Music

Chicago, 1928

I am between the River and the Lake. I am between the devil and the deep blue sea. Isn’t it romantic? Here in the place where Sinatra saw a man dance with his wife? In the sweet home. In Chicago? I am here where my father was born, and where my mother was born. And where their parents were born, save the old Swede. I am back in this sandy city full of old ghosts living and dead that trail me and show their faces at the most unexpected turns, and I am thinking about a day before I was born. I am thinking about several days, actually.

There is a story that may be apocryphal, but which ought to be true, because it speaks to something about America that I wish to believe. It begins in my mind with Louis Armstrong. Not the 1960s Louis whose mugging and sweating and commercialism I grew up confused by. But the young Louis. The Louis who had come up from New Orleans six years earlier, when he was only twenty-two, his first time off the river, and who had blown the doors off of the windy city. The Louis who is smiling, sure, but it’s a smile on a fighter’s body, the body of the boy who grew up in Storyville, who was arrested as a child and sent to reform. The Louis you can hear in those Hot Five and Hot Seven records, whose playing draws the breath out of your soul, hitting rhythms, hitting notes, hitting notes of emotion, that you can hardly believe you are hearing. That Louis. It starts with him.

And he is in a hotel in the South Side of Chicago. And in my memory of this story, he has rented out the entire floor. Because he is living large – twenty-seven years old and already the king. But he has taken the floor also because of security. Because he is about to do something that he cannot imagine. That he cannot imagine, and yet cannot die without enjoying. I see him, on this hot August day in Chicago, where Augusts are often as hot as any on the Delta, in his shirt sleeves. I see him in a hardbacked chair. I see the sweat on his smooth forehead, not yet creased by time. I see those eyes, watchful and alert and always on fire. I hear the knock at the door.

And I see Bix Beiderbecke walk in. Oh, Bix. What can you say about him to someone who has no ears to hear? That listening was like sin? That it just sounded like fun? Even on the sad songs? He would have been, at this point, a little past his prime, though he would have been only twenty-five. Three years hence, he’d be gone, the alcohol and the touring and the frustration finally winning out. But I like to think that he would have been right at the top of his game this week. Because this was the prize. To play with Louis – with whom he could not share a bandstand or a recording studio or a cup of coffee. Because this was America in 1928, and blacks and whites did not do those things.

I can see Bix walking through the door, shy, though I have no reason to think he was. I see him in a suit, because that’s almost the only way I’ve ever seen him. I see him putting down his trumpet case. Louis standing up. Them shaking hands. Louis surveying him, like a fighter, and then breaking out into his famous smile. And Bix laughing, still shy, nervous, embarrassed. I can see a bottle on a table, Louis seeing Bix see it, offering him some. Bix accepting, swallowing, and sighing deeply, because it would not have been the bathtub gin he was used to. It would have been real whiskey. Because Louis was the king.

And then they played. And my heart leaps at the thought of it. At what it must have sounded like. At what magic that hotel room must have born witness to. Was it like anything the two of them had ever heard? Was it like anything we have heard since? There’s a part of me, of course, that likes to think that they pushed each other to places the rest of the world would not hear for decades. Imagine “So What?” coming out of a hotel window in August of 1928. Imagine “A Night in Tunisia”. Such playing would have had the power to charge the air, would have altered the very molecules of every breeze it drifted on, out of that window, on to the streets, changing the DNA of every living thing that it blanketed – the knowing, the unknowing, the believing or unbelieving, the hearing or unhearing, the born and the yet to be born and especially those in the very act of birth itself. Like my father, that very week, in that very city.

Rolling Down the Driveway

Not me and my brother in the 1960s

Once upon a time there was a rental car in the driveway of our home on Long Island – the house I lived in from about the age of three to the age of five. The rental car belonged, temporarily, to my father. That is, he had driven it home from work, I think. And there are two important aspects to this fact. The first is that, although I am at a loss to describe the particulars of why my father had gotten into the habit of driving rental cars home from work at that time, I am certain that it was a habit, albeit a temporary one. I believe this because we were allowed to play in it. And because there were rules aforethought. For example, we could pretend to drive, but we could only touch the steering wheel and the turn signal. Not the lighter. Not the shift. Not the radio. And not the brake. So much for foreshadowing.

The second aspect to the rental car was that although it was part of a habit, it was still fairly new and magical to us – exciting and intriguing enough in those pre-cable-television, pre-video-game, almost-dawn-of-electricity times we lived in, to want to entertain ourselves with it on a Saturday morning.

So Andrew and I climbed in and one of us “drove” while the other sat in the passenger seat (the “death seat”, my friend would later call it after the jaws of life cut him out of it one day in Connecticut, and then we’d switch. And what did “driving” consist of? Mostly turning that enormous steering wheel as much as we could (and it was enormous in those days, those recently fin-less, newly seatbelted, somehow un-padded dashboard days), and flipping the turnsignal up and down, as we shifted across whatever we thought America was.

Which leads me to a word about geography. Our house was accessed by a very steep driveway which was perpendicular to the street we lived on. At the top of the driveway was a plateau, on the right side of which was the garage, which was attached to the house. So, practically speaking, you backed out of the garage onto the plateau, and then turned to head steeply down the driveway to the street, which itself sloped steeply from right to left. My father had parked his rental car “nose-in” on the plateau; apparently, he’d simply driven it up the driveway and parked. So it pointed towards our backyard, and away from the steeply sloping driveway behind it.

Now, I cannot say I was scared when the car first began to roll down the hill backwards. I cannot say with clarity exactly what feeling I had. But some part of me instinctively likens it to that moment when you lean too far back in your chair, when that infinitesimal organ in your inner ear flips the balance switch and says “uh-oh”. A tiny panic of great foreboding. I cannot say what Andrew’s reaction was. On the one hand, he tends to be less emotional than I am. On the other hand, he was two.

I do remember bouncing, however. And I remember slow motion, like astronauts in a flight simulator. I can see Andrew floating and bouncing along the bench of the front seat. Me bouncing from the front seat to the back seat and back again, as if we were traversing ten miles of bad road, instead of rolling gently off of the newly blacktopped plateau at the top of our driveway and down the steep incline unstoppably towards the perilously steep street below.

There is, as with all stories of this kind, some disagreement about what happened next. Or rather, about how what happened next happened. But someone (me, Andrew, Maradona) turned the steering wheel, diverting the car sharply to the right, careening it off of the driveway and across the front yard that our parents were planting ivy in, and into a tree, which, as far as I am concerned, was planted by God moments before, solely for the purpose of stopping us that day. Had it not, or had we not turned, we’d have accelerated down the driveway and either crashed into the house across the street, or roamed left and headed further down the street, gaining speed, gaining momentum, bouncing and bounding like members of Apollo, coming to a sudden crashing halt somewhere less forgiving than the Pacific Ocean.

And yet, somewhere in there, I have this dim, split second image of my father. He is standing in a sweaty t-shirt and some horrible, paint-spattered pants. His hands are covered in dirt up to the middle of his forearms. He is wearing those classic tortoise shell spectacles he favored during the Johnson administration. And he is looking at me in just the way I looked at the television when the towers came down. What exactly am I seeing? How does this make sense? What part of this story have I missed that will make it make sense to me? Is this what incredible means?

On the Pocahontas Trail, Part Two

On the road in Virginia

Are the people of the earth less numerous than the stars in the heavens? Probably. I don’t know. I don’t know the numbers of the stars, the numbers of the people, I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know your dreams or your fears or your hopes. I don’t know what sounds wake you up in the morning, or what ones gently caress you to sleep at night. Such is the relationship between the writer and the written to.

And if something as intimate as this ­– where the voice and volatility of one human being are inserted and enflamed in the mind of another – if this relationship no longer engenders a meaningful connection, then what hope is there for any bond between the rest of us human beings who walk the streets, the highways and the sidewalks? None. You would have to agree that the smart money is on none.

So here is a story that flies in the face of the smart money. That pays off on the dark horse while sense goes wanting.

I am standing on a sagging wooden porch, in a withering front yard beside a grey road on the verdant peninsula finger that points from Williamsburg to Norfolk. I am knocking on an ancient peeling door as the rain starts and stops behind me, as unsure of its intentions as I am of mine.

To be clear, I am not a talker. That is, left to my own devices, I prefer to leave people to their own devices. I prefer not to invade their personal spaces and I am respectful of their privacy to the point of excess. Where I picked up a mode of conduct that is probably better suited to the nineteenth century than to this one is anyone’s guess.

To be standing here at all is something of a high wire act. A sort of dare. A string of questions that, individually, seem innocuous enough, but when strung together elevate exponentially the anxiety of such an exercise. Would I ever drive back to this part of the country in the first place? And if I did, would I seek out this house? Would I even be able to find it? And if I did drive and seek and find, would I actually stop the car and knock on the door? And would they be home? And would they answer? And would I stay around long enough to find out

I can hear them in there, talking, and without thinking I knock again – not sure if they haven’t heard me or if they have heard me and are merely discussing among themselves the reasons why a white man might be standing on their porch in the pouring rain. A white man with his white wife, while their white daughter waits patiently in the new car which he has in explicably parked in their driveway.

Cynthia, standing next to me, is nervous. Or maybe she is just being friendly. I have never been very good at telling the difference. She turns ever so slightly away from the door and considers the road, the embankment, the front yard where our car had finally come to rest nearly three-and-a-half years earlier. When the people of this house, and of the houses gathered around us in the shadow of thee Zion, good cheer of the yuletide still clinging to their clothes like the aroma of sweet hearth smoke, pushed, pulled, prodded, provoked, until they were coated in a fine patina of rich Virginia bottomland, and until my car was successfully extricated from their front yard.

So I am here to say thank you. To offer my appreciation and some small trinkets of gratitude. That’s all, all these years later. Thank you for coming out of your house on that miserable day and helping a stranger. Me.

And then the door opens and I see a vision of delight in their smiling faces. I see them slowly recall that day, bashful at their generosity. And as I hear myself explain this journey and why I’m here, and as I see their unbidden affection, I recall what the old man said about business. And I realize that those aren’t chains I hear, but the improbable connecting. And I realize as they tell me that I was raised right, that even if our paths never cross again, we are countrymen, and so will be for ever and ever.

On the Pocahontas Trail, Part One

Not my car, Christmas 2004

I am a very good driver. This must be distinctly understood. And I understand that by stating this, I have violated the first rule of very good drivers. Because, the conventional wisdom goes, people who are very good drivers don’t have to proclaim it. Like fight club.

Furthermore, I am also aware that very bad drivers will similarly proclaim themselves “very good drivers”. Indeed, some might even say that they are the first to make this announcement. Like when you try to wrest the steering wheel from their icy grip. Or when they begin an essay. Ahem.

It was Christmastime and I was driving my family from Williamsburg to Norfolk. There had been some snow, and the elected officials do not believe in snow. Or if they do, well then they have a strange sense of humour, because they don’t spend a dime of tax money on the removal of it from their highways, especially the one that leads from Williamsburg to Norfolk. Which was why the Interstate was closed a few miles outside of that old capital, and why we caravaned onto a small state road, an endless train of modern-day camels headed east.

Real camels might have been faster. Hell, waiting to die and then having the wind scatter my ashes in the direction of Norfolk might have been faster. I don’t think we broke ten miles an hour the whole time. A tap on the gas, a tap on the brakes. A tap on the gas, a tap on the brakes. Repeat endlessly.

And then we began to slowly slide. So slowly, in fact, that if I had had even an inkling of what was about to happen, I probably could have gotten out of the car and slowed it down myself.

But I didn’t, because I couldn’t believe that we weren’t going to stop. We were going ten miles an hour, for crying out loud. Who breaks free of the manic pull of traction at ten miles an hour? If that’s all it takes we should be floating up to the tree tops on a daily basis!

This was the nature of my argument as we slid. But the tail lights of the car in front of me loomed nearer and nearer still, and the admonitions of my wife were grew louder and of a pitch usually only associated with the finest sopranos or the smallest of small birds, so I pumped furiously on the brake.(As I’d been taught to do in just such emergencies. It should be noted, however, that nowadays the cars will do the pumping for you. So I can only imagine that the crazy samba beat me and the car’s hydraulics were generating that festive day would have made the lads in Rio jealous. But I digress).

It occurred to me that I had three choices. I could either 1) continue straight and hit the car in front of me; 2) swerve left, heading into oncoming traffic; or 3) swerve right, towards the shoulder. I chose option three.

Did I mention there was a ditch? Okay, I should probably mention that. The major drawback to option three was that there was some sort of drainage ditch running alongside the shoulder. Dipped about four or five feet from the road, and then lay fairly flat as it blended into the front yard of the hide-and-seek houses that called this road home. And while I realized that there was a possibility we could slide into it, I was certain that we would stop long before we got anywhere near it, because we were only going ten miles an hour for crissakes.

Which was the argument I made to my wife when we finally came to a stop at the bottom of the ditch.

Before I could launch into a second argument, out from the small house whose yard we had just invaded emerge four men in assorted sizes, come to find what strange present Santa has left them this year. A white man and his family trapped in a blue Volvo? What the hell are we going to do with that?

Now, I was fully expecting them to tell me that I had illegally invaded their property and that I would be required to remove myself, my family, and my vehicle, forthwith, otherwise I could expect the fullest prosecution that the law would allow. I also expected them to explain that if their yard or for that matter their drainage ditch (which had great personal significance) had incurred any damage, they would expect remuneration of some sort, if not actual punitive compensation.

But instead, the smaller of the four tapped on the windshield while the other three positioned themselves strategically around us. “Straighten out” he said, pointing to the front wheels. I did and they pushed. And nothing happened. But in time, after family and other strangers from the caravan pitched in, after much pulling and pushing and after coating ourselves and half the neighbors in mud and other detritus, we managed to move the car out of that little grave, coming finally to rest with thee, Zion. Hallelujah. Hallelujah indeed.

Paris

Paris in the 1980s

I was arrested once. Or rather, I was nearly arrested once. It happened like this.

It was in Paris. And I had just been chased through the bowels of that sainted city by friends, the like of which I have rarely found again. (Friends, I have learned, have as much to do with time and place as they do with flesh and blood.) And so it was with these flesh and blood friends, for in that city of light, we were friends, heady with the freedom that time and space can give you, roaming those ancient scented streets like Ernest and Scott and even like old Bill, though we knew them not nor their miserable feast.

But I digress.

How did it start? Who can say? I know I see myself running with strange breakneck excitement – the envelope’s edge inexplicably beneath the soles of my shoes – on a Métro car under Paris, shuffling and sidling through the Gallic crowd. Looking over my shoulder because there they are! Looking amongst disgruntled Frenchmen for me! I can see them heading towards the car I am in. I burst out laughing and the dour confused Parisians are looking at me like there must be something wrong with this oversized, underfed American. And indeed there may be, for who am I to judge?

But how did I come to be arrested? I seem to remember feeling cornered. I seem to remember running out of the station, up the stairs, across the street that faced the great cathedral, and back down into the station, leaping the turnstile to get back into the game. And then I waited, understanding that the fun was in the pursuit. Understanding that if I completely eluded them, I could wind up in some godforsaken suburb, feeling very proud of my intellectual abilities, and yet all by myself. Insert your favorite metaphor for the friendships of my life here.

And then a stout black woman in some kind of uniform summons me. And she says something to me, very fast in French. Something disapproving, something disappointed. Something disgusted. Something clearly “dis”. But this does not affect me. I am used to being disapproved of now, and for this I am forever indebted to the French.

And frankly, if she’s going to play her part, I’m happy to play my part too. What was she saying? Were those actually words coming out of her mouth? Isn’t this America? Is this still the planet earth? Who am I? Who are you? Who? Who?

What I should have done was create a minor scene and then walked out of that station, walked back up the stairs into the sunlight and disappeared. But I didn’t and you know why? Because I might have run into my friends again, and that would have meant failure, which was unacceptable. And in this way we learn that I am an American after all.

So instead, I concede a tiny level of understanding. And she is saying something about a fine. And then she asks for my passport. Which I hand over to her and effectively hand her the game.

Because in the battle of idiocy and obstinacy, we were fairly evenly matched. Like a pair of Zax, we were fully capable of spending the rest of our lives in that little alcove of the Métro as Paris was built and rebuilt and rebuilt again around us. But when I gave her my passport, I gave her something she could hold for ransom. Or as they say in France – “rançon”. Yeah, I learned that word pretty quickly. And she wanted 50 francs to get it back.

In 1980 50 francs was about ten bucks. But I‘m still thinking that if I play dumb enough she’ll give up. That she’ll think it’s just not worth it. Or that mother Mary herself will magically materialize in this hole in the shadow of the great shrine built in her honor to save me.

Instead my friends show up. Laughing, giggling, exulting that they have caught me. They grab me and start to lead me away. This does not make the little Black French woman any happier. She begins to reach for something menacing in her bag – handcuffs? A walkie-talkie? A truncheon with which to beat me? Or perhaps she is just putting the passport away, never to be seen again by stupid white boys from America who are rich enough to come to her country but not smart enough to play her game. So I beg money off of one of my friends. Money to pay my fine for eluding him all over Paris. Money that will keep me from being hauled off to the bowels of French justice. Money which, I realize only now, over twenty-five years later, I still owe him. Money which he inexplicably gives me.

Money which is, apparently, the price of my friendship.

Ice Skating

Ice Skating in America

In spite of the best of intentions, you never quite wind up where you think you will. I have spent a lifetime learning this lesson over and over again. I realize that there are worse lessons to have to re-learn; at least this one doesn’t involve a rock.

When the word, or rather, the words, came from that irredeemable blue green land of improbability, an image immediately came to mind and just as immediately it was discarded. And why was that? I could spend a lifetime trying to figure that one out. It could be due to a pathological stubbornness that some have said was genetic. Or it might have merely been my father. I asked him about the topic during one of our monthly visits and he spoke instantly of his father. I was startled by his response because there was something almost synonymous about it. And as he briefly described the arc of his father’s grace on those now nameless inner city ponds, I was aware that I was missing – or at the very least, had missed – something important.

But whatever the reason, I began writing of my second thought, which, of course, had to do with summertime.

In the summertime, we would learn the fundamentals of the American game on the unforgiving diamonds of an ancient park on the southern side of town. But in winter it was transformed. That gothic, always-locked clubhouse, was open then. The long wooden benches stacked in corners that we could see through the windows in the long hot days, were then neatly arranged in good Lutheran rows on the thick concrete floor. And the dreaming fields it overlooked were flooded – perhaps by firemen, perhaps by God – until the baseball nature of the place was erased, until the backstops blended into the leafless trees they so resembled, until our very enthusiasm for balls and bats seemed inconceivable, and the place was finally reinvented and reimagined as if by Brueghel, and we took our places in it like the tiny fifteenth century characters we are.

I can see us there. My god! We seem caught as if in a bird trap, in layers upon layers of wool and cotton and god knows what other fabric spun from the sweat of climates that knew nothing of ice skates, or of that pain in the front of your shins that you carried in those first days of winter. Look at us! Scurrying and laughing as our Nordic parents and grandparents had done for decades on this continent and for how many Viking centuries before, across the frozen wastelands of Europe and beyond.

And you have to ask yourself why. Why winter sports at all? Why leave the warmth and security of hearth and home for the merciless cold? Why, to all those ancestors, back through countless heartless winters, across countless frozen ponds and lakes and rivers. Why? Is it as simple as the simple love of movement? To push off, like some great Viking longship, and with strong legs and the deep breathed balance that comes of composure, to glide with a grace that clouds memory with its resemblance to flight.

Or is the enjoyment of contradiction at its root? The thought that those tiny tiny edges are somehow carving toe holds in the ice, and that all your weight, all your size, all your mass, is balanced precariously on a fraction of a fraction of an inch. And not merely balancing! But propelling you, arms pumping or hands clasped elegantly behind your back, crossover, crossover, crossover, as you turn in your wide effortless arc, moving faster on this frictionless miracle than you would ever dare dream on solid, simple ground.

I don’t know. Probably none of it. I know that for my father, he merely reveled in the cold. Whether it was the simple repetition of shoveling snow, or the wild exuberance and enthusiasm he had for skiing – the falling of the mercury ignited something in him that he would admit, but be hard-pressed to define.

Which is why, like my father before me, my thoughts of ice skating turn to my father. But not, ironically, to that crowded floodplain of my youth. No. When I think of him ice skating, I always see him on a shining pond of Olympian proportions where a light shines down benignly from a goose island. He would go out there, late late late on those bleak nearly-New England nights, by himself and carve endless circuits. And as I lay in my bed in my house on these gentle New Jersey plains, it is through shallow breaths that I can now recall laying in my bed in my room at the far corner of another house, and hearing through my open windows the breathing of the pines and the simple cutting and scraping of my father gliding effortlessly and alone along the steely edges of those restaurant skates as Orion watched over him and sighed. And as I do, I marvel again how we never seem to wind up where we think we will.

Mary Houston

Mary Houston

I don’t know what it is about me and vomit. Sick as I may be, drunk as I may be, there is a line that is crossed when you vomit that says “I am too sick”, or “I am too drunk.” It may have something to do with the nose, actually, that triggers my revulsion. The nose – that ancient organ of fliess – and a sense that the natural order of things – the natural direction, if you prefer – is upset. Things do not come up one’s esophagus, do not flood the sinus cavity from behind, do not shoot out your nostrils in long, river-run streamers. No.

And so I clench my teeth and, gullet closing tighter than Richard Daley’s sphincter at a gay pride parade, I abstain.

Unless a car’s involved, in which case all bets are off. The retching, the gagging, the possibility that it may come shooting out my nose in a desperate, last-days-in-Saigon attempt to flee whatever the hell it is in my stomach are all options. And of course, there’s the chance that in its haste, some stray piece will be left balancing precariously on that ledge at the back of your sinuses, where you can feel it wobbling every time you breathe, annoying you, maddening you, until you feel you could reach up into your nasal cavity with an elongated wire clothes hangar and scrape it out. But you can’t. You might want to take my word on this one.

I can recall clearly two times I threw up and a car was involved, and one of them involved Mary Houston.

Mary Mary, how contrary? A good Scots name, “Mary.” Like “Anne.” Like “Art.” Utterly unlike “Florence” however. “Florence?” What distant dream of Dante and Boccaccio conjured that name from the neo-romantic, late-Victorian dreams of the ancient Arthur and Christian Christina? There were rumours, of course. Rumours that “Florence” was the name of a previous paramour, and I like to think this was true, if for no other reason than the simple wrongheaded audacity of it. “Ah, hello dear, thanks for the unmedicated nineteenth century labor and delivering me my first offspring. Think I’ll name her after someone I loved before I loved you. Cheerio!”

But Mary, Mary, Mother of God, mother of us all, and yet this Mary was, of all that brood of McKays, the only childless one (Anne had two, Flo, one, Art one (who died in youth) carrying on, ironically, with fewer than the parsimonious immigrants had manufactured), and was, on that day, driving me and the patron saint around Chicago, past that improbably reversible river. And I am sick. I can see myself, leaning out the door of the car, vomiting neatly onto the street, and then leaning back against those large bench seats with the seat belts no one in America wore. I press my hands to my face to cool it and sigh. We are heading back to Mary’s apartment.

Mary’s was the first apartment that I can recall easily. High above Chicago, overlooking neither impersonal buildings (that was yet for me to discover in other cities) nor the lakefront (being descended neither from millionaires nor gangsters nor politicians, nor from some strangely Chicago conglomeration of all three), it was a thing that distinguished her to me – living up in the air like that, so far above Flo’s beloved gardens, so far over Art’s snowy head.

And high above that Chicago, as it struggled to emerge from its self-imposed shadow (a shadow it named “New York”), as it wrestled with fresh memories of tanks and summer streets (How worldly! How cosmopolitan! How like Prague! How like Budapest! And how achingly familiar to those middle European immigrants whose fathers and mothers had swarmed to the safe shadow of the hogbutcher’s shoulders only decades before!), I remember laying on a couch in Mary’s apartment. I hear her talking to my grandmother (“No, I don’t think he ate anything strange. Now Flo, really; if he’d been hit in the head, don’t you think I would’ve noticed?”), and I turn to the television, whose meager fare in those pre-cable days often drove us to watch things we otherwise wouldn’t have bothered with. Mary, her hand over the phone, asks me if I want her to call my parents, and I say, no, because I have become entranced by a re-telling of “Gulliver’s Travels.” And there is the good doctor, awaking from his ordeal, trapped by a thousand tiny slings and arrows. I roll one eye towards my brother who has dozed off beneath art from the rising sun, and then to Mary who is in heated discussion with Flo about something other than me, and then turn back to the swift moving story and wonder vaguely if any of this really happened at all.

Baseball

1939 - Centennial of Baseball Commemorative Stamp

Let me now speak of my mother’s father.

My mother would comfort me, saying he did not know how to act with his grandson. “Act?”, I thought, from the balcony of my naïve and innocent empiricism. What can that mean? You don’t act, you are. You don’t need to know how to be with your daughter’s son. You just are. Aren’t you?

Oh irony. For like him, I have always lived in a shimmering haze of alienation. But all I saw was that he was an adult – an adult’s adult, my mother’s father! It was actually inconceivable to me that he was shy, awkward, unsure.

For he didn’t sputter and shake and tremble. His eyes didn’t dart about the room. Panic seemed as remote to him as a distant Northern city. He simply sat where he was, patiently, calmly, generously!, forever in his white oxford and dark trousers, smoking cigarettes, and doing whatever it was he did.

Which more often than not, in my imagination of him, was the quiet research of his stamp collection. It spanned years and geographies and economies. And when I was young, I existed on an outer orbital plane in relation to it, somewhere in the vicinity of Pluto or Neptune as he circled it like Mars or our own lonely planet. I could see it’s draw on him, but I could not feel its warming glow.

When I was very small, he gave me my own collection, extra sheets pulled from his own supply, collected in a thin black binder. It sat dormant for many years until I was older, on the threshold of my teens, when I purchased a more complete album, a great red beast with hundreds of pages and great steel posts. And I began to slowly transfer my stamps to that one, adding stamps of my own.

And so I pressed on in my room in New York, as he did in his room in Chicago.

One year, they came East. It was October. Not Christmas or Thanksgiving or my mother’s birthday or St. Swithin’s Day, but October.

What I remember of their visit is one night. My mother and grandmother and my brother had gone to bed – or in any case, are not in my memory – and the three of us that were left – myself, my father and my grandfather – were watching television. I can still see that paneled room and those black Eames chairs. I can see the ceramic light that hung from the ceiling at the front of the room and the light it shone on the wooden table underneath it where I had hopefully spread my stamp collection for my grandfather’s unknowing eyes.

It was a Tuesday night in October and I was twelve years old and we were watching television together. And the thing we were watching that night was the sixth game of the 1975 World Series.

Now, if you do not know about that game, then I am not the one to relate it to you. But it was a mythic, titanic, heroic, hardly-believable  game (only believable, really, because it’s exactly the kind of game the Boston Red Sox have built their legacy on). Many have called it “the greatest game.” I don’t know. I don’t know enough about baseball to make that claim. I do know that it was that marvelous kind of game that repeatedly lulled you into false senses of security and despondency – “Well it’s over now” and “Well, they’ll never come back from that” – but it wasn’t over, but they did come back.

And when Carlton Fisk finally ended it, we knew that finally the rules of physics had been broken. That the negation of the impossible had somehow loosed the chains of convention.

So in retrospect I should not have been surprised when my grandfather – that great, silent, lonely doppelganger of my yet-to-be, stood up, smiling and turned my way, his broad back to the narcotic televised pandemonium and said to me, inconceivably, “Well now, why don’t we take a look at the stamp collection of yours.”

But that is baseball. It is a game of illogical, almost willfully random connectedness, interrupted by long, desert-like stretches of individualism, selfishness, and monomania. Jackie Robinson steals home and he is ineluctably connected to Yogi Berra in a way that neither will ever be connected to their teammates. Enos Slaughter scores from first and goes down in history with Johnny Pesky. Ralph Branca elevates Bobby Thompson to immortality. Pat Darcy and Carton Fisk. My grandfather and me. The list goes on. Play ball.

The Indiana Dunes

The Indiana Dunes, circa 1967

14,000 years ago, the last great continental glaciers, weary, I suppose of their meaningless and millennial progress across the prairies, began their ponderous, lumbering, elephantine retreat back through North America, dragging all manner of debris and detritus across the future downtowns of Detroit and Dubuque and forming, in their senseless and stupefying way, a slim strip of sand at the base of Lake Michigan, summer habitat of erstwhile homebodies and alewives and steelworkers from the mills of Gary and beyond. Forming, the Indiana Dunes.

The Dunes, home to more than 350 species of birdlife, untold crinoids, and, for a few memorable summers in the golden moments of my youth, me. I close my eyes tonight, stretch my arms out from my sides until I can feel the sinews pull at the sockets in my shoulders, and hear it; the quiet crinoline rustling of that sky blue water as it lapped the beach, gently lullabying me to sleep at night.

There I am, asleep in the upstairs room, head beneath the screened windows. And I have a sense of the room being a loft, a sense of unfinishedness of the floor we’re on, of planks and walls that open to nothing. And also a memory that when I stand I can look out at the lake, that endless blue that blurs with the horizon halfway up the sky. “Lake,” you call it? Typical American. In Europe this would be a sea, stage for Odysseus or Jason. Because lakes, by comparison, are puny; they are simple circumnavigable things from which one never loses sight of land. But this? Stand on the shore with me and look out at it. Water to the horizon, and water for how many hundreds of miles until Canada? This is a lake only in the American sense. In the sense of bigness. Everything is big in America.

How did I wind up on that bed that I can dimly see through the haze of memory? I don’t know. Its occurrence in my life was like much that has happened to me. We were going to the Dunes. Why? I don’t know. Did I object? Why would I object? I had nothing against the Dunes. I had nothing against going there. It would be like objecting to the color of sky. It was. We went. And yet, if you asked me today, I couldn’t tell you how many years we spent there. Was it only two? Was it five? Who knows these things now?

One night, I remember, I could not sleep. I cannot blame the waves. We all fail once in a while, and my days then were no more taxing than days are to a beach ball. They were languorous and their pace was slow. And when night came, it did not come with that relief that I greet them with now, the relief that sleep is near. Night came late those summers, past eight, past eight-thirty, nearly to nine, when the ancient, disinterested stars would finally deign to emerge from their hiding and shine down thoughtlessly on us in that dark sky, a sky as warm as bath water, as warm as the lake that was as big as an ocean that I could barely recall.

And so, there were, sometimes, nights when I could not sleep. And this one night that I call out now, must have been a weekend, because my father was in the house. He spent his weekdays in Chicago and in our real house, in our home, in Lake Forest, and would appear magically Saturday morning with news of our friends and the smell of our things. This night he was downstairs, sitting in the blue illumination of the television, alone, quiet, as I often am now. And I could not sleep, and he told me to sit down and watch the movie with him. And I have a memory of sitting on his lap and watching Thomas More argue with Thomas Cromwell about Averill Machin, an argument that would ultimately lose that great man his position, his lands and, of course, his head, though it never touched his reputation or for that matter, his soul.

And I think back now to those men acting like giants and of me sitting smally in my father’s warm lap as the enormous lake outside crashed against the ancient dune. And I can’t help but wonder: What dunes I have left in my wake?

Jean MacKay

Jean MacKay

What is the difference between legend and myth? I will tell you. Myth never happened to me, and the things that I deem “mythological” are the things that, as others swear by them, I am content to smile condescendingly and say “All right, if that’s what you want to believe.”

Legends never happened to me either, of course, but the difference is that I believe them all the same. Why is this? The feats they entail are no less magnificent or ridiculous or unbelievable. Their connection to reality (that is, to the tight little island I call my life) is no more tangible. Myth and legend; they are in so many ways the same.

I think it’s because I have always felt that myths were instructional which has always had for me the odor of cod liver oil. Of turnips. Of that which will provide some vague and obscure vitamins and minerals to my moral diet. The vanity of Icarus melted his wings and he perished, stupid boy. Got it. Vanity – Bad. Also, don’t get carried away with your fun. Can we move on now?

In other words a myth exists only for a purpose, and if it isn’t informing some idiot, making some point, explaining away some mysterious phenomena (why is there winter? Because Persephone is spending half the year in the underworld, you ninny!), then it ceases to be.

But a legend? A legend exists, beyond you, without you, in spite of you. It sits down the bar from you and says, without fear, without belligerence, without anger, “Believe me if you like. It doesn’t really matter to me one way or the other. I am here. You are there. I think I’ll have another beer.”

I have met some legends in my life. And the first one I met was Jean McKay.

She was tall and thin and old when I met her. Her hair was white, and she looked down at me from an imperious height that I now recall as around 8 foot 5. I can see her looking down upon me. We are standing in her kitchen in the ranch in Montana. Behind me is a doorway to the dark rest of the house. She is before me. Beyond her is a kitchen sink, with a window that overlooks a pasture where the sheep are. To the right is a screen door that lets out to the driveway and all of the Big Sky country. All is warm and brownish – and that could be either the beige of appliances or the sepia of memory.

She is looking down at me warmly, somewhat in profile. I have just said something to her as she passed by, and she has half turned back. I remember the faintest smile on her lips, but that may just be my own generosity.

Now let us say, for the purposes of this story, that she was 70. So what was it I said? Ah, I nearly quake at the memory. I said – and I swear I did – that she didn’t look a day over 69. Can you imagine? I am, what seven? Eight? And I come up with this, this pickup line. Good grief. What kind of idiot, even a seven-year-old idiot, says that?

I wrote a letter to her once. I was in college. Of it, I remember only three things. One, that there was a curious refrain in it of “Let it go, let it all go”. I’m not exactly sure why it had this refrain – I think I had this image of her as holding the strands of many lives, and that the pressures of them was somehow exhausting. At least, that’s what I think I thought, sitting at this safe remove.

Next, I remember the comment of my Aunt Ruth. She was the roommate, the companion, the friend – before that word lost it’s innocent meaning – of my Aunt Jean. She was, indeed, even less actually my aunt than was Jean. She relayed that she thought the letter was “special and unusual”.

And the third thing, of course, is the fact that Jean died while I wrote it.

When she died, my father called to tell me, and the grief came upon him like a sudden summer storm, bewildering him. I remember him apologizing through his tears, as if they were hiccups interrupting a formal dinner party. I remember me telling him not to apologize, that it was perfectly understandable. Yes, I recall those words distinctly. Perfectly understandable. Clever, eh?

The irony, of course, is that it was a moment that cried out for Jean McKay. The poise. The measured word. The grace. And when she left, we realized not only what we’d lost. When she left we realized that we were doomed to a future of eight year old boys handing out pathetic pick up lines to living legends.