* * *
And so, where building my own coffin had at one time seemed like such an enticing metaphor, its assembled form revealed its own truth, the one my father had recognized on the very first day:
It’s just a box.
And now it was time to live with it.
One afternoon near the end, as I painted its interior with a coat of pale green paint, I confirmed my previous notion of what to do with it. I would take it home, stand it on end, fit it with shelves, and put it to use. I could keep Nine Stories there, and John’s Little League team photo, given to me by one of his boyhood friends. I could change its contents as my own life changed. As I drew my brush along the interior corners, I considered the possible locations for this overbuilt, overconceived, highly glorified shelving unit. The living room? No. Gina would never go for that. It could fit in the foyer, but that would mean moving the piano. There was no way it was going to the basement. This would arguably be the nicest piece of furniture in our house. It ought to be seen.
Finally, I arrived at the only viable spot: a foyer on the second floor, against a wall, in a space currently occupied by a very ugly, slightly damaged “wicker” (actually, plastic) bench from Big Lots.
Furniture-wise, this would be a win-win. There was one problem, however. Above that bench hung two very large paintings, one of boxer Michael Dokes and the other of the old Richfield Coliseum, near Cleveland, where the hometown hero once lost a championship bout in a spectacular knockout. Together, they formed a bold and enticing visual narrative, a great rise and fall. But the paintings would have to go.
It’s a hard-knock life, John.
As I completed my paint job, I began to work up my overture to Gina. I had continued to dodge her question of where this thing would be stored, and I would need to be persuasive in my delivery. I hoped that she would agree before considering what I, alone in my thoughts, had just realized: if that spot in the hallway indeed became its ultimate (or rather penultimate) resting place, the box would be positioned in such a way that the first thing either of us saw upon departing our bedroom each morning was my open casket.
* * *
That same week, I attended a student awards ceremony at the University of Akron art school, in the same building where John had discovered himself, and where his retrospective exhibit had taken place. Two students were being recognized as the Puglia scholarship winners. I sat next to John’s parents and his brother in a small, crowded auditorium. A young man and a young woman were called forward, introduced by a faculty member who read a brief description of John’s legacy at the university and as a lifelong working artist. They awkwardly made their way from their theater seats to the front of the room and sheepishly received applause. Their faces looked so young.
I wondered what John would think of them. They’d already made the field trip to New York City, several weeks before, during spring break. I wondered what they’d seen, how they saw themselves, how they might have been changed. I wondered if they’d been the same places he’d been, places John would later take me. I wondered who they were becoming.
28: THE MOON FOLLOWS US HOME
* * *
The road to my father’s house winds through a shady, forested stretch of parkland crossed by bicycle trails and deer paths, adjoined for a spell by a creek that overflows after heavy storms, gouging deep edits of erosion, something of great concern to the township. In the dark, I’ve seen foxes and skunks skulking along. In the summer, the treetops weave a dense canopy, and the path feels private and close. In the winter, the branches scratch a geometry of loss. When the road opens up to ambling yards and meadows and long stretches of split-rail fence, it rises and falls, and I know where to accelerate to cause that butterfly feeling in my gut. I’ve known this road all my life. My grandfather lived here when I was a child, and I can remember my father doing the same thing, flying into the dips, making us all quicken with delight, except my mother, who scolded him every time. Leaving there in the twilight, I always marveled at the way the moon followed us home. I still do.
Somewhere along here was a pond deep in the woods. My brothers and cousins and I would troop our way out there sometimes during family gatherings, and in my memory, these were long treks filled with daring and discovery as we encountered piles of Genesee cans and the carcasses of birds and the occasional waterlogged Penthouse. We shattered the pond’s surface with rocks and bottles and hooked bluegills and concocted fictions of the old man who owned the property and whether we could outrun him and his theoretical dogs. But if I’m right, and I think I am, that pond is the same one I pass by now, just a few yards from the road, cleared of trees, the size of a wading pool, benign as a birdbath.
My father had begun to talk with increasing specificity about moving. The acres of upkeep and the relative distance from the help he might need someday had him devising what he referred to as his “two-year plan”: to find an easy-maintenance place in the city, near the part of town where three of his children live. He wanted to downsize his workshop to a basement or garage, to arrange his life into a few rooms, to simplify. He had identified a place that seemed just right, a brick bungalow set back from the street at a quirky angle that made it seem private and alluring. By the manner of his continued investigation, I knew the place had pulled up a chair in his imagination and wouldn’t easily leave.
Nothing was imminent, but we’d had enough Sunday-dinner conversations on the subject that driving this route now included the recognition that someday, maybe soon, this road would belong to someone else. As I passed the pond, it began to dawn on me that this was sort of an ending. I was on my way to apply the final coat of varnish, and all that would be left to do after it dried was to haul the coffin out of there and give him back his room. The convertible top was down. I powered up the rise and into the descent, entered the final curve, and turned at the homemade mailbox post into his driveway.
When I walked through the back door calling hello, he was at his little kitchen table, hunched over the order form in one of his woodworker’s catalogs. He had announced, not long after our visit to the Amish factory, that he was going to build a casket for himself. He’d been sparked by the simplicity of the pine box with its pegged-down flat lid, and it had wormed into his mind. He’d been lying awake at night working the mental puzzle of dovetailed corners, and now he sat with his pen and the folded-open catalog, ordering a jig to guide the pattern, a specialized router bit, hinges, handle hardware, and latches.
“We made all the mistakes on yours,” he’d told me not long before. “Now I can make mine the right way.”
I used to think life was best when I was only vaguely aware of the mistakes I was making, powered by the precarious confidence of a young man not knowing how much he does not know. If not for that, I’d never have played guitar in public, nor attempted a novel, nor moved into a condemned house, nor entered the terror of fatherhood. My existence in the dark allowed me experiences I had no other legitimate right to. Fumbling, blind, and reckless, we find things, including ourselves. But as life has gone on, I’ve found greater and greater interest in knowing my mistakes, examining them in the light, trying to understand. They are full of information.
“I was going to go down to Keim Lumber today,” my dad said, referring to one of his favorite haunts. “But then I remembered something. Let’s go out to the barn. I want to show you.”
We walked across the backyard together. It was late summer, nearly a hundred degrees, the air so muggy it was hard to breathe. The fluorescent tubes in the barn’s exposed ceiling fixtures got temperamental in this kind of weather. They had to warm up for a long time, and it was still never guaranteed that all would come on. But Dad had known I’d be coming and, as usual, had gone out early to flip the switch and give the lights a head start.
We entered. The barn air was cooler. We made our way through the outer room that led to the workshop, past the clutter of dusty broken furniture awaiting his attention, past the battered green lawn tract
or and the buckets of garden tools and a pair of his old boots. He led me to a flapped-open cardboard box near the workshop door. Inside was a jumble of wood, dark-stained scraps in various sizes, none over eighteen inches long.
“This was my dad’s,” he said. “I’ve had it forever. Black walnut. It was the wainscoting in the old Ohio Edison building downtown. He salvaged it when he worked there.”
Like a lot of things in Ohio, the black walnut tree is both common and fine, with inherent difficulties—its green pool-ball-size nuts pummel roofs and break open to a greasy black mess—but with a heartwood as good as any.
The pieces in the box were dusty and ragged with cobwebs strung with rough sawdust. I pulled one out, a plank about twelve inches long, and wiped its surface clean. Like the rest, it was a half-inch thick, smooth, with a coffee-bean tone, beveled at the edges where it once was fitted to another piece. The grain was tight. I could feel its density just by the way it weighed in my hand. Quality, in wood, is straightforward.
Once milled, wood is very close to music, in the way each crafts nature into order, the way each relies on pattern and variation. Both hold internal resonance, endlessly, elusively familiar. On the drive out here, I’d been listening to Ryan Adams’s album Heartbreaker, an old favorite of John’s, and I’d cranked the volume when “Shakedown on 9th Street” came on. Its hard Bo Diddley shuffle and ballsy rasp sounded just like this piece of walnut felt.
I knew this box. It had been in a crawl space in the basement of our old family home, stored in the void between the foundation walls of the addition my dad had built. It was one of a half dozen or so such containers that I’ve known for as long as I can remember, filled with treasured scraps of wood jumbled up with less notable odds and ends. I have a similar collection at home in the shadows of my own workshop, buckets and boxes, and I know the history of every piece. I still have a few sheets of the green-painted plywood I hauled home to build my ill-fated basement room some forty years ago. And I was sure I remembered this black walnut from my grandfather’s workshop, a place from which a number of my dad’s tools and my own had come, tangible artifacts that keep his old shop from drifting into fable or, worse, the place beyond memory. When my uncle Jim died, my aunt gave Dad another box of the same wood. He’d thought of the stash as he was sketching inlays for his casket, and when he’d sorted through, he’d realized that between his and his brother’s share, he’d have just enough pieces for that purpose.
The box of National Lumber Manufacturers Association wood samples that I inherited from my grandfather includes a rectangular block of black walnut, No. 46, Juglans nigra. “USES: Home and office furniture, interior finish and paneling, radios, musical instruments, commercial fixtures, gun stocks, auto trim, steering wheels, caskets, sewing machines, flooring, airplane propellers, clocks, etc.”
It had been waiting a long time for this.
He left. He had work of his own to do. Alone in the barn, I entered his workshop through the dirty glass door. It was quiet. The exhaust fan hummed, and I could hear the ebb and flow of the highway traffic beyond the rear wall. Once again, it felt strange to be here without him, yet surrounded by him.
At eighty-four, he repays the blessing of his good health by not wasting any of his days. His life is both small and large, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. He has his rhythms, his way of doing things, a new structure since my mom died, but within very old patterns. Just beyond the rear wall of the barn is a corner post on the high stockade fence where, every winter for years, he has mounted a tall plastic Christmas candle, which stays lighted all season, visible from the highway. The year before, a newspaper columnist noticed it, tracked him down, and wrote about his tradition. The article was accompanied by a photograph of Dad posed beneath the candle, a juxtaposition that created the unfortunate illusion that my father has a plastic Christmas candle growing out of the top of his head.
A slew of responses followed from others who’d seen the candle and been similarly charmed by it. One woman thanked him in the newspaper’s online comments section, said it made her smile every day as she passed it on her early-morning commute to Cleveland. A stranger mailed him a letter of thanks. Someone delivered him cookies. We called him a celebrity. He liked the attention, though he never expected it. The reason he still puts the candle up is because my mom always insisted on it. Just because she’s not sitting across the kitchen table doesn’t mean her wishes are gone. It’s a good lesson. It’s why I can still share a laugh with her.
I pulled my used varnish rag from the end of a sawhorse where I’d hung it wet two days before. It was hardened and held its shape. I could smell its crude caramel as I dropped it with a thunk into the aluminum trash bucket pushed underneath the elevated casket. Warming to the day’s work, I took a slow walk around the perimeter of the long box on its sawhorse legs, inspecting the new depth that the finish had brought to the grain, the way it distinguished the oak from the pine.
I decided to climb inside. I knew it was something I was bound to do, and I’d been biding time till what seemed like a meaningful moment, but had resisted for the same reason: it seemed like an overly conceptual ceremony, like that thing where you’re supposed to find transcendence by synching up Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz.
But now I was here, I was alone, and I was aware that there wouldn’t be many more opportunities here in my father’s workshop, the place where the box would be its most real. And I had grown to doubt the promise of epiphany. I reached for a short wooden stepstool, set it in place, climbed up, reached one leg over the edge, and stepped in. My boot made a dirty print on the mint-colored paint of the bottom. I brought the other in more carefully. I lowered myself, scooted into position, and reclined.
Paul was right. I felt much deeper inside it than I’d imagined, and there was considerably more length beyond my head and feet than was necessary. Like a child in a parent’s overcoat. The lights were bright, and the wood felt hard and cold. I closed my eyes and crossed my arms. The few times I’ve attempted meditation, I’ve felt like this, restless and deflective, my consciousness running like a cheap moped. It was important to put things in order. It was important not to forget.
I’d been writing down a set of instructions for how the final pieces would need to go together someday, how the lid and handles would need to be attached, which pieces of hardware went where, and so forth. Gina had wanted me to upholster the interior, but I’d insisted that a quilt and a pillow would be enough. As always, I imagined that the final preparations would be hers, that she would be there at the end. This process had prompted me to do something I’d always wanted to do—to compile my funeral playlist, just as I had done for John’s and my mother’s memorial services. What I’d found as I’d added and revised was that the list directed itself toward a true north of songs that belonged uniquely and mutually to Gina and me: “Kiss Me on the Bus” by the Replacements, which we’d sung together at the top of our lungs as we drove through the night to our honeymoon . . . “We’re Going to Be Friends” by the White Stripes, which we’d played together for our kids every year on the last summer night before school began . . . Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” even though I know Dylan grates on her, but that’s kind of the point.
This had begun as a conversation with her, one that continued with my father, and now it had found its place in a conversation that has no beginning and no end.
Lying there, I felt my own smallness. It felt all right to me.
APPENDIX: FUNERAL PLAYLIST TOP 20
* * *
1. “Streets of Laredo,” Tex Ritter
2. “This Must Be the Place,” Talking Heads
3. “If I Should Fall from Grace with God,” the Pogues
4. “New Day Rising,” Hüsker Dü
5. “I’m in Love with a Girl,” Big Star
6. “Kiss Me on the Bus,” the Replacements
7. “Moon River,” Audrey Hepburn
> 8. “Do You Realize??,” Flaming Lips
9. “Beautiful Boy,” John Lennon
10. “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Elvis Presley
11. “We’re Going to Be Friends,” the White Stripes
12. “The Jackson Song,” Patti Smith
13. “Jesus, Etc.,” Wilco
14. “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” Richard Thompson
15. “We Will Become Silhouettes,” the Postal Service
16. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” Bob Dylan
17. “Time,” Tom Waits
18. “If You See Her, Say Hello,” Jeff Buckley (Live at Sin-é version)
19. “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” the Pixies
20. “It’s a Beautiful Day,” Pizzicato Five
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Furnishing Eternity Page 18