Marcus Aurelius advises

We had a nice sendoff for my father on Wednesday. About 50 of us got together at The Lambs’ Club, an organization founded in 1869 in England, and in 1874 in New York. It grew out of dinners made up “of lively folk of the theatre and the arts” at the home of Charles and Mary Lamb in the early 18th century.

I like that, since I teach that period of British literature.

It’s always been a convivial place. The grand dame for decades has been Joyce Randolph, Trixie on The Honeymooners.

I’m happy to report that Joyce was there last night to see dad off. I’m afraid I was talking to her when she was trying to get at the buffet table, so she looked up at me and said: “You’ve left me with just a crust of bread on my plate.” Which I did. But she said it with a smile, and eventually got fed.

Dad’s doggerel

Back in 1987, a barge full of garbage floated along the east coast and the Caribbean. My dad’s paper, The New York Daily News, naturally wanted a story on the situation. But the subject matter – garbage – seemed less than poetic, and the Daily News has always been about poetry, of a sort.

This was many years before I became a professor of British Romantic literature. Dad had just read and studied this stuff on his own. He always had a a great ear, and an amazing command of meter and rhythm.

So, back to 1987 … The editors asked dad to give a story about the garbage barge “the Flynn treatment.” On deadline. This is what he came up with:

It is the Ancient Garbage Scow,

And it stoppeth never yet.

Doomed to sail forever now.

Whatta ya wanna bet?

The scow was packed, its garbage pressed,

Merrily did it drop

Below New York, below Key West

But never could it stop.

Avast! Get out! Phew and Arrgh!

Did landfill keepers shriek.

On, on it sailed, the hapless barge

While all the bags did reek.

A Foul breeze blew, the great stench, too

The seagulls followed free

It was the worst that ever burst,

Into the Caribbean Sea.

Landfill harbors everywhere!

Yet all the ports did shrink.

Garbage, garbage, everywhere,

Oh, what an Islip stink.

Out! Out! howled North Carolina

And New Orleans, as well.

The Bahamas posted picket ships.

It couldn’t get into hell!

Sail on, sail on, Oh scow of fate

But Mexico says never.

Even unknown Belize says nay

This trip shall last forever.

About! Abaft! All motion ceased

The scow lost every motion.

As idle as a painted skiff

Upon a painted ocean.

The skipper cries, “All flies are dead

“We’ll find a port now soon!”

From Washington, he hears a drone

– A Congressional bassoon.

Alas, poor Ancient Garbage Scow

The politicians smell you.

Your fate is sealed forever now

What’m I gonna tell you?

Ten years for Cable TV,

For tunnels, dozens more,

With Washington to help you

You never can reach shore.

So … just to repeat. He wrote that on deadline. Neither he nor I had an idea that I’d become a Romanticist someday and teach Coleridge. He got everything that reeks of Coleridge into that by memory. Remember yourselves, that was 1987. No internet. No easily accessible version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Just saying.

Dad died this evening

My father’s battle against cancer ended about 5:45 this evening. He died peacefully, I hope. We brought him home Thursday afternoon. Nurses cared for him from then until his passing. They prepared me to take care of him as of 8 p.m. this evening. That was the end of the last nurse’s workday. Maybe he didn’t think I was up to it. Maybe he wasn’t up to it himself.

I want to say he was a remarkable man, and most of me believes that. But many of us think our fathers were remarkable. Maybe we’re all right. I know my father worked his way out of a poor beginning into a middle class middle. I know he started as a “greaser” (his word) and became a playwright, TV writer, novelist, and journalist. Bootstrapping if there ever was any.

He was born in St. Louis in 1928. Dogtown. He told me he would ask his mother and sisters where Dogtown was. “We lived there,” they told him. He was the fourth of four, and moved away, so he wasn’t ever sure he lived in the ghetto.

Dad went on to college because of something that never even helped him in an economic way. He credited the G.I. Bill. He was too young for it to pay for his schooling, but his older brother George was a signalman in World War II, and when he got home, he went to the University of Missouri on G.I. Bill money. My dad had never known anyone in his world could go to college before that, or at least that’s the way he always put it to me. He liked to talk of the G.I. Bill’s residual effect. It gave people like him an idea. So he went to Missouri himself and got a journalism degree.

That eventually turned into a career working on newspapers in St. Joseph, Missouri, Topeka, Kansas, Kansas City, Chicago, and eventually New York.

But from the beginning, dad wanted to write creative things, so he did. Plays, novels, TV shows. I won’t go into details. Those will come in future posts. But he never stopped writing.

My brothers and I will miss him. We’re grown up now and can take care of ourselves. But it’s one thing to be grown up, and another to have to deal without the man who made you who you are.

Dad comes home tomorrow (or the next day)

My brothers and I decided to bring dad home today. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. That’s up to the medical professionals. They have to transfer him from doctor care to hospice care. End-of-life treatment.

We’re hoping to get a little of him back before he’s gone. Being at home might help. Listening to his cheesy old records and waking up to horrible wallpaper he and our mom chose themselves can’t hurt.

Today I asked the hospice nurse to drop by. She’s the only medical professional he trusts these days. When we suggest a possible course of action, he asks: “Have you talked to Erica?”

He’s not even in her care at this point. She can’t make decisions for him until he is. But she’s answered every call and has visited him in the nursing home twice. A truly dedicated person with deep feelings, maybe too deep for the work she’s doing.

When I told one of my brothers she was recommending more medication, less treatment, he pointed out that her role is to be a gateway. An angel of death of sorts. True. But dad’s at that gate. He’s not fighting it.

Radiation’s upset and confused him, so tonight I’m preparing his living room for a hospital bed. I dug out the records he loved. We’ll be hearing a lot of Ethel Merman around here for a while.

Hopefully that will bring him back a bit. It may kill me, but I survived it in my growing up years.

Just so you know, Ethel Merman is the best singer ever, because, according to dad:

“She can peal the paint off the back wall of the theater without a mic.”

That’s singing.

I also have my trombone with me. He paid for all the lessons, so he can’t complain when I start jamming along with Ethel.

“Care” vs. “Torture”

The last couple of days have been rough for my dad. He’s been a fiercely independent man for about 78 of his 84 years. Maybe 79. So, being wheeled around, asked how he slept, asked if he’s hungry, does he want the bed up, or down, does this hurt, do you have pain, and on and on and on … It bothers him. I don’t want to say it drives him crazy, but that’s how he’d put it.

When I was here a week and a half ago, I wrote this post. It was hard to know how to approach them. Now, there’s no difficulty. He needs: we (my brothers and I) give. Simple formula.

As far as hospice life goes, h e just wants everyone to leave him alone. But he needs people to help him. So he’s stuck. It’s very tough for him to deal with.

Today I went with him for the first of five radiation treatments. They put him on a gurney, drove him 10 miles to Englewood Hospital, made him wait for hours while they figured out what the hell they were doing, then took x-rays and generally “cared” for him, or tortured him. My brothers and I are mad about it, and need to take some steps to make sure that the rest of his time is better than this afternoon was.

A host of well-meaning doctors and nurses are out to care for my dad and others in his situation. There’s the very professional and charming radiology/oncology specialist we dealt with today. He impresses me to no end. So kind, sort of suave in an earnest way, obviously well meaning. His nurses, their nurses, the other medical people with letters after their names … all good people who want to ease pain in the only places they identify it: X-rays, bones, bodies.

But it’s getting hard to discriminate between care and torture. Whatever kindness the radiation did to his leg, the trip and the wait took from him through his emotions. He’s going to suffer, as most of us will. Choosing your suffering from a set of options is obviously far from easy. Choosing someone else’s suffering seems impossible. But dad, brothers, and I have to get together and pick the right pain. We’re all talking about it in the same way, so we’ll get there soon. But in the end, we want dad to say what he wants, when, and how.

We’re figuring it out, and hopefully will know what he wants and what’s best very soon.

The neighbor speaks French, too

I just found out that my new neighbor, the one who’s been helping me get rid of the raccoon(s) and feed the cats, along with other things, speaks French like me. (I can’t decide whether to put “speaks” or “French” in quotation marks to appease my friends who actually speak French.)

This means we’ll be annoying everyone around us when I get back. Oui, Branden? Mais bien sur. (Can’t figure out how to do the accents on this putain computer). We will have baguettes and croissants and absinthe and look down our noses at many things.

Mercy mercy, Mr. Percy, there ain’t nothing back in Jersey

Nothing but me, and a few million other people, that is. But the song with that line by Tom Waits has been going through my head these days:

Invitation to the Blues

A younger woman I know asked me why “old people always like Tom Waits.” I’m not sure all of us old people do, but that’s not the point of this post.

Being back in Jersey reminds me how frequently I’ve thought there were few reasons to go back. Austin’s a great place to live. Jersey exists for New York and Philadelphia, at least in my way of living in it. My dad worked for the New York Daily News. I went to school at Juilliard for a little while. Bridges and tunnels. Mercy mercy, Mr. Percy, there ain’t nothing back in Jersey, has resonated for a while.

In a few weeks, or months, it’ll have a more permanent resonance. I’ve got a brother who’ll be here, and some friends. We’ll find ways to be in touch. But the home base will be gone. It’s a sobering thought. I’ve been peripatetic for decades, so it’s not as if I can’t get along in this world without a base in Jersey. But I’ve never had to before now.

I don’t have a handle on it, but I keep coming back to the fact that many Americans feel a need to declare a homeland. We hyphenate ourselves to connect ourselves to an originary place. African-American, Asian-American, Italian-American, Irish-American, etc. Being from the suburbs is like being doubly from an unrooted, unoriginal America. So we go back. To New Jersey now, to Ireland for my dad, me, and many. To many places.

The picture above’s of my dad, back in the late 1950s when he would have been 29 or 30, kissing a tree in Phoenix Park, Dublin. That was his original place. I’ve been to Ireland several times now, searching for that same sort of thing. The last time, two years ago maybe, my cousin Bridget took my kids and me around to some tiny towns around Kilkenny where we actually found a postal clerk who had some sense of our family’s past. He seemed a simultaneously muddled and focused sort of guy: Aspergers Syndrome probably. I’ve taught two, maybe three students with that condition in the past couple of years, amd this man definitely fit theattern.

He acted like he knew the people buried in the cemetery. He talked of some Foleys (my grandmother’s maiden name) who lived in the area when they were building a railroad in the 1880s. He had a vague idea of a Flynn. I hatched the idea that maybe my great grandmother, who ran away from a convent in Ballyragget, and the man from Ireland she married after emigrating had come up with a plan to travel separately and hook up in America. I have no idea if that happened.

I’m happy to report that there’s a townlet, nearby, vaguely visible on the most particular maps, called Maudlin.

And there was no marker in the graveyard to give us a real lead.

So people are all we have left now. They’re more work than places are, but they’ll have to do.

Writing on the road

I’m trying to keep my routines going despite all the moves and changes. Writing’s the most important one. The blog’s been easy to get to. Pictures, travels, stuff to write about.

But I’ve also been forcing myself to write in my hotel rooms, and it’s worked surprisingly well. I got up at 7 both yesterday and today and wrote for an hour. I’ve got my protagonist walking a London street. I left him and another character somewhere on the sidewalk between the British Library and Euston Station. It’s early March, gray skies, but the rain’s holding off so far.

I hope it does the same on the road today, but don’t think I’ll be that lucky.

Now, on toward Jersey.

Driving alone’s effects

I’ve driven 1,600 miles in two days now, all of it alone. I’m getting good at it. It’s an intense, quiet business. I think this picture sums up how I look behind the wheel by now.

It’s still 1985 in Bloomington

Today’s been a trip through the mid-80s for me. I spent a few hours at my old university. I didn’t recognize much as I was getting into town, but I blame GPS for that, along with the fact that I got into town from the south, which I rarely did when I went to school there. Actually, I’m realizing on this trip how much I miss actual maps. I’m nostalgic for everything these days. People, places, paper, my wasted youth, etc.

It shouldn’t surprise me. My dissertation and the book that emerged from it were all about trips in space being like trips in time. In the case of that study, it was how America always existed as a different time for England, and how by the 1830s that time was both primitive and too new at once. Others have written a lot about similar things, and I leaned on several for the book.

But it’s one thing to write about it. It’s altogether another thing to experience it. By tomorrow I’ll be traveling back into the 1970s and early ’80s. I’m sure living in a town like Austin, Texas, where change is so obvious and insistent, has something to do with it. But the gaps between visits to places like Bloomington and New Jersey have played their roles as well.