The Mentor at the Crossroads

The best teachers aren’t the better teachers. The best teachers are the hero mentors who recognize you, single you out for individual attention, and broaden your horizons without harming or endangering you, regardless of how well or poorly they perform in a classroom or whether they teach in a classroom at all.

Tim Dale was still a bachelor and the assistant master in my boys’ dormitory the year that I arrived at the Stony Brook School as an undersized, fragile fourteen-year old leaning on a cane that I tried to pretend was cool. This was an evangelical school where one of my dorm mates was Billy Graham’s youngest son, and this was 1976. Tim was not only himself one of the youngest staff members at just twenty-seven years old but also the only man on the faculty who’d grown out his beard. Tall, thin, and long-nosed, with shaggy dark hair and wire-rimmed spectacles, he bore a notable resemblance to John Lennon ca. Abbey Road. In outlook as well as appearance, he was the closest thing to a rebel the campus tolerated. He lived in a two-room apartment at the top center of our dorm, with a collection of about three thousand record albums ranged neatly around the walls. You could open a classic vinyl shop in Brooklyn today with that pristine collection, although you might be sold out by the first afternoon.

Tim’s door was right down the hall from the room I shared with two other freshmen, the burly, bullying Gummer Gaebelein and the slight and fussy Bill Stauber. I could knock at Tim’s door almost any time, but it was in the school library where he worked that I first got to know him. Like all good librarians, Tim turned out to be awfully well read and firmly opinionated.

The library itself was small but elegant. Handsome, dark, polished wood featured everywhere, along with leather armchairs, brass lamps with green shades, and leaded, mullioned windows—it had been built after World War II at one end of a matter-of-fact brick classroom building, thanks to the money of an alumnus who obviously wanted it to look like a proper library.

I began hanging out at the library almost immediately upon arrival on campus. It was soothing. It had comfy armchairs next to a tidy rack of current newspapers and magazines. It had a decent section for fantasy and science fiction, which I devoured. After I had checked out about a dozen volumes within the first few weeks of the school year, Tim looked down his nose at me, pushed his spectacles up with a long index finger, and suggested that my tastes were narrow. If I wanted exclusively to read works that dealt with magic and fantasy, perhaps I should try something more daunting than Tolkien. He handed me The Magus and One Hundred Years of Solitude, the combined weight of which nearly overbalanced me. 

I read them both in my rickety bunk bed that month and had no idea what the hell I was supposed to think of them. I was barely turned fourteen, an inexperienced Baptist kid from suburban New Jersey, possessed of  a razzle-dazzle verbal fluency but zero social or psychological sophistication. My previous exposure to literary classics had pretty much begun and ended with a few chapters excerpted from The Count of Monte Christo and, of course, deep daily dives since early childhood into The King James Bible. I never forgave Fowles for not allowing real magic into The Magus, which I ever after thought of as the Scooby Doo of highbrow novels. I expressed my annoyance with him by turning up my nose at The French Lieutenant’s Woman. But I was delighted as well as thoroughly confused by Garcia Marquez. The description, “magical realism,” is still one of my favorite pompous oxymorons to mock.

And that was just the beginning. While steering me to books I never would have read (including, eventually, those monstrous 19th-c. Russian novels, which proved perfect for whiling away my occasional long hospital stays), Tim also blew open the doors on my views of pop music. 

One day in the dining hall, I was sitting at Tim’s table and brought up a TIME magazine article I’d just read that had presented a sniffy view of the new “punk” rock music. Having heard virtually no rock at all in my strict household, and having only recently been introduced to the likes of Simon & Garfunkel, Loggins & Messina, and James Taylor via my roommates’ soft-rock record collections, I was perfectly prepared to accept the TIME writer’s verdict that this “punk” stuff I’d never heard of must be worthless and nasty. I said so, and Tim asked me if I had listened to any of it. No? Then I should stop by his rooms so I could listen for myself. 

Before the year was out, I was a fan of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, but Tim’s album library stretched back into the depths of early blues, rock, and R&B, as well as out into the furthest tendrils of psychedelia, pub rock, glam rock, New Wave, reggae, on and on. I would stop by his rooms of an evening if I had finished my homework, and I would stop by on a Saturday afternoon if he was in and I was bored. Tim selected samples to play and opined. I listened and I learned. On occasion, as when we replayed Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" several times in a row, I just laughed.

One of the things I learned was to disagree with him, even to quarrel with him if my ears liked something his didn’t. I learned that aesthetic disagreement could be fun and no harm. Evangelical in my faith, I was becoming catholic in my tastes.

Tim’s company was a safe place for me, although that was no more than an instinctive, almost unconscious feeling. He taught upperclass English electives on topics like children’s literature, but I never had him in class. He matter-of-factly befriended me as someone he considered worth conversation. We would occasionally walk down from campus to the corner deli together, discussing. An alumnus of the school himself, he gave me the benefit of a longer perspective on the antics of the rich kids, the cool kids, the preachers, and the bullies. And he talked about a world of ideas, movies, movements, and controversies that I had no idea existed beyond the sternly disapproving allusions of my parents and pastors in church.

Tim married over the summer after my freshman year and moved with his bride into a small house just off campus. My casual drop-in listening and bull sessions about music were done, but his wife Debby, a sparrow of a woman from the Carolinas, was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. They would have me over to dinner and board games, and Debby brought her own rich set of opinions and preferences into the conversations, her folk music and activism, her soft spot for liberation theology. I never once sat at their table where they didn’t bring up some topic I hadn’t yet heard about. And nice, kind Debby was a killer at word games.

Tim introduced me to a bigger world, but he also warned me off whatever he felt I wasn’t ready for yet. He lectured me against trying to sneak in to CBGBs underage, and he tried to dissuade me from hanging out in the seedy Times Square of that era. He gave me fair warning that David Lynch’s Eraserhead would give me nightmares, and he was right, even after I waited a few more years to view it in Lynch’s own birthplace, Missoula.

By the time I was a senior, Tim and Debby had left to work together in Manhattan. I took the train in from Long Island to the city to visit them in their narrow railcar apartment, but the distance was daunting. During my years in and out of college in the early eighties, I drove in to pick them up and head out to a concert a couple of times. The last time we went out, Debby was pregnant and chose to stay home, while Tim and I drove into New Jersey to catch a new band from Georgia called REM.

Although I admired Tim and Debby, although I valued their friendship, at the time they felt like friends who had influenced me and been kind to me but were sort of enmeshed in a tangle of relationships of all the other peers and adults who were important to me during my teens. It was hard to see them as especially important among all the rest. We corresponded occasionally, but this was years before email and decades before Facebook. They moved south, then to Europe. I moved out to Montana. They had two sons. I got a PhD. We lost touch.

In 1997, Tim tracked me down on the Web, or maybe I tracked down him. He and Debby invited me to visit them. In the spring of 1998 I did. They were teaching at the American School at Lugano, in the Ticino Canton of southern Switzerland, bordering Italy. Their sons were adolescents, about the age I’d been when I first met Tim. I flew out for a week on spring break, partly in celebration of just having been awarded tenure. 

They were as hospitable and kindly as ever. Tim, about to turn fifty, looked almost unchanged in his wire-rimmed spectacles, although his hair was shorter, his beard was long gone, and sciatica was bothering him. Debby appeared just a few crow’s feet removed from herself fifteen years before. The boys were tall, cheerful, bilingual in Italian, and precocious. Tim was still opinionated, but this time, finally, I was the one who brought news of a new world to him. His intellectual blind spot had always been the sciences, and by the late nineties I was obsessed with the debates over human evolution, mind, and cultural change, although I was still a couple of years away from returning to grad school to formally study them. I spent the days touring the Lake District while they were all at school, and in the evenings we debated new music and whether Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins were right about anything. 

I asked Tim what happened to his albums. We had reached the heyday of music on CDs, several years before MP3s and streaming services muscled in. Vinyl was not yet quite the retro cult it would become. Tim said he had several thousand records in a storage unit in South Carolina. I wonder now what’s become of them. 

After I left, we stayed in touch but we descended to the Christmas-bulletin level of relationship after a few years. I abandoned my career as an English professor to study and teach human evolution. Tim and Debby’s oldest son sent me a link to his radio show when he was an undergraduate DJ at UNC Chapel Hill. Then one year, after I had married and was living in Salt Lake, we failed to exchange holiday updates. Since then, I’ve not heard from them.

So what was it about Timothy Dale, school librarian and assistant dorm master of the no-longer standing Johnston Hall? It was partly his simple kindness, partly respect—the mentor who can engage you, despite a sizable gap in life experience, as an equal if not a peer. It was partly my first experience of exchanging idiosyncratic opinions with someone who had them in surplus, had reasons for them, and made no bones about letting you know what they were, unasked, but who yet was never compelled to bend you to his worldview or else quit the friendship. I never became a leftist evangelical like him. I early ceased to be an evangelical at all, except in the cultural sense of having been shaped as one (and in the narrowest theological sense, particular to evangelicals, that a person who has once accepted Jesus Christ as personal lord and savior and thus been genuinely “born again” is presupposed not to be able to reverse that rebirth). Unlike Tim, I never excoriated the natural sciences even in my lit-crit days; indeed I came to dabble in their black magic professionally. And truth be told, although I’m still fond of a bit of angry, propulsive song and drums, I long ago began preferring the spookier sorts of chamber music to punk. 

So? Shall we draw ourselves a moral? It’s not how far someone accompanied you down any particular road. It’s whether they alerted you to new roads in the first place, warned you of where the shadows might be, and then let you go. Heaven send I’ve done that for someone at least once myself. Heaven send you do so, too.

Jiminy Cricket

My father raced cars without using his feet. He couldn’t reach the pedals. That he drove at all, that he loved driving all his adult life, is a small story in itself.

Born with extremely brittle bones and eventually diagnosed with Osteogenesis Imperfecta, he had at first not been expected to live. Then his parents were encouraged to institutionalize him, which they didn’t but only after they almost did. Various futile surgeries followed. Pictures of him look elfin as a little kid, his tall, handsome father always carrying him, heavy metal braces on his legs, bright smile on his face. His name was Jim, so “Jiminy Cricket” was what they nicknamed him. 

By all accounts, despite the fractures, he was a cheerful kid. When he later talked about his childhood with us, his own children, the thing he complained about most was that his maternal grandmother, a strict disciplinarian, sometimes pulled his hair to punish him, since she didn’t dare slap his fragile face. He said he’d been lonely as an invalid, but I can’t recall him ever carrying on about the surgeries or the myriad breaks. They happened. That was it.

A few years after Franklin Roosevelt died, my father’s family made a pilgrimage to the former Roosevelt estate, recently opened to the public, up in Hyde Park, New York. I can’t be certain, but I believe it likely that the reason for the visit had as much to do with FDR’s heroic narrative of triumph over polio as with his lengthy presidency or any family preference for his politics. In any case, what changed my father’s life was not the inspirational tale of FDR’s heroics but one of Roosevelt’s motorcars on display. Peeping into the car from his own wheelchair, my teenaged father saw how the wheelchair-using FDR had managed to drive: the steering wheel and foot pedals were fitted with a custom-tooled set of metal hand controls that allowed braking, steering, and even changing of gears without needing to use one’s feet.

My father, excited, sketched the mechanism on the spot. He was mechanically and artistically inclined, and on the drive home, the construction of those hand controls was all he could talk about. He was too young yet to drive, and my grandmother was alarmed, but my grandfather had already made up his mind to help Jim out. 

Grandpa had built my father a specially fitted work bench, set to wheelchair height. This was the late 1940s and there were no accessibility guidelines or items then. Disabled family members were still largely hidden away from view, even among the wealthiest and most powerful families, as the Kennedys well knew. But it had occurred to my grandfather that his Jim might master some small but useful trade, analogous to a that of a blind piano tuner, if only he had the chance to use his hands. And anyway, making things was one fascination that my grandfather and his crippled son shared.

After the trip to Hyde Park, Grandpa added a vise and metalworking tools to my father’s workbench, and the two of them began scheming on a hand-control design. The problem was that my father’s arms were also brittle and distorted by healed fractures. It became clear that it would be extremely difficult for him to manage any complex shifting of gears. FDR’s system had one floor-mounted lever on the left to operate the brake and the clutch, plus a wheel-mounted handle to depress the accelerator. My father’s short arms couldn’t span both such levers, plus a gear shift, and still steer.

The solution was to buy a car already outfitted with a “hydramatic” shift. Not a full automatic, these transmissions featured gear shifts operated without a clutch pedal and were popular options on American cars in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. (Volkswagen Beetles still featured them into the 1970s. I tried one once and promptly stalled.) 

The hand controls that my father and grandfather eventually created consisted of a single metal lever with a rubber handle, mounted on the left-hand side of the steering column and angled so that it didn’t interfere with the feet of anyone who wished to use the pedals instead. Putting the handle just under the wheel and using good Archimedean principles to maximize leverage, they made it possible to keep one’s left hand on the wheel, thumb and index finger hooked over the rim, while holding the lever lightly with the other three fingers. A gentle tug generated smooth acceleration; a slight push applied the brakes. The right hand was then free to quickly shift without having to long leave the wheel. It required a delicate touch to not lurch forward or stop abruptly, but my siblings and I would later grow up around the device, by then mated to a fully automatic transmission. Most of us could drive either with Dad’s hand controls or our own feet at the time we earned our first licenses, although only my brother Jimmy, born without legs, used the hand controls exclusively.

By 1950, my father the invalid was freed. It was the heyday of the auto age in North America. New-fangled services based on car culture were springing up everywhere: drive-in movie theaters, drive-in burger joints, even drive-through grocery windows. (One of my earliest memories is of a winter evening drive with my father to pick up milk and bread at just such a drive-through.) Soon the Eisenhower Interstate System’s vast construction would be underway. Increasingly, my father could run his own errands, seek his own entertainment, go for long drives with pit stops at full-service gas stations, and never have to struggle from his seat. The same automobile-based living that nature writers, fitness enthusiasts, and urban planners have condemned now for decades opened the whole world for him.

Something in Jim, as a young man, wasn’t content with that freedom alone. I don’t know how he got started doing it, but my father began drag racing. He had a crazy trick. Somehow he would brace the steering wheel in place and then tear off down a short strip, left hand pulling up the accelerator lever hard, right hand smoothly shifting through the gears, short legs dangling placidly over the seat, far from touching the floor.

He won often enough for it to become a gratifying compulsion. He and his friends and rivals would meet frequently to drag illegally, usually at night on secretly selected streets. With the help of an auto-mechanic pal of his named Howie, Dad had modified his mother’s Caddy into a roaring beast, even though on the outside it looked unchanged. Despite a few near-disasters, he kept up this nonsense into his early twenties, becoming something of a local legend, until one night he was caught and arrested with several buddies of his. The police already knew his name, and the officer who arrested him was mightily pleased. Dad himself liked telling the story of the night he got caught so much, and told it so often, that, years and years after he was deceased, I wrote the incident into a poem that quoted his favorite part of the story as its title, "Mr. Jeffreys, I've Fnally Caught You".

After that night, he made an agreement with his parents only to drag race in legal events. He got his own souped-up Cadillac with the money he made from his fledgling cabinetry shop and began competing in NASCAR races in the “stock drag” division, roaring down quarter-mile strips. He placed as high as second in the eastern nationals in 1955 and 1956.

I grew up with those two trophies in the house, always prominently displayed. My father had given up competing in his late twenties, as he grew bored with it and more involved with work. Then he met and married my mother, who persuaded him to toss all the lesser trophies and keep only those two best. They were both heavy chunks of white and black marble, topped with a bronze car and fronted with a brass plaque bearing the crossed flags of NASCAR, along with my father’s accomplishment and name. They grew dusty and neglected in later decades, the plaques tarnished, and by the 1990s they were relegated to some obscurer office shelves, no longer given pride of place.

But my father never ceased to relish driving,  as long as he lived. He religiously subscribed to Car & Driver. He took the family out for long Sunday afternoon drives and two-week road-trip vacations. He prided himself on knowing every twist and turn of every New Jersey street. The year I turned ten, he drove us all around the Lower 48 for two months straight. He ate out at drive-throughs into his sixties and mourned the death of the drive-ins. He kept one wheelchair in the back seat so he could leave his house wheelchair parked in the carport, waiting for him. (An insanely loyal cocker spaniel usually guarded it in his absence and would growl at any of us if we got too near.) Whenever he could afford them, and sometimes when he couldn’t, he favored ragtop Cadillac coupes, even as they fell far from fashion. 

And if our mother wasn’t in the car with us and the mood happened to take him, he would often aim the vehicle at a tempting hill, gunning the engine until we hit 90 or more, his hand-control holding the pedal to the floor. When we hit the hilltop, he’d release the lever and let us soar out and drop, our stomachs momentarily sinking as we levitated, before the Caddy came back to ground on the asphalt with a squish of its cushy shocks. “Do it again, Dad,” we’d shriek in unison. “Do it again!”

The Good Neighbors

It takes children a while to doubt their parents’ views. Some never do. In my case, it was a long time before I questioned my father’s crotchety opinion of our contentious older neighbor, Tom Gullette. I questioned my parents’ perspectives on God and our Lord Jesus Christ before I doubted their thoughts on Tom.

The first I recall being made aware of Tom’s existence was the year my father decided to make a pond. I was eight going on nine and we were new to the neighborhood at the time, having moved in and built a house on five wooded acres just the summer before. 

It had been a dream of my parents to buy a property with land. My mother had been raised on a tiny farm. My father had a vague yen for the status of landed gentry. At least since I was five or six we had been making occasional pilgrimages out to the countryside from our suburban north ‘Jersey home, looking at properties as far afield as Pennsylvania. These adventures left a lasting impression on me. Into my teens and twenties I sometimes dreamed of living on bosky acreages, and I can still call up a sunny summer afternoon around my sixth birthday when we visited a For-Sale farm and I wandered across a meadow to sit under a tree while the grownups in the house discussed. That was an hour of happiness for me.

In the end, what my folks decided on were these five acres of secondary woods, grown over what had been, a century earlier, the northeast corner of a dairy and cattle farm. The people who sold them the acreage lived in a fifty-year old home on a remaining ten-acre strip just behind us, a property itself carved from the same farm decades before. And behind them, in twenty-seven more acres, stood the original nineteenth-century farmhouse, which is where Tom Gullette lived. Most of the original farm, however, had been sold before he’d arrived and long since converted into a municipal, recreational airport. The buzzing of those single-engine prop planes would become the background sound of my youth. Between the airport and those three scraps of subdivided farm ran a natural creek edged by a strip of wetland that we called the swamp. 

The creek crossed the patch my parents bought, and my father had the bright idea that, if he dammed it, he could make us a swimming hole. Without consulting anyone, he did exactly that. A forklift lowered several tree trunks chained together, and my father’s workmen cemented the ends. Initially, it did the job nicely, and that summer we had a pond. I have fond memories of the water striders gliding over its surface and of the hot days when, one leg in a cracked plaster cast that was in imminent danger of dissolving, I stationed friends on either side of the water to quickly towel me off after each swim across.

One evening at dinner my father was cranky serving the meatloaf. It seemed there was some mean man up the road behind our house who was threatening to go to the town council if my father didn’t rip out the dam and drain the pond. I was shocked. I was nine. What could possibly be wrong with a pond?

In the end, the dam stayed in place until that winter when storms and a late-February thaw combined to flood and ruin our shady front lawn, so recently and effortfully hacked free from the forest and the poison ivy. Then, just as the flood approached our door, the pressure ripped apart the dam’s logs. The lawn drained and my father let it go. In the spring he quietly removed the tumbled logs. He wanted to save that lawn. The next year, he built a swimming pool in the back of the house, and from then on, whenever he put up a shed or added a part to the housing, he sought and posted his construction license from the town.

But the myth of the mysterious, mean old man up the road lived on. My father tangled with Tom again when Dad moved his noisy cabinet-making business into our garage. In retrospect, I’m amazed how many of these battles my father won, despite the zoning laws. I suspect he played the card of the local saint, the churchy man in a wheelchair with half a dozen adopted, disabled, multiethnic kids. Later, I discovered that the Gullettes were avid birdwatchers, and I know I would have hated the song of those saws buzzing all day in my bird-haunted backyard. If I had been Tom, I might have been angrier than Tom. But as yet, I didn’t question my parents' logic. They had to feed us, after all, and I loved my father’s workshop in the garage.

In my teens, away at boarding school most of the year, I took to walking up that back road between the scraps of old farm and the airport swamp whenever I was home, especially in the colorful fall. I always took care not to step onto the property of Tom Gullette. I scarcely dared looked at the windows of his house. Who knew if he kept a shotgun or not?

Then one day I got caught. I was strolling down the lane on a fine autumn afternoon, lost in the fantasies about myself that passed, for me, as thought. I was startled by a booming voice just over my shoulder just after I had turned and headed home. “You’re Jim Jeffreys’ boy, aren’t you?”

In a moment of sheer panic, I lied. I said that, no, I wasn’t a member of the family. I was only Mark Jeffreys’ friend. The real Mark Jeffreys was away at boarding school, I said.

Come to think of it now, there was maybe more than a grain of truth in what I bluffed then. The boy that I could be at school felt far more real to me than the boy I had to be at home. But that’s a topic for another rant.

“Oh, I see,” said the man with the booming voice, who was now abreast of me. His white hair tousled, he looked startlingly like the elderly Robert Frost but with thick, horn-rimmed glasses. “When will you see him, then? Because I wanted to speak with him. My name’s Tom, by the way.”

He didn’t ask me my name and I knew right away that he saw clear through me, but I tried to keep on fibbing anyway, hoping to make my escape. “Should I give him a reason you wanted to speak with him?” I asked cheekily. 

Tom chuckled. “My wife Mildred heard from his mother at the grocery store the other day that he plays chess. Do you know if he’s any good? If he is, next time he’s home, I’d like to have a game with him.”

This was disorienting information. Since when did my mother talk to the wife of old Tom Gullette, sworn enemy of our family’s chaotic ways, herself a woman we’d never met? Since when did my mother talk to any random neighbors at the grocery store, about me? Since when did my mother talk to anyone?

In a moment of pure craziness, I doubled down. “Oh yeh, Mark’s very good at chess. He’s an excellent player. He’s much, much better than me!”

“I see,” Tom said. “Tell him, next time he’s home, he should stop by my place. I’d like to see if he can beat me. Good evening.” He turned and headed back his way. 

The next couple of holidays, it became a game. I would wander down the lane, half hoping, half afraid to run into Tom. He’d turn up, wanting to know when Mark was going to come play chess with him. We were at about the third or fourth level of theory of mind by then, which was its own sort of chess. I knew he knew and he knew I knew he knew. But still we chatted about the prowess of that elusive Mark. 

Finally, the next summer, the summer before before I went to college, Tom and I agreed that, in the absence of the real Mark Jeffreys, he should just play a game against me.

So one evening in August, a fortnight before I turned eighteen, I turned up at Tom’s and Mildred’s farmhouse door after dinner, right as the crickets were getting going for the night. They welcomed me in, Mildred tiny and birdlike, with a sweet voice like a bell, and Tom shuffling but still tall and booming, and still pretending he didn’t know that I indeed was Mark but also that he didn’t care to know my “real” name, either. He and Mildred took a moment to show me around the home, which was lovely in a classic farmhouse way but surprising in that the walls were hung with framed black-and-white photos of their travels with their children all around the world. There they were at the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, Machu Pichu, all the classic 20th-century destinations for western tourists, the works.

We wandered into the kitchen, Muriel and Tom now talking excitedly about the birds on their property they’d recently seen or heard. Without asking how old I was, Tom mixed me a large Bloody Mary and plunked it down in front of me. Then he carried out a handsome, well-worn wooden chess set.

Over the next hour or two, he proceeded to beat me soundly, two or three times. He played like a pirate, seemingly careless and swift to sacrifice, ruthless in his endgame. I later realized that the Bloody Mary had been a back-up. The man really liked to win, and I suspect that if I had turned out to be more challenging, more like the “real” Mark Jeffreys whom I’d boasted about, he would have assiduously refilled my drink, the better to tip the advantage back to him.

While we played and Mildred popped in and out with commentary, I found out that they were originally from darkest West Texas. They had come to Manhattan as newlyweds a half-century earlier, during the Great Depression, both graduates of Texas A&M. Despite the grim times, Tom had somehow made it in New York as an advertising man.

They had raised a couple of kids, one with a fairly severe cognitive disability. They had traveled, become ardent conservationists, joined the Republican Party to spite the Dixiecrats, and mostly lost their Texas accents. They’d bought this farmhouse to be closer to nature but still close enough to the city for his commute. In fact, Tom told me, a moment before I spotted another checkmate coming at me, I should climb to the top of the hill behind his house on a clear day, welcome any time, because from there I could see the skyline of Manhattan.

When I left that night, a little tipsy, laughing, I told them it was too bad I didn’t have Mark Jeffreys with me. He would won at least a game or two from Tom. Tom nodded mock ruefully and said he’d sure like to meet that fellow sometime.

Before I left for university, I did climb up their hill one afternoon. I peered at the hazy tip tops of Manhattan. I got some poison ivy on my ankles for my troubles. And I told my father who my new friends were. My father just shook his head like I’d given him one more sign of being an unhinged teen.

For the next decade and change, in and out of school and grad school, in and out of my family home, I would stop in from time to time to have a peppery Bloody Mary, discuss the birds and local conservation issues, play chess and get beaten. One time, I brought a couple of visiting friends from Montana, one of whom worked as a properties manager in the movies. Not long ago she had spent a year hunting down furniture for Horton Foote's 1918, a film about a small town in Texas during the great influenza epidemic. She, Tom, and Mildred discussed the rarity of period antimacassars from Texas for half an hour. Another time I brought along a girlfriend from Alabama who spent the entire visit being perfectly charming while wearing her trousers tucked into her socks for fear of ticks and Lyme disease in their overgrown yard.

Nearing the end of the millennium, when I was a young professor in the New South of Civil Rights museums, evangelical mega-churches, and wall-to-wall white Republicans, I got word from my mother that Mildred had died. I sent my condolences to Tom, but I never heard back from him. He followed her soon after. My father died a couple of years after him, and then my mother moved to Pennsylvania at last. I have no idea who lives in the old farmhouse now, but I still think of Mildred piping about bird sightings and of Tom and his Bloody Marys, although I haven’t played a game of chess against anyone since.

And daughter, if you’re still reading, the moral of this story is this: always question the wisdom of your parents, especially concerning neighbors.

Peter

Nearly a decade before you were born, your uncle, my brother, Peter died on the very same night as his wife, but of different causes and in a different town. This seemed typical for Peter, somehow. He was only thirty-six and, by any storytelling standard, his was not a remarkable life, but it had never been an ordinary one, either. Short as his life was, and unaccomplished, he lived it far from normal, from one end to the other.
 
His parents had been unwed, underaged teenagers. As my mother told it, his birth mother was an adolescent white girl from a Roman Catholic Italian family who got pregnant by a black boy in her New Jersey middle school. This was 1966. Her parents gave the girl no choice but to carry, deliver, and surrender. Things were made no better when Peter (his original name was Mark) was born with hydrocephaly and spina bifida. Instead of being put up for adoption, he was kept first by the hospital and then raised “in an institution,” as the grim euphemism went, for the next eight years of his life.
 
I’ll never know what that “institution” did to him. I was never even told its name. I have my suspicions it might have been the infamous Greystone, a hulking monstrosity the primary mission of which was to house the insane. Peter had to have suffered from the lack of any secure attachment, even if whatever rotating staff working there had been mostly kind, which I very much doubt. Surgeons had placed a shunt in his neck to drain the excess water from his brain, but my parents were told that there had been some damage anyway and that damage was to blame for his learning difficulties. Knowing him for decades as I did, I suspect the shunt was quite successful, and more of his tardy learning was down to those eight lost early years than to direct damage to his brain. But who can make such distinctions after death?
 
When my parents were first introduced to Peter, he was still in diapers because his spina bifida prevented control of his urine and he’d never been given a stoma. As a result, he hadn’t been toilet trained at all. He could talk. He could walk with a shuffling gait, the bifida causing him a permanent crook in the knees that he would later labor to recreate as a casual, bent-kneed hipster’s stroll. He couldn’t count or read.
 
My parents had been called in to consider him because by then they had already adopted four children, added to the two kids born to them, myself and my sister, your Aunt Alleene. Moreover, the last three of those adoptees had all qualified as what were then still casually labeled “unadoptables”—a Eurasian boy born without legs, a twelve-year old Korean boy with polio who’d already been rejected by his first adoptive family, and an abandoned African-American baby girl. Would my parents possibly be interested in another such case, a disabled black boy, eight years old?
 
My father, who told us the story often, found himself terrified out of his wits by the “institution” when he rolled his wheelchair in. He would tell us about the overwhelming feeling of dread he felt as soon as they had pulled up to the gates. When he first described the visit to my grandparents, my grandmother was aghast. She told him she had been advised by her family doctor to deposit him in that very same institution because of his severely brittle bones when he was only two, back in 1934. She and my grandfather had gone so far as to leave him there, only to turn back before halfway home and return to fetch him. Once he heard that, my father swore that he must have recognized the place somehow and felt such dread because of deja vu. That was his narrative, but I expect the place was simply dreadful. You needn’t have had a close call with it as a toddler, I suspect, to have found it disturbing. But I wasn’t there.
 
In any case, my parents adopted Mark and changed his name to Peter so that it wouldn’t inconveniently echo my name, which left me feeling vaguely guilty for years. Then my nearly indefatigable mother set to work on catching him up with his peers. He had surgery for a stoma. He slowly learned to use an external bladder and control his bowels. Within a year or two he was only a grade behind in school.
 
Into his adolescence, Peter was a mostly quiet, gentle kid. He endured teasing and occasional bullying at school and in the neighborhood because his struggles to master his urine bag and his bowels meant he often smelled foul, and he was never quick of wit. Within our family, he nestled into a trio and then a quartet of adoptees nearly the same age, separated by roughly five years from us older kids. Then I went away to boarding school when he was ten, and on to university, and for the next six years, I didn’t see that much of him.
 
By the time I had crashed and burned out of college a couple of times and was forced to come home again, Peter was a teen and Peter had changed.
 
He was being administered shots of testosterone. His own testes never descended, another aspect of his spina bifida, and the doctors were attempting to trigger a normal adolescence, which is somewhat like trying to trigger a normal war.
 
Peter was more aggressive now, with a faint mustache haunting his upper lip. He tried his best to make his crooked steps a swagger. He looked eerily like a very young Lionel Richie. He sassed my mother and father. He sassed everyone. He had zits. He was something of a problem, but on the other hand, he seemed like a more or less normally unhappy teenage kid.
 
When he was fifteen he entered a public high school after having spent his grade school years in a small church school. The high school social scene was divided along racial lines, and Peter began to claim his Blackness. He hid his disability as best he could and mimicked the cool and tough mannerisms of the dominant boys. At home, he remained close to our Korean sister Kim but had an uneasy relationship now with his also mixed-race, also disabled brothers John and Jim. For the rest of the family, including his white adoptive parents, his familiar quietness shaded into deliberate silence, punctuated by occasional storms of defiance. “Watch your attitude!” Mom would tell him, a warning that served to incite him.
 
I had my own problems to work through about then, and I have to admit, as far as Peter’s high school years were concerned, I didn’t much care. In a crowded, chaotic house, we were good at staying out of each other’s way. After a couple of years at home, taking night classes, working for a donut shop, for a theater company, and eventually for a giant insurance firm, I left to go to graduate school in Montana. Two years of that were followed by two years of more graduate school in Georgia. Peter was someone I saw during my rare visits home, and he was hardly around the house then. My memory of him in those years, consequently, is vague.
 
In 1989, I had a dissertation fellowship to study the T.S. Eliot archives in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the famed Manhattan branch with the great stone lions out front. I was twenty-seven and single, and the most cost-effective thing to do was to live at my parents’ house in New Jersey, pay them a modest rent, and take the bus into the city each morning. Half of the kids had cleared off by then. Two of my sisters were married young mothers, one in another state. Two or three brothers had their own places.
 
Peter was a different story. At twenty-two, he’d been kicked out of the house for stealing to support a drug habit. When I first settled into my rental space in the house’s back rooms that summer, no one knew where he’d gone. Jim and Kim, with whom I was close, were worried about him, but Jim was caught up in his studies and social life at William Paterson University down the road, and Kim had her baby to take care of. “Besides,” Jim shrugged, “Peter’s crazy.”
 
I don’t know how Peter survived those days. He didn’t have a driver’s license. He couldn’t walk very far. He had squeaked through the vocational trades track of a crappy public high school, but unlike our father or our brother John, he had no evident skills at carpentry, mechanics, or electronics. He was certified and licensed in nothing. Did he live with friends? Did he live on the street? Did he deal on the side? I don’t know.
 
Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. One week toward autumn, Peter gave us all a scare by moving into the scrub woods and bushes around the house and moving about so stealthily that we had no idea it was him. We would hear a rustling outside the windows at night or see a shadow in the trees during the day. The house was surrounded by several acres of thick undergrowth, swampy ground, and second-growth forest. Neighborhood dogs haunted it, as did seemingly innumerable deer. And as close as we were to Newark and New York, there was nonetheless always someone rumor-mongering about the sighting of a bear. For a few days, my younger siblings still at home, especially Alice, who was just fifteen herself that year, thought of all the monstrous possibilities that could be out there and propped shelves against their windows in fear.
 
One sunny afternoon, home early from Manhattan, I spotted Peter standing under a window where a trio of pines sheltered the side of the house, trying to climb in. I called to him, startled, and he scrabbled away, down across the back garden into the trees. Any able-bodied man could have run and grabbed him by the collar, but I have my father’s brittle bones and could not have caught him if I cared. And I did not care to catch him, even if I could have. What would have I done with him, if I did?
 
My parents put out a restraining order, barring Peter from the property, which was probably pointless and only hurtful if he ever knew of it. He didn’t return. By midwinter, I had finished drafting my dissertation and returned to my adult life in Atlanta. Jim told me the next spring that Peter had been picked up and deposited in Greystone, of all places, to get clean. It seemed like a terrible, fateful closure to me.
 
The next time I saw Peter, things again were different. It was a year later, and I’d come home for the holidays prior to traveling to an academic convention. Peter had been released from Greystone after six months, back into my parents’ care. He’d found steady work as a dishwasher in a local diner, where they appreciated his tendency to silence, and he’d found a girlfriend named Pam who served tables there. He lurked around the house doing nothing when he wasn’t working, but he seemed clean. Things didn’t go missing. His eyes were clear. He looked almost content.
 
Over the next few years, as I taught in the Deep South and pursued my career, Kim and Jim provided me with updates. Pam had gotten pregnant. She said Peter was the father, and my parents said he should marry her. He did. Jim and I raised eyebrows, knowing how biologically unlikely it was for Peter to become a father with undescended testes, but our parents insisted, thinking it was good for him. Pam moved in.
 
Their baby girl was born with straight dark hair and pale skin. Pam was white, pale, freckled, and Peter’s birth mother had been Italian, but Jim and I raised our eyebrows again. Their family continued to live at our parents’ house. There were reports of trouble, some fighting between the couple, a minor arrest for Pam. Then there was another baby, a curly-haired boy with light mocha skin. Who knows, said Jim to me, maybe? More reports of the same sorts of troubles, then another baby, a girl who looked nothing much like either older sibling, with wavy dishwater blonde hair as well as pallid skin. Peter and Pam claimed they were all Peter’s, but when I visited they didn’t look much like kin to each other much less to him.
 
Pam was treated for drug addiction. My father died of diseased lungs. My mother worked another year, now in her seventies, suffered a stroke, retired, and sold the home. When she moved out to rural Pennsylvania to be close to Alleene and her six kids, Peter and Pam came along with her.
 
In his thirties now, Peter was aging rapidly, visibly, and looking gaunt in the last picture I saw of him. My mother and Alleene had hoped being in the country would curb Pam’s appetites, but within a few months she was out of the house most of the time, leaving the parenting to Peter, apparently scoring heroin.
 
One night in 2002, one of his kidneys failing, Peter went in for emergency surgery. The children stayed with Alleene. Pam was missing and no one knew where. Peter died on the operating table, and in the morning police arrived with the news that in a nearby town where she’d been sharing needles with a boyfriend, Pam had overdosed and died the previous evening at about the same time. Alleene and her husband Charlie adopted the three instantly orphaned kids, bringing their own family to nine overnight, nearly literally.
 
And that’s the story of Peter's life, so far as I know it. I warned you, although it was anything but ordinary, it was anything but a storyteller’s dream. At my mother’s wake, nine years later, I sat at a table with Peter’s children. The oldest was a smiling, plump young woman with thick glasses and bobbed brown hair. The middle child was a small, quiet teenager with light brown skin. The youngest was just entering adolescence, a sallow-skinned blonde girl with clear cognitive difficulties. Who knows? Maybe. They asked me eagerly if I had any good stories to tell them about their father, who only the oldest remembered clearly. I didn’t know what to say.
 
Twenty-two years earlier, the day after my grandfather died, I composed a tribute to him, one of the worst poems I’ve ever written. Alleene printed and framed it, propping it up among photos of him on a table at his funeral service. God, that poem was an awful thing. The gist of it, the gist I tried to create for it, was that an unremarkable, unremarked life, if decently lived, was exactly the life worth living. But although I admired my grandfather, I didn’t believe it when I wrote it, and the poem itself was proof I didn’t believe it and was awful because I didn’t believe it, of course.
 
If lives can’t be saved, and they can’t, even though they can sometimes be enlarged and a little extended, then everyone lost deserves remarking, everyone, the unremarkable included, so that our story deaths like our animal flesh can at least restore and nourish those who must continue living behind us. Peter’s life deserves remarking; otherwise, what was the value of all that aimless shuffling and suffering that shaped him?
 
I just wish I could have thought of one true and happy anecdote to tell his children, your cousins, after all, something extra for them to cherish about him.

Frame Narrative

“Dramatic” was never a good word in my family. Anyone “being dramatic” was dancing on the precipice of a just punishment. It was an accusation one step short of being spanked for lying. 

We simply had no role models for what pop psychology might call a healthy theatricality. My maternal grandfather had been a rural fundamentalist minister. My maternal grandmother spent most of her life as his strictly fundamentalist widow. My paternal grandparents comprised a quiet, hardworking sales rep for a minor manufacturer of plastic dinnerware who married an even harder working housewife with aspirations to the bourgeoisie. No aunt, uncle, or cousin on either the devout or secular sides of the family had ever taken up acting as a hobby, much less a profession. We knew what movies and TV shows were. We even watched a few of them. But we tried not to be dramatic.

Then I went away to boarding school, a school with a theater company that put on regular plays, including musicals and dramas. I can tell you, just sitting awed before a brightly lit set where students I actually knew, students my own age, pranced, sang, and shouted while in costumes on the stage, well—it was dramatic.

For the next few years, the longing to be in theater and be dramatic reshaped me. I managed to get into a few high school productions, despite my diminutive stature and permanent limp. My best role I lost a week before opening night when I literally broke a leg. When I couldn’t act, I stage managed. I lured my family to a few plays and discovered my father had a secret fondness for musical theater. We took in a handful of Broadway shows. With my father and two of my sisters I saw, slackjawed, the original Sweeney Todd. My mother abstained.

At university, the theater groups were plural, but the auditions were daunting. After landing a few bit and character parts, I decided to try my hand at directing a group of my own. Winter of my sophomore year, I found myself hunting for some funding and a venue.

My opportunity arrived when I learned that there was a little unspent budget for a lapsed theatrical group. If I were willing to revive it under the same name, I could use the funds. Beneath a dormitory there was a decommissioned fall-out shelter that I got permission to use as a theater space.

That fall-out shelter, creepy as it was, inspired me. Just a week earlier, I had been at the campus art museum, looking at a Frank Stella painting. The thing that had caught me about its stark geometry of black lines turning parallel corners on matte grey wasn’t the content of the painting but the shape of the frame. In the upper left and lower right corners, where the marching angles approached the edge, Stella had cut the frame to match the shape of the approaching lines. Staring at it, I had blurted out to another student standing there, “The frame knows what it’s holding.”

Now, poking around the cobwebbed dark of the fall-out shelter, which had never been properly emptied, turning over cans of expired food and packets of bandages, I grew excited by the thought that I could pick a play to perform that let the space have a say in the content, that let the shelter become a frame that seemed to know what it was  holding.

I chose Say Goodnight, Gracie, a nearly contemporary play at the time, in which dope-smoking thirty-somethings reminisce about being teenagers during the Cuban missile crisis. I’d been only an infant during the crisis, but it haunted me that the world had come closest to nuclear Armageddon when I had barely been born. We used the leftover barrels and whatnot, some still marked with their black-and-yellow shelter symbols, to furnish the stage as props. It wasn’t a great play, but we were pleased, and if you look in my college yearbook for 1982, you can still see us, in character, five young things grinning from a black-walled stage and out of the black-and-white page at you. 

After dropping in and out of college a couple of times, auditioning for dinner theaters in northern New Jersey, and working a while as a stage manager for a traveling troupe that entertained in the Catskills and Poconos, I gradually wearied of being dramatic, but I retained my fascination for content-conscious frames. They’re everywhere in the arts, once you look. In architecture, of course, they’re cliche, "form follows function" and all that, but they’re most interesting to find where you don't expect them. 

Book bindings for example. Anonymously assembled medieval quires may seem at first glance nearly random miscellanies of unrelated poems and stories, but more careful reading reveals the arrangements to be deliberate, often ironic, and rich with implicit commentary. The form reached its zenith in those great works with explicitly narrative frames linking the miscellaneous pieces, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio’s Decameron, but it can be found in the bundled quires still chained to the shelves as well. Most have been destroyed as people cut them apart for their favored contents, but the frames that are left suggest they were shaped to suggest they knew what they held.

It wasn’t until nearly thirty years after college that I thought of content-conscious frames any differently than as occasional, fascinating features of art. Six weeks after you were born, I composed a poem. You were napping on my chest, your mother was in the bath, and I was in a wheelchair with another broken leg, caught in my own body, holding your tiny body, your whole life rising and falling slightly at my every breath. It occurred to me that we ourselves are the frames that know our contents, the fixed theaters hosting our plays. We individual human bodies are the frames, the stages that can't escape ourselves, that constrain what we can never control. Every tune and tale performed within us may move on without us, may play in another town for other souls, but we stay framed as we are, until something or someone finally burns or tears us down. 

That was the thought that I framed as a poem. If it hasn't yet disappeared, you may still find it here. Then I couldn’t stop. I wrote day after day after that, framed poem after poem, until I'd composed and posted a few thousand more. And this? This is only another frame for the origin of all those poems, which are their own, other show. But now I'm just being dramatic again, as you know.

Edentate Explanations

My mother had dentures before she had babies. I didn’t realize this until I asked her once, when she was in her fifties, why she never openly smiled in any of the few pictures taken of her when she was young. In each of them she offers the same wide but tight-lipped smile, whether as a teenager in chestnut braids, a clear-eyed nursing school graduate, or a youthful missionary in Nigeria. “I had terrible teeth,” she told me. “That’s why I never really smiled. But I had them all out and replaced with dentures the year before I met your Dad.”

My father himself later confided to me that he had been startled to discover one morning, shortly after they were married, teeth floating in a glass beside their nuptial bed. “I practically jumped out of my skin,” he said. He swore he’d had no idea about her false teeth when he proposed, but he and she together hid the dentures from us unsuspecting kids until we were mostly in our early teens. As her firstborn and as a child whose own teeth were slow to come in, I sometimes now reconsider the photos of my mother and I in my infancy, the beaming, toothless baby on the lap of the beaming, secretly toothless new mom.

Before I knew how early she’d begun wearing dentures, I had liked to think that the sudden appearance of more radiant smiles had something to do with the appearance of my father, marriage, and motherhood in her thirties. I was sort of hoping that, when I asked her about the close-mouthed early pictures, her response would include a phrase along the lines of, “but then I met your father and things have been much happier since. Now I can really smile.”

But no. It was simply the case of a shy girl raised during the Great Depression by a widowed mother with nine other children, subsisting on a hardscrabble New England farm. Dental hygiene was the least of their worries, and by the time she went away to boarding school at fourteen, the quiet girl with the abundant head of hair and pretty eyes had already had more than a few carious teeth pulled, in lieu of actual dentistry. From there she just got shyer, until she had a fresh set of pearlies put in, and then she smiled. That was it.

Or was it? My mother used to chide me frequently for not smiling broadly enough in posed photos myself, especially once I was in my teens and thought that I looked cooler slightly surly. My teeth weren’t hardly handsome, but I was never shy about them. I just favored a tight-lipped smirk for a while. And then in my thirties, for no conscious reason, I started posing with open smiles. I could make up a story about why. It’s half a story already to imply that my adolescent punkishness was to blame for why I started grimacing in the first place. But is a post-hoc explanation, however plausible, anything anyone should trust? I’ve begun to doubt, especially now that I see you, at merely seven and with mostly baby teeth still brightening your laugh, already beginning to shut your mouth and smile your grandmother Harriet’s girlhood smile, your father’s adolescent smile.

The reason our memories get such a bad rap, I’m convinced, comes not from their hazy and creative view of the happened facts. It’s because we can’t bear to have done something, anything, any damn thing at all, without having a plausible-sounding causal explanation for why we did that. And once we’ve settled on our explanation, then, as needed, we begin to bend our facts.

I don’t know, really, why your grandmother and I started smiling those close-mouthed smiles that you’ve begun to smile. I never knew that I was even smiling that way until adults, including my mother, complained, and then I only knew that I didn’t want to smile the way that they wanted me to smile. I suspect you feel about the same. Maybe it was in our genes, and in our genes again to start smiling more broadly, apparently more happily, after our twenties had passed. Maybe, but that’s another speculative, post-hoc explanation, isn’t it?

You’ll make up your own stories to explain your own memories of course. We all do. But as much as I want to catch you grinning that big grin that you give me during silly play, I’m okay. We’ll brush your teeth properly in the meantime, and some day well into your young adulthood, I’ll wager, you’ll set those pearlies back out on display.

Parade de cirque

My grandfather, your great grandfather, painted The Last Supper. His was the first version I ever saw. It was as wide as he was tall, and he was a tall man. He had it ornately framed, and it took up most of a small guest-bedroom wall. Barely in grade school back then, I was in awe.

His secret was paint-by-numbers. He was an absolute master of that rarely studied genre, and, like most masters of arcane and disrespected arts, he was without honor, even in his own home. My father and uncles saw their father’s paintings as amusingly pointless monstrosities. My grandmother, who aspired to the good taste of the college-educated middle class that she vividly imagined but to which she did not belong, tried to keep his masterpieces out of sight. His smaller paintings were mostly relegated to the basement where he also kept his woodworking tools, his workbench, and his breeding tanks for tropical fish. A later generation would have called it his “man cave” or some such silliness. He called it the workshop, full stop. 

When I was allowed to visit that dim downstairs, to stare at the golden green glass tanks burbling with fish that sparkled, to be shown how the fry were kept safe from eating each other, to gingerly handle the heavy metal tools arrayed in neat rows over the workbench, I felt as if I were in the viscera of an ongoing creation where my grandfather was a demigod. His poorly lit but brightly colored paintings that lined the basement walls could as well have been stained-glass windows to me, or the Stations of the Cross, so heavy with solemn reverence the dank air felt. 

The tricks to his painting skills included patience, restraint, a trust in authority, and a surgeon’s steady hand. These also happened to be among his chief personal characteristics. No matter how large the numbers rose—the larger paintings came with kits counting over a hundred premixed colors—he never by mistake or experiment put a dab in the wrong spot. No matter how tiny and oddly gerrymandered the individual patches, he never smeared two colors or strayed so much as a brush hair over a color line.

His own family was considerably messier, both in practice and in coloration. His middle son was a literal mutant who lived in a wheelchair, dabbled in oils, and somehow became a moderately successful cabinetmaker. His eldest son was a golden boy as tall as himself; his youngest son struggled to get through school and married his pregnant girlfriend when both were in their teens, a pattern repeated by their own children. Some of the other grandchildren were mixed race, individually and collectively, and included several adoptees. His favorite grandchild may have been my Korean sister, Kim, who arrived in the States as a badly malnourished three-year old in 1969 and who would sometimes follow Grandpa around his house as a toddler, clutching the remains of a breakfast orange that she refused to surrender, her perpetual snot bridging her nose and her upper lip. 

Nothing, in fact, was well contained or precise about his grandchildren’s generation, from our haircuts to our shapes to our behaviors, which is one reason why my grandfather’s silent obsession with tightly confined painting so fascinated me. His finished pieces were fantastic practical lessons in the power of distance and perspective. When I stayed overnight, I always asked to sleep in the little bedroom with that giant Last Supper opposite my narrow bed. From across the room in early morning twilight, it was impossible to see the dividing lines. Subtle colors shaded into one another, shapes almost moved, and the disciples’ diverse personalities glowed. You just needed the right angle and the right light to see the genius of the despised thing.

It was a decade before I saw a painting by Georges Seurat, when I was on a high-school field trip to the Met, and realized how much could be done with distinct color dots. Parade de cirque. I was thunderstruck. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get on the Internet and look. See that spooky figure in the center, hooded and holding a trombone, entirely composed of tiny dots, just like all the rest? Had no one told my grandfather such a thing was possible? Had no one manufactured a paint-by-numbers kit to challenge a natural pointillist, a kit in which every myriad number dictated precisely the same-shaped dot? 

A century before my grandfather’s death, Seurat had painted the one musician who would have been most appropriate at the funeral where I gave the eulogy. After the service I drove home, opened my third-hand coffee-table volume of Great Impressionist Art, looked at the blurry, lurid reproductions of agreed-upon greatness, thought of those long-lost number paintings that had been disposed of when my grandparents moved into their last condo, and knew I should have wept.