Memoir

I have been writing this memoir for the past few years. I am savoring the illusion that it is now done. Here are the first forty pages or so. Please do have a look, and share with me any thoughts you may have. Additional pages are available if you're so inclined.

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Everything Is Happening at Once. Everything.

A Memoir

    I climb the creaky staircase and follow the crooked corridor. Daughter Rose and girlfriend Veronica downstairs, deep into a trove of antique linens. They call but I don’t answer.

    My fingers climb the strata of a bookcase, jumping from one sagging shelf to the next, and then skipping down a stack of Life magazines to something fuzzy. Old black pages, a crumbling photo album. Fragile. I stop and open the cover.

    The first page, a faded sepia image, a little girl  . . . with that look of total absorption. Her wavy hair. The slightly amused tilt of her mouth. I know who it is. I feel her presence. We buried her yesterday. It’s Mom, maybe five years old, alone in a field of daisies. Alone and agog and immersed in the wonder of it all. I never knew the picture existed. Had never seen pictures of her in childhood.

    I don’t look at anything else in the album. Can’t get enough of this first photograph. Close my eyes: Mom in the daisies.

    I nod and set the album aside.

    My fingers fuss on the next shelf and trip across a small black volume, gold letters on the spine: “National Association of the Fur Industry.” Weird. What is that doing here? Race on to the next stack. Then I freeze. Fur Association. That would be Grandpa, Philip Rothenberg. He made his fortune in the fur trade. A middleman buying pelts from the trappers out west and selling the goods to furriers in New York.

    The book peels open with a quick crack.  

    The title page announces, “Dyeing and Dressing of All Kinds.”

    But it's not a book about fur. It's a datebook, used as a journal.

    The next page, in dense, loopy script: 1880, the year that I was born. To this day, no one knows the date of my birth. One of the reasons is that my mother gave birth regularly every year, so there was little importance to remembering birthdays and there was never any celebration to my recollection.

    Hundreds of pages of Grandpa's hand-written story here. His writing is hard to read, especially in this dim light.

    Grandpa Phil. Lived ninety years. Died in 1971. Haven’t seen him for decades.     Can picture him vividly, though, through childhood memories. He’s short and dark with brilliant green eyes. With his erect spine and confident gestures, he always seemed physically powerful. Grandpa made people laugh. He sat at the head of the table. He would sing opera with no prompting. Mom always spoke solemnly of the poverty he suffered in childhood. But Grandpa Phil never said a word to us about it, and Grandpa is the one I know least of all the relatives. I never realized this before. Not until this moment in the hallway, his hand-written volume in my hands. The small large man at the head of the table. Grandpa Philip was the least communicative of anyone in the family. Yet in a family of endless dialogue, only Grandpa has left such a personal document.

    These pages in my palms, and with Mom’s presence palpable, a connection with Grandpa sparks in the corridor.

    So I whisper, “You came to America, all alone, as a teenager, and you struggled . . . you became wealthy . . . but did you get what you came here for?”

    And right away I hear Grandpa's voice.

    The hair on my neck stands up.

    He says, “I did struggle. And what have you been doing?”

   

≈ ≈ ≈

    What have you been doing?

    Can’t find any words for an answer.

    As if my life were a special balloon to inflate and coddle – which now pops at the mere poke of Grandpa Phil’s question. Bam! Bits of latex splatter all over.

    Barreling west across U.S. 2, up near the Canadian border, alone in an old Cadillac with no radio.

    In love with the 1960s.

    Working on a cattle ranch in Israel.

    Framing houses on a bluff above the Chattahoochee north of Atlanta.

    Single dad, ex-wife not in the picture.

    The yearning, always the yearning.

    Immersed in The Group with Jan Cox for years – if not a cult, damn close.

    What happened?

    How do these pieces fit?

    They don’t, at least not in any way I can frame it for the guy who came here alone in steerage at age sixteen. His youth devoured by struggle. He left home and never saw his parents again.

≈ ≈ ≈

    Rose, Veronica and I pack the van. The biggest things go in first, starting with the art deco headboard and footboard that Aunt Miriam inherited from Grandma and Grandpa. I remember these pieces from childhood. In Grandma and Grandpa’s master bedroom in Daytona Beach, these tall monuments glowed amber. The pieces are heavy, solid maple, with veneers of exotic hardwoods like burl of applewood and cherry. The matching bedside table, with the same fancy veneers and cool deco curves, gets a hug from each of us on its way into the van. Boxes of fine linen follow, mostly white, detailed like crazy, plus a stack of yolk-yellow napkins with black filigree.

    The van fills up. But the smallest pieces are the most precious cargo: the photo of Mom in the daisies, and Grandpa’s journal. They provide solace.

    I really didn't want to do this today, because yesterday lingers.

    Our small extended family, just eight of us left, at the cemetery. In the Jewish tradition. Though we’re hardly traditional. When the rabbi nods after a prayer, each of us heaves the ceremonial shovel-full of earth. The shovel slides easily into the cone of freshly dug dirt by the open grave. Each gesture deliberate. Load the shovel. Hoist and toss. Dirt hangs in the air. Then, thud. The solid, final sound, of dirt smacking the casket. No echoes. The earth swallows sound like it swallows bodies. Pass the shovel. Throw a single scoop of dirt into the grave, to acknowledge the passing. To say good-bye.

    I  grip the shovel once more after everyone’s taken a turn. One more toss. Silence, then thud. Then another. And another and another. Into the rhythm of the digging, hoisting, tossing weighty earth. Off comes my jacket, even in the biting November gusts. As the casket recedes under the gathering dirt, the sound softens. Dirt falling on dirt. Rose takes another turn. Maybe it’s some peasant blood from Grandpa Phil. The heavy lifting and tossing, we’re drawn to it. We want to labor for Mom. The cold wind and the booming sunshine inspire the heaving of raw earth in Westchester County. The casket recedes and the hole is shallow now. We keep digging and tossing until mom is completely tucked in, right next to Dad and Grandma and Grandpa, along with Aunt Miriam and Uncle Harry  – in the plots Grandpa and Grandma bought a long time ago, about twenty miles north of New York City.

    Good-bye, mom. We’ll always miss you.

    She leaves a hole at the center of the family. The last one of her generation. The one who would get as close as anyone let her.

    Followed now by a void at the periphery – this old stucco house out on Long Island where we load the van.

≈ ≈ ≈

    I explain to Rose and Veronica – this old house in Long Beach is the one structure that’s been part of the family my entire life, until today, the day after mom’s burial.

    The house is part of things because we always gathered here, in this yard, in these rooms. Uncle Harry and Aunt Miriam bought the place when they were not much older than Rose is now, and they never left. One house the whole time. Unlike our side of the family, jumping around all over the place. Never knew what all the jumping around was really about. The places we left we never saw again. But Harry and Miriam stayed right here. The frequent visits throughout childhood and all the decades since confer a sense of ownership. Ownership by direct perception.

    But now it's somebody else's house. My cousins sold it just last week, got what they wanted – to be free of the place, plus a tidy sum for the old heap. It’s a block from the beach, an hour from Manhattan. Now it belongs to a neighbor, and they got me one more day to have a look and take what I wanted before it's all thrown away.

    I wouldn't call the place architecture. But these rooms contain something beyond plaster and floorboards. Laughter and muttering and pontificating ping from the walls. You absorb it all one last time, as you do that final visit with the dying: not to lament the failing body, but to clutch the life that hummed there.

    I tell Rose and Veronica, "It doesn’t make sense that both Mom and the house would disappear on practically the same day."

≈ ≈ ≈

    We drive back to Mom’s apartment, on a bluff north of the George Washington Bridge, overlooking The Hudson River and the Palisades. Her neighborhood, Riverdale, may be the best kept secret in the metropolis. Seems like an upriver village instead of New York City, and with each passing hour after her death I cherish it more.

    It’s the last night our small family is together after the funeral, before we scatter to homes all the way from Brooklyn to The Big Island, to mine in Atlanta.

    Mom was offered heart surgery. But she said no. I’m ninety-one. I’ve had a great life. I can’t go through surgery. I don't have it in me. So over the next five months she pitched forward into death with a clear mind and her eyes on the goal. Never blinked.

    We’re all sitting in the living room. Thinking of her inspires me to pour glasses of schnapps and vodka, "Your choice, I’ll take one of each." Like suddenly I’m the patriarch or something.

    “Here’s to Mom!”

    Everyone hoists a glass.

    And I blurt out, “She learned how to live and she showed us how to die.”

    Not everyone is comfortable with my observation.

    So I pour another round, two more for me.

    Mom used to ask me, “Why don’t you want anyone to visit you in Atlanta?”

    I would always explain that I didn’t want everyone descending on me at home. I’d rather buy a ticket and visit everyone in New York or Chicago. I did not explain further that I didn’t want to be the host because then it would be impossible to escape the repeating-loop-discussions: "What are we going to do today?" Maybe all my patience for these long discussions over short questions was used up by age six.

    But now on this last night after the funeral, with schnapps as lubrication,  Mom’s desires stream out of my mouth. “Why doesn’t anyone ever visit me in Atlanta? I’ve been flying to see all of you for how many decades? And when was the last time any of you even mentioned visiting me? What’s that about?”

    Rose and Veronica telegraph with scrunched faces, Shutup! You’re out of your mind!

    But my speech is magnificent, and I can't stop. I shame them all.

    The next morning on the way to the airport, everyone’s saying, “See you in April – in Atlanta!”

    Oh, shit, how did I get myself into this mess?

    It's later referred to as Jon’s soliloquy.

    But after a while, I figure it’ll be okay. Mom would like it, and now that we’ve said good-bye to her, a long period of peace and calm stretches into the future. There will be time.

    Time to host a family visit.

    Time to read Grandpa’s journal. And hopefully time to find a way to answer his question. What have you been doing?

    Don't really know how this is done, but I want to talk to him.

≈ ≈ ≈

    I'm back in Atlanta full time after the funeral, after months of long weekends with Mom.

    Catching up with work. Catching up with friends. Catching up with fun.

    Grandpa's journal is on my desk. Then by my bed. I re-read the first page maybe once a week. Maybe once a month sometimes. "Augostowa was a part of  Russia at the time of my birth . . ." Practically got it memorized.

    But I can't ever get to page two. Something always comes up.

    Houses to design and build in the gentrifying neighborhoods of downtown Atlanta. Designing small houses for urban pioneers, that’s the reward of my job. The reward and the challenge, both, because it’s much harder to tease perfection out of a small house than a house with hundreds of square feet in play. In a small house, each room fights for each inch. All you’ve got is fifteen hundred square feet for three bedrooms, two bathrooms, the public rooms and a sense of space.

    “Design perfection is the reward, but building them is the punishment,” I tell Veronica. She's my bookkeeper.

    I’m supposed to obsess over the cost of every board and nail. But instead I obsess over dual exposures and cross-ventilation and sight lines to noble oaks and furniture placement for imaginary buyers I might never meet.

    Good thing Veronica comes in every Tuesday to total the line items in each category. She sits at the keyboard, invoices on the left and keypad on the right. Her fine-boned wrist barely touches the desk. Her fingers are poised like little ballerinas, ready to jeté. The fingers on her right hand tap in flurries. Each finger proportioned so it looks even longer than it really is. She could be a hand model. Her fingers fire off five-digit totals in under a second. She never misses or goofs. She has dark brown hair and brown eyes and she’s young and cute and smart and I look forward to Tuesdays even though I hate bookkeeping.

    We go out for dinner one Sunday night in 2001. That was almost seven years ago. Now we live together.

    She’s getting her MSW, Master’s of Social Work. The spirit of Mom’s clear-eyed path to death flows easily into our thoughts and conversations – and into Veronica’s career path, too, because now Veronica is planning to be a hospice social worker. “She showed us it’s okay,” Veronica says with a tear in her eyes. “I want to show others.”

    And now another “M” word has entered our conversation: Marriage. I bring it up by way of a less-than-romantic blunder. In the sleek sushi restaurant where we’re celebrating her birthday, savoring exquisite flavors and sake, I tell Veronica, “I’ve got a great idea. Let’s tell all our friends we’re getting married. And when they all show up, we’ll tell them it’s really just a big party!"

    Veronica stares at me for a long moment. Then she starts crying. Right in the middle of the restaurant.

    I have ruined the birthday dinner.

    But she forgives me later because now the M word has entered our conversations. We could never talk about it before. Now we can. I look at her and the dross of prior divorce crumbles away. We talk about how much fun we have together. I tell her she’s calm and she says no I’m not and I say yes you are, but that’s OK, we don’t have to agree on everything. We talk about how much younger she is, and what are the chances of either this happening or that happening. So we look at the odds for a little while and we look at the life we have. We like the life we have. Let’s play it as it lays. Let’s get married.

     I don’t have to ask her dad’s permission. She’s not close to her parents. She’s the last of ten children, and somewhere around child number one or two, her parents abdicated. They found booze more interesting than the kids. Veronica grew up in a nuthouse with no staff. And my parents are dead.

    But I do have to ask my daughter’s permission.

    Rose interrupts before I can finish the sentence: “Yes! When?” She has just graduated from college, and applauds a change in my life to complement the change in hers.

    And we already have Bijou's permission. Bijou the cat, who has owned the house for over a decade, has made it clear that despite my loyal service to her, Veronica is all that really matters around here. I’m acceptable, but Veronica is the center of the universe.

    April is not that far away. The family is coming to town. We decide to stage a surprise wedding, and arrange for a Dekalb County judge to show up on Saturday night. So with fifteen people – my family, a few friends from The Group with Jan Cox, and one of Veronica’s siblings – crammed in the dining room for dinner, I say, “Well, we have an announcement to make.”

    Gasps. Pause.

    “Veronica and I are going to get married.”

    Gasps. Applause.

    And then we wait for the question.

    “When's the wedding?”

    “At 8:00.”

    More gasps. More applause.

     At dusk in April under a blooming new-green canopy of giant Atlanta hardwoods, we all assemble on the back deck for the ceremony.

    Everyone is smiling.

≈ ≈ ≈

    The blaze of happy days and busy times illuminates everything except the pages of Grandpa Phil's journal.

    I'm packing a bag to go the beach. Early April. We're going to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. Grabbing stuff for the beach. What book to bring?

    Grandpa's journal.

    Shit, it's been a year-and-a-half since Mom died. And since I came across Grandpa's densely scripted words, and heard his voice for that brief moment in the old hallway in Long Beach. A year-and-a-half, and I'm still on page one.

    I can do this. I can read some more pages of this treasure. Doesn't matter if it's not great writing. And it's hard to read Grandpa's script – you can bump along for three or four or maybe even ten words and then you hit a thicket of loops, and try to capture one or two letters until the next word comes clean. But really, it doesn't matter if it's hard to read because, yes, this is a treasure that he left, these words reaching through the bloodlines and across the decades from another time.

    I pack one book, his. Gotta read some.

    So I plant a beach chair next to Veronica's and copy her setup with a beach umbrella clamped to the chair. And dial my attention away from the tourmaline surf and the soaring gulls and the drifting foam, down to the page.

≈ ≈ ≈

    He never uses the words gnawing poverty. But I feel the frost and the emptiness. A different kind of emptiness when an entire family with seven kids packs into two rooms. There’s a fold-out bed where he usually sleeps with his brothers. It’s a clapboard shanty on a mud alley. The kitchen and the living room and the bedrooms are all the same room and they all sleep in there.    

    When Grandpa can no longer tolerate the infernal racket of his father’s hand-cranked bottle cap machine – apparently the only source of family income – he escapes to the other part of the house.

    I guess it’s what we call a duplex. A separate family lives there. Grandpa loves to watch the man in the other part of the house while he's working. Mendel the Shoemaker quietly repairs old shoes. The leathery shoe polish aroma, Mendel's deft touch with a blade, as Grandpa watches these reincarnations. New heels and new soles make old shoes new shoes.

    All he says about his father is that the bottle cap machine makes a racket.

    He barely mentions his mother.

    In a few pages, his childhood is gone, he’s thirteen years old and leaving the hardscrabble little shtetl to work in Warsaw.

≈ ≈ ≈

    I'm startled by Grandpa's skeletal childhood.

    His barren youth amplifies the golden years I feasted on, a feast I never comprehended until reading these next pages of his. So finally I am able to start answering – for him, and for myself – what have you been doing?

    My golden age of childhood fanned out during fifth and sixth grade when we lived in upstate New York.

    Wintertime muffles the woods behind our house, everything all smudgy white. The stream in the woods disappears under etched ice. A rock shatters the ice like a light bulb. Something’s crawling in there under the ice. I’m on my knees, eyes to the ice. Oh, look! It’s the stream, snaking slow and heavy. Later, in the dead of winter, the stream freezes solid, a giant diamond in a white trench.

    I love walking to school. The crunch and squeak under my snow boots. The crazed sideways flurries. The cresting snowdrifts at the corner of Bolton Road and Hartford Terrace. Puddle jumping in slush season. In the afternoon, on the way home, I usually stop at the tiny one-room no-name store at the corner of Allport Place. It's dark in there. Old man behind the counter. “One Cherry Lik-M-Aid,” as if I’m bellying up to the bar. Lik-M-Aid, a penny for an envelope of tinted sugar. Happy Hour on Hartford Terrace. And if the ground’s not too wet, I’ll stop at Bruce Domser’s house for one-on-one tackle football. Wailing away on each other until dark. Rubber bodies, rubber earth.

    All the comforts of middle class American life, we just expect them. A private bedroom. More food than you can eat. A car in the driveway, and a parent on hand to chauffer as needed.

    Parents to engage with in a way nobody could imagine in the 1880s.

    But our family is not exactly normal. Normal families seem to operate on a roughly standard model, in which the parents make decisions – for better or worse – and some kind of action or consequence follows. Friends are always afraid of getting in trouble at home. But it’s not like that at 37 Bolton Road. Everything unpredictable, unenforced and everything always up for gobs of discussion. Even simple matters, like where to stop for gas, become bloated, confusing conundrums for the entire family to chew on. No line between “parents” and “children” cleans up these free-for-alls.  

    “No, don’t go to the Shell station.”

    “Why not?”

    “It’s on the wrong side of the street. You’ll have to make two left turns.”

    “I have to go to the bathroom.”

    “No, don’t go to the Esso.”

    “Why not?”

    “I don’t know, I just don’t like it.”

    “Don’t like it? How do you ‘not like’ a gas station?”

    “You just went to the bathroom.”

    “We wanna go where the horse is.”

    “Yeah, Pegasus. We want to go to Mobil, c’mon. We wanna see the horse. . .”

    “Let’s just get it on the way back. We have gas right now.”

    “No, Bob. You always do this. We need gas, and we need it now.”

    Judy and I never doubt that Mom and Dad love us, and we take that for granted, along with all our other blessings, when we form our non-verbal early childhood alliance to fill the power vacuum in the general nuthouse atmosphere at home. Most of the time, nobody seems in charge.  And then there are the “go ask your father” and “go ask your mother” volleys when the two big people can’t agree over the demands of the moment.

    Sometimes, when the confusion engulfs everything, Judy and I exchange a glance that means enough is enough, at which point we step into the shambles, grab the rudder, and right the listing family vessel. Every now and then, something extraordinary results.

On this one thick and still summer Sunday, the sky goes dark with hulking thunderclouds. Trees curve, elastic in the gusts. Wind pours through the house, then curtains of rain shimmy everywhere. The lawn gone to pewter, everything sideways and swaying, everything wet, even the windowsills and the floors around the windows and little fingers, wet, clutching the windowsill. The storm full and fat and thrilling.

And then it’s gone. And everything’s changed. The temperature plummets, maybe fifteen degrees. New scoured air electrifies the land. Judy and I bounce around the house as if we’re plugged into that current.

    We start bellowing, “Let’s go for a ride!”

    We have to go for a ride. Mom and Dad never want to go for rides. But so what? We have to see it, the washed world. It won’t last, we know it won’t. We have to see it before it disappears. We’re in emergency management mode. Mom and Dad are beached whales, immoveable and mute, but within minutes they succumb to the force of our desire. We herd them into the car. C’mon, hurry, before it goes away!

    The car rolls down Bolton Road to Hartford Terrace, but instead of turning left towards school and work, the car turns right. In no time we’re out on Oneida Road, out in the country. Nobody else has yet emerged. The empty road glistens pitch black and forest green and sky blue. The car hums, windows down and ballooning with pure new air. On rolling Adirondack foothills, the road curves through the dairy farms and the spruce groves. Nobody speaks. The spectacular new world overwhelms our small family, and binds us together.

≈ ≈ ≈

    Grandpa Phil had a yearning. It glimmers through the bare bones of his story.

    I have a yearning, too.

    But I feel a little silly talking yearning-for-yearning with Grandpa Phil. Look at the trajectory of his life. Six time zones. The Dark Ages to Modernity. Poverty to wealth.

    What have you been doing?

    I want to continue answering the question.

    And I still want to hear his voice like I did that day in the hallway, going on two years ago.

    But when we get back from the beach, I am consumed by the busy-ness and the business and the glitter of daily life, and Grandpa Phil's journal resumes its shuffle between desk and nightstand. Unopened.

   

≈ ≈ ≈

    Months later. August. Family get-together at Lake Michigan, near Chicago. Rose flies in from Brooklyn, her second summer after college. She's making her way in the art world.

    Seeing them on their turf. It’s better this way.

    Better, except something is wrong with Veronica. She can't eat much. No energy to ramble the giant dunes that rise hundreds of feet over the lake, and roll out across thousands of acres.

    A little desert by the inland ocean. On the far side of the mountain of sand, a nearly vertical sand wall plummets from solar heights above the tree tops. Rose and I bounce gravity-free from the top of the white dune – you can see Chicago across the lake – all the way down into deep damp shade.

    I wish Veronica could traipse around here with us. But she sits in her chair by the beach and barely moves.

    We figure this will pass. She’s young and healthy and sometimes people don’t feel great.

    But it lingers.

    Back in Atlanta, in September, the doctor can’t find anything wrong. But something is wrong. It's in her belly. She can't eat like she used to.

    Then it goes away but when it comes back, the doctor still can’t find anything.

    She can’t eat everything she used to eat.

    Then it’s November. Veronica is the maid of honor at a wedding in Los Angeles.

    November. Two years since Mom died. She would be happy Veronica and I are married. I want to honor Mom’s memory, and she makes it easy. I thank her. I write, I wish you were here now. In many ways, you are. And for that I am grateful.

    Then I put down my pen and say out loud, “But the only thing is, Mom, I want to have another conversation with Grandpa.”

    I still haven’t read very far into his journal. Mom nods.

    I imagine what she might say. She would admit that she never read his journal. I guess Mom knew it was in Aunt Miriam's bookcase. Miriam, Mom's sister. I bet Miriam never read it, either. But Mom would encourage me to read Grandpa's pages.

    She always made sure we knew about his youth. The youth he never had.

    Then Mom would smile. She’d be happy we’re making the most of a trip to L.A., going the long way.

≈ ≈ ≈

    We fly to Flagstaff and drive with no plans. You can speed from here to L.A. in eight hours. But it takes us a week.

    We ignore Veronica's malaise. The doctors seem to be ignoring it, too. Maybe nothing's there.

    Maybe a blast of open-ended periscope days will burn it away, whatever it is.

    We noodle through slices of infinity and stop in Oraibi, on the Hopi Reservation, one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the continental U.S. Adobe dwellings as severe as the land. You can see mesas seventy miles away. Space is a crystal.

    We find a room at The Grand Canyon. Veronica doesn't feel like hiking in the canyon. But she is happy in the room.

    I get up at five and hike solo into the center of the earth. I promise to turn around when the rising sun catches me. I descend for hours. On the way down there are no shadows. On the way back the shadows are steep and mass of the land is revealed stripe-by-stripe. The earth rocks with information.

    We travel west on Route 66, the old two lane, just as I’ve always done since before the interstate highways sucked the miracle out of rolling across our planet in a nice chair.

    On the afternoon of the fifth day, we stop in the town of Joshua Tree, California. Right next to the famously mystical national park of the same name. We get a room at the Safari Motel. Veronica wants to stay in the room. Some days she feels like doing more and some days she feels like doing less. Maybe it's the malaise.

    But we don't call it the malaise, and we don't talk about it all the time. Even though it's hovering. We pretend everything is normal. We don’t have to do the same things all the time.

    I am impelled to wander in the desert and promise to get back before dark.    

    A mile or two past town, you enter the park and everything changes. Weird looking Joshua Trees punctuate the land. Never seen them before. They’re the platypuses of the plant kingdom. Maybe designed by a family where the kids are in charge. Goofy and gawky and it’s hard to take them seriously as life forms. But the land is solemn and alien and naked and riveting. It’s very, very quiet. You breathe differently.

    Soon I’m out of the car crawling around a village of smooth beige boulders, through crooked lanes of rock creatures and rock buildings. They’re all alive even though they never move. Some of the rocks you can pick up. Some are jack rabbits, some maybe Cenozoic reptiles. Others big, big as a county courthouse.

    Back in the car, rolling deeper into the silence. The sun, getting lower in the sky. A national park sign says Mt. Ryan Trail. And right there is Mt. Ryan, squatting on the desert floor. Everything is visible out here.

    I can do this, climb to the top, it's in plain view, and be back before dark like I promised.

    My backpack has the basics. Water, a compass, a knife, a jacket. And a camera. I snug the pack, put on my big-brimmed desert hat, and start walking. The sun just slid a notch. The violet of dusk darkens the far edge of the valley. I want to get to the summit, to wink at the setting sun. Quick footsteps on the rocky trail. Rough trail. Giant steps, rock-to-rock, steep desert incline.

    So quiet out here. I'm like a mule train banging up the mountain. I stop for a second. Pure utter silence.

    But I can’t linger too long. Gotta keep climbing. The shadows of dusk are creeping across the valley.

    The trail ascends around Mt. Ryan as if spiraling up through a nautilus shell. The trail curls to the shadow side of the mountain. The sun is hidden now. The sky is blue-on-blue. The land and the rocks and the desert scrub, all tones of charcoal and lilac. Seems even quieter in the muted light. I keep climbing.

    Then, bam, a rifle shot echoes out of the distance, out of the stillness. A rifle shot? Out here? I keep climbing. Then another rifle report. I stop. And hear absolutely nothing. Resume walking. Another rifle report. I freeze. And the sound stops. Oh, I whisper out loud. I take off my hat. And walk some more. My eyes open wide, and a shiver grabs my spine. Not because of danger. But because of amazement: it's not a rifle at all. It's my hat slapping the top of the backpack. That’s how quiet it is out here. My hat tapping on a fabric backpack sounds like a Remington. Everything magnified. Everything significant, sacramental.

    Feet quickening, stone-to-stone. The path curls back to the sun side of the mountain. The shadow of dusk fills the valley and creeps up the mountain. You can see the velvet line on the mountain. Dusk, like a gorgeous daily death. I whisper the word, Death. And it’s not a taboo word. It’s okay. Death. Here comes purple death up the mountain. I quicken my pace to get to the summit before . . .  well, before death. The death of the colors, the death of the day.

    The valley of the shadow of death. Words from the psalm hover over the shadow in the valley. The shimmering clarity of shadow and light and space make me smile.

    The inevitable encroaching death of the day, swallowing the mountain, carries my mind to Mom. She died two years ago. But right now I can almost feel her with me, right here climbing. If she were here, she'd tug on my arm and I would slow down. I would much rather stroll with Mom in the twilight than hurry to a summit sunset.    

    Imagining Mom carries me to Dad. He died of cancer, young, just a little older than I am now, the summer before my daughter, his granddaughter, Rose was born. It’s always easy to make Dad laugh, and his propensity to laugh inappropriately was a favorite tool when we were kids trying to dial a bit of focus out of the eternal family fog. If Dad was an obstacle, we could usually disarm him with his own laughter. I could feel him in my body when Rose was a little girl. She would imitate the way I was talking, making fun of it, word for word. She was being disrespectful. She should have been disciplined. But I couldn’t help laughing. It was Dad’s laugh out of my mouth when Rose was a little girl. It's his smile on my face right now, as I'm hoofing it up Mt. Ryan. If he were here, I'd slap him on the back and say, “Goddamn, Dad.” And he'd say, “Goddamn, Jonathan.” Dad was a potty mouth. Mom liked that about him.

    The trail wobbles onto the shadow side of Mt. Ryan. I do hope I’ll catch the sunny side before it dies to the night.

        The stones looks so soft in the fading light. But the stones are hard, and the trail is craggy. Ankles twist on the angles.

    Four months. Jolts me as I scramble up. Like a rifle shot in the silence: we're in the fourth month of the malaise. Dad's smile is gone, and my face is tight. My belly wobbles under a pang of queasy.

    Whatever this thing is, the malaise, it's gripping our lives. With tentacles that reach all the way up a mountain. I don't know what to do about it.

    I long to stretch across some chasm . . .

    I wanna talk to my grandpa.

    I keep climbing.

    . . . in a family of endless dialogue, only Grandpa has left so personal and verbal a document.

    I'm going to turn sixty next year. But for this second, feels like I'm just six.

    I wanna talk to my grandpa! Promise I'll read his journal. Cover to cover.

    I keep climbing.

    And now, with each step, inexplicably, another loved one who has died fills my mind.

    Grandma Rose.

    Uncle Mac.

    Step by step.

    Uncle Abe.

    Joseph, heart attack. Jim, AIDS. Ronnie, cancer. All friends from The Group with Jan Cox. They were like family. Died young.

    Step after step.

    And Warren Newman. Cathy Freer. Friends from college. They died young, too.

    Curling back to the sunny side of the mountain, now the revolutions are short because I’m winding up the cone where Mt. Ryan softens at the sky. Maybe I’ll get to wink at the sun, maybe I won’t.

    Now I'm taking steps without thinking of dead people. The trail is kinda hard to follow. The rocks, with a gilded pink sheen on one side. Suede on other.

    I'm standing still. The sun collapses to a dot.

    I hear that voice. And what have you been doing?

    Grandpa?

≈ ≈ ≈

    Grandpa Phil and I do not really have a conversation on top of Mt. Ryan. But the connection is made.

    The connection holds.

    When Veronica and I return home, I open Grandpa’s journal every day. And read it. And when the illegible hoops and loops and tangles of  his penmanship stop me cold, I unknot the ink with my eyes until the words shine through the scribble. I don't care if it's hard to read.

    I want to labor for Grandpa.

    I'm immersed in the pages.

    One night late, after Veronica and everyone else in Atlanta have gone to sleep, it seems perfectly natural to ask him out loud, “What would have happened if you had stayed in Augostowa?"

    He answers right away. And it's perfectly natural that he should.

    Natural, the way sparks light the kindling. One moment, there's no fire. The next moment, flames emerge. In that same way, whatever this is between Grandpa and me, at one moment in time it's not happening, and at the next moment in time it is happening and it's part of everything. Abyss or no abyss, Grandpa and I inflame with conversation. Feels just right. Just as it should be. Perfectly natural, and perfectly mystical. Like fire.

    He never wondered. He says, “It’s a dead thought. Figuratively and literally. If starvation or boredom hadn’t killed me, the Nazis or the Russians would have.”  

    Grandpa says, “Augostowa was a magnet, a magnet that repelled. It pushed me away.”

    Out there in the little shtetl, his eager mind brimming, with only a shoemaker for entertainment. Dark at night out there in the ghetto, garroted in vicious turf wars between Poland, Russia and Lithuania. Before the automobile, before electricity.

    Grandpa says when you’re really, really poor, you hate the stuff you have because it’s never enough and you hate the stuff you don’t have because you can’t have it. He says it with his teeth.

    But he is not a bitter man. You can tell he never said that before.

    He was born into a time and place that say go away.

    I say to Grandpa, “You started out in a place you couldn’t wait to leave and I had golden years of childhood in a place I never wanted to leave.”

    “When I left home and went to work in Warsaw, every human emotion filled my veins. Part of the time I couldn’t see anything because there was too much to see. I arrived in Warsaw, got off the train, looked for my favorite sister Manya, but she’d been gone from Augostowa so long I didn't recognize her.”

    He sighs. The pain grabs me. To be so separate from loved ones, separated beyond recognition.

    He continues. “But leaving Augostowa was tantamount to a rebirth, in 1893. The year of my Bar Mitzvah, in the shabby old shul in the shtetl. The rabbi blessed me, I was a favorite of his, and the ceremony did confer a giant step into manhood: leaving home and getting a job. I became an errand boy in my grandfather’s insurance business. I delivered documents, and collected signatures, inside and outside the Jewish ghetto, all over Warsaw.

    “After my daily sojourns all over the city, the son of a barber tutored me, and the tutor said that I hungered for knowledge. I was a promising student.

    “But after just a few months, everything changed.

    “My grandfather, born around 1810, became old and weak. The insurance business declined and work got scarce.”     

    “And my sister Manya, with whom I was living,” his voice cracks for a second. But only a second. “She received a proposal to marry Louis Rabinowitz, an old family friend, who had emigrated to New York. And so Manya left Warsaw for America.”

    Grandpa found work as an errand boy for a bridle fabricator.      

    But he says, “Inwardly, I was suffering. Maybe it was a kind of homesickness. But I didn’t want to be in Augostowa. It felt like homesickness. Rather, it felt like I imagined homesickness would feel. Because I didn’t want to go back there. It wasn’t a home for me. I didn’t want to be around my parents. They were all used up. I was homesick for something I never had.”

    I want to reach across the chasm with a hug that would say I'm sorry.     

    And Grandpa says, “A sort of melancholia got a choke hold on me, and I fought it for many years. For many of the years of my life.”

    The job as an errand boy ended and Grandpa cast about for work. His studies continued intermittently.

    A distant uncle who was a prominent attorney took a shine to him, admired his penmanship – the scribbled loops must have been just right for Polish – and hired him as a scribe to copy documents for submittal to the Supreme Court in Warsaw. The uncle paid him promptly and generously. Grandpa clutched the precious rubles, thrilled for the money he earned with his own hand.

≈ ≈ ≈

    When I’m about the same age as Grandpa Phil leaving home to work in Warsaw, our family moves from upstate New York to Jacksonville, Florida. It's not a rebirth. Drinking fountains downtown labeled “White” and “Colored.” I had never seen those before. The land is flat and it seems we stepped backwards into some small place, and in autumn the snow silence never comes. I ride the bus to school instead of walking through the seasons. I don’t like it here. But the days get busy and the walls become invisible.    

    They say after my bar mitzvah I will be recognized as man in the eyes of the congregation. This is a big deal and I want to be worthy so I find some extra height in my spine when I walk into Rabbi Lefkowitz’s study to begin my preparations. He will lead me to complex adult insights on my Torah portion, and these insights will be part of what the congregation recognizes as manhood in me. The rabbi will recognize that I have a yearning, and this will earn me special challenges. I will rise to them.

    But all the rabbi talks about is what to memorize and where to stand and when to start talking and when to stop talking. Rabbi Lefkowitz is just an old man with a job and I am part of the workload. And after my bar mitzvah I am just another eighth grader, with way too many thank-you notes to write.   

    Looking for something else. Because there is this yearning.

    Grandpa had a yearning for something, anything, because he has nothing.

    And I have a yearning for something raw because everything is insulated.

    But there isn’t any something raw that we can get our hands on. It’s nice that everything is nice. But it’s dumb. The only reason we know what a beatnik is in the early 1960s is because of a TV show.

    The Sixties really begins for me early one summer afternoon in the middle of the decade.

    I’m just leaving Jacksonville, driving alone down to Daytona Beach in the family Impala on Phillips Highway, the old U.S. 1.  

    When the light turns green at the corner of University Boulevard, I spin the big boat to the south, and all I see in the windshield are the knees and thumb of a hitchhiker. He must be really tall. I hit the brakes and crunch onto the shoulder.     Hitchhiking is normal. Dad used to tell stories about hitchhiking after the war, and we know the story, word-for-word, of how Mom and Dad hitchhiked to their wedding. So now that I’m driving, and making the big decisions, this is a new part of things to capture for myself.

    The door opens, and all I can see is legs. Legs already folding into the car. Red hair falls to his shoulders and the bandana he’s wearing, it’s cherry red, school bus yellow and Dodger blue. He seems adept at collapsing himself. His knees poke above the dashboard. The door closes and we’re rolling.

    “Thanks, man. Glad to be riding. Nobody around here wanted to pick me up.”

    I can see why. He doesn’t look like anyone from around here. As tall as a truck, and the long red hair. Everyone in Jacksonville probably sped up when they saw him.

    “Where you going?” I ask.

    He says there is a scene in Key West.

    Nobody talks like that in Jacksonville. A scene is either on a postcard or in a play.

    He’s glad to be rolling down the road. He thanks me again.

    Then he doesn’t say anything. He seems content to simply leave Jacksonville.

    But I’m curious. “What kind of scene?”

    He looks at me, deciding whether or not to answer. Then he says, “A different kind of scene is happening in certain places now.”

    This is way before Life Magazine's shocking cover story about a newly coined word, “Hippies,” and how these people are living in a different way.

    It’s like some future Daniel Boone is sitting with me in Dad’s Chevy. He knows stuff that nobody in Jacksonville can even ask a question about. I want to know what he knows. I want to be like him.

    He says, well, if you’re that interested, a lot of what we were taught about the way things are, well, they’re not that way at all.

    Yes, I am that interested. Very interested. Extremely interested.

“A lot of stuff, about our government, about the purpose of life, about the nature of love,” he says.

    Again: nobody in Jacksonville talks like that. The patter in Jacksonville concludes foregone conclusions.

    “Like the war in Asia.” Nobody in Jacksonville is talking about the war. “Why is the government making guys fly half way around the world to blow up villages in the jungle? Guys like me. But I got lucky. I’m six-foot-nine. They won’t draft me because I don’t fit in the Jeeps. So I don’t have to go. But you have to wonder what’s driving all that madness.”

    “I’m not going,” I tell him.

    “But that’s just a small part of it,” he says, like I’m not getting it. “It’s more about ‘What forces do we represent?’ And, ‘Why are we alive?’”

    Finally. Somebody is talking about a more profound life.   

    He says, “Your neighborhood. Everyone’s in a box, right? Sure, the houses look like boxes. But so do their heads, man. Once you see it, all the people are boxes living in boxes.”

    I picture this one guy in our neighborhood. He lives alone. Everyone else is the same. A mom, a dad, and some kids. I never thought about the guy until right now in the car. We never play in front of his house. He’s just different. His yard is always tidy, but he’s never in it. All of a sudden, I like him a lot and want to see him out in the yard.

    “After high school, you should learn how to walk on stilts and make yourself six foot nine, go down to the draft board, and get out of the war.”

    He cracks a smile and says, “You can be better than this war. Go find your own war. Fight a different war, man. Fight your war.” He smiles bigger. “That’s how you make peace with the world.”

    When we get to Daytona Beach, I take care to place him at the best hitchhiking intersection in town, at the corner of US1 and Main Street. He thanks me for the ride.

    But even though I can’t get the words out, I’m the one who’s really thankful. Like I just met not only some future Daniel Boone, but also the prophet Elijah. I’m chewing on something new and raw and fresh and dangerous. I want to fight my war.

≈ ≈ ≈

   

    In January, all of Veronica’s symptoms disappear. So that malaise, whatever the hell it was, is gone.

    Whew. What a relief.

    We can eat! We can eat whatever we want! What fun!

    Veronica's the menu planner. I like to cook. Veronica likes to eat. Well, we both like to eat. This makes for good times around the dinner table – that sometimes ascend to bliss.

    She promotes me to chef. I promote her to sous chef. In the middle of winter, we can't make pesto with basil and parsley from the garden, but we can make other favorites. A deep spicy gumbo, laced into a slow-stirred roux. Mushroom risotto, earthy and melting. Red sauce from scratch. Roasted winter vegetables. We splurge on fancy seafood at our favorite northern Italian place.

    Look at her. When we met, she was my part-time bookkeeper who had never finished college. She couldn't go back because she was afraid of writing a paper.

        Now it’s over a year since she got her Master’s degree, and she's a hospice social worker. She’s really good at it. I can tell by the way she talks about it. When she meets the patient and the family, she first asks if they know the patient is dying. Frequently, the doctors can’t talk about death, so the patient often assumes that hospice is another form of treatment. It’s not. Veronica explains that medical treatments have been exhausted. Hospice is a way to die with dignity and without pain. When she’s sure they understand and are ready for the next question, she asks, “Have you made funeral arrangements?”

    Wow.

    I’m hard at work over at the other end of the life cycle. Building houses for urban pioneers, almost always young couples buying a first house and planning a first child. I design a lot of the houses with the kitchen in front and the living room in back. Because you want to see who’s approaching when you’re washing the dishes and when you’re not washing the dishes you should enjoy, with your main squeeze or your newborn, the urban forest in the back yard.

    All of this deserves celebration. Especially this: Here's to Veronica's vibrant health!

    Everything is great.

    Everything except, oops, I put Grandpa's journal down again.

    But this time, for fear of jinxing Veronica's health, I pick it up again. Quickly.  

≈ ≈ ≈

    When Grandpa Phil is sixteen, the work in Warsaw dries up. He receives a letter from Manya, now married to Louis Rabinowitz, and living in New York. They invite Grandpa to move there and work with Louis in the fur trade. Grandpa doesn’t care about furs, but he cares about work and money and having a future and making his way in the world. A new life in the New World. He can't stop thinking about it.

    New.

    World.

    Grandpa visits Augostowa for the first time in three years, to say good-bye.

    His younger brothers don’t recognize him.

    He doesn’t mention his mother.

    Why, Grandpa?

    He sits still for a very long time. I wait. The answer unfolds slowly. “My mother gave me life. For this, I bless her memory. But I wanted more. More than delivery into this world." He pauses. "She was really just a cipher of what you think of as a mother. In the shul, they taught us to honor your mother and your father. I tried to do what the rabbi said. But I wanted more, and she had only a womb and some milk to give. My mother was not curious about anything. She was all used up.”

    Sister Manya gives him something his mother couldn’t: Hope.

    After a month, he says good-bye to his family.

    His father takes him to Hamburg, Germany, on The Baltic Sea, and helps him onto a ship packed with other immigrants bound for New York.

    He says good-bye to his father.

        On July 26, 1896, Philip Rothenberg arrives at Ellis Island.

    He finds his sister and his brother-in-law and his nine month old niece Bertha, and is welcomed into their home at 156 Suffolk Street, on the Lower East Side.

    After a Turkish bath and a week to rest up, Louis says let’s go to work.

    Grandpa’s roommate and fellow laborer shows him how to sort the pelts from the trappers and how to package them for the furriers. Grandpa does not complain about this work.

    The roommate is a very observant Jew and cannot work on the Sabbath.

    But Louis Rabinowitz says you must work on the Sabbath.

    The guy loses his job.

    Louis Rabinowitz is not a nice man.

    Grandpa is hardly more than an indentured servant. And he wants to observe the Sabbath, too. But he loves his sister, she is the closest he has to a mother, and he has nowhere to go and doesn’t speak much English yet, so he stays, and he works seven days a week.

    And out of a meager salary, he saves pennies and nickels – religiously. No dimes to spare.

    After two years, Louis Rabinowitz refuses to raise Grandpa’s four dollar a week salary.

    Grandpa Phil goes out on the street with his new command of the English language, and peddles teaspoons.

    After a week, Louis Rabinowitz wants Grandpa back, and he raises Grandpa’s salary to five dollars a week. Now Grandpa can save dimes, and quarters, too. Religiously.

≈ ≈ ≈

    Grandpa covers years of his adolescence in a couple of pages of his hand-written prose. Sometimes I rotate the National Fur Association datebook in my hands the way you do a sponge, trying to squeeze a bit more from it. But when you’re working seven days a week for your abusive brother-in-law at a job you have no affection for, the experience just doesn’t soak up much juice. It’s more like doing time than living life.

        And now that we have a dialogue, he asks again, “And what have you been doing?” He wants to know more.

    I wonder how much to tell, because I was given everything he was denied. I'm nervous about sharing the lavishness of my experience.

        But, so far, Grandpa doesn’t hold it against me. He's got to be jealous, at least a little. But that's not what drives him. Mainly, he just wants to know what his grandson did with opportunity, and he wants to know some of what he missed. The least I can do is tell him. And hope he doesn't frown too deeply at some of it.

≈ ≈ ≈ 

   

    A couple of months after I give a ride to the red-haired hitchhiker, I’m back at the intersection of University Boulevard and U.S.1. This time, it’s my thumb outstretched, waiting for a ride to Daytona Beach. I don’t have to wait too long. I still look like one of the folks from around here.  

    A two-seater Sunbeam Alpine rolls up, top down. I hop in.

    “Name’s Zeke,” he says. “Zeke Zoflansky. I’m from Merced.”

    Looks like he popped off the cover of a Beach Boys album, with stringy blond hair and dozens of teeth.

    “Where you going?”

    “South,” I say, just like the giant hitchhiker said to me. “Where’s Merced?”

    “California. Central valley. The big valley that runs down the middle, between The Sierras and The Coast Range. It’s all farmers around there.”

    I doubt if there’s a scene in Merced.

    “I saved up a bunch of money and I’m just driving around.” he announces. “However long it takes, that’s how long it takes.”

    All the other cars are speeding past us. The sun is everywhere.  

    “I always go fifty,” he says. “Even when everyone goes eighty, I go fifty. ‘Cause I always go fifty. But I mean always. On the highway, I go fifty. In town, I go fifty. In parking lots, I go fifty. It’s just a good speed for me. So when we get to the towns,” he says while waving at passing traffic, “I pass them all right back.”

    I assume he’s exaggerating. It doesn’t matter. Zeke is glad to have an audience. I’m glad to be an audience.

    How can the same stretch of highway look so different? That day in May, with slate skies and a new order of reality emerging. Now it’s a perfect summer day, with dry air and linty blue skies. I’m in a beach movie with a beach boy.

    We approach St. Augustine. “Speed Zone Ahead,” the sign says. Zeke is talking about his surfer buddies in Merced. “We would meet up at The Merced County Fairgrounds at four in the morning, nobody’s out, and we’d race each other outa town on Los Baños Highway and the back roads over the spine of The Coast Range.”

    The speed limit is thirty-five now. We’re passing everyone.

    “But really, we’re racing the sun. Good thing the sun rises in the east, right? ‘Cause we’re racing west. Away from the sun. Buys us a little extra time, right?”

    The speed limit is twenty-five. Zeke flies past everyone.

    “So, really, the race was to get our boards in the water before sunrise. But you couldn’t tell when the sun rises. For one thing, you’re down there in the surf, and the mist is everywhere. Like you’re in a cloud. On the water. For another thing, the sun rises in the east, behind the mountains. You can’t see through the mountain, right? So how you gonna know?”

    He grins and whips the wheel to the right. “I’m gonna get some ice cream.” The tires squeal into the Winn-Dixie parking lot. Everything’s a blur. He’s going fifty in the parking lot. How can the one speed – fifty – switch from slow motion to double-time?

    Zeke did not exaggerate at all. He always, always goes fifty.

    The bookends of the Sixties. The visionary and the hedonist. I get them both, in one summer. On one highway.

≈ ≈ ≈