The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Six

There was something truly creepy about this experience, beyond even the general creepiness I expected. It felt like more than mere snooping. It was as if I had broken into a stranger’s apartment and was rifling through his possessions. Whatever curiosity I might have had regarding my grandfather and who he was or what had caused his rift with my father was rapidly evaporating. 

I picked up the phone on the kitchen counter –it was an old tabletop, rotary model—and found that there was no dial tone. It hardly seemed possible that the telephone service had already been disconnected. There was a yellowed note pad next to the telephone, and among the several numbers that were scrawled there in an unsteady hand I noticed the number for my apartment in Chicago. To the best of my knowledge, my grandfather had never called me.

I couldn’t bring myself to look in my grandfather’s refrigerator. It seems ridiculous now, but I literally couldn’t handle the thought of opening the refrigerator door. I have no idea what it was I thought I might find that seemed so distressing at the time. The chaotic archive of my mother’s fridge had always depressed me, though, so perhaps the dread was ingrained. 

I stood there in the middle of the kitchen and realized I was agitated, as if I was afraid I would be discovered in my dead grandfather’s apartment and arrested for trespassing.

I went back into the living room, found a remote, and clicked on the television. I was shocked to discover that my grandfather had cable. I sat on the couch and surfed up and down the dial for a time. With the exception of a couple old Christmas movies, you would have been hard pressed to guess what day it was from the offerings on TV. I actually sat there and watched about a half hour of “Crocodile Hunter’ and a good portion of one of those home video shows where some guy is always getting whacked in the nuts.

I turned off the television and sat there in the silence for a moment. The building was eerily quiet. Every couple of minutes the silence was broken by some kind of mechanical voice blurting out an insult or challenge from somewhere beneath me. I eventually surmised that these eruptions were issuing from a pinball machine in the bar downstairs, and I was also, after about an hour of hearing them, able to make out what the voice was saying: “Come and get it,” alternating with, “That’s more like it.”

I eventually screwed up the nerve to take a look at the pile of drawings on the drafting table. I took a seat on the stainless steel stool and hunched over the first drawing on the stack. The paper was very fine, almost transparent, and yellowed with age. At the top of the page were the words, “Charlie’s Dinky Links,” and beneath them was what appeared to be a layout of a golf course, with holes numbered one through ten. Each hole had a slightly different size and shape, from a zigzag to a boomerang to a horseshoe. The drawing had an almost abstract architectural precision. Various hazards, it seemed, were indicated by shaded areas or bands of solid black. Subsequent pages revealed hole-by-hole plans, complete with alternate designs and proposed variations. Each of these individual drawings was detailed and finely drawn –there was a windmill, a lighthouse, a covered wagon, and a rocket ship; among others there was one labeled the “Loop-dee-doo”; there was a “Mouse Trap,” and another called “The London Bridge.” In the margins of these drawings were all sorts of elaborate specifications and minutiae.

I spent at least an hour looking over these plans and marveling at the obsessive attention to detail. Whoever had drawn them was an excellent draftsman. One of the last pages featured a series of light poles and stringers of bulbs; this drawing was labeled “Starlight Golf.” I certainly couldn’t make sense of any of this, of course, but it was a wonderful distraction all the same.

I realized at some point that I was starving, and went back into the kitchen to see whether there might be something to eat. The cupboards were literally almost completely bare, other than a few mismatched coffee cups and glasses and plates. The silverware and pots and pans were in the drawer and cupboard next to the stove. As much as I dreaded looking in the refrigerator, I finally broke down and popped open the door. It was more or less as I expected, largely empty with the exception of an old bottle of catsup, a plastic jug of antacid, a bag of shriveled carrots, half a jar of dill pickles, a partial loaf of bread just starting to bloom with mold, and a half-gallon of milk that was only a few days beyond its expiration date.

I poured the milk down the sink, rinsed the carton, and opened a broom closet at the other end of the kitchen in search of a garbage can. There was, in fact, a garbage pail there, lined with a plastic trash bag, and literally overflowing with empty beer cans. There must have been at least a hundred beer cans. Given the otherwise obsessively tidy appearance of the apartment it seemed strange to me that my grandfather had resisted emptying the garbage. Perhaps, I thought, he was one of those old men who saved aluminum cans. It occurred to me that Iowa had some sort of recycling deposit on aluminum and plastic, so I supposed it was possible that he was simply stockpiling his cans for a trip to the redemption center.

I found a box of trash bags above the broom closet and yanked one down. I filled the bag partially with the overflow from the garbage pail and then hauled it over to the refrigerator, where I noticed that there were two incongruous looking items pinned to the door with little magnets; there was a picture postcard –apparently quite old, judging from the lurid pastels of the colorized photo—of “Sunny California,” a scene of a beach sunset and some palm trees. Beneath this on the fridge was a portrait in colored pencil or crayon –primitive and clearly the work of a child—of a stern-looking old man. I removed this drawing and turned it over to find my father’s clumsily written name written on the back, as well as the words, “Thomas Edison.”

Though it felt like one more violation, I slid the magnet from the picture postcard with my thumb, removed the card, and read the cursive inscription. I couldn’t tell if the handwriting was a woman’s or a man’s. “Awful nice hear,” it read. “Hope your behaving yourself, but I don’t suppose you are. Probably will not get back that way again and I know how you are, so. You and your crazy ideas. You can have that place, Charlie.”

It occurred to me standing there with that old postcard in my hands –the postmark was smudged, so I couldn’t quite make out the date—that it was not only possible, but entirely likely, that all of these confusing and mysterious loose ends and old strands would never add up to anything for me, and that my grandfather’s story –whatever that might have been—would forever elude me even if I went through every last item and scrap of paper in his apartment. I had absolutely nothing to work from or with, no personal memories or family stories, and absent the miracle of a diary or a journal I might as well have been going through the random items in a thrift store.

I’m not a speculative guy, and I’d make a lousy detective or archeologist. I’d have a hard time reconstructing my own life from the items in my apartment. I also realized my father wasn’t expecting me to make sense of my grandfather’s life; he simply wanted me to dismantle what was left of it, to erase all traces of his existence.

I couldn’t imagine a more dispiriting way to spend Christmas day. I had long since gotten used to being alone, but that morning I suddenly felt the melancholy flush of what I supposed was, in fact, a sort of loneliness. I decided to take a walk another walk around the town to try to clear my head.

I made my way back down the narrow, dimly lit corridor to the door. There on the wall in the entryway I noticed a rack of keys, each of them attached to a hard plastic label. There was a key labeled “entry,” and another “apartment.” There were two other keys as well; one for the “office,” and the other designated “roof.” I took down the key for the office –whatever that was—and compared it to the keys they had given me at the hospital. It appeared to be a match for one of the seven keys I already had in my possession. The other keys on the rack also seemed to have duplicates on my grandfather’s key ring. I wondered if perhaps my grandfather was some kind of caretaker or janitor for the building.

I went out into the hallway and checked my grandfather’s mailbox. It was empty, but I noticed there was also a mailbox on the wall adjacent to the door across the hall –a door I now noticed bore a sticker that read “Office”—and this mailbox was stuffed with envelopes and assorted junk mail. There was also a large package against the wall beneath the mailbox. I glanced down at the package and saw that it was addressed to my grandfather, care of “D. Links, Inc.”

I removed the mail from the box and shuffled through it; all of it was addressed to either my grandfather or, again, “D. Links, Inc.” The addresses corresponded to the number on the office mailbox. I fiddled around with the keys and found one that fit the office door.

The room was cold and musty, and had the eerie look and feel of a place that hadn’t been entered in years. There was a desk against the back wall, above which were tacked a bunch of drawings exactly like those I’d seen on the drafting table in my grandfather’s apartment. The surface of the desk was dusty and cluttered with mail, miscellaneous papers, and old phone books and catalogues. On the opposite wall there were wooden racks that were lined with golf clubs –all of the clubs, actually, were putters. Scattered across the floor were dozens of wire baskets full of golf balls, many of them brightly colored.

Everything in the place had a fine coating of dust. I noticed a calendar on one wall that was from 1958; the month that was displayed was November. In case there was any doubt that this was, in fact, my grandfather’s office, there was one of those old laminated nameplates bearing his name on the desk.

I tossed the pile of mail on the desk with the rest of the junk, and noticed that most of the mail I had just removed from the box was postmarked from 1982. There was a door next to the desk, and I tried the handle and discovered that it was ajar. I pulled the door open and found a short flight of wooden stairs beyond which I could see nothing but gray sky. I ventured up these steps and emerged onto a quite large rooftop, the entirety of which was taken up by an incredibly preserved –and incredibly surreal—miniature golf course. All of the obstacles were either badly faded or bleached by age and exposure, yet they still appeared structurally sound and imposing, and truly striking in the way of adventurously awkward but inspired outsider art. 

I wished I’d had a camera. I wandered over to an old picnic table and took a seat beneath a trio of artificial palm trees that retained only the faintest hints of original color, almost like a badly tinted photograph in an old vacation scrapbook. A pet phrase of my mother's occurred to me, a phrase that she generally employed with withering irony: World of wonders.

I was sitting in the middle of a long-abandoned miniature golf course on the roof of a building on Christmas morning. There was actually a lovely view from up there, looking straight down the Main Street and out over the neighborhood of old houses to the river beyond. At that gray hour the Mississippi was a flat black streak crawling through a few patches of lingering fog.

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Five

I’m trying to tell this story as I remember it, which is, of course, really the only way you can tell a story. I have a pretty good memory, and am also an obsessive diarist, but there are things I’m just going to have to recreate or maybe even make up altogether. Since I was a child I’ve been plagued by strange dreams (this applies to my daydreams almost as much as those I have while sleeping) and tormented by my utter inability to make sense of them, and this whole episode in my life shared a lot of the slippery characteristics of those old and futile battles.  

I went to a shrink once, at my mother’s suggestion, to try to get to the bottom of these torments, and I couldn’t have been more disappointed.  I honestly hoped and believed that this woman would somehow explain everything to me, or at the very least steer me in the direction of some explanations.  This woman, however, was a very bad psychiatrist. I recognized that much, and as unfair as it likely is, the experience cultivated in me a huge and unyielding distrust of the entire profession.

This particular doctor, of whom my mother had apparently heard good things, was, as far as I could surmise, a flake; she was clearly stoned –I could smell pot on her when I entered the office.  The marijuana seemed to make her detached to the point of actual disinterest.  The entire time I was in her office she was doodling on a pad of paper, very concentrated doodling; she didn’t even pretend she was taking notes. I recounted a dream to her once and she looked up briefly from her notebook, raised her eyebrows, smiled, and said, “That’s a fun one.” Then she slumped back over her tablet, with her long, straight hair falling down over her face. There was a ruler near me on her desk and I had to resist the urge to pick it up and rake the hair from her eyes. I remember I had to shove a bunch of stuffed animals aside to make room for myself on her couch, and I also noticed that she had all sorts of generically affirmative nonsense all over the walls, posters of sunsets and beaches with glib little italicized snippets of purported inspiration.

This story really doesn’t have much to do with anything, but on Christmas Eve I had a dream that was peculiar even by my own standards. It means nothing to me now, but at the time I was probably more susceptible than I ever again will be to the possibilities of portent, and so I roused myself in the middle of the night and wrote down everything about the dream that I could remember.

In the dream I was sitting in a sauna next to my grandfather, completely enveloped in steam.  I was wearing an elaborate cowboy outfit, complete with a huge ten-gallon hat, and my grandfather was stark naked.  We weren’t acknowledging each other, let along speaking to anyone else.  It wasn’t clear if my grandfather knew who I was or not; he didn’t let on if he did.  He kept clearing his throat and spitting in the direction of the stove.  From somewhere else in the room someone else was coughing so hard it sounded like they were choking.  It was, of course, very hot in the sauna, and I was increasingly uncomfortable in my cowboy getup.

After a long and uneasy stretch of silence, during which time I thought perhaps my grandfather had nodded off, I heard the door open at the other end of the room, beyond the steam, and felt a cool blast of outside air and saw the cloud of steam billow and scurry and momentarily part; through this moving steam emerged Santo, exactly as I remembered him from our encounter in the parking lot, except for the fact that he was wearing a sleeveless white underwear shirt, and every visible inch of his skin was covered with black tattoos.  He leaned over and whispered something in my grandfather’s ear, and my grandfather rose from the bench, wrapped himself in a towel, and followed Santo from the sauna.

I left the steam room to follow them, and emerged into a giant glass enclosure made up of descending tubular corridors, all of them, on all four sides of the enclosure, emptying out onto a bright red gymnasium floor below.  By the time I got to the landing outside the sauna, which was at the very top of one of the corridors, I could see people moving along these glass tubes on all sides, at various levels.  It appeared that the building was being quietly evacuated.  The majority of these people appeared to be professionals; they wore suits and slacks –even the women—and carried briefcases.  They were all moving along at an almost martial pace; without exception they appeared joyless, and shuffled along in silence.  My grandfather and Santo were the only exceptions to this.  They’d somehow managed to get a good distance in front of me, and were almost to the gymnasium level of the enclosure. They were making a good deal of noise, either arguing or laughing, and their loud voices were echoing throughout the glass enclosure. 

My cowboy outfit was soaking wet.  My leather chaps were waterlogged; it felt like I was trying to walk with a gymnast strapped to each of my legs.  My cowboy hat was sagging down around my ears.  I tried to run down the corridor but felt like I was running in place.  I was shedding such prodigious amounts of water that a small stream had developed in front of me and was rapidly swelling and gaining such momentum that it was sweeping people off their feet and carrying them away.  In a matter of moments the gymnasium floor was flooded, the water level rising so swiftly that I could now see people bobbing about below me and struggling to keep their heads above the surface.

I caught a brief glimpse of my grandfather; he was being carried away, and I saw him reach out one arm in desperation and open his mouth to yell.  At precisely that moment the door to the sauna burst open and a huge moving cloud of steam enveloped everything.

 

I was awakened early the next morning by the ringing of the phone, but didn’t get out of bed and across the room in time to answer it. Outside the window of my motel room the town was completely socked in by fog.  I pulled on a pair of pants and my boots and went across the street to get a can of Mountain Dew from the pop machine in front of the car wash.  At eight o’clock on Christmas morning some solitary guy was washing his truck.

I hung around my room most of the morning, watching television and trying to screw up the gumption to walk over and take a look around my grandfather’s apartment.  I was starting to get cold feet about the whole thing.  I suppose the fact that I was alone in a strange town on Christmas morning had something to do with that, but I was also dreading what I might find when I actually started poking through my grandfather’s things.  Who knew what I had gotten myself into?  I remembered helping my mother clean out her house as she prepared for her move to Arizona, and it was appalling how much junk she had accumulated and how much work it was getting rid of it.  I must have made a dozen trips to the local Salvation Army and we still filled two huge rental bins with crap. 

Going through the last few boxes and bags in my mother’s attic I had been appalled to come across several ancient porn movies on Beta format, along with a dog-eared stash of extremely lame and –in a number of cases seriously foul—smut magazines from the 1970s.  This, of course, was more information about the private life of my parents than I really cared to know.

When I finally poked my head out of my room that day there was a holiday sausage, cheese, and nuts basket at my door, with no card or note attached.  I’d noticed Jehovah’s Witness literature on the counter in the motel office, so I figured I could eliminate the proprietor as the source of such holiday kindness.  I stopped down at the office, but the place was locked up tight.  My father, I supposed, was a suspect, as so far as I knew he was the only person outside of a few friends in the city who knew where I was, but it seemed like an uncharacteristic gesture on his part.  My mother was a more likely candidate, as she still seemed to somehow always know how to track my father down, and he was in the habit of checking in with her on such special occasions.  She would, I knew, be appalled to know that I was spending Christmas alone in a motel room in my father’s old hometown, tidying up –as she had done on so many occasions—my father’s unpleasant affairs.  She had always expressed complete ignorance about my father’s apparent rift with my grandfather –“That water’s already in another country,” she’d say, her own curious variant on “That’s water over the dam,” or whatever the hell the phrase was.  She claimed to have never met my grandfather.  “If he was invited to our first wedding, he didn’t come,” she said.  “But I seriously doubt that your father even sent him an invitation.”

I put that gift basket on the bed in my room, locked the place, and walked downtown to take my first look at my grandfather’s apartment. There was an eerie stillness to the town that morning; the fog had mostly lifted overnight, or at least thinned, so that there was an almost milky quality to the early light.

It was maybe ten blocks to my grandfather’s building, and I don’t think I saw a single person or automobile moving on the streets or sidewalks on my walk downtown.

I stopped at the door next to the bar –‘Mernie’s,’ I now noticed the place was called; the sign looked ancient, and was badly faded. The bar looked even smaller and dingier in the daylight. I fumbled with the key ring I had been given at the hospital. There were seven keys on the ring, and I found the key for the street-level door on the third try. The steep flight of stairs disappeared up into the darkness. I ran my hand along the wall at the bottom of the steps and managed to find a light switch that illuminated one bare bulb above the landing at the top. At the top of the stairs there were two doors facing each other across a short hallway. One bore a sign composed of metallic stick-on letters: OFFICE. The other door had a small black mailbox nailed squarely in the middle. My grandfather’s name, written in an uncertain hand on a slip of paper, was taped to the mailbox.

It was cold in that entryway, and I could hear nothing but the sound of my own breathing. Already, standing there in the shadows, I could smell the last years of my grandfather’s life; the building had that unmistakable trapped smell of old age, old everything, stuffy and baked into permanence by years of sweat, grease, dust, and old steam radiators. It seemed like I could literally feel the steam heat seeping from under the door to the apartment and breaking up into small, distinct blasts of old smells in the cold air at the top of the stairs.

I had to go through all the keys a couple times before I finally managed to get the deadbolt to snap. I shoved the door open into a very narrow hallway, where there was a high ceiling and a light cord I literally had to stand on my toes and jump a little bit to reach. Once I turned on the hall light I ventured further into the apartment. It was a remarkably neat and tiny place. There was a small kitchen with a breakfast nook just off the hallway before the living room. The living room was spacious and bright, and had a high bank of bay windows that faced east and looked out over the town towards the river. An old couch faced a cheap, prefabricated entertainment console that held a television, VCR, and compact stereo system. A pair of burgundy Oxford shoes was neatly aligned next to the sofa. There was a large, oval braided rug and a couple of uncomfortable looking chairs that appeared to be part of a dining room set.

Against the wall beneath the windows was a beautiful stainless steel drafting table with a matching adjustable stool. The thing looked very heavy and very old, and its surface was covered with a large collection of drawings. I didn’t poke through them right away, but it was clear enough that they weren’t anything recent; the paper was yellowed and curling with age.

Just off the living room was the bedroom and bathroom. The bed, I noticed right away, was neatly made up. I grew up in a house where I don’t recall a bed ever being made; I certainly can’t remember ever making one, and my mother and father always slept on a big mattress on the floor.

Along one wall there was a rack of shirts and jackets next to a big wooden chest of drawers, the top of which was cluttered with the random possessions of an old man: ancient ballpoint pens, razors, bottles of aftershave, a deck of cards, a pile of old mail bundled with rubber bands, a fingernail clipper, dirty plastic combs, stray change. I didn’t nose through any of the stuff just then. Facing the bed was a dressing table and a mirror, very similar to one you might expect to see in a young girl’s bedroom.

I was just sort of standing there in the middle of the room, taking things in, not touching anything and not quite sure what to think or do next. I went to the windows and opened the blinds all the way so as to let in as much light –such as it was—as I possibly could. I sat down on the sofa for a while.

I was once again struck by how impossibly tidy the place was. Everything was in its place. Tidiness is a wholly foreign concept to me. Growing up, my entire family was masters of clutter, and our home was always a warren of disorder. Perhaps it was the salvage man in him, but my father couldn’t ever seem to bring himself to throw a single thing away.

I don’t know what I was expecting, to be honest with you, but I guess I had imagined the filthy apartment of a slothful old bachelor. Just above the television there was a reproduction of that famous old painting of an old man saying grace at the dinner table. I also noticed several photographs taped to the mirror above the dressing table. One of them, I could tell from across the room, was a childhood portrait of my father. I went over and took it from the mirror and examined it; it looked like he was maybe ten years old at the time the picture was taken. He had the same expression on his face that he had apparently had his entire life, a very serious, almost perplexed look, but with the slight suggestion of amusement in his eyes. His hair was as cowlicked and unkempt as it had been the last time I’d seen him. I turned the photo over in my hands. Written on the back in large block letters were the words, “My boy,” and under that, obviously added later and with a different pen, “Son, 1955.” There was another photo of an older woman, a relatively recent shot, it seemed, maybe ten or fifteen years old, the sort of photo you might see in a church directory. She looked like a fat, cheerful old woman, but there was nothing on the photo to indicate who she might have been.

Finally, there were a couple photos of my grandfather, or so I presumed. In one of them he was shirtless, tall and skinny and squinting into the sun. He appeared to be laughing and standing on a rooftop, surrounded by clutter. You could see the trees, television antennae on the roofs of houses, and automobiles in the distance behind him. This was one of those black-and-white snapshots with the serrated edges and a date-stamped border: “June, 1958.” Written on the back of the photograph, in the same careful block letters I’d noticed on my father’s portrait, were the words, “Golf course.”

On the dressing stand itself there was a color studio portrait of my grandfather with a nice-looking older woman with big cheekbones. It looked like it was from sometime in the Carter or Reagan administrations, and bore the stamp of a portrait studio in Minneapolis. My grandfather looked surprisingly healthy and happy. His hands were folded neatly in his lap, and he and the woman were seated in front of a cheesy forest backdrop. His hair was oiled and neatly combed (in the photos my father had of him his head had always been shaved), and he had a very small and tight smile on his face.

I put the photo back on the dresser and went around the corner into the kitchen. There was a tiny artificial Christmas tree on the table, and under which were one wrapped gift and a familiar shipping box of Florida oranges.

I slid the box of oranges out from under the tree; it was already addressed to me at my father's address. The other box was wrapped in shiny green foil paper and topped with a red bow. Unlike my box of oranges, this one had a tag attached, on which was written in a shaky hand, “For Santo.”

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Four

The woman at the hospital had given me a bag of my grandfather’s personal effects, including his wallet (with his driver’s license and address), a key ring, some change (four quarters, a dime, a nickel, and three pennies), an arrowhead, and a money clip with $37.  Back at my motel I sat around, stunned, channel surfing on the television and pondering my next move.  Now that I had decided that I might as well hang around and wrap up my grandfather’s affairs, I realized that I honestly had no real idea what this might entail. 

My father’s instructions had been clear enough: Just shut everything down.  He’d told me, “I’m pretty sure he still rents an apartment downtown, probably the same one he moved into after he left my mother.  I suppose you’ll have to track down his landlord.  Whatever he’s got in there, get rid of it –give it away, throw it away, sell it; I don’t care what you do with it, just get rid of everything.  I can’t imagine there’ll be much.”

I’d had a terrible connection with my father that night –the telephone connection, I mean; it sounded like he was calling from some kind of a cellular phone—and I could tell he was impatient with me, or probably (to be fair) not with me, but with the whole sore subject of his father’s death and whatever old turmoil and conflict it stirred up in him.  That was my father’s style, anyway, to delegate everything, particularly the shit jobs, as he called them; it was one of the things that had driven my mother nuts about him.  I could tell he just wanted me to take care of everything and give him the briefest of reports when I was done.  It seemed to me like a good opportunity to nose around and try to dig up some answers for myself, the prospect of which must have occurred to my father; if there was anything that struck him as awkward or unusual about sending me in to clean up the affairs of a man who for all intents and purposes I didn’t even know, my father never let on.

I eventually went over to the motel office and asked the woman at the desk for directions to my grandfather’s place.  It turned out he was living in an apartment above a bar on a block just off the Main Street.  I walked back downtown and checked the place out; the bar was closed on Christmas Eve, but I stood for a moment with my face pressed to the dirty glass; it was a small joint, one long room with a bar running the length of one wall and a pool table dominating the rest of the space.  There was the usual assortment of bar neon, liquor posters, and a bright jukebox against the back wall.  Outside, alongside the entrance to the bar, there was another door, this one bearing my grandfather’s name and address on the mailbox.  There were a couple grimy panes of glass in the middle of this door, through which I could see a dark staircase disappearing into the black hallway above.

Night had fallen by this time and the entire downtown seemed abandoned.  I walked back to the corner and looked off down the Main Street, where the light poles were strung with alternating artificial green Christmas trees and red plastic candy canes that glowed above every corner.  Bells were ringing at the big Catholic Church a few blocks east of the downtown, and a moment later I heard the first strains of an organ drift up the street.  Sound, I discovered, really carries in an empty little town on Christmas Eve.

I decided against investigating my grandfather’s apartment until I at least had daylight to beat some of the gloom out of the place, and as I strolled around the fog-swept downtown I kept moving into pockets of choral music –or Christmas carols and hymns—that were bleeding out into the streets from Christmas Eve services at various churches around town.  It was eerie and oddly thrilling; there is something both desolate and romantic about being alone in a strange place on Christmas Eve; it fills your heart to the point of breaking, is how my father had once described a Christmas he had spent in an empty hotel somewhere in the north of Norway, where he had attended services at a Lutheran church and had been greeted warmly by the same townspeople whose stoic demeanor had been driving him nuts for nearly a month.

I walked all over my father’s old hometown that night, and eventually ended up down by the river, whose presence I could smell and hear and sense, but not really see because of the thick fog.  There was a pathway that ran along the river, and I walked along this for a time.  Just at the edge of town I encountered a train idling in a small railroad yard, and I could see the train’s crew sitting down together for dinner in one of the engines before they began –or continued—their Christmas Eve run down the Mississippi.

When I got back to my motel room at the River View there was a man sitting there on one of the white plastic lawn chairs that were lined up on the sidewalk directly in front of the windows.  He stood as I approached and removed a large black felt hat and sort of held it to his chest, a gesture whose quaint formality struck me as oddly charming.  The man appeared to be either Hispanic or Indian; he was a small, rugged-looking man with a thick head of black hair, sharply pressed industrial teal work slacks, and a pair of well-worn and scuffed boots.

“You’re Charlie’s boy,” he said, and nodded.  “All right then.” 

He had his hands in the pockets of a lightweight denim jacket, and his hat was now dangling from a free thumb.  This all happened so quickly that I hadn’t yet had time, or found the words, to respond; I think I had just been nodding along with him.  There was certainly nothing about the man that frightened me; he had a soft voice, dead pan, uninflected, and this characteristic was also reflected in his face; he had cold, dark eyes; you couldn’t read anything in his eyes, he was a guy like that, who kept everything he was thinking or feeling in the back of his eyes, back there in that dark little projection booth where he could process everything in private.

“I’m Santo,” he said, but didn’t offer his hand.  “I knew your grandpa for over forty years.  I was with him when he died.”  He was now turning over his black hat in his hands.

“What happened?” I asked, and he looked hard into me for the two or three seconds it seemed to take me to phrase the question.  He shrugged and put his hat back on his head. 

“He was old,” he said.  “They figure his heart must have just gone out on him.  We were playing cards and he just froze up and pitched over.  By the time I got him to the hospital there was nothing they could do for him.”  He had turned away from me and was rocking back and forth, rolling very slowly and methodically on the soles of his boots.  He had removed his hat once more and was clutching it with both hands behind his back.  “It’s a pretty night,” he said.  “I always did think this was a pretty night.  Neither of us were religious, but we’d go to church together every year.  Tradition, I guess.  He liked to make oyster stew, and we’d drink a little bit.”  He was staring off in the direction of downtown, where the Christmas lights stretched off in the distance and slowly disappeared in the fog.  We both stood there silently for a long moment.  He was breathing heavily, exhaling a continuous cloud of steam.

“I didn’t know him,” I said finally.  “I'm sorry, I'm sure it sounds appalling to you, but it's like I couldn't even recognize him at the hospital.”

Once again Santo was watching me intently as I spoke, watching my eyes.  He nodded.  “Is your daddy coming for him?” he asked.

I’d never in my life called my father ‘daddy.’  “No,” I said.

 “That’s sure a sad story,” he said.  

I shrugged.  What the hell did I know about it?  Certainly it was something I’d been curious about over the years –mildly curious, I should admit that.  I think I had always had a pretty precocious understanding of estrangement and all the ways both tragic and seemingly trivial that people could break apart and drift away from each other, the easy and difficult ways that bonds could be broken.  I’m not even sure exactly how I came by this understanding, but the ultimate principle behind everything my father taught me, however unintentionally, was that the only thing I could take for granted was that I couldn’t take anything for granted.  As I stood there outside my motel room on Christmas Eve I sensed that this man a few steps away from me in the parking lot, this mysterious Santo, was capable of filling in much of the daunting blank slate that represented so much of my father’s history.  I could also sense that I’d have to coax it out of him, and I didn’t feel up to the task at the moment, one way or the other. 

Santo must have sensed my exhaustion and impatience, because he once more put his hat on his head, bowed to me, again almost formally, and said, “I’ll wish you good evening, then, and a merry Christmas.  Your grandfather was a good friend to me.”

I said something –“thank you,” perhaps, or “good night”—and Santo turned away and walked off in the direction of downtown.

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Three

By the time I left the hospital on Christmas Eve the afternoon was slipping away. It was a murky gray day there in that little town; there was a sloppy covering of snow and a damp fog was moving in off the river, bringing a weird, early dusk. Some of the houses along the narrow streets had modest or half-hearted displays of Christmas lights, and the combination of fog and the sort of gloomy, crepuscular light lent a spectacularly forlorn quality to these feeble outbursts of color.  The whole town had the feel of that hospital basement; everything seemed poised, ready to shut down for the holiday. Many businesses along the Main Street were already closed for the day.

I stopped off at a little grocery store to get some food for the next several days. I had already made up my mind to hang around town and get my unpleasant job done with. The two women at the checkout counters were just leaning at their stations and shooting the shit. The store was otherwise completely silent and empty of customers. I asked one of the women if they were getting ready to close and she said, “Another hour-and-a-half, hon.” I didn’t understand that ‘hon’ initially, and I thought for a brief moment that she had mistaken me for somebody else and called my by that person’s name. It finally hit me about half way down the first aisle. The woman didn’t appear to be much older than me.

How sad it all suddenly seemed to me as I moved up and down the aisles of that little grocery store.  Christmas had sort of disintegrated for me as a holiday; it was a real thing and a nice thing when I was a kid and my parents were still married.  Even into my early adulthood we had all made an effort; before my sister moved away to France my father had always made a point to be home for Christmas.  We were never an extravagantly sentimental family, but we were always comfortable with each other; we had a good time together.  All of us loved to talk and eat and sit up late.  I think eventually we just learned to take each other for granted.  My sister, for instance, is by no means estranged from the family; she just fell in love with a Frenchman, and France.  None of us are letter writers or telephone talkers, so it’s easy enough to drift out of touch for these long stretches, but I have no doubt that the next time I see my sister we will pick right up where we last left off and have a grand time.  For whatever reasons, I seem to lack the ambition and wanderlust that characterizes the rest of my family.  I am a drone of the fluorescent lights; all I ask of any job is that it provides me with enough money and leisure time to enable me to spend as much of each day as possible sitting around reading and listening to music.

My family had always been a remarkably insulated and self-contained unit. Despite my parents’ divorces there really hadn’t been much in the way of drama or anything you could call real tragedy in my life. Even when my parents would fight they would do so with a sort of quiet resignation; we didn’t have a lot of shit storms around our house. We weren’t people who made scenes, which was both a point of pride and a sort of mantra with both of my parents.

Because my family was so small, and I suppose because we lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood, my childhood was relatively untouched by grief. We were this strangely insulated little group of emotional spectators, distantly puzzled by suffering and calamity and the usual public and private responses to it. Typical small, ugly things happened to us, but we had been spared calamity, let alone anything approaching true tragedy. People in my life didn’t die, or hadn’t died, and in this, I realize, I was remarkably lucky.

There had been an older boy in my neighborhood that had drowned when I was a kid, and a couple of high school classmates were killed in a car accident, but I hadn’t been close to any of these people and hadn’t attended their funerals. Their deaths had been shocking in that general way that all sudden deaths are shocking, I suppose. They had also been profoundly mysterious to me, largely because of the way they had been announced, briefly tsk-tsked over, and then dismissed by one or the other of my parents with a rattle of newspaper pages being turned. Yet death didn’t hold any emotional mystery or meaning for me. It seemed to be simply this strange or puzzling thing that happened to other people.

I suppose I would have to characterize both my mother and my father as reserved, or perhaps buttoned down is the phrase that other people might use. My mother could get paranoid, and had a voluble, eccentric streak, but she didn’t do hysterical. If I thought about it hard enough I might consider my older sister the most thoroughly rational person I know.

I remember when I was young and something disruptive happened in my life or around my house my mother would say to me, “How do you feel about that, David?” Yet it was always clear to me that this was something almost uncomfortable for her, something she assumed was expected of her as a parent. She was attempting to communicate with me, I know, but I also know that what she really wanted from me was almost always what she got, a shrug. There was nothing more reassuring around our house than a shrug. A shrug might mean, “I don’t really care,” “It’s no big deal,” or “What can you do about it?” And all of those things ultimately meant that we weren’t going to have any big scenes or make a fuss.

I suppose you could infer something about my emotional makeup as a child by the nickname that dogged me through junior high school: The Zombie. And also from the fact that being called The Zombie never really bothered me in the least.

One of my first jobs out of college was as a legal assistant at a large Chicago law firm, and I remember the first apartment where I ever lived alone was in this non-descript five-story cinderblock building, one of those absolutely generic and utilitarian examples of (I assume) 1960s architecture that you’ll see all over every big city. My apartment was in the back of the building, and every one of my windows had a view of the brightly lit parking lot of a huge funeral home.

Shortly after I moved into this place I developed a severe and persistent case of insomnia, and I got tuned into the disturbing nightly routines of the funeral home. From appearances the place did a bang-up business. It seemed like several times every night hearses –and the occasional ambulance—would pull into the parking lot after midnight and disappear into the darkness of the underground garage. Night after night I found myself sitting in my living room with the lights out, drinking beer and watching this mysterious and very final transfer or transaction taking place. I found the routine oddly compelling.

Often in the aftermath of the arrival of the hearse or ambulance there would be other visitors to the funeral home. Cars would show up and take a space in the huge expanse of the otherwise empty parking lot. It was always curious to me that most of these people would choose to park at some distance from the actual entrance. I’d watch as these people made the long walk to the backdoor, where there was a lighted vestibule.

Sometimes people came alone to the funeral home in the middle of the night. Other times they would come in pairs, or in even larger groups. However they came, they would make their way, clinging to each other (if they had anyone to cling to), up the incline of the long sidewalk that led to that backdoor.

I have to admit that this spectacle was gripping theater, and it reached the point where the basic routine became pretty much predictable. Once I’d seen the people into the building I felt strangely obligated to sit there in the darkness until they came back out.

Sometimes they’d be back out in fifteen or twenty minutes, and other times they’d be in there for what seemed like more than an hour. What they’d do when they came out, however, virtually never varied. If there was more than one person and they had arrived in different vehicles they would gather around their cars under the lights of the parking lot, and they would stand there quietly, alternately embracing and moving away from each other and pawing at the pavement with their shoes. In warm weather, when I had my windows open, I could often hear them weeping, sobbing, choking through great, wrenching, congested squalls of grief.

If they had come alone, or in a pair, they would almost invariably sit there in their car in the parking lot for a prolonged period of time –I once saw one man sit there all night in his running car. I assumed they could not bring themselves to go home.

This nightly ritual made me feel lousy, but I couldn’t seem to escape it. Every night I found myself making my way out to the living room and settling into the one chair in the room, directly facing the windows. I’d tell myself that I was just checking in, but inevitably I’d end up sitting there for the whole grim spectacle.

It didn’t take long for that experience to sort of infect my entire life and affect my job. I felt like I had acquired a dark secret, and was carrying it around with me every day. I never told anyone about it, and I didn’t have any close friends at work.

This business went on for many months, through one entire summer and into the late fall. I suppose it was inevitable, but one night about five or six months into what I had come to think of as a sort of vigil I watched as a car pulled into the parking lot and a woman I recognized from my office emerged alone and made that long walk to the backdoor of the funeral home.

I saw this woman every day; she was a secretary on my floor, and I suppose she was probably in her fifties. She wasn’t in the funeral home for very long, but after she came back out she followed the standard routine by lingering in her car in the parking lot for more than an hour.

The woman didn’t show up at work for a couple weeks, and I never heard anyone in the office discuss a reason for her absence. I couldn’t even tell you whom the woman had lost, whether it was a husband (my first assumption, I guess, although now that I think about it I never even entertained the notion that she might have lost a child) or a parent. For several days I carefully studied the obituaries in the local newspaper (another disturbing habit I’d gotten into, trying, I suppose, to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle), but I never saw her name –or what I understood to be her name—show up in any of the fine print.

Partly in an attempt to break myself of this increasingly disturbing habit I volunteered to go to Phoenix for three months to work on a case that involved a lot of document retrieval. I was going to be set up in one of those large extended-stay hotels right downtown, and as I’d never really gone anywhere, I was actually somewhat excited to be embarking on something that amounted to an adventure for me at the time.

My first night in Phoenix I had just gotten settled into my room and I was sitting in the little dining room area eating a pizza and watching TV when I heard the thump of a helicopter outside my windows, growing insistently louder until it was literally rattling the silverware in the kitchen drawer. I watched, astonished, as the helicopter dropped into view directly adjacent to my window; I could literally see into the helicopter, could see the pilot in his headset.

The helicopter landed on a rooftop pad that was at almost exactly the same level as my room, and perhaps a hundred yards away, separated from the hotel by a ground level parking lot. The cargo doors of the helicopter were opened and several people dressed in surgical scrubs dashed across the rooftop in that unsteady lurching wobble that is characteristic of people approaching a helicopter. These people unloaded a body from the copter and placed it on a waiting gurney. The body was already hooked up to various I.V. bags, and it was obvious that I was watching a victim of some calamity or mishap being delivered to a hospital’s emergency room.

It should have been obvious, at any rate, yet it took me several disoriented moments to process what I was seeing. There was a sort of floodlit glare to the proceedings that gave it both an astonishing clarity and an unreal quality.

After this patient had disappeared into the hospital through what looked like the gabled entryway to a saloon, I didn’t have to wait more than ten or fifteen minutes for the appearance of the first ambulance, moving in silence up the empty service road with its lights tossing a strobing red wash over the dark adjacent buildings and empty parking lots. The ambulance disappeared beneath an overhang, and shortly after its arrival –and the arrival of the helicopter—I witnessed the appearance of a solitary car in the parking lot beneath my window, and saw a young man spring from this car and run full speed toward the area of the hospital into which the ambulance had vanished just moments earlier.

As attracted as I had gotten to my grim vigil each night in my apartment across from the funeral home, this new spectacle was certainly a noisier and more dramatic deal all around. I was astonished by how many emergencies a big city can manufacture in the middle of the night. This hospital, of course, was merely one of any number of hospitals in the Phoenix area, yet virtually every night brought the appearance of at least one helicopter, and it was not uncommon for them to come and go a half dozen times in the course of a single night.

The ambulances came steadily, at all hours, almost like taxi cabs. I supposed that the appearances of the helicopter must have represented some truly life threatening crisis. Why else resort to such extravagant transportation in the middle of the night? The ambulances, however, could be carrying anything from heart attack victims to hypochondriacs.

I’ll admit that I found it a bit disconcerting that in attempting to escape my morbid routine back in Chicago I would now find myself a helpless spectator to a variant spectacle. There was, though, a crucial difference here; these people’s lives still hung in the balance, and they might yet be spared the ride to the funeral home.

My own response to these nightly dramas continued to disturb and puzzle me, mostly because I was fully conscious that I was sort of blankly fascinated by what I was watching, and recognized my almost complete lack of any kind of real emotional connection to events that I was witnessing from the comfortable distance of my dark room.

Eventually I went back to Chicago, got a different job and a new apartment, and gradually moved beyond the strange vigils of that year. I’d sometimes think about those days, though. The memories would come to me at odd times, and I would marvel at the things I’d seen and try to make sense of that time in my life, and to figure out what it was I’d felt sitting there night after night watching the private dramas of complete strangers unfold.

I felt compelled, I knew that much. I kept, after all, returning to the windows, often for hours at a time.

But had I ever felt real compassion? Had I ever felt frightened, for either those strangers or for myself and whatever unhappy surprises the future might hold for me? Had I been moved?

I don’t think I ever did manage to find an honest answer to those questions.

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Two

The afternoon I rolled into the town where my father had been raised, my grandfather had been dead for three days, and when I checked in at the hospital I was appalled to discover that no one had yet claimed his body. It quickly became shockingly apparent that I was the only family member in town, and the people at the hospital were anxious for somebody to make funeral arrangements and take the body off their hands. I told the woman at the hospital’s morgue that I wasn’t even in a position to identify the deceased, let alone make funeral arrangements, and promised her that I would check back the next day. 

I left the hospital and checked into a motel in town, The Riverview, which was one of those park-at-your-door places. I left another message for my father, and gave the secretary a phone number for my room as well as a number at the hospital. I had no real idea how to proceed, and was confused by the long mimeographed checklist of procedures and responsibilities they’d given me at the hospital.

That night –it was two days before Christmas—I was sitting up in bed watching Marlon Brando in “The Young Lions” when the phone rang. It was my father calling from Saudi Arabia. I hadn’t told his secretary that my grandfather had died, but he had apparently surmised as much from the fact that I’d left a message in the first place, and also given him a phone number bearing the area code of his old hometown in Iowa.

“What happened to him?” he asked, and I realized for the first time that I really didn’t know. I admitted as much to my father. 

“But he’s dead?” he said. I told him that, yes, he was, in fact, dead, and explained my dilemma.  My father told me –or asked me, I guess—to have my grandfather cremated, and to take his ashes home to Chicago. He promised to wire me money as soon as he got off the phone. He also asked me to hang around town as long as necessary to “clean up the old man’s affairs.” I pointed out that the next day was Christmas Eve, and there was a pause at the other end of the line. He asked me if I had plans for the holiday, and I had to admit that I had none. My father said he would wire me enough money so that I could go back to Chicago, or wherever I wanted to go, and return to tend to my grandfather’s affairs after Christmas, if that was an option I’d prefer. I promised I’d take care of it one way or another, wished my father a merry Christmas, and hung up the phone.

By the time I got to the basement morgue at the small county hospital the next morning the place had that unmistakable feel of impending shutdown. It was Christmas Eve, and the woman on duty seemed clearly disappointed, even pissed, to see me. There was a good deal of paperwork to be filled out and signed –releases, that sort of thing—before my grandfather’s body could be handed off to one of the local funeral homes. And there was also still the matter of officially identifying and claiming the body, something I was still reluctant to do, for any number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I had nothing to work from other than the vaguest recollection of a couple old snapshots that were lying around the house when I was growing up, photos that each revealed my father as a boy, standing at some remove from a tall, skinny man in a white tee-shirt and jeans; the photos were virtually identical except for the background and the fact that my father was clearly younger in one of the shots. My grandfather, however, looked virtually identical in both photos; in each he was either scowling or squinting into the sun; in both his head was completely shaved and his hands were in the pockets of his jeans, and a pack of cigarettes was rolled up in the sleeve of his tee-shirt. Look at that, I remember my mother saying, looking at those photos. That man thinks he’s something; he really thinks he’s something.

And then all of a sudden there he was –that man who once upon a time had apparently thought he was something—in a basement drawer of a little county hospital in Iowa. If you’ve never been in a place like that you can probably nonetheless imagine what it was like, a weird combination of grimy and antiseptic. It was clearly an old basement; the upstairs had seen some renovations and expansions over the years, but the basement morgue still had a sort of 1950s Eastern European feel, a lot of old, scarred concrete and stainless steel surfaces with black scabs of corrosion; very bad fluorescent lights, as you might imagine, and entirely windowless. It smelled vaguely –well, not even vaguely—toxic, a combination of all sorts of bad smells. I can’t imagine they did a lot of business in that place, and the woman had made it clear to me the day before that this was hardly a morgue proper; “We’re really just an in-and-out facility,” she’d said, in pressing me to take my grandfather off her hands. “The families usually have them out of here the same day they pass. We don’t have a proper set-up for long term storage, and we’re not even in the ballpark of current code for refrigeration and such.”

I’m sure such an experience is shocking and surreal under any circumstances, though I’m supposing most keenly when you have an actual emotional connection to the deceased. As it was it was just surreal and profoundly creepy. I looked at the old man there and felt not even a spasm of recognition or grief, sensed nothing in the way of family resemblance. I didn’t know what to think or say. There were Christmas carols coming from the ceiling speakers, tinny, distant, that awful, desolate effect of music playing in a large, empty, and acoustically-bad building, through a crummy stereo system. I had no reason to believe the dead man on the table was anyone other than my grandfather, yet when I nodded to the woman and confirmed the identity of the deceased it felt somehow wrong, as if I was complicit in a terrible hoax.

When the woman asked me if I was sure, I could have –and perhaps should have—tossed the question right back at her; I was taking her word on it even more than she was taking mine. I just took it for granted that these people knew what they were doing and were working with solid information. 

I signed off on the forms releasing the body to a local funeral home that could apparently handle the cremation arrangements. It being Christmas Eve, however, I was going to have to wait at least a couple days for that to happen; I was told that I wouldn’t even be able to talk to anyone at the funeral home until the day after Christmas.

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part One

Every December when I was a child my grandfather would send me oranges, one of those mail order arrangements that had a To and From label printed directly on the shipping box, which featured a repetitive pattern of palm trees and bright yellow suns.  The package was always addressed to me and included my grandfather’s return address in Iowa.  There was never any other card or note, and these annual deliveries –which were, in fact, a much-anticipated holiday tradition for me—received little in the way of acknowledgement from my father.  I would come home from school and the box of oranges would be sitting on the kitchen table or, sometimes, on the bed in my room. To the best of my knowledge no one else in my family ever received a Christmas gift from my grandfather.

For me the oranges themselves meant next to nothing –I didn’t even particularly like oranges, couldn’t stand peeling them and the way the juice would sting the sensitive skin along the tips of my chewed fingernails—but the package and the special delivery were thrilling to me as a child.  I seldom if ever received any mail at all, and the gift of a box of oranges seemed like such a mysterious gesture on the part of a grandfather I’d never actually met.

While I was growing up my grandfather was never mentioned around our house except in passing, and as I got a bit older it seemed strange to me that my father appeared to have no other family, however extended, that he kept in touch with or ever talked about.

It’s fascinating, my father once said to me.  Maybe one day you’ll see.  You somehow manage to bring this person into the world, and it’s ceaselessly interesting to me what happens after that.  How, he asked, did you get to be this person, this mysterious stranger, who’s sitting across the table from me? He’d always laugh when he said something like this, but it was also clear that these sorts of questions seriously perplexed him.

It was certainly a good question, though, and the fact that I didn’t spend as much time as my father did on such largely unanswerable or plainly obvious questions was one of the essential differences between us.  I could have said, I suppose, that I was as puzzled as he was by the nature of our relationship.  The truth, however, was that my father was a great, mysterious, and generally loveable character, and people had been disappearing from his life for so many years that I had long ago made up my mind to be one person he could always depend on.

This, my mother would consistently contend, was a severely misguided resolution.

She always said that my father was endlessly fascinating, and though this perception was likely shared by almost everybody who knew my father, it was nonetheless not enough to keep my mother from divorcing him. She divorced him twice, in fact.

I suppose in some ways –a number of ways, perhaps— we were an atypical family.  I certainly don’t recall seeing a family that in any way resembled ours portrayed on television or in the movies.  I’m familiar with Tolstoy’s line about all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way, and despite his claims I’d think the same is true of happy or merely dysfunctional families.  Though I suppose most people would consider us dysfunctional, we weren’t, I don’t think, what I’d consider a genuinely unhappy family, although there were certainly occasionally unhappy components to our dysfunction. There was also, however, a good deal of happiness as well. We weren’t, though, a family for emotional blow-ups or hashing things out, although my mother could be dramatic and made occasional game attempts to speak her mind. But for the most part we didn’t talk about our feelings. My father is the sort of man who would put quote marks around a phrase like “our feelings,” and as he liked to say, we kept “our bullshit” to ourselves, as individuals and as a family.

I don’t think my father believed in unhappiness. Unpleasantness --that was his word: “Let’s put a stop to this unpleasantness right now,” he’d say when someone was upset or making a scene. Even so, I’ve always imagined he must have had an unhappy childhood. This assumption seemed reasonable to me given that he had apparently been estranged from his father, and whatever other family he might have had, for the entirety of his adult life.  His mother died when he was sixteen years old –he never mentioned this fact without a tone of mysterious bitterness creeping into his voice, and whenever the subject came up at all a pained expression would flare on his face, an expression that almost resembled a smirk. This was clearly an unpleasant subject, and I learned early to avoid it. Whatever unhappiness he might have known as a child, however, and whatever the source of his estrangement from his family, my father was generally considered a bright, accomplished, and cheerfully eccentric character.

He was in the industrial salvage business on a very large and international scale. This was apparently a complicated and lucrative racket. His company would salvage everything from abandoned oil stations in the ocean and foundered cargo ships and tankers to military equipment like trucks, tanks, crashed planes and helicopters --the spoils of war, I guess, consigned by the victors to the scrap heap. My father had been in the military for a number of years before I was born –he was in his late thirties when my mother was pregnant with me—and he’d apparently learned the ropes of the salvage business from somebody he met in the service.

He didn’t travel constantly for his job, but when he did travel it was usually for long stretches; he would literally be gone for months at a time, and since most of this time was well before the days of laptop computers, email, and cellular phones, we’d often hear nothing from him at all during these extended absences.  I guess he would make an occasional phone call to my mother, or send infrequent postcards, but I don’t think he ever wrote an actual letter in his life.

My mother never really did learn to trust my father, and made no bones of this fact.  I’m not even sure she entirely believed that he was in the salvage business.  We certainly never saw any of the tangible results of his trips; he didn’t take any photos that I knew of, and seldom spoke of his work.  My mother had a habit of talking about my father in my presence, well beyond the point where I had no idea what she was speaking about.  The gist of these conversations was virtually always that she didn’t trust him. He was suspicious, she’d say; all these trips, this salvage business, it didn’t add up for her.  She was sure the government still had him in its clutches; he was up to something mighty fishy. She always assumed he had something to do with the CIA, one of those deals where he couldn’t tell a soul, not even his family.  It scared her half to death to think that a man –her husband—could keep so many secrets. She said as much, often, in just such terms, and I suppose it should be noted that she had quite an imagination, and that I had always just assumed that this speculation of hers was utter hogwash.

The truth, though, was that I had long ago learned to stop worrying about what my father did for a living.  It was clear enough that he wasn’t much interested in talking about it or involving me in any way.  When I was still young and pissed off enough by his frequent absences to ask questions he would always give the same basic details, shrug, and say that it just wasn’t really all that interesting; it puts food on the table and clothes on your back, he’d say, and that’s the most important thing for any kid to know about what his dad does for a living. And his job was just like most other jobs, he’d add, too much work for not enough money.

Whatever the hell it was he did, he kept doing it for a very long time. After my mother divorced him for the second time he started going off for even longer stretches. Whenever he’d come back we’d always have a fine time together. He liked to see movies, liked to explore local restaurants, loved wine and animated conversations. For a guy who held his own life so close he was certainly full of questions about my life and what I was doing with it. He didn’t have, or at least didn’t offer, any opinions along these lines, but he was certainly curious.

    

I have an older sister who married a Frenchman and apparently turned her back on America for good shortly after she graduated from college. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in well over a decade.  At one time my father would check up on her whenever he was in Europe –or so he claimed—but at some point she and her husband had moved and even he had lost touch with her. That was it for my family.

After my mother finally split with my father for good she met a dentist who was going blind, and moved to Arizona. I’d go down there every year to visit her and watch spring training baseball in the sun. My mother’s husband would accompany me to the ballparks and would sit quietly beside me while I provided rambling play-by-play and commentary on the action. One summer, at his insistence, I spent two weeks attempting to teach the dentist how to ride a bicycle, a skill he’d never learned, and the difficulty of which was obviously compounded by his rapidly deteriorating eyesight. He’d gone out and purchased an expensive new bike expressly for the purpose. We did eventually reach a point where he could negotiate in a wobbly fashion the lanes of his neighborhood, just as long as I peddled my mother’s bike right beside him and provided him with constant directions. He was a proud and determined character, and I’ve no doubt he would have ultimately succeeded in his quest if my mother hadn’t made such a stink and insisted that we put an immediate stop to what she considered a dangerous and ridiculous exercise in folly.

Despite a decent but essentially worthless education (I have an English degree), I have never managed to find a job that in any way engages any of the things that interest me, which admittedly aren’t many. I was apparently born without a work ethic, which is I’m sure unfortunate, as well as something that has genuinely puzzled and frustrated my father, a man whose life has been defined by his work ethic. Since I left college I’ve had a dwindling string of mostly casual girlfriends, but with one possible exception, no serious relationship.

I’ve been forced to conclude that I am one of those people who may never be –or truly feel—compelled. I’ve never felt myself hectored by some claiming or defining desire. I’m sure there are millions just like me, perhaps tens of millions: people who never manage to learn what it is that they want to be when they grow up.

I think the essential problem for such people –for people like me—is that we had clearly unrealistic early expectations combined with insufficient will or ambition, an unfortunate combination that so often leads to a sort of surrender without any real fight.

The world, this world, is of course hard on immodest dreamers, and such people –people like me—learn pretty early on that our only true dreams, the dreams of our fiercest longing, are clearly beyond our talents or abilities. We learn this, of course, in all sorts of cruel and common and sometimes terribly crippling and unfair ways; we are taught this, told this, and have this knowledge beaten into our heads again and again by experience. And at some point in this process we also learn the sorts of prosaic things that anything resembling a real life demands of us. The notion of maturity that was drilled into me during my formative years insisted that we all should accept this knowledge with an attitude that, while never overtly sold to us as resignation, has the same basic end result, which is a strain of befuddled futility, the hard-wired, back-burner disillusionment of the normal, functioning human being.

Still, I’ve always been willing to give people the benefit of doubt, I guess. I always assume there’s something stirring and things going on that I can’t even begin to imagine in the mysterious lives all around me.

I guess by the time I hit thirty I’d seen virtually all my old friends drift away into the sort of normal life I couldn’t quite get my head around; there was a long stretch where I was going to a half dozen weddings a year, and pretty much everyone I knew from my high school and college years had careers, homes, children. Meanwhile, I’d worked what seemed like an endless series of meaningless jobs, mostly temporary gigs or undemanding positions in the service sector or corporate world, jobs that –barely—made the rest of my life possible without making any actual demands of me, jobs that I could quit on a moment’s notice without the slightest fear of repercussion or regret. I had a stable and relatively comfortable run for a few years with an Internet start-up, but I was one of these guys who were instantly downgraded to useless status again when the dot.com world started collapsing. I lost two decent jobs in less than a year, and had been doing temp work for six months when I got a phone call informing me that my grandfather had died.

This was the grandfather of the Christmas oranges, a man I had no memory of ever having met.  He was living in a little town called Bryton, which was located on the Mississippi River in Iowa, and I have no idea how the woman who called managed to track me down. My father was somewhere in the Middle East. By this point his company was a giant and sprawling international operation, and was doing a booming business. He was almost certainly in regular contact with someone back in the United States, so I left a message with a secretary at the company’s main offices in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.

I didn’t hear anything back from him, by which time the woman from the hospital in Iowa had called again looking for instructions from what she called “the family.” I talked to my mother in Arizona, who essentially sighed and threw up her hands. My father, she insisted, would want nothing to do with the business. She couldn’t, she said, think of another soul I might call. “Go down there if you feel up to it,” she finally said. “You might find it…interesting. I’m sure the man has nobody else.” The way she hesitated before settling on ‘interesting’ was curious to me.

I was bored at the time, was in a long relationship drought, and had no plans for the holiday, so I called my shitty temp job and told them I was going to be out of commission indefinitely, packed my bags, and headed down to Iowa.

From a Line in 'Catcher in the Rye'

There once was a man who loved to play the piano. He had first learned to play the piano as a young boy, but learning had been difficult for him. He was not a natural, but he had so loved the sound of a piano that he was driven to play and to get better. The more he listened to the music he loved, however, and the harder he tried to make his hands move across the keys in such a way as to duplicate some of the sounds he heard in his head, the more he realized the impossibility of ever truly realizing his dream.

From an early age he had been self-conscious about his playing, even bashful. He despised recitals, and could barely bring himself to play for his mother or any other human being. Eventually, in fact, he could not even bear the scrutiny of his piano teacher, who was a kind, patient, and encouraging man; still, whenever the teacher would demonstrate some particular passage of music himself it would affect his student almost like a blow.

The piano teacher was a very good player, and had once played with a large theater orchestra that had made many recordings.

The man who loved to play the piano despaired that he would never even be able to play half so well as his elderly teacher, and so he convinced his mother to allow him to quit his lessons.

He continued to play, though, and as he grew older his playing became more and more solitary. Slowly and steadily the man who loved to play the piano achieved a sort of modest mastery of the instrument, and though he recognized this improvement it was not enough to overcome his self-consciousness.

In middle age he lived alone in an old and very large apartment building. He was so respectful of the privacy of his neighbors --not to mention protective of his own-- that he kept his piano in the small basement storage closet allotted to him. There were many other storage closets in the basement, as well as a laundry room.

Each evening after work the man would venture quietly down to the basement to play his piano. He would often play for hours. The door to the closet was very old and poorly hung and would not close all the way, so from time to time the man who loved to play the piano would be aware of another resident peering in on him as he played.

To the best of his knowledge, though, no one ever stopped to listen, and each time no one stopped to listen he would pause and briefly consider what he was doing and why he was doing it. And inevitably it would occur to him that what he was doing was playing the piano and he was doing it because he loved it, and then he would go right on playing his piano in the closet.