After I sobbed over Five Smooth Stones when the grandfather was killed, I sat up late reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Spending two days a week all summer volunteering at the Corryville pool, the contrast between the inner city world and my village seemed so intense I could barely stand it. I couldn’t talk to Linda about this or about my summer’s crush on Mr. Flannigan, which I noted in tiny, almost invisible handwriting in my journal.
SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING to us in the glass house; something was happening to our life, to me. One summer evening after dinner, I felt antsy, strangely uncomfortable. I slid open the sliding door and called out, “I’m going for a walk. Back in a while.” The muggy heat smothered me after the cool dry air in the house. I was sweating by the time I stepped off the deck and walked across the yard, crossed the stone slab bridge across the stone stream my father had sculpted out of the clay soil. I passed through the orchard we’d planted to the little hill my dad had made with his bulldozer, placing a rock slab on top. I wanted to look at our house, the gardens, our life. From a distance I hoped to gain some perspective. To try to see what was going on.
I didn’t wander around the village at night looking at all the big houses lit up, like a lot of teenagers did. It was as if a leash held me to the borders of our property and all I could do was watch our life under glass, where my family passed under the spotlights in a blur of movement. We were so exposed living behind glass walls, but we also seemed invisible, buffered by this land around us. Who really knew what was going on in our house? I looked at my bedroom window when the desk light shown down on my books. I wondered if anyone watched me from the outside like this. I yearned for someone who would someday really see me, the real me, the secret me.
SUMMER WEEKENDS MEANT landscaping with Dad. He stood astride the bulldozer, shouting orders over the deafening roar as he leaned his head to avoid the plume of blue diesel smoke. Even though this was the ‘little’ bulldozer we called Peanut, it was slowly lowering a two-ton granite curbstone we had helped him wrap with heavy chains around the nine-foot blade. My brothers and I all wore leather work gloves too big for us, afraid of those chains holding onto the granite, afraid the hook of metal might give way, the chain might slip, the chains might crush our hands or arm or leg. I was fifteen, Wood was thirteen, and Hubbard was ten. The Ohio summer damp heat drenched us all in sweat.
Jo left early every Saturday for her first college class in twenty years. At forty, she was going back to school, taking a class called an Introduction to Corrections, at St. Xavier. She loved the class, even though Woodie got mad every Saturday morning. “We’ve got gardens to build! Why are you leaving?”
She answered calmly, “Remember you asked me to start working part-time? I’ve got to go back to school first.” She waved happily as she drove off.
Woodie roared at us, “Is the curb straight?”
Wood and I eyed the slab, adjusted the pry bars to press against it. I shouted back,
“It looks good.”
“What?” Dad shouted, as the bulldozer’s engine revved louder.
We each gestured with one hand, thumbs up.
Dad’s reddened face and bald head nodded at us, sweat streaming down his neck through clay dust and grit. His bare chest was sunburned, dirt streaked, his khaki pants soaked with sweat around the waist. He held onto the knobs controlling the blade as he leaned forward to peer into the trench.
Hubbard stood ready with a shovel load of sand, to toss it in to stabilize the slab when we positioned it into place. At the end of the long covered porch, Wood and I held six-foot pry bars in the trench to guide the slab as Woodie lowered the unwieldy granite toward the trench we’d been digging for weeks in Ohio clay.
Clay hardpan: yellow, gravel-studded, and impenetrable. Woodie repeatedly slammed the bulldozer blade into it, trying to crack it open. If the blade slid, the hardpan smoothed hard as marble. But if he backed and filled and came in at an angle and hacked into it, it would crack. We stepped in with pick-ax and mattock, breaking and digging, shoveling out crumbling clay and gravel until we made a twelve-inch-deep, eight-inch-wide trench. We measured and dug to level, over and over, until the trench extended around the perimeter of the porches and the end of the house, over 150 feet of trench. Now granite curbs weighing from six hundred pounds to two tons were fitting into place, like puzzle pieces in my father’s grand plan.
We would spend five years transforming overgrown woods and fields tangled with grape vines and poison ivy into acres of Japanese-inspired gardens. My dad often bragged that it was fifteen years of his offspring’s childhoods. The house would be bordered with granite, with rounded stones inside. There would be a stone slab bridge over a “stream” of white river stones edged with dwarf conifers. Granite boulders he found alongside farmers’ fields in Prebble County, northern Ohio, dropped by the glaciers, would be set into the gardens. We would plant 1,500 pachysandra to create masses of ground cover, and a thousand hemlock seedlings on hillsides to create living privacy screens. After five years of work, expanses of lawn would lead to distant streams and stones. It was a “work in progress,” or “design as you go,” he explained to visitors. His stacks of legal pads were filled with notes and drawings, his books on Zen temple gardens were studded with book marks, and plant books and catalogues fell over in piles next to his bed.
Some of his inspiration came from being a great scavenger. The granite curbs were brought by dump trucks from urban renewal projects as they ripped up Upper Vine Street in Corryville. When my dad found out they were dumping the granite into the river, he talked to the foreman and paid to have the drivers bring the loads out here to dump on our land.
Dump trucks carried cobblestones from Third Street, downtown, so we could build a stone spiral patio thirty feet in diameter. Each stone was thirty-five pounds, and most were gummed with asphalt we had to chisel off before each stone was set into a leveled bed of seventeen tons of sand. Woodie announced this was Jo’s project to do with us. “It’s good for you to have your own project to feel proud of.”
Later she growled to us kids, “Just what I need, one more project! He’s trying to keep me home doing more work.” But she was obedient, and even though we groaned and complained, we didn’t mind working with her because we’d talk as we worked. We kept busy on her project steadily on hot summer days for three summers until we completed the spiral.
Dad got the village of Glendale to bring truckloads of oak leaves they picked up from raked piles along the streets, dumping down a hillside in our yard, forty tons of leaves a year for four years. When we were younger, the first year, we jumped in that pile of leaves and slid down the hill, not knowing that after it had compacted and broken down into rich leaf mulch, we’d be shoveling and hauling it out by the wheelbarrow load to plant evergreens in mulch to offset Ohio clay.
AS WOODIE LOWERED the slab into the trench, we were all feeling confident. This was slab number three. Four curbstones a day was our record and the job was almost done. Jo would soon be home from her summer school college class. Then we’d have lunch and a break in the air-conditioned house, before we would see our friends.
Over the rumble of the bulldozer, Wood glanced at me for a second. “I’m thinking about BLT’s for lunch.”
I kept peering down my crowbar, eyeing the slab as it edged lower. “Great idea! As soon as this gets into place, I’m making us some iced tea. We have to take a break!”
Hubbard groaned, “I’m so thirsty. How come you always make the tea? Why can’t I make the tea?”
“Wood, stay focused!” Woodie shouted from his throne on the bulldozer above us.
My brother glanced up, looking mad, and shouted, “I am!” while he muttered under his breath, “God damn him!” He leaned hard against the pry bar to direct the curb stone into the bed of sand.
“Hub, start tossing in the sand!” Woodie directed. As the sand flew into the hole, he called out, “Atta boy!”
The curb settled down into the trench, inches from
the bottom. We had to get the chains out. The bulldozer was left trembling in neutral, as Woodie clambered off, grabbed my pry bar, shouted directions to each of us, orchestrating the unhooking of chains. We each hauled out the heavy links as two tons of granite slid into place on the bed of sand. We stood back exhausted and relieved. We’d done it again.
But Woodie leaned over to measure and yelled, “Hell, it’s off by half an inch at this end.” He threw his whole weight against the bar, and then something happened. The butt of metal hit his forehead, and he began to fall back, in slow motion, like a huge tree going down. We stood, stunned, watching his big tall body forced by gravity to sit down on the edge of the porch. His hands went limp, let go of the bar, before his chest and head slumped sideways onto the wooden planks. Blood began to well up from the rip in his forehead.
Hubbard cried out, “Is he dead? Is Daddy dead?”
I took charge. “Daddy’s not dead. He’ll be okay. I need your help. Fast.” I looked into their scared faces. “Hubbard, get a towel in the bathroom. Get it wet with cold water. Wood, turn off the bulldozer. Be careful the front loader doesn’t jerk.”
I climbed off the porch to move the pry bar out of the way, leapt back up to put a shirt under his head. He looked scary pale under his sunburn, sweat streaming across his face as blood seeped down over his forehead and past his eye. As soon as Hubbard brought me the towel, I knelt down and held it firmly over the wound. I somehow knew I had to stop the bleeding so it could clot. The bulldozer shuddered silent. A relief of silence billowed around us as we stared at our dad, his hulk sprawled over the porch.
“Hubbard, go look at the clock. How soon will Mommy be home?” He dashed off again.
Then Woodie groaned, opened his eyes and looked at me. “What happened, Sugar?” He tried to sit up.
“Daddy, take it easy. Let’s slow down the blood first. You really banged your head.”
I turned and whispered to Wood, “Get a glass of water.”
I looked down into my father’s pale face. “Dad, I think I should call an ambulance.”
Even though his voice was weak, he shook his head. “Hell no! I’m a tough old goat. It’ll take more than this little bump to stop me.”
By the time Jo got home a half hour later, the bleeding had stopped. We’d helped Dad stagger into the house to lie down. We spread towels over his side of the bed and he lay there with a cold washcloth on his head.
He told Jo, “You’ll be so proud of our daughter. She was calm, cool and collected. I’m impressed. The boys too. They did great.” He looked at each of us standing in a ring around the bed. “Time for lunch, and...” he paused. “You can have the afternoon off. You deserve it.”
MY MOTHER WAS busy that summer. She read about a government grant program in the newspaper and she decided to raise matching funds for a federal study to investigate the Cincinnati Workhouse. She built a team, ran meetings, and planned fundraising events. She found out about a radical play called The Cage, about life in prisons, that was traveling around the country and would be performed in Cincinnati at Playhouse in the Park that fall. The man who wrote the play and the actors had all been incarcerated in San Quentin. She arranged for them all to come to our house for a reception and to talk about prisons as a fundraiser for the grant. I went to see the play with my parents.
I sat in the dark in the front row at the little theatre in the round. On stage in a jail cell, black and white actors were guards and prisoners. They acted out strip searches, men getting raped, and guards beating them up. Under the spot lights, I watched sweat dripping down their naked chests. One man had a scar on his back, another on his face. The theatre went dark. As the audience clapped, I was shaking.
The next evening our house was ablaze with theatre spotlights streaking red, blue, and yellow shadows on the fireplace wall. We had helped Jo cook all day, stuffing and rolling hundreds of grape leaves with a filling of rice, lamb, and dill. We laid out platters of food, served glasses filled with wine, carried plates to and from the kitchen. We watched the actors as they shook hands with the guests and talked about the situation in American prisons.
Then one of the actors came up to me and asked if I had a record player in a quieter room. He had Abbey Road, the brand-new Beatles album none of us had seen yet, under his arm. I nodded, and tipped my head, follow me. My brothers and some of the actors slipped away from the crowd into my corner bedroom. Once we closed the doors, it was quiet and dark with only a desk lamp on. He set the record on the turntable with box speakers. There were eight of us, the black and white ex-cons settled around the room, on my twin beds, and on the desk. My brothers and I sat on the rug leaning against my closet, awed to be included, as we listened to Abbey Road for the first time. The music was strange and cool.
We all listened, our faces serious, nodding our heads with the music, trying to figure out the words and rhythms. In “Come Together,” there were words I thought had to do with being black, shoe shine, and Muddy Waters. John’s voice chanted, punctuating each word, “One thing I can tell you is you got to be free.” We nodded our head with the beat. Then the chorus kept returning, “Come together—right now.”
We could have been a play. The cultured voices from the party in the glass room, and three white children sitting at the feet of the ex-cons, listening together in the near dark. At the end of the song, one of the men said, “Damn, that was something else.”
We all nodded. “Yeah.” It was.
THE HIPPIE
The architects of the Modernist movement... wanted their houses to speak of the future.... They wanted their armchairs to evoke racing cars and planes, they wanted their lamps to evoke the power of industry and their coffee pots the dynamism of high-speed trains.
—ALAIN DE BOTTON, THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS
A ROBIN’S-EGG-BLUE VW MICROBUS CHUGGED UP our driveway on a late summer weekend in 1969, as my brothers and I washed and polished Woodie’s Jag, his new BMW, and our green and white VW bus. We sprayed mud off the tractor tires. We stopped and stared at a painting on the front of the approaching VW, a larger than life portrait of an Indian guru with a long white beard and hair flying outwards, like the sun’s rays. On the roof were a dozen very long sapling poles. Even though it was the Sixties, in Glendale, Ohio, the only hippies we’d ever seen up close were in the special Woodstock Edition of LIFE that summer. We gazed with astonishment as a petite young man with a soft mustache and a fuzzy brown ponytail got out of the bus. He walked up to Dad, put out his hand, and said, “You must be Woodie. I’m Chuck. Jo invited me to come visit.”
Jo had told us about a C.O., a Conscientious Objector to the war in Vietnam, who worked with bishops and rabbis at an inter-faith coalition in the city. He helped her edit letters to judges and politicians about prison reform and was the fastest typist she’d ever seen. Twenty-year-old Chuck now looked at the car my dad was waxing and asked, “Is that the new BMW Bavaria? It’s the six-cylinder, right?”
Dad lit up. “I don’t usually go for a sedan but I have to ferry around a lot of clients these days to show them my buildings.” He laughed, “But I’m not suffering. This baby could cruise at 120 mph all day if I had the Autobahn to drive on instead of these ridiculously low speed limits.”
Chuck nodded, “I hear they are built for cruising in the Alps—great suspension.”
My brothers and I glanced at each other and stared at his bell-bottom jeans, jean jacket, and tee shirt. Usually Dad made nasty comments about dirty lazy hippies.
Chuck looked up at our house and observed, “What an interesting American variation on the European International Style. Jo said you were an architect. Are you a student of Le Corbusier?”
My father was charmed. “Jo’s at a class but please, join us for lunch.” He led Chuck under the overhang and up the steps to the main level of the house.
Chuck didn’t reveal that the house took his breath away, but he would later describe it as ascending into a glass pavilion surrounded by exquisi
te gardens. As a child of a typewriter repairman in Cleveland, Chuck had studied the Sunday paper’s Modern 1950s house designs, drawing his own crude floor plans and elevations. He was ten when he read about the Guggenheim opening in New York, and bicycled to the library to learn more about Frank Lloyd Wright. After graduating from high school, there was no money for college and no thought that he could ever study architecture. He started working as a bank accountant until Selective Service ordered him, as a classified 1-O, to perform two years’ alternative civilian service, which brought him to Cincinnati. His first year he worked as a hospital orderly carrying bedpans, making beds and taking bodies to the morgue. A series of events led Chuck to work as a secretary for a social action agency. My father was the first architect he’d ever met.
As he entered the great room, Chuck admired the indirect light from the clerestory windows. He added, “I love the design of Eero Saarinen’s Womb chair.”
Woodie nodded. “We’ve had that chair since before Elizabeth was born. She grew up in it. I had it recovered when we moved into the house.”
I glanced at Chuck, somewhat unnerved. I was disappointed in myself. I hadn’t known the designer of my favorite chair.
My father fired commands. “Elizabeth, get out the leg of lamb from the refrigerator. Hubbard, go out to the garden and pick some ripe tomatoes and a bunch of basil. Wood, go down to the wine cellar. Hmm. Let’s see, which bottle?” He paused and assessed this young man wearing moccasins. “Do you enjoy a good bottle of wine?”
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