Grandma Wetherbe

The remotest ancestor I knew in person was my maternal grandmother, your great grandmother, Alleene Bond Wetherbe, born in 1888, died in 1972. Had she lived to see you, she would have been by far the oldest person left on earth by the day of your birth. She was already thirty-nine and just widowed when her eleventh and last child, my mother, was born. She was seventy-four by the time I was born, and of course it took me nearly half a century to become a father to you. Averaging just over forty years a turn, that’s a lineage that pushes the upper limit of human generational intervals. I don’t know why it should amuse me but it does. With just three births, we stretched from the Victorian era well into the 21st century.

My earliest memories of Grandma Wetherbe are around the hazy age of four. A fiercely devout, old-fashioned, and independent rural New Englander, she had lived alone on her little scrap of farm for twenty years after the last of her brood had scattered. Then at seventy-eight, she slipped in her bathtub and broke her hip. She crawled out of the tub somehow and across the the kitchen to her first and only recently installed telephone. A month or so later, she was out of the hospital, shuffling on a walker, and she came down to New Jersey to live with us. It was 1966.

The only previous time she had come to New Jersey had been during my parents’ engagement. The wedding was planned for Labor Day weekend up in Massachusetts, and Grandma Wetherbe figured that if she were expecting her latest set of in-laws to come to her home, it was only polite to visit them first. Seventy-three at the time and having never learned to drive a car, she took trains to get to my father’s town. She had worried my other grandmother by not forecasting her exact time of arrival, and then astonished her by showing up at their doorstep, suitcase in hand, one hot summer afternoon, having walked three miles with that suitcase directly from the station. I wish I could have been there when those two women met. They were a good nineteen years apart in age and about fifty years apart in life ways. 

I never did see the two of them in a room together. When Grandma Wetherbe moved in with us, her country walking days were over. She wasn’t the type to domineer, interfere, or even talk much, but being a grandmother, after all, she automatically took stock of what her grandchildren’s upbringing lacked. In my case, she took note of my disgusting habit of endlessly rootling about absentmindedly in my snotty nostrils. A less thrifty woman might have force-fed me tissues, but Grandma Wetherbe decided to turn me into a gentleman of the elegant handkerchief.

Her strategy was to generate a sense of ownership of the handkerchief in me. (I was tempted to write, “pride of ownership,” but Grandma Wetherbe frowned on pride, so that can’t be.) To accomplish this end, she bought a dime-store packet of cheap, white, mass-manufactured men’s handkerchiefs and set to work embroidering them.

I had no favorite color as a small boy. I only knew I already hated hospital green. My grandmother decided therefore to use her own discretion. She thought purple was a manly color, fit for Biblical kings.

She embroidered each cheap handkerchief elaborately by hand, edging them in purple thread and then stitching my initials in gothic, purple-and-lavender lettering in one corner of each. I thought they were pretty, but strange, like ungainly butterflies stuffed into my small shirt pockets. Rolling around in my wheelchair or stumping on my crutches, I quickly dropped and lost them, then returned to my more traditional, manual excavations.

My grandmother tried again. Each morning she approached me as soon as I had gotten dressed, bearing a clean, handsomely monogrammed handkerchief and a safety pin. With the pin she would affix the handkerchief directly to my shirtfront, just above the breast pocket, if I had one, so that it was now like a limp specimen of that same ungainly butterfly secured to my chest.

I don’t recall how long this project lasted. At some point, at my insistence, the handkerchiefs were permitted to be stuffed in a pants pocket and neglected, except in my grandmother’s presence.

If she hadn’t yet had a stroke when she broke her hip, Grandma had one discreetly after she moved in with us. A sturdy and formerly stern woman, she began quickly to become rather pleasantly daffy and indifferent to action as the year progressed. The following summer, at the end of which I turned five, I and my little sister, Alleene, who was Grandma’s namesake, spent long hours on sunny days playing in the backyard around our grandmother’s chaise lounge as she watched us or napped in the shade. She always kept her glasses on and charmingly pretended that she watched us like a hawk and never slept, although we often used her torso as a desk or played with small toys on her gently rising and falling chest.

One Monday morning, Grandma emerged from her room at 8am precisely, dressed in her Sunday best, complete with flower and hat. I remember the incident not because it meant much to me that she’d forgotten what day it was or that she’d spent hours at our Baptist services only yesterday, but because being corrected by my mother so distressed her and left her clearly frightened as well as upset. Her anxiety also bothered me. I wasn’t used to seeing an alarmed adult, and never my mother or her mother, but they were both clearly flustered with each other, and Grandma in particular seemed as horrified as if she’d wandered out of her room without having dressed at all. She, all of her children, most of her grandchildren, and of course her own parents and grandparents, had structured their entire lives by regular church services, the sundials around which the trivial shadows of each week progressed. To be confused about when to go to church was, for her, akin to being confused about who she was. And she was.

Not long after that, my mother’s youngest of several older sisters, my beloved spinster Aunt Elizabeth, the kindest of the family, the one who knitted every grandchild a personal blanket, missing not a single birth or adoption over decades, the one who in the end was the longest lived of the siblings by yet another half a decade, decided that it would help Grandma’s peace of mind if she moved back up to rural Massachusetts and lived with her. So she did.

And after that, I saw little of Grandma Wetherbe. Although she lived with Aunt Liz, she kept the farm, eventually taking tenants. Summers when I turned six and seven and eight and nine, we visited. I can vaguely remember my parents, aunts, and uncles talking in quiet voices about how Grandma was doing or about some latest incident. 

She seemed sweet to me, nevertheless, although less and less mobile, and was always delighted to visit her farm with us. One summer, with the help of my mother and Aunt Liz, she introduced Alleene and me to the delights of raw goat’s milk on blueberries we’d just picked. And the summer that  I turned six, she was delighted to see that my parents had given me a yellow pup-tent for my birthday and insisted that, as a birthday treat, I be allowed to camp by myself one night in her meadow back of the barn. I did, and I retain a vivid memory of the early sun the next morning, lighting the yellow canvas over me a blazing gold and silhouetting the outline of a Daddy Long-Legs that was delicately traversing the glowing expanse, while I observed from my sleeping bag, up on one elbow, silently.

Things take their course. We are a senescing species, after all, and although we don’t age all at once and mercifully like salmon or the one-horse shay in the poem beloved by Grandma Wetherbe, we age inevitably. The last time I saw Grandma she was eighty-three, had just had a serious stroke, and been placed in a nursing home. She struggled to talk or recognize me. 

When I was nearing ten years old, I was playing in the driveway of our home with my friend Donald Murphy, when my father rolled out to tell me that Grandma Wetherbe had died. He and Mom would be going up for the funeral in Massachusetts over the weekend. My other grandparents would look after my siblings and me.

After my father went back inside, Donny Murphy, who was eight, stared at me. To his credit, the kid knew something about condolences and tried to say something to comfort me. But I didn’t need condolences. I wasn’t struck by grief. I was too busy processing the news that the thing I had heard of and read about for years already, death, had finally crept a bit closer to my family and become a newly fixed component of reality.

The Wanderer

Our lives can be shaped not only by the people we’ve known and wanted to be like, but by the characters we’ve longed to know or be who never were. I’ve been shaped by mentors, friends, and family members, of course, but also by someone I’ve only half-glimpsed in stories, only imagined, and insufficiently imagined at that.

He was the best person I knew who never actually existed—the avatar I couldn’t become, my alter ego, my patron saint or, if you like, my spirit guide. They’re all metaphors; pick one. I think you’ll also have someone like him—not him, of course, not likely, but like him—if you don’t already. I’ve seen your imagination up close. You’re a bright child. You have a strong, wandering mind. 

He wasn’t my imaginary friend. That’s a particular talent I never had. Some children can manage the whole creation. They can generate a friend entirely to their satisfaction. A few of them go on to create enormous narratives, even epics around those friends. The Bronte sisters, so I’ve read, co-created their own imaginary civilization, and I’ve encountered cases of similar, endless works in progress by both children and adults. Some of them are locked, inscrutable kingdoms, accessible only to their authors. I suspect the Voynich Manuscript of being one. There’s even a lively debate among researchers about how healthy these imaginary worlds are, when and if they ever go too far.

My imagination could never go far enough. It knew where it longed to go, the kind of character it wanted to be in its undiscovered world, but it couldn’t get close without props, the wonder tales and fantasies already written out by others. And although those could be entrancing, could absorb the weeks and hours, they were never quite sufficient. My imagination wanted to go, really go, to get lost on its own, to wander indefinitely, but like the little kid trying to run away from home only to hide out for a few hours and then sheepishly come back for dinner, my imagination never escaped as far as it imagined it would.

The figure I wanted to be was the Wanderer, which was either ironic or obvious, or both, given I could hardly walk. From an early age, I had an exact notion of his core mythology, what I wanted him to do, what I wanted myself, as him, to do. He was to set out as a solitary figure, stoic and resourceful, exploring or exiled in a dark, mysterious world. His world was a dream world, as I thought of it, taken seriously. 

Literal dreams, that is, have a number of features that have fascinated me since I was quite young. They can be brightly lit up close or momentarily display brilliantly illuminated landscapes, but there’s almost always a surrounding dark. I expect that’s because the sleeping brain is generating the world of the dream and to fill out all the edges with brightly lit detail is too much work. So dreams tend to shadows, for a start. Also, and perhaps for the same reason, in a dream it’s impossible to read much text. There are books and signs, but they’re generally illegible or meaningless except for a few phrases occasionally, gnomic utterances. There’s not as much talking in dreams as in waking life. And dreams are notoriously unpredictable in progress, with characters blurring into each other, laws of society and physics flaunted,  and wholly unexpected events. This last aspect is the one most overemphasized in popular depictions of dreams as wildly hallucinatory and fantastically rococo parades, when actual dreams, as far as I remember them, are more often moody, dim, and simply strange. The moodiness mostly stems from another feature of dreaming, the staggeringly strong emotions in them, both delightful and frightful, often attached to happenings that, when described upon waking, seem trivial. How many times have you had a profound nightmare that seemed a bit silly when you told it to someone, or a dreamed a profound insight that you woke to realize was banal? All these things intrigued me. I wanted to be able to explore, awake, the world of dreams.

Besides the obvious problem, given that one’s brain doesn’t perform dreams well when it’s awake, this longing of mine ran up against the dilemma that one aspect of dream wandering I desperately wanted for my fantasy Wanderer and/as myself was exactly the element of surprise. And when one invents one’s own surprises, well . . . It felt a bit like opening all the windows of a haunted house amusement ride one morning to let in the sunlight while touching up the paint on the motorized skeletons. Eerie, maybe, even in the light, a little weird, but work to do and hardly fantastic anymore.

So I looked for the experience of the Wanderer prefabricated for me in books. There are countless wanderers in stories, and they come in many, often overlapping forms—the pilgrim, the simpleton, the exile, the marked man, the chosen one, the monk, the naturalist, the tracker, the ghost, the flâneur. There are wanderers, imaginary and historical, so famous and distinctive that they can only even be described by their proper names: Odysseus, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Childe Harold, Xuanzang. 

But although I enjoyed my vicarious adventures with all of these and fiercely admired a few of them, especially the more heroic, solitary, fictional ones, it was always the label “Wanderer” itself that most powerfully appealed to me and most thoroughly disappointed me. I was thrilled one day in high school to find a volume on the library shelves with a brooding cover illustration of an empty path into a dark forest, titled The Wanderer, by Alain-Fournier. That evening, I was so eager to read it that I passed on the excitement of watching a World Series game with the rest of my dorm and slipped down to the quiet basement instead to be alone with my mysterious adventure. It was a good tale, as I remember, complete with teenagers, romance, magic, and an ancient estate. But the story wasn’t really about The Wanderer, or even much wandering per se, and when I saw that the original French title had been Le Grand Meaulnes, I felt swindled. For that I had missed a great baseball game. 

I was more thrilled still, as a freshman in college, fortunate to find myself in Professor Margaret Doody’s survey of early and Medieval English literature, when I spotted a thousand-year old Anglo Saxon poem titled “The Wanderer” on our syllabus. Doody was the sort of professor who started the semester by launching straight into a booming recitation of the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, in Middle English, without introductions for either herself or us. That night in my room, I skipped over the more familiar assignment in Beowulf, as fascinating to me as it was, to go first to “The Wanderer” poem.

This was more what I had dreamed of dreaming myself, at least initially: the exile with trouble in mind, no one to confide in, wandering among the ruins of a lost world. But the poem was a lyrical lament, curiously static despite the scope of it, and moved swiftly to a coda of consolation in faith, without any narrated events. Then I spotted in the copious footnotes that the original manuscript had no title. “The Wanderer” was just a title awarded it by an early nineteenth-century translator, and no less a myth-making scholar than J.R.R. Tolkien himself, revered among my peers, had complained a century later, campaigning to get the title changed to “The Exile’s Lament,” which surely fit better, but without success. Great poem, to be sure, but so much for that.

I'm much older and more jaded now. I know that many of the paths in these woods lead nowhere and that there are false signposts everywhere. There are “Wanderer” titles and characters scattered all over pop culture, just for starters. Comic book heroes, doo wop songs, gunslingers, “Young Adult” fictions. None that I’ve yet run into comes very close to the character I’ve sought out all my life. You may discover one day that this holds true for your own dream avatar, whoever that might turn out to be. 

 

For now, my Wanderer stands, a silhouette and a shadow, on a path through the great and growing forest, washed in moonlight, waiting for me to join him. A moth flutters by his ear. He turns and starts walking. I try to imagine what will happen to him, but he walks too quickly for me, and in a moment he disappears.

When I Was Just Your Age

In the autumn of 1969, when I was seven-years-plus-two-months old, the exact age that you are now as I write this, I contracted a staph infection after surgery and almost died. My memories of the weeks around that illness remain by turns hallucinatory, fearful, and precise. They also include a few of the warmest memories of my life. I thought of those memories often last week, when you came down with the flu and a fever of 104F, when for a couple of days there your grandparents and I were keeping a close watch over you.

It began with a broken femur. I’d broken my right femur playing in a sandbox the year before, and, using a still-new technology for the time, “internal fixation,” the surgeon had placed a titanium rod inside my broken bone for it to heal around. That rod lasted, in fact, for the next forty years, and when it finally gave way in an airport parking lot, its timing was such as to play a significant role in my getting to know your mother, and hence, in your existence. But that’s another thread. When my remaining, left femur broke the following year, the plan was to rod it the same way my right femur had been rodded. This time things did not go as well.

An odd thing about the left femur fracture is that I can’t remember how or where I fell. The memories of most of my major breaks and a great many of my minor ones stay with me. And yet that one I can’t recall, beyond being pretty sure it did not happen at school, where I was in the second grade class of Miss Fornelius, who wrote her name in flowing cursive on the board each morning, so that I fell in love with the capital letter F. There, I was one of only two children in the class, the other being Sammy Armijos from Venezuela, who were so small that we still had to use kindergarten-size chairs to keep our feet on the floor. Sammy and I hated that, but there I never fell.

In my earliest recollection of the injury, I’m already in the hospital. My left leg is in traction, the standard approach to femur fractures back then, but has no cast on it. It’s been a day or two since the surgery, at least, because I’m already past the grogginess and the post-operative nausea that always afflicted me. For medication, I’m taking ground-up aspirin in applesauce. I’m in a semi-private room in the Chilton Memorial Hospital’s pediatric wing. I do not know it, of course, but the hospital will one day be converted into condos, and my paternal grandparents, who are both volunteers at the hospital, will own their last home right below my current bed. My grandfather will die there in that condo, in his own bed, and there my grandmother will have the massive stroke that leaves her hospitalized herself for the last four years of her life. Right now, Chilton’s just the place I go when I break, the place where I was born.

My roommate is another little boy, named Chris. He’s in for a broken collarbone and a separated shoulder that he got playing pee-wee football. He’ll go home soon, that I know. At dinner time, which is also parental visiting hours (very strictly rationed and monitored), his father and my father chat amicably between our beds. His father crosses the room to change the channel on the hanging, black-&-white television set. My father, in his wheelchair, reaches to help me open my milk carton and cut my meat.

These evenings will be memorable mainly because Chris’s father has found a really absorbing TV show for us to watch while we eat. All day, when not dealing with nurses, Chris and I have been suffering stoically through adult soap operas and asinine programming designed to sell packaged sugars to preschool kids. There is no educational TV, unless you count the likes of Mr. Rogers, and only the pre-soap morning reruns of I Love Lucy and the The Andy Griffith Show alleviate our misery. Chris likes both those comedies, but I don’t really understand poor Lucy, whom I pity, and the whistling intro to The Andy Griffith Show mysteriously depresses me.

Then Chris’s father discovers a new syndicated show that comes on during dinner hour on Channel 9 TV. It’s like nothing that I’ve ever read, had read to me, or seen. Not even remotely. It’s set in outer space, begins with an absolutely eerie theme, and then shows people using technology that’s pure magic on the screen. It’s called Star Trek, and I’m entranced. We watch it every weeknight that week. After one episode, Chris’s father entertains me by standing at the foot of my bed, turning sidewise, and shrinking out of sight while making warbling noises in imitation of the dissolving crew members in “transporter room” scenes. 

By the weekend, Chris has gone home. I am doing fine, almost to the point when stitches get removed. My mother comes by each afternoon for a while, leaving my five-year old kid sister Alleene with a neighbor for an hour or so. My father comes straight to the hospital to see me after work. Mashed potatoes and peas are the most common sides to the supper dishes, and because I am clumsy scooping my peas, he encourages me to mix the two and use the mashed potatoes as glue. “I eat my peas with honey,” he sings. “I’ve done it all my life. It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on the knife!”

The plan is for me to stay another week. Two-week stays after orthopedic surgery are the norm, of course. Monday morning, my stitches are removed. It’s a curious sensation, when the small, cold steel scissors slip under the black threads. A mildly painful tug, like a bug sting, a snip, and then the feel of a bit of thread being teased from my skin. A wipe of stinging alcohol. An urge to scratch the itch. All the way down my thigh, the nurse works methodically, from just below the hip to just above the knee. It’s discomfiting, but it’s a relief.

Tuesday morning, taking my vitals, a nurse notices I have a fever. Nothing too high to worry about, but something to keep an eye on. Extra aspirin in applesauce for me. 

Wednesday morning, after the doctor’s rounds, my leg has been taken out of traction and casted. The nurse cleaning me up with a sponge bath afterward, notices my skin is covered in spots. She asks me how long I’ve had them. They’re news to me. 

By afternoon, my bed’s been wheeled to ICU, not because I’m in any great danger right now, my parents are assured, but because it might be scarlet fever, in which case I could be dangerously infectious and need to be sequestered from the other patients. (Decades later, it will dawn on me, the spots were hives, an immunological stress response to the actual infection. Mysterious outbreaks of them will reoccur at apparently random points in my adult life. But in 1969 the misdiagnosis as scarlet fever costs time while the fever worsens.)

I have the feeling that something is wrong with the grown-ups, that my parents are acting distressed. I don’t know yet that my mother grew up with an awareness of scarlet fever as a killer, one of the many spectral diseases that haunted the world of her childhood. Her own father had died of an undiagnosed species of fever, three months before she was born. My mother rarely worries and frequently prays, but now she seems unhappy and her praying seems somehow excessive to me.

I have my own cubicle of a room. I can’t say I much like it. It’s small, with one interior glass wall through which I can see an always-attended nurse’s station, from which a nurse can always see me. The opposite, exterior wall, barely three feet from my left bed rail, has one small window that gives directly on a view of solid bricks. I am, apparently, facing a courtyard or a corridor, some kind of fold in the hospital’s architecture. The wintry outside light is dim. When it snows, I watch the flakes swirl past the bricks, never sticking to them, floating down from high nowhere to disappear from the frame before landing on anything. 

My fever rises and the grownups are visibly more concerned. I am tired. I am tired all the time. I lose track of the weekdays, normally so unmistakably ritualized in hospital wards, and I eat almost nothing. They reopen a vein on my right hand and begin a fresh saline IV. There is another little boy, smaller than me, with a heart condition, in another ICU cubicle across from me. His relatives bring him a bunch of balloons to cheer him. He plays a bit with a purple one and loses it. It bounces from his cubicle, across the intervening room and into my space. He makes a plaintive cry. I tell my mother to give it back to him, but the nurse says that she can’t. I might contaminate him. And his balloon might contaminate me. Wearing her face mask and latex gloves, the nurse removes the balloon as medical waste. I hear the other boy whimpering, but I’m overpowered by the desire to sleep.

Later my parents will tell me solemnly of the Wednesday night prayer meeting at church where I was the object of everyone’s prayers. They will credit those prayers and their God that I remained on earth. But for now, nothing seems to be working. I hit a fever of Fahrenheit 108. 

One of the happiest, dreamiest memories of my life emerges from these days. I begin skirting the edges of coma, slipping in and out of sleep. When I am aware, it is often barely and with my eyes closed, but behind my eyes I do not see the usual darkness or daytime wash of pink. I see gold. I float in a golden haze. The only other sound is of my mother’s voice reading Little Women to me. She reads the entire thing, I think. I am already an avid reader myself by this age, so she has been reading to me less and less. I don’t think she will ever read to me again. Later, when I am eighteen, I will write one of my first poems, struggling to articulate that sensation of drifting, all but disembodied in a contented, golden haze without any other sensation, only the continual murmur of my mother’s voice, slightly muffled by her medical mask, reading about a strange, gone world from the previous century. I will never read Little Women again. I could never bring myself to overwrite the unreal prose of that memory.

One day, when neither my mother or father is with me, and I feel I can barely breathe, a nurse attending me notices a yellowish stain on the outside of my plaster cast. Within the hour, the cast has been cut off and a massive, suppurating staph infection has been discovered in my thigh. It has begun to split the just-healed skin of my surgical scar. It is the source of my fever and has been too well entrenched for medicine to defeat it.

A doctor comes and reopens the wound wider with a scalpel. I don’t even feel it. A fresh regime begins of cleaning out the wound several times a day, combined with heavy doses of intravenous antibiotics. Once the wound is open and the deep infection cleaned, my fever stabilizes and then begins a slow retreat. After a day or two, I can increasingly feel the nurses' swabs moving inside my leg, slightly disgusting me. The doctors are in no rush yet, however, to restitch me. When it is all over, the infection will have eaten a permanent dent in my flesh, just below my hip, a feature that you will notice as a child and ask how it was acquired.

On a grey morning, as I sit staring through my window at the rows of bricks, a nurse enters my cubicle excitedly. She knows that I hate most of what’s available on daytime TV, and at this point in my recovery I’m still too weary much to read. But she’s got news. There’s a new program on, designed just for younger school kids such as me. It began broadcasting while I was floating in my haze, and now that I’m alert again, she’s going to put it on for me. The name of the program is Sesame Street. 

I’m terribly eager to watch it, but terribly disappointed. I can’t explain why to the nurse or my parents, although my mother, who never lets us watch any TV at home, proudly interprets for me: “He’s too advanced for something like that. They’re rehearsing letters and numbers, and he’s already reading at the seventh-grade level. Do you know, he’s read all the way through the Bible?”

(Forty-odd years later, I will discover to my immense amusement that my preschool-aged and not-reading-at-all-yet daughter, you, also will turn up your nose at Sesame Street and its muppets, despite a short-lived fondness for Elmo before you turn two. Maybe it’s just genetic. We like what we like, and then we invent plausible-sounding reasons. From the way that you’ve taken to Harry Potter, I’d guess you’ve at least got my weakness for the physics-defying worlds of the fantastic.)

Except for one detail, the end of that hospital stay will become blurrier in mind than even the memory of its days of golden haze. After seven weeks, when I’m released at last and my wheelchair is pushed through the hospital’s front doors, the taste and bite of outside air in my breath and on my skin is a revelation, as if I had acquired an additional sense of perception. I breathe it in as deeply as I can, even the acrid odor of car exhaust in the parking lot. The world is real again. I forget what happens next.

That Sort of Life

My paternal grandmother, your great grandmother Edith, was the last born of my grandparents and also the longest lived, thus the last to die. Yet a single calendrical century easily contained the whole of her life. She was born in 1907. In 1996, she died.
 
I think about my grandmother often when I’m considering what might define “a good life.” She lived just shy of ninety years. She raised three sons who all gave her grandchildren, who in turn all made it to adulthood and gave her several great grandchildren as well. At the time of her death, all her sons and grandchildren were still alive.  She accomplished most of her major goals. The daughter of a scandalously abandoned mother, she went on to live a comfortably middle class life, untouched by any scandals herself. She managed her family finances and household needs wisely and efficiently. She married at a suitable age and remained married for sixty-two years to my grandfather, her stable, reliable "provider," until the night he died in bed beside her, aged eighty-five. She lived independently well into her ninth decade and pretty nearly as she wanted to live most of her life. She died exactly as she did not want to die.
 
My grandmother’s home was always clean and bright. Her cooking was conventional but competent and precise. She was the sort of woman who wore a neatly tied apron in the kitchen, usually over a string of pearls and a monochromatic knee-length dress. She had her hair permed weekly, and her hairstyle from 1950 to 1990 hardly changed at all, but she let it go silver, then white, because she considered it vulgar to dye. Occasionally, I was lucky enough to catch her warbling to herself during chores, “Darling, I am growing old/ Silver threads among the gold.”  She collected Hummel figurines and kept fresh mints on glass dishes on the end tables, under the reading lights. As a small boy, I always felt privileged whenever I was invited to spend the night.
 
She had her little vanities and surprises. She tried to never let herself be photographed in profile because she was shy about what she called “my Dick Tracy nose.” It had an indentation in the bridge, a reduced version of which I have myself. And when I was visiting my grandparents once in my teens, I was startled to realize that she had a 1920s first edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay hid high on a shelf. The one or two pictures I saw of her from that era, just before she wed my long-legged grandfather, show a coyly stylish young woman with a wide face and bobbed hair, clearly attempting a demure take on the “It Girl” look of Clara Bow.
 
She was famous among her sons, grandchildren, and daughters-in-law for her manner of being politely reproving, writing letters in cursive ink on cream stationery, explaining what we had done to offend her and actually posting the notes to us through the mail. These letters weren’t sent often, but on the rare occasion I received one, it stung. The year I passed my doctoral qualifying exams in modernist poetry and poetics at Emory, I got a polite note from Grandma congratulating me and then rebuking me for having showed up to a wedding on my last visit home looking shabby and woolly in my great beard and ponytail, behaving jokily with my brother Jimmy at the reception. “That’s not how an English professor should conduct himself, at all.”
 
The question of how properly to look one’s station in life vied in importance for her with the question of how to improve that station. Her mother had been born a Ryerson, a descendant of the oldest Dutch family in New Jersey. Her people had settled in the 1620s and ‘30s. They counted the first Dutch child born in the New World among their ancestry, and through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries they had grown rather wealthy and smug. By the time my grandmother's mother was a young woman, however, her branch of the family was floating more on reputation than actual riches, and she made the mistake of falling in love with a handsome devil who was a ne'er-do-well journeyman carpenter, then marrying him despite parental objections. One night, he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned, leaving my great grandmother a shamed single mother with an only daughter, Edith, aged eight.
 
My great grandmother never remarried, and my grandmother became something of a lifelong obsessive about reacquiring and maintaining reputation. She’d not gone beyond high school herself, and her own good-looking young husband, my grandfather, had only a ninth-grade education. But he was a worker and steady, and he stayed employed straight the Great Depression, while my grandmother built her local social circle, volunteering, presiding over ladies’ clubs, remaining prominently a part of her Dutch Reformed Church’s congregation. There was a terrible setback when my father, her second son, was born with a devastating bone condition, but she soldiered on. Her oldest boy grew up to look like his father, serve in the Navy, and attend Penn State University.
 
The college thing was of particular concern to my grandmother. There were no especially gifted students in her immediate family, but she keenly felt the social value of a college education. When I went away to an Ivy League school, she promptly slapped on her car the one and only bumper sticker that it ever sported: Princeton. She refused to remove it for years after I’d dropped out. "After all," she would remind me, "you did attend." The sticker only disappeared with the sale of the car itself.
 
So when she wrote me that last time, fretting over whether I comported myself in accordance with her idea of how a young English professor should appear, she meant every word. It was important to her, and it shamed me. I tried to do better. It helped that I soon became an actual professor. It helped that for a while, early in my career, I kept to a close-trimmed, sculpted beard, a generic short haircut, and always wore a tie to work. It helped that, a year after I’d taken my first position at Morehouse College, I brought my gracious southern girlfriend, an educated woman from a prosperous and educated family to visit her. That visit truly impressed my Grandma. But even then, at eighty-four, she was on the alert for any slippage that might send the wrong impression to anyone overhearing. When I referred to what someone had said to my girlfriend “and me,” my grandmother immediately hyper-corrected me: “Oh! You mean, ‘her and I,’ Mark, not ‘her and me.’ Goodness, people will never believe you’re an English professor, talking like that.”
 
The remarkable thing was that my grandmother’s fixation on reputation never made her cruel or unwelcoming of differences. When my parents adopted a slew of children of varying ethnicities and disabilities, she included them as family automatically, although her private letters to my father questioned his financial sanity. When her beloved eldest grandchild, my cousin Brad, came colorfully out of the closet in the mid-seventies, she accepted it without recoil (unlike his father and younger brothers, who nearly disowned him). When Brad’s younger brother Scott married into a Jewish family, my Dutch Reformed grandmother happily attended her great-grandson’s bris.  She never circled the wagons, although she was forever retouching their trim.
 
Not long after I made my first visit to her as an appropriately attired and partnered young professor, my grandmother suffered a major stroke. Here her story turned darker. If it had been someone else or a different sort of stroke, perhaps, I might not say so. My other grandmother, for instance, had slid into senility by easy degrees and had never been afraid of any sort of end. Likewise my mother later, who, before her own series of small strokes, had attended the bedsides of hundreds of patients with advanced dementia over the years. But my grandmother Edith had been explicit about the nature of her dread. Repeatedly in her seventies and eighties she had told me that what she feared most was a long and incapacitated twilight. She had been immensely relieved when my grandfather, clearly fading a bit but with his basic memories and personality intact, had died at home, peacefully in his sleep. Over and over again she had told me that she did not want to die gabbling and trapped in a metal-barred bed.
 
She almost got away intact. She was living alone and on her own the day she had the massive stroke. Had no one found her, she might have simply slipped out of existence, but my brother and his fiancée stopped by to visit her that day and found her unconscious. She was taken to a hospital and revived, more or less, with severe damage to her thalamus.
 
My grandmother lived another four years in a barred bed. She never was herself again. She drifted in and out of awareness, sometimes recognizing or mistaking someone for someone else, sometimes staring blankly and mouthing an inarticulate whisper. The last time I visited her, she was snoring softly and, although I hadn’t seen her in over a year and knew I might not see her again, I refused to try to wake her.
 
A few months later, I was in Edinburgh, teaching a summer class in the literature of the supernatural, the day I got the phone call from my brother Jimmy that our grandmother had died. My first thought was that I was glad for her and relieved. My second, less rational thought, was that her ghost might approve of my class. Since then, I have wondered, when I think of her, what makes for a satisfactory life? Is a good life truly marred by an unhappy end?
 
In the summer of 1983, after I had dropped out of university for the second time, I was working a night shift at a donut shop and was something of a disgrace. My grandparents started having me over once a week for lunch. My grandfather would first have me mow their small lawn, then closely inspect the result. The two of us would go back inside, to an enclosed back porch. My grandmother would serve grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, and an exact square of coffee ice cream sliced and centered on a clear glass plate for dessert. Conversation meandered while Grandpa and I, who ate quickly, would wait for Grandma, who ate delicately and with deliberation, to finish. Leaf-filtered summer light fell through the porch’s wall of windows, onto my grandmother’s thoughtful face. “We expect you to go back to school,” she would say quietly, almost as if thinking to herself, and then she'd look up to make eye contact with me. “You’re too bright for this sort of life. You need to teach.”
 
At just that moment, the sun in the windows, my grandparents on either side, I rather liked that sort of life, but I would only nod dutifully and get up to clear the plates.

Alma Mater

I doubt I’ll ever know how or why my mother, Harriet, the grandmother you never met, was sent from a small farm in northwestern Massachusetts to an evangelical boarding school in Chicago in 1941. Her mother was a widow with ten surviving children, most of them beginning adulthood by then, my mother the youngest, aged 14. Those still at home lived in a farmhouse without electricity or indoor plumbing. They certainly could not have afforded the board and tuition themselves, nor even the cross-country train rides, so some sort of scholarship or charity must have been involved. I never questioned my mother closely about it while she was alive, and all the others who might have been able to explain it to me are long gone. Even her high school itself has not survived.

I wonder about a lot of things that I failed to wonder about when I was younger. What was it like for her to go back and forth between the little farm back east and those dormitories in the big city? What were her train journeys like? Did she travel alone? How often did she go home? Was she happy or depressed to be back? You’d think I would have asked her.

It’s not as though she never mentioned her life in boarding school, but she focused on the churchy stuff. She liked to tell us about the tall and handsome young Billy Graham who was a senior in the affiliated college on the same campus and how he definitely seemed like he’d been called to preaching. She mentioned a roommate with whom she’d been friends, although I don’t think the two of them stayed in touch after graduation. She told us her own mother had encouraged her and all her siblings not to stay on the farm, to scatter and spread far. But that was about it.    

I know that she was fond of the experience because her satisfaction with it played a role in my own departure for another evangelical boarding school when I was the same age. She never suggested I should go away, but when I wanted to, she persuaded my skeptical father that I would be okay. She even suggested it might help me become a preacher some day, in which hope she was very much disappointed. For myself, I had only romantic notions of boarding school as an escape from the dreary and the constrained.
 
By early 1975, when I was 12, our family had become a strange and grubby place to live. We had always been out of the ordinary in various ways. My father, Jim, the grandfather you never met, had a severe genetic bone condition that left him too brittle to stand on his own. I had inherited the same condition. My mother had grown up dirt poor and deeply religious, of course, but had become an R.N., worked as a single woman in the hospitals of several large American cities, spent half a decade as a Baptist missionary nurse in the mostly Muslim, Hausa region of Nigeria, and then married a disabled man a half decade younger than her, quite suddenly, when she was in her middle thirties and already presumed an “old maid.”
 
After marrying, they had two children and raised a protective cultural scrim around us: daily Bible readings and prayer, thrice-weekly church services, no pop, jazz, or rock music, no dancing, no card games, no movie theaters, very little TV, education at an elementary school run by a local Baptist church. The shield was effective enough through my early childhood that I was haunted for years by having only once heard Petula Clark’s “Downtown” on the radio while visiting a neighbor boy’s house to play. My hospitalizations gave me an intermittent window into the world of TV, but I still knew so little of pop culture that as an adolescent I once refused to believe that one of the Beatles had been named George because “George” seemed like an uncool name to me, and all that I knew about Rock-‘n-Roll was that it was supposed to be very cool. My parents Jim and Harriet were not cool, not even "Ozzie and Harriet " cool, not by any stretch.
 
And yet, for the first decade of my life, it was sort of an All-American childhood. Despite the intense evangelical religiosity and the faith filters that somewhat alienated our largely Roman Catholic neighborhood, despite all my fractures and frequent hospital trips, we were pretty typically, comfortably suburban. My dad had his own cabinet shop that did well throughout the sixties. My mom put aside her nursing career to be a homemaker. We had a little ranch house with a front lawn and a backyard swimming pool on a tree-lined street of modest houses in New Jersey. My sister and I never lacked for books or toys. We took winter vacations to Florida and summer vacations to New England, once even to Quebec. We were comparatively secure in an insecure world and we felt it.
 
Even after we moved onto a larger, stranger piece of property, five acres of overgrown, swampy woods, we only felt richer. My parents adopted first one, then another child, both from an evangelical orphanage in Korea. In 1972, my father sold his cabinet shop and took us on a twenty-plus state motorhome tour of the country, hitting all the tourists spots—Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Coasf, Pike’s Peak, the Gateway Arch, the Great Salt Lake, the list. Along the way, as a sop to my mother, we stopped in at the homes of all her far-flung older siblings in Vermont, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, California. In the cases of some of my maternal aunts and uncles and quite a few of my cousins, it would prove to be  the only time I ever saw them in person. Wherever we stayed, we looked for a Bible-believing church to attend.  Once in Tennessee, an ambitious Free-Will Baptist minister attempted to coax the Holy Spirit into healing me.
 
It was during the next few years, between ‘72 and ‘75, that things at home grew more notably peculiar. For starters, when we returned from that two-month long trip, my father discovered just how hard it was to find work in a wheelchair. No one was going to hire a severely crippled man in his forties for anything to do with wood work, no matter that he had designed and built half the fancy kitchens in town.
 
Eventually, he started building cabinets and furniture in our garage, opening it as another shop. It was slow going. A gifted draughtsman and cabinet designer, he had thrived with his first shop in no small part because he had teamed up with a childhood friend named Ted, tall and blonde, who handled all the sales while my father oversaw all the actual cabinetry and designs. Now, he had to find the work himself. Customers were often as skeptical as employers. When he did get jobs, they were usually modest projects and his margins were always razor thin. To help make ends meet, my mother returned to nursing, working nights at the local senior citizens’ home.
 
Meanwhile, in a kind of faithful frenzy, my parents had also adopted four more children—three disabled boys and one severely hyperactive little girl. It was a lousy time to be doing such a crazy thing. The first energy crisis hit and runaway inflation followed. The postwar building boom in New Jersey was over. By the end of 1974, we also had two foster boys living with us. My bedroom, once shared with only my brother Jimmy, now slept four boys in bunks. We no longer had spare money for the least of frivolities. My mother kept saying that the Lord would provide and reminded us daily of her own, harder circumstances as a child.
 
We had our fun. Our property was large and we were able to keep it thanks to my grandparents’ help with the mortgage. When it snowed, we had woods to make trails in. During the summer we had the creek. We had each other to play with, although several of us had come from situations so difficult that we didn’t always know how to play.
 
We got our clothes from donations. We grew some of our vegetables in small garden plots, kept chickens for their eggs and slaughtered them for meat. (It was my job to hatchet off their heads. They tended to run around headless for a few seconds afterward, spurting blood from their necks.) We experimented with novel sources of nutrition. A bow-hunter gave us a side of venison for letting him hunt in our woods. One summer evening we collected all the frogs we could and dined on boiled frogs’ legs. We harvested strawberries at a nearby greenhouse in exchange for a portion of the fruit. If we wanted to get popsicles, we scoured the couches and chairs for any lost change.
 
I became restless within this regime, however, not because I was suffering in any meaningful way but because I was a dreamy kid who lived largely in the fantasy worlds of his library books and who hated the increasing grime, crowding, and chaos of our home. Despite all the praying and occasional fun, there was a growing disorderliness and insecurity to our world. It felt cramped and small.
 
One day, the birth mother of one of the foster boys living with us asked my parents if they would drive her oldest daughter to an interview at a boarding school on Long Island where the mother hoped a church charity would pay to send the child. My parents agreed and made a family field trip out of it, bringing along half the kids as well as the girl being interviewed, leaving the younger children behind with my grandparents for the day.
 
We left on a Saturday morning in early spring of ‘75, arriving after a three-hour drive from Jersey, straight across New York City and through to the north shore of central Long Island.  It was a mildly blustery afternoon when we got there, with a sea breeze in the trees and dampness in the sunny air. We drove onto campus up a lane lined with Norwegian maples just coming into leaf and found ourselves in a complex of wooded lawns and paths surrounding handsome brick buildings with black slate roofs, white-pillared porticos, and white wooden trim.
 
By coincidence, we had arrived on spring cleaning weekend. Students who would have normally been in their rooms or out on the practice fields in back of campus were instead marching out on to balconies and fire escapes, beating rugs and piling sacks of trash. They were industrious but playful. There wasn’t an adult in sight. My imagination immediately perceived a spontaneously ordered city of teens, a society of lost boys and girls taking care of themselves in a gracious setting. It was far from the truth, but the vision bewitched me.
 
I don’t know how the girl’s interview went. I do know she never attended the school. The next day at home, I told my parents that I wanted to go there for high school myself. They gently explained to me what a long shot I was. We couldn’t afford such a place. My father worried about me and my brittle bones leaving home at all. My mother thought I’d be fine but told me I’d need a scholarship. Then she told me that if I were really motivated, I would contact the school myself. She could loan me her old portable, manual typewriter from her years in Africa two decades before, but beyond that I was on my own.
 
I had never composed a formal letter to a stranger. I had never used a typewriter. But I wanted to live on that leafy campus of free teenagers in their handsome brick halls. My mother dragged her dusty, olive-green typewriter case out of the crammed heap of junk at the bottom of her closet and handed it to me. It was supposed to be a portable, but it was solid metal and weighed me down. I found a paperback somewhere on the shelves that had a guide for writing business letters. I sat at a table with the book and the dark typewriter, fed the paper into the platen, and laboriously pecked one letter at a time. I have a vivid sensory memory of pushing those clunky, worn enameled keys and squinting to check each stroke was correct, although I can’t remember how many drafts of my letter I attempted.
 
My inquiry initiated a sequence that took fifteen months to complete. I received a reply inviting me to apply and directing me to the scholarships available. I typed more letters, including one to the DeWitt Wallace Foundation, making my case for a grant. In the fall of my eighth-grade year my parents made the drive out to Long Island again with just me this time. I met a tall man in a dark, wood-paneled room that felt mysterious, even solemn to me. I remember the conversation as stilted but pleasant, and I had the sense of being spoken to as if I were an odd discovery. Then I went into a smaller side room of similar appearance, sat at a small desk and worked my way through a battery of pencil-and-paper tests. We drove home. Three months later, I was accepted to the school, but no word on a scholarship yet. A few months after that, the DeWitt Wallace Foundation awarded me a scholarship that covered my tuition. Some additional funding was offered from the school’s general scholarship fund to account for much of my room and board. Another small grant came from the local Rotarians that would catch part of the rest.
 
Still my parents worried that they wouldn’t be able to afford the remainder. By midsummer of ‘76, while the Bicentennial celebrations were underway, we faced a deadline to make an initial payment so that I could enroll as a freshman that fall. The day before the deadline, a Lutheran minister driving by our place saw our sign for purebred St. Bernard puppies, which were another side project that my father had started, hoping to raise a little extra cash. The minister wrote a check for the two priciest puppies of the litter, and the next day my folks, convinced that the minister’s money was manna from heaven, divinely signaling I was meant to attend this school, sent the first payment in.
 
For the next four years, I was a boarder at the Stony Brook School, and as tiny and narrow a world as that campus appears to me with forty years of hindsight, it opened my horizons as wide as my devout mother could have borne, and probably a bit wider, had she known.
 
It wasn’t nearly as carefree and uncomplicated an escape as at twelve I had dreamed, but I loved that place, and I was almost always reluctant to come home. During the years I was a student there, my mother and I were both matter-of-fact about it. She had gone to a Christian boarding school for high school and liked it. I was going to a Christian boarding school and liked it, too. Neither one of us was surprised, and we pretty much left it at that. I wish we’d had more to say to each other about it.
 
Decades later, not long after my father had died, a date persuaded me to see the first Harry Potter movie, although I had thus far successfully avoided the books. Incongruously, and to my surprise, when watching the scene of the first-year students floating across a black lake at night in their torchlit boats, approaching Hogwarts Castle, what flashed through my mind was the moment when my family, packed into our old station-wagon, rolled up that long, handsome drive lined with spring maples, when I first glimpsed the colonial brick dormitories placed around those wooded lawns. The two scenes were literally as different as night and day, and yet I understood as being entirely the same that sense of wonder at approaching a new and richer form of existence.
 
And here I am, nearly another two decades on, too late now to ask my mother if she herself felt something similar or utterly different when her train finally pulled into Chicago on a late-summer day, a few months before Pearl Harbor. For the past several weeks I’ve been reading those Potter books that I so long avoided, aloud to my seven-year old daughter, you, and whenever young Harry is said to get a little thrill at returning to that Castle, although it’s much more magically unreal than my own alma mater, I get a little thrill, too. It’s the memory of returning to a greater world.

Newspaper Obit

We don’t often think of technologies as characters who shaped us, friends we’ve lost touch with, mentors who remade our minds, but they are. 

I can’t remember when I first read a newspaper. They were part of the ordinary furnishings of my world before I knew what a newspaper was exactly and before I ever read one.  I recall when I was nine noticing a story on the latest expansion of human lifespans. It said that women lived longer than men. The paper had been lying on the dining table at home. I looked up from it and asked my mother in the kitchen, was it true women lived longer than men? Why? Her answer combined something to do with smoking rates and the way God made us. I was satisfied and even pleased because my father didn’t smoke and my mother was several years older than my father, so I guessed they’d come out about even in the end. 

In the actual end, my father died a dozen years before my mother anyway, and wouldn’t you know it, his lungs did him in. But back in 1971, things seemed satisfactory, and I didn’t apply the news to myself because, well, what was old age to me then? It’s not that I thought I was immortal. I was nine. I knew I could die. I knew a bus could hit me when I crossed the street. Adults were reminding me of things like that all the time, especially in our Baptist church. But age? Age is irrelevant to death when you are nine.

The next faint snapshot of a specific encounter with a newspaper that I have still in my mind is of a political cartoon that came out the following year. I spotted it at my grandparents’ house. My grandfather had left his daily paper folded to the Opinions section, and the cartoon caught my eye. It was not a clever cartoon. It depended on a stupid pun. It was a drawing of a giant heap of wooden poles and a small bird with the head of a man pecking at the base of the heap. The bird’s human head was a caricature of the Democrat’s candidate for president, George McGovern, who was in the midst of a losing campaign against the incumbent, Richard Nixon, a caricature of whom was sitting smugly on top of the pile. The caption read, “All the polls.”

I didn’t read a paper often until I was in high school, at which point I got in the habit of checking the sports and weather in the papers hanging on wooden spindles racked in the school library. I don’t know why the weather section intrigued me. In the mid/late seventies, the newspaper weather consisted of a small black-and-white map of isobars laid over an outline of the United States. The part that fascinated me was below the map, where historic temperature and precipitation highs and lows for the date and the month were updated. For some reason, I had an apocalyptic craving for the onset of a new ice age. After a particularly stormy winter on Long Island my sophomore year, I read a magazine article speculating on the possibility of the return of ice ages, and I was hooked on fantasies of encroaching glacial sheets. Of course, I was to be sorely disappointed, as the whole world warmed around me for the rest of my life.

In college, I read the daily campus paper mostly for any articles with the bylines of my friends. Two friends were dedicated contributors, one rising to editor and moving on to a career in journalism, editing a paper in Miami for many years. It never occurred to me to write for the paper myself, although I was majoring in English. I thought deejaying midnight shows at the campus radio station and doing theater were cooler.

A year of working in a cubicle at a giant New Jersey insurance firm confirmed me in the habit of daily paper reading, although I spent more time on science magazines. I read pretty much anything to cleanse my palate of the piles of insurance documents. That’s where I began the habit of reading poetry and Proust on my breaks and it was there I began stealthily composing poems at my desk.

Once I repaired to the graduate program in creative writing at the U of Montana, I made acquaintances with other students who wrote for either the Kaiman or the Daily Missoulian, both of which I read religiously. Being rather skimpy papers, I got in the habit of reading them end to end. Other people complain of newsprint getting on their fingers, but I have dry hands and never had that problem. I began following comic strips and regular opinion columnists. I lived above a coffee shop and assembled the day's paper from the leftover sections scattered around. To this day, I have a soft spot for the memory of leafing through the news in a quiet cafe on a snowy morning.

I learned that almost everyone felt obliged to complain about the local paper. When I began studying at Emory, I applied my obsessive reading habits to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a more substantive paper that even garnered the occasional Pulitzer Prize, but people spoke as dismissively of it as Missoulians had spoken of the Missoulian. The same would prove true for the Birmingham News in Birmingham and the Salt Lake Tribune in Salt Lake. It was practically a citizenship requirement to disparage the local paper, regardless of politics.

I wouldn’t say I loved them all, but I found something to love about each of them. Although I read national and international papers of record as well, and although I perused whatever got shoved under the door of rooms at hotels when I traveled, I was most interested in the local rag wherever I lived. Over in central Pennsylvania, one of my brothers-in-law even made a late-twentieth century career as a printing press operator for the papers of the towns near him. Whenever I landed in a new place, short term or long, I checked out the local press.

At each stop of my life, a different section of the local paper would attract my most intense attention. In Salt Lake it became the obituaries. Mormons have a distinctive language to their obituaries, involving stakes and missions, sealings “for time and eternity,” and they themselves tend to be long-lived and fecund. For a while I would check the Trib religiously for any centenarians and to find that day’s leader for the most surviving descendants. Some of the numbers were quite impressive. Humans prove most Darwinian when they fancy themselves anti-Darwinian.

By the time I reached my forties, I had a subscription and a set ritual, at least when I was home. As soon as I got up, I would get the Trib from outside my front door and spread it on the breakfast table. I would fillet the meaningful sections, separating out the advertising inserts. After making my tea and breakfast, I sat down to read the whole thing from back to front, then returned to whip through the crossword. I kept scissors handy for any clippings I thought I could use in a class. The rest went straight into the recycling bin. The next morning, I’d do it again. For a while, my wife was a regular contributor to the neighborhood section, posting stories on the solar house up the road or the activists around the corner. Once in a while, I’d spot a letter or an Op Ed piece by an acquaintance or a colleague. Once I wrote a letter in myself, in response to a rather unfortunate tirade against archaeologists who challenged the accuracy of the Book of Mormon. My excommunicated LDS academic colleagues were gleeful, but I only nudged that beehive once.

I would read the occasional doom-&-gloom piece about the dying of great newspapers and their traditions, and I could see the way more and more provincial papers were being snapped up and bundled by national corporations. But I still savored the ritual of my morning paper and still loathed getting news from any sort of screen. I didn’t see myself giving up on newsprint or magazines, ever, but personal events, as much as shifting technologies, shifted me. 

After I was early and unexpectedly widowed, I had a different reason for reading the obits one week. It felt like I had stepped through the looking glass to see the words I had written for my late wife printed there in the paper on my breakfast table. And then, for a long time, I lost interest in reading the obits again. I continued to read the daily Trib for a little while, but more disruptions followed. A month after being widowed, I was hospitalized after a severe, open femur fracture. Scarcely two months later, I fell again and had a slew of fractures requiring surgery on three limbs simultaneously. In the midst of all this, I fell improbably in love.

That was spring. It was summer, suddenly. I was in a wheelchair but constantly traveling. My new love, your mother, disdained newspapers, in part because she was much younger than me. I took a sabbatical leave from my university. We spent a year traveling the Southern Hemisphere. We were rarely in any location for more than a few weeks. There’s a picture your mother took of me reading a local paper in a hotel lobby in New Zealand a month or two before we got engaged, but by and large we either ignored the news or read it on our laptops when we could.

We married in Namibia the following spring. The next summer we spent in a village in British Columbia where the local paper was free and published only fortnightly, although we looked through each issue assiduously. That autumn we moved to a hamlet in the south Utah desert and there was no local paper there, no newspaper delivery. I still received the Trib or sometimes the Deseret News in my hotel room during the school year, when I commuted four hours each way, each week to teach at my university. Years passed that way. You were born. We relocated and I took a new position at another university that wasn’t so far that I couldn’t come home in the evenings. My first year at my new job there were free paper copies of the New York Times in the foyer of my office, along with the campus weekly, but those were discontinued by my second year.

One day I realized I was reading the news from half a dozen sources every morning on my iPhone, and the last time I’d read a paper was on a visit to my in-laws, your grandparents in Salt Lake City. That was two or three years ago, and that’s been the case ever since.

The other morning I sat with your Grandpa Joe at his breakfast table, sharing sections of the Sunday paper and discussing the demise of print. He was studying the sports pages and I’d just read through the comics and obituaries. But while our conversation was lively, our reading was desultory, there being really nothing newsworthy in the paper we hadn’t seen or read in more detail elsewhere. That was until Joe called my attention to the front-page notice of the death of a wealthy Salt Lake businessman who had once hired me to do some research for him. I read the article thoroughly, and told Joe a few anecdotes about the man himself as I’d known him. Then I found a pair of scissors and cut the article out carefully. 

Now I don’t have a clue what to do with that clipping, the first I’ve cut in nearly a decade. I can’t forward it to anyone directly. I may take a picture of it with my phone and then toss the pointless paper scrap. There's no genuine obituary for newsprint yet, despite all the preemptive requiems for the technology, but it dawns on me that my once-faithful companion the newspaper is already all but lost to me.

A Goodbye, At Least

By now, you may think all my memories involve the past century, the people who lived their lives there. But you know I’ve lived in your century, too, and in the first decade after the turn of the millennium, I met and married two women, one your mother and one other before her, Paula, thanks to whom I almost became a father more than once, years prior to becoming a father to you.

There was a time Paula was the center of my existence. Later she was its bane. Still later, I wished I could forget her. Any longer, I only fear she’ll be forgotten. Like almost everyone I’ve ever known, she lived a mostly quiet, minor life, far from the big events of history, and if the great and gory traumas of her time moved her, and they did, deeply, they shaped her only indirectly. But still she held her tragedy.

Within her own life, Paula was, like most of us, an emotional self-hypocrite, full of the very same contradictions and confusions that she frequently mocked or denied. She cared a great deal about her image and appearance, often telling me mournfully as we traversed our early forties what an awful thing it was to slowly age out of one’s beauty. (I invariably replied that I wouldn’t know, to which wisecrack she would respond tartly, “Exactly! You have no idea what it’s like.”) 

When I first met Paula, she was a smart, hardworking, and effervescent flight attendant who was impulsively kind to strangers, who inhaled serious novels and “cozy” murder mysteries, who shopped at thrift stores and garage sales almost exclusively, who’d been through a divorce and a recent bankruptcy, who'd been a public radio DJ, who'd lived in China and spoke Mandarin, who wanted badly to become a mother, and who nevertheless confided in me that one of her secret dreams was to one day be, or at least be perceived to be, “a real thin, rich bitch.” Despite that sort of fantasy, she frequently announced quite fervently that she didn’t give a fig for what anyone thought of her, that appearances were false currency. And she believed in all those things.

One of my more vivid memories from those early days with her is of leaving a restaurant where we’d dined with some casual acquaintances. Paula excused herself to go to the women’s room, and when she returned she was trailing a tail of toilet tissue. I didn’t notice it as we said our cheerful good byes, and if anyone else did, they didn’t say anything, but when we left the restaurant to cross the street, Paula was prancing happily in front of me. I told her she had a new appendage, but when she realized what it was, she only lifted it gaily and draped it like a shawl around her as she reached the farther sidewalk. Then she held it aloft as if she were an Olympian ribbon dancer and twirled it to the nearest trash bin, waving at the wide-eyed passing traffic as she went. 

When I caught up to her, she told me, a little breathlessly, “Who cares? By tomorrow morning people who saw me tonight with toilet paper hanging out of my skirt will start forgetting, and in a hundred years no one will know that I even existed, much less that I once publicly waved toilet paper around!” Every time since then that I’ve seen someone jut a chin and declare, “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me!”, I think of Paula dancing down the street with her streamer, passionately caring and uncaring simultaneously, and I wonder if anyone does remember that scene, other than me.

It was one of my little complicities in Paula’s eventual downfall that I enjoyed her company especially when she was like that, when she was just a little tipsy. She was always dramatic and funny; tipsy she was even more fun. Later, however, I had ample occasion to try to keep her company when she’d gotten well and truly drunk. Nights out were more and more dramatic but no longer so funny then, and they were certainly no longer fun.

In between lay the quartet of years in which we attempted pregnancies. In what seemed like a cruel irony to me, Paula got pregnant easily, especially for a woman in her forties, but the fetuses never turned out healthy. Somewhere in there, she began to despair.

After we gave up trying, after the last pregnancy ended in a neonatal fatal trisomy when we were forty-three, Paula accelerated her gradual descent. When someone’s on the way down thanks to addictions, their personality changes and it becomes increasingly difficult to know whether a particular illness, rage, or delirium is purely chemically induced, a sign of encroaching mental illness, or the coevolution of both. Increasingly, it doesn’t really matter what the answer is. The last two years of Paula’s existence veered wildly between happiness, affection, darkness, and madness.

I can remember one miserably long night near the end of our time together that I spent crouched on the floor by her side of the bed in the dark, watching the lights of the LDS Temple come on outside our downtown Salt Lake condo’s windows, listening to her mutter, curse, and accuse me, her mother, her sisters, her friends, everyone she knew of secretly hating her and wishing her dead, while I held her trembling hand, waiting for her to sleep. Finally dawn arrived, and Paula started snoring gently as the Temple lights blinked back out again.

Our last year under the same roof, Paula branched out in her quest for pharmaceuticals, building a list of doctors that she rotated through monthly, even weekly, with new complaints, a bee visiting reliable flowers. She had prescriptions for sleeping, for waking, for calming, for pain. The contraindications on the labels meant nothing. She joked she was Rasputin, that no combination of pills could take her down. And all the time, she drank. She was financially better off than she’d ever been, and she was thin, oh she was thin. Hair dyed red and stylishly cut, eyes angry as a hawk’s, she had reached the stage she’d once cheerfully, drolly fantasized. She projected “rich, thin bitch” wherever she went, and she was beginning to die of it. 

She worked a flight on Valentine’s Day, 2007. I had sent roses to her hotel room that morning, and she reported to me that during the flight she’d delightedly distributed them around the cabin to anyone who looked down, a touch worthy of her old self. When she got back to her base in Chicago that night, she called me terrified because she couldn’t remember where she’d parked her car. After I’d talked her calm and helped her locate it, she unwisely drove it to her "crash pad," god knows at how much risk. That same night she fell into her bathroom sink and injured her elbow. The next day she flew home to me in Salt Lake. She took a handful of pills as soon as she got home and fell into bed, but the next day I woke to find her staggering around the condo, cursing about her mother. She grabbed a butcher knife and threatened to cut her own neck. When I approached her, asking for the knife, she leaped toward me, threatening to cut my neck instead. Then she dropped the knife on the floor, disappeared into the bedroom for a few minutes, and reemerged in her uniform with her roll-on case. She wasn’t working that day but she stalked out the door, wobbling, and was gone.

We never spent a night in the same place again. I tried contacting Paula’s therapist for help, but no help came. I filed for divorce a week after she disappeared. For the next year, she dropped in and out of my existence. Her sisters would report an intervention in Houston when she showed up there, a rehab in Chicago, another in Baltimore. She left the airline. She hired an expensive lawyer then fired her. One time I stepped into an elevator in our building to find her crouched in the corner. She hopped out at the next floor and disappeared again. Almost a year after the incident with the knife, she showed up in Salt Lake City for an appointment with a divorce mediator. After the meeting, during which Paula sobbed uncontrollably without saying a thing, the mediator asked me privately not to go home that night as she’d overheard Paula talking to herself, making threats on my life. I went home anyway. Paula did leave a slurred and spooky message on my answering machine, but I never saw her again.

A month later, the divorce papers still unsigned, she died in a hospital in Indiana. A neighbor had found her unconscious on the floor of her apartment. Apparently she’d medicated a perforated stomach ulcer with a colossal drinking binge and septicemia had set in.

The sister who lived nearest there reached the hospital in time to get me on the phone and then hold her phone up to comatose Paula’s ear. What could I say to her as she was drifting away? I quoted a line we’d once promised to repeat if either was ever in danger of forgetting the other, from the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

“Meet me in Montauk,” I said. Two hours later, she was dead. And right now as I write this, I wonder why I’m writing it. What am I trying to remember? Why include these memories, and just these, not others from a life lived for six often happy years with her, except, I guess, to consider how without that life and death, you would have never later been? Is that enough reason to write about her to you at all, if I'm not going to write enough? 

There are hinge moments, I suppose. The night that Paula died, her sister's frantic phone calls reached my cell while I happened to be at a movie with your mother, who back then was a friend I barely knew. I went outside to take the call, and your mother came out a few minutes later and drove me home. A couple of days after that, there were condolences and flowers at my doorstep from her, and a couple of weeks later we met to talk about what had happened to Paula and what was happening with your mother and her first husband, Brad. We ended up discussing Robert Frost's poem "The Sound of the Trees" and the carious landscape of mining ghost towns in the American West, including the town of Ophir in which your mother was conceived. You were far, far from inevitable yet, but you could say that you were already on the breeze. Not quite three years later, you finally landed.

That carved crabapple, Frost himself once said, "Everything I know about life can be summed up in three words: it goes on." But in a hundred years, she will have still existed, the woman who danced down the street with a ribbon of toilet paper, who handed out roses to strangers, carefree and caring simultaneously, even if no one then remembers.