We were out of clamps and out of floor space. Nothing more could be done for now.
“Let’s walk away from this before we get too fussy,” Dad said. “We can do the other one tomorrow.”
I returned the next day. Dad had come out in the morning and removed the clamps. The iron pipes had stained the soft wood where we’d soaked it in our glue-wiping process, leaving streaks of gray. In addition, there were a few yellow-brown patches of dried glue we’d missed. I asked if that was okay. My dad nodded.
“You’ll be doing plenty of sanding,” he said.
For all the roughness, though, a significant transformation had occurred. These were no longer sticks and planks, the bones of an idea. This was what the side of the box would look like, and it felt like progress.
* * *
The following morning, I settled in at my desk in the old servants’ quarters at home to catch up on email. When I opened Outlook, the little chime dinged. A notification box appeared on the upper right corner of the screen.
WALLY WAFFLE TIME
2 hours 12 minutes late
This was the second Tuesday of the first month since John had died. The app for our standing breakfast date was still active.
I could have clicked the “dismiss” button, but I didn’t. I left it there. The reminder contained a strange and private communication between John and me, and I could find nothing within myself other than a desire to preserve it. It may have been a glitch of digital memory, a ghost in the machine, but I also knew that it was the direct product of his fingers on the buttons of his smartphone as we walked side by side along the canal that cold March morning sixteen months before.
I started into the mundane task of churning through email. Every time I returned to the Outlook window, the notification refreshed, chiming and reappearing at the top of the screen. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a version of Gina’s promise that the departed speak to us in dreams. I chose again not to dismiss it.
As I cleaned out my inbox, I came across a Google alert. My name had appeared in a post somewhere. I followed the link to discover a puzzling version of a feature-length obituary that had appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal the week John died.
The original lead was this:
“John M. Puglia saw beauty everywhere, then created art from what he saw.
“From old factories to backstreet bars to boxers, Mr. Puglia was always moved by whatever came into his field of vision and continuously inspired others with his art.”
But through some bizarre mutation of artificial intelligence, it had shown up on a secondary newsfeed, apparently after having been run through some version of autocorrect, and it came out looking like it had been translated into Chinese and then back into English:
“John M. Puglia saw beauty everywhere, afterwards total art from what he saw.
“From aged factories to backstreet bars to boxers, Mr. Puglia was always changed by whatever came into his margin of prophesy and invariably desirous others with his art.”
I had been quoted in the original article, identified as “longtime friend David Giffels, a former Beacon Journal columnist and now an assistant professor of English at UA.”
Now I was “longtime crony David Giffels, a former Beacon Journal columnist and now an partner highbrow of English during UA,” and I considered John “a many exhaustible chairman.”
I was quoted as follows:
“John lived an desirous life, and he desirous all of us who lived it alongside him. His possess continuous oddity and creativity led us into places we never would have gone. He took me into deserted factories and dive bars and peculiar corners of a cities we explored together. He introduced me to art and song and novel we wouldn’t have found otherwise . . .
“He engrossed so much of life—art and film and song and novel and booze and sharp food and large ideas and stupid jokes—and he gave behind in equal measure. He common all he had.”
There is no doubt in my mind that if John were to speak to me from beyond the grave, this was how he would have done so. We were well bonded in this kind of mischief. He once threw an elaborate backyard party to celebrate the art world’s discovery of a previously unknown primitive artist named Dick Tappan. John had gone to Big Lots and bought a bunch of red apple Christmas ornaments and cheap wooden knickknack boxes with flowers painted on them, and had autographed them all with “Dick Tappan” in silver Sharpie. He’d developed a folk-hero backstory for Tappan and announced at the party that he would be giving each guest an original piece of the man’s work. It wasn’t until he handed me a megaphone for the announcements that the joke began to reveal itself.
“Everyone make sure you get your Dick Tappan . . .”
“This will be your only chance to get your very own Dick Tappan . . .”
“Remember, it’s not a party until everyone has a Dick Tappan . . .”
And so forth.
All men, having once been thirteen-year-old boys, will forever after be thirteen-year-old boys.
* * *
I returned to my dad’s workshop later in the week. He had some appointments that day and wouldn’t be home, so he had left the barn open for me.
The boards we’d glued were stacked together vertically against the wall. They were uneven, bruised from the clamps, and stained from the glue. But they offered the scale of what they were to become.
I’d brought my power planer with me, and I set it, along with my bagged lunch, on the workbench. I was glad to be alone here, alone anywhere, with something to do. I wanted to clear my head, to give myself over to the slow rhythm of thoughtless work. The workshop felt wholly different without my father in it. I’d rarely—maybe never—been here alone, and in some way my presence felt like a violation of a private space. But it also felt like a privilege, a tacit trust.
I carried one of the two long sides to the sawhorses and lowered it into place. I plugged in the planer, tested the trigger, then stepped back to eyeball the general landscape. The seams between the wide pine boards and the thin oak racing stripe—as I’d come to call it—didn’t match. In addition, there was some slight cupping in the pine that would need to be brought level.
I triggered the planer, the torque of which caused it to rotate slightly in my hand. The blade bit into the grain. Its pitch rose. It left a clean white wake as it removed a small fraction of the surface. Slowly, I made my way down the length of the board, sweetness rising from the young wood, a release of whatever it held inside.
Gradually and then completely, my mind was absorbed into the high whine of the little motor. I was transported into the task. When I found a need for a greater attack, I switched to my old-fashioned hand planer, sliding it along the high spots, leaving papery curls of wood trailing up out of the opening behind the sharp blade. Then back to the power tool. After two or three hours, I switched to my dad’s disc sander to begin the finer smoothing. Sculptors will tell you that they allow a piece of stone or wood to suggest what it wishes to become, and even in the case of commercial-grade off-the-rack lumber, this communication was taking place. The wood’s grain had determined which side would be inside and which would face out. The various pieces placed in proximity had suggested which ones wanted to match up. I was reminded, as one hour stretched into the next, of how John’s work had taken him into the same sort of relationship with his medium, as he learned the way the vellum would respond to the ink, and he responded in turn, adapting his idea to that of his materials.
* * *
Late that day, as my work was winding down, my nephew Edward, a strapping sixteen-year-old in a straw fedora and Bermuda shorts, arrived to mow my dad’s lawn with the old green tractor. I caught sight of him from the corner of my eye and shut off the sander.
“Workin’ on your coffin?” he said, staring at the wood and nodding. “That’s pretty cool.”
“I guess so,” I said, still unsure how to respond to such questions. Edward disappeared back into the other side of the barn, and I settl
ed into the final round of sanding.
When I emerged a short while later into the bright sunshine of late afternoon, Edward was standing next to the tractor in the middle of the big yard, staring at it, thumb and forefinger of one hand stroking his chin. He saw me approach. “I shut it off and now it won’t start,” he said.
“Hmmm,” I said.
I climbed into the seat, set my left boot against the clutch, and turned the key.
Nothing.
Now I stared with the same blank bewilderment. An old thought that had recurred countless hundreds of times since my dad’s cancer arrived again: How will I do any of this without him? How will any of us?
I tried the key again. No response. Then a thought. “Was the mower running?” I asked.
“Yeah. I think so.”
I reached for the black plastic knob and pulled the lever toward me, disengaging the blades.
Then, foot back against the clutch, choke pulled out slightly, I tried the ignition. BRRRRROOOMM.
Edward smiled, relieved.
“I knew it was something like that,” he said.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
* * *
Summer was ending. In some ways this had seemed like the worst season of my life, but the summer had also included Gina’s and my twenty-fifth anniversary, celebrated with a trip to New York, and possibly the best (and definitely the most expensive) restaurant dinner we’d ever shared, at one of Mario Batali’s restaurants—Babbo, across the street from Washington Square Hotel, John’s hotel—where the house music had unfolded as a seemingly personalized soundtrack of our decades together: Gina’s and mine, and John’s and mine, and Gina’s and John’s and mine. Over the long course of the meal, three albums were played in their entirety, each specifically meaningful to us in each of those decades—first the Pixies’ Doolittle from the eighties, then Wilco’s Summerteeth from the nineties, then the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells from the aughts. This summer had also included the celebration of Evan’s high school graduation—a boy growing to a man—and the vicarious sharing of my dad’s trip to Europe—a man returning to his youth—and a great deal of goodwill from people who knew we were grieving.
On the last August Saturday before school started up again, Gina and I went to a screening downtown of a 1924 Soviet sci-fi silent movie—Aelita: Queen of Mars—that a bunch of local musicians had collectively composed a soundtrack for. I’d recorded a segment with a friend. (He’d provided the actual musicianship, scoring and synchronizing a looping melody. I’d accompanied him with the only movie-soundtrack guitar trick I know: a twangy riff drenched in vibrato and reverb, the ranch dressing of guitar effects.) Each of the participants had been given a three-minute excerpt to score, and the pieces unfolded one into the next into the next, creating their own spontaneity of performance against the black-and-white film. Taken as a whole, it was captivating and unexpectedly coherent, especially considering that many of the musicians had never met. Gina and I sat together in the dark and watched and listened, the accidental beauty of collage.
Later, we went to a big outdoor after-party. The organizers had gotten permission from the owner of West Hill Hardware to use the parking lot behind his store for a bonfire gathering, with the store’s cluttered back porch serving as a DJ stage. Someone had draped haphazard strings of Christmas lights along the rear of the store and around the parking lot. Some of the musicians who’d scored the film now created a live pastiche of electronica. Gina and I sat side by side on a pair of West Hill secondhand commodes stored next to the garage, passing a bottle of wine back and forth as we watched kids dancing in the firelight in their dreadlocks and gypsy dresses.
It was strange to see this on the site of the old hardware store. The party seemed either too modern or too primitive, generally too intentionally capricious for such a place. Nonetheless, I liked that it was here. I liked that I was here. I liked that I was here with Gina, slightly happy, slightly drunk, sitting on a toilet in this place that felt like home.
I looked up at the sky. It was black, starless, with an orange wedge of moon hanging aloof to one side. I was reminded of summer nights long ago, lying haphazardly on the dewy grass with my brothers and sister as my dad reclined in his plastic-webbed lawn chair, gazing upward, narrating the constellations, describing bears and arrows and the edges of the Milky Way. He knew all the shapes and names.
Directly above us, high in the blackness, was a constant swirl—the white undersides of birds, circling, swooping, down, up, a loose tornado of flight. They followed a chaotic pattern like bats would, but these were not bats. They were white. We lived barely a mile away, and I’d never seen this sort of bird activity in my own little piece of the same night sky. They were graceful and busy and constant. For the rest of that night, I wondered about them, why they were here, how they belonged. Were they attracted by the light from the fire, or the Christmas lights, or was it the music? Or were they always here, and I’d just never looked at the sky this way?
“I miss John,” Gina said.
I hadn’t been thinking that, but immediately, I agreed, and now I was thinking only that. “I know. He would have been here.”
“He would.”
PART 3
* * *
17: TURNING FIFTY
* * *
I have always been age-obsessed. Not in the vain way, necessarily—I don’t mind that my body is aging, and the older I get, the more thankful I am for my years. But at every age since I can remember, I’ve tested myself against any potentially quantifiable benchmark. When I was nineteen, I was irrationally aware that Tommy Stinson, the bass player for the Replacements, was two years younger than I was and had already been a legitimate (or at least illegitimate) rock star for three years; I was also irrationally aware that he had made out with two girls I had also kissed, and at that point in my somewhat pathetic life, I’d properly kissed only four girls. My statistical analysis suggested two things: 1) Extrapolated across the fifty states, Tommy Stinson was getting a lot of action; and 2) I was already too old to become a rock star.
When I was twenty-six and finishing my master’s degree in creative writing, I was irrationally aware that Michael Chabon was just ten months older than I was (actually, nine months and three weeks, but who was counting?) and had published The Mysteries of Pittsburgh two years before, which established him as a sort of literary golden boy, and that his writing shamed everything in my not even finished master’s thesis, and therefore I was doomed before I’d even begun. Complicating matters that year was the fact that one of my professors returned from a trip to New Orleans with a gift for me, a copy of John Kennedy Toole’s The Neon Bible, which had just been published twenty years after the author’s suicide. This professor, who thought of me as a young writer, told me he thought I’d like to read the work of another young writer. But Toole had written the book when he was sixteen and had died at age thirty, and I was acutely aware that I was much closer to the latter than the former.
When I did turn thirty, I tacked a photocopy of Katha Pollitt’s poem “Turning Thirty” to the wall above my writing desk (I am nothing if not literal) and therefore day after day I was reminded that I’d reached the age
when suddenly “choices”
ceased to mean “infinite possibilities”
This poem came from her collection Antarctic Traveller, and for a bookmark, I used the brochure I’d requested from the Anchorage “Star of the North” Chamber of Commerce. One of my recent infinite possibilities had involved a plan to move to Alaska, which was progressing swimmingly until Gina, who was unaware of the plan, discovered said brochure and informed me that, no, we would not be moving to Alaska. I responded by asking her if we could have a pet monkey. She said no.
My infinite possibilities continued to dwindle.
Mostly by chance, the first book I read for pleasure after completing graduate school was Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. (A side note: isn’t it the kind of irony that seems tailor-made for an E
nglish major that one becomes an English major because one loves to read for pleasure, and then, upon entering the major, finds that reading suddenly becomes anything but pleasurable?) That book accompanied a growing fascination with my age in comparison to the ages of others in my generation: what we had done, what we had failed to do, in our thoughts and in our words, forever and ever world without end amen.
The obsession continued. In my early days of using Facebook, when everyone still included a username as the opening phrase of a post, I declared one day that David Giffels “is younger than Johnny Depp, but feels older, and older than Brett Favre, but feels younger.” I was finding myself unavoidably in middle age but at a complete loss to reconcile just exactly what that meant. Was I becoming less young or more old? Was I acting the way I was supposed to act? Was everyone else?
I thought a time would come when I would feel definitively like a grown-up, like I would have achieved a certain kind of acumen for making decisions and knowing what to do in unknowable situations, when I wouldn’t feel insecure in real-life grown-up scenarios (board meetings; ordering wine; delivering eulogies). Instead, I still felt like a kid. Or rather, I felt like an adult who was in the continuous loop of his youth. I found my forty-four-year-old self at the mall one day with my tween-aged children, shopping for a pair of sneakers and wondering at their open contempt as I lingered over a pair of Chuck Taylors.
Dad. You’re not cool.
Did they not understand that these were the only sneakers I ever wore, or had ever worn, and therefore my continuity undermined any accusation that I was trying to achieve hipness, to pass as relevant? I was simply trying to maintain a much valued status quo, and I specifically chose a white pair, the most pure and unstudied of all the colors, to drive that point home.
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