Saunders--Week of 11-02

11-02

Dialogue with my father

I had been thinking about conjuring my father's spirit and asking him to react to what I've been writing about our relationship, and here's what came up:


M: Daddy, I’ve been thinking about talking with you for a while. Are you willing to talk with me?

D: I don’t like this.

M: What is it you don’t like?

D: Being found out. It creeps me out bigtime.

M: That doesn’t sound like you. “Creeps me out”? That sounds like someone else. Whom am I talking to? I want to talk with my Daddy.

D: All right then, let’s get it over with.What’s on your mind?

M: What do you think about what I’m writing in my memoir about the time around your death?

D: Does it matter what I think? It’s not for me you’re doing this thing, it’s for your own sake. I have nothing to do with it, I’m just an object you’re turning over in your hand, describing what you see.

M: I think that’s something of an oversimplification. I think you’re stalling, talking and saying nothing. What are we avoiding here?

D: It doesn’t matter, everything is plain, nothing is hidden, nothing is inside, it’s all on the surface.

M: That sounds very cryptic. Do you mean to say that you’re an open book, or that my relationship with you is all a matter of obvious understanding? I can’t agree with that. I think things between you and me are still—even after all this time, all these years after your death—things are still very complex and complicated between us.

D: That’s what you think, is it? So there.

M: What do you think about me as a person? How do you look at me, what do you feel for me?

D: Deadness inside these walls, it’s insane how good nothing feels. I’m broken, breaking, and nothing inside this wall these walls matters. It’s a tomb, I’m safe, hidden, encased, out of the game. You’re suffering, you’re in the game, you hurt because it’s living taking its toll on you. I’m beyond all that, so the things that matter to you don’t affect me or mean anything, for that matter. Matter doesn’t matter to me, because I no longer have any of it.

M: You’re sounding very cryptic, and I don’t think you’re answering my questions.

D: Did I love thee? Count the ways. I gave my life up for –

M: You can’t finish that statement, can you? You gave your life up for me, is that what you were about to say?

D: I gave my life for nothing.

M: You sound very focused on yourself, very much like a petulant boy. You don’t sound like a father. You’re toying with me, playing a game. I’m trying to meet you head-on, honestly, and you’re playing word games, chattering about yourself. Can you not be honest with me, can you not talk with me like a father, is there no love in you for me?

D: Of course there is something left, but it’s not like the love of my being in my fat body and being miserable on the physical plane. All of that is over, was over long ago. Living is easy inside the lines.

11-03

I'm beginning to question the way I'm approaching this memoir. It is shaping up into a straightforward narrative, and I'm just wondering how honest that is. Maybe I need to cut loose a little and not bother so much with whether or not I keep to a single line of--well of anything.

I go back to remembering what it was like to spend time with my mother the days after my father died. There's really very little memory there. It was cold, I remember that. We were all numb, I remember that. I felt terribly sorry for my mother, because she was having to handle everything. It was awful having people parading in and out of the house. We all wanted to be left alone, but everyone was so intent on doing the right thing, the fact that we really wanted to be left alone didn't seem to matter much.

My father left no will, which immediately emerged as as serious problem. Being the macho guy he was, he had put much of the property he had in common with my mother in his own name, so that she was obliged immediately to start thinking about arranging to probate "his" estate. He also had failed, like most people, to provide any instructions for his own funeral, and had left only a very modest life insurance policy.

This meant my mother was left with the horrible task of figuring out all the details of getting him buried, while also having to deal with the fact that half the household income was gone and that most of the property they had in common was or would be legally frozen. My mother had stuck with my father through twenty-eight years of marriage, most of it either unhappy or just plain empty, and this was what she was left with at the end of it.

I couldn't be mad at my father for leaving his affairs in such a muddle; I felt horribly sad for him. I had no idea what would happen to my mother, and I was in no position to help her except to offer the limited support that being with her afforded. I remember feeling, throught the next few days, that there was very little certainty left in our family.

When we went to see my father in the funeral the evening after he had died, as I've said, it was shocking. Seeing him lying there with all that makeup covering his melting face was, I think, a bigger shock than hearing he had died. He looked sort of like Brezhnev, lying there in state in a very shiny suit, the lights thankfully dim so you couldn't see what a travesty, quite literally, had been made of his body. I have to admit I felt a certain perverse satisfaction at seeing him so physically humiliated, realizing what a mess he'd left for my mother to have to clean up and, once the shock of his death began to wear off, beginning to remind myself what a horrible bully he'd been through his life.

I remember the following day we had a funeral. My mother had quickly arranged to have him interred at a cemetery near their house. This didn't make any kind of sense, since both his family and my mother's family had family plots near old home family homeplaces in south Georgia. Furthermore, it finally emerged that he had wanted to be buried at sea, something he was entitled to as a serially decorated veteran of WWII. I can understand my mother just needed to get past it, though, and I can only imagine what must have been going through her mind, as confused as my own thoughts and feelings were. So Daddy didn't get buried at sea, he got buried in the ground in a cemetery in Lithonia, Georgia. If there's an afterlife, by now he's learned a lot about having lots of black folks as neighbors, something he never experienced while he was alive.

11-04

As I have been thinking about this project, bits an pieces of memory of my father have come up and circulated through my awareness, like morsels in a simmering stew. Some of them keep coming back to me, some are very, very old, going back to my earliest awareness.

Me at age fifteen or so, puttering in my bedroom, which I've painted six different shades of blue and yellow (an early design impulse I was allowed to act out). I can see the poplar trees out the front bedroom window, which is a double window. I often enjoy looking out this window and watching the leaves dancing silently in the afternoon light. On one such afternoon my father comes into my room while I'm puttering, listening to a Chopin concerto. He lies down on my bed and falls to sleep while I fidget with something, probably books or drawing materials. I watch him sleep while Chopin plays. It's one of the sweetest memories I have of him.

Me at age five or so, being dragged out onto a pier to go fishing. The whole family is there, and I'm hangind back. I'm unable to lift my gaze from the cracks between the boards on the pier. The pier is massive, substantial, firm, but I'm convinced that at any moment I'm going to liquefy and drip through the cracks in the boards. I'm terrified of walking over this surface. My family are humiliated by the spectacle I make of myself. No one shows me any pity, just derision.

Me at age five or six, in our Key West Navy housing apartment. My sister and I are being entertained by our father, who is showing us how placing a magnet near the screen of our black and white TV distorts the image ridiculously. My sister and I take turns messing with the TV as our father looks on approvingly. My mother is furious, insisting that we're going to ruin the TV set or electrocute ourselves. We laugh the whole thing off.

The smell of my father's Navy uniform: it is pungent and very male, smells of leather and polish mixed with my father's scent. The sound of his dog tags, which is high and silvery.

Going sailing with my father when I was fourteen or so. I had a very small sailboat: just large enough for the two of us. My father was intent on teaching me how to tack. For some reason, he was entirely inappropriately dressed in his work clothes: white shirt, no tie, dress slacks and dress shoes and socks. At this point he was very, very corpulent. I was also pretty pudgy at this point, so we must have been a very comical father-son pair. We both managed to get into the boat, push off from land, and get out far enough into the lake so that the wind began to catch the sail. I had to steer the rudder to begin to tack, and as I did so, the boom crossed the deck of the boat. My father was so fat that, when the boom approached him, he tried to lie down to let it pass over him, but it got stuck on his belly and we almost capsized. I didn't laugh, even though it was very funny watching him flailing his arms and legs in the water as the small boat began to lean precipitously. Eventually he managed to suck in his belly and the boom passed over him. Somehow I managed to tack back and forth, and each time I turned managed to do so gently enough so that he was able to avoid getting hung up on the sail. By the time we finished, I knew how to tack, and he was drenched.

My father showing me a pin-up he had hidden away. It was soft porn. He told me not to telly my mother. I immediately screamed for my mother and ran to her to tell her what he'd done. My father gritted his teeth helplessly. I think I was about ten when this happened.

I remember coming home one afternoon when I was twelve or so. I'd been sucking Bobby Kelley's dick down by the creek across the street from our house. When I got home, everybody was in the kitchen, harassing my mother about what we were going to have for dinner. My father looked at me from across the kitchen, came over and looked at my ear. I had no idea what he was doing. In horror, he swiped his index finger across my ear and drew back a globule of Bobby Kelley's spooge. Wide-eyed and speechless, he showed my mother what he'd found. She looked at him and said something like, "It may be something else..." Not another word was said about it. I acted as if I didn't know what the fuss was. I knew there was no way anyone could prove it was someone else's baby batter.

11-05

I often think about the fact that I live within a few blocks of where my father died. It wasn't as if I consciously fought to get here. A few years back I was working for a large law firm in the Bank of America building, a block away from my present home. I had a big, wonderful old house, supposedly somewhere around 130 years old, out in the country. The drive killed me--an hour and a half one way most days. Twice a day, into town and back, made for a lonely life in the car, trying to avoid having a wreck with some idiot speeding and chatting on his (or possibly her) cell phone. I found a place in town, in a charming old building a block away from work, and after finding a buyer for my lovely, lonely old house, I moved into this place, a two-room apartment in a grand old building that was once one of the grandest places in Atlanta.

It's now a not-so-grand place. Lots of rich people live here, some of them in truly magnificent apartments. The building, designed to look like an Italian Renaissance palazzo, looks like a metastasized version of one of the fine 16th century palaces of Florence. I live on the third floor in my very modest, two-room place (two rooms plus a kitchen and bath). My view is very scenic, looking north up Peachtree Street and west towards the sunset. Until someone comes along and builds something on the vacant lot across the street, I'll be able to enjoy lovely sunsets and the warm glow of afternoon light.

Afternoon is my favorite time to be in my little place. The windows are very large and cover the full length of my two rooms. There are, in fact, five huge windows in all, each of them four feet by six feet. Unfortunately, an idiot renovated the place in the 1980s and took out the original mullioned windows, replacing them with blankly, ugly modern single-pane windows that make the once-stately building appear perpetually to be staring as if it has had a lobotomy or, as a French friend of mine would say, "comme la vache qui régarde passer le train." Even with the defaced windows, the afternoon and evening light are often splendid, turning everything into the most brilliant gold. On days when I see this, I can forget much that is bad or unwanted in life. In the evenings I can use the flashing lights of the Fox Theatre marquis to lose myself in crepuscular dreams as pleasant as I could hope to conjure.

All this by way of saying that, living here, I do not feel myself in contact with the pain of my father's last suffering as he died. In fact I don't think he could have suffered much, as his death has been described to me as a massive stroke that must have worked so quickly that, once it started, it almost immediately overtook him and gave him all his suffering an end. He died in the parking lot of what was then the Life of Georgia building, a stately, sculptural skyscraper that still stands at the corner of West Peachtree Street and North Avenue, though it now belongs to another bank. Clad in luscious, lightly mottled marble, the building's design has held up well over the years. In a city of mostly repulsive, childishly executed public architecture, it stands out as a work of stately balance and grace.

The Life of Georgia (or whatever it's called now, soon enough it will just be The Bank) sits on the southwest corner of a remarkable intersection. On the southeast corner is the Bank of America Building, noted for its postmodernist melding of the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower. The structural quotation of the Eiffel Tower at the building's top creates a kind of virtual building--it's just a tower of steel girders serving no purpose other than to give the overall structure enough height to claim bragging rights as the Southeast's tallest building. I like the fact that it's fake and useless, our copy of the Eiffel Tower. It is very Atlantan in its simultaneous affirming and denying of space. On the northeast corner of the same intersection is the MARTA station, non-descript, functional and almost a piece of anti-architecture, and therefore, in its way, also very Atlantan. Of all the corners of the intersection, the MARTA corner is the most public, by extension, the most civil, and because it is Atlanta's version of that, it is ugly, drab and humble--in fact, it's an opening to a hole in the ground, so it balances the Bank of America's perpetually disintegrating, soaring height in a funny kind of way. And on the northwest corner, there is the venerable All Saints Episcopal Church. Like the Bank of America Building, All Saints recalls another place, with its lovely English Gothic styling and its sumptuous Tiffany windows. All in all, a remarkable place, the intersection where my father died.



11-07

It was a cold day when my father died. I was out in the woods, among men I mostly cared a great deal for, full of innocence, full of youth and surrounded by it, full of the satisfaction of thinking, at least for the moment, that I was working at something worthwhile, trying to do good, trying to do something meaningful. But I was also very much aware of how hemmed in I was, how much there was that didn't make sense about the system I'd become a part of, how much didn't add up, how clearly it was that, in a matter of time, I'd come to the conclusion that I didn't belong there, where I was, being a good boy, working hard, helping people (I thought), staying focused.

My father's death really saved me from continuing too much farther down that path. He died, I went home, endured the dreadful pomp of his funeral, and went back to work. People were nice to me at work, treating me with tenderness, really doing a good job of taking care that I wasn't too raw, that I felt as comfortable as could be expected while I learned to move around with the wound of losing a parent burned into me. The few days away from Anneewakee did something to me, they performed a kind of deprogramming, and some kind of process started that began to make me see I didn't belong there, that I wouldn't become a therapist and continue working with kids like the ones I was living with.

I don't remember much about the funeral, which seems odd to me. I spent the weekend with my mother, watching her, observing how the death of my father hit her. She seemed old to me then, as I've said, and the fact of my father's death seemed to have added age onto her. She was too overwhelmed to grieve openly; at this point her grief looked like the feebleness of a serious illness, as if she had cancer. We muddled through talking about what needed to happen to get through the next few weeks, and as I recall, that is mostly what we focused on--getting through each day, trying to figure out what needed to be done in the short term to just make it a few steps, a day, further, as if our grief, our surviving my father's death, really were a trip we'd embarked on.

The funeral was proper, held on a cool, sunny day. My mother, sister and received folks at the funeral home, then drove to the graveyard in rural Dekalb county for the service. Because my father was a decorated veteran, he received a twenty-one gun salute. There were lots of people there, and many kind words were said about my father. People were quite affected by his death, and they treated my mother, my sister and me with kindness. My mother had a hard time getting through the funeral, and afterwards, she panicked as people began to come towards her and offer condolences. She hid in the limousine and made it clear she needed to go home. I think her upbringing made it very shameful to her that she should show her grief publicly. She came from poor, proud farmers, people who have always associated displays of emotion with a kind of shamefulness, something I've never really understood. But I did know it was the way she was, and so I understood when she needed to run, almost literally, from the grave and hide in her awful, lonely little house.

So the day after the funeral, I think, I went back to Anneewakee. I don't remember how much time passed, whether it was a week or maybe more, but one day not terribly long after I'd gotten back to Anneewakee I received word that someone needed to talk with me, someone from outside. Again I had to leave my group of boys and follow someone to an administration building, where I took a phone call. I can't remember the exact chain of events, but I do remember that somehow, the people at Emory University library, where I'd worked briefly in the acquisitions department, had gotten word that I'd been selected to receive a Goethe Institut scholarship. The scholarship would pay my travel, tuition and living expenses to study German intensively for two months in what was then West Germany. I had to decide quickly whether or not to accept. I decided it was too good an offer to pass up, and so I told the folks at Anneewakee that I needed to do this, and could I maybe come back and work for them after the study term ended? They agreed, reluctantly. Of course, once I left Anneewakee, I never went back. And so, I left Anneewakee in mid-December. By Christmas, I was traveling alone to Germany to go to my new home, a place with a fabled name: Radolfzell am Bodensee, situated on the Bodensee or Lake of Constance.