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Journey Through the Past

Truth is stranger than fiction, which is what makes fiction such a comfort.

We often turn to fiction to escape, but so many of the novels I read turn on tangents so close to the life I lead. I read the echoes of my existence in many of these stories. 

The Book of I by David Greig (Europa Editions, $24) is unlikely to remid you of your sputtering love life or your fellow proles dwelling in neighboring cubicles.

To start, the story takes place in 825. It may not look like it, but that’s a date — as in 825 A.D.

The main characters are a young monk, an aging Viking and a woman who makes mead that can change the course of history.

Since Grimur the Viking is a major character, you can expect a certain amount of pillaging and sword-wielding violence. 

Yet the book is funny. I might even venture to say hilarious.

Reading it, I was reminded of a Coen Brothers film. I remember sitting in a theater lo those many years ago, watching Blood Simple. That was the first Coen film and I knew nothing of them. How well I recall my reaction. There was violence, followed by humor. Then those elements merged. The audience was perplexed, to find itself laughing at brutality.

Click on the cover to order.

There’s a lot of violence in The Book of I, but much hilarity ensues. It’s an intoxicating blend, a work of deft writing. No surprise the author, David Grieg, is a playwright, a man aware of the power of words.

The story is so well told.

The island of I (I think we’re to pronounce it ee) is a bleak place off the coast of northern Scotland. Today known as Iona, it’s in the inner Hebrides, and has long been famous for its abbey. It’s a spiritual place, y’understand?

Brother Martin, one of our three protagonists, is loweest on the totem pole among the monks. 

When the Vikings arrive to do their pillaging, the monks are delighted, because they have been joyfully awaiting martyrdom. They get it, of course — the Vikings are nothing but thorough — killing all of the monks, save Brother Martin.

The Vikings don’t find and kill Martin because he has a supreme hiding place, lurking undernearth the rancid shit in the monk’s trough of excrement and urine.. 

While he hides there, Una, the mead-maker and beekeeper, is being assaulted for the last time by her husband. It’s the last time because Grimur the Viking happens upon the bickering couple and he severs the husband’s arms. However, Grimur is later knocked unconscious and his fellow Vikings bury him.

When the Vikings depart, the stench-covered Brother Martin happens upon the Grimur’s hastily-made burial spot — a hand reaching up throuhg the dirt is a dead giveaway — and digs him up.

David Greig

Now liberated from her brutal husband, Una joins Grimur and Brother Martin to and form an alliance and begin to rebuild.

The book hits that high note that connects comedy and tragedy — again, much like the Coen Brothers. 

Or maybe Coen Brother. Now that they are making films separately, we can see it’s Joel immersed in drama (he made The Tragedy of MacBeth) and Ethan who’s the funny one. He’s finished two entries in his Lesbian Trilogy (Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t) and more fun no doubt awaits. The Book of I has that Ethan Coen tone.

Together, the Coens create an excellent blend of comedy and tragedy. This book matches that tone.

. . . . .

A couple of years ago, my sister-in-law had us all do the ancestry.com thing. My sibings and I all had a blend of Irish, Scottish and German blood.

But me? I had a whiff of Viking blood. 

How did that happen? I well recall the aphorism that motherhood is fact and fatherhood is speculation. 

Nonetheless, I am working to embrace my inner Viking and therefore award The Book of I my first Viking Seal of Approval.

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This Might Be the End

I don’t think this story will ever end — at least not until I end. 

Not until I …. shuffle off the mortal coil . . . get deleted . . .  eat weeds by the roots . . . get carried away by angels . . . become a null parrot . . . bid adieu to Earthy scenes . . . change a fleeting world to an immortal rest . . . depart from this in hope of a better life . . . take the big sleep . . . cancel my subscription.

And those are just a few euphemisms for death.  (When I was writing Everybody Had an Ocean, which is about rock’n’roll stars in the 1960s, I knew there’d be a lot of fucking in the book. To avoid overuse of the Fuck Word, I wanted euphemisms for the act. My pal Sarah Kess helped me put together a list of more than a hundred such, and that list was so much more fun than this death list. My favorite was “crashing the custard truck.”)

I could go to my eternal reward later this afternoon. Or I might stick around for thirty more years. Of my parents and grandparents, four out of six made it deep into their nineties. 

You never know.

So, back to the point: where and when does this end?

How about here? This may be a good stopping point. 

(Click for “The End” by the Doors.)

I still have neuropathy. The primary medication for this is Gabapentin. I take the maximum amount, but the neuropathy does not go away. If I stop taking those pills, the pain is significantly worse. 

So I keep taking Gabapentin because it lessens the pain.

What helps more is the mushroom supplement I put in my coffee, and cannabis, whether in tincture form in coffee, or gummies. I dislike smoking, but will burn one down in a pinch.

Cannabis gummies give me terrific sleep. When I catheterize before bedtime and take a gummy, I sleep through the night. I’m not sure I’ve done that regularly since my footie-pajama days.

Without gummies and / or Gabapentin, the neuropathy is sometimes so bad that it wakes me. If I’m having an onset before hitting the sack, it can keep me up for hours.

I describe this neuropathy sensation as if “I’m walking on your feet.”

I never know where my feet are going to go. I have no control. 

I warn students about my neuropathy at the beginning of each semester. I feel they deserve a warning and to not think I’m just lazy. I tell them I may sit down, which is something they’re probably not used to in large lecture classes. But standing too long, with the neuropathy, feels like dancing on nails.

I also warn them that I walk like a drunk, but that I’m not drunk. Again, I’m never sure where my feet are going next.

This can’t be helped. 

(For the record, I don’t drink much anymore. I have maybe 3-4 beers a month, perhaps the most startling thing my friends note about my health issues of the last few years.) 

This all started due to ass cancer. So perhaps you wonder about the state of my ass.

It’s fine; thank you for asking. 

It’s not a perfect ass, but after what it’s been through, a little gastric eccentricity now and then is to be expected.

I think back on my former gastric horror shows and think of those events as masterpieces of CGI. That couldn’t have really happened, could it? No body could produce that much foul waste, could it? Those scenes had to be special effects, right?

I still have problems with the southerly orafice now and then. Fortunately, none of these incidents have turned into a public spectacle, like the train station incident years ago. Knocketh thee on wood, please.

When I go someplace new, I immediately locate the restroom for possible emergency use. I never go anywhere without crafting a contigency plan. I have changes of clothes in my car and in my office. At work I store these emergency clothes, along with old research papers, in my refrigerator. Not sure why I do that, but I do.

This fecal fear means I limit my activities sometime and pass up doing things a normal-assed person might want to do — things that an abnormally-assed person like me might fear to do.

But I have to put my ass first if I want to avoid disaster.

That’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite used to say.

I am this way because I wanted to stay alive. This is the price I pay, so I accept it.

Every couple of weeks I fall. These falls happen at the strangest times. The most recent one, last Sunday, came after I walked into my house. I didn’t trip on a cat toy or hook my shoe on the threshhold. 

I just fuckin’ fell.

One or two of my boys have been with me when these falls happen. It’s still kind of freaky to us all. It’s only happened a few times in a public place. Usually, it’s inside the house or in the driveway.

It’s astonishing that these little dudes, whose diapers it seems I was changing just two days ago, have turned into big, hulking men, helping their father to stand. 

Life, it is short.

Jackson thinks my falls are related to dehydration. I’m not sure. I should drink much more water than I do — he’s right about that. But more water means more pee and that introduces other sorts of issues.

In addition to “my urologist,” I have “my neurologist.” The falls could be related to something in my melon, but so far no evidence of that.

You heard right. I’ve added a neurologist and an allergist to my Rolodex of medical professionals.

Here’s why:

In addition to the falling, I started getting the shakes. I couldn’t open jars or even the boys’ juice packets. I could not write by hand.

A couple of times my right hand shook so hard in lecture that I held it behind my back so my students wouldn’t see.

On top of the shakes, I began to have memory issues.

I was being interviewed for a Bob Dylan podcast a few years back when, right in the middle of analyzing one of his songs, the floor fell out from under me. 

I could not think of the next word I planned to say. I could say other words. 

I told the host, “I don’t know what’s happening.” Also: “This is really embarrassing.” Lots of silence coming from me. 

The host, Rockin’ Rob Kelly of Pod Dylan, tried to coax me through. “Just take your time,” he said. “Relax.” 

He got me through it. This emptiness lasted a full minute — absolutely no idea how to continue my thought.

Eventually words came back to me and we finished the interview. Rob edited my brain malfunction from the recording and when I listened to it — which I did, because I wanted to know if I sounded weirder after “the incident” — it sounded great. I made sense as I analyzed one of my favorite weird basement-tape Dylan songs, “Clothes Line Saga.”

As I listened to the podcast, I couldn’t tell when my brain left the room. I sounded somewhat lucid, considering it was me.

But that scared me.

Then the same thing happened in class, and that was terrifying.

I jabber for a living. Talking is what I do. And in one school year, I had an incident in the fall semester, then an incident in the spring semester. In both cases, it happened in a lecture: my non-stop yapping suddenly stopped.

Both of these incidents happened in my History and Principles of  Journalism class, a large lecture, with usually between eighty and a hundred students. 

Neither brain malfunction lasted as long as the podcast incident. Maybe thirty seconds, though it could have been shorter. Maybe the students mistook it for a dramatic pause, not realizing the panic inside my skull. When your brain decides to hop a psychic freight, you’re unable to correctly judge the passage of time.

Those incidents worried me and I asked Sofia Chu, my primary-care physician, if she would recommend a neurologist, and she did.

I spent a summer shuttling to different members of a neurology practice. The first session had some testing. The second session was long — four hours of testing and being interviewed. We also played some memory games.

I have to admit: the tests were exhausting. I was mostly embarrassed by my issues with short-term memory.

My mother had Parkinson’s. My sister has Parkinson’s, as do several friends. I feared that was my problem, but after some initial concern, turns out I don’t yet have it. I have a “slight cognitive malfunction,” which, my neurologist assures me, everyone gets at my age.

To this, I offer a big whew.

However, it’s given the boys ammunition. 

“Damn,” I say, coming home from he grocery. “I forgot to get detergent.”

“Are you having another slight cognitive malfunction, Dad?”

It’s Charley who likes to tease me. I ask for help with some task — folding laundry, for example — and when the job doesn’t get done in sufficient time, I take issue.

“Are you going to fold this laundry or are you going to make your poor ol’ cancerous dad do it?”

“You’re cured,” Charley says. “Your cancer is gone and your ass is fixed.”

Then he goes ahead and folds the laundry.

My pain migrates. One day my left forearm hurts to all hell, then the next day it’s my right shoulder and the next day my left knee.

I can’t figure that out.

About two years ago, I began having rashes and these too migrated. My left arm would be clear, but the right arm looks like the lunar surface.

One day, I have a huge bump at my temple. Looks  like I’ve been in a prize fight. The next day I wake up and the painful bump is on my lips, which are swollen and look like boiled frankfurters.

I went to see a dermatologist and before he could take a look at my regular skin eruption, he was digging a chunk out of my arm. I had to come back two weeks later so he could get more of my arm for a second biopsy. 

The thing probably would turn into skin cancer, he said,  but he caught it in time.

He put me on a course of medication and sent me to an allergist. The allergist couldn’t figure out what it was that I was allergic to, but she gave me long-term medicine that keeps the skin eruptions at bay.

So long, hot-dog lips.

Jackson serves as my health-and-wellness conscience. He has lived with me full-time for about six years. I tell friends, “Well, somebody has to find the body.”

He’s very concerned for my health. He’s a slob in many ways and perhaps that’s not entirely his fault. I suspect it’s genetic.

But he does do some things: he cooks a couple of nights a week, he does the lion’s share of the mowing, and he keeps the main part of the house clear of his stuff. He realizes that tripping on his gnarly Crocs left in the hallway would bring about one of my falls.

What he does best: constant harassment about my water consumption, which is, in his view, inadequate in the extreme.

He’s right. To remind me of my needs, I have a splendid new T-shirt with this printed on it:

DRINK WATER

LOVE HARD

FIGHT RACISM

To order this cool shirt for your own bad self, click here.

Chemo and radiation battered me and so my immune system was shot to shit. 

I’ve worked in Boston for a decade and a half, and was a proud user of public transportation.  

But then I began to get spooked. Transit riders would sneeze, slinging their goo across the subway car. I have no time for such hijinks. 

I also tired of being pressed together with others, in a mass-grope on the trolleys that run through campus. During my subway trips, I’d amuse myself by watching the snot trails on the faces of my fellow passegers.

Being immuno-compromised and in such proximity to the germs and expectorations of others was not a good combination.

So I began driving to work — in the worst driving city in the country. 

In the Marco Polo Guide to Boston, the “Driving in Boston” section reads, in its entirety, “Don’t.” In another section, the guide advises tourists who insist on renting a car to go ahead, but to be sure to leave it in the rental-car lot at the airport.

It is a difficult city for driving. They don’t call the locals Massholes for nothing. Driving to work is truly a contact sport. It’s kind of like watching Death Race 2000 unfurl on your windshield twice a day.

My carbon footprint might be the equivalent of a pacyderm’s but being solo in a car allows me to tend to all of these sudden issues — urinary, gastric, mental — when, on public transportation, I might be trapped.

Still: I miss commuting to work by ferry. There’s nothing quite like approaching Boston from the water.

I’ve always been a believer in therapy, but I had not gone to see a therapist regularly in many years. After my wife moved out and the horrifying process of divorce was under way, I decided it was time to see someone.

She became one of the most important people in my life. I ended up meeting with her weekly for six years or so. 

At the start, we picked through the remains of the second marriage and rather swiftly I began to feel at peace about the end of all that. Then we settled into multi-year sessions devoted to parenthood and the possibility of romantic love coming into my life again.

We kept talking. We finally came to mutual agreement that things were much improved — thanks to therapy and anti-depressants — and so we could end our sessions. She told me she was always there if I needed her. 

I haven’t called. I’ve been tempted, but mostly just to get on the horn and say, “Waaasssss uuuup?”

I’m not going to compromise my therapy sessions, but I will say that there was great value in what she said about helping my children through the post-divorce years and the aftermath of trauma. 

Childhood is anguish and suffering. Other children are cruel. Adolescence devours lost dreams. 

I had a pretty demanding job, but I was never off. 

My real job was at home, and I built my life around the boys. I’d get them on the weekends, so there was no time for a social life. That was okay with me; I so valued my time with them.

After a while, Jackson came to live with me full time, so my life was rich and also a challenge. Mostly, I struggled with trying to get this stubborn boy to do his homework and to consume the meals I worked so hard to prepare.

My failure rate was high with those tasks, and others. I will say he has tremendous hygiene and has excellent manners (in situations that do not involve his immediate family).

My life was a whirlwind of commuting, work, baseball and football games, coaching basketball (Charley’s town-league team), and chaufeuring the boys around the South Shore. 

That was our life:  Movies. Red Sox. Game Stop. Fish sandwiches at the Mill Wharf. Friends. Sleepovers. And in the summer: Road trips!

Savannah had moved away to Florida, so the house was all-male. Travis captained the high school baseball team, Charley captained the football team and often, after games, the house carried the fragrance of Essence du Athletic Sock.

I made a lot of pancakes and a lot of pizza. In my defense I also made chicken with sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese, manicotti Florentine and New England Boiled Dinner.

I’d apologize for the sameness of my life each week when I saw my therapist. 

“Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon,” I’d start. 

For some reason — probably because it’s what I’ve done all my life — I framed my weekly accounts into pithy stories, as if it was my job to entertain my therapist.

But after a few years of therapy, a few years of a certain kind of sameness, I began asking her: “Am I really living or am I just waiting to die?”

Instead of resorting to the well-what-do-you-think cop-out, we would explore the question.

Through dating apps, I’d met a variety of fantastic women. Several have become treasured and terrific friends. 

Alas, I was no one’s Mister Wonderful.

And how could I be? I asked my therapist. I’m a mess, and came pre-loaded with a list of health issues that that would serve as a date-killer if I was asked, “How have you been?”

I’d have to tell the truth. That’s just the way I roll. So who would want to wake up with Mister Has-Bowel-Issues  every day?

When I wrote one of my dating profiles, I said that I was “pre-cancered,” which I thought might get that stuff out of the way. 

One of my former girlfriends saw my profile and said I was under-selling myself. She got my password, hijacked my profile, and sang my praises. 

I got a lot of responses from that — people interested in what she said, not interested so much in me.

I’ve always had a lot of close female friends. Maybe the women I’ve met through these dating apps see me as friend material, not boyfriend material. (Though the term “boyfriend” at my age seems to be stretching it. I suppose I’d be a geezerfriend.)

Is that a bad thing? To be a friend? I say no. I’ve never had too many friends.

I have loved many intelligent, beautiful and hilarious women. Sometimes, I can’t believe I’ve had the life I’ve led. These women have given me a tremendous highlight reel. I’ve remained friends with most all of them.

So, here I am. Maybe I need to face it: the romantic part of my life is probably over.

That could change, but I’m okay if it doesn’t..

Years ago, when I lived alone in Florida, I’d often wake at 4 or 5 in the morning and be unable to return to sleep. I’d get out of bed and go to my home office and listen to music, drink coffee and read

Often, the record I’d listen to was World Gone Wrong by Bob Dylan. He performs some traditional country blues, including the title song (originally known as “The World is Going Wrong”) by the Mississippi Shieks. 

That album contains one of Bob’s greatest performances. “Delia” is one of the saddest songs I know and Dylan has never sounded more moving, when he sings the song’s refrain: “All the friends I ever had are gone.”

I have lost a lot of friends in the last couple of years.

There was my friend of longest duration, Lucia. I met her when I was 16 or 17 and she was a worldly woman, about five years older. She and her roommate Kathie and I were inseparable for a few years. We attended our first Bob Dylan concert together.

Later in life, Lucia lived with her husband in a house overlooking the bay in Pensacola. Despite the six-hour drive from my home in Gainesville, I’d frequently go there for weekends. It was my refuge.

One of my few acts of semi-heroism occured there. One of Lucia’s friends came to visit and brought along one of her pals. We chatted and had some drinks, then Lucia and her husband went to bed. 

Marcia and Susy and I went down to the dock. Susy stripped down to her skivvies and jumped into the bay without checking the water. She hit a submerged boulder and fractured her skull. 

I got her out of the water and carried her up the steep slope — really a cliff, which brought to mind  The Guns of Navarone. Trekking up the slope was  a difficult task even when not carrying a grown woman. 

I got her to the emergency room. She had to stay in the hospital, but I was back at the house before Lucia woke up. She was startled to hear of all the drama that occurred while she slumbered.

Susy thinks I saved her life. As I see it, I just transported her to the hospital. But if she thinks of me as her hero, I’ll take that.

Lucia had a worn leather couch in her living room. You could lie there and watch the bay, down the embankment, and listen for the sounds of the water and the cars on the Scenic Highway (its real name). She called that leather couch “The Spaceship,” because once you laid down, you went on a trip to dreamland. As a guy whose never had much luck taking naps, it was revelatory.

I miss Lucia. I wish I could take another ride on the Spaceship.

Then there was Tom. I have an excellent older brother, but Tom became an auxiliary brother. He was about 10 years older and had had many lives. He co-wrote some songs with Jimmy Buffett, had published a half-dozen novels, and collaborated on two unfinished screenplays with Hunter Thompson. 

I owe two books to Tom: meeting him and interviewing him enriched my biography of Thompson, Outlaw Journalist, and he bequeathed to me Thompson’s idea for the book that became Mile Marker Zero.

Tom’d lived in Key West in the 1970s and knew the cast of characters — writers Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison, painter Russell Chatham and actor Margot Kidder.

Tom said he was too close to the material write the story of that creative and carnal community, so he entrusted the story to me.

But beyond that, he invited me in to his creative, multi-faceted world.

His death was sudden to so many of his friends. No one knew he was sick. He was unselfish and stoic to the end.

And now Jim and Russell and Margot are also gone.

Then there’s Jon. He was another friend of long duration. I saw him at work most days for 25 years. In addition to the usual friend exploits of beer and chicken wings and baseball and football, he served as a great role model.

Jon was a lot of things, but to me he served as an ideal of what a father should be. I saw his example and tried to follow it.

When I heard of his death, it was a stunning blow. Jackson berated me for not flying to Florida for the funeral, but I didn’t think I could hold it together. The last thing his family would want was a blubbering man in the back pew.

And there were others — Bill the painter, for example. He was a man of great talent and enthusiasms. We would pass a note online most every day. He was another father I deeply admired.

And Mike, a pal from 25 years of going to football games together. 

And Meredith, a student who became a great friend, killed in an accident long before her time.

I was talking with my friend Wayne today. He lives in Florida and I was recalling that of the people in one of our Venn diagrams of overlapping friendships, we were the last two left. 

It’s sobering.

I talk about death a lot. I make my somebody-has-to-find-the-body joke with Jackson, and he rolls with it. What else can you do? 

I often hear the great Hoosier poet John Hiatt singing in my cranial jukebox:

‘Time is short and here’s the damn thing about it:  you’re going to die, you’re going to die for sure.  And you can learn to live life with love or without it,  but there ain’t no cure.”

A few years ago, I was asked by the university to record some sort of message to the students on the verge of graduation. I think they expected me to say something funny, but I thought I’d been given a serious and enormous charge.

“Don’t check out of this world without leaving the place better than you found it. Make sure that it matters that you were here.”

My whole life, I’ve fretted about that. What would I leave behind? I’m proud of the work that will remain — both as a storyteller and as a teacher — but in the end, I see that the whole point of being here was to leave behind the legacy of my family. I have seven children and (so far) six grandchildren. They have — and will continue to — make the world better.

I can’t ask for more.

Last night, I dreamed I was dying, but slowly. I knew it was coming and was at peace. 

As I prepared for death, my friend Wayne put his hand on my forearm led me from room to room in an old house. I recognized it as the Indiana farmhouse where my family lived temporarily when my father was transitioning from the Air Force to private practice.

That was the summer I was 13. I think of that time frequently and memories are vivid.

In each room of the house, we found my family and friends from the many places in my life, from England and Germany, to Nebraska and Florida and Texas. 

Of the family and friends, some were dead and some were living. I wondered: Is this heaven?

The dead were talking with the living, swilling highballs, smiling at the others. I saw my parents, my grandparents, my friends I’d lost.

Gradually, the friends drifted away, but he children and grandchildren stayed.

The house had no furniture, but all seemed content to stand and play their roles in a collection of conversational bouquets.

It was like a well-cast cocktail party where everybody was happy and fluttered from room to room, trying to talk to everyone. I was the orchestrator of this party. I’d subliminally created the guest list and brought everyone together.

I was in constant motion, checking each room to make sure everyone was happily engaged. I wanted no wallflowers.

They didn’t know I was dying and that this was my farewell. I just wanted to watch and see that everyone was happy.

It wouldn’t be long before I would exist only as a memory.

Ifelt a hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t Wayne’s. He’d crossed the room and was talking with the boys, getting them to laugh, as he always did. 

The girls were all laughing too. The hand rested lightly on me and I started to turn but couldn’t see anything or anyone. 

I wondered if it was that presence I negotiated with so many years ago — that time in New Mexico, when I think I died. I’d asked for more time. Jackson was in utero. Travis and Charley weren’t even thought of yet.

I can’t leave; not now. This is not it. I’m not finished.

That was so long ago now. I’d gotten what I asked for. I got a lot more time.

If it’s time to cash that check, I’m ready.

Then I woke up.

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Let Us Now Praise Famous Editors

Bombarded by communication we may be, but there is still the possibility for something personal within our over-ripe and festering mass media.

We can watch television — doesn’t matter if it’s traditional network or streaming — and not really have a sense of who’s running the business. 

Same thing goes with traditional news organizations, those things we used to call newspapers that now have little to do with paper. We may read The New York Times, but where do we see the publisher’s personality reflected?

Those big media conglomerates that produce our music and entertainment are as bland as soda crackers — and could well aspire to be that imaginative and crunchy.

But consider the magazine. Good and important magazines still exist and carry forward the DNA of their founders or longtime editors.

Hugh Hefner

Think of Playboy. Its founder. Hugh Hefner, made sure his magazine reflected his interests and tastes. 

When he hopped off to the bunny ranch in the sky, the magazine went into an immediate skid. 

Does it still exist? Does it matter? Let me know, will ya?

In the early 1960s, Helen Gurley Brown took Cosmopolitan, a men’s magazine that had published fishing and hunting stories by Ernest Hemingway, and turned it into the bible of the single working woman. 

It was a brilliant move because it created an ever-renewing demographic. Brown is getting mani-pedis in the sky, but her work lives on.

Helen Gurley Brown

The New Yorker has been blessed with strong editors. Its founder, Harold Ross, liked humor, cartoons and fiction. There was no doubt who ran the place in his lifetime. 

But when Ross died, his No. 1 assistant, William Shawn, became editor and changed the magazine as he served for the next 35 years. 

This is the New Yorker issue that published John Hersey’s masterpiece of reporting, “Hiroshima.”

Shawn’s interests in long-form nonfiction reinvented the magazine. Few venues of any kind will give storytellers the space that Shawn allowed. 

This is a blessing yet also a curse. Some New Yorker writers began writing sentences in the 1980s that have yet to conclude.

Time shuffles on.

Esquire magazine (under Harold Hayes’s editorship) became the defining voice of the 1960s. 

The magazine published so much brilliant stuff in that era that it’s difficult to think of a publication with a better voice for the times. 

Its collection of articles from that decade was titled by Hayes: Smiling Through the Apocalypse. (Has there ever been a better title for anything?)

Harold Hayes

As Hayes was leaving the editor’s chair, along came a rowdy rock’n’roll magazine based in San Francisco that put itself on the cultural map by publishing a full-frontal nude photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. (This exposure of celebrity genitals drew the fans-of-famous-foreskin demographic.)

College dropout Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967 and for the next quarter-century, under his tight control, the magazine published things he found interesting. Those things became our interests.

Wenner also liked to put his friends on Rolling Stone’s vaunted cover, which was fabled in song.

As Wenner withdrew to the ski slopes and left running the magazine to others, it began losing its way and discovered its problem was the reverse of what happened at Cosmopolitan. 

Whereas there will always be single working women to read Cosmo, Rolling Stone was faced with a critical problem: its core readership was tied to a generation that was rapidly aging and dying. In the early years, when Wenner was young, so were his readers. He published the magazine for his peers.

Advertisers looked at Rolling Stone as a clear connection to young, affluent buyers.

But then we got old. The magazine had a core interest in popular music. As the subscribers aged, the magazine sometimes tried to push flavor-of-the-month artists at the Classic Rock audience. It was like the old guy showing up at a college kegger wearing a gold medallion in a desperate stab at youth.

Jann Wenner, when Rolling Stone was in San Francisco

For a while, Rolling Stone was the magazine that defined its times. 

I was part of its target demographic from the start. When it would arrive in the post, I used to go into what my then-wife called my “Rolling Stone coma” until I had sucked all of the marrow from all of the worthy articles I found between the covers.

The magazine peaked in the early 1970s, when its roster included David Felton, Grover Lewis, Hunter Thompson, Ben Fong-Torres and Annie Leibovitz, among others.

You’ll notice Leibovitz is the only woman mentioned. The only way a woman could get a job on Rolling Stone‘s editorial staff was to start as a secretary — perhaps another reflection of the founder’s personality. (Leibovitz was the exception. )

Wenner developed so much talent at the magazine, but once the magazine had made it, he sought the big names — Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Caroline Kennedy, who acquitted herself in her coverage of Elvis Presley’s funeral. (Her kicker quote was from the Elvis minion who shaved the King’s sideburns one last time before he was planted in the back yard.)

But Rolling Stone’s relevance dried up by the end of the 1970s, around the time it moved from San Francisco to New York.

Tina Brown

The magazine that assumed the mantle of most-likely-to-send-me-into-a-reading-coma came along in the 1980s: Vanity Fair.

The original VF had died before the Second World War, and when it was revived . . . who could tell? It was underwhelming.

The revived magazine committed the worst sin in journalism: it was boring.

Fortunately, it was saved by Tina Brown, the British editor brought over to turn it around, two years after its weak re-launch.

For the subsequent three decades and change, few magazines could compete with Vanity Fair.

Brown left the magazine after eight years to breathe life into its sister publication, The New Yorker, which was staggering along after the departure of Shawn. 

Brown prepared that venerable publication for the 21st Century by making necessary overdue changes. For one thing, she acknowledged the existence of photography. Until she took over in 1992, the magazine had never published a photo with any of its editorial copy.

Graydon Carter

It’s Brown’s successor who deserves the lion’s share of credit for Vanity Fair’s brilliance. He made it into the must-read magazine for a couple of generations.

Graydon Carter recounts his life as a magazine editor in his new memoir When the Going Was Good (Penguin Press, $32).

Journalism is my jam, so naturally his inside baseball stuff is appealing to me.

But I ended up liking the book more for the pleasure of getting to know this guy.

I think this is what I admired the most:

Carter at Spy.

Here is the editor of one of the greatest magazines on the planet. Sure, there are a lot of social obligations and events and dinners and balls. That’s what we expect of the high life, right?

Instead, we find a guy who passes up all of that stuff in favor of a family dinner. He’s home by six every night, and the whole Hee-Haw gang sits down to the table. Everyone talks, everyone learns about what everyone else did all day … you know, wholesome stuff.

Graydon Carter is Ward Cleaver with a better wardrobe. I admire parents who take their job seriously.

He could be hanging out with some boldface names, but prefers family dinners, game nights and fishing in the wilderness with his children.

His tale is a successful story of work-life balance.

Carter was born in Toronto and attended a couple of Canadian universities without graduating. The rigidity of schooling sometimes gets in the way of education, which is something best left to the individual.

He learned on the job, starting with The Canadian Review, which unfortunately went bankrupt.

He moved to New York, worked at Time and Life, co-founded Spy magazine, edited The New York Observer, then took over Vanity Fair in 1992.

Carter belongs in the history books if for no other reason than this: while at Spy, he coined the term “short-fingered vulgarian” to describe President 45-47. What a rush it must be to have a quip remembered so.

Still, this isn’t a book of journalism gossip. It’s an absorbing, superbly-written account of a well-lived life with a lot of accidents and surprises that led to the pot of gold. It could serve as a guidebook on how to be a good parent.

When Carter edited Vanity Fair it was a work of art, essential to life. Each issue was a king’s feast to be devoured.

Since he left — and started the digital-only Air Mail — Vanity Fair is skidding. It’s no longer a must-read.

Magazines are bound to the personality of the editors. They follow a life cycle, like a human being.

Carter has left the building and that great magazine is having a midlife crisis.

For now, read Carter’s book and remember the great times and the great stories.

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Swimming Through the Library

John Cheever came up with an interesting premise for one of his greatest short stories. 

In “The Swimmer,” Cheever’s protagonist, Neddy Merrill, lounges, hungover, poolside at a friend’s home on a Sunday afternoon.

It’s a muted gathering, suburbanites recovering from the night before, questioning the wisdom of drinking so much.

As he sits there, Neddy hatches a plan: he will swim home. 

“The Swimmer” appears in Cheever’s Pulitzer-winning collection. Click on the cover to order.

All of the homes in his neighborhood have pools, so he will follow a chain of them to home.

It’s an odd story that takes a surreal twist and ends in a gut-punch of sorrow and devastation.

If you haven’t read it, you should.  It’s a brilliant piece of work.

Last week, I decided to follow Neddy’s lead, but with my own twist. 

I never learned to swim and few homes in Massachusetts have pools anyway.

But I found myself in my former town for a doctor’s appointment.

When I was done, it was a brilliant summer day and I thought, “I’m going to do a Neddy.”

Instead of driving straight home, I decided I would go home via the libraries in each of the small towns that freckle the South Shore.

Every library has a Friends of the Library book sale. Maybe I’d find some books for sale — books for which I have no more room in my house (but that’s another story).

Here’s some of what I found.

. . . . . . . . 

John O’Hara, The Big Laugh (Random House, $4.95)

Before you get all excited about that bargain price, I should point out that $4.95 was the list price when the book was published — in 1962.

I got this one at the Scituate Library, which has the best second-hand store of all the South Shore libraries.

Click on the cover to order

I’ve read a lot of John O’Hara — a lot. Yet I’d never encountered this novel.  How did I miss it on the “Books by John O’Hara” pages?

O’Hara seems to be largely forgotten today, which is a shame. He’s been credited with sort of inventing the New Yorker short story, and was an early and prolific contributor to that magazine. 

His writing was tight. I’ve read some stories of his that were all dialogue, yet he managed to describe without describing.

He’s one of those writers I encourage students to read. There’s nothing flaccid in his work. Reading him [and James M Cain, Robert B Parker, Michael Connelly and others], I tell my class, is like giving your mind a suppository. You empty your brain of needless words, in the manner of a colon cleanse. 

In addition to his terrific short stories, I’ve read his big novels — Ten North Frederick and From the Terrace — but The Big Laugh was a tremendous surprise. It told a stirring tale over the course of two decades and never did it drag. Turned out to be a quick read, unlike some of his other novels, which went on too long.

It’s the story of a shithead who goes from black sheep of his family to one of the reigning movie stars in the early days of talking films.

Don’t wait for a redemption arc, though the main character does prove himself to be more likable by tale’s end. There are some surprises along the way, and O’Hara keeps the story moving. He was a master at that.

John O’Hara in his natural habitat

Now to folks of the current generation, whatever your moniker may be: you did not invent sex.

Same goes for my generation. We Baby Boomers like to think that various carnal acts were unknown until our arrival and that we invented many non-Euclidean variations on the basic premise. 

So here is a novel written by a man who was there in the 1920s and 1930s when the novel takes place. And the characters fuck like monkeys. There’s a lot of fucking here.

A lot.

I was a little surprised — not that people sportfucked so much back then but that the novel was so frank, being as it was published in 1962. 

That’s either a note of caution or encouragement.

For me, I’m always happy to find a book by a favorite author that I have not read. The presence of so much fucking is like finding a bonus track on an album.

. . . . . . . . 

Ben Mezerich, The Midnight Ride (Grand Central, $29)

This one caught my eye at the Norwell library. 

Ben Mezrich

I knew of Mezerich from his nonfiction books — The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, two books I have not read.

But he’d always gotten good reviews and I was curious how he was as a novelist.

Turns out he is deeply entertaining.

This novel takes place in Boston, and those sorts of stories are always of interest to those of us who trudge through that insane city’s streets daily.

The book also focuses on a local mystery — the unsolved theft of priceless artwork from the Isabella Gardner museum decades ago. It brings together a plucky card-counter who makes her living at the gaming tables of the Encore casino, and an ex-con trying to start over.

Click on the cover to order

These protagonists — Hailey Gordon the card counter and Nick Patterson the ex-convict — have an unusual meet-cute: it happens over a dead body in a hotel room.

The Gardner theft is only part of the story. The rest is steeped in Boston’s rich history and, as the title suggests, Paul Revere plays a part. 

It has echoes of The DaVinci Code and National Treasure, but it’s a lot more fun.

Hailey and Nick returned in The Mistress and the Key, which came out last fall. 

Looks like it’ll be back to the library-swim to find that one.

. . . . . . . . 

Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim (Random House, $25.23)

I read Puzo’s The Godfather not long after it was published and always considered it kind of trashy, because of one particular narrative thread.

Turns out Francis Ford Coppola felt the same way about that part of the book and it was a reason he initially balked on making a film of Puzo’s book.

We both were repulsed by the subplot that led to a character paying for his girlfriend’s surgery. He had this young woman go under the knife so she would be tightened up — in the non-Archie Bell & the Drells meaning — giving, presumably, greater sexual pleasure to both of them.

Mario Puzo

As I learned more about Puzo’s back story, I’d heard of his first two novels, The Dark Arena and The Fortunate Pilgrim. Both were tagged as “literary fiction” and both were failures.

So he wrote The Godfather strictly to make money. It was a paycheck book, so the trashier the better.

(In the years since, I’ve relaxed more and found The Godfather to be a generally entertaining book and I skip over the surgery scenes.)

I happened across The Fortunate Pilgrim at the library in Hanover and grabbed it immediately. 

I’m not sure I’d say this was literary fiction, but it was a compelling story of New York’s Italian population in the 1920s and 1930s. Putting this story next to Puzo’s own, we can see the elements of autobiography. 

Click on the cover to order

The primary character is Lucia Santa, an emigre from the farms of Italy, who comes to the New World and is deposited into poverty in Manhattan.

She marries, has children, and is left to raise a family herself on the mean streets. It’s a tough, often tragic, life.

Puzo made no secret of the fact that Lucia is based on his mother and that the protagonist of his most famous novel, Vito Corleone, is also based on his mother.

It’s a good and enthralling novel that shows how much American lives have changed in the last century. The violence and the spectre of death look over the shoulder of us all.

This is an entertaining story and becomes a tribute to the immigrants who built America.

But it also has some irritating touches. Puzo has a group of elderly Italian women who sit on the tenement stoop and form sort of a Greek chorus. Puzo calls them crones. One use of “crone” is probably okay. He uses it six or seven times over the course of a couple pages early in the book.

Consider this your crone warning.

. . . . . . . . 

I couldn’t go by the Norwell library without stopping at John Cheever’s grave.

A few years ago, I discovered that his body rests just a few miles from my house, and across the street from The Tinker’s Son, a Irish pub where my youngest son has worked for the last four years. 

Odd, to find one of your literary heroes buried just six feet away from a parking lot serving a convenience store.

Fortunately, Cheever was honored by a local denizen of business who built The Cheever Tavern adjacent to his grave.

I have the feeling he would approve of the place named in his honor. The food and the booze are excellent.

If you’re nearby, visit the place and seek out his grave. Then you can say you were truly (an) over a Cheever.

Back to the swim.

I recently picked up a few more books during my swims– State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and a Pete Townshend novel. I have a lot of good reading ahead.

Come on in; the water is fine.

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The Story of a Song

I sing when I’m alone. I have to; no one wants to hear me.

And the song I sing in the shower, or in the kitchen or while mowing the yard — it’s often this one particular song I choose over the others in my cranial repertoire.

I did not hear the original version first. It came my way thanks to one of my favorite groups, The Byrds.

The Byrds introduced me to lots of things, because the members of the band came from a folk background and weren’t a typical rock’n’roll band.

Thanks to The Byrds, I heard the lovely “John Riley,” a 17th Century English ballad based on The Odyssey.

I first heard the stark and haunting “I Come and Stand at Every Door” on The Byrds album Fifth Dimension. The song was narrated by a child who died in Hiroshima. Now the child appears — “no one hears my silent tread” — to remind us all of the horrors of nuclear war. 

Roger McGuinn

It began as a poem by Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet. American writer Jeanette Turner took a translation of the poem to Pete Seeger and urged him to set it to music. With some help, Seeger did so and then The Byrds took the grim message to us kids.

The song I sing when alone was on the 1969 album by The Byrds called Ballad of Easy Rider, where it was titled “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” 

There have been many variations on the title, and this song also owed its existence in part to Seeger.

I was a serious student of record labels and I saw the song credited “W. Guthrie — M. Hoffman.”

Woody Guthrie, I figured. 

I was an ignorant 14 year old, but I knew who he was. Two years before, I was a junior high student in Fort Worth, Texas. There was a music-loving girl who sat next to me in Mrs Brock’s speech class. She was a non-stop talker and that spring, she was obsessed with Arlo Guthrie, who had just released his debut album, Alice’s Restaurant. 

Woody Guthrie

“He’s Woody’s son, you know.” 

I nodded; she was cute and I pretended I knew more than I did.

Guthrie — was that the guy who wrote “This Land is Your Land”?

“You know, Woody died the same month Arlo’s album came out,” she said. I nodded again. “I hope Woody got to see Arlo’s album before he died.”

Nothing ever happened with that nice girl, due to my ineptitude with women. But she  began to open me up musically. 

The first album I ever bought — years before — was The Concert Sound of Henry Mancini. Thanks to that nice girl and her recommendations, by junior high I was beginning to listen to Simon & Garfunkel and a few other rock artists. I still had a lot of catching up to do if I wanted to be a card-carrying Baby Boomer.

Two years later, Texas in the rear-view, Ballad of Easy Rider came out (I refer to The Byrds album and not the Easy Rider soundtrack) and there, in a spot of honor near the end of the album was “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” Roger McGuinn, the head Byrd (and the only original band member left at that point) sang the song in his flat-tire matter-of-fact voice.

I was in better company by then. We’d moved to Bloomington, Indiana, and my classmates rated much higher on the hip meter than had my fellow scholars back at Monnig Junior High. [Though the cafeteria at that school served, every Monday, the best chicken-fried steak I’ve ever eaten. Also, our football coach, Spud Cason, was the inventor of the Wishbone offense.]

I began listening to a lot of stuff. I discovered Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Crosby, Stills and Nash. And, of course, The Byrds.

McGuinn sang “Deportee” in a somewhat neutral voice, and didn’t need to push any buttons to elicit a response. He wanted us to hear this story, which Guthrie had written as a poem, and he wanted us to feel. He did not want to feel for us.

His stark singing gave the song heart-breaking power. It was also in my vocal range. I think.

Looking for survivors in Los Gatos canyon

What we learned: a plane had crashed in a California canyon. In addition to the small flight crew, there were migrant workers on board, being deported to Mexico after the end of harvest. Without being told the story was true, we could tell this crash had really happened. Later, we’d learn that the plane caught fire and crashed on January 28, 1948.

There was a problem with a gasket in the left engine. As the plane lost altitude, it splintered into flame and the left wing fell off.

Witnesses to the crash said they saw some passengers jump from the plane before it hit the ground.

When Guthrie heard news of this on the radio, he was enraged by the off-hand way the announcer dismissed most of the passengers on the plane. As he told it:

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

Guthrie had long championed the cause of migrant workers. One of his best songs, in my mind, is “Pastures of Plenty.”

In the angry verses of that song, Guthrie spoke in the voice of farmworkers addressing those who lived off their backs and labor:

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well it’s North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine

Further back in my musical history, I recalled third grade in South Florida, on the southernmost military installation on the mainland, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (But that’s another story.)

When the denizens of Air Base Elementary congregated in the cafetorium, we sang Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” and other American songs, including the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

When I was a kid, I’d hear rumblings now and then about “This Land is Your Land” becoming our new national anthem. Everybody, it seemed, hated “The Star Spangled Banner.” Me, I always liked it because we only sing one verse of the song at ballgames and it ends with a question we can ask ourselves every day: Are we still the land of the free and the home of the brave?

What I didn’t learn until much later was that “This Land is Your Land” was an angry answer song to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” That uber-patriotic song infuriated Guthrie. 

The original chorus to what became “This Land” was: “God blessed America for me.”

And, in another key verse, Guthrie may have been supplying a Marxist answer to Irving Berlin’s jingoism:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

Some might say his songs were bitter, but to me they carried the fragrance of optimism. We can do this, we will endure. Those were the sentiments I took away.

Often attributed to Guthrie: “A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it.”

But then: “Deportee.” There was no optimism there, just human beings whose lives were devalued because of their skin color. 

The passengers, the friends scattered like dry leaves, do not even earn the dignity of being known by name. They were “just deportees.”

The plane’s manifest named the crew, but for passengers, they were listed as a group of “Mexican nationals.” The passengers were buried in a mass grave.

Demonize the immigrant, demonize the undocumented. It’s the American way. The more things change, they don’t.

Guthrie wrote the “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” poem on his kitchen table, within hours after hearing of the crash. He didn’t write it as a song because he was beginning to lose his musical ability, as the degenerative neurological condition known as Huntington’s disease began its destruction of his body. He was beginning a long, slow decline that within a few years would leave him without his voice.

It took 20 years to kill him.

A decade after the crash, Pete Seeger was on a campus tour, singing the songs that had gotten him blacklisted during the McCarthy Era.

At Colorado A&M in Fort Collins, he did his show then gathered afterward at the home of a member of the college’s folk song club. Seeger played more songs, the students played some songs, and Seeger was about to fall into slumber on the couch, when one of the students — it was his living room — said he’d taken a poem of Guthrie’s, the one about the plane crash, and set it to music.

Pete Seeger

Martin Hoffman based his melody on a Mexican waltz, which made such sense with the words. Seeger listened as Hoffman sang “Deportee” but didn’t say much. He was tired.

But when Seeger got back to New York, he called Hoffman and asked him to send a tape of him singing the song, so he could get it copyrighted, with authorship split between Guthrie and Hoffman. That was 1958.

And then Seeger began performing the song. Judy Collins recorded it. Arlo Guthrie recorded it, as did Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen and Joan Baez. And so did The Byrds.

Recently, a 1948 recording of Guthrie talking / singing “Deportee” has been unearthed. He was losing his ability to sing, but he got through it. It was not long after the crash and he wanted to make sure his poem would live longer than he would.

Hearing that voice from 70 years ago, despite Guthrie’s pain and ravage, the  song that began as a poem still has its power.

And the question returns: “Who are these friends who are scattered like dry leaves?”

It began with a poem, so it’s fitting that a poet answers the questions in the song. 

Tim Z Hernandez is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is a renaissance man, producing art in a variety of media.

Tim Z Hernandez

Hearing “Deportee” had the effect on Hernandez that it had on me, but he did something about it. He set up a website to solicit donations to his project to make a documentary about the crash and the plane’s passengers.

He found out who those dry leaves were and he told their stories. No longer were they “just deportees.”

Hernandez produced an excellent and compelling book a few years back called All They Will Call You (University of Arizona Press, $13.35).

He deserves to add “historical researcher / journalist” to his list of talents.

Where the passengers had been listed a “Mexican Nationals” on the manifest, he now offered names and stories of the passengers — what their lives were like, what dreams they had, how their families carried on.

With his poet’s license, he indulges in speculation about the last moments on the plane, but he has researched the passengers enough to know them and his conjecture is not out of line.

Hernandez is transparent in the book, bringing readers into his interviewing process and gathering stories from descendants of the crash victims.

Across the decades, Hernandez answers the song’s question about the doomed passengers. Guthrie would approve of this other poet’s work.

Writer Joe Klein called “Deportee” Guthrie’s last great song before the disease crippled him. Guthrie recorded it with only the whisper of accompaniment, chanting the words, unable to sing as the disease began its torturous dance on his body.

Martin Hoffman in 1970, a year before his suicide

The words waited a decade before they were found by Hoffman and his Mexican waltz, which gives the song its razor edge of tragedy and beauty.

One evening in 1971, Martin Hoffman walked through his neighborhood and knocked on doors, telling his friends how much he appreciated them.

Then he said goodbye.

The next evening, he played guitar, took a slug of Scotch, then went into his bedroom, pulled out his double-barrel shotgun from under the bed. He put the barrel square in front of his face, then pulled the trigger with his big toe.

The song leaves us another mystery.

With the grace and beauty of a poet, Hernandez tells the story of the passengers, the small crew, Guthrie’s life and work and Hoffman’s short and tragic time on earth.

I marvel at his achievement. The storytelling tribe can do great things, right past wrongs, and find the truth behind the stories.

If just for a moment, Hernandez brought those friends back to life, honoring them by giving us their names and telling their stories.

All They Will Call You is a beautiful piece of work.

Click on the cover to order.

The passengers: Ramon Perez, Jesus Santos, Ramon Portello, James A. Guardaho, Guadalupe Ramirez, Julio Barron, Jose Macias, Martin Navarro, Apolonio Placentia, Santiago Elisandro, Salvadore Sandoval, Manuel Calderon, Francisco Duran, Rosalio Estrado, Bernabe Garcia, Severo Lara, Elias Macias, Tomas Marquez, Louis Medina, Manuel Merino, Luis Mirando, Ygnacio Navarro, Roman Ochoa, Alberto Raygoza, Guadalupe Rodriquez, Maria Rodriguez, and Juan Ruiz. The pilot was Frank Atkinson and the co-pilot was Marion Ewing. Both Atkinson and Ewing were deeply experienced and flew with distinction in the Second World War. The regular flight attendant had called Atkinson that morning and said she was unable to fly. Bobbie Atkinson — the pilot’s wife, newly pregnant — said she would fill the flight-attendant role. She’d get to spend more time with her husband. There was another passenger: Frank E. Chaffin was with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He was to escort the passengers back to Mexico. His job was to make certain the farmworkers got safely home.

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Be All You Can Be. Read.

Will you look at this beautiful thing? 

I’ve had this poster, framed, in my house for more than a half century. Before the United States Army co-opted the slogan “Be All You Can Be” for its recruiting efforts, that was the slogan of National Library Week, with that one crucial addition — “Be All You Can Be: Read.”

I’ve always taken that saying to heart. When I think of my father, who died when I was 20, I think of him with a book in his hand. He was never without. There was a book on the arm of his chair and one at the breakfast table and one in the formal living room. He always had one on the front seat in case he got stuck waiting in a parking lot or at a long stoplight.

And now: I have become him.

Dear Old Dad, as a young man with a pooch. I’d bet good money that there’s one of those wartime paperbacks in his back pocket.

As the saying goes, “Children learn what they live.” I’m rarely without a book. I start my day with coffee, newspapers (one on paper, two digital), then push back in my tattered leather chair for an hour of quiet, alone and lost inside a book.

This poster by Peter Max was published to celebrate library week in 1969. Max’s work was ubiquitous then. Collectors were paying enormous amounts for his work, but I’m proud to report that I got this beautiful thing for free.

I was a mid-teen that year, transitioning to high school, though it was on familiar turf. I was a student at Indiana University High School in Bloomington, part of a kindergarten- through-Grade- 12 school that had been an experiment managed by the university’s School of Education. Super-secret and newfangled teaching techniques were loosed upon students at the school. In fact, the original team name of the school’s mascot was the Guinea Pigs.

But then, in the early 1960s, the school moved from the heart of the university campus to the fringe. The new school was built with shiny metal roofs and was split into a series of buildings. It always made me think of what a small liberal arts college on Mars would look like.

We also became the Univees. I have no idea what a Univee is,

The University School campus. This picture does not do justice to the striking look of the place, but it was a swell joint to go to school.

Soon, we were no longer so experimental and the university passed us off to the local school system and what we called U-School was phased out.

I was in the last class to graduate, the class of 1972.

The building in the heart of our Martian campus was the library. 

Let us now praise wonderful librarians. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned from archivists and librarians over the course of this life. Because of my work, I’m often in the lovely hives of a library.

Whether it’s a towering university library (Indiana boasted for a time of the largest university library west of the Hudson) or a cozy small-town ediface (I thanked the staff of the Cohasset library in Massachusetts in my book Everybody Had an Ocean), I find some of the finest people I’ve known behind the desk, ready to help.

At University High School, we were blessed with two great librarians: Norma Miller was in charge and was assisted by Pamela Brown.

Keep in mind. I was a kid with my hormones on a full, rolling boil. There was a reason I rarely ate in the Commons, but instead spent lunch hour in the library.

I was in love. I ached to be older, to be someone with whom Pamela Brown wanted to spend time, perhaps over a cup of coffee, discussing great literature. Too bad I had not yet learned to tolerate coffee. Too bad — as her courtesy title made clear — that she was already married.

There was a reason all of the boys in my class enjoyed trips to the library.

Norma Miller and Pamela Brown

Mrs Brown was beautiful but also kind and encouraging. (Can’t seem to refer to her coldly as Brown or Pamela Brown. She was Mrs Brown then and always will be.)

One day, not long after the spring semester resumed, I came into the library and she was standing behind the counter, and for once something other than Mrs Brown drew my attention.

“That just came in this morning,” she said, nodding at the poster. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I was speechless, a rare thing for me. We both silently beheld the poster for a while, loving the psychedelic artwork, the image of the Youth following a path set by the Seer. 

The Youth and the Seer … or Master and Grasshopper.

And that slogan. It expressed to me the beauty and splendor of reading, of passing on our legends and tales and knowledge, of learning what it was like to be another.

Not that I was much of a reader then. I’d read a few serious books — let’s say “grown-up books,” since “adult books” has a different meaning —and was pleased with myself for moving past my Hardy Boys obsession from a few years earlier.

Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had affected me deeply, as did A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I read A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Those works of poetry have always stayed with me.

Kurt Vonnegut in the 1940 yearbook from Shortridge High in Indianapolis.

Mrs Brown encouraged me to read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. “He’s from Indiana,” she told me, as a special inducement. I was always on the lookout for great Hoosiers. (I later learned that my great Aunt Inez had known Vonnegut since he was a little boy.)

Slaughterhouse-Five was followed by other suggestions. Somehow Mrs Brown sensed, without us really talking much, that I was on my way to being a reader. From that point, I was gone.

(We didn’t talk much because I was pathologically shy. I was often nervous and tongue-tied in her presence. Still, she spoke to me a lot. Her eyes told me she was aware of my infatuation.)

Mrs Brown at work. Photo by Skip Augustine.

What was important: Mrs Brown recognized the reader gene in me and made sure it was watered and manured to maturity.

I spent most lunches in the library, usually plopping down in an easy chair to read magazines. ’Twas there, in that library, when I read Joan Didion for the first time.

Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, shared a biweekly column called “Points West” in the Saturday Evening Post.

This particular Didion column was about a young woman so desperate to be a movie star that she used her savings to buy a full-page ad in Variety, announcing that she was going to be famous.

Didion drove to the young woman’s house and took her for a ride, then recounted their conversation in her column.

I saw this as a tragedy in the making and a couple years ago, curious about what happened after Didion’s article, looked up the young woman’s screen credits. She had two: Shattered if Your Kid’s on Drugs and Blood Orgy of the She Devils. No idea what happened to her after that.

For once, I turned the tables on Mrs Brown. At the end of lunch hour that day, I took her the copy of the Post with Didion’s article on the wannabe movie star. “You should read this,” I said. “It’s good.”

When I came in the next day, she said, “You were right. That was a great piece.”

Joan Didion

A few years later, I worked at the Saturday Evening Post and loved to steal afternoons in the archive, reading every column (I’m pretty sure) that Didion wrote for the magazine. 

I owe so much to that library — to Mrs Miller and Mrs Brown. A word of encouragement and a simple act of kindness can mean so much to a kid that age. As a teacher, I always wanted to be like Mrs Brown. She set the bar high.

I was one of the last days of the school year and everyone was getting restless to get the crank rolling for summer.

I came into the library and before I was much inside the door, Mrs Brown was standing in front of me.

“We’re getting ready to close up for the summer,” she said. “I thought you’d want to have this.”

What she handed me was folded into a neat rectangle. I didn’t need to open it to know what it was.

My face must’ve flushed. She smiled indulgently. 

She’s probably in her eighties now. I hope she’s still with us — that she’s out there somewhere, still having a good life. I hope she’s still reading, still helping people.

I want her to know that her gift has been hanging on the walls of every one of my homes over the last half century, and that every time I look at it, I’m reminded of her kindness and encouragement.

Thank you, Mrs Brown. You made such a difference in my life.

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Making the Leap

“What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high.” EUDORA WELTY


Too true, Ms. Welty, too true.

I used to write fiction — and published several short stories — many years ago. Not sure why I gave it up except that I started publishing nonfiction and I had only one life to live. Rather than live it as a blonde, I decided to live it as a nonfiction writer.

But I know the excitement of which Ms. Welty speaks. I loved entering the “mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself.”

I wrote several stories in the voices of people unlike me: a woman bullied by her family into selling the trinkets and baubles of her lifetime, a barber who served in the Second World War and put off his dreams until it was too late, and a radio evangelist shredding fire and brimstone on your AM dial and rhapsodizing about finding a good roasting ear for the church barbecue.

I think that’s why I read so much. I love stepping into some else’s life for a while.

I read a lot of fiction. Our lives are short, so I feel I get more out of living by adopting these lives for the time it takes me to learn about them and hear their stories.

Here’s some commentary on three books — lives — into which I have recently leapt.

. . . . . . . . .

Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood (Europa Editions, $27)

Sara Byrne is a correspondent (not a full-time staffer; a contract reporter) for a London newspaper and she’s assigned to Gaza.

This isn’t 2023. This is the Gaza of 2013.

Click on the cover to order.

Byrne is good at her job. Dropped into the brutality of war, she can still compose an intelligent and accurate account of what she has seen.

But of course, that doesn’t mean she sleeps well and unaffected. When you’ve seen a child severed at the waist and trailing entrails as his father carries him to the hospital, it’s something you are cursed to remember to your deathbed.

I’ve never been a war correspondent but Greenwood tells a good, evocative story and is excellent in giving us a sense of place and drawing memorable characters.

Byrne is one of the younger journalists at the bar of The Beach Hotel in Gaza. It’s the nicest lodging around, even if its walls are freckled with shrapnel. The older reporters are irritating and condescending but Byrne holds her ground.

I wrote my thesis in graduate school about how journalists are portrayed in popular culture. I studied the first two-thirds of the 20th Century, reading a ton of novels. Some were excellent and some were mediocre.

Phoebe Greenwood

I discovered a change in the portrayal of journalists over the years. In the early years, they usually appeared as society’s guardians — not in the noble sense of protecting the free flow of information — but in withholding from audiences anything damaging to society’s heroes or to the myths that keep a nation propped up.

That changed over the decades. In later years, journalists became destroyers of those beliefs and heroes they used to preserve. All that’s good, right?

But the private lives of the journalists were consistently marred by alcoholism, infidelity and ethical breaches. Of course no one trusts the press anymore. When they see reporters portrayed as drunks who sleep with sources to get stories, no wonder they consider journalists to be purveyors of fake news.

It’s a pretty consistent portrayal across books, television and film. I’ve kept up with this stuff for decades.

So of course I was fascinated by Greenwood’s novel. It’s a great portrayal of the press and despite the blood and gore, there are moments of dark comedy. Greenwood draws her characters well — not just Byrne, but also Nasser, her fixer, and the staff of the hotel, still trying to please guests while bombs rein down.

This is is about the Hamas of years ago, and Byrne has the urge to tell her readers back home that these guys are the Keystone Kops of terrorists. Unfortunatly, we know what Hamas became and there’s nothing comic about it.

Byrne is under pressure — she’s in a war zone doing what is, in essence, a yearlong audition for a full-time staff position with her newspaper. In addition, her father has just died, her mother is losing her shit, and she’s still wrestling with the fallout from an affair with a much-older man, a pal of her father’s.

Vulture gives us a sense of time and place and heartbreaking descriptions of war visited on the civilian population. Journalists generally have to develop shells for protection from the horror and some of these exercises of humor might be too dark for those outside the tribe. Byrne suffers collateral damage to her soul.

It’s an intriguing blend of strong narrative storytelling, satire and ruminations on the physical and psychological effects of war.

I look forward to more from Phoebe Greenwood.

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley (Knopf, $28)

Sometimes I’m drawn to a novel by the geography. The late Tom Corcoran’s novels took place in Key West. That place has become so expensive that it made economic sense to read one of Corcoran’s books — just plop down $24.95 — in lieu of a trip to the island. Corcoran had the ability to engage our senses of smell and taste. It was like tripping to Key West without leaving the Barcalounger.

Click on the cover to order.

So the first thing that drew me to The Girls Who Grew Big was its setting — a stretch of the Florida pandhandle, near but not part of the high-rise condominiums that have begun to tower over the once-desolate beaches.

I used to camp there a few decades back, at a place called Grayton Beach. It was at once wild and pristine. Over the years, I watched the coming of the condos and the inevitable spoilage. It was heartbreaking.

The protagonists here are single teen-age moms. Some have birthed, some are soon to birth.

Simone’s twins are four now and she becomes the spirtiual leader for these younger girls. They congregate on the beach — the Redneck Riviera part — and hang out around Simone’s red truck, her only home and the temple of support for these young, discarded girls.

Leila Mottley

There are three narrators. Simone is the group’s griot. Emory is a local girl who idolizes Adela, the new girl in town. Adela’s been exiled from Indiana by her parents who cannot deal with the shame of her pregnancy.

Adela’s pregnancy frames the story. The girls argue, fight, and commit acts that others consider betrayal. Simone basically lives in her truck and she’s wary of the social workers from the Department of Children and Families who threaten to take away her twins. Now she’s she’s pregnant again and access to reproductive care is … well, it’s a fucking mess.

The boys in their lives serve only as sperm donors. The boys fall on various spots of the responsibility continuum, mostly at the take-none end. With a few mild speed bumps, they can go on with their lives. The girls all have dreams that now will be deferred.

It’s an engrossing novel and a great example of why I love to read. I’ve stepped inside the minds of these young women as they wrestle with their intense drama.

. .. . . . . . . .

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Knopf, $28)

This book came out three years ago, but it’s new to me. I’ve seen lots of copies of it in backpacks and on the subway, so I know it was a hit. It appeared in front of my face when I was cruising a used book store. How could I pass it up when it was a mere $2?

Click on that hideous cover to order.

I have to tell you about it, because only once or twice a year, as I go through the course of my regular reading, do I fall into a book and enjoy being smothered by the story.

I loved this book, which is about something completely alien to my life. It’s about gaming.

I am not a gamer. I could never be one because it requires hand and eye coordination. The key word is coordination and, since I am from Indiana, that it something I lack.

But this is the story of two young folks from Los Angeles who meet in tragic circumstances as mid-teens and who later end up in the same town for college (Harvard and MIT).

They begin to collaborate on making games — this takes places a couple decades back — and their circle begins to widen with roommates and friends who help with some of the nuts and bolts stuff. Two sophomores huddled together in front of aa computer screen grows into an industry leader over the years.

Gabrielle Zevin

Our protagonists, Sam and Sadie, love each other but are not in love. Don’t wait for them to hook up. Not gonna happen — and that’s not really a spoiler.

Sadie is having an affair with her professor, which is all right with Sam. He wants to use an engine designed by the prof to run the game he and Sadie have made. Later, Sadie is repulsed that her friend did not convince her to abandon the teacher earlier in life.

Sam and Sadie have a complicated, angry and loving relationship. I wanted to leap into the book and get to hang with them. That’s when you know you’ve found a good book.

There were some twists and tragedies I didn’t see coming. When you invest so much in characters as arresting as these, you feel the loss severely.

(Take a look at that book cover. I know what they were going for, but it’s hideous and not worthy of such a fine book. Don’t let it scare you away.)

. . . . . . . . .

William Faulkner said, “The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.” I practiced journalism and later taught it, so I might need to wrestle Ol’ Bill in a vat of creamed corn to settle that debate.

But I know what he meant. I think when we check out of life, we should do our best to make sure we’re better than we were when we checked in. Reading can help us develop the compassion and understanding that makes us better human beings.

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Up the Ol’ Mississippi

Daughter Sarah called the ambulance over my objections, but what else could she do when I had so obviously lost control? I was suffering a cognitive malfunction (I suppose that’s a polite, clinical term for saying I was fucked up) and desperately needed help. 

This is part 45 of my Asshole blog

I barely remember the ride to the hospital, too preoccupied by what had just happened.

I was thinking I was all right, but as I sprawled on my couch with Sarah and the two emergency medical technicians and was unable to come up with the names of everyday items — keys, coffee cups, shoes — that they held up before me.

I was in serious trouble..

I’ve always been the kind of guy who doesn’t want to make a fuss and who is embarrassed by attention. I didn’t quite feel myself stepping backward into the fog (as I had when I first died years before, in New Mexico) but the inability to talk or to approach anything with reason, was scary.

At the hospital, I hoped to find out what was wrong — but also was afraid of what I’d learn.

The ambulance arrived at the hospital’s emergency bay amid lots of shouting and scrambling around by all of the nurses and EMTs. As someone who often wilts from attention — everywhere outside the classroom, where I hope for attention — I was on the verge of humiliation. There I was, inert on a stretcher, with a variety of anxious faces looking down at me, asking questions.

With my cognition so impaired — that was the scariest thing about all of this — it was Sarah who answered all of the urgent questions with an efficiency and urgency. The medical staff found her helpful in the extreme.

I was moved to a three-walled room in the emergency suite, shut off from everyone else by a curtain. They allowed Sarah in with me, and she was repeating everything she had told the EMT’s and the first-line-of-defense people at the ER. Now she was talking to the nurse who would actually be overseeing me.

I was oblivious. My head is usually a gumbo of the long-lost jetsam taken residence in my skull. At any time, I have a bubble of remembered literature floating into some long-forgotten song, as well as the images of family and the pieces of time I store, those moments that for good or ill I’ve replayed in my cranial cinema for all of my life.

But all of that was gone. My brain was empty as a white-on-white room. All things were muted. I was in the hospital bed, but when Sarah and the nurse spoke, it was if I was buried under a Kilimanjaro of pillows. The voices came from far away, traveling slowly. Seemed that a question was followed by a full minute of silence before the answer. I’d stepped inside of time and pushed at the walls, like a low-rent Steve Reeves in Hercules Unchained.

Inside this expanding time, I had trouble following the conversation until the word surgery dropped like a ripple in a pond.

Until the coming of this routine (sorry, Dad) knee surgery, I’d never feared going under the knife. I would add up the number of surgeries I’d had in my life, but I can’t count that high.

In a strange way, my previous surgeries had not only worked, but somehow provided an odd kind of comfort. It was always good to know that I would continue to function, that these trained people had opened me up, goofed around with my organs, and that I’d survived and would, no doubt, continue to live.

When the nurse left to go get some paperwork for Sarah, I turned to my eldest (and trustworthy) child, now a woman in her late 30s, and offered my contribution to the emergency-room discourse.

“Please,” I whispered. “No spinal.”

“I’ll tell them,” she said.

“That’s how this all started.”

My father was a good man and would never want to embarrass anyone, especially his youngest son. He’d never say I told you so, but I felt it. It had not been my choice to go through the knee surgery under a spinal block, but I knew I’d never do it again.

I had the usual meds, the ones that make patients relaxed and silly, and then they came to take me away to surgery.

“Who’s the doctor?” I asked. I wonder if they’d called in Clifford Gluck. He was the urologist I’d first seen a couple of years before, when this whole health walkabout began. I visited him  to see how it would go if my vasectomy was reversed and I would procreate again. 

And then everything happened — cancer and all of the stuff that followed.

“It’s Dr. Tracy,” the nurse said. He’s the urologist on call. 

“My urologist is Clifford Gluck,” I said. “Shouldn’t we call him?”

(I’d never felt so old as I did at that moment when I said my urologist.)

“We don’t have time,” the nurse said. “Dr. Tracy is on duty.”

I did not meet Keith Tracy, my new urologist, until after the surgery. He was a busy guy that day.

I’m not sure about what they did during that surgery, but I came to afterward, back in the same room. Before I opened my eyes, I heard the soft sounds of fingers on keyboard.

Was I writing in my sleep?

When my eyess opened enough to focus, I saw Sarah sitting next to the bed, working on her laptop. She is an artist of multi-tasking. 

She has a demanding and rewarding job in New York, yet kept up with her work while managing our part of the surgery. She hadn’t even had to take a day off. That’s the McKeen work ethic in practice.

I’d have to spend the night in the hospital, but I felt I was recovering well enough for Sarah to leave. I insisted. I felt like I’d disrupted her life enough. Besides, Nicole had volunteered to help if I needed anything.

My room was comfortable, like all of the accommodations at South Shore Hospital. Too bad hospitals don’t give points for each stay. I would have earned a few medical vacations.

If my brain hadn’t been so exhausted, I’d try to recall all the nights I’d spent at South Shore. But I was too tired.

I settled down into the hospital routine. You actually don’t get a lot of rest in the hospital, since you are awakened every couple of hours for them to test vital signs. Plus, I was catheterized, so the nurses also had to keep track of my urine bag.

The day after the surgery, I met my new urologist, Keith Tracy. He was an affable guy, probably about half my age. 

He talked a little bit about the procedure, but he buried the lead, as we say in journalism.

“We came close,” he said. “You were about 20 minutes away from being dead.”

I had sepsis. I knew little about it, but I knew it was serious shit. Thank God for my iPhone. The often moody Siri overcame her grudge against me and offered this definition:

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition that occurs when the body’s immune system overreacts to an infection. This overreaction can lead to widespread inflammation and organ damage. It is a systemic infection with life-threatening organ dysfunction .

From the Cleveland Clinic

So after a few days in the hospital, I was sent home. There was a catheter with a tube down my leg that led to a bag that I had to change now and then.

I could never tell when I was urinating. It was like a tap, turned on all of the time.

I thought, I could live with this. But I knew things were more complicated than that. Of course.

In my follow-up visit at Dr. Tracy’s office, he had one of his nurses show me how to self-catheterize. (Self-cathing as we say in the trade.)

This was tough. First, I had to wash my hands, then put on rubber gloves. Then I had to clean Mr. Happy with an alcohol wipe. Once that was done, I had to face the catheter. It was a plastic tube, about a yard long.

That’s right — a yard. Thirty-six inches of plastic tubing. 

Imagine: you insert that thing up the Ol’ Mississippi and it pulls all that pee from your bladder that doesn’t come out the usual way. 

You use a lubricant, like KY Jelly, to limber up the catheter, and you add a little bit to the crown of Mr. Happy’s head, to make for smooth sailing as the tube is inserted.

For all of your urological needs!

There are many adventures on the journey. At a certain point, the tube has to negotiate its way past the prostate gland. This requires an intake of breath and holding of same. It’s kind of like the Jungle Cruise at Disney World. Once we are safely past the rapids (prostate), we wait for the tube to drop into the pool of urine.

Stop immediately when the flow begins. Push too far and you piss blood. (That happened on several occasions.)

I’d always hated catheterization. I remember my first surgery, a hernia operation when I was 20. The nurse (a male, but insensitive to this procedure) seemed delighted to shove what I was sure was a garden hose up my willy.

That was miserable and peeing was painful for days afterward. From that point on, I asked nurses to delay the cathing until I was under anesthetic. I feared cathing more than any surgery.

All of this happened as the school year was beginning. My administrator and good friend, Sarah Kess, had been managing the office in my absence. There was some concern in the college administration about whether I could return or whether I’d need another medical leave.

I was determined to get back in the classroom.

I was not ready to return immediately, so Sarah K (the K is my Kafkaesque way of keeping her straight from my daughter, Sarah M) covered my classes the first week. She mostly told the students I had had a medical emergency but that I would be back next week.

I wondered if maybe I did need a medical leave. When I looked in the bedroom mirror I didn’t recognize me. There was a haggard, elderly man in my room. Who is that dude and how did he get in here?

But let’s go back a bit, back to when I was still wearing the nurse-installed catheter with the tube down my leg into the bag of whole goodness attached to my ankle. 

Dr. Tracy’s nurse had not yet taught me to self-cath when I made it back to the university. I still had the bag at my ankle, still had to visit my urologist’s office to get the catheter replaced every other day.

I was moving slowly. As often happens after surgery, the primary feeling is of fragility, not pain. And that’s what I felt. I used my cane and treaded deliberately. 

What could be sexier than walking around with a urine bag on your ankle?

Thank God for public transportation, which saved me hundreds of steps. I took the ferry from the next town over, Hingham. It was a quiet, often beautiful ride and afforded time and atmosphere for cat napping. 

When we arrived at the dock, there was a short walk to the subway. There was one transfer and then the subway came above ground and conveniently stopped in front of my building. A wee bit of hobble and I was at my office door.

That would seem to be a full-day’s work, just getting to the office, but my duties were only about to begin.

When Sarah K saw me, I could see myself in her face. She seemed wary and concerned.

“Are you sure you’re ready to come back?”

“I’ve got to do it sometime.”

I sank into the chair across from her desk, where we habitually indulged in our morning debriefing sessions. Those were often the highlights of my day. I know few people with such a terrific sense of humor.

“You look gaunt,” she said. That was my rare moment of joy in those days. Overweight most of my life, I’d longed to be gaunt. Later, Sarah said it would have been more accurate to tell me that I looked near death. Because I was — or recently had been.

My first class was upstairs — and in the same building. I scored on that one, meaning I wouldn’t have to drag my sepsis ass down Commonwealth Avenue to some basement room without windows.

Just one floor up, but I needed to use the elevator.

When I got to class, the students were already there. I made my way to the front of the room.

“I’ve had some health issues lately,” I said. “Would you mind if I sat?”

No one objected, so my carcass collapsed in the chair at the instructor’s desk.

The class was Literary Journalism, something I’ve taught with great joy and relish for decades. I love the subject, so I spent that first day giving the class the lay of the land and getting them stoked — I thought — about journalism that could endure and become art.

I could feel that I was not all there. It’s as if the sepsis had left scar tissue on my brain. I was still not able to retrieve the words I wanted from my skull. But at least I was much improved over my halting, stuttering performance with the EMTs.

Class was a three-hour block, but I asked if we could end early. No one objected.

“Thank you,” I said. “Does anyone have any questions?”

A hand shot up in the second row. “Yeah,” a young woman said. “Are you going to live?”

Good question. I didn’t laugh it off. I told her I’d do my best.

Class over, I moseyed down to my office where I again planted myself in the seat across from Sarah K’s desk.

I told her more catch-up stuff and then ended with what the student had asked in class. I intended that as my closing line of the update, some comic relief.

But Sarah did not find it funny. She urged me to take care of myself.

Then it all hit me: the cancer, all of those medical procedures, my divorce, not seeing the kids daily, my mother’s death. I thought of all of the humiliations I’d had because of my health condition. I’d gotten through it all, but now I had to face this: the self-catherization. This was it. This was the low point of humiliation. I was at the bottom, clawing to get ever deeper.

I had met my limit.

Poor Sarah. She came to work that day to do her job and now there was a blubbering old man in her office. 

I was done. This was it. “I can’t take it anymore,” I told her, choking out the words.

And, for one of the rare times in my adult life, I cried.

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She Was a Good Cat

It is with great sadness that I report the death of my cat, Ramona. She was a sweetheart and I miss her.

I got her from the animal shelter at the urging of my youngest children and she spent half her life with me.

It was a Christmas seven or eight years ago. My wife had moved about a few months prior and so I was alone much of the time. The kids were with me three days a week but the other four days were deathly quiet.

Ramona

To fill the void, I talked to myself. I’d done that all of my life, but usually there was someone in the other room who’d ask, “Are you talking to me?”

After the separation, no one answered, yet I continued talking to myself.

The kids decided I needed someone or something to hear my yammering, so we went to the shelter right after Christmas.

I went into the cat room. There were several needy meowing cats, but I took to Ramona instantly. The shelter had given her a name, but I can’t remember what it was.

Compared to the other cats, she was quiet and mysterious.

She also was withdrawn, and beautiful. The vet tech got her out of the cage and set her on my lap. The kids and I petted her and made the decision quickly.

“The first couple days, maybe a week, expect her to hide,” the tech said. “This one is very skittish, very afraid of people. We think she suffered some trauma. We found her in a dumpster. But be patient. She will come around.”

They weren’t sure of her age, but estimated she was seven or eight years old. She ended up living with me for about the same amount of time. I’d guess she was 14.

To honor Bob Dylan, I named the cat after one of his songs. (Listen to “To Ramona” here.)

I brought her home and she was as advertised. She hid behind the couch.

But that night, after the kids left, I was reading in bed when I felt a slight movement on my mattress. I put my book aside and there she was. She camped out on my chest and her eyes told me she wanted petting.

It was smooth sailing from that point on.

She turned out to be the opposite of the tech’s expectation. Ramona rarely left my side when I was home, and she would root at my hands until she got the underside of her chin stroked.

Years passed. We eventually lived in three homes together. She survived the arrival of my son’s kitten, Carlos. He loved her and wanted to play with her, but Ramona would take none of his shit. She was the boss.

Carlos

When she got sick earlier this year, I took her to a vet. She said there was an impacted and infected gland. She could offer a temporary fix, but it was likely she would die soon anyway.

A second vet told me the same thing. Think of her quality of life, the vet said, and they urged me to have her put down.

I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Maybe I was wrong.

But she was still Ramona.

At home, she could be her usual self, skittering around the house and challenging Carlos when he wanted to chase her.

But I could tell she was getting weaker.

The other night, still up at 2 a.m., I petted her and told her good night. When I got up at 6 the next morning (yes, I know I need more sleep), I found her dead.

She was a good cat and I miss her. I loved her and she loved me.

Rest in peace, Ramona.

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A Full Life, Well Lived

Jack Corn in his younger days.

My friend Jack Corn died this week.

Though he was a quarter century older than me, we became close friends during our years together at Western Kentucky University.

We were both rookie teachers, trying to navigate this mystical new process of education.

Jack came to the job as a much decorated photojournalist.

I was just a punk.

While Jack served as a full-time teacher (his title was Photojournalist in Residence), he also worked on a bachelor’s degree. He’d started work as a news photographer right after his high school graduation, so now he was tying up loose ends and getting a degree.

So he took my journalism history class one summer session.

What a treat that was. Since he’d had such a long career, he knew some of the characters I talked about in class.

Hodding Carter, for example. He was one of my heroes and the definition of an independent, autonomous journalist.

While talking about Carter, I told the class that I might be guilty of over-romanticising the guy, because he was a white newspaper editor speaking out against segregation in the heart of Klan country. Carter’s office was bombed and his home attacked.

“Oh no, Beell.” (That’s how Jack said my name.) “That’s exactly how he was. You got it right.”

Jack asked me to help him do a book on a 1918 lynching in East Tennessee. One of his uncles was part of the mob trying to kill this young man. Jack’s grandmother went into the street and stop it. She was unable to protect the poor kid, who was murdered by the mob.

I wrote most of the book. Jack was handling the visuals. He finally sent the manuscript to journalism guru John Seigenthaler, one of his old pals. Seigenthaler told me later that he stayed up all night to finish it.

He also sent a copy to another old pal — a guy he worked with on several stories over the years, David Halberstam. Halberstam asked his agent to shop it around but nothing came of it. It’s a shame that story is still waiting to be told.

By the way, when Jack and I met Halberstam for drinks, I asked David to sign my copy of his wonderful book, The Powers That Be. He signed it, “From one of Jack’s collaborators to another.”

That’s some good company. I feel that I am part of a special tribe that got to know and work with this man. He was a great storyteller and a great teacher. He sometimes used draconian methods — if he didn’t like a print one of his students turned in, he might drop it to the floor and grind it into the linoleum.

He was tough. I didn’t have his level of gravitas and so I could never do what Jack did. He pushed people to think and to do their best, most compassionate work. I’m not sure you can teach empathy, but students absorbed Jack’s caring and commitment.

His methods worked spectacularly well.

His students went on to tremendous heights in journalism. Jack was proud of all of them and they were lucky to have him as a teacher. I was a colleague but I often felt more like one of his students. He taught me so much and I became a better teacher because of him.

Below is one of his portraits of coal miners. I may look for a few others to post. Watch this space. To me, Jack’s work has the power and intelligence of the work by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.

Jack was 96 years old. He was married to Helen Corn for decades. They were beautiful people and their love gave us all something to which we can aspire.

Goodbye, Pal. We’ll miss you.

Photograph by Jack Corn