My pals in Minneapolis considered this a real paradise (so did we) and they often drove up and enjoyed a weekend of contemplating corn and associating with large animals. On the Fourth of July, 1971, we had twenty people come for a picnic in the yard, an Olympic egg toss and gunnysack race, a softball game with the side of the barn for a right-field fence, and that night we sat around the kitchen and made pizza and talked about the dismal future.
America was trapped in Vietnam, a tragedy, and how could it end if not in holocaust? We were pessimists; we needed fear to make us feel truly alive. We talked about death. We put on loud music and made lavish pizzas with fresh mushrooms and onions, zucchini, eggplant, garlic, green pepper, and drank beer and talked about the end of life on earth with a morbid piety that made a person sick, about racial hatred, pesticides, radiation, television, the stupidity of politicians, and whether Vietnam was the result of strategic mistakes or a reflection of evil in American culture. It was a conversation with concrete shoes.
I snuck out to the screen porch with my son and sat and listened to crickets, and my friend Greg Bitz sat with us and two others came out, tired of politics and talk, and we walked along the driveway out of the yard light and through the dark trees and sat down in a strip of alfalfa between the woods and the oats. (“What’s that?” they said. “Oats,” I replied.) And then we lay down on our backs and looked up at the sky full of stars.
The sky was clear. Lying there, looking up at 180 degrees of billions of dazzling single brilliances, made us feel we had gone away and left the farm far behind.
As we usually see the sky, it is a backdrop, the sky over our house, the sky beyond the clotheslines, but lying down eliminates the horizon and rids us of that strange realistic perspective of the sky as a canopy centered over our heads, and we see the sky as what it is: everything known and unknown, the universe, the whole beach other than the grain of sand we live on. The sight of the sky was so stunning it made us drunk. I felt as if I could put one foot forward and walk away from the wall of ground at my back and hike out toward Andromeda. I didn’t feel particularly American. Out there in the Milky Way and the world without end Amen, America was a tiny speck of a country, a nickel tossed into the Grand Canyon, and American culture the amount of the Pacific Ocean you bring home in your swimsuit. The President wasn’t the President out there, the Constitution was only a paper, and what newspapers wrote about was sawdust and coffee grounds. The light I saw was from fires burning before America existed, when my ancestor John Crandall lived in the colony of Rhode Island. Looking out there, my son lying on my chest, I could imagine my grandchildren, and they were more real to me than Congress.
I imagined them strong and free, curious, sensual, indelibly cheerful and affectionate, open-handed—sympathetic to pain and misery and quick in charity, proud when insulted and modest if praised, fiercely loyal to friends, loving God and the beautiful world including our land, from the California coast to the North Dakota prairie to faraway Manhattan, loving music and our American language—when you look at the stars you don’t think small. You don’t hope your descendants will enjoy your mutual-fund portfolio, you imagine them as giants on the earth.
Between the tree line and my left elbow, a billion stars in the sky, each representing a billion we couldn’t see. We lay in the grass, thinking about America and also a little bit about snakes and about spiders clambering from blade to blade who might rappel down into our mouths, and looked open-mouthed up at the heavens, and everything we said out loud seemed hilarious to us. Tiny us gazing up at the South Wall of the Unimaginable Everything and feeling an obligation to comment, and our most profound comments sounded like peas dropped in a big empty bucket. “It makes you feel small, doesn’t it.” Plink. “I used to know the names of those.” Plunk. One more peabrain having to share the effect that the world is having on him. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it.... I remember when I was a kid—” someone said and we laughed ourselves limp—Shut up, we said, laughing, we’re sick of sensitive people, everything you see just reminds you of yourself! So stick it in your ear.
Perhaps in 1776 our ancestors, too, were rattled by current events and the unbeatable logic of despair and had to go out and lie in the weeds for a while and think: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Indoors, the news is second-hand, mostly bad, and even good people are drawn into a dreadful fascination with doom and demise; their faith in extinction gets stronger; they sit and tell stories that begin with The End. Outdoors, the news is usually miraculous. A fly flew in my mouth and went deep, forcing me to swallow, inducing a major life change for him, from fly to simple protein, and so shall we all be changed someday, but here under heaven our spirits are immense, we are so blessed. The stars in the sky, my friends in the grass, my son asleep on my chest, his hands clutching my shirt.
LONDON
MY SON WAS due in at Heathrow Airport at nine-forty last night, flying from New York, and about noon yesterday, a Sunday, lying around in my hotel room reading the Sunday papers and drinking coffee, I started to think about him on a plane and got the jitters. He is twenty and has flown to Europe on his own before and could find his way to the hotel OK, but I am a father who is susceptible to jitters, and I can’t talk myself out of them. I think about a plane over the ocean with my progeny aboard and pretty soon the plane wobbles, and then I need to take a walk.
The neighborhood here isn’t so different from parts of Manhattan, except that the streets are named George, New Cavendish, St. Vincent, Weymouth, Paddington, Devonshire, Nottingham, and Marylebone High Street. The last isn’t so different from a New York shopping street, except for the ironmonger’s, the photocopy centre, the cafe offering takeaway food, the shops with “TO LET” signs in the windows, a pub called The Rising Sun, the red brick façades and knobby roofs out of Dickens, and the Mobil station selling unleaded premium for forty-eight pence per litre.
Facts such as these help to calm down a father who is suffering from sudden propulsive anxiety, the sort that every parent knows well. The last time I traveled in Europe with my son, we rode a train to West Berlin, and at the last station in East Germany grim squads of border guards came aboard and searched the car, and I had a sudden, stark fear that the guard who was studying his passport picture might notice the tones of green in his long hair and pull him off the train and find marijuana in his bag and we would enter into a bureaucratic hell that would occupy our lives for the next three years. My skin got tight at the thought of it; my nose trembled. This is the sort of fear I am capable of. My son came into the world, after forty-eight hours of labor, in a teaching hospital where the staff seemed to be a few chapters behind the one my wife and I were on. Since then, I’ve worried about him pretty consistently. Facts are consoling, compared with what a parent can imagine. The plane shook from side to side, and loud snapping and whirring noises could be heard from below.
The outstanding fact of Marylebone High Street lay just north, across from the corner of Beaumont. In a lot between a bakery and a school (where, beginning on Monday, September 25th, the Westminster Adult Education Institute was offering classes in Calligraphy, Vegetarian Cookery, Welsh 1, Navigation [Day Skipper], Guitar, Transactional Analysis, and Jazz Dance and Fitness for fifty-five pence per hour) was a little park behind an iron fence, about two storefronts wide and forty feet deep. Close to the fence was a white obelisk about eight feet high marking the burial place of Charles Wesley (“Crown’d through the mercy of thy Lord/With a free full immense reward”), the hymn writer and a founder of Methodism. The park was paved with bricks and stone. Inside were tombstones set into the brick walls and some in the pavement. Six wooden benches faced a sunken stone floor about ten yards square, which was, according to a plaque on the back wall, the exact site of the old parish church of Marylebone, built in 1400, where Francis Bacon was m
arried (1606), and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (to Miss Linley, in 1773), and where Lord Byron was baptized (1788).
Facts—you could sit on a bench and contemplate them one at a time or all together. Death, for one. In the center of the stone floor was a tablet beneath which lay Lady Abigail Hay, and around her, according to another plaque on the wall, lay the following:EDWARD FORSET Lord of the Manor 1630
SIR EDMUND DOUCE Cupbearer to 2 Queens 1644
CLAUDIUS DE CRESPIGNY AND HIS WIFE 1695
MARIA DE VIERVILLE French refugees 1708
JAMES FIGG Pugilist 1734
EDMOND HOYLE Writer on games 1769
JAMES FERGUSON Astronomer 1776
ALLAN RAMSAY Painter 1784
I strolled along the wall, reading tombstones, until one of them set my teeth on edge. It read:To the Memory of
Mrs HESTER WILTON
Widow of WILLIAM WILTON Gent
The untimely loss of her only Son
who died
at Tenna on Christmas Day 1792
after being Wreckd in the
Winterton Indiaman
brought on the Illness of which
She died August the 24th 1800
Aged 56
This struck too close. I am forty-seven, and my only son was over the ocean. I could understand how the death of a child could bring on an illness that would last seven and a half years and finally kill you. The plane bucked and dove; the lights went out. I turned away, then turned back and wrote the inscription down on a blank check, the only paper I had on me. A dignified gray-haired lady watched me from the sidewalk. She wore a brown coat, a blue skirt, and black stockings, and carried a cane. Perhaps she saw I was an American and thought I was trying to buy the park, but all I wanted was Hester Wilton’s epitaph, and when I got it I headed back down Marylebone High Street toward the hotel, where my son would be arriving, by cab from the airport, in about three hours. Somewhere between there and The Rising Sun, it struck me that I could fill up some of that time by simply taking the Underground out to Heathrow and meeting him at the gate.
I caught a train at the Baker Street station at eight-thirty and got off at Green Park to change to the Piccadilly line, where an electric sign over the platform told us patrons exactly how long until the next train: “HEATHROW ... 1 MIN,” it said, and a minute later in she came. We rolled into Terminal 4 at Heathrow at nine-fourteen. I took the escalator upstairs and found that British Airways Flight 178, due in from JFK at nine-forty, had landed at nine. About ten limo drivers waited for their customers, along with forty or fifty of us civilians, including the actor Peter O’Toole, in a gray tweed suit, who was waiting, it turned out, for a lanky, elegant woman pushing a cartload of luggage, and a boy of about nine in a blue blazer. He raced into Mr. O’Toole’s open arms and was hoisted up and kissed twice, and soon after him came my son, twenty, with a guitar on his back, and wearing one of my old shirts and a pair of black pants with white paint stains on it. He grinned, and we shook hands.
The flight had been bumpy, he said, but the time had gone by fast. He had eaten a roast-beef dinner, watched Field of Dreams, and read two chapters of a biography of Bob Dylan. “It’s good you came out to the airport,” he said. “I forgot the name of the hotel. I wrote it on a slip of paper and then left it at the apartment.”
I asked him the classic fatherly question, a line that probably dates back to long before Hester Wilton’s time: “What would you have done if I hadn’t been here?” I recognized its classicism even as I said it.
“I’d have gone into the city and remembered it,” he said cheerfully.
STINSON BEACH
A LITTLE BUSINESS CALLED ME to San Francisco a few weeks ago, about two hours’ worth of business that I managed to work up into a full two-day itinerary so as to justify the long flight, and then I flew out a day early to attend to my real business, which was a drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, and over Mount Tamalpais, along a boulevard of eucalyptus trees, to Stinson Beach, a village where I’ve spent four weeks in the past seven years and which I wanted to see again. Stinson Beach looks out on the Pacific from the foot of a mountain, and for seven years I have been pacified by visions of it. When I lie down at night, and night thoughts crowd in around me, and I am about to get up and spend the night looking out the window, I imagine a bright spring morning in Stinson Beach: the sandy path from a rented cottage over the dune to the beach, and me walking barefoot, the sound of high surf—and by the time I spread a towel on the sand and lie down on it morning has come and I get up and take a shower. The path is no more than sixty yards long, through tall pampas grass and a patch of dark-green succulents and two little jungles of flower garden, and yet it has served me so well so many nights—a short hike from the cool, dim house to the sea which takes me into a sweet sleep—that I wanted to see it again and commit it more clearly to memory.
I flew to San Francisco in the morning, wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses I had broken the day before by making a sharp right-hand turn into an iron pillar at the office. The pillar had not been there earlier. A carpenter friend of mine had glued the break—on the bridge, between the eyes—and I didn’t think about it all the flight west over the mountains, the drive north into the city, until I got to a room in a hotel on Nob Hill, sat on the bed, and took the glasses off, and they broke in my hand.
Without my glasses on, I see San Francisco as a few objects in the foreground of a vast Abstract Expressionist world, not so different from Omaha or San Jose in the same circumstance—the Bay might be a bay or it might be soybeans, the Berkeley hills might be soybeans, the Golden Gate might be a storm on the horizon. So I hiked down the hill toward Market Street, feeling a little ill from lack of focus, and found a stationery store and bought a bottle of super-glue, found a restaurant, and sat down and ordered a cup of coffee and got busy repairing my glasses.
The directions that come with the little plastic container give a person pause—especially a very nearsighted one. “Warning,” they say. “BONDS SKIN INSTANTLY. CONTAINS CYANOACRYLATE ESTER. Avoid contact with skin and eyes. If eye or mouth contact occurs, hold eyelid or mouth open and flush with water only and GET MEDICAL ATTENTION. If finger bonding occurs, apply solvent.”
In order to see what I was doing, I had to hold the glue dropper and the glasses pretty close to my eyes, and the thought of the warning made me a little shaky. I wondered if I had any sort of personal identification on me. (“S.F.P.D. SEEKS IDENTITY OF VOICELESS MYOPIC PERSON WHO GLUED OWN MOUTH AND FINGERS SHUT, YESTERDAY.”) I squeezed one drop of glue on the right spot, bonded the glasses, then, putting the cap on the dropper, got a little glue on two fingers and, for one horrific second, instinctively tried to rub the stuff off and felt my fingers bond, then pulled them apart at the last moment! And sat for a few minutes until I recovered from the shock. I didn’t touch the cup of coffee.
I put the glue bottle in my pocket and the glasses on my face, and walked two blocks to Powell Street and caught a cable car heading up Nob Hill. I stood on the forward right-hand running board, holding on to a pole, and when the driver sang out, “Hold it in on the right! Watch your back!” I leaned in toward an old woman sitting on the bench as we swept past a parked truck, its extended side-view mirror a few inches from my back.
The glasses held together for the drive across the Golden Gate and up the mountain and along the coast. The highway is a roller-coaster of a road, with plenty of dramatic curves that hang on the mountainsides over sheer drops, and in the event of sudden glasses breakage I was going to plant one lens in my right eye, like Erich von Stroheim, and keep going, but I simply hugged the right shoulder, avoided looking at the ocean far below and the tops of tall trees in the valleys (I have a mild form of acrophobia, feeling that if you look down from a great height mysterious ground forces will pull you over the edge), and cruised down into Stinson Beach, past the Sand Dollar restaurant and Ed’s Superette, and into the parking lot at the beach. I got out and walked. Everything was there, as
I have remembered it so many times: the beach houses on pilings, the dunes, the surf and surfers, the cottage where I stayed (its shades pulled), and the magical path. I stood by the cottage and looked at it for a long time. I heard, faintly, in the nearby surf, some voices from old vacations, including the shouts of an eight-year-old boy who is now fifteen. The sun shone down, and as I walked slowly up the path and over the dune I felt sorrow and danger recede into the ocean and thought I’d like to lie down on the sand and take a nap.
I am back from San Francisco now, with a clear image of the path in my head: the greens are really green, the air smells of real salt water, soft sand is underfoot. I also have two little patches of dried super-glue on my right thumb and index finger, clinging to my skin with a tensile strength of up to five thousand pounds per square inch. The strength of a clear image of a path leading to the ocean cannot be expressed in pounds, but I estimate that mine should be good for another two or three years of ordinary use.
4
HOUSE POEMS
O What a Luxury
O what a luxury it be
how exquisite, what perfect bliss
so ordinary and yet chic
to pee to piss to take a leak
to feel your bladder just go free
and open up the Mighty Miss
and all your cares float down the creek
to pee to piss to take a leak
for gentlemen of great physique
who can hold water for one week
for ladies who one-quarter cup
We Are Still Married Page 26