Memory ... Summer 2005

Yesterday, I posted on my blog "Daily Doggerel" (link) a few pictures I'd taken on July 21, 2005, in and around Red Cloud, Nebraska. One of them shows Joyce and me standing near the girlhood home of writer Willa Cather (see above), whom I was chasing around various places that summer because our "summer reading" (for juniors at Western Reserve Academy) that year was Cather's Nebraska novel My Ántonia, 1918. I hadn't read a lot of Cather, so I was spending the summer reading her complete works--and visiting sites that had been important to her.

Before the Nebraska trip with Joyce, I'd already driven (alone) to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to see where she had lived when she was teaching in a high school (that building still stands, too--and, yes, I saw it). I'd also gone to Back Creek, West Virginia (near Winchester), the area where she'd been born; both her family's home and her grandparents' home (not far away) are still standing.

After Red Cloud, Joyce and I drove out to Ketchum, Idaho, to see some Hemingway sites: the home where he killed himself, the restaurant where he ate his final meal, etc.

But this is not a summary of our literary visits. No, that picture perched atop this post--a picture I'd not really looked at very closely in quite a while--gave me pause this time. And here's why ...

On June 5, 2005, just about six weeks earlier, I had undergone prostate cancer surgery at the Cleveland Clinic: a prostatectomy (the removal of the gland). The surgeon's hope--hell, my hope--was that the procedure would cure me.

It didn't.

In subsequent years (as I've posted here now and then) I've undergone two rounds of radiation, a course of immunotherapy, and I'm now on some pretty powerful meds that have permanently altered my life. Trelstar, for example (a quarterly injection), killed my libido (it suppresses testosterone, the food of prostate cancer), sapped my energy, gifted me periodic "hot flashes," made me vulnerable to bouts of depression, etc.

Anyway, I was determined, in 2005, that I would not let my recent cancer surgery prevent me from living the way I wanted to. Although during the time of the Red Cloud trip I was wearing, well, liners to prevent post-surgical dripping, although I was still feeling a little bite where the surgeon's knife had bitten me, although I was dealing with my evanescing sex life, I was still ... hopeful.

And so we drove around Nebraska, around Idaho--and in subsequent years we made many other "literary" trips all over the place, spent an early-August week in Stratford, Ontario, for the Stratford Theatre Festival (about fifteen consecutive years we did that). But Time and Age and Illness began to win the wrestling match that I, deluded, had thought I was winning.

So ... I look at that picture now ... I see on my face, in my posture, a determination to appear "normal." Still in control.

I would go back to WRA that fall, would teach Cather's novel and Hamlet and The Great Gatsby and other works I loved. And for a few years I thought I'd actually won the battle.

Until my PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) began rising again. By late 2009 it was high enough that my oncologists recommended a course of radiation ... and so began my journey down the road I am still traveling. I'm stumbling more now (literally and metaphorically)--finding it more difficult to deal with the increasing darkness--but as that photo shows, I still can hold close that human being who keeps me sane (most of the time), who keeps me (moderately) hopeful, who has shown me for nearly a half-century the vast dimensions of Love.

***

Thought I'd show you the whole house--and the historical marker outside.

Happy Birthday, Open Door Coffee Company!

Five years.

Which, of course, simply cannot be. But--like many other things which apparently cannot be--it not only can be but is. It was just about five years ago that the coffee shop on the corner of Main and Clinton Streets here in Hudson opened its doors. A blessing of my life ...

For a number of years before they opened, I'd been sort of coffee-shop-hopping. Our long-time hangout--Saywell's Drug (which occupied the space next door to OD)--had closed in 2005. So ... I'd migrated to Coffee on Main, just down the block.

It closed.

So I went to Caribou—only a couple of blocks from our house. Did so for a few years.

It closed.

So I started walking each morning to Bruegger's Bagels--about a half-mile from our house.

But quit when Hattie's Cafe opened in the space now occupied by OD.

It closed.

Back to Bruegger's.

Then the Open Door Coffee Company arrived, and I've been there ever since. I love the place for all kinds of reasons ...

• They've integrated into the space a lot of the stuff from Saywell's (which, to be fair, Hattie's had also done): the soda fountain, some wall hangings, other things.
• They have great coffee.
• They bake their own goodies right on the site.
• The hiring is superb--just some of the greatest young people have worked/are working there.
• They attract some of the most interesting customers in town. The "early-morning" folks are great coffee-companions.
• They reserve a small table for me each morning.
• The owner (Deborah Pinnell) and her son (Nigel, a gifted musician) work there. I'm proud to know them both. They brew kindness and humor along with the coffee.
• I feel at home.

So ... I'm urging them to stay in business, right there, until Mr. G. Reaper arrives at my door in earnest. (He has been lightly knocking, then--at least for now--going away.)

Going there each morning--and, okay, for a while each afternoon--has become one of the great pleasures of my latter years.

So ... Happy Birthday, ODCC!

Link to their website.

Not the Best Idea ...

It wasn't the best decision I've ever made, as subsequent events would certify.

Yesterday, visiting our son and his family for a Memorial Day cookout, I impulsively asked my 14-yr-old grandson, Logan, if he wanted to pitch some Wiffle Ball to me out in the back yard.

Did he ever! He's a pitcher--and a good one--on his summer team, and the thought of whiffing his grandfather must have seemed even better than the sourdough bread he'd just eaten. (I won't say where that bread came from.)

So ... out to the back yard we went. I loosened up a little with the plastic bat while Logan arranged the other particulars--a home plate, etc.

After a few errant tosses, he grooved one, and I nailed it--liner into left-center. Possible double.

But ...

... I felt myself stumble a little during the follow-through--a little reminder of my Old-Man Vertigo--a gift from my age, from my medications. I dismissed the feeling.  I can handle this!

No.

A few more pitches--friendly debates about the strike zone--then ...

Logan grooved another one.

I swung ferociously. I missed. I was immediately on the ground, my head arriving first to greet Mother Earth with a jarring thud! My glasses went somewhere. And I lay there, momentarily stunned. It had happened so fast, I'd had no time to throw up an arm to break the fall.

Family gathered around. Our daughter-in-law (who teaches at the Nursing School at Kent State) asked me some questions--What year is it? Etc. I answered them. Struggled into a chair they'd brought out to the yard. Felt like a fool.

I became the pitcher for a couple of minutes. Watched while Logan nailed my offerings.  Then headed slowly inside, carrying with me some realizations:

• My Diamond Days are over.
• Wiffle Ball is too much for me.
• I must never do such a thoughtless thing again.
• I want to play baseball.
• I want to be young and healthy again.
• That ain't gonna happen.
• I want it to happen.
• That ain't gonna happen.
• I want it to happen.
• That ain't...

You know ...

I woke up this morning with sore ribs (where I hit the ground?), with a bit of a bruise on my forehead, with a bit of redness on my nose (where my glasses were knocked from me), with a bit of sorrow (okay, a lot of sorrow) about Career's End.

In Love with Sleep

Morpheus, god of dreams

At various times in my life I have loved being asleep. In the whirlpool of adolescence, on weekends, I could easily sleep till noon--except for those times when Dad decided I needed to help him with some chores. And even during the school week, I would sleep till the last possible moment. Dad had an old school bell that he would ring in the morning, a bell whose piercing peals were designed to urge us upward (out of bed) and downward (to the breakfast nook), where we could have a "family breakfast." Dad, who'd grown up on a farm in Oregon, must have thought my brothers and I were aliens--spoiled ones, at that, as we sullenly and silently slurped our cereal in the morning.

Later, a teacher, I couldn't sleep in, of course--except on Saturday and Sunday. So on weekends I would crash long hours. I think my record on a Sunday was about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. After I got married, for a while, Joyce and I both slept late on weekends.

Years went on ... and I remembered something my dad had once said when, absolutely flabbergasted by the habit of both Dad and Mom of getting up and going around 5 a.m., I'd asked him why? And he'd replied, "When you get older, Son, you'll see."

Hah! No way!

Way,

The older I got, the easier it grew to get up early. The last decade or so of my teaching career, I was generally the first one in the building--by 6-ish. I got a lot done in those quiet, uninterrupted hours.

Retirement.

And I'm still getting up early, about 5:30 most days, every day hearing Dad's prediction from a half-century ago. I've found that my most productive hours are in the morning, and if I don't get some things done then, it's unlikely--no, impossible--that I'll get them done later in the day.

Very late in his life, Dad spent a lot of the day sleeping in his easy chair and, later, in his wheelchair. Once I asked him if it bothered him, sleeping so much. And his reply: I like being asleep because in my dreams I'm young again.

Dad had been a great athlete (football, track, baseball), and I hope Morpheus was kind to him, that Dad got to dream all the time of running and leaping and doing whatever-in-creation-he-wanted-to-do. He'd earned it.

And now, in my mid-seventies, I'm once again finding the profound appeal of sleep. I know, you see, that Bad Things Are Coming. Sure, I've always known this in an intellectual sense (everyone dies, etc.), but now I'm experiencing it in a very personal sense. Just in the last couple of years I have lost dear friends, former students, family, ... And much more (and much worse) hovers on the horizon, glimmering with dark light.

So I guess I've figured: If I can just stay asleep, none of those things will happen. And so I nap. And go to bed early. And in some ways hate the waking, the waking that will carry me, inevitably, one step closer to all that I now dread.

Sunday Sundries, 228

1. HBOTW [Human Beings of the Week]: Friends from Hiram High School days (I graduated in 1962), who on Facebook have helped me, over and over again, to reconstruct things I was trying to remember. This week--Tina Dreisbach and her husband (Paul) and Ralph Green helped me remember some things about music class in, oh, 1958! Facebook has its Dark Side--but, also, the Force surges there , as well!

2. I finished just one book this week--but it's a long one: Killing Commendatore (2017, 2018) by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (I obviously read the book in translation!), a novel I'd decided to read because I saw in some review somewhere that it had connections to The Great Gatsby, which I greatly enjoyed teaching for a decade at Western Reserve Academy.

There are connections (but we'll get to those in a moment), but there is also an auctorial connection: Murakami translated Gatsby into Japanese a little over a decade ago, and he has said that the novel had a tremendous influence on his own writing.

Okay.

In Commendatore, we have a narrator who lives near a mysterious very rich guy, a very rich guy with secrets (and a mansion), a very rich guy who wants to get close to someone he loves (sounding familiar yet?), a very rich guy who befriends the narrator (who's a successful portrait painter who now wants to branch out a bit).

But Commedatore is a novel much more weird than Gatsby (which, of course, has its own weirdness--green lights among them). Near the narrator's house is a shaft into the ground where weird stuff happens (and it sometimes serves as a portal); we have a spectral creature, the Commendatore himself, who appears and who has connections with some kind of parallel universe; we have a teenage girl (with connections to the Gatsby character--connections of which she is not aware), a girl who takes a painting class with the narrator, a girl who gets involved with him (no, not that way).

In the end we have a story about loss, about loneliness, about art, about the supernatural, about finding your metier, about the weirdness of life and its (sometimes) incomprehensibility, about coincidence, about love.

I read the book very slowly, about ten pages a night just before beddie-bye (it's nearly 700 pp long)--and they were ten pages I really looked forward to, pages that flew by each night. And, later, I would lie in the dark ... and wonder. And listen for the sound of a distant bell. (Read the book--you'll understand!)

3. We've started streaming on PBS the latest available season of Unforgotten, a series from the UK about a police unit devoted to solving old cases. It stars the wonderful Nicola Walker as the lead detective. This current season begins when some bones are found near a highway construction project. Whose are they? What are they doing there?

Last night we watched one of the most moving scenes I've ever seen on television--the cops discover the identity of the victim--and notify the family. I'll say no more. If you emerge dry-eyed from those moments, you'd better have your pulse checked ... are you even alive?

Link to some video.

4. No movie this week. We were going to go see Booksmart last night, but the thunderstorm warnings spooked me, so we stayed home and read and streamed instead. I wasn't really crazy about going to see it--but the reviews have been pretty good. Will probably still give it a look-see.

5. I used the word bailiwick this week--and immediately wondered where it came from. Checked it out. Learned ...

• It dates back to the 15th century--to Middle English--and initially referred to the jurisdiction of a bailiff--or other authority. Wick meant a village or hamlet. So ... bailiwick was the jurisdiction of a bailiff. Now, of course, we use it conversationally to mean "a person's area of skill, knowledge, authority, or work."

6. Last Word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from wordsmith.org (a bit naughty--so it goes)

skitterbrook (SKIT-uhr-brook)

noun: A coward.

ETYMOLOGY: From Dutch schijtebroek (literally, shits his pants), from schijten (to shit) + broek (pants). Earliest documented use: 1652.

USAGE: “The royal skitterbrook’s advice to the remnants of his army, still holding out in castles and towns along the borders, was terse and characteristic: ‘Let each man look to himself. Expect no help from me.’” Thomas B. Costain; The Conquerors; Doubleday; 1949.

I Know a Green Cathedral

Imagine this: an 8th grade boy, still somewhat fresh from Oklahoma, sitting in a music class at the Hiram (Ohio) Local School (RIP), and the class is singing "Green Cathedral."

Imagine this: that boy has a high soprano voice, a voice that some (earlier) teachers found so pleasing that they let him sing solos; one he still remembers, decades later, is "School Days," performed for parents one evening at some school function back in Oklahoma.

Imagine this: that boy likes the song "Green Cathedral"; he finds it emotional, and he's always liked Mother Nature.

Imagine this: that boy, now in 8th grade, is in the middle of a turning point in his life: his voice is changing; he's no longer a soprano; he's not really anything right now--he sounds more like a crow than any other creature.

Imagine this: that boy has tears in his eyes--right there in the classroom--as he realizes he will never again be able to sing the way he used to; he mouths the words, not wishing to startle those near him with his corvine cawing.

Imagine this: sixty years have passed, and, driving down a tree-shaded street with his wife, he begins to sing "Green Cathedral" in the rough baritone he's had since 1958; it astonishes him, how he remembers almost all the lyrics.

***

And so ... into the house I go to google "Green Cathedral." I discover right away that other bloggers and Internetties have searched for it too, have found a few things. Here's a link to a video of someone singing the song. (The lyrics in the video are slightly different from those I remember--from those published elsewhere--see below.) And here's more--a choral version.

Caught in the clutch of nostalgia, I plunk down $10.98 to buy the sheet music online. One day, those who survive me will find it, will wonder What on earth?

And--somehow (I am positive this will happen)--the music will commence, and my soprano voice will answer their questions.

Lyrics:

I know a green cathedral, a shadowed forest shrine,

Where leaves in love join hands above and arch your prayer and mine;

Within its cool depths sacred, the priestly cedar sighs,

And the fir and pine lift arms divine unto the pure blue skies

In my dear green cathedral there is a flowered seat,

And choir loft in branched croft, where songs of bird hymns sweet;

And I like to dream at evening, when the stars its arches light,

That my Lord and God treads its hallowed sod,

In the cool calm peace of night.

The Old Man and His Umbrella

As I’ve gotten older, my habits have changed. Some of my New Ways are pure Old-Guy cliche.  I take naps. I go to bed early. I find myself using this introductory adverbial clause: When I was young ... Or I find various ways to complete this incomplete sentence: My parents never would have put up with ...

You know ...

I also worry about things I never worried about before. When I wake up, will I remember who I am? Should I buy a new sweater? (I mean, what if I’m not even here when next fall rolls around?!) Should I really try to go upstairs with both hands occupied? Shouldn’t I make sure I have one hand free to grip the banister? Where did I put my glasses? (Oh, I’m wearing them!) Didn’t we already stream this episode?

But perhaps the most patent sign of my galloping senescence is this: No rain catches me sans umbrella.

My dad called an umbrella a “bumbershoot”—an expression that goes back to 1876, the year Custer died on the Little Big Horn--and according to the OED, it’s principally an Americanism formed by combining a version of umbrella with parachute.

I never carried one as a young man. Bumbershoots were for, you know, Old Guys. When it rained, I ran. Held something over my head. (Did you see that video the other day on FB of a woman holding her baby over her head as she hurried through the rain?)

Years passed. I slowed down. I began to see the wisdom of the bumbershoot. I now have one in each of our two cars. We have several stuffed in a stand near our back door. And—as I type right now at the coffee shop—there is one hanging on the chair on the other side of my little table. (Oh, and I always have a little collapsible one in my backpack.)

Why?

There’s a chance of rain this morning.

I check my Weather Channel app every day, and if there’s a 20% chance (or more) of rain, then I’ve got my bumbershoot with me. No exceptions.

And, of course, most of the time (from 80% on down) I don’t need it. I kid myself that my preparation is why the rain has not come. I sometimes even tell puzzled (younger) people the same thing—people who wonder why I’ve got an umbrella with me—the sun is out, for Pete’s sake!

When I pass by, they probably nod knowingly at each other (if there are two) or one another (three or more) and think (or say): Old Guys are weird!

And so we are--weird, it's true. But also dry.