Gone So Long and Gone and Going On

I started this as a post for social medial, but it didn't quite seem right for that. Maybe it's a prose poem. Maybe it's just a few thoughts at the end of a week, an OK week except for contemplations. 

But then those matter don't they? They affect well being. 

Talking about them is supposed to do some good. 

 I’ve been gone from where I used to live a long time, almost a quarter of a century. A moment in a book I was reading reminded me the other day I ought to try again to find out what happened to this one girl I used to know. We knew each other as kids and in high school, rubbed each other the wrong way frequently, but co-existed well all in all. 

Funny the little things that trigger memory. The book had an incident about a swimming pool, and she and I were in the same circles that went swimming when we were 10 or so.

I had learned when her mother died that she had preceded her in death sometime before the internet documented obituaries as well as they do now, except maybe behind paywalls. 

I thought a fresh Google might let find out what happened to her. I didn't get an answer. But that led to the discovery of another person who passed, then another and another. 

That on the heels of learning a while back of a friend 30 years gone I just hadn’t heard about.

I need to stop looking and counting. 

One girl, I couldn't tell you the last time I saw or talked to her, but her passing made me sad and made me keep reading Legacy. 

One in the mix was a guy I hadn’t thought of in years and years and years, but when I saw his obit I remembered this one time a friend and I went with him and flew this plane he built—long, long before drones.

A piece fell off while his remote-control plane was in the air. He managed to land it without destroying it in spite of the fact that it was an aileron he lost, a piece pretty important to control. 

We joked about insurance. As he loaded the damaged plane into the back of his car, he said: “Yeah, I need `a piece of the rock' for my plane, too.” It was a spin on a slogan for Prudential many might not recall. 

As I read of his passing, I learned he turned that passion for building into a successful small business and made that how he spent his time until… 

Made me look more at one of the others. She was a parallel friend, someone from the schoolyard you'd say hey to or chat with if you crossed paths back then. You can look at some timelines now and get reminded in small ways they did the same things you did back when with a different set of friends. 

And she went on to a career and other things until circumstances, and possibly some bad decisions, kicked in. 

Trying to find out more, I learned of another friend who preceded his mother in death. That's all her obit said.

It's made me think of fond moments with each of those seven gone that I've learned of in the last few years.

Apparently origins and specifics of the quote are disputed, but I'll go with the variation attributed to German poet Ludwig Jacobowski that I found. It seems to fit best:

“Do not cry because they are past! Smile, because they once were!” 

 Maybe so. I'll remember that and go on trying to create new moments. 

 Zevon nailed it. "Enjoy every sandwich." 

And a paraphrase from that first quote above is sometimes mixed with a passage from Dr. Seuss, I'll keep in mind too. 

 “We’re off to great places, so let’s be on our way.”

A Bit of Memoir - C. Dean Andersson, John Steakley and Self-Promotion

I've mentioned not loving self-promotion, but I'm also aware repetition is necessary on a project so I share where I can. It's in marketing textbooks, but I got a personalized lesson once upon a time.

I guess that makes this a story with foreshadowing and everything.  

The late great and wonderful C. Dean Andersson (the 𝘏𝘦𝘭 trilogy, 𝘐 𝘈𝘮 𝘋𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢 and much more) and his wife Nina Romberg aka author Jane Archer, once told me of doing a mall signing with the late John Steakley of 𝘈𝘳𝘮𝘰𝘳 and 𝘝𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘦$--the one made into a movie by John Carpenter--fame. 

Steakley's father was a car salesman, so when someone was dismissive of the work on the signing table, he rose and followed the guy all the way down the mall loudly hawking the work with a continuing spiel about the virtues.

So flash forward a while later, Steakley was master of ceremonies or toastmaster at a con I was attending, okay it was a Coast Con in Biloxi, Miss. Early '90s or so. There were these big gatherings of con attendees and guests on opening night in those days. 

A comic I wrote, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬, was the new thing I had out in the moment so when Steakley introduced me, I mentioned that. 

"What was that title again?" he asked, tipping a microphone to his lips then pointing it back at me.

 "Er, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬." 

"𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬 you say. Interesting. So everyone should know about 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬?" 

"Sure, it'd be nice." 

"Excellent, so what was that title again?" 

I said it a little louder and with more assurance: "𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬." 

"𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬. Well great. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬!" 

He kept the riff going a while, proving everything Dean had described, repeating 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬 often and loudly until he finally clapped me on the shoulder: "That's what you have to do. Keep saying it, my friend." 

I smiled and sat back down.

Wish he and Dean were still with us.

Memory and Loss

 I've been in a remembering mode for the last few days. I guess my last post on "A Christmas Memory" touched on that. Maybe it's the holidays or just COVID times. My cousin, who is deeply immersed in family history, sort of fueled it further with a Merry Christmas email that mentioned places my mom and grandmother lived before my parents were married.

That sent me to Google Street View to check out my childhood home. It's still there, though looking different on a little street across from the high school in my home town. The siding's new along with a few other features, but the back porch with its red brick steps and ornamental iron posts looks the same. It's only four or five steps, but it seemed mountainous when I was a kid.

It's hard to describe how looking at a recent photo makes me feel. It's a bit bittersweet, though that's not quite the right word. It's just a rush of emotion and memory.

I can recall the guy down the street got a pirate costume one Halloween, just one of those crappy, in-a-bag jobs with the shiny fabric they call vintage these days. I remember him before Trick-or-Treating hanging out and climbing onto that irorn work with a toy hammer and declaring: "Me gonna fix this ship."And I remember sitting on those steps and reading Superman No. 199 in which he raced The Flash. 

So that's the place I was in when I got word last night one of my old friends from high school and college days passed away. Not the kid in the pirate suit. The segue's a little awkward. 

This guy's name was Lee. 

I immediately thought of him calling and waking me up on what would have had to have been June 1, 1984. I'd started working the 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift at the newspaper, so an early call was like the middle of the night. I grumbled, but then I realized Star Trek III: The Search for Spock opened that day and we needed to find out how things turned out with our favorite Vulcan. 

Seeing Trek was a tradition. We'd been Trek fans a long time. We'd been friends a long time. He lived around the corner from me, and we rode bikes as kids. 

He'd actually been the one to purchase the Star Trek Concordance, which was a handy guide in the days before the internet. Gaming was on a Commodore 64, by the way. We explored Zork and other worlds of Infocom. 

We actually missed seeing Star Trek II together because he was running late, and we couldn't get into an opening night showing. I saw it the next day with my girlfriend at the time. She was not a Trek fan. Her friend, who did get in the night before, had been saddened. "Paula said somebody died." Yeah, that spoiler was on Lee. 

We got past that, and we continued to see movies during our early working life.

I'm not sure when our paths diverged, but over time we drifted into different circles. He went back to school, I got married. He later worked in IT at the company where my wife worked, so I'd hear of him a lot more than I saw him, then I left Central Louisiana.

We caught up on Facebook a couple of years ago. He found me, and we kept in touch via posts. He'd moved to Baton Rouge for new IT jobs and was active in a church music program. He'd always been in choir and played the piano well. 

I noted his occasional post about bad service at a quick stop or other steps along his path, noticed not too ago he was dating someone. I was happy for him. Saw pics at a high school reunion I didn't attend because of COVID. He was there in the mix of old friends. 

I shared a meme about Louisiana foods not too many days ago. How many have you had? Along with a lot of other people, he responded adding a quip, a familiar Cajun exclamation. Not something that warranted a response by me in a long thread, but a reminder he was out there living his life. 

Then word came he'd had a heart attack in his home. Someone I didn't know remembered him fondly. 

And suddenly 30 years are compressed, and I'm contemplating, amid this year of death and chaos, yet again how fast it all seems to have been when you look back.

And you start mining your memory. Yep, we saw Raiders together, my second viewing. Dune, Never Ending Story, Krull. All early '80s. 

Okay there were films and dinners. Was he in that mix of friends discussing 30's onslaught? When did we go our separate ways. 

Couldn't tell you. 

But he scored 22 out of 23 dishes on a New Orleans food test. Which one was he missing? Shrimp BBQ or turtle soup?

Ayeeeeee. I should have asked when I had the chance. 

Favorite Short Stories - A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote

I read "A Christmas Memory" first in junior high. 

It was assigned reading in our textbook. I didn't know who Truman Capote was yet. My Weekly Reader neglected coverage of the Black and White Ball and didn't review In Cold Blood. 

It was just another story in the reader back then, but Capote writes in that little tale of an elderly cousin who was a friend to him in his childhood. 

As I was growing up, my grandmother, my mother's mother, lived with my family. She was my babysitter when I was little since my mom was a high school teacher.

The relationship between Buddy, the narrator, and his cousin reminded me of my relationship with my grandmother. 

She was as much a friend as a guardian. She worked hard to keep me from killing myself, but she didn't worry much if the afternoon movie was playing Them or The Incredible Shrinking Man. 

She told me stories of her youth, an early bad marriage, an early widowhood in a second, happier union. She was an ally against my mom who'd inherited a strict approach from a Baptist minister grandfather even though we were Methodists.

My grandmother cooked though she didn't have the inclination toward fruitcakes exhibited by Buddy's cousin. I don't remember a signature dish.

I do recall her liking Delaware Punch, a soft drink. It's all but gone I read the other day. I haven't seen a bottle in years. But at a little grocery store back in the day, we'd slide bottles out from the case-style soft drink machines where the bottles dangled inside and cool air rushed up when you looked in.

The family lore held, since she'd lost a son to a heart attack two months before I was born, that taking care of me revitalized my grandmother.   

She took me to kindergarten on Fridays until I went every day the following year. We took a cab driven by a guy who looked to me like The Skipper from Gilligan's Island. She dressed up for those occasions, wore a hat and waited for me at the bottom of a flight of stairs outside the classroom. 

My grandmother was still alive, still living with us when I read A Christmas Memory for the first time. She'd live three, maybe four years longer. Happily at that time in my life years didn't tick past like seconds and certainly not like the blur 2020 has proved to be.

But even then, in reading, I could see that the world was finite. The story offered a bit of a bittersweet portent, especially when it reached this passage:

"...more and more thirteenths are not the only days she stays in bed: a morning arrives in November, a leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to exclaim: "Oh my, it's fruitcake weather."

I guess in some ways, the tale prepared me even as it celebrated the relationship of Buddy and his cousin. My grandmother passed away the day after I finished my first year in high school. I always suspected she held on to let me finish final exams.

I picked up the boxed 1966 edition of the story for probably a dollar years later at a library book sale. I keep it around for Christmas re-reads. It triggers good memories. 

Cooking Shows And the End of Life

I think the gist of Michael Pollan's New York Times Magazine piece "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch," which coincides with the release of the Meryl Streep movie about Julia Child, Julie and Julia, is that more people are watching cooking shows than actually cooking.

Sometimes that's not a bad thing.

I do a fair amount of culinary work at home, so I might not fit the pattern described, but I had occasion to watch The Food Network a good bit a few years ago. It helped pass the time as I sat with my mom in hospital rooms on a few different occasions, and I recalled that as I perused Mr. Pollan's article.

My mother was a home economics teacher for most of her career, an expert on food preparation, and sewing. Her memory had faded by the time she neared the end of her days, so I sought things that might seem familiar to her such as food preparation.

She never really developed much of an interest in the shows, but I sat watching, whiling those endless hours between doctor visits as she fought one condition or another. In a trapped situation, any diversion becomes more engrossing.

It winds up being an oddly fond memory now that she's about a year gone, not the best of memories by far, but a pleasant moment. Sitting with her, watching Emeril prepare a chicken dish or one of the other hosts dishing pasta or barbecue rubs.

Watching those shows provided peaceful lulls between the strife-filled moments. They were just entertainment, not instructional shows. They were something we could share in a strange way, something my mother might once have appreciated but couldn't fully on her slow journey toward the end.

I printed out some of the recipes from the web later. They're in the folder with all of our recipes, but I've never attempted any of them.

Different Seasons

A lot of people came to my mom's wake, people I had not seen in some time. Among the guests were students she taught long ago. They told me stories of her teaching days.

"Was she strict?" I asked.

"No, she was easy going," I heard.

That was a little surprising, but then, with consideration, not so surprising that she would have a gentle touch. She used to fix me breakfast after I was out late, heated dinner when I first worked nights, wiped my brow when I was sick.

I heard stories from my cousins too, one my mom taught to sew with detail. Another, who is a photographer, recalled how beautiful he thought she was when he was little and how photogenic. His dad was a photographer too, trained by a Dutch master photographer in post war days, and thus there are happily tons of portraits and family photos from those years.

It was good to hear the stories and to be reminded of who she was before disease submerged her thoughts and personality into a nebulous skein. It reminded me of the her I knew before nursing homes, medications and tests to see if she was engaged in life.

Jumping back, before the difficult times was important because it is important to get back to the memories that matter and are to be carried as I wend onward.

Going Home Again

Time goes, you say? Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.
--Henry Austin Dobson

This is the doleful fact, you have to go home again for funerals and that means mixed with mourning for the lost loved one is the mourning for what used to be.

I found myself staying in a hotel downtown, a place I used to go for meetings and gatherings, occasionally for a drink in the lounge. It's changed hands a few times and though preserved still has reminders it's not what it once was.

• Not the place I toured with other reporters when it opened with a flourish of elegance and grandeur, the place my buddy Raymond and I longed to shout: "Hail to the plebs."
• Not the place we went once upon a time for Christmas buffets when I had grown more patrician.
• Not the place Christine and I attended a New Year's Eve party long before we dated.
• Not the place I made a church public relations man nervous with a skull ring I wore in my horror-writer days.
  

Stepping onto the street that stretched back down to the newspaper office, the sense of time's passing was not so strong. It felt more the same, like it was fifteen years ago.

It felt like I could walk up the street a few blocks, enter the front door and make my way to my desk where my stuff would be waiting including the fake photo of Jesus in the Clouds passed on to me by a predecessor with a reminder: "Don't believe everything you see or hear."

It felt like I could walk up the street and see everyone who used to be there, not just the few who remain.

On the blocks in between I found myself straining to remember what used to be here or there. The jewelry store where Christine and I picked out her engagement ring is now a restaurant.

The restaurant where I had lunch so many days was gone. I found the wooden doors though they seemed to open to nowhere, not to a special with a Coke. No shrimp po-boys, for sure.

You discover such moments, I think, only by living long enough to discover them.

Knife Wounds

I know three people with knife wounds at the moment. A girl I work with was making French fries and her right hand attacked her left. It was kind of like that Clive Barker story "The Body Politic," I think.

Wayne also got an unkind cut from an exacto knife, and Kate was prompted to ponder the color of blood with an artist's eye after a smilar slice.

Scars from the past
All that reminded me of the time I stabbed myself in the thumb. Christine and I recounted the story to my freedom-fry-deprived co-worker in empathy.

It was a Saturday night when we still had our apartment, sometime before the chain smoker moved in downstairs and prompted us to become home owners.

I was making an Italian chicken dish. I don't remember why I tried to open the drawer that was jammed but when I yanked it I got a knife - this little pairing knife with a thin blade went right into my thumb.

My actual recollection of the event gets a little fuzzy after that, I suppose due to the lack of blood supply to my brain. All of my blood was rushing out my thumb at that point.

It ain't easy bein' green
I wrapped a paper towel around it and staggered into the den, looking a little green, as Christine describes it. Green, I was, and glassy-eyed.

Then I used one of the words Cliff and Stewart have been talking about.

"I think I cut the (expletive deleted but it's bodily waste so I think you know which one it was) out of my finger," I said.

"Why don't you sit down?" she suggested.

Legend has it I sat down.

Then she walked into the kitchen, which she says looked like a homicide scene.

The next recollection I have of anything at all, we were at the local emergency room where we were processed by a clerk with indifference that achived remarkable degrees of coldness even for a jaded ER worker. After she took my information she sent us to the waiting room to watch TV while they dealt with people with larger wounds. It was a Saturday night after all.

There, somewhere just short of desanguination, the bleeding eventually stopped on its own.

The Fog
We went back home and in a bit of a fog I finished the Italian chicken and we went in the next day to a convenient care center for a tetanus shot. Since it was a stab it didn't require stitches, but it remained painful to turn faucets for a while after that.

It was really the worst injury-accident I've ever had short of the time I ate peppered shrimp at a social function and then rubbed my eyes.

To all those who've injured yourselves, I feel your pain.

Times it will always be

A meditation by the narrator of A Separate Peace by John Knowles notes there are moments that essentially get frozen in the memory. For him it's the era of his school days. Roosevelt will always be president, he'll always be in high school, he says, and so on.

I keep thinking about that passage as I contemplate a favorite story I need to re-read, Sticks, by Karl Edward Wagner. Wayne Sallee, who was close to Karl, has written eloquently about him in a couple of posts, including this one.

Wayne's notes and going through my books, still for Library Thing, thumbing my paperbacks of In A Lonely Place and Why Not You and I, have me thinking about the days I went to a lot of conventions. Karl Edward Wagner always seemed to be there, everywhere, and doing something crazy.

I remember him coming into a panel room once and grabbing a table cloth to throw it around his shoulders or opening a panel discussion on monsters by affecting an instructor's monotone and saying: "We are here today to discuss the care an maintenance of the CXL small engine..."

I remember him acting like a professional wrestler and trading insults, boasts and challenges with Charles L. Grant

In my mind, that's a time it will always be. A floating universe somewhere, where time hasn't moved along so rapidly.

I read "Sticks" first in that big collection of horror stories edited by David G. Hartwell. It's collected in In a Lonely Place, which I bought along with a couple of the Kull books right after KEW died, selfishly worrying they would quickly become hard to find.