But he never answered.
At dusk I went out one last time.
Way off in the palmettos I heard a little, far away voice say, “Hel-loo, hello, hell-ooooo.” I yelled, “George!” And he said, “Help!” Just once, but it was plain and clear, and I ran to where I thought I heard the pitiful cry, and there he was crouched low at the base of a slash pine. I really thought he was going to say, “What took you so long?” But he didn’t. On the way home, he scrunched himself down flat and had a wary eye trained on the sky. I gave him a little kiss and he said in a small, pathetic voice, “Is that it, then?”
That outing didn’t faze him much, or else he completely forgot about it the following day, because he was in his cage on the porch when I heard him giving someone a hard time. I wondered who it could be. Well, we have a wall of trees in front of the house, so it’s hard to see into the property. Here was this guy walking his dog and having a spirited conversation with George. He couldn’t see George and George couldn’t see him, but they certainly could hear one another.
The dog-walking gentleman was saying, “Well, son, you just keep up that foul talk and I’ll come over there and wash your mouth out.” The outraged man sounded like Foghorn Leghorn. I don’t know what George had said to irritate him, but this was an incident in the making. I called through the fence of trees, “You’re throwing insults at a bird, sir.”
The indignant walker responded, “Give me the bird, and I’ll wash both of your mouths out!”
As I wheeled George back into the house, I muttered, “What’s wrong with the world is everybody’s trying to fix everybody else.”
George eyed me with curiosity, and said, for the second time, “Well, that’s it, then.”
“Yes,” I said, “I guess it is.”
George chuckled, sounding very much like a frog.
I wheeled him into the kitchen and, well, I hate to admit to a cliché, but I offered him a cracker.
George regarded the saltine with some disdain. Then he gave me a bribed look, and said with sarcasm, “There you go.” Snatching the cracker he dropped it into his water dish and turned his back on it
Shortly after this, a telemarketer called with some insidious phone plan. After hanging up, I sighed and said, “What a jerk!”
George flashed a game eye in my direction, and quipped, “You’re the jerk!”
It’s not surprising to me that an Amazonian parrot can talk as well as George does, but sometimes I wonder why he’s such a grouch. Author Eugene Linden explains this, however, in his book The Parrot’s Lament. “Unlike dogs and cats, domesticated for thousands of years, parrots are wild animals, not at all adapted to human company. Their needs and neuroses are not nearly as well understood as those of other pets, and these smart, highly social animals are capable of making life a living hell if an owner inadvertently presses a hot button.”
One such button was pressed the other night at a dinner party here at the house. One of our guests insisted she was especially good with animals and could soothe a raging beast. I told her to beware of George, whose beastliness was beyond normal bounds. Our guest replied, “Oh, he’ll be eating out of my hand before the night’s over.” When George bit her, she cried out in pain, and George promptly asked, “That hurt?”
I was told that night that I should seek a therapist for my aberrant bird. There is such a thing, by the way, as a parrot shrink. One of them is a lady named Sally Blanchard, who is really an animal behaviorist in Alameda, California. I didn’t call Sally, though; I phoned a friend of mine, Fred Maas, who has an African Gray. He listened to my tale of George’s woes, and said, “I think George needs two places of residence: a daytime house and a nighttime roost. This is consistent with parrot behavior in the Amazon region.”
So, feeling Fred’s instinct was right, I got George another cage. This one I set up in the small office where I do all of my writing. It gets a bit crowded in here with our Great Dane, Dachsy and Siamese cat—and now, George—but that’s the end of the tale. George loves being in the office. He likes to hear the computer keys clicking. His behavior is much less antisocial, too. I suppose he fancies himself the writer of this essay, which isn’t all that untrue, come to think of it. Guess that makes me the parrot’s scribe. I can live with that.
Reflections
Three Guys from Atlantic City
a play for voices
This little script came to me exactly as I have written it. I was eating breakfast in one of the last great diners on New Jersey's south shore and suddenly these three pundits began their disquisition. I wrote it down as fast as I could and afterwards realized it was, in a sense, a William Saroyan play. Well, almost, anyway.
First Guy: (loudly) Now, when the people went into the Sinai following Moses they walked in the desert for 40 years.
Second Guy: (softly) Forty years? I spent 50 years putting on my shoes this morning. But wasn’t it something like 400 years? – I mean their time not ours.
Third Guy: (whispery) I think it was more like four years, or better yet, four days. By the way, that’s how long it’s taking us to get our muffins in this diner.
First Guy: They call it the 50-50 diner, y’know why? Cause 50% of what’s on the menu isn’t available and the other 50% isn’t any good.
Second Guy: Hey, I don’t mean to change the subject, but what do you guys think of the messiah?
Third Guy: You mean the film with that actor, Mel Gibson?
Second Guy: No, I mean the man.
First Guy: I think he had pow-wers. Leave it at that.
Third Guy: Before or after he died?
Second Guy: Is there a difference?
First Guy: Powers . . . schmowers. Did I tell ever tell you about Rabbi Shmelke? He heard melodies no human ever heard. He heard singing that wasn’t even invented yet!
Third Guy: What melodies? Hey, look, our muffins are here.
Second Guy: I’m in heaven!
First Guy: Before or after you eat?
Just Like Geronimo
This happened, and it may be mere reportage of an event of small consequence, but to me, it was of large significance. I'd heard someone saying that Santa Fe was a changed town. That you no longer heard stories spoken on the streets. Well, that's why we came to Santa Fe in the early sixties and why we lived in New Mexico for more than twenty-two years and I'm glad there are still ancient echoes on the Paseo. "Just Like Geronimo" appeared in the booklet Bokeelia, published by Longhouse Publishers, and it was also included in Full Metal Poem, a magazine published in Germany.
I was sitting in Dunkin Donuts on the Paseo outside Santa Fe. I used to go there a lot because, no matter what time of day or night, there were storytellers. Just people talking about their lives, in Spanish, English, Tewa, Tiwa, Towa, Navajo and sometimes Apache. I got whole collections of stories from just sitting and listening to people talk.
I knew someone, a student of mine actually, who was a direct descendant of Geronimo but he never talked about the man and he didn’t look related, whatever that means, and I only got one story from him about another not-so-famous warrior relation who took about a thousand bullets in the chest and lived. It was one of the best stories I ever read.
So, anyway, one day at Dunkin Donuts there was a man seated at the counter who looked just Geronimo. I seated myself next to him. He was sipping some coffee, no donut and looking straight ahead. Slowly he turned toward me and said straight out of the blue – “Who’s your favorite conductor?”
“I haven’t been on a train lately.”
He cut me with his eyes. “I’m referring to symphonic conductors.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“With me,” he said, “It’s a toss up. Eugene Ormandy, Erich Leinsdorf, Arthur Fiedler, or Seiji Ozawa.”
“I saw Seiji Ozawa once,” I told him.
“Yeah? What’d he look like?”
“Small, intense. Very nice hair.”
“Ever see Ormandy?”
“Matter of fact I lived a bl
ock away from him.”
“What’d he look like?”
“An old man in a heavy overcoat.”
“Yeah? Say hello to Ormandy, if you see him again.”
“He’s dead.”
“Nah, he’s trodding the earth, just like Geronimo.”
My Mother and My Father
When I first went out on the road as a storyteller, I had a full set of stories, and this was one of them. It hasn't appeared in print; I never tried to write it. But I must've told it a few hundred times. Knowing parents is nothing like explaining them to those who didn't know them. But, then, maybe we don't ever know who our parents are until we finally let go of who we think we are as a result of them.
I have a hard time explaining my parents to people because they, my mom and dad, were sort of unusual. Sometimes I don’t think of them as parents but rather as friends, very good friends of my brother and me. Sometimes I see them as lovers, as two who loved each other so deeply that there was no room for anyone else in their life. But of course that is silly, and I know it. Because they made room for my brother and me. Occasionally, I see my mom and dad as they were on the farm in Maryland, in 1946, running naked in the rain, their bodies still young and glistening. I am in the tree house with my brother and it is raining and our parents are naked, holding hands and running across the green grass of that remote hilltop farm.
I think of them that way sometimes.
But it’s no good. I might as well see them sitting next to each other in the Quaker Meeting House in Westminster, for they were there too, only clothed. As were my brother and me, also clothed, but none of us have ever had anything against nakedness, which is maybe why I am telling this story. It’s about being open and free and loving and going that way full tilt until the end. If there is an end – and that is another reason I’m telling this story. I’m not sure there is an end -- to anything. It only seems that way. But I am getting away from my parents, and I don’t want to.
My father always looked like Ernest Hemingway to me. That is, if Hemingway had been a short Hungarian. Well, their mustaches were the same anyway. The other day I showed Hilary Hemingway a picture of my dad and she said, “Are we cousins then?”
My mother resembled, if she liked, Queen Elizabeth, whom she neither liked nor disliked. But there was nothing of the royal air in my mother. She was, however, descended from Mayflower stock and had a certain presence, a way of holding her head and shoulders very erect. Her hands were beautiful, long and tapered. And her eyes.
One time my father said, “I didn’t fall in love with her on first sight. It was second and third sight, and after a time I just loved the way she looked, every part of her, every little thing: her face, her hands, her feet. When we first met, I was in love with a woman in the mist. Then, in Mexico, I ran away from her and so doing I ran away from myself. One time, when I was supposed to meet her and give an engagement ring, I got in a canoe instead and paddled on the Chesapeake and got lost and I think I broke her heart a little but I didn’t mean to do that. I was confused. I had a funny family and I didn’t want her to know about it.”
My mother’s story of their first meeting was a little different. But she did bring up the part about the mist. They were connected to water, these two, from lake to lake, they met and fell in and out of love, and eventually I scattered their ashes in the lake they loved the most. Ah but I am far ahead of myself.
My mother told me this: “I met your father the summer I was tutoring Gloria Vanderbilt at the Whitney family estate in the Adirondacks of New York State. I would get up in the early morning before anyone else was awake. I would dress and go out on the dock to listen to the loons. That was where I saw your father for the first time. He was canoeing across the lake, which was private. I supposed he did not know that. I saw him from a distance of about thirty feet – a handsome mustached man, very dark of face and hair, and strongly built with very wide shoulders like a gymnast, well, you know he was a gymnast. He waved. I waved back. I said to myself, “If I could have a man like that I wouldn’t ever let him go.” I was unmarried and, at age 30 I was wondering if…well, that is another story. But your father waved and I waved and then the shrouds of early morning mist closed over the lake front, and the canoeist disappeared. Forever, I thought. Because when the fog went away, the man in the canoe was gone. I wouldn’t see him again for ten years.”
“Where did you meet him again?”
“I met him in Mexico. Actually, it was on a train going to Veracruz. I saw a dark handsome man with a mustache sitting by himself as the train moved sinuously through the mountains and down to the sea, and I wondered if he would talk to me if I talked to him and whether or not he spoke any English, for I was sure he was Mexican. What a surprise when I did talk to him and he turned out to have a bit of a Brooklyn accent. He, like me, was a New Yorker. And there we were – just like that – sitting together and so deeply in love we almost couldn’t speak. But we did speak and I remembered him and he remembered me from that distant morning on that Adirondack lake. And we were so much in love.”
I asked my father what he felt on the train and afterwards in Veracruz and he said, “I made a mistake, not the first one, mind you, the first of many, like the time I ran away in the canoe on the Chesapeake when we were supposed to be engaged. The problem, I suppose, was that I felt she was just too good for me. When I found out about her background, her blueblood and all that, I got worried she’d never want anything to do with a crazy bunch of Hungarian immigrants. My parents didn’t speak very good English. My brother was a manic depressive, and a bit strange too. There was a bit of the Gypsy in us and a lot of the Jew and no high born blood at all, and I just thought her family, your mother’s family wouldn’t want any part of me or my family. So, right after we fell madly in love in Veracruz and went everywhere holding hands, and so on and so forth, I went back to my room, packed my things and returned to Maryland. I never said a word to her about any of it, and you know, I just broke her heart. And my own at the same time. But I’m telling you the truth: I was afraid.”
I have read her letters and his letters, and though she was the artist in the family and so expressive, he, as it turned out, was the better writer. Somehow he got her to understand that he was “not good enough for her” and she forgave him and came to Maryland from New York and they eloped and were married and their wedding announcement said –
Hear Ye, Hear Ye –
Married
Dorothy Little
Sidney Hausman
And their two names were printed under the word married, and that was that. They had two children, my brother was born in 1942 and I was born in 1945 and our parents were these two love birds all the days of their lives, which were many, as I can attest. And when they died, first my father and then my mother, I scattered their ashes in the lake where they’d started out, and the ashes didn’t sink. They sort of swirled around for a little while and then, I swear that this is true, they kind of met and, for a moment or two, the white ash seemed to gather into two shapely forms, whereupon they joined together and sank, slowly and deeply, glimmering all the way to the bottom of the lake.
Open Water Swimming
Open Water Swimming first appeared in my short story collection Castaways: Stories of Survival. I come by my water experience, naturally and humbly. My father was a distance swimmer and a lifeguard and my mother was a high-diver. I took up free diving, salt water deep diving without a tank, and that became "my sport." I have now spent a half-life deep diving in all kinds of waters and weathers, some dangerous, some calm. Important, to me, is the connection between open water swimming and writing. I discovered writing in swimming. In writing I learned to hold my breath.
A few years ago, when my wife and I were living in Jamaica, we took a trip up the coast on a whaler. We were between Port Mariah and Port Antonio when a violent storm came up suddenly and threatened to swamp us. One of the passengers in our boat had a bottle in his hand, and when a big wave struck
him, the bottle turned into shards. We had never seen waves of such force, worse, we’d never been at their mercy.
Fortunately we got out of that scrape in one piece, but it left a question in our minds—What would we have done if the whaler had overturned in those twelve foot, angry seas? Could we have swum the three and a half miles to shore?
I’d been trained as a Sea Scout when I was growing up and we had been in Jamaica for many years and had experienced all kinds of stormy weather, but the question of survival at sea now began to haunt me, as a man and as a writer. As a certified scuba diver, I knew my capabilities under the sea. But what about on top of it, in storm conditions? Could I handle myself in a riptide? In swells more than twelve feet high?
To answer these questions, I began to swim in the open sea. This is not something I encourage anyone to do who has not had previous experience as a free diver and swimmer. As a trained lifeguard, I knew how to swim well—but I had never really pushed myself to the limit. So now I started swimming by myself along a mile long reef. In the months that followed, I found myself out beyond it, where the depths ranged from 55 to 300 feet, swimming towards an island three miles distant. The round trip from Blue Harbour to Cabarita Island and back, was about four miles total. The current between Little Bay on the reef side and Cabarita on the other, was so strong that no one attempted it. This seemed to be the grandest challenge of all, and once I was in good shape, I went for it.
I found that by alternating swim strokes—sidestroke, backstroke and breaststroke, I could handle long distances without tiring. However, an active player in my workouts was the constant silent partner called Fear. This included predatory fish, barracudas more than sharks, but worse than these stinging jellyfish that could, and sometimes did, paralyze my shoulders—fortunately, just for a short time during which I usually floated on my back.
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