Sisar Canyon

Sisar Canyon

I miss the hills of brush,
pungent sage, lavender ceanothus
I miss the water's rush,
tumbling o'er boulder, rock, gravel

I miss the trees,
spiny live oak leaves and
galls
wherein wasps make secrets

I miss the screaming Stellar's jays
brazen bandits
announcing dawn and day and dusk
raucous muezzins of the canyon

my mind recalls it all

the heat,
the scent
the sounds
the feel
of rock at midday summer
of wild things rejoicing
of water dappled with shade
of firm earth beneath my feet
and gentle sky above.

ah, the canyon I have left
but it has not left me.

Run To The Darkness

run to the darkness
run and fear not
your feet will stumble
and your lungs will burn
and your hands will bleed

carry truth and salt
galvanize the staid
run to their darkness
run
run to the darkness

run though it be battering rain
and run though the air howl with heat
and run though the wind shred the skies
and run even when you cannot run

run to the darkness
carry the flaring torch
and scatter hot sparks of truth
and ignite the fields and forests
and burn the mountains down
and run even when you cannot run

lie not abed in soft comfort
forsake shoes and food and air
run to the darkness
and when you have run,
run again

till the earth ache with truth
and it succors the souls
of those who taste it and
until the oceans overflow with it
and mountains yield to it

but run

One Way Up, Two Ways Down

I lived in a brick duplex. In a circle of brick duplexes. On a military base. And I had a mulberry tree.

Not the mulberry bush of “here we go round.” This was a towering leafy shade-crowded, ladder-limbed berry gushy playground. A hundred feet tall if it was an inch. It must have been as tall at its crown as the neighbor’s house was at its second floor roof peak. A hundred feet easy. Looking up from down. When I was 7 or 8. A hundred feet of limbs here and there, of nasty tasting useless fat purple berries, of limbs that seemed to dip low at the passing of bare feet, beckoning, inviting, calling in leafy whisper.

And answer we did. Summers in Baltimore were as humid as the inside of a dog’s mouth. But we didn’t care. We had trees to climb, an endless lawn to play on. Swings 20 feet high. A sand box the size of Rhode Island. A pool just for the non-coms kids with three diving boards. Our bikes. The forbidden treasures of Colgate Creek- a slimy stinking barely-crawling open sewer with belly-up turned fish, old tire carcasses, and mysterious rainbow glimmerings on its surface. The test hill where the military used to drive trucks and jeeps to see if they were fit for service.

The mulberry tree.

The mulberry tree was a stone’s throw from our duplex, with a circle of beaten down earth around it, beaten as hard as the tennis courts at the other end of our circle of houses. The circle? That was the common name for the cluster of duplexes that the non-coms and their families occupied in Fort Holabird, Maryland. Perched on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay, just across from historic Fort McHenry. The same. Where Mr. Francis Scott Key penned that song that stirs so many hearts, our national anthem.

Forgive my digression.

It was a circle of brick duplexes, 4 bedrooms and a bath, hardwood floors, a florida room, full basement and coal fired furnaces. There were 15 duplexes, thirty families. The playground, a lawn the size of an airfield, tennis courts...and my mulberry tree. The circle lay somewhere just there from the entrance to the base. Bounded on one side by a siding for the B&O railroad, another by the base’s gym and laundry, another by unused barracks, and the last side by the tennis courts and a few barracks occupied by WAC’s.

There were the Toth’s next door, a childless couple with a dog named Candy. Sometimes they let me walk her. Truth is, she walked me as much as I walked her. And one night I cried in terror as I dreamed that someone cooked her and ate her.

There I go again.

Summers on the base were endlessly fun. John, my older brother and I had bikes, the ultimate freedom machines. Clunky though they were, with fat tires, longhorn handlebars, one speed forward and coaster brakes, they were our dream machines that took us from home to the pool, from the pool to the PX to buy root beer, from the PX to the library, from the library to Colgate Creek and home again.

Pick up games of baseball, played with bare hands, a bat, and a tennis ball. And I was always chosen last. Well, I was only about as tall as a well grown weed. Despite my size I played two seasons on our base little league team and we won the league one year. Thanks to a tall skinny freckled boy called Steve Dupre who could hit like a jackhammer and throw like a tornado and run like a greyhound.

Invasions of Japanese beetles were meant for batting practice. Dusk was for playing kick-the-can or for catching fireflies. Winters for sledding down the test hill.

And summers. For the shade of the mulberry tree.

The mulberry tree. It was at the duplex nearest ours. Tall enough to overshadow the south side of the house, like I said, it was at least a hundred feet tall. We climbed it all summer long, my brother and I and our friends. We spilled from our bikes and tore for the bottom-most branch, a short jump up, a leg over, a hoist from the arms. Branches beckoned here, there. Some shot out over space like the 3 meter board over the deep end of the pool. Some snaked and rollercoasted along, treacherous with dips and turns. Some, some shot up toward the blistering muggy sky.
Climbing must have been something innate, second nature. I could climb that tree before I could ride a bike. My hands found knobs of old branches to stick to. My feet found twisting, turning ladders of leaf and bark, and stuck to them like library glue did to a grubby hand. Prehensile toes we had, I am sure. Who wore shoes? Shoes were for the other seasons, for school and for church. Summer was for bare feet, heedless of bees and glass. The grass, ah so cool in the heat, so perfect for our bare toes to wiggle in or fly across.

So we played in the mulberry tree. Sometimes we’d just climb for climbing sake, clinging to branches with dirty feet and grubby hands. Snaking upwards as high as we dared go, up where the trunk thinned out, where the top scraped the sky. Up where the vertical members began to bend and sway under our weight.

Sometimes we only climbed a bit, and sat a lot, though John, my brother, didn’t sit much one week. He and I were climbing a tennis ref’s tower by the courts, a rickety 10 foot relic of some other time. Bare wood clinging to bare wood with long rusty nails. John found one nail with his butt, letting out a howl that made dogs howl back. When he turned his back on me to climb down, there was a minuscule spot of blood on his shorts and a barely visible rip. But he’d sat on a rusty nail. And we knew what that meant.

Kids talked about the grossest things. And we had the oddest debates. How diseases would affect you. Why dogs ran on three legs. How to squeeze tobacco juice from a grasshopper.
Would gum clog your guts if you swallowed it?

Lockjaw. We’d talk about that one in hushed tones. If older boys were around, the outcome was grimmer with each telling. His jaw froze shut and he could never talk or eat again. All his muscles locked up till he froze like “Swinging Statues.” Even his eyeballs couldn’t move, so the rest of his life they had to turn his whole body when he wanted to look another direction. How could I question such knowledge, such wisdom. I was 8, the really smart guys were, golly, 11 or 12?

So John sprinted back to our house, despite the pain in his butt, despite the dreaded treatment for lockjaw, despite what he KNEW was coming.

A shot.

In.

The.

Butt.

I followed closely, bare feet just grazing the grass. Back then I could run like an antelope across that expanse of grass, on feet that were destined for running. Mainly I ran behind him cuz I wanted to see what happened.

No luck.

John was quickly whisked off to the base dispensary, where they did things amid the stainless steel and porcelain and smell of alcohol. Amid the bright lights and the green linoleum. Course they wouldn’t let me go. I had to stay and wait. Wait for the tale of the needle. The tetanus shot needle. You could never see it coming, cuz the shot was in the butt. Still, we’d sob in anticipation and wriggle in Mom or Dad’s arms.

The indignation. Pants yanked to ankles. The chill of alcohol on the skin. The stab of the needle. Ooww. Ooww. A needle the size of a tent stake, a soda straw, driven in by a muscular corpsman, who had tattoos on his forearms of glaring dragons, driven in like he was drilling for oil. Felt like he not only pounded it in, but then wiggled it around.

Exploring.

Having found no oil, suddenly the pain stopped, the pants came up, off we went. All done.
My desire to see John’s pain and indignation was a bit sadistic, I admit. Though in later years, John and I became best friends, I was subject to his temper from time to time while we were yet young. Revenge was not a concept I really understood, except as I’ll get you for that!
Ha. Getting back at my big brother was a wild notion. One that did not come to fruition for many years. But a kid had to dream, right? Well, there was minor satisfaction when I would come home from a pummeling, or a wad of itchy seed pods stuffed down my back, or as the loser of a dirt clod fight. I’d get Mom’s undivided attention. A Kool Aid treat. A seat in front of the window fan.

And John would get a solid smack on the butt and some serious basement time.
So when he finally did come back from the clinic, having gotten his comeuppance, I mean his shot, I waited, gloating just a tiny bit, while he told the tale of the needle.

This base dispensary must have had some some truly strange men working there. Some good and kind ones too. But the last memory I have of that place was going in for our immunizations for our trip overseas. All six kids, Mom, Dad. Lined up ready for the needles. And there amid the chrome and glass cabinets was a board of torment.

Affixed to the board were a dozen or so needles, one for each rank, starting with private and working up to general. Each needle labelled neatly, like a reservation tag, and with each rise in rank, the needles looked more and more threatening and bizarre.

Corporal was just an extra long needle. Sergeant had a curve in it. Lieutenant, a long hook. Colonel, a 4 inch zig zag. And General, a 6 inch spiral, like a corkscrew. I tried to imagine Nancy’s father, THE GENERAL Prather, getting that one in his hinie. It was not an image that I could coax to mind. Usually I only saw him at formation, ramrod straight in his open staff car, miniature flags fluttering from the fenders. Uniform starched as stiff as iron with creases that sliced the wind. Returning salutes with a snap that you could hear over the engine.

I am sure we stood mouths agape, eyes wide as saucers.

So John got his shot. I got my satisfaction. For a while.

Days under or around or in the mulberry tree. It could have been anything, that old tree. A pirate ship. A castle. It could have been the tree house in Swiss Family Robinson. But apparently we also used it for more mundane things, like our variation on dodge ball.
One of us stayed on the ground, chosen by “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, catch a tiger by the toe...” The rest of us scrambled for the branches, legs and feet and arms hooking limbs like so many monkeys. Could we climb? Does a giraffe have a long neck?

And then the dodge ball started. The kid on the ground had a tennis ball and tried to hit whoever he could amid the branches. So we clung to the branches and trunk, trying to duck the ball that zinged through the leaves, clinging for our lives but trying to not get hit either. And whoever got hit was out and had to clamber down and replace the kid on the ground. Up went the last ball thrower. Down came whoever got hit. Seemed so simple then.

Fearless climbers we all were. Twenty feet to the ground? Nothing. A mere eye blink to climb down.

Until.

There is one way up a tree. You climb. Fingers, toes, arms, legs. You climb. And there are two ways down. One, you climb down. Fingers, toes, arms, legs. Just a reverse of going up, perhaps with a bit more thought, a bit more care.

There is another way down.

I was somewhere near the limit of my height. Four or five others clambered around me, likely my brother, my friend Stevie from across the circle, a couple others. Whoever was throwing sent a real zinger at me, like pitching to a star batter. I saw it coming and with a small sidestep, the ball went past.

I lost my grip as my weight shifted. I threw a arm out for the limb as I fell back. And fell.

Hitting.

Every.

Branch.

My descent was a cascade of images...each branch I hit, that pummeled my back, my legs. The leaves that slapped my skin as I plunged through them. The startled faces of the kids above me. I whipped through space at the speed of thought, missed the last thick branch and landed.
Crash landed. Flat on my back. A reverse belly flop. And knocked the wind right out of my lungs.

Have you ever done that? It is truly terrifying.

I couldn’t inhale. Every last cubic centimeter of air had been slapped out of me at the end of my gravity challenging drop. My mouth flopped open and shut like a sunfish suddenly yanked from the Chesapeake Bay and dropped on the ground. Like a balloon, tense with air, popped and deflated all at once.

I squirmed there on that hard packed dirt, my hands convulsed and grabbed at the air as if they could shovel some into my starving lungs. My feet plowed furrows in the hard packed soil.

Help.

Help.

Help me.

Help me.

My lungs started to work after an eternity of panic, of hgnnn, nnggngng, hrrrrhrrrhrrr, gasp.

Like trying to start an old pull cord lawn mover.

Yank. ch-cch-ch-ch-ch-cchh.

Yank. ch-chh-chh-ccch-poot.

Yank. chh-chh-chhh-poot poot.

Yank. ch-chh-chh. Pop. RRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Help me. Help me! Help me!

I lay there, finally. Sucking great bucketsful of air. Gorging on soggy Baltimore oxygen. Mixed with some Japanese beetles. Shoveling air into my starving lungs like Mr. Haywood shoveling coal down our coal chute for the furnace. Lay there till I knew I was going to live. I guess I wasn’t so sure for a while.

Later, I found out that my brother John, he of the tetanus-shot-in-the-butt, thought that I was dead. He told me he was terrified.

Terrified?

At long last I rolled over and dragged myself to my knees. And stood up. Shaky as a new calf. And staggered home.

John must have followed me. What else could he have done? Maybe he put his arm around me and helped me. Like the time after a Boy Scout meeting when he jumped a flight of stairs, sprained his ankle and I had to help him home, a good long walk of a mile or more in the fresh snow, arms around each other. Hop, step, slip. Late at night. Hop, step, slip.

Maybe he put his arm around me and held me up.

He must have.

The mulberry tree fell into infamy shortly after that. Someone came along and cut off the bottom limb, the one we boosted up to, that started our climb. It was a lot harder to get climbing after that. We had to give each other the leg up.

Boost me.

I grew a bit shy of tree climbing for a while. Not because of the fall. Because of having the wind knocked out of me. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Not on my brother in his worst moments. I’d rather have a shot in the butt than to repeat that.

Help me. I heard my words come back at me from the neighborhood bullies and jerks.
Tease me they did. Hey, there goes “help me.” I would hear as I raced by on my bike. Help me.
Now, lest you think my brother and I were at each others throats constantly. He stood up for me when I needed it. He was my near constant companion and friend, sometimes only friend, for our first decade and more. He defended me from hostile German kids who I had the temerity to insult in their own language. In their own neighborhood. Lifted a sled to his shoulder, ready to swing it like a club. Two against two. But he had a sled. Cocked and locked. Two against two-with-a-sled. No contest. The German kids backed down and backed away.
When we moved to Germany and looked for friends, John was there. When we moved back to California and looked for friends, there too.

So. There are two ways down a tree. Don’t do the second way. Nuh-uh.

My Father's Heart

May 20 1972

Ultimately it was my father’s heart that betrayed him, one spring Saturday morning, there in southern California, in a house under the walnut trees. He’d spent part of the morning mowing what he called “the back forty” with our balky self propelled reel power mower, laying grass into windrows and dodging the piles of “donations” from our two large dogs. For a lawn that was never fertilized, it grew surprisingly well, especially over the septic field that was none too compliant with code and from time to time, especially after a heavy rain, treated the lawn to a good dose of organically sourced nitrogen. It also grew well in some spots that the dogs had treated though their treatments were just as likely to kill the lawn and freckle it with dead spots as to make it grow more abundantly.

The yard was large, by southern California standards, where water was relatively scarce and we soaked the grass anyway with a flip-flop sprinkler that sometimes ran until we went to bed. You couldn’t really call it a lawn. It grew a variety of crab grass, Bermuda grass, dandelions, chick weed, purslane and something with thick saw like edges and, here and there, the southern California delicacy- dichondra. Mostly it was weeds that we kept green and trimmed and raked and it passed for a lawn in our middle class neighborhood, perched high above the Ventura river, which most time of the year, was just boulders sand and dust.

But the lawn. Our duplex, shared by 6 children and parents on one side, and my grandparents on the other, sat on a third of an acre or so, with a towering poplar, a deodar pine that was a weed itself. A dozen walnut trees, remnants of an orchard that grew before the houses were built. A stand of box elders, a hedge of bamboo and a row of sturdy prolific roses, that were first my grandfather’s joy, and then mine. And one single nectarine tree that grew the most wonderful heavenly sweet fruit imaginable in this world or the next.

So it was my father’s heart that betrayed him. He mowed the back forty, came in for a break, snapped on the television to catch “War Zone” a Saturday movie that featured, well, war movies and headed for his favorite chair, a scratchy well worn platform rocker. He never made it to the rocker. His last words to no one in particular, but maybe to Ruth my second sister were, “Your thespian brother can mow the rest when he gets up.”

And then his heart betrayed him. And stopped cold. And never started again. He collapsed all in a heap, knocking his rocker against the wall and startling Ruth, who was dusting the maroon Japanese lacquer dish that Mom and Dad brought back from Japan. The family memories go fuzzy here and there. Ruth remembers calling Mom, and ran to get Richard up. At first Richard was confused and thinking Dad was ill, brought water and then seeing him, sprawled on the parquet floor, called the fire department. Janet flew next door and got Kenny, a robust oil field worker.

Kenny and Mom tried to revive him, as did the firemen when they arrived. But the ambulance crew recognized his demise and called it thus. So Dad never made it to his rocker.

Dad had experienced his share of trauma, serving in the Korean War in a MASH unit, keeping the field hospital running in some capacity. Losing his parents at a relatively young age. Being ill and losing a job in his late forties and being on welfare to keep his family in one piece. Getting serious depression and not getting effective treatment for it. Pondering whether one or both of his elder sons would be drafted and shipped out to Viet Nam. Then watching one son enlist while the other became a draft resister (and later failed the pre-induction physical much to his great relief).

I didn’t know my father. I was familiar with him, and loved him and saw bits and pieces of him here and there. But did I know him? Hardly. I mean, there was that time of growing up with him and doing father-son stuff like fishing and playing catch and the time we watched a monster thunderstorm roll over our little part of Baltimore from the safety of our porch. Rites of passage-he was there-when I joined the Boy Scouts and took my oath. And when I swam on the swim team he was hanging on the chain link fence, watching. He was there when I graduated from high school. And when I dropped out of college.

And we tried on some words for size in my teen years but mostly it was awkwardness and misunderstanding and little losses and small grievances that passed without mention. There was that time, in my early twenties when I went to see a mildly risqué movie and ran into him in the lobby. If I could have shrunk down to nothing and run out the door that would have been better than the deep embarrassment we both felt. Instead of running we sat together and after he gave me a ride home. We never mentioned it, just like the silent-but-deadly that no one will own up to, we let it sit there, a small moment, a splinter under the skin of our relationship. They were just there like oxygen, those fragile innocent incidents that were as much a part of growing up and away, as the tie-that-binds in the father and son rituals of the 50’s and 60’s.

Let’s wax the car together. Or Dad would pass wrenches while I fiddled with the 1960 VW bug. He didn’t care that he couldn’t tell a coil from a condenser. And neither did I. We were spending time together. Fishing in the Chesapeake and catching only blue crabs with our bamboo poles when I was oh-so-much younger. But really it was the all rituals that pulled us closer and not just the ones that strike us as being the obvious ones exclusive to the male domain.

On Sunday mornings as all 8 of us got ready for church, he tied my tie. “Chin up son.” And I raised my chin while he fiddled with my collar and got the tie just so. So perfect that after church I often slipped the tie off over my head, still knotted, and hung it on the tie rack for next Sunday. Slipped my cuff links through the cuffs. A little gentleman, that was me. He slicked down my hair and when it rebelled, he pretended to spit on it and comb it through. I was supposed to be grossed out but really I thought it was funny.

Like when he’d toot at the dinner table and all six kids were stifling laughter while Mom chastised him gently, “Bob.” but then he’d say, “Tickles when you do it in the bathtub,” and no one could stop the gales of guffaws that circled over the meatloaf and lima beans and mashed potatoes. And he would pretend to be chagrined, but not really.

Not really, because one memorable day he took John and I aside and told us a couple of mildly off color jokes. Potty humor. Both jokes featured the English and today, it’s as if he were standing in front of us, miming a cockney accent all the way to the ribald punch line. I remember every word of every line of those two jokes. And so does John, my elder brother.

Not even showers were safe haven from his sense of humor. A glass of cold water tossed over the curtain elicited shocked cries and “Daa-aad.”

Though sometimes he could not say it, he loved us. There was no doubt in my mind, even when a deep silence stretched between us, like an unbridged chasm, when I decided to move out on my own. For three days, he said not one word to me, even though I was going only a few miles away. Mom cooled him off with one of their late night bedroom conversations. I could hear murmurs through the wall of the room I shared with John and Richard, though just then John was in the Air Force. Mom’s quiet assurance, Dad’s uncalculated questioning. And then she warmed him up and we began talking again.

Still the awkward silences, the ‘what do we talk about now’ kind of empty spots as a young man begins to assert himself and make his way in the world and the father, longing for the companionship of the boy, must reconcile his love for the child, now grown, startlingly fast, into and through adolescence into manhood. The young man no longer depends on the father and it’s the father’s loss of his sense of self with the changing of the rules and the roles. The days of playing catch yield to a game of chess which yields to wrenching on a car and later still talks about jazz and Wagner and Schumann’s works for solo piano.

In the back of his mind, as it is in mine now, thinking of my 16 year old daughter, he still saw a tow headed, sparkly eyed mischievous boy who swam and biked all day and played outside until the streetlights came on. And he had to juxtapose that with a man his own height, with curling hair and a serious girlfriend. And accept them both. As now I accept my daughter’s phases as being all part of the same woman-child that I treasure.

It was in those days of first making my way that we began tentative overtures into our changing roles. I acquired an old mower and began mowing lawns for a living. And he fed me jobs, maintaining the grass of homes that his savings and loan had repossessed. I moved into a tiny studio apartment and he would drop by just for a couple hours of conversation over tea, with my portable LP player spinning black vinyl records of his favorite music. I joined up with a tiny obscure branch of Catholicism and he came to Holy Eucharist just to marvel at this man-boy serving at the altar in a purple cassock and splendidly white surplice. He loved our music and never failed to come forward for communion, though he was as dyed in the wool a Presbyterian as anyone I’ve known down these many years.

I have strayed far afield. It is my affliction, that when I open up my memories of my father, they pour out, many unbidden, some unwelcome, all requiring my attention, now that I am 53, two years shy of his age when he died.

Dad had a job, his first civilian job out of the Army. He retired after 21 years and numerous postings and various positions. But his first job after the military was head of housekeeping for a hospital. I think it suited him and we were happy that he was happy. But then one day, he started having chest pains and a nurse recognized what was happening and got him help. Not long after that, he lost that job. I don’t know if it was mutually agreed on, but lose he did. And then passed several months of unemployment, and welfare, and my leaf raking money going into the family pot. I was just 15. And he stewed and fretted, under this invisible yoke of no job. Self image, that was it. A man is defined by what he does, at least in his own mind. The provider, bread winner, the hunter, bringer home of the bacon. To us, he was more than that, but perhaps in his mind, being a dad was just not enough. He needed to know that he could take care of us, provide us with food, clothing and shelter. As well as his love.

He got a temporary job with Manpower, something manual, and loved it. He came home beaming and eager to share his day of shifting boxes. Sure, it was a bit menial, but to him it was life with a capital L, work with a capital W.

And then he landed a job with a savings and loan. Avco. A largish institution in Ventura. He started out as a mail room clerk and quickly moved into supplies officer and building superintendent something or other. He had his own office and a circle of tellers and clerks and loan officers who seemed to really like him. One weekend, he convinced me to help with the audit. My job was to pull packages of transactions, all on paper in the basement, and take them to the auditors for review. It was not challenging at all but it was fun to be with him and watch what he did and ride to and from work for a few days. But it wasn’t me. I liked being outdoors with plants and dirt and tools. Anyway, he offered me the same job he had started out in and, when I turned it down, he took it right in stride. And then he started getting me yard care and lawn mowing jobs from his co-workers or for Avco, keeping up the yards of the repossessed houses.

My days at this age, 53, are sometimes marked with anxiety about the unknown future. After all, I share some of the same risk factors that my father had. I am too sedentary, but my blood pressure is good and I don’t smoke and my cholesterol is marginal. And I take an anti-depressant because, like Dad, life got me down too many times and this last time, it was too hard to get up. So I look into the future and wonder if my demise will be like his, so sudden and shocking, like cold water thrown over the shower curtain. Frankly, it has made me lose sleep on a few nights, lying in the silence of my out-in-the-woods apartment, feeling my heart stir and pump in my chest, some nights noting the occasional pause of an irregular beat.

I do what I can. Eat healthy. Well, usually. Try to ride my bike now and again. See my doctor regularly. Take the medicine that keeps me from slipping into a bleak sadness. I see my father’s face every day, in an old black and white studio photo that hangs in my dining area. Dad’s dressed in a suit, the remainder of his hair neatly slicked back, clean shaven, round glasses perched on his nose, his tie carefully knotted, a white handkerchief in the breast pocket of the suit coat.

It may have been his heart that betrayed him, but it was with all of his heart that he loved me. And its taken me a good 34 years since his death to see all the signs and wonders of his love. A father loves his children, unless he’s a dysfunctional monster, sometimes without knowing why or how he came to love them. It’s a great mystery, how a man grows in love toward first, the tiny squalling bundle of a new born, then the mischievous 10 year old, and still later, the querulous adolescent, fast becoming a young man. But love he does.

Daddy loved me, with all his heart, though his heart betrayed him. Sometimes I tried to ignore the gifts of his love, the things that did not say in so many words how much he loved me. Like how upset he was when I decided to move out on my own. Like the unexpected visits at my tiny apartment. Like coming to evening service at my catholic church, just to see me serve. All too self involved, I lived my own life without knowing really the depth of his care, concern.
So now at 53, I watch my daughter growing up and growing away. Days are when she prefers to be with her friends. And much as I miss and treasure her company, I have to make peace with who she is becoming, lest I fall into a trap of self pity. And maybe if I can make that peace, my heart will go on beating happily, loving her in simple ways as only a father can love.

My father’s heart may have betrayed him. But this late in life, as I stare into the mirror, one that reflects both past and future, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my father loved me.
And though he is gone these 32 years I love him too.

Friendship, Pondered in Winter

It’s winter and, forced to be inside, away from drifts and icicles and rasping snow, kicked up by steady winds, one tends to become introspective, perhaps a substitution for hibernation. Who knows, winter brings out the inner man, and summer, the outer. There is snow drifted up against the door wall and a draft streams under the window ledge in the bathroom.

Outside on the deck, black capped chickadees and downy woodpeckers and their like, cling to the feeders, feasting on sunflower seeds and burrowing beaks into suet in search of bits of fruit and nuts. The light is waning, a thin watery yellow of the westering sun against the leafless maples and oaks, casting long lavender shadows across the brilliant glittering snow. On a walk earlier, I’d watched a pair of horses, geldings, one deep brown, one paint, kick their way through hock deep drifting snow, sending low waves forward from each hoof as they made their way from the far fence edge across to nuzzle my frozen face with big warm soft noses. An exhalation through a pair of nostrils fogged over my glasses momentarily and I was like a near blind man, fumbling my way through a drift to stumble back to the plowed driveway.

One becomes introspective, like I started to say. One thinks of winters past, Christmases past and today I found myself thinking of my older brother John and what had bound us together as friends.

John and I grew up sharing a bedroom, sometimes just him and I, sometimes, depending on how tight quarters were, with our younger brother Richard. So first we were forced into each other’s constant presence. Sometimes that was a good thing, where in we spent hours with board games or books or plastic soldiers, making war across the cheap red throw rugs. And later, as we grew, our games became more intellectual. There was one we had with our pair of dictionaries; one would take the A-M and the other, N-Z, and we’d quiz each other on the meanings of various obscure words. Lying on our wooden bunk beds on a chilly winter day, in Augsburg Germany. It was not for nothing that, later in life, John was called, affectionately, The Walking Dictionary.
At night, sometimes, by the light of illicit flashlights, we’d make animals and other things with shadows on the ceiling. No body part was safe from this game. Sometimes we’d be caught by Mom who ssshhh’d at us and ordered us to sleep. And we snorted and snuffled into our pillows, reckless laughter that threatened to bring in Mom again.

And forced into a constant companionship, even outdoors, we hung together, at least till we entered junior high school.

Sometimes, as ignorant children, we bickered; bitter words that children will hurl thoughtlessly, spurred by envy or a slight or an unintended bump of a knee to a head during a more physical game. Sometimes our companionship was uneasy for this reason and we, with a mother wiser than I’ll ever be, would be sent to the basement “until you can be friends again.” Being younger and smaller, I was disadvantaged, but not always the loser of a squabble. Not always.

Thrown together by necessity, we were also pushed together when I joined the Boy Scouts and my father insisted I be in John’s pack. So when I took the Scout oath, right hand raised with three fingers up and thumb crossed over my pinky on my palm, I joined him again in hiking and knot tying and ax sharpening, sleeping in a pup tent, sleeping closer together than even at home. Even then we shared our camping food and set up our tent together and loaned each other pocket knives to cut rope.

In later years, as adolescence brought hormones and new friends and sharper differences in our ages, we were prised apart as we found our way into our teens. He was more bookish and fond of classical music and I began to lean towards longish hair and hippie rock n roll. The struggles became more verbal as we tried , less and less successfully over time, to share our room. Younger brother Richard was not subject to any of our enmity, being no threat to either of us and several years younger by far.

But then, one shocking fall day John sat Mom down and told her he joined the Air Force and suddenly he was off to basic training and then other training and then Okinawa. And for some reason, we began to correspond. He on yellow legal pads, me on notebook paper. We poured out thoughts of home, popular music, sci fi, and later, after our father died suddenly at 55, of John leaving the Air Force on a hardship discharge and how to get him out .

I think that it was the draft, the selective service system that sealed our friendship. John was already far away, Kadena, Okinawa, Japan and I was I-A for the draft, ready, able and completely unwilling. And on the day I was rejected by the military as unfit to serve, I wrote him a voluminous letter that spelled out my relief, my joy. It was not long after that our father died and John came home for the funeral and eventually was discharged so that he could help with the family. He was a resister within the military and I from without.

I can remember the first time I hugged John. On Dad’s death I volunteered to drive to LAX with Richard to pick John up, and at the gate, tentatively , we wrapped our arms around each other and around our grief for moment. We were a motley trio, John with regulation hair, me with longish curls and Richard with a elderly villager’s bald pate and fringe for his part in the high school’s production of Teahouse of the August Moon. That earned us a few stares when we stopped at Denny’s for breakfast. And to the wide eyed woman, gaping over the booth’s divider, I gave a fish mouth, puckering my lips tightly and waggling them like an oxygen starved tetra at the water’s surface. She ducked down quickly.

And, never one to resist harmless mischief, we posted antiwar rally posters right on the window glass of the Ventura Selective Service Board office. I drove the getaway Bug, and John taped the posters up, brazen for having picked full daylight during business hours.

We spent a few months, hiking together, hanging out with my hippie friends in an loosely knit commune in a narrow, brush choked canyon, Sisar Canyon, that was home to towering sycamores and prickly leaved live oaks, a stream that ran almost year round. Climbed the face of Topa Topa, rocky bluffs that stood over the far east end of Ojai Valley. Nowadays you can ride a mountain bike up on top of it. Hiked into Santa Paula Canyon for a three day, only to be rained out on our first night. Wet fuel, wet clothes and a missed turn sent us back, not discouraged but disappointed. And the classic line from my brother as he departed the tent, folding shovel and TP in hand, “I hate crapping in the wilderness.” Indeed.

Its hard to think of what companionship and friendship are, where they come from, the purpose and what sustains them. Why do any of us have friends? Why is there a spot in our hearts and minds that needs the company of others? Oh, biologically one can see the need for friendship that leads to love and procreation and all that, whether one believes in pure evolution or in creation. But why have friends?

Sometimes I think too hard about these things, in my sixth decade, each year a step more weighted with mortality and physical discomforts. But I yearn, like any man must, for someone who, besides a spouse, understands me fully, having years of history and easy conversation and tea. And later, dark ales and philosophy and reminiscence of times past. Out here in Michigan, so far from the two men I love the most, John and Richard, and being the unwitting victim of, not only distance, but the trauma of having been in a religious cult that devalued such human love as being inferior and undesirable and a distraction, its been a struggle to let any man close to me. Actually its been nearly impossible.

Other than my brothers. God bless them both.

Tears come more easily as I age. I am more sentimental by far. In my youth memorabilia came and went in a blink or a heartbeat or a flick of the wrist as I tossed high school yearbooks into the trash can. Now, I can’t let anything go that reminds me of, links me to another time when I was young and relatively innocent of worldly distractions like sex, drugs, rock and roll.
Just this past summer, in a quiet little sandwich and ale shop in Eugene Oregon, having sandwiches and a brew with my younger brother, Richard, my daughter Jenny, my mother and Sarah, Richard’s ex-wife and still friend. Richard had me close my eyes and when I opened them, there was a relic of my 11th year, a Japanese version, over sized, of the Swiss army knife. Fork, spoon, corkscrew, screwdriver-bottle opener, can opener, scissors, saw, and blade melded between two fake pieces of animal horn and held securely in a leather pouch made for a belt.

Tears welled up instantly. I could not believe what I saw, there on the table cloth with my name printed in my mother’s hand, black permanent marker on the back side of the pouch. Chuck. A relic of, a memory of hikes through towering pines in Bavaria, a frozen winter camp in a giant army surplus tent with tan sub-arctic sleeping bags, prickly with feathers, and olive drab air mattresses that turned soggy at night with leaks despite endless patching. Scrambled eggs and bacon cooked in a stainless steel mess kit over a gasoline stove.

And so the tears welled up and threatened to spill down my cheeks, my eyelids near to over flowing with hot tears, my cheeks flushed, my throat welling up, my voice failing me. I could only reach out and hug him and utter profound thanks over and over.

Why? Why is friendship so important? Why are we not all islands of independence, stiff arming intimacy, shrouded and armored from anything resembling loneliness and the sense of isolation. Why are we not all, as Paul Simon said “a rock, an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries”?

There is a design that cannot be, I think, explained by evolution. A fortuitous mix of part emotion, part intellect, part physical and part spirit that for no other reason, created by God because it pleased Him to see us care for and about and with each other. Sure, one could say that the utility of friendship is purely biological, a survival reflex, a progeny producing relationship twixt man and woman, a gathering of strong muscles and quick reflexes that protects and defends the vulnerable and elevates the strong to leadership. But it seems to go so much deeper, nurtured there in the hours over a pot of tea or a bottle of wine, during an arduous uphill hike or the strangling chaos of grief at the passing of a loved one, in the brief touch of hands when one passes a tool to the greasy underside of a car, to the raising of voices in a plaintive song about unrequited love or the loneliness of a sailor spiriting home on favoring winds. In the few passing moments when a prayer is raised like a banner over a house afflicted by death, or thanking God simply for the fried chicken and green beans. There we connect as inexorably as atoms of essential molecules, drawn together by an unseen force, to form a bond, a coalition of friendship and family that sustains and nurtures.

And beneath it all, like the soft sighing of wind that lifts the kite to the clouds, unseen, but there nevertheless, this ‘je ne sais quoi’, this divine something, this spirited union that we call Friendship.

So at long last, I come to what I set out to say, that I haven’t really got a clue as to why it exists, when I set aside the purely physical utility, but there it is. We are friends, for better and worse, in difference and in concert, and I hold these two men ever so dear, my brothers John and Richard.

I love you guys.

The Butterscotch Stone

When I was 5, or maybe 6 years old, I cut off my left pinky. Understand, this was not an act of self harm, attention seeking or stupidity. What normal 5 year old could conceive of doing such a thing? Heaven knows I got a boatload of attention from it though. And my first encounter with ether dreams. And my first experience with earthly angels, which we now call nurses. And a young surgeon who was interested, more than a little, in saving my finger. Standard practice would have been to remove the mangled flesh, and make a neat serviceable stump. And I saw my father’s deeply tender side. Found that our Rambler could do 80 miles an hour in a pinch. That even sick kids can be cruel. And hospital food tastes worse than library paste mixed with buttermilk mixed with boogers. But I get ahead of myself.

I did it this way. Near our military base home, Fort Holabird, Dundalk, Maryland, was a tennis court and behind the court a building, the typical tan, non-descript one story building that military bases were filled with in the ‘50s. Between the building and the tennis court ran a path, that after a rain, seemed to rut a bit deeper each time. I used to ride my bike down there, training wheels and all, to watch the non-coms slap the ball back and forth. Once in a while, a wild swing would send a ball over the chain link fence surrounding the court, and I would run like crazy to scoop up the ball and hurl it back over. Thank you’s always followed. Or, what an arm, you see that kid throw? I think that’s why I liked to go down there. So the non-coms in shorts could see what Sergeant Dietzel’s kid was made of. So I could catch a few compliments, as well as tennis balls.

So I’d ride my bike down there, training wheels and all. And, because the rain rutted the path, it often exposed stones. Every 5 year old, or was I 6? had a rock collection. Gravel, fossils, brick corners, quartz, coal, arrowheads. Me, I found the butterscotch stone. Found it in a rut, washed smooth, washed clean, the size of, oh, of a grade A medium egg, but irregular, more cubical than ovoid, but with soft corners and a smooth texture and a creamy light brown shot through with a few streaks of pure white. Like a piece of butterscotch that you’d sucked on for a minute and took it out to look at it. It invited touch, that smooth, creamy rock.

I carried it in my pocket, my butterscotch stone.

Have I digressed again? I cut off my left little pinky when I was 5 or 6.
Down by the tennis court, in that rutted path one day, I discovered that I could park my bike, training wheels and all, over the rut till the back wheel hung suspended, free wheeling. I could spin the pedal and the back wheel spun on like a manic grindstone, a ferris wheel for bugs, or. OR! In my mind it became the ice cream machine, churning out every flavor possible, every flavor ever made, every flavor in the universe and then some. And! And, I could make it ting-ting-tung-ting-tung-ting-ting just like an ice cream truck’s bell.

Shove the pedal, spin the wheel, let a finger play the spokes, like guitar strings. Ting-ting-tung-ting-tung-ting-ting. The ice cream poured out in endless streams into an infinite number of cones for all my friends, real and imaginary. Why there was enough for the tennis players, my family, our little subdivision of brick duplexes, maybe the whole base.

Chocolate, butter brickle, vanilla, strawberry, rocky road, mint chip...did you want pineapple, peach or banana? Coming right up! Fudge cake, peppermint stripe, or orange-vanilla? No problem! Here you go. There you are. Two scoops or three or even four? This one’s for you!

Ting-ting-tung-ting-ting-tung-ting-ting.

Over the fence, the tennis ball thwocked back and forth. And I turned out torrents of the best ice cream in all of Baltimore.

The pain must have been hideous, like the scream that ripped from my throat. I can’t remember the pain. Not a bit, not to this day. One of my fingers had gone too deep between the spokes, instead of flicking it, instead of making the spoke sing. And my hand was dragged down in an instant, faster than I could blink, into the sharp edged, rusting chain guard. And in that eye blink my pinky came off midway between the first and second joint, and I collapsed shrieking to the ground.

Thank God for tennis players. They were by me in a flash, faster than Superman, who I aspired to be. How did they get there so fast? One, I heard later, ran to my house. I think. The other wrapped my mangled fingers-pinky, ring and middle- in a towel. Somehow I got home, a blur of walking, being carried, crying. And a blur of going down to the base dispensary, which was no more than an outpatient clinic, no emergency room, no surgeons, no help at all. There was my dad-holding me, carrying me in his arms, and then, in the car, speeding for Fort Meade, where the military had its pre-eminent hospital, its surgeons, x-ray, wards.

Its ether.

I never knew our Rambler, sky blue, robin’s egg blue, could go that fast. I heard later from Mom that Dad had only two tickets in his whole, entire life. Neither of them were from that night.
I watched the speedometer wiggle around 80. I leaned against Daddy, my hand in a dispensary towel, blinding white with a blue stripe and my hand throbbed. Fort Meade seemed like a big place. I was hustled here and there, my dad always next to me. Bright lights, men with clean stiff white coats that buttoned at the shoulder. My hand on an x-ray table. Sitting on Dad’s lap with his warm arms around me, his sandpaper cheek against mine and I didn’t even mind. The fading scent of Old Spice. The towel beginning to show blood. Just a spot.

And the films coming back, still dripping and those clean handsome young men in white, talking with Daddy in serious tones, him nodding, me exhausted, crying. Him putting his hand to his face and rubbing. What time was it? Time had stopped when my hand hit the chain guard.
There was another blur, another room where my clothes came off and a little gown replaced them, a starchy white thing with ties in the back and no bottoms. And then a short trip down a hall, with the tears streaming down my cheeks. Where was Daddy? Daddy? Daddy!

What child does not love his father, maybe more than life itself. Who else can be my father except my Daddy? Who else would I run to greet when he came home after work, and he would open his arms to me and smother me with a kiss and his Old Spice and his love? Who else would toss the ball for me to catch in my new glove?

Daddy? A sweet sick smell penetrated a cotton mask above my mouth. Daddy? I counted to one, two...one, two. Just like I was told. And slipped into dreams. Green skies, me in the crows nest above the pirate ship. The mast swaying like a fishing pole, like the bamboo poles we tipped over the bay in search of sunfish. One, two...The mast went this way and that, and I clung for life. But I was not afraid.

Daddy? Daddy!

I struggled out of sleep, clawed my way up through starched sheets and nausea and green skies and an unbearable thirst. And cried. I was so thirsty, I must have been Moses, fresh from the desert. My mouth was filled with sticky cotton, my tongue glued to my gums.

Daddy? I cried. Daddy?

Then a soft word, a gentle hand on my forehead, a straw to my lips and such refreshment that a drop of water brought. Sshhh, said a gentle voice. Sshh. Daddy will be here soon. Sshh. Another sip from the straw. Daddy? Softly.

I woke up in a big room. There were at least a dozen beds. High beds, but not cribs. With metal railings around them. And the lights were dim, except in one corner, a beacon of lights in just. one. corner. I had to pee so bad that I hurt. I cried, whimpered, called out. Where was I? And where was Daddy?

And there was that voice again. So soft, so kind, so gentle. Sshh. What’s wrong?

I have to go.

Footsteps patted away and back. The sheets lifted up and a cold something was placed between my knees. Sshh. Its okay. Now you can go.

And so I went. And went. And went. My ice cream machine could not have produced what I did that night.

Goodness, said that gentle voice. Was there ever a sweeter voice? You really did have to go. My bladder relieved, I drifted off to sleep again, sensing that gentle hand, that sweet voice nearby, watching over me from a bright corner.

I woke to the noises of the children’s ward of the hospital in Fort Meade Maryland. Beds down one side of the ward and up the other. At least a dozen, maybe more. Girls in wheelchairs. Boys in bed. Children at a table at the far end of the ward, having breakfast. Daddy?

It was all so strange. A nurse came around with a pill. Then another with a tray with gluey gray stuff in bowls and other, tepid things in glasses. There was a white enamel pitcher on the stand next to my bed with a little towel over the open end. Ooops. It wasn’t a pitcher. There, there was the pitcher, and in the summer time heat, it oozed drops of water down onto the table that swung over my bed. Who could eat that gray stuff? I must have. I drank every thing from the tray. There was nothing else to drink just then. I couldn’t quite reach the water. And my hand. It was all wrapped up in white gauze.

My first couple days in the Children’s ward were a blur. Doctors came in to undress my hand and murmur serious words. Nurses were always there, to scold or comfort or hold my hand or pass me a pill. My hand felt foreign, distant, wrapped like a mummy in white up to my wrist. They began getting me out of bed. And one morning the nurse brought me a pill I had never seen before and two hours later I was in the john, scampered through the wooden swinging stall doors, and parked, for a looooong time, bottom first, on the toilet.

I had visitors. Mom. My brother John. Daddy! Daddy! Fresh Old Spice, smooth cheeked, smiling. And John with his gap toothed grin. Mommy. Mommy! Enfolded in the love of family, aaah. They brought me...something. Who can remember that far back? And John got to go to the movies cuz he was so well behaved.

On visiting day, before any one arrived, we were having lunch in the playroom. Gray stuff in bowls. Warm, soupy things covered in gravy and smelling like steam tables and unknown glop. Bland vegetables soggy to the point of disintegration. And something that looked like vomit without the chunks. They called it custard. Lunch was rambunctious, kids with casts and dressings talking all at once, hospital gowns floating here and there with every gesture. One little girl took it upon herself to zing me with a handbell, when I refused her offer to take the custard off my hands. Clang. Right in the forehead. And the ricocheting bell landed in the mashed potatoes and sent gravy every which way, like a sluggish summer fly, suddenly splatted against the glass.

I screamed in pain and white shoes pattered in and out. One took the girl out, unrepentant. Another made sure my brains were still intact and ended the lunch room fiasco in seconds flat.
A few days later, the serious doctors took my dressings off. There was my finger. Black stitches holding the pinky on, I didn’t lose it after all. Later, I learned that it was hanging by a shred and an ambitious young surgeon had said, The worst that can happen is we have to go back later and take it off. So I still had my finger. It had a little crook in it, and later, when it was cold , it would hurt like crazy. But I had my finger.

I went home a few days later. Found my butterscotch stone in my room on top of the dresser. Smooth and curvaceous and warm. Stuck it in my pocket. Later, Daddy and I would go back and have the stitches taken out, and I would snuggle up by him, butterscotch stone in hand, and remember contrasts. The smooth stone and his sand paper cheek. The cool soothing hand of an angel in white, and a bell clanging off my forehead. The sweet trickle of water down my parched throat and the welcome relief of emptying my bladder. Ether and Old Spice.

One Moment In Time

This is a song I wrote and sang at my wedding.

Music: Rolf Lovland (Serenade to Spring from the album by Secret Garden: Songs From A Secret Garden)

Lyrics: Charles Dietzel

This one moment in time,
It is yours, it is mine,
And the blessings today are ours.
As we dance through our days,
I will ever give praise
For knowing the love that will e’er be ours.

Chorus:

Once I danced all alone,
Dancing all on my own,
Then you came and you took my hand.
Now as God makes us one
We will dance in the sun,
Celebrating one moment in time.

E’er the years have all gone,
Let us dance our pavane,
As the evening star lights our way.
Then we’ll soar with the stars
To the music that’s ours,
Till night yields its place and it’s our new day.

Chorus:

Celebrating one moment