The Long Goodbye

This is me and Rupert standing on my Grammy's porch for what might be the last time. Beth came down in her dad's truck and helped me clean the place and pack up my extra stuff in the bed. On our way back up to Maryland, a heavy storm came up and we almost had to stop and pull over. The sky got so dark and the grey clouds hung over the horizon like upside down wisps from a smoldering fire. The rain came crashing with lighting cutting across the horizon in front of us and I had to go slow for fear one of the the trees on my drivers side might fall on the car. But nothing fell, and by the time we reached my favorite local ice cream place halfway between D.C. and Charlottesville it was only sprinkling. We got out and ate a couple cones next to a wide field of grass. It felt like it was just us and Rupert in the world. I knew New York would be different, but everything was perfect then.

Thanks for reading.

Grammy Lives

This evening, right before the sun set, I went outside to water the tomato and squash plants. I left Rupert inside, because this is the hunting hour and he'll just bolt for the first deer, squirrel or rabbit he sees. After I finished watering, I started thinking about what I could do to thank Grammy for my time here and commemorate her memory. The idea of planting a tree came to me. But as I walked around the property, it looked like every tree was in it's right place, as if someone had the idea to plan the planting of every tree way before I did. It was the best time of the day in nature. The whole area sounded alive but the sky was still and getting pinker and darker by the minute. Then I realized that my Grammy made this property into her own sanctuary. She watered every plant, planted every bush, and fed all the birds so this place would be her perfect idea of heaven on earth. Standing there, I got that feeling that she must have had standing in the same place at the same time of day when she was alive. It was a complete escape from everything.

A Wedding in Brooklyn

I haven't posted in a while because I've been driving up and down the eastern seabord. I've gone to New York 3 times, once to Pittsburgh, and 3 times to Silver Spring, Maryland to visit Beth.

One of our trips was to attend Ben's sister Lisa's wedding. Ben's Uncle Chet and Aunt Pam threw it in their backyard on Degraw Street. Josh hosted the afterparty on his roof down the street and we all danced in front of the river and Manhattan.

On another trip to New York our air conditioning broke down right after Beth and I left her driveway. At first I freaked out a bit. After all, it was the hottest week of the summer. As always, Beth retained her hardy American spirit: "Maybe what's wrong with our society is that we can't live without things like air conditioning anymore." But then, as we drove through Baltimore with the hot air blowing against us and in Rupert's mouth, I looked over to Beth in the passenger side. She was asleep with her head leaned back against the red and white pillow she'd brought along and the sun was cut off perfectly by the shade of the car just above the ankles of her bare feet, and I thought to myself that she was right– sometimes it's good to have less and be reminded about what it feels like to be close to the earth, without all these man-made barriers.

Later in that trip, I watched the sun set over Far Rockaway floating on my surfboard with nobody but Josh and I out and a 3 foot swell coming up to 4. The sky is so big out there- not like the rest of New York. I kept thinking of the line from the Odyssey where Homer describes it as "the rosy-fingered dawn", except this was dusk.

Anyway, it's been good to be alive this summer.

Driving Across This Country

On Saturday night at 9pm I left Pittsburgh for Washington DC. A couple of hours later I was driving through the Appalachian mountains underneath a gigantic, almost-full yellow moon. Rupert was asleep in the backseat, I was listening to the new Shins album and I felt completely free. I started thinking about how great it would be to drive across the country with Beth. I've done it twice: once alone from LA to DC in four days when I was 16 and then with my best friend Ben from DC to LA when we were 18. I began to try and figure out how Beth and I could make this happen. Then I started thinking about the obstacles that would arise: money, hotels that don't take dogs, etc., etc., etc. I began to get sad and depressed, feeling old and like all my adventures were over. Then I had a miraculous thought. But, I'm doing it, I realized. I'm doing it right now. I don't have to be sad at the prospect of not being able to drive across the country in the future because I'm actually driving across the country right now! As I thought about that near miss more and more I saw that so much of my life is like that: I imagine how great things will be in the future, completely blind to how great things are in the present.

That's Jack Kerouac on the right and his best friend Neal Cassady on the left. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in the book. (This one goes out to you, BK.)

Happy Fathers Day, Dad

Dad, Aunt Kym and Uncle Steve

I found this picture of my Aunt Kym's wedding day in the garage. They look pretty cool. The look on my dad's face reminds me he was once like me.

*Addendum: My brother Josh commented on this post and said, "He still is like you."

C.S. Lewis Would Have Hated CNN

Beth always says she's in good company with C.S. Lewis whenever I give her a hard time about not staying up on current events. After reading this quote, I must admit he (and she) has a point. This one's for you, Shorty:

I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then "written up" out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

The Aughts

Felix Post, an English emeritus psychiatrist who performed a close study of the biographies of the most eminent men of our century in the arts, science and in politics noting, as have other authors, a higher prevalence of mood disorders in his sample, supposed that the psychological discomfort itself which accompanies to a mental disorder is the main drive for creative effort: many writers, in fact, asserted that through the act of writing they hold off depressive anguish. For him this relationship can be biuniform, meaning that even creative effort, like other types of stress, could favour a psychological breakdown: the intense intellectual work of the creative process is associated with higher neural activity in the brain, and this hyperactivity can determine the onset of mental problems in those already vulnerable. Even in the past, during the Renaissance, there were philosophers who supposed that intellectual work could lead to melancholy, and this was the explanation they offered for the proneness to depression in poets and other men of letters.*

*From The Gift of Saturn: Creativity and Psychopathology

At Close Range

I can't stop thinking about this movie.

Abbot Prince Street and Katharine Bates Ruthenburg

This is a picture of my Grammy and Grandfather's wedding day on September 7th, 1942. Pearl Harbor had been attacked almost a year earlier and they got married in her hometown of Evansville, Indiana while he was on leave from the Navy. He died when my Dad was 12 and my Dad gave me his namesake 15 years later. People say he used to smile a lot and little kids followed him around like a Pied Piper.

From the Naval Academy's website:

Abbot Street was born in Richmond, Virginia on July 18, 1918. He died there on October 30, 1959. After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School, he attended Severn School in Severna Park, Maryland for a year before entering the Naval Academy in 1936. On graduation, he was assigned to the cruiser MILWAUKEE, in which he served for two years before going into flight training. In 1942, he married Katherine Ruthenburg.

Music for a Blue Monday Morning

Two days ago, I received an email from my sister with a link to her boyfriend's new album. Today, I opened it and listened to it. It's been raining a lot and I woke up feeling a little sad this morning. I'm posting the link to Jason's album here because the story behind this album, and the album itself, reminded me that art leavens life and people are brave, and it gave me the extra bit of courage I needed to forge ahead today.

Live Animals vs. Stuffed Animals

While I was working this morning, I saw Rupert prancing around the property with a stuffed animal in his mouth. My aunt and uncle have left several teddy bears around the property and Rupert often brings them in and dismantles them in the den. He was walking with such bounce this morning he reminded me of our old family dog, Sadie. The first thing Sadie would do when we got home was grab her stuffed rabbit and prance back and forth across the living room in front of us, as if she was proud of her fake kill. This morning, it took me a couple hours to realize that the stuffed animal in Rupert's mouth was actually a dead squirrel. Now, he keeps trying to bring it inside. I'm not sure what to do because there's no way I'm letting him in the house with that thing. The worst part is earlier this morning I let him lick me on the cheek when I still thought it was a stuffed animal.

How to Write Well

After my Grammy's funeral, we all family came back to this house. The first thing I did was look at her books. I've always thought looking at someone's book collection was the best way to get to know them and the Street family has always been hard to get to know.

It didn't take long for me to find these two shelves dedicated to books on how to write fiction. When I asked, my dad told me his mom had always wanted to write. I knew she'd had Masters degrees in English and Library Science, I knew she'd subscribed to Atlantic Monthly and Harpers, but I never had any inkling she'd wanted to be a writer.

When I found this out it made me sad that I hadn't been able to share this connection between us. It made me think she must have been proud of me for setting out where she hadn't and it made me wish I'd sent her my first published story. One of her favorite authors was Robertson Davies. I've never read him, but I will now.

Life and Death

I found this bird's nest of 6 baby chicks on a shelf outside the screen door yesterday. At first I thought they'd been abandoned, so I looked up "Raise Baby Chicks" on the internet. Then my Aunt Issa told me they hatch there every year and the mother's never too far away. I was relieved because according to Avian.net it takes a lot of work to raise 6 baby chicks.

This morning I found 4 wings of a butterfly lying on the front walkway. I think Rupert probably snatched it right out of the air and decided to eat the meat and leave the rest. So far, I've seen him eat crickets, junebugs, stinkbugs (it occurs to me writing this that may have something to do with his breath), beetles and now butterflies.

Danny and Krista

My brother Danny and his girlfriend Krista came over last night. I fried us up some steaks with onions and garlic and boiled some new potatoes and poured some salad dressing on some lettuce. Rupert was pretty good about it all. Except for the time he tried to kiss Krista.

It's good to see some of the new generation who aren't obsessed with Facebook or Twitter or the newest independent films or the hottest indie rock. These two couldn't care less about all that. They just want to spend their days swimming in quarries and hiking through the woods.

When you live in New York so long you forget what it's like in the rest of the country. My dad always talks about "the wisdom of the masses". John Cheever said anyone who didn't live in New York "has to be, in some sense, kidding." I'm still not sure who's right.

Addendum to Last Post

From the "Comments" section:

Beth said...

wow, shorty... you got that story wrong in so many ways. i said that about hydrangeas. and that's not a hyacinth, it's an iris. sorry to blow up your spot, lil homie!

May 5, 2010 8:04 PM

This is what a hydrangea looks like:



And this is a hyacinth:




This wasn't meant to be a horticulture blog.

Beth's Hyacinth

Beth had to leave before this bloomed, so I promised I'd take a picture of it for her. She told me Hyacinth's aren't naturally purple, but became that way from fruit acids cultivators added to their soil. The flower is named after a fallen Greek goddess who was murdered by Apollo. Zeus turned her into a flower after she died to save her soul from Hades. The myth says Hyacinth's blood made it dark purple.

Telemarketers Will Follow You to the Grave

Every day they call. I won't deny I get a sadistic pleasure out of informing them their lead has passed away. They're always contrite. Often they offer condolences and I remember then that they're just people stuck in a crappy job.

I was one once. I called people to ask for donations to lobby for an extension of Bill Clinton's late 90's moratorium on cutting down trees in national forests. You cringe every time someone picks up, just waiting for the inevitable tirade. Protocol says to call during dinner because that's when most people are home. But they're also eating dinner and it's the first time all day they haven't had to be on the phone at their crappy job.

So I go easy on these telemarketers, ask them to take Grammy's number off the list and thank them for their well wishes. We're in a recession.

A Note

I found a note written on a small piece of paper tucked behind a wooden jewelry box on top of my Grammy's dresser. On a 2" x 2" piece of paper, in handwriting almost identical to my father's, it said:

Use it up
Wear it out
Make it do
Or do without

Rupert + Horses = Manure + Topsiders

I was walking around the front of the property where the sun sets when Rupert saw a deer. He froze and it froze. It watched him silently while he emitted a burbling growl. Then it took off through the tall grass and Rupert galloped after it. (A woman at Lake Albemarle said Rupert ran like an elkhound.)

The deer disappeared over the barbed wire. By the time Rupert found a way through he'd discovered the neighbor's horses. He's like a kid at a candy convention here. He ran up to the horses barking maniacally. They barely paid him any mind. I called him furiously but he just glanced at me and continued his harassment. Wading through the tick-infested grass I finally found a way in but Rupert pretended I didn't exist. I was screaming at him by this time and the horses perked up. They trotted nonchalantly towards me like inquisitive interns at an insane asylum. It looked like they didn't intend to stop so I climbed back over the fence to go get some hot dog pieces with which to lure Rupert.

Being a city boy, I'm not sure what the protocol is when horses seem to want to meet you. At first I had a mystical feeling that they were sensing some deep peace inside of me and wanted to commune with me as a fellow creature of the natural world. Then I remembered what one kick from their back legs could do and figured it was a better idea to keep the animal/human barrier in place.

I got back down the hill hot dog bits in pocket and lifted the barbed wire. Rupert finally came to me after I threw half of it at him from a safe distance. To my humiliation, I had to give him a piece before I could take him by the scruff and yell at him some more. By the time we got home the sun was setting. I clinched one tick off him and three off me. My topsiders were filled with manure. As usual Rupert had no concept of the torture he put me through. It's definitely better than chasing him through Brooklyn. Give me horses trying to kill me rather than New York drivers any day.

The 1st Day

Beth left today after a perfect weekend of fried chicken, gardening and scrabble at sunset. I stood holding whining Rupert while she drove my father's Camry around and down the gravel drive. After she was gone I went outside and had some iced coffee on the back porch to think about what I was going to do here and how I was going to live. I looked out at the Blue Ridge mountains in the silence. A big bumblebee hovered suspiciously near me for a long time. Because they don't sting I decided to accept it as a good talisman. I wondered what it must have been like for Grammy to confront this silence after Grampy died without even a dog to interrupt it. Thank God for Rupert.