initiate a violent situation that could result in significant casualties to demonstrators resulting in escalation to mass insurrection. In such a case it is well known the police always win. The governor and the mayor trusted that the peace would hold, that the citizens would help police each other and good Minnesotans would behave responsibly and assemble peaceably.
Then everything went to hell. The insurrectionists took over and broke all the windows, stole anything perceived of value, doused the premises with gasoline and lit the place on fire. All up and down Lake Street, Broadway, the Midway. Chaos. The fire department was overwhelmed and blocked from the scenes. Orders were given to abandon the 3rd Precinct, a bitter defeat to the cops who served there and a blow to morale of all precincts, but they obeyed. The city chose to abandon a police station building than defend it from attack and probably kill some civilians to get it done. Rather than defend the stores and markets and shops and offices of private property by force and probably incur more civilian casualties they fell back and let it burn.
The governor and the mayor bet wrong on trusting the peaceable character of Minnesota citizens not to riot and to restrain those who would. Demonstrators continued to rally, but in the light of day the authorities called in the National Guard, the citizen soldiers, to enforce curfews and maintain order, along with the Park Police, Highway Patrol, the county sheriff, Department of Corrections, federal advisors and suburban law enforcement agencies until the threats at night died down and the city cops regained composure and established equilibrium, if not order.
The aftermath of George Floyd keeps coming around and around, as it always will in some vision or another. As the past is never really passed. Yesterday the uncle of Darnella Frazier, the teenager who recorded the last nine-odd minutes of George Floyd’s life, was killed in a car crash with a city police car engaged in hot pursuit of a felony suspect through a residential neighborhood. Cop t-boned the uncle’s car. If Darnella feels singled out by fate no one would blame her. I hope she and Amanda Gorman correspond.
If this unending feud between Blacks and cops could solve the race card and get on solving the crimes of poverty and ignorance that metaphorically enslave people today and populate the penitentiaries. The racial disparities in Minneapolis have been recognized publicly and fretted about in every way from education to real estate ownership for decades in whispers, so once again it comes out during the pandemic in hi-fi stereo streaming from everywhere and as a culture we are fools if we let this moment of opportunity slip away without reconciliation.
When I look for hopeful signs sometimes I see them. Maybe it’s just apophenia. Or pareidolia. Looking around at video and seeing the demonstrators passing through the neighborhood and minimal personal mingling with masked crowds surveying damage to Midtown, I noticed a lot of the mostly young people — younger than me — were white. Asian, Black and Brown too of course, and Native. White carrying Black Lives Matter signs. I acknowledge it could be racist to look at it this way, but that’s part of the process, recognizing self-consciousness. I want to believe I am not alone in this universe.
She stares at me like she sees me coming a mile away. Five centuries later. She gets me. She’s not into me at all.
She has no eyebrows.
An unremarkable nose, she may as well be masked. Without her famous lips her countenance is an unreadable codex whose eyes are indelibly underrated. She knows exactly what she’s seeing. She’s got a skin bleb by her nose near the corner of her left eye. She’s not hiding anything from anybody.
Bold forehead. Who wears a hairnet in real life?
She’s looking at me from a canister propped on the living room coffee table where I live. The canister contains a jigsaw puzzle of the whole painting, which I’m sure you’ve all seen — Wikipedia and other sources say it is the most recognized painting on the planet. The jigsaw puzzle was a gift from a well-meaning sister who understood how profoundly this portrait by Leonardo Da Vinci affected me, and still does as you can tell. Mona Lisa succinctly defines my epiphany at visiting France the first time — she and Eiffel Tower. I must have raved like a converted apostle because for years people gifted me with refrigerator magnets, trinkets, Christmas tree decorations and kitsch like the jigsaw puzzle, to go along with my own chosen prints and mementos I’ve collected to furnish my home with things to remind me of my life in ways that affirm my memories are based on meaningful experiences. My first ever trip to Europe — which my old friend Jim calls the Old Country — did not transpire until I was a ripe old man of 53. And all this while I acted as if I were a modestly cultured and educated man.
For an American living in the Midwest, as they used to call us in the northern flyover zone. Please do not misunderstand my criticism of my country and my culture as self-loathing of western decadence or anything like that because critical examination requires genuine quality questionings. Being American the last half of the 20th Century was indeed something exceptional, not to squander. Mark Twain might say something like, in America any dumbass bumpkin could wankle an education in just about anything you want to know. Such as how I learned about the world without stepping outside American borders. Somehow trusting the American story. Believing in things like the Great Society. Reading and watching movies. Trading music. Never say I hate America. Why would I hate America? I can be ashamed of mistakes. Slavery and aborigine genocide were not good ideas. For example. Trying to get society reconciled over things like this has preoccupied my lifetime and disaffected social progress at the same time it has made grand progressions which will benefit future generations in ways not yet measured. America is not as dysfunctional as some un-Americans and non-Americans might think.
After several years of hearing how broken and degenerate the country is and how only one man could make it great again, and now confronting what is really broken and degenerate and how it can be repaired and regenerated by multiple people, America emerges from the coronavirus pandemic woke to new paradigms. We think. Nobody kept score who really acted as if We were All in This Together. It’s been a year. Only one year. Mona Lisa on a puzzle canister reminds me of what I miss about this world and how lucky I am to have been where I have been before the borders closed down.
I’m guilty of living most of my life with — dare I say — an American chauvinistic view, and probably still do to the extent of my residing bumpkin-ness. I remind you, I am a Boomer. We left the Old Country — Europe — behind several generations ago and only looked back to write papers to earn degrees in romantic history. I attended American college. Took two years of French. Boodles of art history. Even worked at a world class art museum, the MIA. What need was there to study abroad when exhibitions, books, color plates, lectures and slides brought the seemingly ancient world to your immediate grasp — imagine what it’s like now with the internet? To borrow from Voltaire, I lived in the best of all possible worlds, and it just keeps getting better.
Of course I used to dream, or at least think about, actually going to Paris. Or Provence, as that guy wrote about being there a year. But why? At the same time I privately mocked Eiffel Tower as a cheezy French cliche. A tourist trap. Unwittingly I used to mock the Louvre. At some time in high school (probably in a British movie) I heard somebody refer to the bathroom as the loo. So, sophisticated a teenager as I was I began referring to a trip to the can — the whizzer, the john — as visiting the louvre, and kept doing so — not knowing the difference — until about twelve years ago when we visited Ireland.
I lived content to ignore the Old Country as a trip destination most of my adult life. It was expensive. Unnecessary. Even our heritage didn’t seem that enticing. Then in 2004 Roxanne got the opportunity to attend the international Plant and Animal Genome conference in Dijon, France, sponsored by her employer, the University of Minnesota. Her boss was a distinguished professor and she had been helping him map the genes of various legumes, notably medicago. She co-authored a paper with him which he would present in Dijon and he wanted her there. The university offered to fly them and their spouses and pick up the hotel tabs in Dijon. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. We already had passports from our habitual winter vacations to the tropics. Life as empty nesters seemed to offer Roxanne and me bonus opportunities to travel and mostly we favored the western States. Europe was never unthinkable. Our careers were at comfortable plateaus. This was a big deal for Roxanne and no question she would go, and I was no fool.
The genome conference was in June. We planned to fly in and out of Charles de Gaulle, Paris. We blocked out time before and after the conference in Dijon to explore Paris, Burgundy and Cotes du Rhone. We rented a car and drove around Burgundy in the Cote d’Or. We rode trains in and out of Paris and from Dijon to Lyon. We learned Dijon was once the mustard capital of the world, and the countryside was blazing yellow where it wasn’t red from poppies. Much of the yellow crop is not mustard but canola, locally called rapeseed. Not every farm in France grows wine. We stayed in the medieval town of Bonne. We made a picnic of wine, cheese and baggette.
Except for the day Roxanne and her boss presented their paper, when they snuck me in to watch, while Roxanne attended conference sessions at the civic center I roamed the streets of Dijon ville on foot. Found my way to the duke’s palace art museum and found myself wandering through a hallway gallery with an array of French-made Roman-style sculptures with their penises lopped off and emerged facing a masterpiece naked lady painting by James Tissot.
I found myself enchanted in a strange land not much different from my own where people talked in tongues everywhere. After work we dined with scientists Roxanne and her boss and his spouse met up with at the conference, people from elsewhere, nobody exclusively talking shop. It was cool seeing Roxanne mixing with big league scientists.
The enchantment started in Paris. I will try to keep it brief. Jet lag from the overnight flight dazzled our impressions transporting from the habitrail of the airport terminal, by bus to the train platform, train into the city, taxi from Gare du Nord to our hotel on the Left Bank, the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne in the early afternoon sunshine practically blew our minds. How do you say wow in French and really mean it? The neighborhood around the hotel thrived with people with backpacks and scarves. The scent on the sidewalk smelled like no other urban mix of odors, aromas. The architecture was a complete city of intrinsic grandeur reserved back home for knockoff neighborhoods. It wasn’t Kansas. We witnessed by our trek from the airport the layered exoticism of Paris. To arrive at our Sorbonne hotel with rather gentle ease is testament to research and preparation in the Google Age and owes the rest to the intuitive accessibility of Paris to itself. Once checked in and secure in our room we took a nap to process our trust.
It’s a place you would rather not spend valuable time napping, so we found time our first day to meander the Champs Elysees around six, which in June is still very sunny, to the Arc de Triomphe. The scale of the Arc itself impressed me. I knew it was monumental, and it has been replicated repeatedly in other cities at affordable scale — knockoffs everywhere — but this one in Paris would be a fortress palace anywhere else. That day we could pay a toll and walk up the stairs to the roof, where we first saw Eiffel Tower in the distance, aglow in silhouette across the plain of city. Arc de Triomphe also stands at the center of the biggest and most dangerous traffic roundabout in the western world, so bad drivers need extra insurance to drive it, there are tunnels underneath it to cross for pedestrians and a train station underneath the middle to take you completely away under the Seine.
Seeing Eiffel Tower on the skyline from Arc de Triomphe scared me a little. From that distance it seemed bigger than I anticipated. Paris is not a high rise city. There are skyscrapers in the Pompidou district, but within the heart of Paris the monumental qualities of the dated buildings project a broad cultural character not a vertical one. Even a standout like the Pantheon projects a rounded girth. Like the white Sacre Coeur church the Pantheon stands on a hill. Eiffel Tower stands on a plain. Plain of Mars by name, translated. You used to be able to meander freely in an open plaza underneath its four legs. We took the train to the RER station along the Seine. Funny how the closer you get to Eiffel Tower the least you see it. From a distance in certain areas of Paris it pops up or pops out or even hangs with you like the moon. The closer you come the more the neighborhood buildings obscure it. Then you come to the plaza and voila!
There it was. The most beautiful human made object I had ever seen. Simple. Elegant. Structural. Abstract. Immense. Half made of air. The lattice work of iron girders all holding itself up like hips and shoulders into the sky dizzified me to behold from underneath. So big. Once upon a time the tallest building on the planet. I didn’t know that before.
Its design ridiculed as a cursed blight on the City of Light. Erected in 1887 for the Paris World’s Fair on a promise to tear it back down the way it went up after the Fair was overwith, Eiffel Tower made a hit and allowed to stay. I suddenly understood. It was a mind-blowing work of genius. Never mind how many times it’s been copied — Disney, Las Vegas, Prague — there is nothing so powerful to behold as the original. To ascend on one of the elevators up the legs or towers to rise up to the first of the three floors. To walk around the concourse, ascend the next elevators to mosey around the second deck, or climb stairs to the top for the ultimate view of Paris. At every level the latticework holding us together condensed into finer compacted strands like a steel net, half air.
It’s romantic to share a kiss with your true love at the top of Eiffel Tower. To look below and beyond, to the Seine, down river to the tiny island where a little Statue of Liberty stands. To find the other landmarks like Notre Dame, Musee d’Orsay, Pantheon, Louvre, Invalides, Sacre-Coeur, Arc de Triomphe and savor the view. I remember telling myself this may never happen again. As it turns out I’ve been back five or six times.
The Champ de Mars stretches for several blocks from Eiffel Tower away from the river. Flat and grassy it makes ideal picnic grounds — too ideal, they have to sequester stretches of it to allow grass to grow back. From the far end of Champ de Mars the full view of Eiffel Tower can be appreciated unobstructed and without straining your neck. It’s still difficult to appreciate how many people are always up there on the decks of the tower too tiny in scale to be perceived from the ground for all that steel. Too bad the plaza directly below the tower is closed off from arbitrary moseying. It used to be a melting pot, part bazaar and part carnival. Now they have landscaped the plaza area with shrubs, rocks and water and fenced it off so only people with tickets to the tower elevators can queue. It’s worth every euro.
So too a trip to the Louvre, if just to see Mona Lisa. When I first saw her she was installed at a cul de sac wing in the Italian Renaissance gallery, one way in and one way out. She’s a very small painting, 20 by 30 inches. Today they have her displayed alone in a wide gallery where crowds can sprawl past in an orderly way and maybe get a closer angle or linger without getting as crushed as in her old gallery.
At the time Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code was tremendously popular. I’d read it and found it compelling. I was a fan of Mary Magdeleine and got a kick out of finding her small pyramid below the Louvre’s big outdoor pyramid at the modern entrance, her supposed resting place, the Holy Grail. The novel piqued my interest in Leonardo’s imagery, less for the Christian conspiracy theories than the precise pictography of his brush strokes.
The gentleness of his faces and gentility of his human forms in the geometry of physics virtually levitated his subjects among the dignity of the divine. Mona Lisa Gioncondo, bourgeois wife of a silk merchant, receives the treatment of a saint. She sits with us with hands in repose. Perhaps we are on her terrace in Tuscany. She is modestly dressed in what first appears to be drab threads but when examined closer have a subtly dyed fine quality and tapestry. She wears her hair combed long, straight and uncomplicated past her shoulders. She is not glamorous. We don’t see her ears. As I said, she has no eyebrows. She does possess a soul. Leonardo created her to emote a radiance transcending even womanhood beyond eons.
Most mavens attribute her mysterious allure to her smile. I credit Leonardo for his animated study of lips. In his Last Supper he catches apostles mid sentence. His John the Baptist might be on the verge of laughing. His foreboding picnic in the caves, Our Lady of the Rocks, both versions, depict the characters sharing a little holy mirth, holy fun. Mona Lisa’s lips definitely smile. Deliberately and freely.
In the days of the Old Masters, nobody smiled for portraits. They thought it made them look stupid. Foolish. Life was a bitch to be endured. Only serious people deserved recognition for posterity. Mona Lisa defies the rule of solemnity with a spontaneous spark of humanity ahead of her time.
For me, though, I am captured by her eyes. First of all, in the painting’s old gallery I first caught sight of her through and over a dense crowd which obscured her lower face. There she was, looking right at me across a crowded room. Looking at me with the gift of sight. Looking with the sense of seeing. Then came the smile as I crept closer. Her delicate hands. Those eyes would not let go. I jostled to the front of the rope line. Like Eiffel Tower she was too much to take in at a flash moment. The museum staff hustled those of us who lingered too long to move on and let others get a glimpse. I obliged and recirculated back into the flow for second and third approaches until a guard in uniform gave me a dirty look my fourth time, when I staggered out of the cul de sac with one look back at those eyes.
I’ve been back to the Louvre a few more times since, always to see Mona Lisa. And I always reconnoiter within the crowd to get at least three times at the front of the rope to get as close as I can to see Leonardo’s brush strokes to have created such an exquisite picture with paint. On a wood panel. It’s still such a tiny painting for such a big room but like a great singer she deserves an arena. Lost in the background the road winds through the valley and woodland over her shoulders, the landscape in soft focus. Depth of field. Mona Lisa’s eyes could be looking across that valley but instead she chooses to engage yours truly. To keep me honest.
At home we have never assembled her jigsaw puzzle. I’m not that obsessed. Not even curious how much time it might take. Not even during the covid lockdown. Never took it out of the canister. The canister resides on the coffee table. Mona Lisa’s eyes rise up like a periscope amid the sea shells, stones, books, magazines, tiny statuary and toddler toys. She faces me on the couch, where I read and daydream. I am self-conscious of being observed, being watched. Being judged. Absent her approving smile she’s the apotheosis of Cheshire Cat.
ZOZO is the name I give the year gone by. Was ZOZO a lost year?
Seventeen years ago I found myself in Paris. First time in Europe. Visiting the Old Country. My lost and found. My lo and behold.
A continent I’d written off as a jaded and jealous sepulcher of a culture as morbid as the Latin language, in not just two weeks of grudging exposure to mere France but from the first day, almost instantaneously I realized to my stunned surprise I was wrong.
I held too many false assumptions to enumerate but they essentially linked my mentality to an unforgiving notion that America came into being of its own accord as a sovereign idea displaced from the European world, as if the collective memory of human civilization were re-synthesized within a grand think tank called the United States of America. There was little allowance for the staggering accumulation of generations, of ages and epochs to seed and weave infrastructure to feed and frame human societies and guide them in the light of beauty.
I was awestruck by Paris and my epiphany inspired existential awareness of my surroundings motivated by the sense that I may never get another opportunity. Twice we visited the Cathedral of Notre Dame that trip. It stands on an island in the Seine called Ile de la Cite. Started in 1163, completed about two hundred years later it has stood more than 850 years. For its high arched vaulted ceiling, its prolific stained glass windows and flying external buttresses to ease stress on its walls, Notre Dame is the seminal example of Gothic architecture. Visitors amassed in a procession up the aisle on the right side of the immense nave, the central place of people’s pews, proceeded in a loop behind the altar and back along the left aisle to the exit at the main door. There was no sense of rush. Time seemed to stop. That undefined aroma of Paris I now associate with Europe was infused with scent of frankincense. The vaulted arches high above seemed to aim at eternity and I touched the massive stone pillars as if to steady my giddiness. The narrow, vertical stained glass windows above the aisles depicted no Bible figures but distinctly different geometric patterns as if to illustrate the universe as optical physics. The round rose windows glorified light by bursting with color. The acoustics resounded with hushed holiness, solemn whispers. Prayer. I lingered, even backtracked against the flow of the procession and cut across the transept, the t-section in the middle of the basilica floor plan, to see and feel the place from the middle and from side to side. I sat in a chair in the nave — in the old days there were no pews, the congregation stood and knelt on the stone floor — amid the rows of wooden folding chairs, just to take it in and absorb the whole endeavor, to contemplate its design and construction so many centuries ago. For all its intent and purpose it exalted the idea of a place of worship, of soul-searching epitome of human yearning for divine inspiration, the churchiest church I had ever seen.
A mosey around the exterior was always a nice catharsis to being inside. The buttresses come flying at you from the pinnacles over the windows and land in a grassy park surrounding the cathedral along the river. The grand old lady is not glamorous from the outside but she is distinct. The sculptured facade and twin bell towers render it irreproduceable, along with its famous gargoyles on the roof haunting our souls below. As it turned out I have made maybe ten more visits to Notre Dame since then, each time with loyal reverence, some times to just pop in to say hello to the shrine of Joan of Arc. Everyone knows about the fire in the oak timber attic that almost immolated the grande dame in the spring of 2019. April 15. Watched it on CNN. Wept thinking about the first time and how it made me pay attention as if I may never get to be there again. Roxanne and I passed through Paris in September that year and found ourselves shocked to see the cathedral standing whole to all appearances and the double bell tower facade clear of soot or scorch marks.
Of course a big part of Ile de la Cite was cordoned off, and access to the St Michel metro station congested, access to the other little island on the Seine Ile Saint-Louis was comromised, one of the famous Paris bridges across the Seine was closed, the plaza out front of the cathedral where you might once imagined busy with tourists and Esmeralda dancing to Gypsy jazz guitar is fenced off to the public. Needless to say we were unable to mosey around the perimeter. As close as we could get on the commercial side of the street, the chain link fence kept everybody off the sidewalk on the cathedral side of the street. Broken gargoyles collected in the margin along the walls. Plywood implied aftermath of disaster but it was clear, Notre Dame survived the fire and would be restored. In time.
Our fateful inability to make a proper visit inside the cathedral the year before last resonates the more when pondering the inability of anyone to go anywhere including Cathedral of Notre Dame Paris the year of ZOZO. Since I retired in 2014 my mantra response to get a life has been to use free time to live in a wide world. That first trip courtesy of my scientist wife Roxanne only lit up our want to visit Europe again. It’s one thing to see an image from a photo on a screen or in a book, and to read about its origins, but there is something very special in seeing an original painting and being close enough to see the brushstrokes. To walk the streets of a city celebrated by a time called the Belle Epoque and feel as if it still is. To stand on the Plain of Mars and view the whole Eiffel Tower and think, I been to the top. Let’s go again. We’ve kissed at the top. Why stop?
Takes getting around to it. Takes saving our money. A few years after France we went to Ireland, and that was a blast. We talked about maybe Italy or England. Then two years before I retired our daughter Michel’s family moved to Switzerland on assignment of her husband Sid’s work. Our daughter and grand daughters went from across town to a quarter of the globe away.
Not getting any younger and unwilling to surrender our grandchildren’s childhood Roxanne and I gave ourselves permission to visit them as often as possible. With their consent, of course. And whenever we went to Switzerland we extended our trips to explore more of Europe. Factoring the air fare and how may hours it took to fly it didn’t pay to merely spend a week. The next six years (not counting year ZOZO) we made nine trips. The Kysylyczyns, Michel, Sid and the kids, moved back home to Minneapolis after four years. After that Roxanne and I went two more times sans Switzerland.
We averaged a month each visit. We took family road trips with the Kysylyczyns to Germany, France and Italy. On our own we took trains, planes and boats from Madrid and London to Athens via Zurich. The kids taught us how to ride Swiss transit, and if you can ride Swiss rail you can ride trains everywhere (it’s not hard). I retired from my job about two years into the Kysylyczyns’ Swiss residency and had unlimited time to travel. Roxanne had enough accumulated vacation she could take off for weeks and weeks, and in two years after me she retired too. Roxanne told people we were on a senior backpacking tour, although we lugged suitcases on wheels and didn’t subscribe to any formally institutionalized fraternal itinerary. We are not wealthy but we could not afford at this place in our lives to not take every advantage of opportunities to mosey around Europe. It was worth every europenny. Worth every Swiss franc.
We have ascended Eiffel Tower with our grandchildren. Made visits and lit votives at Notre Dame, once while the choir sang a chant. With Clara and Tess, alias Sparkles and Kitty. We held hands so we wouldn’t get separated on our way to the rope in front of Mona Lisa together. They are both teenagers now. They’ve been in Minneapolis five years if you include ZOZO. While they lived in Europe they were little kids. Kitty left America at age four and came back nine. Clara left at seven and came back 12. No telling if time not spent with them those four years could ever have been made up later, it just seems much nicer to know them now and not have to compensate for lost years. Still, they have no idea how much fun they have given us or what it means to us to experience everyday life along with them.
The pandemic separation has been hard, but not as hard as depending on Skype once a week. As a family we’ve distanced, but we’ve pushed the boundaries to greet in person within limited intervals. If not due make up lost time we try to keep up, and it’s working. It helps when we as a family live in the same metro. We remain healthy. Above a certain age we are vaccinated. We wear masks in public. We plan ahead to vacation together in June in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado for summer solstice. It’s not about Europe so much with Clara and Tess any more. Still, I owe them for enabling me and Roxanne to go where we went, some places more than once. Here we are in our advanced age doing everything to educate them and provide guidance and raise them right as they mature, when it was they as children who provided for me an exquisitely elegant education in my advanced age.
Looking back beyond ZOZO when the borders were open seems like a Golden Age. For a Lost Year so much was gained in spite of great sacrifice. To have survived says something. Never before in my life have I been sincerely glad to say it could have been worse. Surviving ZOZO without international catastrophe means something. Humanity took a beating and persevered. Somehow democracy at the ballot box defeated authoritarian thugs in the USA. Free enterprise and innovation teamed with liberal government to sustain the economy and maintain a formidable standard of living against a vicious pandemic. Events proved Black Lives Matter. Science developed safe and efficient anti-covid vaccines in the nick of time, not to mention developed life saving treatments along the way. All this happened on our watch. We all witnessed this.
Last September I had hoped we would be in Portugal, but it didn’t happen. My sad loss. At least you may have noticed I don’t use being-a-prisoner metaphors for the pandemic restrictions, and am careful not to whine about deprivation of constitutional rights. I’m a rich world victim of these circumstances and suffer minor inconveniences compared to a big gulp of the population. I haven’t had a job in seven years and thus suffered no loss of income nor the ignominy of loss of importance and purpose, I’m already there and it makes no difference to me, by choice. We skipped Mexico this winter, needless to say. We got cell service, wi fi, cable TV, newspaper and magazine delivery, postal service, retail deliveries and food and groceries for call ahead pick-up. Roxanne subscribes to digital books from the public library. I have books I got for Christmas I haven’t read yet. Pens and paper. Stamps. I have three stereo systems and umpteen records, CDs and digital songs. This is the 14th largest radio market in America, if that still counts for anything. Not to mention some world news events over the Lost Year took place just blocks from our house, you cannot say I’m isolated in an Ivy Tower, unaware and unwoken to what’s happening. I’m saying I’m not punished by the dynamics or suffering the consequences of society’s clash with covid-19. I live the Life o’ Riley compared to a lot of people. I can charge charitable contributions to my credit card for cash back points but that doesn’t compare to the fates of the people who may benefit from my left handed quasi-tithing. Being stuck at home throughout ZOZO wasn’t so bad. Could have been worse.
I had to skip Mexico and Portugal, and probably Basque Spain, Brittany and Paris too, and that’s my tra lee tra la. Forced to stay home at our urban cabin and edify ourselves. Roxanne overwhelmingly most often volunteered to go out into the world for supplies and I literally laid low like a fugitive. Not so much on the lam as more like on the goat. Roxanne used errands like groceries to get out and found every excuse to bring Caribou coffee drinks to the Kysylyczyn’s, whereas I didn’t relish even a drive along the creek parkway — keeping in mind I am not a winter animal. It never bothered me that they canceled the Minnesota State Fair. I hibernated. I daydreamed of walking along the river Seine from the Louvre to Eiffel Tower. That smell, that aroma of Europe, the je ne sais quoi. I look up from the couch and lock eyes with Mona Lisa, aka La Joconde.
Our first morning in Paris I went from our hotel down around the block to get two coffees at the Sorbonne MacDonald’s on Rue St Michel across from the Luxembourg Gardens. Roxanne was still asleep so I figured I had a little time, so I crossed at the light and peered into the park beyond the iron gate where we would eventually explore. I crossed back towards MacDonald’s and saw a tall, elegant woman coming the other way in the crosswalk striding towards me in a long black leather trenchcoat — Serena Williams. We made eye contact as we passed. It took me a few French seconds to realize who she was and why I knew her. The French Open was happening somewhere across town. When you meet Serena Williams crossing the boulevard of St Michel in Paris you know you are going to have a good day.
Another good omen that first morning was discovering a sidewalk cafe on St Michel facing Luxembourg Gardens called Rostand, namesake of Edmund Rostand, creator of Cyrano de Bergerac and his beloved Roxanne.
Woof woof baa. Cockatoo.
As we emerge from the pandemic caves and try to somehow go right back where we left off at normal, we’re left accounting for ZOZO the Lost Year as if we really missed opportunities and got screwed at the pump. I may never get another opportunity this big to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace cover to cover. Such is my persistent American bumpkin lack of classical education. In truth, I’ve evaded it this long, there’s always another beach vacation in the future, so long as there’s a future. We emerge with another chance at the good life. It’s springtime. Rebirth. Resurrection. Reconciliation. Rehab. Renaissance. The Summer of ’21 promises who knows what? It’s safe to say Portugal is out of the question this year, I hate to concede. The Louvre is locked tight. Maybe now is the right time to read a classic Russian novel. While exploring the American West. My existential time and attention span has been validated. From here on, as they say, it’s all gravy. So what if my daily moseying experiences evoke reminiscences of past travels and memories of other things in my life that went well. Someday perhaps I will mosey with Roxanne down La Rambla in Barcelona and run into Shakira, I should live so well.
For now the Old Country doesn’t want us back. It’s an odd way to practice national isolationism but even the Schengen Zone of the EU has imposed restrictions of cross border travel. Until it opens back up there’s consolation in souvenirs and memories. An exhibition of hyper-enlarged color photos of all the panels of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Mall of America will have to do for the time being, and two things bring joy to such a pedestrian occasion: the Mall is open to the public again, if at limited capacity, and Rox and I have toured the Vatican a couple times and have a feeling for what we were looking at up close in the exhibition.
It wasn’t the real thing, but when you visit the real chapel in the Vatican the ceiling paintings are high up and far away and have to be appreciated at a distance, Michelangelo’s intent, and be read as a whole. The MOA exhibition presented wall sized panels of very decent detail quality to give a look of getting a scaffold-eye view of brush strokes. Isn’t this a touristy cliche attraction to beat all? Now with the Vatican and a bunch more supermuseums closed for covid-19 these facsimile shows can deliver fine art from the Old Country to your virtual doorstep. Cheaper, of course.
ZOZO was a hard year but not as lost as people say. For some of us though we shall be struggling against another kind of long-hauler syndrome just adjusting back into society in our very own home town. To resist the indifference to seek approval or even acceptance among other people. It’s been proven this past year the world — the cosmos, the universe — the Old Country as well as America — gets along just the same without my meddling. Still I stand vigilant to meddle if nominated and elected. I’m a face in the crowd of my own home.
Terrorism is the unlawful use or threat of violence against the state or the public as a political means of attack or coercion.
Last month the American Department of Homeland Security issued a general warning of imminent and credible threats of attacks against the United States by domestic insurgents. In addition to investigations of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol January 6, the DHS is monitoring chatter posted on the internet and social media praising the insurrection and calling for more blood, including the assassinations of public servants.
We used to dismiss such rants as by wackos and hecklers too far beyond the pale of the lunatic fringe (on both sides) to think they and their ideas could hold sway with mainstream citizens. It turns out the Republican Party is so beholden to these terrorists it has taken means to censure party members who denounce them or their leader, Donald J Trump.
Impeached a second time, this time for inciting the insurrection just two weeks from leaving office, it appears that he may again be acquitted by trial in the Senate because enough Republican senators are so afraid of angry mobs and death threats they will not vote to convict him. These senators fear terroristic retribution if they hold Trump accountable for siccing a violent mob against Congress for the purpose of overturning the election he lost fair and square.
Several of these Republican senators attempted by legislative process to overturn the election in the same procedure January 6 that was in progress when the insurrection invaded the Capitol, when the joint Congress met to certify the state electoral college votes. The mob and those senators were complicit in their coup attempts to force the reversal of the election results based on Trump’s big lie the election was stolen from him by massive vote fraud. The terrorist mob was motivated by their belief in Trump. The senators all know better than to believe Trump but they believe in his sway over 74 million voters, and especially the power of untold countless followers who use their First Amendment rights to commit murder and mayhem to subvert the very Constitution that protects them. Those Republican senators, and more than a hundred and forty Republican members of the House of Representatives, know better, and if they are not in direct collusion with the domestic terrorists they are very much afraid of them.
Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to name just three must be scared witless for their lives, you can see the fear disguised as neologic as they explain away the moral issues of contesting the election this way so they don’t offend the terrorists. Talk about politically correct. Talking the Trump line to keep a block of violent voters from turning away towards someone else in their party amounts to intellectual cowardice and moral turpitude. These are men supposed to be conservative leaders and good examples. Look what examples they are led by.
In the House the minority leader Kevin McCarthy made a speech holding Trump accountable for sedition against the Capitol in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection. Then he turned around and cuddled up to Trump at Mar a Lago. He must be more scared of future threats than he was when he himself took shelter during the siege. A newly elected representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, retweeted a post advocating putting a bullet in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head with a “like” and has harassed kids who survived school shootings, calling them fakes. McCarty put her on the education committee. House members are spending their resource allowances on body armor and have expressed fear of some fellow congresspersons who carry guns to work who refuse to go through metal detectors to enter House chambers.
At the rally on the 6th Trump directed the crowd to go to the Capitol and fight like hell to overturn the election. He explicitly offered to go with them, although he went back to the security of the White House instead to watch the insurrection on TV. Was he appalled by the horror? No. Some aides say privately he was stricken with glee. Did he direct a tweet on Twitter to stop the attack, stand back and stand down? No. Did he even have the decency to phone his vice president, bunkered down within the Capitol, to inquire if he was okay? No. As the attack dissipated and reinforcement authorities reclaimed the Capitol, Trump put out a hastily recorded video telling the mob to go home in peace. He called them beautiful and said he loved them.
That’s treason. He must be convicted of impeachment and never allowed to hold public office again.
Worse than any Deep State, the country is rife with sleeper cells of militias who hearken to 1776 as they plot more armed treason. Insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol threatened to lynch the vice president. They are enabled by Republicans afraid to repudiate them and their lying beliefs the election was stolen and they must overturn it by force. Leaders who say impeachment only creates disunity are really saying they fear more insurrection if the truth be told. They are becoming the party equivalent of Al Qaeda. That’s what the Q in QAnon stands for, lies and terrorism.
All directed by a delusional charlatan shaman showman who rules by lies, who commands legions. Mar a Lago is the new Tora Bora. Donald J Trump is America’s Osama Bin Laden.
Buffalo Kelly 