by Wade Rouse
My mom and grandma would seek out sisters and brothers, cousins and nephews, friends and neighbors, soldiers and war vets who had passed before them or in service to the country, my mom and grandma sharing stories about the dead and what each had meant to them.
It was standing in these graveyards that I got to know many of those family members I never had the chance to meet. Sometimes my mom and grandma would laugh, sometimes they would cry—depending on the person and the length of time they had been gone—but they always ended with the same ritual: My mother and grandmother would kneel to say a prayer, pay their respects, and then plant peonies and American flags into the earth over the grave.
“See you next year,” they would whisper, passing a kiss from their hand to the earth before standing again, interlocking arms, and slowly making their way to the next party guest.
But when I was fourteen, a litany of death strangled my family in short order like a swarm of locusts—starting with my brother, Todd, who was killed in a motorcycle accident weeks after he had graduated from high school and weeks before I was to begin my freshman year.
Todd’s death was quickly followed by those of my aunt and my grandpa—my mom’s sister and grandma’s daughter; my mom’s father and grandma’s husband—and it was then that our Memorial Day visits abruptly ended.
We simply headed to our cabin, taking a circuitous route that bypassed all local cemeteries, a task, I now realize, that must have taken a great deal of forethought.
As I aged, I didn’t consider Memorial Day much beyond the fact that it gave me a three-day weekend, a kick-start to summer.
And then I met my partner, Gary, who, in many ways, reminded me of my grandmother. Topping the list, he was an avid gardener, just like her.
I always admired those who tended to the earth—a gift I did not have—and I guess when I saw Gary work his garden, I saw my grandma. I also secretly believed if Gary could cultivate seeds in a dead patch of earth, then he could surely nurture me back to life.
And yet for years, when Gary would ask me to join him in his garden, I always declined, hiding in the house, behind a curtain, or just off to the side of a window, watching him work, weed, mulch. And seemingly every time Gary would begin to dig a hole in his garden, I would turn away.
One scorching summer day a few years back, around the anniversary of my brother’s death, my parents drove up to visit Gary and me after we had moved to Michigan.
This had not been an easy visit for any of us, especially for me, since I found myself constantly preoccupied, even three decades later, with what my parents were still missing: my dead brother, his imaginary wife, the ghost grandchildren they would never hold.
Just before my parents were to leave, as I was dragging my mom’s suitcase to the front door, I heard Gary ask her if she would like to go on a final tour of his garden. I hid behind a curtain in our cottage and watched Gary surprise my mom with a bouquet of peonies, along with a start of the plant in wet paper towels.
Suddenly my mother fell to her knees in his garden and started crying—convulsing, really—all the while hugging the peony start tenderly, as if it was an imaginary grandchild.
As my parents drove away, I said, “What was up with that? Are you the Flower Whisperer?”
It was my typical pattern: Sarcasm, like a good tan, could cover any defect.
“Those peonies,” he said, “are from your grandmother’s garden.”
I stared at him. “What are you talking about? She’s been dead for years.”
“Just smell,” Gary said.
He plucked a white peony with a pink center from our cottage garden and held it in front of my nose and, like some sort of scent therapy, the memories came flooding back.
My grandmother used to grow long rows of peonies on the back side of her Ozark house, a spot where the sun would bake them much of the day. She rotated bushes of white and pink, pink and white, and the flowers would grow so heavy that they simply exhausted the stems that valiantly tried to support them. Eventually her peonies would just flop on the ground like a tired, old dog, thick powder-puff blooms of soft pink and virginal white.
What I remember most was the flowers’ fragrance, which would hang in the air like a cloud of perfume. For a few precious days, before a thunderstorm would come and knock off all the petals, I would rejoice in the peonies’ thick smell, a fragrance so rich and deep, in fact, that it would scent the bedsheets that flapped on the nearby clothesline. I would fall into the pile of line-dried laundry when my grandma would bring it inside and roll around in crunchy, stiff sheets that smelled like heaven.
And it was then I remembered the conversations my mom and grandma used to have about these peonies as they drove to the cemeteries on those Memorial Days of my youth.
My grandmother intentionally planted two types of peonies, early and late blooming. The early-blooming peonies were planted for only one reason: so that she could decorate the graves of her family and friends on Memorial Day with not just real flowers but with flowers she considered to be the most beautiful in the world.
“I just don’t understand how people can place plastic flowers on their loved ones’ graves,” she used to say. “Peonies are the perfect flower.”
Which is why she always placed them on her family’s graves.
And why I had buried that memory deep in the ground.
That summer day after my parents left, I stood in Gary’s garden, remembering all this as he watered, and I started to cry, soaking his shoulder as the hose soaked the dry ground.
And it was then I finally accepted Gary’s invitation: He asked if I would join him in his garden, and I—for once—accepted.
“The earth is what grounds us and connects us all for a very short time,” Gary said to me. “That’s why I like to grow and share starts of plants with others—like your grandmother’s peonies—because it’s like sharing a memory with the world. Did you know your mom saved peony starts from your grandma’s garden after she died, and then passed them along to me? It’s a way to keep family alive, to keep the memory of those we love in our home, no matter where we live or how much time has passed.”
The next Memorial Day, I surprised my parents by driving eleven hours to visit them in the Ozarks, telling them I needed a few days by the water at our new cabin, despite the fact I had Lake Michigan and a beach less than a mile from our house.
The journey back home was never an easy trip for me: too many painful memories meshing with too many good ones.
Out of the blue on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, just as we had finished eating dollar-size pancakes with strawberry syrup, I gathered my courage and asked my mother if she wanted to decorate graves.
Her tears told me she did.
She reappeared moments later wearing a dress and a pair of respectful, sensible heels.
“We’ll need to pick up a few things on the way,” she said as we headed to my car.
I shook my head, popping the trunk, which I had already filled with miniature flags, a box of Kleenex, and, most important, peonies that had been born in my grandma’s garden, passed to my mother, and then forwarded to Gary like precious, fragile cargo.
Though wilted, their beauty remained.
We stopped at my brother’s grave first—just the second time I had visited it since he died—and then my grandmother’s, where we told stories, and we wept, and we hugged.
I then knelt on my grandmother’s grave that Memorial Day, my knees on the cool earth, and planted a flag and then said a prayer: a prayer that after I am long gone someone takes the time to share my story, to visit me on occasion, to pass along my legacy.
And then I scraped my hands into the wet earth, digging through new grass and mud and red clay, and planted some peonies.
“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
–MARK TWAI
N
FATHER’S DAY
Zooks, Cukes, Maters, & Taters
There once lived a family in my little town that I firmly believed had been in the circus. The husband was freakishly tall and thin, six eight, 160 at the most, while the wife was short and stout, almost like a footstool with hair. They had two children, a boy who, sadly, looked like Mom, and a girl, who, sadly, looked like Dad.
While my family ate TV dinners and watched M*A*S*H, I would often picture the circus family at dinnertime, the father and daughter consuming a single bean while plucking birds from the sky, the mother and son eating whole cows and hundreds of pies before going out back to roll around with their pigs.
Despite their differences and oddities, however, I always knew they were a family even though others seemed confounded. I guess I could just sense it, that familiarity that families have, the same way I could smell rain coming.
Ironically, though, I had trouble discerning that odor in my own family.
While strangers certainly never had any difficulty telling that I was my father’s son—we’re both little fireplugs of men, with sandy hair, occasionally clenched fists, and stomping walks—I always felt as if I were the illegitimate son of a circus performer.
Whereas my father is complete left-brain logic, I’m all right-brain creativity.
I’m a writer. He is an engineer.
My father couldn’t care less about culture, fashion, trends. He thinks Warren Buffett should be knighted, while I believe Mary Hart should be granted sainthood.
Despite this, we have a wonderful relationship, forged through years of valiantly trying to build a bridge to span that personality gap.
Every Father’s Day, for instance, my father used to emerge from the Ozarks and join me in the city, where I would immediately, upon his arrival, cart him around to different stores in the area—Trader Joe’s, boutique delis, local farmers’ markets—in order to prove that there were places to shop in this world other than Walmart or the Liquor Barn.
One Father’s Day I took my dad to Whole Foods and had left him only briefly—in order to nab a box of Kashi Go-Lean Crunch cereal—when I heard my father screaming, “Where’s the zooks, darlin’?”
I turned the corner just in time to see a produce clerk who looked like an earthy Cameron Diaz drop a pretty honeydew she was stacking.
She had obviously never seen a true man of the Ozarks.
There stood my father wearing his summer staples: jean shorts that were about to fall down, a horizontal-red-striped golf shirt that made him look like a pregnant barber pole, and a hat that said, GOLFERS HAVE BETTER BALLS.
“The zooks, hon’! Ain’t you got no zooks?” my father asked again.
The clerk looked at me and I simply shrugged my shoulders.
I didn’t know this man.
And though I hated myself for remaining silent, I didn’t want her to connect us via our voices: Besides our stature, our low, rumbling voice was another physical attribute my father and I had in common.
But not our accents.
I had spent years trying to lose my Ozark twang and vocabulary, while my father still spoke Ozarks-ese.
Ozarks-ese, as I call it, is certainly not an officially recognized language like Spanish, French, or German, or even an important dead language like Latin. Instead, Ozarks-ese is like country rap, Nelly meets Paula Deen, a lexicon used in a seam of the American flag where Midwest becomes South.
In Ozarks-ese, words are shortened and slurred so the mouth doesn’t really have to work too hard to enunciate them. If Ozark grammar were a food, it would be mashed potatoes. Ozarks-ese is like white man’s rap, but instead of “boo,” “ ’hood,” “peeps,” “posse,” and “shake that Laffy Taffy,” we have my father’s vocabulary.
When my father asks for “zooks,” he’s looking for zucchini.
When my father asks for “cukes,” he’s looking for cucumbers.
When my father asks for “maters” (long a), he’s looking for tomatoes.
When my father asks for “taters” (long a), he’s looking for potatoes.
Basically, if my father tried to buy ingredients for a salad outside of the Ozarks, he might as well be shopping for a vacuum in Guatemala.
When my father eats at a restaurant and orders “good meat,” he wants steak. And he wants his steak “beatin’,” which means bloody, heart-beating rare.
When he orders “fuckin’ pluckin’,” my father wants chicken.
Now, “telly” has many meanings. If an actor—any actor—is bald, my father calls him Telly, not caring less whether it’s Ben Kingsley, Stanley Tucci, Bruce Willis, or Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta.
“Telly” is also my father’s term for both the telephone and television: “What’s on the telly?” or “Who’s on the telly?”
I usually tell him that “Telly is on the telly,” and that seems to satisfy him.
Despite my efforts, however, I never felt that I lived up to my father’s expectations. Every gay son shoulders that burden, I believe.
So I made the mistake of taking Gary’s advice one year and led my parents on a Father’s Day trip to Ireland. Now, Gary firmly believed Ireland would be my father’s promised land, a place where there was no language barrier, where golf was king, and where beer was as plentiful as oxygen.
“How can you go wrong?” Gary asked. “You will earn bonus points for life!”
But before we had even boarded the plane, my father pulled a three-day-old hoagie from his travel bag and began gnawing on its moldy remains.
I knew before we had even taken flight that my dreams were grounded.
“Ted, you old witch, I threw that hoagie out in Rolla,” my mother yelled at him.
“I dug it back out of the trash at the Subway, hon’! Mmmm, damn horseradish is good. Mmmm.”
“That will rot out that fat iron gut you call a stomach, sir.”
“I ain’t the one who’s already been to TCBY and Cinnabon, hon’!”
“Shut up, you old goat. After mad cow, airports forbid passengers from carryin’ American lunchmeat products transatlantic, isn’t that correct, James Wade?”
“What the Sam hell do you know about airport security, Geraldine? You’re gonna set off the alarms with all the metal plates you got in that thick skull of yours!”
“You are fat and—What!—rude, sir! All my fellow passengers agree, don’t you, ma’ams and sirs? Yes, yes, they are not fond of fat, bald witches.”
By this time, Gary had moved to a neighboring concourse.
“Have you been on an Alaskan cruise, ma’am?” my mother continued, asking a woman who was fake-reading a book and wearing a sweatshirt that said ALASKAN CRUISE. My mother is a magician at busting people she knows are eavesdropping but pretending not to be. “I would love to go to Alaska, but Ted says it’s too cold. Fat witches don’t like the cold, do they, Ted?”
“Geraldine, it’s too damn cold in Nome. I’d as soon cut my nuts off and serve ’em to the squirrels than freeze my ass off in the cold, yelling ‘Fuck me, Charlie Brown!’ into the arctic wind.”
I smiled at the woman in the Alaskan sweatshirt, who looked from me to my parents and then back again, puzzled, wondering, I’m quite certain from her expression, if these were indeed the two who had given birth to me, or if I had happened to burst magically from my father’s head like some sort of Greek god.
I passed out on the flight to Ireland and woke in the middle of the night, searching for my moisturizer and Purel, to find my father doing shots of Jägermeister with a group of college kids who asked for his phone number when we got off the plane.
I spent my entire Irish excursion watching my dad chug Guinness with the locals and make friends around the Ring of Kerry while I rolled my eyes.
By the end, I was mentally and physically soaked, sick of traveling around the beautiful countryside under a never-ending and constantly moving showerhead, but mostly sick with the uneasy realization that I really wasn’t like my father�
��make that either of my parents—in any way: No, they were way more fun than me.
I was telling this Ireland story to one of my best friends from college, waiting for some sort of understanding response or equally horrifying story, but he said, simply, “Your parents are way more fun than you, Wade. I mean, no insult or anything. Remember college? They were who they were, and, well, you just wanted to change.”
He was right.
Within the first thirty seconds of introducing myself as Wade to my new freshman college roommate, who was from the city, he asked, “Just how many syllables are in your first name?” At the time I was wearing my high school letter jacket—I “lettered” in the trombone—and I had an accent thicker than an eighties belt.
So I practiced my speech whenever I got a quiet moment, trying desperately to quicken the pace of my voice while losing my inbred Ozarks-ese.
“Waaa-aa-aa-de,” I would whisper in the toilet.
“Waaa-aa-de,” I would practice in my room when I was alone.
“Waaa-de,” I would say out loud as I walked to class.
And, ever so slowly, Waaa-aa-aa-de simply became Wade.
I was so good at mimicking others, fitting in, that I quickly mastered friends’ accents and manners of speaking, focusing mostly on sounding “St. Louis,” which I thought was truly metropolitan, working diligently on making my o’s sound like harsh a’s. If Abraham Lincoln had been a St. Louisan, he would have said, “Far scar and seven yars ago.”
And then I worked on my walk, trying to unclench my fists and walk lightly and proudly, as if I were an Alvin Ailey dancer.
I wanted to change, to be somebody new, to not be the spitting image of my father.
But the more my parents visited me in college, the more I felt they defined me—my dad in his baggy jean shorts and hats with Reagan’s face on them, going beer for beer with my fraternity brothers; my mother captivating a group who laughed like hell at a story that ended, “Well, sir, while he was asleep, all of us nurses tied his rather large and thick penis into the shape of a pretzel!”