Words like Glass Windows
A thesis presented to
the faculty of
the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University
In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Master of Art
Suzanne M. Evans
June 2012
© 2012 Suzanne M. Evans. All Rights Reserved.
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This thesis titled
Words like Glass Windows
by
SUZANNE M. EVANS
has been approved for
the Department of English
and the College of Arts and Sciences by
Dinty W. Moore
Professor of English
Howard Dewald
Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
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ABSTRACT
EVANS, SUZANNE M., M.A., June 2012, English
Words like Glass Windows
Director of Thesis: Dinty W. Moore
“Words like Glass Windows” is a collection of essays written and edited during
Suzanne Evans’ study at Ohio University. The collection includes seven essays in total.
Four longer, memoir-based essays speak to the author’s experiences with belief, religious
faith, her father, and Bruce Springsteen, and three shorter essays of meditative reflection
focus intently on the entities central to the longer essays. Though it visits a range of
topics, the collection as a whole speaks to the singular yet universal nature of human
experience and presents the essay as a window that both reveals and reflects. The
collection is preceded by a critical introduction in which Evans discusses the driving
theory behind her own work—a theory established through the metaphor of art as
window—and situates that metaphor among popular historic metaphors, including art as
window and art as lamp.
Approved: _____________________________________________________________
Dinty W. Moore
Professor of English
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I must begin by thanking my mother, the one constant of my life, for her
encouragement, her love, and for igniting the fire within me to keep moving forward,
even in the bleakest of circumstances. I must also extend my enduring gratitude to Dinty
W. Moore who opened the door of creative nonfiction to me when I was yet a shy and
reserved undergraduate and, over a span of years, taught me the layout of each one of its
rooms. Without his guidance and encouragement this work would not be possible. I
express my most sincere appreciation to Dr. Eric LeMay and Dr. Marilyn Atlas who have
helped to shape me as both writer and scholar and who have been gracious enough to
work alongside of me at multiple places in my journey. I am indebted to my friends and
colleagues at Ohio University—Zachary Oden, Jeffrey Yeager, Sarah Einstein, Sarah
Green, and Melissa Queen, among others—for their careful consideration and response to
my work as well as for their unwavering encouragement. Finally, I must thank my dear
friend and colleague, Cameron Kelsall, for sharing with me his beauty, talent, and
determination, without which my journey would have been exponentially more difficult.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract ...........................................................................................................................3
Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................................4
A Window between the Mirror and the Lamp: A Discussion of the Historical Tradition
of Theory through Metaphor in the Context of "Words like Glass Windows" ...................6
Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 19
Words like Glass Windows ............................................................................................ 21
Growin' Up Springsteen: Three to Thirty-One Down Thunder Road .......................... 22
On Fathers ................................................................................................................. 39
The Encyclopedia of my Father as I Know (of) Him: 1969-2011 ............................... 41
On Believing ............................................................................................................. 60
When I was Little, I Believed ..................................................................................... 62
On Faith .................................................................................................................... 77
The Black and White ................................................................................................. 79
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A WINDOW BETWEEN THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP: A DISCUSSION OF THE
HISTORY OF THEORY THROUGH METAPHOR IN THE CONTEXT OF “WORDS
LIKE GLASS WINDOWS”
A few weeks ago, as I was deep into the process of writing, revision, and thought
that would bring the creative portion of this thesis together, one of my most valued
mentors asked me, as part of a seminar on the form and theory of nonfiction, to write,
using metaphor as a springboard, the driving theory behind my own writing. The
assignment was aptly linked to M.H. Abrams’ notion, presented in great detail in his text,
The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, that metaphor
plays an important role in the criticism and theory of art (“Preface”). In the preface to that
text, he writes:
I have attempted the experiment of taking these and other metaphors no
less seriously when they occur in criticism than when they occur in poetry;
for in both provinces the recourse to metaphor, although directed to
different ends, is perhaps equally functional. Critical thinking…has been
in considerable part thinking in parallels, and the critical argument has to
that extent been an argument from analogy…a number of concepts most
rewarding in clarifying the nature and criteria of art…seem to have
emerged from the exploration of serviceable analogues, whose properties
were, by metaphorical transfer, predicated of a work of art. (Abrams
“Preface”)
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I fully appreciated the importance of the metaphor in informing and describing art, as
Abrams eloquently describes, and had been exposed this method of theory in past study.
However, I had yet to consider the application of theory through metaphor to the creative
nonfiction essay, and, more specifically, to my own work. I appreciated the challenge of
the assignment as well as the potential it provided and so I pressed on in my search for
the metaphor that would best present the theory of my own art, my own writing. What
follows is an account of my methods and thoughts in responding to the assignment. This
account visits the prominent historical metaphors of mirror and lamp, establishes and
situates my own metaphor—the essay as window—among those historical metaphors,
and considers the application of my metaphor to creative nonfiction that I admire, as well
as to my own work in “Words like Glass Windows.”
The most appropriate beginning seemed to exist in first revisiting the historical
tour of art’s past governing metaphors of mirror and lamp. Looking to the earlier of the
two, I began with a closer look at the metaphor of art as mirror, a review that focused
specifically on Plato’s Socrates and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As Abrams rightfully points
out, an understanding of the theory at work behind the metaphor of art as mirror leads
certainly to Plato’s dialogues, “where [mimesis] makes its first recorded appearance” (8),
and more specifically to Plato’s presentation of Socrates in book ten of The Republic (8).
Using the example of beds, Plato writes:
Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend
them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?...But would you call the
painter a creator and maker? Certainly not..I think, he said, that we may
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fairly designate him as the imitator of that which the others make…And
the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is
thrice removed from the king and the truth? That appears to be so. (Book
X)
Plato’s presentation here, as Abrams’ notes, clearly demonstrates a view that “works of
art have a lowly status in the order of existing things” (8). Thus, if as artists we are only
mirroring what has already been initially created by God and then physically created, in
the case of the bed, by the carpenter, we are not only “at second remove from the truth”
but also equal[ly] removed from “the beautiful and the good” (Abrams 8). Arthur Danto
more succinctly expresses Plato’s view, as presented through Socrates, and provides a
comparison to the differing thoughts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Though, as a character,
Hamlet may or may not be representative of Shakespeare’s own appreciation of mimesis.
Danto writes:
Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already see; so art,
insofar as mirrorlike, yields idle accurate duplications of the appearances
of things, and is of no cognitive benefit what-ever. Hamlet, more acutely
recognized a remarkable feature of reflecting surfaces, namely that they
show us what we could not otherwise perceive—our own face and form—
and so art, insofar as it is mirrorlike, reveals us to ourselves, and is, even
by Socratic criteria, of some cognitive utility after all. (571)
Though I don’t discount Plato’s contribution to an understanding of mimesis, my own
interpretation of art’s function as mirror exists in closer proximity to the more positive
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notions expressed through Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Though we cannot be sure that
Shakespeare shares Hamlet’s sentiment, the positive interpretation of art as mirror does
resurface in Samuel Johnson’s praise of the famous playwright. In his Preface to
Shakespeare, Johnson writes:
This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour
of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms
which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious
extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language; by scenes from
which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor
predict the progress of the passions. (Johnson par. 13)
Johnson implies that one of the defining characteristics of Shakespeare’s major
accomplishments and successes lies specifically in his ability to construct drama that is
“the mirrour of life” (Johnson par 13). In doing so, he also appears to build upon the
notion of art as mirror and extends the possibilities of revelation from the artist to the
reader. From Johnson’s perspective, it seems that the artist’s ability is not limited to
merely reflecting an image of himself that he could not otherwise see but is extended to
construct a text that reflects what the reader might not otherwise see of himself and, of
equal importance, what the reader might not otherwise see of the world by which he is
surrounded.
Having looked closely at the metaphor of art as mirror, a look at the metaphor of
art as lamp seemed an appropriate second stop, specifically in addressing the “‘decisive
change’ from ‘mirror’ to ‘lamp,’” as presented by M.H. Abrams in his book, The Mirror
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and the Lamp, and discussed by Seamus Perry in his 2004 article “The Mirror and the
Lamp” (263). This change “marked the step from the eighteenth century to literary
modernity,” (263) according to Perry, and centers on what Abrams describes as “a radical
shift to the artist” (3). In further defining this shift and the inherent differences between
the metaphors of mirror and lamp, Abrams writes that the mirror functions as “a reflector
of external objects” while, conversely, the lamp functions as “a radiant projector which
makes a contribution to the objects it perceives” (“Preface”). In elaborating on this
change from mirror to lamp in greater detail, he goes on to write:
In any period, the theory of the mind and the theory of art tend to be
integrally related and to turn upon similar analogues, explicit or
submerged. To put the matter schematically: for the representative
eighteenth-century critic, the perceiving mind was a reflector of the
external world; the inventive process consisted in a reassembly of ‘ideas’
which were literally images, or replicas of sensations; and the resulting
artwork was itself comparable to a mirror presenting a selected and
ordered image of life. By substituting a projective and creative mind and,
consonantly, an expressive and creative theory of art, various romantic
critics reversed the basic orientation of all aesthetic philosophy. (Abrams
69)
Within the context of Abrams’ description, the shift seems to negate, to a certain extent,
Plato’s negative view of the artist as twice-removed replicator and resituates the artist as
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a creator of beauty in his ability to not only replicate but enrich, as a contributing
“projector” (“Preface”)
The metaphor of art as lamp can been seen at work in the poetry of Wordsworth
(Perry 265), work integral to Abram’s presentations of metaphor in The Mirror and the
Lamp. William Hazlitt makes this observation as well. According to Hazlitt, “It is not so
much a description of natural objects as of the feelings associated with
them…[Wordsworth] may be said to create his own materials; his thoughts are his real
subjects” (qtd. in Perry 265). Hazlitt’s observations are clearly evidenced in an excerpt
from Wordsworth’s The Prelude. In what are nearly the last lines of Book XIV,
Wordsworth writes:
Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things (444-50).
This passage provides support for Hazlitt’s notion and demonstrates a focus on the artist
or writer, specifically evident in lines 448-9 as he elevates the “mind” over the “earth”
(Wordsworth). It also exemplifies and promotes the change from “mirror” to “lamp” of
which Abrams writes, moving to “instruct” named “prophets of nature” that the beauty of
the “mind” is far greater than that of the “earth” (444-50).
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Having completed my return to two of the most historically popular metaphors of
art, as described above, I began to see that while I could not wholly situate the theory, or
what I felt to be the theory, of my own work neatly within either the theory of art as
mirror or art as lamp, there was a place between those two metaphors where my writing
seemed to thrive. It seems almost too convenient to say that a window “opened up,”
between mirror and lamp, but that is exactly what seemed to happen.
I believe that my art, my writing, functions as a window that both reveals and
reflects. And, as with historical metaphors of mirror and lamp, identifying that metaphor
seems to be only the beginning, the point of initiation for the underlying theory that the
metaphor reveals and represents.
When I say that my art, my writing, functions as a window in that it reveals, I am
not situating my work wholly within Abram’s notion of art as lamp or the idea that art
should perform as “a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it
perceives” (Preface) and maintain a central focus on “the artist” (3). However, I do find
similarities in the functions of both metaphors here—illumination and revelation. The
specific difference, I believe, is that while the lamp aims to use an inner focus on the
artist to “illuminate” or bring a higher understanding to objects in nature by connecting
those objects to the personal emotions of the artist or author, as described by Hazlitt
(Perry 265), the window pushes beyond illumination, beyond giving new understanding
to already familiar objections, and reveals new objects or information, or new aspects of
objects and information. The window reveals something that, without it, would exist,
invisible to the reader, inside of a closed structure. Functioning as a window, the art, or
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work, then, should provide the reader with a line of sight that would otherwise be
inaccessible.
If I see my art, my work, to function as a window that pushes beyond simple
illumination to revelation, then what is the nature of that revelation? In my work, and I
think in much writing that can be connected in some important way to the genre of
memoir, that revelation often focuses upon the author and the singular experiences that he
or she evicts from their private homes to a new life on the public page. The window’s
function of revelation is evident in the work of many writers who I dearly respect and
admire. Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” reveals to the reader her struggle with
“despair.” She writes:
Of course I could not work. I could not even get dinner with any degree of
certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street
paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that
I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael’s Pub or at
Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East.” (Didion 688)
Similarly, Didion reveals her personal struggle with the crippling pain of migraine
headaches during which she “sat through lectures in Middle English and presentations to
advisors with involuntary tears running down the right side of [her] face, threw up in
washrooms…and cursed [her] imagination” (689) and in doing so reveals to the reader a
positive side of pain. Like Didion, Dinty W. Moore reveals himself to the reader, as well.
In Between Panic and Desire, Moore reveals his personal struggle as the young son of a
drinking father. He writes, “As a boy I coped with this embarrassment by staying glued to
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the television—shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver were my favorites.
I desperately wanted someone like Hugh Beaumont to be my father, or maybe Robert
Young” (“Son of Mr. Green Jeans: A Meditation on Missing Fathers”). Rebecca
McClanahan is no stranger to revelation, either. In “The Riddle Song: A Twelve Part
Lullaby,” from her collection The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, she reveals her
current questioning of an earlier life decision to not continue to try to have children. She
writes, “It was for the best, we believed—a mutual decision, well thought out and
perfectly executed. And now, sixteen years later, it makes no sense” (37).
Though at a point in my career where I am still trying to reach the height and skill
writers like Didion, Moore, and McClanahan, among others, my work does share the
common element of revelation. At the heart of the work in “Words like Glass Windows”
are a range of admissions and sight lines for the reader that touch on my own life
experiences, from the fears and desires of a young child to the adult struggles of the
woman I am now. “Growin’ Up Springsteen: From Three to Thirty-One down Thunder
Road,” reveals my intimate relationship with the music of Bruce Springsteen, a thread
that connects additional revelations of love and loss—the homosexuality of my first love,
the unexpected suicide of my uncle, my choice of self and writing over my fiancé, and
the despair of miscarriage. “When I was Little, I Believed,” a funny—and ultimately
painful—account of a childhood struggle to make sense of life and the non-traditional
family system that sustained me, reveals an innocent tendency to take the world at face
value, a desire to marry Godzilla, the discovery of a quickly-forming hatred of my father,
and an inability to understand the finality of death. “The Encyclopedia of my Father as I
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Know (of) Him: 1969-2011” reveals in greater detail the nature of my difficult
relationship with my father, simultaneously unearthing his own life demons, and “The
Black and White” reveals my personal struggle with faith, afterlife, and illness, a struggle
that is grounded in the dreams and visions of a dead relative. The shorter pieces of the
collection, “On Fathers,” “On Believing,” and “On Faith,” differ from the longer pieces
in that they do not include personal revelations. However, they do attempt to reveal their
subjects to the reader in a new way by presenting the many sides, aspects, and layers
simultaneously in often fast-paced meditations. For example, while I believe that the
varied aspects of faith discussed within “On Faith” are familiar to the reader, intimately
so in some instances, I feel that the piece reveals to the reader a new line of sight in that it
asks him or her to look at each of those aspects at once—dissolving the separation that
often exists between the role of faith in their Sunday morning worship service and more
secular or personal notions of faith.
And so what is gained through this revelation? If the theory behind the metaphor
of art as a window that reveals is one that instructs the author in the construction of
revelations—revelations of self, of family, of friends, of acquaintance, of experience, of
entity—what is gained? For the artist, of course, a therapeutic purging plays a certain
role. I believe that many of my fellow writers of memoir, or even other sub-categories of
creative nonfiction, would attest to the therapy in the “letting go” that is associated with
placing some of the most private aspects of our lives onto the page. For the reader, what
is gained is, as discussed earlier, a line of sight. The reader gains access to experiences
and information that he or she would not have otherwise engaged, at least not in the same
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way. In returning to the work of Didion and Moore, the new lines of sight are clear. In the
case of Didion’s “In Bed,” the reader “sees” the possibility that not all pain exists inside
of an enclosure of destructive and disruptive negativity. In Moore’s “The Son of Mr.
Green Jeans: A Meditation on Fathers,” the reader gains a new line of sight into the
effects of absent fathers on their children and the effect that the many “perfect family”
sitcoms of the ‘50s and ‘60s had on children whose own family structure didn’t quite
match up. I believe that the work of “Words like Glass Windows,” provides important
lines of sight as well. “The Black and White,” for example, offers to the reader a line of
sight into the struggle that often emerges in response to the juxtaposition of knowledge
and faith.
And somehow this function alone seems inadequate. The window that only
reveals seems to want something more than the purging of the artist and the new line of
sight opened up to the reader. This “something more” seems to be the perfect place for
the second function of the window to enter the theory.
When I say that my writing functions as a window, one aspect of that function
being reflection, I’m not wholly aligning myself with the metaphor of art as mirror as
Plato, Shakespeare through Hamlet, or Johnson thought it to function. Just as I see there
to be an important difference in the reflection provided by both mirror and window in the
physical world, I see there to be important differences in the function of reflection in the
artistic metaphors of mirror and window. When I say that I see my art, my writing, as a
window that reflects, I am not subscribing to the theory that my writing should singularly
reflect a pristine, life-like image. After all, a window, without modification or special
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effect, is incapable of reflecting without simultaneously revealing. And so I see my art as
providing a reflection of the reader not singularly or independently, but layered against
the image of what the work also reveals. My goal in most all of my work, and certainly in
the pieces that comprise “Words like Glass Windows,” is that the reader will stand in
front of it, take in and absorb the experience, or object, or part of myself that I am
revealing and simultaneously see a semblance of their reflection, a piece of their own self
or experience. Placing the reflective ability of my work in the hands of the reader,
however, seems to suggest that the reflective aspect of the metaphor is only activated
when a reader engages the work and does not exist of the essay itself. I believe, however,
that the reflective ability of my work is not solely dependent on the reader, that the essay
can, itself, embody this reflective ability in that the singular experiences that it reveals
also reflect, to a certain extent, humankind and humanness. My goal is that through the
simultaneous actions of revelation and reflection, my work, in the hands of a reader or
held up to the world in which it exists, will elevate the singular experiences that I engrave
on the page to a universal significance or understanding that exists between writer and
reader or writer and world.
And in response to this I suppose that the appropriate question, both from my
reader and from myself is: Why? Why, as a writer, do I subscribe to the theory of art, of
writing, as something that should both reveal and reflect? Why, as a writer, do I see great
importance in the transformation of the singular experience into the universal, or shared,
experience? Because when I first experienced the crippling anxiety that came as a result
of being a woman in her mid-twenties who had failed at one career and was on the brink
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of a new one, years behind her much younger peers and unable to regain the years that
the failed career had siphoned from the new one, Joan Didion said, “That was the year,
my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that
some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and
every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it” (“Goodbye to All That” 685).
Because when my late twenties brought a renewed struggle with my father and our
broken relationship, James Baldwin said, “I had not known my father very well. We had
got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn
pride” (587). Because when the neighbor boy left me and then left town, when I failed in
my nursing career, when my uncle shot himself between the eyes with a .45, when my
fiancé left, and when I miscarried my first child, Bruce Springsteen sang “Backstreets,”
“Bobby Jean,” “The Price You Pay,” “You’re Missing,” “Darkness on the Edge of
Town,” and “The Promise.” In some small way, each of those artists—Didion, Baldwin,
Springsteen, Moore and McClanahan, too—saved me, not from hurting, or from
questioning, or wishing for something more or different. But, more importantly, they
saved me from being alone.
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WORKS CITED
Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition.
New York: Oxford UP, 1953. Print.
Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology
from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor
Books, 1994. 587-604. Print.
Danto, Arthur. “Symposium: The Work of Art.” The Journal of Philosophy 61.19 (1964):
571-584. JSTOR. Web. 26 Apr. 2012.
Didion, Joan. “Goodbye to All That.” The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from
the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books,
1994. 680-688. Print.
Didion, Joan. “In Bed.” The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical
Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. 689-691.
Print.
Johnson, Samuel. Preface to Shakespeare. South Australia: U of Adelaide, 2010.
eBooks@Adelaide. Web. 26 Apr. 2012.
McClanahan, Rebecca. “The Riddle Song: A Twelve Part Lullaby.” The Riddle Song and
Other Rememberings. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2002. 18-55. Print.
Moore, Dinty W. Between Panic and Desire. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 2008. N. pag.
Kindle file.
Perry, Seamus. “The Mirror and the Lamp.” Essays in Criticism 54.3 (2004): 260-282.
Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.
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Plato. The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. N.p.: n.p, n.d. N. page. Kindle file.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, Book XIV. The Poetical Works of William
Wordsworth. Ed. William Knight. Vol. 3. New York: Cornell University Library,
1896. 286-292. Gutenberg eBooks. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.
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WORDS LIKE GLASS WINDOWS
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Growin’ Up Springsteen: From Three to Thirty-One down Thunder Road
On a breezy night in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, in the mid-spring of 2000, I
made a decision that I hadn’t expected to make. Somewhere in the middle of “Tenth
Avenue Freez-out,” a selection near the half-way point of that night’s setlist, as Bruce
Springsteen broke into the monologue that typically precedes his introduction of the EStreet-Band, I started to feel the way I had only felt at church when the preaching was on
point and the “Amens” were plenty. I started to feel the feeling that had only come when
the Holy Spirit was so thick in the air that Jesus Christ tingled on the surface of my skin.
And as I stood in that blackened auditorium next to strangers, strangers whose skin, like
mine, tingled with rock ‘n roll and The Boss, I wanted to go with them to the place that
Bruce described, wanted all of us to go “to that river of resurrection where everybody
gets a second chance.” That’s where Bruce wanted to go on that night, and he made it
clear that he couldn’t go alone. “I want you to go with me,” he said, the sweat of his
desire coaxing his hair into ringlets and pulling the once loose fabric of his shirt tight to
his skin, “because I need to go with you.” And in that moment, I wanted nothing more
than to feel the breathless lungs and pounding pulse that would undoubtedly come from
the effort exerted in helping him to fulfill his desire, in helping him “throw a rock ‘n roll
exorcism, a rock ‘n roll baptism, and a rock ‘n roll bar mitzvah.” And when the lights
flew up and Clarence bore down on the slick brass of the sax, I decided that if I ever gave
up Christianity and stopped following God and Jesus Christ, I’d join the Church of
Springsteen and trade the Saints for the E-Street Band.
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It’s true that the terms of such a trade would include the forfeiture of heaven. As
Springsteen says during a 2001 performance of “Light of Day,” “Unlike my
competitors—I cannot—I shall not—I will not—promise you life everlasting. But I can
promise you life—right now. And all ya gotta do is raise your hand and say—I.” And
maybe that’s just the thing I love about the man. More than the sweat drenched t-shirts,
more than the saucy dance moves atop Roy Bittan’s black baby grand, more than the
honesty, more than the way his hand looks raised and clasped to the hand of Clarence
Clemons. Maybe the thing I really love is that for twenty-eight years, he’s made “life
right now,” despite its individual hells and hardships, seem so full of opportunity, so
focused on the second chance, so necessary, so damn right.
Though that spring night was one of the most pivotal in our history, my
relationship with Bruce, with the E-Street-Band, had begun years before. In 1984, at the
age of three, I caught my first glimpse of the man ordained by John Landau, in a 1974
article, as the “the future of rock and roll.” “Dancing in the Dark” was in heavy rotation
on the then young MTV network that played continuously, with or without an attentive
audience, on the living room television in the trailer that I shared with my mom. The
limited space made it possible to hear the signature ba ba ba baa baaaa of the first few
bars from anywhere in the house. Kitchen, toy room, bedroom, bathroom, it didn’t
matter. Bruce could beckon me from anywhere, and I never resisted. My memory holds
flashes of three-year-old legs like autumn lightning, quick and unpredictable, down the
slender hallway, of chubby feet smacking the coarse brown carpet in imitative measures,
and of short clumsy baby fingers clutched tightly around my mom’s blue-handled
24
hairbrush, my microphone of choice. I didn’t yet have the fire to appreciate his tight
black jeans or to vicariously embody the excitement of Courtney Cox as he pulled her on
stage. I had no idea what it meant to “shake the world off my shoulders” or that I would
someday spend years of my life trying to accomplish just that. I wasn’t “tired and bored
with myself.” Yet still, he captivated me…more than the family of ducks that lived on the
pond just below my home, more than Snuffleupagus, more than meatloaf TV dinners.
Bruce Springsteen captivated me with a spark years before I would understand that he
had already written the story of every experience that awaited me.
Bruce remained with me long after my years as a toddler and young child, but I
carried him on the periphery of my life until my late teenage years. Sure, I still listened to
his famed album from the early eighties and I was certainly one of the few kids of my
generation who understood that in its intended context, “Born in the USA,” the
foundations of its verses thick with disappointment and accusation aimed at a government
who turned a blind eye to emotionally and economically wrecked Vietnam War veterans,
was an inappropriate anthem for sports champions who swirled towels and showered in
Champaign. But I would learn to drive a car before I would find either the strength or
necessity to spread and discard the ribs of his popularity and close my hands around the
pulsating center of the man and his music.
Born in the USA had been the album that introduced me to Springsteen in my
early years, the album that taught me how to appreciate the melody, the beat, the feel and
the feel good of the thing that happened when The Boss and the E Street Band threw
down pure, sweaty, damn-the-man talent. But Born to Run was the album that introduced
25
me to Bruce, the album that taught me how to feel the pulse of the poet, taught me how to
run my ears and fingers over the lyrics while blinded by a dark room and still find the
exact places where our souls felt the same consuming electricity of pain or need.
I’m not sure what suddenly ignited the forward progress, what nudge or push
caused me to shift Born in the USA into my left hand and pick up Born to Run with my
right, to exhale the stagnant air in my lungs and sink deeper into the ocean of
Springsteen’s music. Looking from behind the eyes of my then seventeen-year-old self,
in 1998, I could speculate that it was a Springsteen-featuring episode of VH1 Legends
that aired that winter, an episode that I watched from the flower-printed living room love
seat with my mother while the neighbor boy drove around town in his Cavalier with
another girl. I could say it was the result of many futile and wandering late-night
conversations with an older guy from Arizona who used the chat name “E-Street-Band”
and unintentionally and unknowingly insulted my pride with a vat of knowledge that I
didn’t have. I could decide that it was just a whim, a happy happenstance that opened up
an internal window through which entered a sustaining breeze of buck-the-fuck-up-andkick-life’s-ass, a breeze that would carry me across thorn-filled valleys and thick,
muddied waters for the remainder of my life. It could have also been the release of
Tracks, a sixty-six-song, four-disc box set that featured previously unreleased songs,
former B-sides, and alternative versions, a collection that spanned more than fifteen years
of Springsteen’s career. Though I wouldn’t own it until the following year, I had seen its
promotional at the mall while Christmas shopping that year, had peaked at it overtop the
rack of late, great television series from the bygone days about which my step-father
26
often reminisced—The Andy Griffith Show, Ozzie and Harriet, Green Acres. I had
wanted it, then, had wanted to throw down the sugary fakeness of the Christmas giving
spirit and stomp on it as I ran to the display. And I probably would have. But something
in the thick peppermint and spruce-infused holiday mall air, the air that hung stagnant
and sticky between me and the display, made me feel unworthy. You can’t go from Born
in the USA to Tracks. There’s no bridge for that kind of crack in the earth. No one goes
from Born in the USA to Tracks, the voice in my head said. And though at that point I
still knew next to nothing, I knew that it was right. So maybe that’s why I picked up Born
to Run, maybe Born to Run became my rock, my halfway point between Born in the USA
and Tracks, maybe that’s exactly how it happened. The truth, though, is that among the
varied and promising possible motivations for my immersion into the vast expanse of
Springsteen’s music, I can’t pinpoint the winner because I simply don’t remember. All I
know for sure is that in the crimson and often desperate sunset of my seventeenth year,
“Dancing in the Dark,” “My Hometown,” “Bobby Jean,” and Born in the USA as a whole
stopped being enough and something made me close my eyes and jump off into the
beginning of an intimate and sustaining relationship with a lifelong stranger, the
beginning of something that couldn’t end, even when it wanted to.
It’s true that the three-year-old little girl who clutched the blue-handled hairbrush
didn’t yet understand that Springsteen had already written the story of every significant
moment that waited in her future. The girl on the elementary playground who smirked at
her friends while they shouted the chorus of “Born in the USA,” ignoring the unsettled
political accusations of its verses, much like their adult parents, didn’t understand that
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either. But the seventeen year old girl, the one who sat next to her mother on the flowerprinted love seat while the neighbor boy drove around the backstreets of their small,
sluggish home town in his Cavalier with another girl, was on the very brink of the
beginnings of that understanding.
“Backstreets” was the first experience that I shared with Bruce, the first song off
of Born to Run that I sucked into my lungs in eager and uneven gulps, the first time that
the tips of my fumbling fingers found the faint pulse of the man, the poet. In that first
song, first experience, Bruce and I shared the hellish and volatile mixture created only by
the perfect combinations of love, loss, and hate.
Just as Bruce had spent one hot summer in the seventies slow dancing on the
beach and “running on the backstreets” with Terry, I had spent the summer of my
seventeenth year “hiding on the backstreets” with the neighbor boy. We wasted hot
evenings driving into the woods that separated our homes, the lights of his dad’s old blue
Mazda cutting a path through the saturated air. And when we had pushed our curfews to
their breaking point, we whittled away the pre-dawn hours with long phone conversations
illustrated only by the faint light from our respective bedroom windows, light that was
made magical as it sifted through the quiet dance of the leaves and masses of
honeysuckle that separated us against our collective wills. The neighbor boy was my first
love, and not just in the moment, not just in the stamped feet that begged for a later
curfew or the thrown up teenage hands that told my parents that they just didn’t
understand. Even now, with fourteen years, other loves, and his homosexuality—a
revelation that came secondhand, years after the drives into the woods—between us, I
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still concur with the declaration of my seventeen-year-old heart. And when winter came
and he stopped driving me into the woods, when snow replaced the leaves on the trees
between us and my phone stopped ringing after midnight, when he turned off the
bedroom light that I had watched for so many nights, I began to hate him with as much
earnest as I still loved him. And the quietness of that hate, the secrecy that it maintained
behind my pursed lips as I passed him on the street with the other girl in the car, only
made it worse. I wanted to sit down in the middle of the town square and display my
emotional wounds like Job, wanted to find a voice loud and deep enough to indict him, to
tell him that it wasn’t okay, that I wasn’t okay. I screamed in the only voice I had, the
weak voice of a scorned love, and I busted the once prized CD of “our song” and threw
the sharp shards into his mailbox, but there was no echo, no response, no
acknowledgement. There was no release of the pressure that made me small and pushed
me into the painful ground of loss, the loss of a friend and a love.
It was in the midst of this aftermath, in the weeks of screaming with an inaudible
voice into deaf ears, that I found Born to Run, that I found “Backstreets.” And when
Bruce sang of his hate for Terry’s new man, and his hate for Terry when she walked
away, when the controlled anger of his voice flew into the microphone and against my
ears, the pain cracked and the pressure hissed. My own voice was still weak, still
miniscule, but when the lyrics of “Backstreets” pushed Bruce into a neighboring plot in
the painful ground of that same loss, when a voice that had touched the ears of millions
screamed my pain and elevated what I had mistakenly labeled as quiet and secret to a
level of universality, I found peace in shared pain for the first time. And in that moment, I
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latched on to Bruce, the man. I sat down next to him on an imaginary couch and grabbed
a corner of his blanket. And it didn’t matter that he didn’t know I was there, or that he
would never know I was there. I needed him because his talent allowed him to do
something that I couldn’t, to tame and mold a pain, a loss, a love, and a hate that was
trapped in my own voiceless body, a body without musical talent or popular recognition,
and set it free. And it was then that I first knew that I needed him, needed him to scream
for me, to question for me, to hurt for me. And years later on that spring night in
downtown Cincinnati when he said that he wanted me to go with him “to that river of
resurrection” because he needed to go with me, I thought of “Backstreets,” thought of
those first moments in which I found not Springsteen or the E Street Band, but found
Bruce, and I realized that he knew I had been sitting beside him all along.
Born to Run was only the first level of many that comprised my immersion into
Bruce and his music, his life and his words. I started working backwards, reaching into
his shadow. I traveled to Nebraska, crossed The River, wandered through the Darkness
on the Edge of Town, and finally made it back to his beginning, back to The Wild, The
Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle and Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ. And when I’d
reached that beginning, when I’d gone as far back as I could, I went back to the place
where we’d first met, back to Born in the USA and started the journey forward that would
take me to where he was. I went through the Tunnel of Love, spent time with Human
Touch, and traveled on to Lucky Town before stopping to look back with Greatest Hits
and look around for The Ghost of Tom Joad. And I finally stepped up beside him at
Tracks. Far removed from the Christmas spirit, the thick sugary air had dissipated and the
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crack in the earth had squeezed tightly together, close enough for me to simply step
across without the need for even the smallest of bridges. When I held the boxed set in my
hands, when I studied the image of a young Bruce reclining on one elbow with his spry,
slender leg outstretched, when I heard “Happy” and “My Love Will Not Let You Down”
from the smooth discs for the first time, it felt like an accomplishment, a reward that had
been earned through the carefully placed steps of a necessary journey.
During that journey, on the way from Born to Run back to the beginning and then
forward again to meet Bruce at Tracks and also as I continued to walk beside him, as we
stopped at The Rising, Devils & Dust, Magic, and Working on a Dream, “Backstreets”
was graced with the company of additional magical connections between the experiences
of my life and Bruce’s words. Some of those moments were small and quiet, the meshing
and fulfillment of the contents of a single extraordinary day and a line or two of an
obscure song from Tracks, but “Backstreets” met its equals as well, other moments in
which my heart again screamed for the balmy salve of shared pain or understanding,
moments in which Bruce again answered, screaming for me and quieting the monsters on
my skin and under my bed.
“Backstreets” met the first of its equals just over two short years later when the
neighbor boy packed nineteen years of belongings into his silver Grand Am, packed us
and our memories into a locked trunk that he left behind, and moved more than two hours
away, moved to a place with more promise, more acceptance than our sluggish home
town. With the passing of the short years between our sordid separation and his move, I
had learned to drive by his home, a necessity if I wanted to leave my own, without
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wanting to vomit up our memories, without cursing him, and myself, for crushing what
had been the perfect glass of our friendship with ignorant, bare hands. But though I’d
always known he’d leave that place, our place, I never expected that he’d do so silently,
never considered that the anger and the scars would grow too thick for goodbye, even if
only out of a respect for our past. He’d been gone for more than a week when I learned of
the news, a soul stinging statement made in passing by my step-father. The pain was
different than the pain of “Backstreets,” though. It lacked the desperation, the clawing of
blank dirt for an immediate past. It was a soft pain, a final whisper of betrayal that
brought with it slow percolating tears that seeped over a number of days. Like before, I
ran to Bruce, ran my fingers over lists and lines of lyrics that I had come to know by the
smell of their breath until I found the right scream in the right pitch. And when my
fingertips flickered across the words of “Bobby Jean,” when I heard him sing of her
decision to leave without telling him, and of his desire to have been able to simply say
goodbye, I again felt the peace of shared upheaval, of shared shock, shared regret. I
played “Bobby Jean” on repeat for a few days, just until I could drive by his house
without hearing his laugher in my head, until I could stop imagining the glow of his
bedroom light. But even now, years upon years later, whenever I happen upon “Bobby
Jean,” I think of the neighbor boy. I think of the woods and of the late night phone calls. I
think of what it felt like the first time I saw his car missing from the driveway and knew
it was never coming back.
A third song would join “Backstreets” and “Bobby Jean” two years later when I
woke up in the middle of a nursing career, in the middle of an intensive care unit full of
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patients on the brink of their own eternity, and admitted that I had poured ounce upon
ounce of myself into a degree and a life choice through which I could no longer
peacefully, and successfully navigate with any semblance of emotional stability. I
admitted that I was miserable with myself and with my job, with my coworkers, with the
incessant beeping of IV pumps and the rigorous schedule of medications. I was trapped in
the midst of something that I hated violently, something that was evaporating me from
the outside in. I felt blatantly stupid and alone, and I was convinced that I was the only
person in the entire world who had ever failed in such an enormously un-doable fashion.
But again, Bruce brought me back, brought me back to the healing of universality, to the
relieving commonality of my mistake. On my way home that night, and many nights
after, as I rounded the full bellied corners of the familiar road home, Bruce whispered of
others, of the masses of those paying the same price for getting lost inside a dream gonewrong, a dream transformed into inescapable nightmare. And it was then that “The Price
You Pay” joined the growing list.
It was a few more years before the list grew again. As always, there were the
small moments, the private moments, the moments of a simple line or a simple emotion.
But there was a sizable gap between “The Price You Pay” and the next substantial
addition. It came in a time when I least expected to need Bruce, to need the healing for a
life gone off track and jack-knifed. It came at a moment when I thought things were
falling into place, when I had escaped the trap of my former career and delicately rerouted myself onto a more peaceful path. Everything felt organized, and right. And then
we found my uncle dead in his home, in the home that he had shared with my
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grandparents and his siblings as a child, dead from what appeared to be a self-inflicted
gunshot wound to the head. And on that night the things that disturbed me the most were
his things. The things that stayed behind when they took his body from the house. Things
like the sets of keys on the ring holder behind the red kitchen door, like the bottles of
medication on the kitchen counter, like the still running space heater in the living room.
Things like his shoes by the door, like his towel in the bathroom, like his dirty dishes in
the kitchen sink. Things like his wallet, like his birthday card, still carrying a neatly
creased twenty-dollar-bill. I couldn’t force my mind to reconcile how a living, breathing
man, a man so necessary, a man so connected to the living progression of life could be
missing, absent, while the mundane, useless, black and forgotten trimmings of his life
thrived and rejected reverence for him, existing as always, unchanged and unaffected.
And this time, in this moment, I knew the song. I didn’t need to allow my fingers the
pleasure or the ritual of skimming the words or the chains of healing phrases. When the
pomp and circumstance that death drags at its side calmed for the night, when the flesh
and bone that we had loved, and held, and kissed, and nurtured and made our own was
safely locked inside of the funeral home only a block away, I ran to Bruce. I turned him
up loud and I placed my hands on my speakers, reaching for him, wanting to feel the
words. And he sang to me of mundane objects, of pictures on nightstands and turned-on
TVs, of houses waiting for their owners to walk in, and of the presence of a needed loved
one who was missing, missing, missing. On that night, “You’re Missing” stepped in
beside “The Price You Pay,” beside “Bobby Jean” and “Backstreets,” but it stuck out a
little farther, was pulled from the shelf a little more often. The healing of its universality
34
was still there, still beating underneath the lyrics, but its mission was tougher, layered,
extended, and in a way unending.
The two most recent additions to the collection, the final two songs that have thus
far equaled the necessity and healing of “Backstreets,” came in tandem less than two
years ago. Two moments in my life, indelible moments connected through time and
person yet different in shape and pain and poison, struck in the summer of 2010. Within
the short span of eight days, my fiancé made the decision to end our relationship, to
dissolve the plans for our small and delicate December wedding, to extract himself from
the skin to skin connections that had promised to withstand sickness and health, wealth
and poverty, better and worse. He made the decision on a storm-threatened summer
afternoon, in a grey-green light that moved with thick swirls of steamed air, on an
afternoon just eight days after I had miscarried what would have been our first child.
Though my mind fumbled furiously, pain-drunken in the first few days and hours, I did
think of Bruce. I thought of him coherently enough to understand that I needed to
separate the pain before he could help me, to realize that I couldn’t lump the pains into
the same sore and treat it with the same salve.
I wasn’t completely foreign to miscarriage, I had known family members, friends,
who had experienced that loss, once, even more than once, and I knew them well enough
to see the pain at the edge of their eyes, to notice their stiffness around pregnant women
and infants, even years after the initial loss. I knew that the loss of the womb was
resilient, enduring, a formidable cancer of the motherly instinct that indicted women with
guilt and hopeless searches for answers and reasons. And judging it the most steep, the
35
most rocky of the pains that weighted my shoulders and my soul in those days, I set it
aside, I partitioned it off, trapped it in the pit of my gut until it’s time.
I dealt with him first not only because I judged him and his newly and sharply
existing absence to be the lesser of the evils at my door but also because I knew Bruce,
knew his music, and at this point, his life, and I judged him to be more skilled in the
healing of a broken heart, in the healing of the searing strife of disintegrated
relationships. I knew “Backstreets;” I knew “Bobby Jean,” knew countless others. In my
estimation the possible cures, the possible windows for universality were rich and varied
and thus I dug into them teeth first. And because in the pores of my skin, in the eyes of
my heart, I knew that my fiancé’s choice was in reaction to a choice of my own, my
fingers ran quickly over the lyrics, searching for their home, their balm, with direction,
with an intended destination. Though I had hoped throughout the duration of our
relationship and later our engagement that there was nothing that I could do, nothing that
I could choose or need that would drive him away, though I had often rested my head on
the pillow of that assurance, that spring I made a decision that I knew had the potential to
shatter that hope, to bust the feathers from that pillow into a slow and explosive scattering
of all that held us together. When I told him that I wouldn’t relocate, that I couldn’t, when
I chose a graduate program in creative writing and handed the mop and pots and pans and
sparkling floors of a city housewife to an unknown caretaker, I saw the fear, the
resistance in his eyes. And I knew then that the choice I was making could, at any point,
cease to be an addition to our life and become an either or, a taking of one thing and a
letting go of another. And despite knowing that, despite feeling it spin in my stomach and
36
bubble up in sweat at the back of my neck, I couldn’t choose him, not if it was an either
or situation, not if I had to stop studying the thing I loved. And in that knowledge and in
the reverberation of my situation, of my choice, in the soft, darkened lyrics of “Darkness
on the Edge of Town,” I swallowed him and the pain that he left. And I missed him and I
ached for him and I wrote, and I listened, and I wrote. And I found the healing
universality in the song, in the comfort of Bruce’s words about others who had given
away love for need and loved things, or maybe even themselves, more than people. I
knew that the hunger for writing and creativity that burned in my veins didn’t burn in the
veins of the man I loved. And I knew that if given a second chance I would still be there,
in the place I was in, not a second late, and I knew I would gladly pay the price for
wanting the thing I could only find in the place without him, the place where he chose not
to be, the place that he left for his house in Fairview.
The miscarriage was different. I didn’t know how to take it to Bruce, to carry it to
the invisible couch we shared, broken in my hands, and ask him to heal it, heal me.
Despite his talents, despite the calm in his hands and in his voice, I allowed my faith in
him to falter, questioned whether a man could write anything that could understand me or
the loss I was enduring. And the search for the universality was a struggle, a struggle of
days, of weeks, a struggle that became months. It was a struggle that was picked up,
turned over in my hands and put down again. It was a search and a brick wall and a
frustration and a surrender. And when the surrender turned cold and the frustration of the
fruitless search distanced itself, I would go again. We would go again. And we failed.
37
Time and time again we failed. There was nothing that could make it better, nothing that
could make it whole again, nothing that could take away the guilt or the self-loathing.
And then one day, a day that came nearly a year after the loss, a day on which I was
exhausted and bitter, I noticed the problem. I found it at the bottom of our long
relationship, at the very beginnings of me and Bruce. I remembered why I really loved
him, why I clung to his blanket, why I had curled up next to him on the invisible couch
for so many years. I remembered that the thing I really loved about Bruce was that for all
the years of my life, he had made “life right now,” despite its individual hells and
hardships, seem so full of opportunity, so focused on the second chance, so necessary, so
damn right. And it was then that I realized that not only had I wrongly accused him of
failing me, I, in turn, had failed him. I had been searching for the words to make it better,
for the words to take away the gnawing pain. I had been searching for something that he
never promised me. And when I admitted that sin, when I stopped searching for the cure
and started searching for the acknowledgement, starting searching for the right to be
broken, the right to give up, the right to feel it and consume it and let it consume me.
When I started searching for the right to wallow in it and the right to not have to get over
it, I found the universality, I found the commonality. I found “The Promise.” I stepped up
and stood next to Johnny and Billy and Terry. I joined the group who had followed a
promise that had shattered in their hands and, with them, I cashed in the dreams that had
been connected to that promise. I let the loss of my child steal something from down in
my soul and I stopped feeling obligated to salvage it. I didn’t let the medical truth or
justifications make a difference or stop a piece of my heart from going cold. I took the
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dream of motherhood; I took the dream of my child and threw it all away. And I let it hurt
me. I let it hurt me because Bruce finally made me believe that the hurt was okay.
These days, having spent twenty-eight years with Bruce and his music, I can’t
deny that his melodies, his words, his courage, and his voice have been integral parts of
my life. If you ask me why I love his music, I will answer you in the voice of a child with
three-year-old exuberance. I will hold up images of baby legs keeping the beats of the E
Street Band on coarse, brown carpet, images of baby fingers clutched to a blue-handled
hair brush, images of flying blonde curls and giggles, images of captivation void of
thought or knowledge. If you ask me why I love him, I will tell you that I love his
honesty, his initiative, his ability to do what he feels is right, even if the rest of the world
smacks his hands and tells him he’s wrong, his ability to make life right now just exactly
enough. But if you ask me why I need him, I will tell you that I need him because when
the air around me thins, when I struggle for breath and lose my voice, he stands in front
of a microphone and speaks words singular to his own life, to his own experience, and
makes them universal, sings them for everyone who has felt them, everyone who wants to
play painful strings to the backdrop of pained confessions and cant.
And if you ask me why I need to write, I’ll tell you that I need to write because I
can’t sing, can’t play the guitar or the harmonica, can’t shout my singular experiences
into universal comforts in front of thousands to the beats of the E Street Band.
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On Fathers
“My father’s house shines hard and bright it stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling, so cold and alone
Shining ‘cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned”
-Bruce Springsteen, My Father’s House
We are a world of children disappointed in our fathers. From death row, from the
county jail, from the barstool, from the dark alley where we buy our drugs, from the
principal’s office, from the abortion clinic, from the poverty level, from abusive
relationships, from the psychiatrist’s office. And from the house with the white-picketfence, from the corner office in the downtown high rise, from the author’s bio, from the
higher education commencement, from public office, from the movie screen. We have
failed because of them and succeeded in spite of them. We stain their hands with the
blood of our flaws and strip them of the gold hue of our glories. We fill hours of mid-day
television with talk shows that press dirty fingers into their chests. We call them deadbeat dads, sperm donors, and father failures.
But if a father is defined only as “a man who has begotten a child,” our mere
existence negates the failure with which we charge him. Our disappointment, then, must
exist not because we are the children of father failures—by definition, there can be no
such thing—but because we are the children of men who have failed to meet our
expectations, expectations that have been socially constructed, adopted and adapted,
changed by and with the changing of generations and cultures. And because it’s possible
to fail to meet the expectations of one while satisfying the expectations of many others,
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we are prohibited from merely modifying our labels, from dropping the parental signifier
and calling them dead-beats or failures.
And somehow, accepting that there is no set of criteria by which we as
disappointed children alone can deem them failures, as either fathers or men, seeing them
only as men who have failed to meet our expectations, grows our pain in a grossly
undersized pot. To have failed to meet the expectations of one human being seems
diminutive, inconsequential, incapable of igniting a pain of such endurance and size, but
it does.
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The Encyclopedia of My Father as I Know (of) Him: 1969-2011
Acceptance: I have learned, with time, to accept that you are human and were never
meant to be perfect. With every mistake I make in the adult world I believe more strongly
that your mistakes are just the same as mine, misguided decisions made on a clouded
whim, never intentionally malicious, never meant to destroy me. See also: rejection
Adultery: My father began an extra-marital affair in the early months of 1980, at
approximately the same time that I took up residence in my mother’s uterus. His cooffender was the dispatcher at the Ohio State Highway Patrol post. Though my mother
was suspicious, he denied it for months, telling her that he wanted a divorce because he
simply “wasn’t happy.”
Anger: Most of all, I’m angry with you for giving up on me, on us. I’m angry with you for
not trying harder to be my father, despite the circumstances. I’m angry with you for being
a quitter, for accepting our broken relationship. See Also: peace
Ashes: When my father’s mother passed away in the summer of 2009, he asked me to
come along as the family sorted through years of belongings and memories, adding that
he was sure there were things I might want. At the end of the day, as I was leaving, I said,
“You know that if you don’t call, I’ll probably never see you again, now that she’s gone.
There’s probably no one that would even tell me if you died.”
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“Oh, someone would tell you,” he said. “I’m going to be cremated. I put in the will that
my two kids have to spread my ashes in Montana or they won’t get a dime.” As I drove
away, I wondered when three had been reduced to two, when he stopped considering me
to be his child.
Barrel Chest: This condition developed over the latter half of the 1990s as a result of
decreased lung capacity due to at least forty years of smoking Marlboros. I noticed his
labored breathing from the stage of my high school gymnasium on awards day, the first
time I had seen him in nine years. The condition had worsened considerably by his
father’s funeral in 2005.
Baseball Glove: During their marriage, my father and mother spent hours playing “pitch
and catch” in their front yard. It became such a common activity that my father bought
my mother her own glove. On the side, he wrote her nickname, “Snooks,” in black ink.
When I joined my first softball team in grade school, my father showed up at my house
one day, unannounced, to pass down my mother’s glove. The glove has hung in my closet
for years; “Snooks” has faded, but is still easily found by the trained eye.
Best Husband Award: My father received this award for eight consecutive years, 19721979, during which he was married to my mother. The award was bestowed upon him by
an array of in-laws, friends, and co-workers, most of them jealous, as well as his wife,
who didn’t know just how lucky she soon would not be. When my parents got a divorce,
43
my uncle swore that he would never walk down the aisle. “If those two can’t make it,” he
said, “there’s no hope for anyone.” I’ve asked my mother more than once if things were
really that perfect. “He was my best friend,” she always says. “We had the perfect
marriage.”
Birth (of first child): I was born on February 25, 1981. That day, my father sobbed as he
looked at me through the window of the hospital nursery, his face tainted by thick snot
and thick regret. “If I had only waited until she was born,” he said to my mother’s sister.
My mother told me this story for the first time when I was in my mid-twenties, when the
cracks that he left in my flesh began to grow wider. It was the best evidence she had to
support the theory that he never really wanted to leave me behind, a theory that she
believed would mend me to some extent. I still remember the pain in her gaze as she said
the words, hurting herself with the admission she alone couldn’t justify the thick regret.
Birthdays: The last time that my father acknowledged my birthday, I had just broken in
to double digits. He stopped by for less than five minutes to drop of a boom box.
Sometimes I wonder if he still remembers the exact date of my birth. I can never decide
whether it is better that he has truly forgotten the day or that he chooses not to
acknowledge it.
Blame: My father blames my mother for the fact that he started smoking again. He
blames his parents for the fact that he can, at times, be a sub-par human being who makes
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irresponsible decisions. I believe that he blames me for the fact that he can’t escape the
memory of those decisions.
Bon Jovi: At the age of four, I traded an Oak Ridge Boys cassette for my father’s
cassette of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. We listened to it in his red Trans Am on our
drive to and back from Pizza Hut on one of the rare occasions that he kept his visitation.
“Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame. You give love a bad name.” The trade took
place at the end of his visit. I really preferred The Oak Ridge Boys’ “Elvira” over Bon
Jovi, though I liked both, but I gave in to the trade because the Bon Jovi cassette
belonged to him. Though I lost the cassette, I held onto the case for years before tossing it
into the trash pile the last time I moved.
Brother(s): My father is the second of three sons, but lived a significant portion of his
life convinced that he was the least loved. He was probably at least partially justified, the
older always received more—more attention, more money, more everything, and, as for
the younger, few can ever out-do the dead.
Bruce: Bruce was my father’s younger brother. He died nine days after a head injury that
occurred in his first high school football game. He asked my father, the former star
quarterback of the team, to be there that night. My father didn’t go. “Why would I want
to go over there just to watch you get yourself killed?” When Bruce did get himself
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killed, my father seemed to be convinced that the rest of his family wished that he would
have died instead.
Cake: As we sorted through my grandmother’s belongings after her death, my father
flipped quickly through already ravaged photo albums, yanking out anything that had my
face in it and tossing it into my “take home” pile. When I looked through his choices
later, I found a picture of him helping me cut my 5 th birthday cake. His hand is on my
hand as we slice through it together. I wish I remembered that moment.
Candy: When I was between the ages of two and four, my father used candy, at times in
excessive amounts, to bribe me into wiping my tears. I never wanted to go on visitation
with him, and I cried hysterically every time he picked me up, sometimes to the extent
that he would carry me away while I screamed, and sometimes to the extent that my
mom’s father would get red in the face and tell him to get the hell out, without me. On
the days that he carried me out screaming, I would put up a valiant fight until we reached
the row of thick hedges by the corporation sign, when I knew that my own defeat was
certain. It was then that I would inquire about the bribes that he had made beneath my
screams. “Got any candy, Dad?”
Cemetery: When my dad’s father died in the fall of 2005, he, along with my uncle and
male cousins, carried his casket to his final resting place, next to Bruce. From under the
green awning, I could see that each step, for my father, was unsteady, unsure, a physical
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challenge. In those short moments, I wondered if it would be long before I watched him
carried to his own resting place, and if the finality on that day would be something I
could ever conquer.
Cheating: My father cheats, cards mostly, but anything competitive is game. Rumors
suggest that he set the scales back at the highway patrol in order to make his weigh in.
The family tells of his cheating at croquet, subsequently defending himself with the
mallet. He cheated me at a game of Crazy 8s that we played on my living room floor
when I was six so that my two-year-old half-brother could win.
Child Support: For the first nine years of my life, my father paid his court-ordered child
support directly to my mother, on the months that he saw fit to pay it at all. Many
months, he simply “didn’t have it” to give. One month, he couldn’t pay because my halfbrother’s purebred dog had gotten run over by a car. My father had to buy him a new one.
When I was nine, the court system finally noticed that my father had not been paying
child support through them. He told my mother that in return for notifying the court that
he was “current” on his payments, he would be a better father to me. After the day we
went to court, I didn’t see my father for nine years, until I was 18, until he no longer paid
child support.
Christmas: There are only two Christmases in my mind that include distinct memories
of my father. The first is the Christmas of 1988; I was 7. Though I hadn’t attended his
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family’s Christmas celebrations since I was a baby, that year his mother pleaded with me
to come. Though I was hesitant, I agreed on the condition that she would pick me up and
take me home, preventing me from having to go with my father. (I insisted on this
condition because, once, when I was a toddler, my father had taken me to her house on an
overnight visitation, and, though he had promised to take me back to my mother if I
decided I didn’t want to stay the night, he hadn’t. When I told him, just before bedtime
that I wanted my mom, he acted as though he would keep his promise and loaded me and
my things into his car. Instead, though, he drove me around until I fell asleep and then
took us both back to his mother’s house.) His mother understood my fear, remembered
the instance when I was a toddler, and agreed to pick me up and take me home if I would
come up that year, on Christmas Eve. All was well until the night came to a close. My
father belittled me for making his mother drive in the dark and, when she defended me
and loaded me into her van, he left black tire tracks in her driveway and didn’t speak to
her again for a long time.
The second is the Christmas of 2004; I was 23. Again, it was my father’s mother who
begged me to attend the family celebration. Her motivation was that her husband, my
grandpa, was ill and wanted desperately to have all of the family together for what could
be his last Christmas. Because of this, I gave in. When I walked through the door, amidst
the smiles and exuberant welcomes of everyone else, my father dropped his head into his
hands and sighed, loudly enough that everyone stopped. And looked.
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Cigarettes: My father was a smoker when my mother met him in 1969. Eventually, they
were smokers together. Some years after that, they became non-smokers together. That
lasted a few weeks, until my mother decided that she just really wanted to be a smoker
again and my father decided it was no use for her to be a smoker without him. When I
was twenty-three, I ran into my father in the Foodland parking lot. He was smoking a
cigarette and coughing. “You really need to quit that,” I said. “Hey, I quit once, and your
mom had to start in again. It’s her fault,” he shot back. “Anyway, It’s going to kill you,” I
countered. “My life was over a long time ago,” he said.
Comprehension: Sometimes I understand you. Sometimes in the dark night of
conversations with my boyfriend about his fiancé, of the swallowing bitterness oozing
from the miscarriage burned in my memory, of my baseless hatred of pregnant women
and mothers, I understand why you didn’t care to fight back against life’s circumstances,
to be my father despite the difficulty it would have caused. Sometimes I understand how
you became un-feeling, cut-off, at times horrible. Sometimes I love the bitterness, too.
Sometimes it feels good seeping through my skin, making me angry and cold. See also:
confusion
Concussion: Not long before my father entered his adultery/divorce phase, he sustained a
significant concussion while playing football on concrete without a helmet. He was “out”
for quite a while. When I was a few months old, he made an appointment with a doctor
and requested an elective CT scan to determine if the injury had done permanent damage
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to his brain. In a conversation with my mother, he eluded to the fact that he was trying to
find a reason for his drastic change in behavior. The CT scan was negative, and though
the doctor informed him that there could have been changes that weren’t visible any
longer, he never mentioned it again.
Confusion: Despite the fact that many say we are so much alike, I have never completely
understood you, your decisions and motives. I don’t understand your ability to reason
that leaving your child behind was as acceptable as leaving your wife. I don’t understand
your ability to raise two children, yet leave the first behind with such ease. When your
grandchild died in my uterus, I knew I could never understand how you live your life,
passing on chance after chance to know your daughter. See also: comprehension
Contentment: Sometimes, I’m alright. Sometimes I thank God that he brought a man
into my mother’s life who filled the void you left behind. Sometimes I’m satisfied with the
fact that he taught me how to drive and threatened the life out of young boys. Sometimes,
the dreams of my wedding are picture perfect without you walking me down the aisle.
Sometimes it’s no big deal that my future children will never know their biological
grandfather. “Sometimes you have to do things to keep the peace,” your mother always
said at the end of our conversations about you. Sometimes that makes perfect sense. See
also: regret
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Cut-Outs: I have an album full of pictures of my father’s arms, legs, hands, and ears.
When the pictures were passed down to me from his mother, he had been carefully
removed from my presence like a strangling cancer from a necessary organ. My
grandmother passed away before I could ever find the courage to ask her exactly why.
The pictures comprise the vast majority of images that I have of my father.
Despair: There are days when it’s completely over, when you’re a hopeless asshole,
when I don’t care if you die and wouldn’t attend your funeral if someone paid me. On
these days, you’ve made your bed and deserve to lie in it, a miserable, regretful dog.
You’re the one missing out on my life and our relationship and I am completely fine
without you. For better or worse, these days never last. See also: hope
Dispatcher: In 1980, when the patrol post hired a 19-year old dispatcher with big hair
and an even bigger chest, my 30-year-old father said, “You just wait and see, that girl’s
going to get someone in trouble.” Months later, after he had requested a divorce from my
pregnant mother, suspicious co-workers began to compare the schedules of time off at the
post. My father and the dispatcher had coordinated their days off for an entire year,
vacation included. Luckily for my father, when suspicion became near-fact, his boss was
also bedding a young item, and, therefore, my father managed to hold on to his job. No
one really got in trouble.
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Gun(s): My father loved guns. I don’t suppose that there’s much of anything special
about that trait. Cops love guns, wear guns, flaunt guns, shoot cats off of porches at
midnight with guns. Somewhere in between his fleeting passions for learning to fly and
restoring old cars, entered his passion for guns, even outside of work. When firing guns,
buying guns, skeet shooting, and shooting bottles at the strip pit were no longer enough to
satisfy him, he took to loading his own shells, in the linen closet. His interest in guns led
him to The Gun Shop, a place owned by a man who went to gun shows and partied with
Hank Williams Jr., a man who was the father of the dispatcher. Not long after my father
became close with the folk of The Gun Shop, my mother found him in the living room
crying because he had loaned a gun from the shop to the neighbor’s nephew and he
couldn’t get it back.
Hope: There are days when we are both as young as we’ve ever been and there’s still
more than enough sand in the top of the hour glass to allow us to somehow create or
repair ourselves into some semblance of the form of father and daughter. Some days I
imagine the words “I’m sorry” and “I love you.” Sometimes I watch the video of us when
I was little and convince myself that the love I see as you wipe the sticky hands of a twoyear-old me with a gigantic sucker is still somewhere between us, lost in a box mislabeled
“angry scraps of nothing.” Sometimes I know we’ll turn it around. Sometimes everything
will be alright. See also: despair
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Illness: When I was in the third grade, I was hospitalized for what my pediatrician
described as one of the most significant infections of the sinus cavities that he had ever
seen. It wasn’t life-threatening, of course, but, for a young child, I was significantly ill.
My father visited for less than a half-hour. The only thing that I still remember about that
visit was the look on his face as he walked into my room and said, “What am I going to
have to do, put you in a bubble?” My father doesn’t know that two years later I almost
died from the combination of a severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic and bronchial
pneumonia. He doesn’t know that a little less than a year ago, at the age of twenty-nine, I
nearly died from complications as the result of a perforated gallbladder.
Laugh: My father laughs through loosely closed lips, short bursts of air with an edge of
character. I’ve never heard him laugh with his mouth open, from his gut, like he really
means it. Years ago, when I first started smoking, someone said something funny while
my lungs were full of smoke and as I tried to laugh and also avoid choking, I heard my
father. Sometimes I do it on purpose, just remember something good, just to remember
that I’m his.
Little Pink Line: My father decided that he wanted to have a child three years before I
was conceived. My mother, then, was happy either way, but because he wanted to be a
father, she wanted to give him a child. After three years of failed cycles, a pink line
appeared on a clunky home pregnancy test, newly available in small town America. He
was excited then, dancing around the house. That little pink line was the last gift that he
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would ever give to my mother. Weeks later, the attention and the money was funneled
into designer clothes and lavish dinners for the dispatcher.
Motorcycles: My father was a Goldwing man in the years that he was married to my
mother. My parents were avid riders, riding on vacation, riding in the rain. One night
when my mother was pregnant with me but didn’t yet know, they laid the Goldwing
down after riding into an oil spill on a major curve. They stopped riding as much when
my mother found out she was pregnant and after he left, my father didn’t own a
motorcycle for years. When I spoke with him after my grandma’s death, he suggested
that he might use some of his inheritance to buy another motorcycle, to start riding again.
“(This) Old Man”: “This Old Man” was my father’s go-to sing-song nursery rhyme. I
remember him singing it at least once every time I saw him. Even now I sometimes sing
it to myself when I think of him, but I never finish. “This old man, he played seven, he
played knick-knack up in heaven, with a knick-knack patty whack give a dog a bone, this
old man came rolling home.”
Pallbearer: My father and his older brother, Wayne, were two of the pallbearers at their
younger brother’s funeral. My mother once asked him how he managed to do something
so difficult. He looked at her, dumbfounded. “He was my brother,” he said “I couldn’t let
someone else carry him.” Every time I hear the lyrics, “he ain’t heavy; he’s my brother,”
I think of my father, and, for a fleeting moment, I feel for him, cry for him, as if he is
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nothing more than a human being, so much less than the flawed man who peers from
behind my insecurities.
Peace: Sometimes the anger isn’t accessible. Sometimes there are holocaust survivors,
abused and molested children, orphaned children, pregnant mothers with dead soldier
husbands, motherless children wearing pink ribbons. Sometimes I am the blessed one
with only the hidden scar of a dead-beat father. See also: anger
Poet: My father was a poet. He published frequently on scraps of paper, small snapshots
of his mind that existed as his own brief treasures before being quickly abandoned to an
obscure existence under the dresser or in the kitchen drawer where my mother would find
them months or years later. He delighted in the making, the joining of words, the
spontaneous creation of expression, but never found purpose in revision, never desired to
revisit the feelings he captured. As a writer, I find his reckless abandon impossible to
understand. As his daughter, it makes perfect sense. “The moon came out / And hid the
light / That shined the way to home,” he wrote. The lines were scrawled out on one of the
last scraps that my mother would ever find. They are the only lines she can accurately
remember.
Planes: Somewhere between the fascination with motorcycles, guns, and old cars, my
father decided that flying was for him, as well. Trying to put his investment in the license
to good use, he once returned keys to his mother who lived less than an hour’s drive away
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by flying over her house and dropping them out of the plane. The keys have never been
found.
Promise(s): My father isn’t good with promises. He’s alright at making them, sure, but
it’s the keeping that becomes problematic. I promise I’ll call. I promise I’ll stay longer
next time. I promise I come see you next week. I promise I’ll take you home, if you want.
I promise I’ll be a better father. I promise we’ll spend more time together. I promise.
Recess: When I was in the second grade, my father made an unannounced visit at
morning recess. I first spotted him from the swings, my eyes peaking just above the collar
of my reversible winter coat. He was in the patrol car, in uniform. My classmates slowed
the play that had previously consumed them, all watching as the big state trooper walked
up to me. “I was in town and thought you might want twenty bucks. You can take Mom
out for a sandwich later, huh?” I smiled. He tucked the tightly folded bill in my coat
pocket and ruffled my curls.
Regret: Sometimes, you are irreplaceable. Sometimes even the best memories of my stepfather counting bugs in a ditch as I drive the old Cadillac down a country road too close
to white line lose their importance, their joy and dissolve into nothing but the pain and
regret of your absence. At times, the good in my life, all of it, is reduced to your shadow
and left lacking. Sometimes my history is full of holes that I can never fill, holes with your
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name on them that make me empty, empty of past, of present, and of future. See also:
contentment
Rejection: There are times when I cannot, despite effort, rationalize or accept that
anything you are to me, anything you’ve done to me is alight or excusable. In these
moments you are not a flawed human, one among many, one like me. In these moments I
question your humanity, your soul. In these moments I am not considerate of your
motives, you justifications; I am not interested in excusing you. In these moments you are
impervious and destructive and accountable for all the broken pieces of me upon which I
write your name. In these moments no one can make up for your absence. Your parents,
my step-father, my mother’s parents are all helpless to help you, help me. See also:
acceptance.
Rhubarb: My father loves rhubarb. Pies are great, sure, but it’s the raw stuff, right out of
the ground with flecks of dirt that mix with salt and saliva to make mud, that he really
wants. My uncle had a small patch of it that grew behind his hand-crafted roasting pit and
my father raided it every time he came around, when it was in season. He would take salt
and recklessly dump it into a thick pile on the nearest surface, lick the dirty end of the
reddish stalk, enormous green leaf still attached, with his slobbery tongue and mash into
the salt until it was crusted in a heart-stopping mess. Sometimes, he’d hold it up to my
lips and say, “Try it, Skeeter.” He was serious, but I would wrinkle my child-sized pug-
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ish nose and yank my face away. “Daddy, you didn’t even wash that! Momma wouldn’t
like this.”
Rights (Grandparents’): My father sat with my mother on her side of the courtroom on
the day that his parents’ suit for visitation rights was brought before a judge. At the time,
he wasn’t getting along with his parents and had stopped taking me to see them during his
visitation. His argument to the judge was that, had he remained married to my mother,
they, as a couple, could have certainly decided not to allow his parents to see their child
without a case being brought into court. Sobs and rivers of snot accompanied his
additional argument that they were the reason why he was so messed up in the first place
and that they had no business influencing his child in that same manner if he chose not to
allow it. The judge cautioned all of them to work it out on their own. In my mother’s car,
after the ordeal had finished, the sobs and snot returned. “I had it all,” he said. “I had a
beautiful baby girl and a wife that would have done anything for me.”
Salvation: My father was expected to follow rules when he was dating my mother. There
would be no visiting on the weekend if he didn’t attend church on Sunday, per the redfaced orders of my mother’s father. It’s not that my father minded it, but it wasn’t a rule
upheld in his own home, by his own parents, Harry and Jean. Though Jean was raised
Pentecostal, and Harry had more celibate priest brothers and nun sisters than anyone
could name, they had both stepped away from their respective religions when Harry left
his first wife and married Jean, 19-years-old at the time and fifteen years his junior, a
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scenario that my father would repeat at nearly the same point in his own life. Still, at the
time, when my parents were merely teenagers, my father loved my mother enough to
subject himself to the “fire and brimstone” sermons of Pastor Charley Norris each
Sunday, stories of hell’s flesh-eating worms and of the woman who begged her husband
to get saved with her, resisting salvation for herself because he wouldn’t, and died before
him, leaving him to grip the pew each Sunday, unable to accept Jesus because he had
signed his wife’s lease in hell. On one of those Sundays, my father went down front
during the altar call. He sobbed and his signature snot streaks were more present than
ever. Through the sobs, he made his reasons clear. “I’m doing this for Boo,” he said. “I’m
doing this for my brother, Bruce”
Skeeter: When I was a baby, my father called me “skeeter”. My mother says that he
thought I resembled a mosquito.
“Stand Tall”: When my father announced that he wanted a divorce, my mother moved
out. She could have stayed there, in the house, with him, until the divorce was final, until
I was born, but she chose to leave when she could no longer scrape away the thick layer
of bullshit on his “let’s just be best friends” attitude. In the first few weeks after she
moved herself out and in with her brother, living out of an old laundry basket, my father
would call her late at night, threaten to run his patrol car into a bridge abutment, and play
Burton Cumming’s “Stand Tall.” “Sometimes late at night, when there’s nothing here
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except my old piano, I’d almost give my hands to make you see my way. Stand tall, don't
you fall. Oh, don't go and do something foolish…”
State Trooper: My father was an Ohio State Trooper for twenty-five years. He went to
the academy just after he married my mother, and would spend the week away before
coming home for the weekend. His first patrol post station was in Wilmington. He picked
out their first house, on his own, before he brought my mother there to be with him. My
parents lived there for nearly a year before my father’s transfer closer to home was
granted. After he divorced my mother, he went back there to visit, back to their little
apartment, back to the days before the dispatcher.
“Sunshine on my Shoulders”: When I was a little girl, my father used to sing to me.
One of his favorites was John Denver’s “Sunshine on my Shoulders.” My mother tells me
that he picked it because it happened to be the theme song for a show that opened to a
man walking along with his little girl on his shoulders. I have the song on an old record
and sometimes I play it on my mother’s stereo. When I listen to the lyrics against the
melody, I find it odd that just as my father found it fitting for me, then, I find it fitting for
him now. “If I had a song that I could sing for you, I’d sing a song to make you feel this
way.” See also: acceptance, anger, comprehension, confusion, contentment, despair,
hope, peace, regret, rejection
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On Believing
“Seen a man standin’ over a dead dog lyin’ by the highway in a ditch
He’s lookin’ down kinda puzzled pokin’ that dog with a stick
Got his car door flung open he’s standin’ out on highway 31
Like if he stood there long enough that dog’d get up and run
Struck me kinda funny seem kinda funny sir to me
Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe”
-Bruce Springsteen, Reason to Believe
As humans, we believe because we see. We believe because we hear. We believe
because we know. But we believe, also, because we need to, even in the uncertain or the
certainly impossible. It is said that necessity is the mother of invention, but it is also the
mother of belief.
We believe that we will beat the odds. We believe, despite the grimy feel of a
grim diagnosis, that we will beat cancer. We believe, despite the hum of humanistic
machines, that our brother, sister, father, mother, husband, wife will breathe again on
their own. We believe, despite the negativity of the numbers, that our candidate will win
the election. We believe, despite the rampant nature of the rejection, that someday our
creativity, our art, will find a home, an audience. We believe, despite the searing sting of
infidelity, that our marriages, our relationships, will survive, and be better for their trial.
We believe, despite the credibility of the tales, that our friends would not forsake us.
And when the clock ticks beyond those possibilities, we resituate, we readjust, we
revise our belief and continue forward. We believe, despite cancer’s individual victory in
battle, that the heart in the fight of one will ultimately win the war for others. We believe,
despite death, that we did all that we could have done and that our brother, sister, father,
mother, husband, wife is in a better place. We believe, despite losing the race, that the
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ideals that inspired the campaign will still ignite positive change and ultimately win. We
believe, despite rejection, that our art, our creativity, though homeless, has still made us
better for the creating, and that that, somehow, is just enough. We believe, despite
divorce, despite the end, that the relationship has changed us in a way that we needed, in
a way that only failure could, and we believe that there is another door waiting to be
opened, another gift of love to receive. We believe, despite the undeniable proof of
betrayal that the failure of our friends was unintended, an accident, or a failure in our best
interest, a necessary let down.
And so belief only changes, only renovates its home to appropriately match the
context of the time, but never fully leaves us. In times of plenty, times of success, in our
time on the mountain, it may rest in quiet places, in the down-beat of the heart, in the
recess of the mind, but never wanders far from our call of need. And when plenty turns to
scarcity, when success disintegrates into failure, when we descend the mountain and once
again know the dark shadow, we find it once again; we find a reason to believe.
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When I Was Little, I Believed
It was an ordinary day. My mom and I were at home, getting ready to leave for a
destination that she has long since forgotten. She picked me up and started to make her
way to the front door, turning off lights and grabbing other necessities along the way. As
she carried me, I began to play with her long dark hair, picking up chunks, examining,
exchanging them for new chunks. It wasn’t anything that I had ever done before, and she
noticed.
“Suzanne, what are you doing?”
“Mommy? Can I see them eyes in the back of your head?”
My mom had told me on more than one occasion that she had eyes in the back of
her head. She used this phrase as a warning, a side note given to drown any desire I might
have had to try out, behind her back, the things I knew I could never get away with in
front of her. Unaware that she was raising a young literalist, my mom never considered
transforming the catchy phrase into a more accurate expression. Sure, she could have
said: I can see you even when you think I can’t because as sneaky as you think you are, I
am sneakier. But is there really a parent alive who, when using the well-known phrase,
considers that their child will take them literally, will give the phrase any considerable
amount of thought, will believe them, will try to sneak glimpses of these misplaced
eyeballs? There probably isn’t, but there should be because it can happen. It has
happened.
When I was little, I believed that my mother had eyeballs in the back of her head.
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Though my beliefs about the location of eyes, specifically my mother’s, came
first, other beliefs about eyes emerged some time later.
Eye crud. Crusties. Eye boogers. Eye gunk. Eye matter. Sleep. Sleepies. Duck
poop. When I was little, I had a fascination with ducks. I was partial to the ducks that
lived by the pond at the bottom of the hill near my house—Greggy Googenheimer, Dumb
Duck (Dumb Duck was named thus because he swam with his head under the water for
minutes on end, failing to come up for air), Greggy Googenheimer’s wife, and White
Duck—but, I wasn’t unfalteringly loyal. I knew other ducks.
My duck fascination led to frequent trips to Krodel Park during visitation with my
father. I suppose that the ease with which a sack of old bread and a plethora of ducks
could keep a two-year-old happy for several hours is an undeniable temptation for any
man. On one visit, now immortally preserved in the form of several enormous framed
photographs that once hung in the homes of my mother and grandmothers and won an
amateur photo contest sponsored by the Columbus Dispatch sometime in the early 80s,
my father and I fed the ducks with his girlfriend and her mother, Betty.
Later that day, my father drove me home and handed me off to my mother. I went
to the living room and got down to business with my toys, digging deep into my
enormous boxes, spreading them across the floor. Mom joined me, watching from her
chair as I slung out everything that she had carefully picked up while I was gone.
“Oh Suzanne, come here.” She approached me, hand out, and began to wipe at the
corner of my eyes with her index finger. “You have duck poop in your eyes”
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“Must have been where me and Betty was feedin’ them ducks,” I said.
According to my mom, I wasn’t joking. I’m not even sure that a child of the age I
was then knows how to make jokes, especially sarcastic ones of that nature, but,
nevertheless, according to my mom who has told me this story countless times, I was
incredibly serious. Without question, I believed that the stuff that my mom was removing
from the corners of my eyes was real duck shit.
When I was little, I believed that a duck pooped in my eye.
My memory of this belief on duck poop endures not only because of the humor
inherent in my small innocence or because of its prominent preservation in photography,
but also because I own few positive childhood memories in which my father plays a
major role.
My parents separated four months before I was born. Their ten-year marriage
came to an end when I was less than a year old. I have never lived in the same house with
my father, and I never had the chance to spend any significant amount of time with him
that didn’t involve the presence of his girlfriend, the woman who tried to be my mother’s
best friend, the woman who broke up their marriage. I didn’t know this, though, when I
was little, that she broke up their marriage. I only knew that she was always with my
father when I was with him, and, somehow, always seemed to be between the two of us.
On a VHS tape given to me by my grandmother years ago, there is a conversation
between my father and a three-year-old version of me. I’m splashing in a baby pool in the
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back yard, even though the leaves on the ground show that it’s probably way too cold to
be in the water. My father and his mother are sitting in lawn chairs next to the pool.
“Are you my buddy, Suzanne?” he asks.
I scoop water with a red sand bucket and dump it over my body.
“Hmm?” I toss the bucket and return to splashing.
“Are you my buddy?” he repeats.
“No.” I don’t look at him this time.
“Who’s buddy are ya?” he asks.
“I’m mommy’s buddy,” I answer, head down.
“Who’d you say my buddy was?”
“Hmm?” I ask again.
“Whose buddy am I?” he asks, rephrasing slightly.
“You’re Missy’s buddy,” I say, hands folded, eyes focused into the clear water.
This specific VHS tape also contains a conversation between my grandmother and
father about another bomb that I had dropped in his lap during the morning’s drive to her
home. Apparently, the words bothered him, ground into his psyche hard enough that they
forced him to confess the small horror to his mother. My thesis on who was whose
buddy was obviously either prefaced or followed my admission that I hated him.
According to his account of the events, my exact words were, “I don’t like ya. I don’t like
ya. I hate ya.”
That’s the hard thing about being an adult, about dealing with things that begin in
a child’s state of mind. I can no longer access the specific thought process of my three
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year old self. I can speculate, however, that I hated him then for the same reason that I
hate him now—because his girlfriend was the leader of a pack of things in his life that
always mattered more than me.
When I was little, I believed that my father loved his girlfriend more than he loved
me.
I wasn’t the only one who believed that my father loved his girlfriend more than
me. My mom’s dad, my pawpaw, believed this as well, and he made this unmistakably
clear in the first weeks of my life as he lunged for and subsequently chased my father
from the hospital room where I slept sick in a metal crib. Security was called and my
father, the strong Ohio State Patrolman, managed to escape, but the message was
successfully received.
I was full of fire as a child. I wanted to see it all and do it all, at least twice. There
was a constant bubbling desire in my stomach to cross the invisible lines that separated
the behavior of a proper little girl and the actions of a wild child living on the edge, and
there was no one who delighted in or encouraged the rebel tot persona that I had
perfected more than my pawpaw.
Often, the bubbling bubbled over and burst out, and when it did, my pawpaw’s
cheeks turned a warm rosy color and an emboldening smile threatened to divide his face
into two separate halves. This smile was always present when I rode my Cabbage Patch
big-wheel in circles on my grandparents’ concrete patio until I gained the speed
necessary to shoot like a mad woman down the textured mini-ramp at the side, crushing
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my grandma’s flowers and shrieking with delight. His smile only widened grandma
tightened her hands into shaking fists and screamed to him, “Charles! Do something with
that kid!” in painful horror. He did nothing in response to her plea, and, looking back, I
wonder if maybe my pawpaw’s encouragement of the wild behavior that made my heart
sing didn’t have a little to do with the fact that it was a time-tested way to drive my
grandma crazy while at the same time keeping his own hands clean.
Still, the smile was there, as well, on the night I escaped my mother’s attention as
she drew my bath water and made a naked dash through the kitchen and into the front
room where, with hands in the air, I hollered, “Weeeeee,” and took a naked victory lap
around the coffee table in front of my grandparents who had been quietly watching the
eleven o’clock news. It was there on the Saturdays that he drove the RV to the grocery
store simply because I wanted to ride in the big front seat, when he helped me sneak my
rabbit past grandma and into the living room so that I could pet its soft ears while I
watched “The Price Is Right,” when he put chocolate milk in a bottle for the five-year-old
version of me despite my grandma’s protests that he was going to “kill me with that
stuff,” when we broke the teeter-totter, when we narrowly avoided the spray of my
grandma’s pet skunks, and when we watched WWE wrestling on Saturday nights and he
was careful not to spoil the experience by letting on that he knew it was fake.
When I was little, I believed that there was nothing my pawpaw wouldn’t do to see
me smile.
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I never considered that there was an element of theatrical performance involved in
the WWE. I assumed that, though certainly strange, “Animal” really did have a deep need
to eat the turnbuckles and that Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off at home too. I saw no
reason to think that Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake didn’t actually cut hair in his spare
time or that Jake “The Snake” Roberts didn’t take his python everywhere he went. I felt
about the WWE the same way that I felt about Godzilla.
We were in a motel in Ashtabula, Ohio, Pawpaw and Grandma in one bed, Mom
and me in the other. There was a suspected murderer in the room next door, but we
wouldn’t find that out until the next morning when the cops came, beating on the door,
ushering us out of our room and to my grandparents’ motorhome. Grandpa traveled for
work and he took the bunch of us with him on a regular basis. There were a lot of trips—
motels, hotels, campgrounds. I don’t remember this night for any particular reason,
except for what we were watching on television, and, of course, for the fact that we slept
next to a suspected murderer.
We were watching King Kong vs. Godzilla, a personal favorite. I cared very little
for the overgrown ape, but Godzilla was a different story altogether. There was a
magnetic attraction between us, me and Godzilla, and on this night, he caused the
bubbling to bubble over and burst out. I was jumping on the bed. My bed. Pawpaw and
Grandma’s bed. One bed. The other bed. When jumping was over, the bubbling was still
bursting out, and I plopped down on the bed with my head at the bottom, watched
Godzilla upside down, and pounded the headboard with my feet. Grandma pleaded with
me to settle down, grunted her pleas like a woman with a tortured soul—Pawpaw smiled.
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It was after midnight, and in her last effort to calm the bubbling, she said, “Baby. You
better quit that. You’re making so much noise that the man next door is gonna come over
here and kill you!” We laughed later about just how right she could have been.
Still, though the murderer is interesting, Godzilla is the real point. I had a massive
crush on Godzilla. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t even puppy love. I had never
once considered the fact that he might not be real. I did consider, once or twice, where he
lived. My first, and most obvious, guess was that he made his residence in Japan.
However, after taking his movie-star status into consideration, I settled upon the idea that
he must have relocated to the United States, probably California.
When I was little, I believed that I could marry Godzilla.
Dave Parker was a major league baseball player. He played right field for the
Cincinnati Reds from 1984 to 1987. In those years, Pawpaw, Grandma, Mom, and I spent
at least three or four weekends a season in the yellow seats above right field in Riverfront
Stadium. Dave, or Davey, as I lovingly referred to him, had a knack for bringing out my
single dimple. I would stand against the concrete wall in front of our seats and watch
intently as he stood in right field, fielded balls, and, on a few cherished occasions,
glanced back into the stands—at me of course. At least once during each game, I would
announce to my pawpaw, and to everyone else within earshot, that I just might consider
marrying “Davey” when I grew up.
My love of Davey and our frequent visits to watch the Reds play resulted in the
purchase of a life size poster of Dave Parker as a gift from my pawpaw. In those years, I
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pleaded with my mom to unroll it each night and lay it on the floor so that I could see if I
was getting any closer to being as tall as Davey. After the measuring was over, I would
stand back and look at the poster, considering him, reaffirming that Davey Parker was, in
fact, the only thing standing between me and Godzilla, and that my short stature was the
only thing standing between me and Davey Parker.
When I was little, I also believed that I could marry Davey Parker, as soon as I
could match him in height.
Every Saturday morning, without fail, I watched “Winnie the Pooh” in bed with
my grandma. It wasn’t an idle activity. We took it seriously—the same kind of
seriousness with which grown women approached “Dallas.” We cried when Rabbit had
to let go of his bird, Kessie, after raising her for several episodes. We discussed our
favorite characters at length and made confessions about those that got on our nerves.
Grandma couldn’t stand Tigger; Rabbit was her favorite. This makes perfect sense to me
now, considering that my grandma was a sucker for all things orderly and neat and had a
green thumb that grew whole peach trees from seeds that she idly tossed out the back
porch door. My favorite was Pooh, and I was beyond annoyed with Piglet’s stuttering.
Yet, as seriously as we took our “Winnie the Pooh,” I never really looked at the
characters on the cartoon as the animals after which they were modeled, though I admit
that the names were obvious. Still, a wealth of inconsistencies supports my inability to
make such all-important connections in those days. Tigers don’t walk on two feet the way
Tigger does, and they certainly don’t bounce on their tails. I’ve never seen a rabbit in my
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life that has fur an oddly puke-ish shade of yellow, and Eeyore doesn’t look like any
donkey I have ever seen. Certainly, I have never seen a pig with a dark pink striped body,
and, still today, can’t pinpoint any solid logic that would forbid an armadillo from being
named “Piglet.”
When I was little, I believed that Piglet was an armadillo.
Cartoons were only a small portion of my grandma’s morning ritual. A much
larger ration of her time revolved around the bathroom. Some elements were a joint
effort. We washed our faces together with the translucent orange Neutrogena bar soap,
pausing some days to stop and laugh at the comparison of our white soapy faces in the
big rectangular mirror. We brushed our teeth side by side—she used her long handled
yellow toothbrush and I opted for my white one that had the Hamburgler on the handle,
but we both used her signature Gleem toothpaste. I bowed out when it came time for the
Listerine. She had convinced me once, with her slightly smiling plump cheeks, but once
had been more than enough. I could barely stomach the smell, and the sheer thought of
putting the caustic liquid in my mouth drove me from the bathroom with brute force. It
was for the best. After the Listerine gargle, there was the visit with Mrs. Jones, and I
couldn’t be there for that, anyway
My Grandma visited Mrs. Jones at least once a day, sometimes twice, but always
announced.
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When I was little, I believed that there was a woman by the name of Mrs. Jones
who lived in my grandma’s bathroom and only came out when my grandma was in there
alone with the door shut.
Names were a difficult thing for me to navigate when I was a child—names of
cartoon characters, names for bodily functions. I suppose that it only makes sense that my
own names would have been problematic as well.
Uncle Randy only ever used my real name a handful of times, and never in a
jovial or non-threatening tone. If I was Suzanne, I had unquestionably done something
wrong. I had been “Puck” to him for as long as I could remember. For years I suppose
that I was too young to question it, or even process it. However, there came a point in my
childhood when I started to wonder. Still, considering that the act that admitting the need
for clarification on anything that appears to be widely accepted reveals one as being
either left out or too terribly stupid to understand, I wasn’t about to break the silence and
actually ask why my uncle had chosen such an odd and enduring nickname. The only
“type” of puck that I was familiar with, that I could even think of, was a hockey puck,
and I surmised after much thought that there must be some insanely obvious
characteristic in my physical appearance, or personality even, that had led to the choice of
name.
It was many years before I admitted my inabilities to my mother in the strictest of
confidence, before I broke down and finally asked just exactly what it was about me that
made Uncle Randy think so strongly of a hockey puck that he had chosen to call me
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“Puck” for my entire life. It was then that I learned that my nickname, in fact, had
absolutely nothing to do with a hockey puck. In times when I was too young to
remember, “Puck” had begun as “Pork” in reference to the chubby baby version of me.
However, my older cousin, Kevin, who had various difficulties with pronunciation, even
the sounds of his own name, could not say “Pork.” For Kevin, “Pork” came out as
“Puck.”
When I was little, I believed that I, in some major yet unknown way, resembled a
hockey puck.
It’s impossible that Kevin sabotaged my name on purpose, he was just a kid then,
a kid with his own ridiculous nickname—“Peebody”. Those were the days before the
family jealousy developed, the times when my aunt hadn’t yet thrown fits over the fact
that I was closer to our grandparents than her children were, that I got more—time, love,
attention, money. And, of course, greed never sees need, and so she was blinded to the
fact that I was, for all important purposes, fatherless and in an inescapable hole already.
She was also ignorant to the fact that my having something “more” meant living with the
terrifying risk of losing it.
My attachment to my mom, grandma, and pawpaw was what sustained me as a
child. Our foursome replaced my father, replaced the typical family unit that I would
never know, and tried to put glue in the hands of a child from a broken home. One of my
greatest fears was that one of the foursome would die, that we would no longer be
together in the way that we always had been. My fear was so strong that it became
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common knowledge. I questioned each of them about it more than once, most often
during long bumpy rides in the motorhome. I wasn’t satisfied with simple statements like
“everything will be alright” or “don’t worry about that stuff, you’re just a little girl.” I
wanted hard facts, details, plans, proof. I needed to be sure that they weren’t going to
leave me. So, as in many other situations, my mom and my grandparents concocted a
plan to calm my fears. They assured me that God knew exactly how much I needed all of
them, how deeply we all needed each other, and that he would never take one of us and
leave the others behind. They promised me that he would let us all go together. I didn’t
buy it out-right. I asked them how—how he would take us all at once without things
looking suspicious, especially with the consideration of our age differences. Their perfect
answer to this question was a fatal motorhome accident. That’s how God would do it:
One day we would be driving to Riverfront Stadium or Ashtabula or even to the grocery
store and we’d all go to heaven in a great ball of metal and fire.
When I was little, I believed that my mother, grandma, and grandpa had the
divine authority to assure me that God would allow us all to die at the same exact time.
The solution worked for a while and though the fear never complete drowned, it
retreated down somewhere deep. It came back again, though, worse than ever, when we
stopped traveling, when pawpaw didn’t feel well, when the motorhome was parked
beside the garage and the grass began to grow up around the tires and dried bugs
peppered the windshield. I knew, then, that the plan couldn’t work. There had to be
another way.
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In April of 1988, when I was barely seven years old, pawpaw got sick. At first it
was blood clots. They ran every test imaginable, and it was still just blood clots, nothing
else. They put him medicine. My mother still has the tiny black book in which he wrote
his lab results and adjusted dosages. The medicine helped the clots, or I suppose it did,
but it didn’t help the sickness, the inability to work, the statements made to my mother
about dying and the number of death certificates she would need when he finally passed
away. He was fine, though. The tests were all negative, and there was nothing wrong.
There was nothing wrong until early August. Then, he had end stage pancreatic cancer. It
shot across the operating room wall—the cancer—during exploratory surgery. He died
thirteen days later at the age of 58.
I hadn’t been allowed to go into his room that day, hadn’t been allowed to kiss
him like every other day. There were nurses at the door. She’s not allowed. I was ushered
away to make paper hearts with a friend of the family—paper hearts without scissors.
For thirteen days, we never left the hospital until eleven o’clock at night. I was
tearing my billionth paper heart at around seven o’clock when my entire family suddenly
emerged from the front entrance. I showed my dimple. I ran up to my mother—bubbling
bubbled over and burst out.
“Is he better? Is that why we get to go home earlier tonight, because he’s getting
better?”
“No, sweetie. Grandpa passed away. Grandpa went to heaven”
When I was little, I believed that tickets to heaven could be purchased round trip.
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I went to the calling hours and the funeral. I saw him in the casket. I tucked a
keepsake in the pocket of his suit jacket and then I watched them lower him into the
ground. I didn’t cry—hospital, viewing, funeral, cemetery. I didn’t cry. Everyone else
cried. Grandma cried, her eyebrows eternally red. Mom cried, too. I wasn’t caught up in
crying or missing, though. I was caught up in the waiting.
When he missed Christmas, I started to worry.
When I was little, I believed.
When I was not-so-little, I believed that some things are so bad that they make
you stop believing, at least for a little while, maybe for a very long time.
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On Faith
“There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor
I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down
That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground”
-Bruce Springsteen, The Promised Land
Faith is defined as a “firm belief in something for which there is no proof,” Its
very definition akin to a Mad Lib for the human soul, faith breathes among abstraction, a
universal possession void of universal specificity or structured requirements. And
because of this, it is possible that there is nothing that both unites and divides us as
human beings more explicitly than our faith.
Faith is religious. We have faith in God. We have faith in Jesus of Nazareth. We
have faith in the Quran. We have faith in the bible. We have faith in Mohammad. We
have faith in heaven and faith in salvation. We have religious faith. And as the possessors
of that religious faith we veil the importance of the commonality of that possession and
black each other’s eyes for its differentiations. Our faith is better because we follow
Jesus. Our faith is better because we understand that Jesus was not the Messiah. Our faith
is better because we worship three times a day. Our faith is better because we pray to our
God aloud. Our faith is better because our priest is our intercessor. Our faith is better
because we don’t need an intercessor. And ultimately, our religious faith is flawed
because it isn’t enough that our faith is our faith.
Faith is secular. We have faith in the ideology of political parties. We have faith
in the existence of intelligent alien life. We have faith in the theory that Elvis is still alive.
We have faith in the benefits of an organic diet. We have faith in the theory that the
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United States government assassinated President John F. Kennedy. We have faith in
evolution. We have faith in the ability to be able to communicate with the spirits of the
dead. And we protect that faith and pet it in careful hands. We wear it in words on our
shirts and on our skins. We make it our own and ourselves and then because we forget its
very definition, we blow it apart by entertaining the skeptics who ask us for proof.
Faith is human. We have faith in our family. We have faith in our educators. We
have faith in our husbands, in our wives. We have faith in our children. We have faith in
our friends, faith in our colleagues. We have faith in our neighbors. We have faith in
those who share our faith for a common cause. And because no one or everyone has faith
in us, we have faith in ourselves. And instead of being honored by the gift or
endorsement of someone’s human faith in us, we ruin it with expectation and make its
lack the cause of our failure. Because we all could do everything and we would have and
yet didn’t only because no one had faith that we would.
Faith is a lone walk on a long plank. Faith is a choice. Faith is personal. Faith is
empowering. Faith is work. Faith is a dream and its expectations a nightmare. Faith is
blind. Faith must be blind. Faith is a feeling. Faith is an agreement. Faith is fleeting.
Faith belittles. Faith murders. Faith transforms personal choice into requirement
with consequence. Faith loves. Faith accepts. Faith makes meaning from blank dirt. Faith
opens eyes. Faith shelters.
Faith wants nothing more than to exist.
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The Black and White
The pudgy middle-aged blonde on my parents’ flat screen is describing an
ascending set of stone stairs. “They go up and up…and up,” she says. I hear something
about dogs, too, about happy tail-wagging dogs running down the stairs and back up
again, “circling” her, cheering her toward “the whitest light” she’s ever seen.
“Are you hearing this?” My mom’s right arthritic thumb is smashing the pause
button of the DVR remote with each syllable, finally suspending the blond, mid-heavenly
description, with her mouth half-open and her eyes closed.
“I’m listening,” I say, briefly glancing up from my laptop without offering to
pluck the earphone that pours Springsteen’s Land of Hope and Dreams into my right ear
canal.
“You are not listening,” she counters, allowing the pause button a brief respite
while she opens an attack on rewind. “You have to listen to this! This woman died and on
her way to heaven she saw dogs! Dogs!” Mom gestures toward two small, smooth,
rectangular wooden boxes in contrasting finishes that are perched atop the entertainment
center, their gold nameplates reflecting slices of a winter afternoon’s weak sun. “Don’t
you want proof that Reese and Jikki are in heaven?”
“Alright,” I say reluctantly, muting Bruce and closing my laptop on a quarter’s
worth of rhetoric and composition lesson plans. “It’s time for my pills anyway.”
Mom waits in anticipation, finger hovering over the play button as I pop two
chalky, thick round pills under my tongue and coax them down with a tall cocktail of
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apple juice and apple cider vinegar, a magic combination that message boards full of
homeopathic gurus assure me will flush the life-interrupting stones from my gallbladder
and relieve the pain that feels like the size twenty-four boot of Andre The Giant is trying
to snap off my left scapula from the inside out.
“Are you ready to listen?” I can see that mom is assessing my pain level with her
eyes, watching the careful way I manipulate myself in the recliner, judging the degree of
scrunching skin at the conjunction of my nose and forehead. This time, though, she
doesn’t ask me to rate it on a scale of one to ten as she has at least three times a day for
the last month. Either she can tell or is afraid to ask, and in case it’s the latter, I don’t
offer the bad news.
“I’m ready,” I say, after gulping the last of my cocktail, the burn of the vinegar in
my esophagus stronger than my faith in its ability to blot out my name on next week’s
surgery schedule.
The pudgy middle-aged blonde that brought my mother renewed hope of a
reunion with our family’s former pets, the dynamic English Setter and American Eskimo
twosome that was a cornerstone of our lives for nearly ten years, was part of the cast of
characters that fleshed out the first season of I Survived: Beyond and Back. The series,
now in its second season, features the self-described experiences of men, women, and,
sometimes, teenagers or young children who have died in dramatic accidents or
unexpected catastrophic physiological failures and are, in the end, resuscitated, bringing
back stories of heaven, hell, or blissful religiously-independent nirvana. With its
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theatrical presentation of the victim—most often as a lone entity against an orangeyyellow or variegated deep blue background, bedazzled by a shower of artificial, white
light—and its dramatic recreation of events, it’s an inviting concoction for any good
Baptist worth the weight of his or her hymnal. The temptation may have been even more
undeniable for my mother, who, in addition to carrying her hymnal was also carrying the
weight of the fact that her only child was about to lay down amidst the cold steel
appendages of an operating room.
I was only mildly disturbed that the premier of the series happened to coincide
with the impending date of my first rendezvous with anesthesia in what had been, with
the exception of my junky asthma-riddled lungs and a tussle with a rather serious multisystem reaction to an antibiotic at the age of nine, a relatively uneventful and, in some
estimations, medically stellar twenty-nine years. I could find nothing of a “dramatic
accident” or “unexpected catastrophic physiological failure” in the hour-long
laparoscopic removal of a pesky, diseased gallbladder, an operation that was too minor to
warrant an overnight hospital stay. Thus, I didn’t mind that the pudgy middle-aged
blonde, or the grey-haired perma-smile queen, or the rough neck mullet lifer and their
stories of death frequently provided the backdrop for my winter break routine of lesson
planning, pill popping, and vinegar apple juice guzzling in the weeks before my surgery.
What did disturb me about the pudgy middle-aged blonde was that she never
committed herself to identifying any one of heaven’s furry stair-climbing tenants as a
loving pet from her past—I didn’t want to be greeted by a random four-legged
ambassador of the big pie in the sky; I wanted my dogs, my Reese with her impossibly
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tangled ear hair and my Jikki with his rooster-imitating bark and affinity for peanut butter
fudge. What disturbed me about the series as a whole was its blatant inconsistency. The
set of spiritual travelers described their experiences with critical differences. Some,
Christians and Non-Christians alike, clearly believed that they had breached the gates that
hold back the living at either the precipice of heaven or hell, offering as evidence their
conversations with previously-passed loved ones or descriptions of Moses and Jesus, or
Satan and his team of demons. Others were less specific, though, describing landscapes
and presences of peace, comfort, and surpassing joy without identifying their
surroundings in relation to any religion at all, let alone Christianity.
Within the context of my Baptist upbringing, in the long-stretching shadow of my
salvation, there could be no room for both. I was either right or wrong; I had either been
praying to a loving and merciful God for the last twenty-two years or I had been praying
to the thin wisdom of a tossing wind. Upon my death I would go to heaven because I had
chosen to place my trust in a God of salvation that was a real, tangible driving force in
the world. If I was wrong, if ultimately my God lived only in my mind, I would, as my
uncle Wayne once informed his mother about the final destination of his dead brother, go
into the nothingness of the black dirt ground where the worms would eat my flesh. My
problem with the stories of Beyond and Back was that, as a whole, they inserted a clause
into the law of afterlife that allowed an individual to take God or leave him and still gain
heaven. Together, the individuals and their experiences violently mixed the black and
white of religion that was engrained in my beliefs into an emotionally-shaking grey, into
a create-your-own religion that wasn’t unlike the customization process of an icy dessert
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at Cold Stone Creamery—I’ll have the butter pecan streets of gold with angel gummy
bears, please; hold the Jesus sprinkles and salvation whipped cream.
“Can I get you anything at all?” Mom is gazing into the chilled glow of the
refrigerator taking stock of the options. It’s nearly midnight and I’ve just awoken from a
post-pudgy middle aged blonde, Percocet-induced sleep. “Pudding? Applesauce? Hot
Tea?”
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”
“Cereal? Crackers? Hummas?” Mom continues the offerings as though she didn’t
hear me, desperate for me to consume something other than apple juice, vinegar, and
pills.
“I can’t think of anything that sounds good.”
“You have to eat something, Suzanne. Man cannot live on pills alone. Chicken
noodle soup?”
“No, thanks.”
“There’s pimento cheese. Do you want a pimento cheese sandwich?”
“Alright. On one piece of bread. Just fold it over.” Something about the thick
spread sounds good, but I relent mostly because it will make her feel better.
The sandwich comes neatly wrapped in a decorative paper towel. I rip it open,
gobbling at it without offering to sit up from where I’m lying on the couch.
“Thanks,” I say, my mouth full.
“You should sit up, you know. You’re going to choke to death.”
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In minutes I’m out again, and sleep takes me somewhere else.
Grandma, Mom, Aunt Sharon, Uncle Randy, and I are bustling around grandma’s
kitchen amidst the leftovers of one of the biggest and most varied Thanksgiving spreads
that the family has ever conjured up. The smell of what was once a twenty-pound turkey,
not dissimilar to the prized bird in the window of any one of a number of movie
adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, has taken over the small room,
though the turkey itself has been reduced to a mere carcass, bits of off-white meat
clinging to bare bones in a futile attempt at self-preservation. Grandma’s pies, pumpkin
and minced meat, are lined up on the counter next to a cake with the elusive lemon sauce
that we haven’t tasted in more than fourteen years and miss at nearly every holiday
gathering because only one of us inherited the recipe and that person refuses to share.
I’m at the counter wrapping left over rolls in a layer of waxed paper and then
aluminum foil.
“Waxed paper first, then aluminum foil, baby,” Grandma instructs me, though I
was well versed in the drill long before she died. “The aluminum will eat into the rolls
without the waxed paper,” she adds, before shuffling in slipper-clad feet into the family
room.
“Hey Puck, cut me a piece of that pumpkin pie, would ya?” Uncle Randy is sitting
at the table. I can hear him behind me, brushing the crumbs of his meal from the
signature red-checked table cloth in short swift strokes. He’s called me “Puck” since I
was a baby, since Dad walked out on me and Mom and he stepped in as my pseudo-
85
father, washing my baby sheets at three o’clock in the morning and sharing bowls of
Sugar Smacks over episodes of the Chipmunks.
“Sure thing. I’ve got ya,” I answer, proceeding to run a thin, metal paring knife
through the thick brown custard. I dig at the triangle with a pie shovel and slap the piece
onto a flimsy, white, off-brand paper plate before turning from my place at the counter to
sit it in front of him.
“Thanks much,” he says without looking up.
I notice that he’s wearing the blue flannel shirt with thin lines of red and navy and
the jeans and cowboy boots that we buried him in. “You look nice today,” I offer. He
doesn’t answer but when he looks up I can see the familiar bullet hole in the center of his
forehead, jagged and ripped, oozing a thin streak of blood down the right side of his nose.
I am aware that he’s dead, that he shot himself between the eyes with a .45 in the
family room four years ago, nine years after grandma died from heart failure, but I don’t
find it odd that he’s there, sitting at the kitchen table on Thanksgiving, eating a piece of
pumpkin pie.
I open my eyes to an early afternoon sun and the taste of pimento cheese. As I
carefully move from under the heavy quilt and into a sitting position, I notice that a cold
sweat clings to my forehead and the sides of my nose. The sweat isn’t the result of the
haunting dream, though. The dream is familiar, an at least bi-weekly occurrence for the
last four years.
“Is the pain bad?” Mom asks, leaning up in her recliner, studying me.
86
“It’s bad. Really bad,” I say. “But it’s different. I’m sick, too. Like I’m going to
throw up. I think something is really wrong.”
The pain has shifted into both shoulders; this is something that it hasn’t done in the
five months that it has earnestly pursued me. My surgery is scheduled for the day after
tomorrow, but I am sure that I cannot live this way for another forty-eight hours.
“I think you better take me to the emergency room.”
I learned later that afternoon that it is possible for “unexpected catastrophic
physiological failure” to occur as the result of a non-functioning gallbladder, if the
situation persists for too long without intervention. I also learned that the vinegar and
apple juice cocktail, highly recommended by the homeopathic gurus, had been successful
in flushing a portion of the massive stones from the snug nest they had fashioned in my
gallbladder. Because the size of those stones did not agree with the size of my bile duct,
they became lodged, blocking the flow of bile through my body, and thus the cocktail had
also made me significantly sicker, turning my skin and eyes a sick monochromatic hue of
yellow and thrusting my liver into a state of distress that could have been life threatening.
My surgeon’s matter-of-fact explanation of the state of my affairs at the time was that I
needed the laparoscopic surgery to remove my gallbladder, as well as an additional
procedure to extract the lodged stones from my main bile duct, and, in ideal
circumstances, I needed it immediately. The kink in that plan was that the infection in my
abdomen was entirely too extensive to risk the surgery. I would need two days of around-
87
the-clock intravenous antibiotics before she felt comfortable with wheeling me into the
operating room.
Two days later, when the antibiotics had eradicated a significant portion of the
infection, I waited in my hospital bed for transport to take me to the operating room. I
was more nervous than I expected, whether it was the pomp and circumstance of my presurgery shower or the multitude of good luck wishes that were delivered with looks of
what I judged to be nerves and suppressed fear, I don’t know. I do know that I thought
about the pudgy middle-aged blonde and hoped that she wasn’t a dog person, hoped that
she never identified any of the dogs on heaven’s stone stairs as her childhood best friend,
Rufus, or adult companion, George, because she was either violently allergic or
uncharacteristically afraid and had never had a dog as a pet. I found comfort in the
thought that if things went badly, if I went beyond and didn’t come back, I would be
running my fingers through the thick mass of black and white curls on Reese’s ears or
sharing peanut butter fudge with Jikki in a matter of hours. I focused intently on the black
and white of my belief, on the moment of my salvation, and on the small indeterminate
space inside of me where my faith in God had thrived for twenty-two years. When they
finally laid me on the operating table, as I sucked down the first gulps of sedating gas, I
prayed to that same God, asking him not to protect me or to keep me alive, but asking
him, if I should die, to take me to heaven—butter pecan gold streets, angel gummy bears,
Jesus sprinkles, and salvation whipped cream. I asked for the works.
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I noticed the clock when transport returned me to my room. It was nearly fourthirty. I had entered the operating room before nine that morning.
“Where have I been?” I asked my Mom. She was straightening sheets, cooing over
me like a mother bird that couldn’t do anything but had to do something.
“You had surgery, remember? They removed your gallbladder today.” Her words
were slow and perfectly pronounced. I had heard her talk to my grandmother in this same
tone in the years when Grandma’s memory wasn’t always pristine. It was in the same
hospital, two floors up, that Mom had desperately tried to reason with my grandmother
who, due to a bout with dementia, was convinced that her legs were burning telephone
poles and that Jesus was dragging his cross down the hallway outside of her door.
“No, Mom. I know where I was. I’m not confused. I mean the time. I’ve been gone
for more than seven hours.”
“You were gone for a long time.”
“Well what did she say? Did she say why it took so damn long?” I was referring to
my surgeon, the same no nonsense, brilliant, though emotionally-barren, scalpel slinger
who had plucked at least three cysts from my mom’s breasts and intricately removed half
of her thyroid.
“She didn’t say. She said she was sorry that she didn’t keep me better updated, that
she tried, but she had her hands full. But you’re going to be all right, now. She said that
you’re going to be all right.”
I trusted my surgeon, but, at that moment, nothing about my body seemed “all
right.” I was welcomed back from anesthesia by a long list of unexpecteds that were the
89
result of what was later described as several detours during my operation. What I was
told would be two small, inch-length incisions had expanded into an eight-inch incision
across my abdomen and a two-inch incision below my navel because my gallbladder
exploded at the start of the operation and my surgeon was forced to abandon the
laparoscopic plan. Where I was told there would be small strips of tape to reinforce my
incisions, there was a total of twenty thick, metal staples. What I was told would be a
small oxygen-delivering device in my nose had expanded into a full-faced mask that
helped force oxygen-saturated air in to my lungs because my levels dropped dangerously
low and refused to rebound. As shocking as I found these vast differences initially, they
quickly became little more than a backdrop to the one difference I couldn’t quite
comprehend, the one difference that my surgeon couldn’t, or wouldn’t, explain. What I
was told would be an hour-long procedure had expanded into more than seven hours of
surgery.
I knew that there had been complications, that the gallbladder had exploded, that
open abdominal surgery takes longer than a laparoscopic procedure, but nothing that I
had read and nothing that I had experienced in my years as a registered nurse could
explain why the removal of a gallbladder, open or not, should, or even could, take more
than seven hours. Those around me, my parents, my friends, medical staff, didn’t seem
overly bothered that evening. Whenever I mentioned it, they quickly shifted the focus to
the fact that I had survived a grueling and difficult surgery. I couldn’t discern whether
their choice to ignore the oddity evidenced a genuine lack of concern for anything beyond
the fact that I had survived or a deeper fear that if they asked the questions they’d find an
90
answer that they didn’t like. Though I tried to let it go, my attempts proved futile. I
couldn’t stop my blind, fumbling search for an answer, or the feeling that something was
still inherently wrong with me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the pudgy middle-aged
blonde.
Late that evening, when I began to experience complications as a result of the fact
that my main bile duct was still completely blocked, my need to know exactly what had
happened in the operating room, to account for the excessive hours, only deepened. But
as the worry on the faces around me escalated, as I too began to fear that I could still die,
I stopped asking the questions out loud. I lay in my bed with my eyes closed for hours,
pretending to be asleep while desperately trying to clear my mind, to beckon a memory
from beyond. Seven hours screamed of serious complications, of an unstable patient, and
if I had slipped away, even for just a second, there had to be a memory, a glimpse, a
personal, defining answer to the inconsistencies of I Survived: Beyond and Back. I willed.
I focused. I prayed to remember, but nothing came. There weren’t any soft curly dog
ears. There weren’t any stairs. There was no shower of bright white light. And the
guarantee that I was going to be “all right” was quickly becoming nonexistent, as well.
The easy answer to my panic was that I hadn’t died, that my heart hadn’t faltered,
even for a second, and that’s why there was no memory, no thread to grasp. But what
terrified me, what again mixed the black and white back into the emotionally-shaking
grey, was the possibility that I had died, that my heart had faltered and there was still
nothing to grasp, nothing except the black dirt ground.
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It took a few minutes before I noticed Uncle Randy standing in the far left corner
of the room, next to the overbearing wall-length window. It was just after three o’clock in
the morning on the day after my surgery. The room was cool and quiet with the exception
of the pumping swoosh of the compression devices wrapped around my swollen calves.
Mom was asleep under a mess of thin, rough hospital blankets on the impossibly hard
navy blue bed-chair at the foot of my bed. Immediately I assumed that it was a new
variation on the familiar dream, the change possibly the result of consecutive days of IV
pain killers or left over bits of anesthesia, but when I realized that the bullet hole was
missing, that he wasn’t wearing the blue flannel and jeans, I was convinced that it wasn’t
a dream.
I waited for him to say something. He didn’t, though, and I couldn’t find the
courage to initiate any form of spoken communication, both out of the fear of what he
might say and the fear that Mom would wake up and find me talking to her dead brother
or, worse yet, not see him, and find me talking to the wall. I waited for him to disappear,
but an overwhelming air of wait filled the room, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he
was waiting for me. Waiting for me to what? Speak to him? Ask him a question? Ask
him where he was these days? Or was it something worse?
He stayed with me, still and quiet, until I fell asleep. When I woke up hours later,
he was gone, and I’ve never seen him again, not even in the dream that was with me for
so many years before.
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In the days that followed, I was transferred to a larger hospital, underwent
additional procedures to clear the blockage in my bile duct and began to make honest
improvement. With the help of my friends and family, I went back to teaching and
graduate school three working days after I was released from the hospital. At my final
follow-up appointment, I asked my surgeon about the length of my surgery, tried to steer
her into divulging the details by saying that I thought that had my life been in the hands
of anyone else, I might not have made it. Her eyes, eyes that I had only known to be
capable of stern, emotionless fact, filled with tears, and her only response was to pat me
gently, twice, on the back.
The second season of I Survived: Beyond and Back began a couple of months ago.
In addition to the series, they have a fairly detailed accompanying website this year with
several online clips, eerily titled “John—Scalped,” “Jake—Cardiac Arrest,” “Shelly—
Asphyxiation,” and a “Submit Your Story” section. There are still days when I’m jealous
that there will never be a clip titled “Suzanne—Exploded Gallbladder,” but I no longer
focus on the inconsistencies of their experiences, and in the last few months I’ve even
stopped taking quiet moments to purge my mind in the hopes that a glimpse of my own
experience will materialize. I do occasionally take comfort in the fact that if The
Biography Channel’s next endeavor is titled I Survived: Visitor’s From Beyond, I’m a nobrainer for the pilot episode.
93
More than a year after my surgery, my uncle Randy’s former grandmother-in-law
was admitted to a local nursing home for care. A week or so into her stay, she informed
her granddaughter, my uncle’s former wife, that she had spoken with my uncle.
“I talked to Randy,” she said. “And he wants you to know that it was an accident,
that he never would have done that to everyone on purpose.”
She died less than twenty-four hours later.
I don’t know if my heart stopped on the operating table, if I slipped out of the
hands of this world for a moment or moments during my surgery, and I’m not sure how
strongly death danced around me in the days that followed. I could request copies of my
medical records and easily find those answers, but I haven’t, and I won’t, mostly because
I no longer fear that the presence of a brief death and a lack of an experience in the
beyond would mean that death for me will be the nothingness of the black dirt. In oddly
shaped and overlapping ways the peace and security that I feel now is strikingly similar
to the peace and security that I felt as a child on cool autumn nights when I laughed to the
newest episode of ALF or Mr. Belvedere in unison with Uncle Randy.
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