On The Road Without Judy Or Charley

August 21st, 2014  |   

“I made some notes on a sheet of yellow paper on the nature and quality of being alone. These notes would in the normal course of events have been lost as notes are always lost, but these particular notes turned up long afterward wrapped around a bottle of ketchup and secured with a rubber band. The first note says: ‘Relationship Time to Aloneness.’ And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present.”

Travels With Charley In Search of America—John Steinbeck

Notes That Keep Piling Up After A Long Trip

“We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip, a trip takes us.”

Travels With Charley In Search of America—John Steinbeck

“I miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall.”

The clock is closing in on midnight, and Eva Cassidy is singing those words as I write. It’s not autumn yet, but September is creeping up on me. The fateful 9/11 date when Judy and I moved back to Charleston, and the fifth of September last year when Judy died. Autumn Leaves was “our song.” No one can sing it like Eva Cassidy.

The street and playground outside my widow are quiet. There are but two intruders— the sound of a train on the other side of the Kanawha River, and the helicopter overhead delivering someone to the Trauma Center at the hospital a block away. Nurses and hospital staff are tending to people in an emergency room that is magnetized to weekend night-visitors.

Darkness is like an acolyte extinguishing the candles on an altar, a table that has done all it can possibly do for worshipers who have gathered around it as if it were a casket out of which life could be resurrected.

In just a few hours, someone whose face I have never seen will deposit a newspaper on my porch then speed off just before the sun rises on a world that keeps on making headlines.

John Steinbeck, in the waning years of his life, took to the road with only his French poodle, Charley, to rediscover the country he had written about for years. He kept notes as he traveled the interstate and country roads, stopping in the little trailer he named Rocinante, the name given Don Quixote’s horse, to meet people and taste and smell a country he felt he had lost touch with.

Upon returning home, Steinbeck found his notes from the trip wrapped around a bottle of ketchup. He then sat down and wrote “Travels With Charley In Search of America.” I have reread it in recent weeks, on the road, traveling alone, no Judy by my side, no dog as a companion.

A handful of notes, scratched on bits of paper, lie next to my computer keyboard. They record thoughts and feelings that have fallen upon me like confetti on a parade as I have traveled, and since returning home. The note pile, therefore, has grown since I unpacked my bag. Those notes need attention.

Conversation Goes To The Dogs

“A man with nothing to say has no words. Can the reverse be true—a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words.”

Travels With Charley In Search of America—John Steinbeck

Speaking of dogs, when someone you love dies, conversation can go to the dogs. I kid you not, to dogs.  

When Judy died, after our fifty-five years of marriage and her twenty-eight year battle with breast cancer, family and friends struggled to say something that would express how they felt, and also touch the grief that had begun to roll in on me like early-morning fog on a West Virginia mountain. 

Speaking a word in the face of grief, however, is like trying to deliver a message with a mouth full of marbles. Garbled, disconnected and scattered, words fall to the floor short of their intended destination, a grieving man’s broken heart.  

When death arrives on the scene, words often give way to a familiar aphorism.  “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” Better said, “The way to someone’s broken heart, when words fail, is through his stomach.”  In the wake of Judy’s death, whenever mouths went mute, and words flew from stuttering tongues like birds in flight from a hungry beast, food arrived on the scene.

  A container of soup outside my door…A casserole from a neighbor… An entire dinner from someone else…Thirty hot dogs draped in cold slaw and slathered with catsup and mustard from a friend who owns a local restaurant…A chocolate cake from a couple at church, delivered just before bedtime.

Then communication went to the dogs. No stuttering, no hot dogs, just, “Jim, why don’t you get a dog? “ 

I think about that. I am fond of dogs. I feed bones to Gus, a neighbor’s dog.  I’ve seen a dog come into a hospice and prompt a smile and a caress by a man near death. Not long ago I saw a tiny dog wrapped in a bag and attached to a woman’s waist. Upon closer scrutiny, I discovered the dog was along for the ride in order to quell the woman’s anxiety. 

More than just one person suggests that I get a dog. So I have come to the conclusion that a dog is intended to be an antidote for grief, a four-legged, tail-wagging, tongue-licking amulet guaranteed to ward off the noxious fumes left behind after someone has died.  

When words fail, and food stops arriving at the door, that’s when conversation goes to the dogs.  Maybe that’s because people have read so many rescue-dog stories. You know, a dog saves a child in a burning building, or sniffs out the location of someone buried alive in a building, or lost in the woods. Surely, a dog will rescue me from my grief; accompany me through the valley of the shadow of death. 

 I think about getting a dog to keep me company now that Judy is gone from my life, but no thanks. I decide, instead, that the next time someone suggests that I get a dog, I will merely say. “That’s an excellent idea. I’ll get a dog, if you can find me one that looks like Judy. 

Putting The Pieces Together

In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I spend the night with friends Judy and I have had since seminary days—fifty-three years worth of friendship. Many things have bound us together, including breast cancer. I ask if I might accompany my friend to the hospital cancer center for her radiation treatment. The trip will offer me a chance to listen to her talk about her recent diagnosis and treatment. It’s pretty much all about listening don’t you think? She allows me to make the trip with her.

Draped in one of those ugly, dehumanizing hospital gowns (UGH! The word gown doesn’t suit that piece of cloth.), off she goes with a nurse to a room where people are zapped. Two men, waiting for their turn in the radiation room, talk elatedly about the fact that they are both having their last treatment. No more gowns.

While waiting, I pass up the chance to read. It would be interesting to know how many words I have read over the years, while sitting in waiting rooms in doctor’s offices and hospitals, with family, friends and parishioners. I choose, instead, to take a chair at a table on which pieces of a jigsaw puzzle have been laid out. When my friend returns after her treatment, I’ve connected six or eight pieces of the puzzle. It’s far from complete. Others will have to put the pieces together.

It is often said that people “go to pieces” after someone they love dies. It might well be called post traumatic stress disorder after someone just disappears, in my case after 59 years of knowing one another, living together, and loving one another.   

Scattered pieces of people’s lives are strewn across the world like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. I think of people who are in search of a new normal in order to replace the old normal that is no longer there. Palestinians digging out from beneath the rubble in Gaza. Kurds and Christians under attack in Iraq. West Africans plagued by Ebola. A woman who was raped two blocks from my home. The family of Michael Brown and the people who live in Ferguson, Missouri. The policeman who fired the bullet and who has become a target himself. Families, and so many children, who have fled poverty and violence in Central America, and are now confined in detention centers. An alcoholic ashamed and fearful of getting help. A coherent mosaic is out of view amidst this meaningless, directionless graffiti spewed across a globe with reckless abandon.

Drive on, drive on and keep in mind the fresh spirit of the courageous and hopeful woman radiated in Winston-Salem. She channels the woman who once drove across these roads with you, and gave her very best even when she was at her very worst. They are directional signs along the highway.

The Past Is Over…But

Passing by a shop in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I see a variety of large handmade plates for sale. One of them catches my eye. It’s the one with four words embossed on it. They read: The Past Is Over.

Perhaps someone will buy that plate, someone who wants to put the past behind him or her, maybe someone who wants to get over a hurdle and begin something new. I think of the tagline I hear on MSNBC — “lean forward.”

The words on the plate, like all those wise tidbits, those catchy motivators that get posted on refrigerator doors, convey a pretty obvious truth. Indeed, all we really have is the present moment, so grab hold of it.

Walking along the boardwalk, on my way to get my morning newspaper, I pass the Boardwalk Plaza Hotel. Judy and I stayed there a couple of years ago. It was during the winter, that period of time when the beach is washed clean of tourists and trash. It’s that sparse season when gulls are denied leftover french-fries, bits of ice cream cones, pizza crusts, and kettle corn. I like a winter beach; it’s a seasonal affirmation of desolation.

Memories of our time together there wash over me like shells deposited on the shore, coughed up for collection. I collect them. After all, one of the reasons I returned to Rehoboth was to gather a share of memories. But that was the past. The plate in the window has already informed me that the past is over, as dead as flies in a windowsill when summer has abandoned them.  

I grab a newspaper outside of Browseabout Books and glance at the headlines as I wait for the clerk to ring-me-up and fork-over some change from a five-dollar bill I’ve handed her. The front page is covered with spilled blood. The world is in need of a transfusion. Jews and Palestinians are at it again, the longstanding, mutual plunge into violence. Meanwhile Iraq is flying apart as a new player in the region, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), gobbles up territory and killing people as they flee for their lives.

After toast and scrambled eggs, and scattered news from around the world, I take time to scribble a few thoughts onto a sheet of paper. And so I write: The past is over, but it’s not done with us yet.

The Forgotten Narrative Of The Wicked Witch

A man’s called a traitor, or a liberator. A rich man’s a thief, or a philanthropist.
Is one a crusader, or ruthless invader, it’s all in which label is able to persist.

Song from the play, Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz.

A few years ago, Judy and I took daughter Elizabeth to New York City to see the Broadway play, Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz. Based on L. Frank Baum’s classic story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the story has a twist to it worth noting.

Mentioning Baum’s original work, it’s hard to avoid conjuring up Judy Garland and the film that seems to have a never-ending shelf life. The hauntingly beautiful song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” comes to my mind even now as I type away. And for fun, I couldn’t help myself, I clicked on a one-minute film clip of Garland’s character, Dorothy, in Oz, on her journey down the Yellow Brick Road, uttering to her dog what has become a familiar American trope, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

The attraction of the book and the play, Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz is simply that we get the story told this time not from Dorothy’s point of view. This time we enter the narrative of the Wicked Witch of the West. In other words, we come to appreciate that there are, indeed, two sides to every story.

In my last issue of Notes, I expressed my concern about the violence in Israel and Gaza, recalling the faces of the people I visited in 1987 in Gaza’s refugee camp, Jubalia. Reading newspaper accounts and listening to the radio as I drive, I realize even more fully the lopsided perspective I had grown up with in Baltimore in a predominately Jewish neighborhood.

The Holocaust narrative dominated my life. How could it be otherwise? The horrible genocide unleashed in Nazi Germany that resulted in the death of approximately 11 million people, 6 million of which were Jews, along with Gypsies, Slavs, communists, and the mentally and physically disabled.

The Holocaust narrative has been documented in film, books, and in the arts. The pervasive and ongoing anti-Semitism that drove Jews to their death has been documented. The horrors of the Holocaust must never be forgotten, particularly when anti-Semitism continues to rear its ugly head.

But what also must not be lost is the Arab narrative, the Palestinian story. I firmly believe that many people, Americans in particular, do not know the history of the Palestinian people and the Nakba, the 1948 Palestinian exodus in which over 700,000 Palestinians were forced off their land, and out of their homes, and into refugee camps.

Palestinians are viewed as the Wicked Witch of the Middle East. Their story must be told, if peace is to be achieved in the place referred to as “The Holy Land.”

Refaat Alareer, is a young Palestinian academic and blogger from the English Department, Islamic University-Gaza. The editor of Gaza Writes Back, a collection of 22 short stories from young adults in Gaza, he writes: “Of all the people around me, you know best that it takes two to complete a story; it always does.”

“There’s a Palestine that dwells inside all of us,” writes Alareer, “a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word “occupation” is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.”

Lines from his poem, “I Am You,” were written to Israelis from Gaza. They cry out for reconciliation between Palestinians and Jews, based on shared land, mutual respect, and a common history of struggle and violence.

I am just you.

I am your past haunting

Your present and your future.

I strive like you did.

I fight like you did.

I resist like you resisted

And for a moment

I’d take your tenacity

As a model,

Were you not holding

The barrel of the gun

Between my bleeding

Eyes.

The Promised Land From A Jewish Perspective

While on the road, I take early morning and late nighttime to catch up on my reading. A couple of books on the bedside table get the attention they deserve, having been overpowered earlier by people, my calendar, phone and iPad.  

I am finally able to finish Ari Shavit’s book, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. Shavit is a Jew, born in Rehovot, Israel; he is one of Israel’s finest journalists. He is a columnist for Haaretz and a commentator on Israeli public television. His book is written in a way that has readers flowing the road to Israel statehood. He begins with his Zionist grandfather who came to the Holy Land in 1897, and covers history in an absorbing way, without leaving out important parts of the Jewish narrative.

We hear a lot about Arabs wanting to push the Jews in Israel into the sea. Rarely do we hear about the Zionist desire to push Arabs into the sea. Ari Shavit is bold to include the words of Yosef Weitz, a contemporary of his grandfather:

“It must be clear that there is no room in the land for the two people(s). No development will bring us to our goal to be an independent nation in this small land. If the Arabs leave, the country will be wide and spacious for us. If the Arabs remain, the land will remain narrow and poor. The only solution is the Land of Israel, at least the western Land of Israel, with no Arabs. There is no place for compromise here…There is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries…Only with this transfer will the land be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the question of the Jews will have a solution. There is no other way.”

War Zones—Domestic And Foreign

“We’re not worried about what’s happening in Afghanistan. We’re worried about what’s happening in Ferguson…black youths being murdered.”

Anthony Shahid—A Ferguson, Missouri resident and leader

I don’t know Mr. Shahid, but I must confess that I have a soft spot in my heart for him.  He has his hands full of trouble at home, and Afghanistan is a long way away. Nevertheless, the connection between Afghanistan and communities like Ferguson is real.

It’s a connection that Americans better pay attention to before it is too late. Dr. King spoke of it at Riverside Church in New York City, exactly one month before he was assassinated. He linked the Vietnam War to ghettoized racial problems here.

Substitute new words in place of Vietnam and you will see how Dr. King’s message now resonates with us in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in Ferguson, Missouri.

“There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam (Iraq and Afghanistan) and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America (Places like Ferguson, Missouri).

“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam (Iraq and Afghanistan), continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

“A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments (Iraq and Afghanistan), hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam (Iraq and Afghanistan), and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam (Iraq and Afghanistan), continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men (In Ferguson, Missouri), I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam (Iraq and Afghanistan)? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos (Places like Ferguson, Missouri) without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

For many years, time-and-time-again I, along with others, have been beating the drum about the growing militarism in our nation. In essence, I have tried to point to the arming of America. It’s not a new tune from this trumpeter. Here’s the litany, taking into account what is taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Ferguson, Missouri, right now.

We have been weapons peddlers, selling and supplying military armament to countries all over the world, billions of dollars worth of weapons. In fact, arming both sides, like Arabs and Jews, Sunnis and Shiites. The armament industry loves it.  

Time-and-time-again, U.S. weapons wind up getting turned against us. That’s what is happening in Iraq right now, and in the armed-to-the-teeth police in Missouri, as well as other cities and small towns across America. And now we learn that the weapon-peddler here at home is the Pentagon. The very folks charged to protect us are the ones putting us in harm’s way by depositing military weaponry into cities and towns across the country.

Like homing pigeons, battlefield weapons always come home. We may mothball battleships, but the weapons our troops carry, and the massive vehicles they drive, show up where they were shipped from, the U.S.A. It may be next to impossible to find clothes made in the USA, but weapons, are another matter.  

Now, here’s the message that may escape the media attention it should get. Look, police are swat-teamized in part because the general population across this country is able to carry super-sized weapons. Yes, the way the police in Ferguson conducted themselves reeked of racist, incompetent, unprofessionally violent behavior, no ifs-and-or-buts, except the but that points to the fear-driven, armed-to-the-teeth nation we have become.

George Orwell’s words make me wince, “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Truer words were never spoken, and we can only hope and pray that we will wake up, as a nation, and address the militarism that has infected our way of thinking and acting here and abroad. If we don’t, the violence will escalate as people fight occupation in all the places where weapons, our weapons are turned on them—here and abroad.

The Signs Say Stop Here—At Least Slow Down Here

While I was traveling 2,400 miles over 12 states, I can tell by the speed limit signs that we may be one nation, but not quite as indivisible as we might think. Roads are linked through a national network of highways, but each state hold onto the right to set their own speed limit, and sometimes they seem to play games with drivers.

I am on a 70 mile an hour highway, cross a state line and I’d better pay attention. I’m now in a 55-mile zone. And then there are those little roadmap crosshair towns and villages where the roads become streets and the streets go “bypass” or “truck route” on me. And a police car is tucked away in some cove just waiting to stop me and fatten up the local town coffer.

Believe it or not, in Maine pedestrians have the right-of-way. They put one little piggy in the street on the way to market and you’d better have a watchful eye and good brakes.

I remember years ago, before we had these long stretches of super highways, a trip, covering the same distance, could take twice as long as it does today. Driving from Baltimore to school in Lexington, Virginia, I did up-close time with towns now practically desolate because of the bypasses. You could actually stop for a real meal at a restaurant where you got a menu handed to you along with some conversation with a few locals.

I think maybe those speed limit signs are more than safety precautions for folks who actually live in the places I might speed through, or the tricky speed traps set to snatch some cash from my wallet. Maybe those signs have a spirit to them, one that invites me to slow down, perhaps even stop for more than gas or a urinal. People live here, marry here, raise children here, die here, and in that space have stories to tell if someone is willing to listen to them.

Road Repair Seven Thousand Miles From Afghanistan

There was a time when folks stopped and helped a motorist in trouble. They still do, I had one stop me on the road outside of Asheville, North Carolina. A woman pulled her car over and offered me her cell phone or a ride to the gas station at the next exit. But there is little most folks can do with a disabled automobile these days. Computer chips and complicated electronic technology make cars run these days. The days are now over when someone with grease monkey skills, obvious from the gunk under their fingernails, would pull over and say, “open your hood,” and actually fix the problem, have gone the way of the village blacksmith.

So how did it come out? I called my insurance company and they were able to actually spot my car via a satellite connection, locate a nearby tow company, give me regular calls regarding the arrival of the tow truck, and direct me to a repair shop where I could get the work done. It was as if I had my own personal drone mapping and directing me. Arriving at the repair shop, I felt like I had taken a step back into the past. Tools were scattered about, some very dated furniture was in the waiting area, stuffed animals were mounted on the wall and the floor, and the mechanics had grease under their fingernails.

I talked about West Virginia with them, and heard them talk about their hunting trips there. When I left, I noticed that the war in Afghanistan had come home to this place. On a table there were blank sheets of paper and a handful of crayons. People who frequented this place were invited to draw a picture, with an encouraging and colorful message, a note to be sent to one of our soldiers in Afghanistan.

The Marginal Way In Maine

“I have demonstrated that I can’t describe Deer Island (Maine). There is something about it that opens no door to words. But it stays with you afterwards, and, more than that, things you didn’t know you saw come back to you after you have left.”

Travels With Charley—John Steinbeck

While in Ogunquit, Maine, visiting friends for a week, I walk the Marginal Way, a path carved into the rocky shoreline. Judy and I used to walk that path together. Now I walk it alone. But that’s not exactly right. Those words from the show, “Carousel,” come to mind and challenge me. “Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart and you’ll never walk alone.” To paraphrase John Steinbeck, things I knew, and didn’t know I knew, come back to me now that Judy has left.

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