Chapter 4: For Those Who Have Loved and Lost a Pet: Requiescat in Pace

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Writing through tears is every bit the cliché, but there you go: the truth will out, bard-like, whether clichéd or no.

We humans are sense-making creatures, lovers of pattern. Coincidental occurrences once easily ignored seem suddenly connected when propelled by just one overwhelmingly impactful event. For me, just this last week, that event was the loss of a dear pet, Kayda, a sometimes-stubborn yet always-loving standard poodle raised from a pup and who, in many ways, remained pup-like for all of her twelve-plus years, right up until Canine Degenerative Myelopathy (the Lou Gehrig’s Disease of her world) caught up with her.

Kayda was a wonderful dog, unique in many ways. I know that every pet owner says the same thing, but in her case it was true. This was a dog that taught herself how to retrieve, singly. She would grab her Kong (a hard-rubber toy that resembles a small, headless Michelin Man), walk over to the edge of our deck, drop it at her feet, and then knock it through the five-inch space between the bottom railing and the deck’s surface, propelling it over the side. Then she would run down the stairs, hunt out the toy, and bring it back up only to launch it over the edge again. And again. For a dog owner this was wonderful. I didn’t have to stand outside and throw it for her if I didn’t feel like it, something I rarely wanted to do when, say, the mosquitoes had grown duskly thick.

Her game stopped, sadly, a couple of months ago, at about the point where one of her back legs began to drag a bit and her breathing became more labored. That’s what happens with this particular disease: the nerves and muscles fail to converse effectively, and both autonomic and somatic functions quickly degrade. On what was to be her last day she had already gone some time without food, having first decided she no longer wanted her own food, and then progressively losing interest in rice, pasta, chicken, hamburger, and tomatoes—all previous favorites. No coaxing would get her to eat anything but some cheese, bits of hot dog, and her own favorite dog treats. When even these, too, failed to stir her, we knew what she was telling us. A mere walk across the room left her panting and she could no longer stand with surety. Her naps grew deeper and longer. It was time. 

I was with her at the end.

Grief is a drunkard’s walk, pretending direction yet guiding you toward one inevitable fall after another until, slowly, the effects wear off and you’re left with, first, mild sorrow and then, later (sometimes much later), ripe memory. Despite such predictability it surprises us every time, a last call when you need just a few moments more. There’s always something left to say or do, yet those things remain unsaid, undone, headlight-caught in the sudden helplessness of an unwanted ending. Diversion is sought, and soon. A meal out (for who wants to be home with memories?), or a movie (though not a comedy). A book.

And what Pulitzer-Prize winning book would require reading at just this time, if only to provide one of those narrative coincidences that so often strike us as clichéd?

The Yearling.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ coming-of-age story lives in two worlds, both literally and metaphorically. Coming in at over 400 pages yet often shelved in a library’s Juvenile section (where I found my copy), it is a challenging read thus categorized. Still, with various versions peppered with illustrations (N.C. Wyeth’s being the most famous), and with language and story firmly centered on a young boy just coming into his own, the tale’s pendulum swings undoubtedly to the small.

The book, until this project, had been one of those long-avoided; the story of a backwoods Florida family and a young fawn echoed too strongly of the horse stories that girls of my generation grew up adoring. I knew, as a child, that if caught out with such a book I would suffer endless taunting. Better, I knew, to stick with The Hardy Boys and The Hobbit.

I had as an adult seen the movie, largely because of the common guilt many feel when they know a story only as cultural gravitas but have never actually experienced it in any real form. One lazy solitary evening I noticed its pending appearance on TCM and, feeling somewhat Gregory Peckish, settled in to watch. I already knew, of course, how it all ended, how the fawn, grown, becomes an unintending burden and that the boy, also grown, becomes an intending man. Still, at the end, tears fell.

So, too, upon finishing the book, an admittedly uneven affair told moralistically, though with a fair balance of grey tucked between the black and white. Some characters remain flat, either kindly settled or aggressively tempered; others grow and change, learning or giving lessons as required by the narrative. In the end the book satisfies what early Pulitzer committees were looking for: not necessarily the best book, but a book with moral value, with an American catechism deeply etched.

I wonder, though only slightly given a long-standing agnosticism, what brought The Yearling before me at just this time. Was it a story I needed just now? A comfortable companion, something on which to project emotion? Perhaps. More likely, though, it was just a pattern I found in coincidence, a call heard because listened for. In either case (and with a heavy sigh) I admit it’s impact on me, one no doubt greater for my own experiences and, therefore, one more likely remembered, a focus, perhaps, as I stumble through grief, as I write through tears.

Read since last post:

• The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1939)
• The Town, Conrad Richter (1951)

Currently Reading:

• A Fable, William Faulkner (1955)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936

COUNT: 20 read, 67 to go

Chapter 3: In Which I Deplore the Use of Certain Words, Offer my Opinions on Coffee Party USA, and Compare my Father to a Notable Hemingway Character

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As a writer there are words I don’t much like to use, and not just the ones you might expect. I loathe, for example, the word “prestidigitation,” largely because it hides the magic it portends, and because “magic” is, by itself, both simpler and more beautiful. “Euphony” is another I don’t much like (because it’s not) and “logorrhea” sets my teeth on edge. “Eschew” pops to mind, ironically, as well.

And “futility.” Because it sounds as sad as it is.

Today is Father’s Day, coincidentally trailing by two days my father’s birthday. He would have been 79, a calculation quickly performed when I automatically thought to call him and, while reaching for the phone, found those thoughts redirected instead toward that oft-avoided word. Futility.

Over the years (and the many miles that separate one coast from another) we talked far less often than either of us wanted to. I have a tendency to live too easily without the touch of family, and he had a stubborn streak that insisted on outreach as a son’s responsibility. There were times when more than a year went by with only greeting cards exchanged.  It’s more than a year this time, too, and will continue to be.

The memories that come most to mind are, as expected I suppose, the early ones. In particular I remember sailing with my father, how he’d rent a small single-mast for a few hours and we’d head out onto the Pacific. Though never far from shore we seemed a world away, cresting what I realize now were tiny waves, tacking first right and then left, taming a taunting wind that there, on the water, held a personality never possessed on land.

Throughout his life my father almost-struggled his way from day to day, never quite the business success he wanted to be, or the salesman he imagined himself, or the father and husband that limned his desires. He was loved, and loved back—always and excessively—and he often seemed happy. But still he seemed pitted against a series of unseen forces—economic, emotional, perhaps even karmic—that forced futility, forced a sense of “nearly,” of “not quite.” Like Hemingway’s Old Man, who finally captures his life’s dream only to have it disappear one bite at a time, my father, too, watched the inexorability of metaphorical sharks take small but steady pieces from his life, right up to the last, the skeleton remains. A series of careers, some more successful than others. Three wives. Six children, one lost much, much too early. Constant struggles later in life to repair a roof, to help with college tuition, sometimes even to pay the mortgage. Still, my father had a wistful optimism, one that manifested itself in wanting to live bigger, stronger, louder than he knew he really could. Or should.

Yet from futility can come the small essence of success.  Children and grandchildren. Friends.

My father’s futility grew from the personal and so, despite the long odds, he always knew that the proper amount of self-sacrifice and hard work could win out. It didn’t, often, and certainly not at the end, but sometimes it did. Then there’d be steak dinners and premium beer. A new flat screen. A new car perhaps, with an upgraded hand-me-down to the son or daughter needing it most. Not so these days for many, for me. Not so the futility I feel. The futility I feel is larger, wider, more subsuming. It comes tinged with melancholy and is fueled by an anomie so self-supporting that one wonders if it will ever lift. We live, you see, in different times than my father, in times colored and flavored by hatred that travels at light speed. It is a futility not of the lost opportunity, but of the never found. We find ourselves now surrounded not only by friends, but by those who desire us hurt. Sometimes they even wear the same names, the same faces.

Recently a few dozen friends and colleagues, people who had worked together and whom I had worked with for the last couple of years, fell victim. Members, regular and board, of the Coffee Party USA are currently at war over the future of the organization, a non-profit ostensibly dedicated to fact-based, civil dialog on “transpartisan” issues: money in politics, the need for cooperation rather than conflict, the willingness to not just sit with those across the aisle, but to ignore the aisle all together.

In a desolate display of groupthinked mismanagement, the board embarked on an unconventional fund-raising plan, one poorly vetted and containing multiple conflicts of interest. When discovered by the members-at-large, they grew justifiably outraged. Given the principles of the Coffee Party (and, in theory, the brand of person attracted to the movement) the next steps should have been predictable: the differing opinions would seek reconciliation in a way that protected the organization, made the necessary changes to prevent such things from happening again, and moved positively forward.

It didn’t happen. Instead, the modus operandi of the age set in; futility, writ large, rang its Pavlovian bell and dozens responded. People with a history of calm, civil, and rational interactions turned rabid. The good-intentioned were vilified. Entire groups were demonized, declared “less than.” Lawyers engaged. Harassment, first threatened, arrived. Documents were leaked, then counter-leaked. Innuendo become the raison d’etre of those involved. Had it not all become so vile, so mean, the irony might have proved funny. But it wasn’t. Real people are being damaged. And others—also real people—gleefully inflict that damage. I’ve watched the hatred set in, hatred so hardened that many former associates will never be friends again, will likely never even speak to each other again. Attempts to end it have been nothing but a clichéd exercise in futility, as if futility is something actively exercised rather than something now merely inevitable.

And so I turn, further from the hatred, from the futility, and back to my own small world. Perhaps I’m the lesser for it. I don’t know, and right now I don’t care.

Today I wait for my own son’s visit. He’ll arrive late tonight, unable to depart until finished with work. While not a coast away, he lives far enough from me that any visit requires planning and an overnight stay. We see each other more often than I saw my own father, but still not often enough. I go there and he comes here once or twice annually now. He calls with more regularity than I ever phoned my dad, and we chat about work, music, or physics (a hobby of his). Sometimes he’ll tell me about something he saw on The History Channel, particularly if it has to do with one of the many modern-day enigmas that fascinate him, like JFK’s assassination or how the Fed controls the money supply. It’s fortunate that he calls, since I have somehow absorbed my own father’s practice of waiting rather than initiating, a habit I fight against when I remember to. A day goes by, then a week, then sometimes another before I realize that I don’t want him looking back, wondering rather than knowing about my life’s little futilities. These are the ones, it turns out, that matter to me, the ones I have energy for, the ones of importance. These small-f futilities, I now realize, are simply life.

The sadness I still feel, though, comes from wondering why everyone doesn’t just focus on the small, on ourselves and those around us, those things that are, in the end, the most important. We need only to realize that the small can become the large when repeated often enough, and by enough people. Why must we respond when given our lines on a larger stage? Whose ends do we serve? Whose words do we speak, words that—given choice, we would ourselves loathe for the hurt they give? If we would all just think about those small relationships, and the value of their simple reality, then perhaps the words we would hear would not be those we abhor, but instead those that matter. Friend. Ally. Companion.

Person.

 

Read since last post:

·         The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1953)

·         The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron (1968)

Currently Reading:

·         The Town, Conrad Richter (1951)

Still Hanging Around:

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 19 read, 68 to go

Chapter 2: In Which I Muse over the Greatness of Literature, Pay Harold Bloom a Compliment, and Wonder if I’m Lonely

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest. 

 

Debates over what makes “great” literature are as predictable as ants drawn to a sugar cube, attracting pundits, reviewers, critics, and a ton of I’ve-read-a-lot-of-books people to the sweet yet empty calories of armchair literary criticism. To see what I mean, (and for a bit of fun) just head on over to Yahoo! Answers and find the thread on “What makes great literature?” where a young avatar is looking for help in writing a “5 page paper on the topic.” The thread includes some interesting observations (I like, in particular, the notion that the consensus of the professorial elite has much to do with what is and isn’t considered great), but quickly devolves into pithy responses like this one: “I like to read certain books because they make me angry or sad or feel cheated with shitty writing…. That being said, I read mostly cookbooks and watch South Park almost daily.”

Interestingly, the professorial elite fare only slightly better (though with dramatically improved grammar). James Averill of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says that “I do not pretend to have an answer to this question” of what makes literature great, but then goes on to write that “great literature appeals to the emotions.” (So I guess he does have an answer!) That response isn’t all that different from the one given by our cookbook reader, even if it does win on style points.

David Foster Wallace, late and great, put it more simply: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”  I like that. Simpler and to the point.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the mannered spectrum, Harold Bloom, the well-respected if rather stuffy literary critic, will tell you that “[w]hat matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering,” a roundabout way, as I read it, of saying that pain is perhaps the key component of truly great literature. 

*****

There are many types of pain, some incredibly subtle.

Last weekend my wife capitalized on a spur-of-the-moment invitation and traveled down to New Jersey for a mini-family reunion of sorts, hosted by her son (my stepson). Due to various factors (including a rapidly aging pet we prefer not to kennel) we couldn’t both attend, so I stayed behind. I’m not unused to such solitude; my wife travels five or six times a year for periods that range from a few days to sometimes two weeks and I, being an introvert (or “hermit,” as she styles it) quite look forward to the time alone. This time, though, felt different.

There wasn’t much I had to “do” (in the “Honey-do” sense). The lawn had just been mowed (she does that) and the kitchen recently cleaned (me). I needed to pick up a couple of cans of dog food, and there was load of laundry basketed and waiting, but other than that I was on my own and, with a pile of praised Pulitzers before me, seemed all set to enjoy a wonderful couple of days. Nestled in family-room leather, I settled in.

Great books do have the flavor, the color of human suffering, Harold. You’re right.

I hit four books this week; all of them were wonderful, and all of them held an overpowering sense of loneliness. They spread across nearly three-quarters of a century, varied in style, plot, and theme, yet each weighed on me so deeply that, at times, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to move. The fates of the characters in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey left me feeling like I wanted to reach through the pages and provide solace, warmth, and caring, to give each of them a kind word, a sense that fate was not merely fate, but that their lives had purpose, gave meaning to others. The simple tour driver in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Interpreter of Maladies,” seemed pathetically lonely and sad; as I ended the story I felt a heaviness in my legs and arms that I hadn’t noticed before. And Scarlet Sister Mary, ultimately broken down by herself and her community, broke me down as well; tears muddied my view of the last few pages.

I wanted to share this feeling, this experience, with my wife, but she was in New Jersey, and for the first time in a long while I was less bewitched by solitude. Instead, I was lonely.

I read somewhere that the true definition of a successful marriage is when two people can be alone together. The occasional smile passes between them, along with a quickly shared story. Beneath it all is a wondrous love built on appreciation and flaws, on hands held and words exchanged, on glances and touches and quiet and noise and children and parents and time. And time. These books had made me feel that I wanted to be alone together, and not alone alone. I wanted the weekend to be over. Literature and absence combined into an isolating womb. I missed her, and was glad when the dogs’ barking signaled her car coming up the driveway, coming home.

*****

Right about now I’m wishing to read one of the funny books on this list. Unfortunately they don’t come with indicative titles. Is Tinkers funny? Or A Summons to Memphis? I can’t be sure. I do know to stay away from The Edge of Sadness or The Old Man and the Sea. Or anything by Faulkner. If I hadn’t already read it, I’d probably go right for A Confederacy of Dunces; that title seems somewhat amusing. And it is funny. It really is. Only Ignatius J. Reilly really is quite lonely, after all. 

Read since last post:

·         The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty (1973)

·         The Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)

·         Scarlet Sister Mary, Julia Peterkin (1929)

·         The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder (1928)

Currently Reading, Despite Wanting to Read Something Funny:

·         The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1953)

Just Realized I Hadn’t Read, but Only Saw the Movie:

·         The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983)

Currently Causing Hallucinations:

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 17 read, 71 to go