tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83711150182160277992023-11-15T09:25:40.693-08:00THE AQUA MUSTANGMemoir from Fred PooleFred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.comBlogger186125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-74539716346113434162011-06-02T13:40:00.001-07:002011-06-02T13:40:32.627-07:00LATEST POSThttp://insistentscenes.blogspot.com/2011/06/foray-into-america.htmlFred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-44736574923746478462011-01-14T08:12:00.000-08:002011-01-14T08:13:54.225-08:00Going Back AgainFor years it worked, move on to something exciting – Bangkok, Cuba, a revolution in Africa, girls and art in Port-au Prince, more adventure in Jordan or Taipei or Panama city. It relieved the depression and I did not think of anger – but each time my new state would come to an end whatever was around me. And the anger and something dark and immovable were still there.<br /><br />So this too was on my mind, this puzzle about my anger that I seemed on the brink of resolving, on my mind as I entered places of the past in 1986 out to get the goods on the family malefactors – with more questions arising at each stage of the hunt.<br /><br />And I thought of that very recent breakup with Jacqueline when while she was on the phone to me, while she was saying it was over, my white hot anger returned, and click click click, I was shouting angrily back thorough the years at Mary in my recent marriage, at Sheila, whom I had told I would return to Singapore to fetch, at Sunisar in her gold lame gown in Bangkok, and at Bonnie for whom I had left Sunisar, and moving on back through hyper sensual Kentucky Janet to Helga from Zurich, my long time lovely painter girlfriend Valerie, and back into hopeful adolescence with Sandie and especially Ellyse. And to places from which I had been, in the language of those times, eighty-sixed – a bathhouse in Peitou, Bradley’s in New York, a gentile hotel lounge in Nassau, a bar in Hong Kong where when you sat down with a girl they brought you a roll of toilet paper. And then, picking up again, going click, click click all the way back past Ellyse, all the way back to, of all people, my mother.Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-5230585654557842222011-01-14T07:47:00.000-08:002012-08-02T09:45:13.361-07:00Last Gasp in Chelsea<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
These plans, anyway, were circulating. The one that seemed close to a paying off, the light personal experience book, Twins in the American Century, this funny situation of my twin an I traveling the world but always on opposite sides, the people he was connecting with wanting, and sometimes trying with success, to kill the people I was connecting with, and vice versa – it seemed funny when I talked it, but not when I tried to do the sample chapter. But anyway the worst of the plans, the travel series on the West Indies and the dull Bahamas, was ready to go and an offer seemed on the way and Amy was coming from Rome to join me in this first leg – something like the way I thought life should be. It should be like Amy looked.<br />
<br />
My cousin Elizabeth, who until this year I rarely saw but with whom I had had a black sheep’s bond, died just before our departure date. It had seemed like the bone marrow transplant was a success and then she had fallen apart, wound up on a respirator not in the city but in Westchester near her tight family’s little Scarsdale world. Died on a respirator after saying she would not be well for she wanted to die, because of the things they had done to her.<br />
<br />
I went to Scarsdale for the funeral, where not long ago I had gone for my uncle’s funeral, a big stone Episcopal church that actually had a British Union Jack flag draped off to the side of a tidy stone alter, and where they read from the Book of Common Prayer, which we knew was so British, and it reminder me of childhood in the New Hampshire summers, this church where my brother and I took up the collection and where they would actually sing God Save the King. These people. <br />
<br />
It also reminded me of life outside the family. Once Nana has told me that Aunt Marjorie had had a bad experience for there was a problem in her church. At a Scarsdale country club a boy one of the girls had invited to a dance was asked to leave when it was discovered he was Jewish. Later I heard the story from his perspective, for I later discovered it had been my old friend, the brilliant Walter Karp. The problem for Aunt Marjorie was that her Episcopal minister had criticized the country club, and so the parishioners has had him removed.<br />
<br />
After the church service everyone went first to Elizabeth’s mother’s house for drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Aunt Marjorie pointed out that this had nothing to in common with the wakes that other sorts of people, like Irish and Italians, staged. My wife was there. She had appeared at the church. We had been Elizabeth’s friends. This was first time I had seen Mary since that violent night in Chelsea. But she decided not to go along in a limousine caravan to a sprawling Brooklyn cemetery where, it was constantly pointed out, prominent people were buried, and where Elizabeth’s three little children looked like children who had been left by the side of road.<br />
<br />
I hardly paid attention to these children, however, as if they had nothing to do with me.<br />
<br />
I had gone 36 hours without sleep by then for I wanted to get the island plan right, more for possible publication than for this immediate sojourn, before we left. I went back to Chelsea to sleep to a few hours, and then met Amy at the airport.<br />
<br />
Cousin Elizabeth dead. The others still alive, except for Cousin Paul who had been killed a few years back, The others still alive but, I thought, but in precarious lives. Cousin<br />
Richard back drugged our and sexed and back from California to spend the rest of his life with his mother. Lawrence, whose theatrical ventures were getting more and more precious, Jonathan always on the verge of being caught out , because of his kleptomania, even though he had a PhD now and had once been an Eagle Scout.<br />
<br />
I knew without knowing exactly how I knew, that Elizabeth’s death was only one of many death’s looming. And I kept thinking, even as circumstances seemed so different, of death in the air. My twin brother had sent me a letter suggesting I give up everything and find a dull job because I should remember that we had nearly 30 years left to live. Peter always had it figured out. Fifty years when we were 21. Then for a time 40 years, and now 30 years, and the time shrinking fast.<br />
<br />
Was that what I had to fight? That in the family I came from, as made clear in the present by Peter, death had always near.<br />
<br />
And I did not feel depressed. No clear path ahead, nothing like what I would have predicted, but nonetheless alive and invigorated, as in a dash to outrace death.Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-51562599094344055862011-01-13T09:41:00.000-08:002011-01-13T09:43:03.080-08:00November summaryAnd now it is November, two years after that strange cut-off time in the rented room. I still live on that block, but for two years I have had a bright airy place of my own with a view over an abandoned garden and then rooftops – and those wonderful wooden water towers– the view leading almost to the Battery. Two years, the first being an attempt to put everything back together – plans and schemes and this blonde woman in from Rome who went with me to the Bahamas, and everything was wrong. And those events that made it impossible for me not to see what that family came from was all about, even though there were the exciting parts I the family story – socialism and the writing of well reviewed novels. And then there had been an unleashing of everything I has kept in while unaware I was keeping most of it inside me. And then the plunge into the past, the plunge into the stories. <br /><br />And now it was November and I was back in the north country again, for the fourth time in a year, this place I usually had though I thought I did not need to see again, back this time on a rescue mission, which almost ended before it started when I got caught in a full whiteout, snow that suddenly began while I was driving through Franconia Notch, one of those storms that in family lore could come up any time and kill you, like projected attacks by Mama bears, or rusty nails that could give you blood poisoning, or an out of nowhere lightening bolt – back here in Sugar Hill where all the summer people had lightening rods on their houses. Staying now with my old friend Mickie in a White Wings where I had spent the first three summers of my life before being moved to White Pines.Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-26757523304459385962011-01-12T11:05:00.000-08:002011-01-12T11:17:12.272-08:00THE BIG THINGS AND THE SMALL<a href="http://insistentscenes.blogspot.com/">Insistent Scenes</a>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-58379649284344868172010-12-22T08:18:00.000-08:002010-12-22T08:22:19.953-08:00#176 - RED TIDE<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There was always a change at Tampa or Miami to a shaky little propeller plane, always a captain who looked about 18, and often I’d be tossed around for the there is always foul weather there or looming in this so-called sunshine state. And then I had survived another trip on one of these little unregulated commuter airlines. I was in Naples. It would be too cold to swim, despite Florida claims, and anyway you could rarely swim on the west coast because of something called the red tide that left great welts on Your skin. This place where my father had come to die his horrible death, and where my mother had to be waiting for hers, though she still got around. When the dial phone rang in her condo it could be the policed badgering old people for money. The condo was not on the gulf, for her eyes could not stand the glare from the water , but on a bay where sometimes alligators were killed right in front of her place. She no longer played golf, though she still had clubs in the trunk of the little Plymouth she hardly ever used. They had just built a new golf course and new country club building in the rich part of Naples. The developers had sold big houses, McMansions, on the basis that the country club was being built, sold the houses before letting it be known that the country club would not accept Jews. Naples, the nice people’s place. Mother found this of interest, and did not seem to take sides. Some days there were noxious swamp gases from the Everglades in the Naples air.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I had not seen my mother since I had gotten into the significant changes in all the old stories. And I had not seen her since receiving that postcard she sent when her cruise ship docked at the port of Manila, a city where I had recently been under death threat for my activities with the opposition, including the New People’s Army, to the Reagan’s dictator friends, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. On the card she said that my twin brother Peter, the good twin, the CIA twin, had been there to meet the cruise ship. What a surprise, she said. And Peter had added a line in the margin of the card making light of “people power,” which was the not very accurate name for what had just overthrown the Marcoses. Peter had sworn to me he never had anything to do with the Philippines.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I mentioned this now and my mother asked me what I was talking about. I must be mistaken. I must have made it up about Peter being there and writing on the post card. She could assure me it had never happened.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I did tell her I had been in the While Mountains. I said I had seen Mrs. Milner. She said Mrs. Miner had left the family because Aunt Alice was having an affair with her son, which was not even close to what Mrs. Miner had told me, for Mrs. Miner said she left because life at White Pines was cold and mean. Mother said she had been getting calls from Aunt Alice who said I had written her saying I did not want to see her when she came to new York for the winter because of how she treated Deirdre. Aunt Alice had told Mother that my refusal to see her was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Mother reported this with no sign of any emotion about any of it.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I asked if she had old photographs, something I had not bothered with before. She did, she said, in a storage space below the bookcase. Actually Peter and his wife had gone through them, but there was still many they had not taken. I found somed I had never seen of mother holding her two little babies, or rather holding Peter in a safe grip and hardly bothering with me. That was when we were about a year old, and the same thing again in a photo a few years later. And there was a picture of me with old two stuffed animals, one of which I recognized as my old favorite – a pale yellow dog made of leather and fake fur that I had named Barksy.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I told her I had been looking into old places up in the mountains. I did not tell her why. I did not tell her about my need to get the story right, to find out why so many of the people from those perfect summers, including all my cousins were coming to such bad ends. Deirdre’s battering the least of it for unlike some of them she was alive and her brain was not damaged. I did not tell her what I had suspected had happened to me.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">At one point Mother made a statement about the family. She said, “What separates us is that we have…” and here she paused, “We have good genes.”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">That first evening she got a phone call from Aunt Peggy, my late father’s sister-in-law, one of the relatives who stayed away from his death bed scene. The news was that the wife of Peggy’s pampered older son Jonathan – who was named after a purported naval hero in her line of descent – had just killed herself. Hung herself in Rochester, where Fitz was a new assistant professor of anthropology.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I was thinking of this late the next morning, still in bed in the guest room, which had recently been my father’s room. I was thinking about Fitz’s wife Elkaa, who had written to me in Southeast Asia me before she got married saying she had heard a lot about me and was happy there was someone in the family who was not a standard issue Poole. And we hit off when I was back in the country and finally met her – a vibrant , good looking young woman with an ironic but kindly smile. And I knew she disturbed her in-laws. What made Aunt Peggy particular furious was that when Elka came to spend a night in Scarsdale she brought with her a much loved black cat. This was as serious as that Elka was Jewish. I wondered what would become of her cat.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Mother knocked on the bedroom door. She said she had good news. She said she had just been on the phone with Peggy, and Peggy had just been talking with Elka’s mother, and the two mothers had agreed that it was all for the good that Elka was dead now. She had always been such a problem to her family in Long Island. And now Fitz would be able to lead the life he was meant for. My mother presented this as good news.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">One photo that hit me hard was of Mother’s father, Grandfather Taylor. I remembered him as a jolly man, even when he was wasted away with cancer. But in this photo he looked like an Irish barroom fighter. He also looked a lot like Pat Buchanan, the Nixon aid turned opinionated journalist who was running for president on a basically anti-Semitic platform. And I thought of how on his infrequent visits he called my mother Dolly, and how he would find a bar wherever he was. I was once asked to fetch him form a bar in Westport where he was regaling everyone with baseball talk and joking stories. As different as it was possible to be from a person in my father’s family.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And then one of those memories that stayed somewhere in conciousness but had seemed meaningless. Once when Grandfather Taylor visited us in Connecticut, which was while his ex-wife, Grandmother Taylor, was away, Peter and I were going through his things and we found a pouch filled with pencils that had our names printed on them, such as ones had had made to give us for Christmas but here were clearly for himself. This discovery set us of crying and shouting, scared and furious.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">At one point I asked Mother to tell me something about her childhood. She said she remembered nothing until she was in boarding school except for a picture in her mind of a servant looking down at her when she was in a baby carriage. She loved her boarding school, she said. I remembered that, though she handily ever sang, she had sung to us her old school song – “Arden my garden, my school amongst that pines…”</span></span></p><div><br /></div>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-55348046283009825472010-12-19T11:18:00.000-08:002010-12-19T11:21:09.163-08:00#175 – “HOME” FOR "THE HOLIDAYS"<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">A week after getting back to Chelsea from this perhaps final trip ever to the White Mountains it was time for my annual trip to awful Florida. Dull, pretentious bigoted Naples on the genteel people’s usually placid west coast – Naples where three years ago my father had died in great pain, his chest an open red and yellow cancer wound, the death bed scene taking place in a third rate hospital that they all thought was fine but thought turn away Mexican citrus grove workers who came with knife fight wounds. This death scene. My then wife and I would spell each other, though our marriage was entering death too. In turn we would nap beside him on a raised bed that had been placed next to the death bed. At the foot the death bed sat a sad eyed and laconic young private nurse who said she was from a river town in Kentucky. The only sound the forced uneven breathing of my father. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">A death bed scene to which no one came, except at the end my almost ex wife taking turns with me there. The others from this family I was now getting the goods on had deserted him. I knew enough already although this was three years before my intense investigations began. I did not just suddenly decide I was not a part of this sometimes intriguing and but also bigoted and deathly world I was born into. The death bed scene to which they did not show up. My mother, his wife, drinking at their condo, where she had already removed his hospital bed and Hoyer Lift and turned his bedroom into a guest room, and my brother the twin, and his British wife, and my father’s last living sibling my Aunt Alice, and his still living sister in law Aunt Peggy – none of them would come to the death. Sometimes the excuse was that Dad was surely in such a coma he would not know, but my wife and I knew he knew a lot, knew he asked for his wife, but none of them would believe us. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">My routine now was to go to Florida at Thanksgiving so as to avoid Florida at Christmas. Back in the city I was back with all these new people I had been with all year, people willing to go back into the past so as to be alive in the present, and I was back to drawing cityscapes, water towers and boxy buildings and cars that looked liked cartoon characters, and hanging traffic lights. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Everyone in ACOA knew about my visual adventures, just as they knew about dark things I knew or suspected about the places I came from. At this very time I was back for maybe the last time from the mountains, and about to be in Florida for a cold version of a cliché family holiday visit, a new book by Alice Miller came out and they gave it to me in ACOA. Alice Miller who she did more than anyone else to help get at family horrors and break free of family horrors, her own and those of her readers. Her new book was called Pictures of a Childhood. It contained reproductions of her free form paintings, the paintings by which she got at what had happened. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">This tough Switzerland-based analyst who up till then had been an honored orthodox Freudian, holding on to all that Freud had used, including the child sex drive theory, to keep himself from the harshest parts of real stories, those of his patients and probably also his own. She wrote in an introduction of how when she started painting, which she had given up so long ago she had forgotten she ever painted. It was at a time in mid-life that she felt her life at a dead end, then something crucial happened. In the mysterious sphere of art a little girl took her by the hand and led her back into that past she had tried to make better and tried to deny. Back to a time when she was painting, which in the past had been a secret thing between her and the forms and the colors. And then she had stopped altogether so that the narcissists who were her parents couldn’t get to it and kill it. And now this little girl took her back into herself.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> I carried Pictures of a Childhood on the plane to Florida. And I drew on the plane. Across the aisle a fit middle aged man was reading a best seller by a basketball coach.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">II</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">What I was drawing on the plane to Florida were, first, full page cartoon-like faces so distorted they were surprisingly horrible. They appeared almost all by themselves on my drawing pad. They seemed to be faces I knew. And then while on the plane I became focused on what I had suspected all year and really known since that moment last month on the phone when my Aunt Alice was telling me that her daughter was in a battered women’s shelter and that she really sympathized with the batterer because her daughter, my favorite cousin Lauryn, was just too young looking and appealing for her own good. Had it always been this way – these things happening and there being a connection between them. Paul’s death. Elizabeth’s. Malcolm’s druggy incapacitation. Paul’s serial sexual assaults on Deirdre. Deirdre’s battering. I remembered now that in the sports bar Deirdre was also telling me that her mother had gone through the same sorts of things – which I thought I would have known if I had done any reading between the lines.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">But that moment on the phone with Aunt Alice. That moment I had had a quite clear idea of why long before I was grown even to the point of looking for prostitutes much less getting involved with girls who seemed to love me, back even when I was so young I had only the vaguest and totally incorrect ideas about the mechanics of sex, not even that sex has anything to do with babies growing in female stomachs, even back then I knew, without knowing I knew, the feel of a bare rounded breast, of bare soft smooth skin, of the special skin on a woman’s inner thigh. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">This is on my mind on the plane to awful Florida where I go for Thanksgiving as a way out of going for Christmas with my mother. I have with me Alice Miller’s Pictures of a Childhood and I have the drawing pad I had just taken with me on that last trip to the White Mountains to rescue Deirdre who was back there again just out of a battered women’s shelter in the Midwest. My favorite cousin. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Ever since that phone call I have had I this picture of myself at the end of the upstairs hall at White Pines, the end that used t be blocked off as servant’s quarters but by the time I came along servants wanted to live in their own homes in the village, So these bedroom at the end of the hall were available for overflow family people, as in when they realized how freighted my brother and I were by real and imagined sounds in the night when we spent the nights in the distant Boys Wing and so moved us to these servant bedrooms at the far end of the upstairs of the house. From outside my room here there was a very steep staircase that led right into one of the pantries of the huge kitchen, where I seemed to spent a lot of my time. Down at the foot of the stairs was a box on the wall on which numbers would fall down corresponding to the room of whoever had pressed a buzzer button meaning service to that person’s room upstairs was desired.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I drew the box and the numbers. I also drew a collapsible woods slat gate that was sometimes pulled across the top of the narrow stairs so that we children when alone there would not tumble down. Sometimes I would be visited by someone who came directly up those steep stairs, like the day my Aunt Alice, a proven war widow, told me she had it on good authority that the Japanese pulled their prisoners' tongues out – or when in a still earlier summer Aunt Alice and also a free-flowing California blonde cousin by marriage, came up at twilight time to tuck me in, kiss me good light. They were dressed in flowing silky things that showed their arms and backs and their breasts almost to the nipples. They were on their way to a formal dance, a Red Cross fund raiser, at the Playhouse. During the day I had been up there at the Playhouse with our nurse watching a man hang Japanese lanterns in rows for people pass between as they came in to the dance. These women in my room now, dressed for the dance, they smelled sweet, like my mother’s cologne but more so. And they seemed pampered like kids, their smooth skin powdered like their pretty faces. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">On the way to the playhouse, where in my own time we danced in nearly pitch dark not to an orchestra but to LPs, locked together so that, though actual sex seemed out of reach, it felt wildly close.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">After I drew the box a few times. I drew the gate. Right here in this anonymous airplane I could smell those women. But my drawing was not accomplished art work. Maybe after I started at Parsons…. As it was, in the three months of my trying to draw I had done the buildings and water towers and hanging traffic lights and waiting cars parked around where I lived. Inanimate things that felt animate. And I had done one of little girls at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden sitting Indian fashion in a semi-circle around a friendly looking fat tree and a friendly woman. I had also been trying to sketch people in the subways, usually adults and children leaning on each other. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> In the plane now I can feel myself a small child wrapped in a smooth woman. When I am not trying to draw I am looking at the Alice Miller dream paintings, and reading about how what happened was that finally a little girl came out of the past and took her by the hand. I exactly didn’t see a little boy taking me back, but I was remembering things I had forgotten that had to do with putting lines and colors on paper. I remembered drawing World Wry II planes, like everyone was doing, but mine were flying between and around the planets. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I had not seen anything like it until a couple of weeks ago there was a post suicide show at the School for Visual Art of works by this artist, younger brother of my childhood friend, who had planned to drive up to Vermont with me at the start of the summer but had killed himself insteaed. In the show were paintings of little people pedaling fiercely on unicycles as they dropped through space. </span></span></p><div><br /></div>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-80346609411311729642010-12-16T11:11:00.000-08:002010-12-16T11:13:00.951-08:00#174 – DEFECTIONS<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">There were defections. I knew there would be but it still was startling, like a lover moving on, and you had hoped and known she would, but when she does it is like it comes out of the ether.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">An early defector was a chubby young girl who seemed violently unhappy, but kept saying everything was fine, a girl whose face was twisted in a grimace often and whose overweight body sometimes seemed nubile but sometimes it was like the sagging body of someone old and defeated. And when she talked, and she talked at length, it was always about how pretty she was, though her moments of seeming pretty were fleeting. She was a friend of the very alive and actually pretty young girl who was back in Lenox, Mass. I ran into the chubby girl one day on the subway. She said she was finished with ACOA, all these people who had nothing do to but complain. She was moving on as, she implied, she always knew she would. Goodbye you little people who can’t get your lives together. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Over on the East Side there was a sweating man in twisted middle age who said people should realize he was really with the CIA, and was gearing up to go on one last mission. And he said not to feel insulted if he did not recognize any of us for he had something in his brain that made it impossible to identify faces.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">An older girl or woman who could really let go in meetings disappeared too. She had not claimed to be pretty. She had often spoken of being passionate about sexual attraction to and from women, and she would say that what made her really angry was that the men wanted to keep all the women to themselves. She was the one who when the Reaganites bombed unprotected people in Libya, and Reagan’s Defense Secretary was leaping up and down on television in apparent sexual arousal, came to a meeting angry at the French for, she said, we must all think the worst thing was that the French would not let our bombers fly over their country. And now I ran into her in the subway too. She said I may have noticed that she had not been around. She had had enough, she said, echoing an AA thing about “getting off the pity pot.’”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Century"><span style="font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">And there was a well-groomed, soft-spoken, clean-cut man </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">who had been coming for years but now sent a letter around to everyone in Manhattan ACOA whose addresses he could find telling them he had moved on to another stage, and now would go only to a meeting in Brooklyn Heights where people held in their anger. A nice people’s meeting. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">And some who stayed were defecting in other ways. A taut woman, who looked like someone who would carry a clipboard, announced what she called the good news that ACOA was getting a national organization, to be based in California. Worse than a defection, this could mean the end to the sorts of tough life-giving things that were happening with people in non-scripted, non-pious Manhattan ACOA. I had seen the vague California version on my last trip out there, the self flagellators, the pious followers of pious versions the 12 steps that we mostly ignored in Manhattan – the Californians’ penchant for cutting off what I thought of as healthy anger, to closing everything down in the name of harmony, whereas in Manhattan there were no rules, no hierarchy. In Manhattan, anything was allowed short of racial bigotry or necrophilia. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">And something else was changing too. The really smart people, including the sympathetic therapist who had finally turned her attention to herself and her history, and also my frightening stalker Abigail, had gravitated to each other. We really smart people. And now there was a new intellectual named Harry who had just appeared and it seemed he was “one of us,” the therapist told me happily, “one of us” meaning, to her, that he was a solid atheist who would work to keep any soft and silly AA piety, or any other sort of piety, out of ACOA. She almost forgave him for showing up quite drunk at a couple of our meetings that had expanded to get the goods on all abusers but were originally formed to get the goods on abusing boozers. I certainly was not religious. An author’s directory had me as correctly atheist/agnostic. But this year would not have been this year if I had not become open to alternative versions of reality. I thought of those churches in Vermont. And now for the first time I could see that between my new allies and me there could be a chasm as great as the divide between me and the Poole dynasty of the White Mountains. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">And I was finding that I was spending as much time in the museums as in ACOA meetings. I talked with Julia, a tall sweet, sometimes tortured girl in ACOA whose parents had been Cuban before they became American State Department people. She was an artist and understood what I as doing. And she was enrolled at Parsons.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I thought of an open and delicately sculptured girl named Trish, who was more vulnerable than I had realized and whom I had been with a number of times when I was with other girls too way back in the late fifties. She gave me a book of love poetry. It felt wonderful. I could not find her again three years later in a time of darkness after foreign adventures. Had she changed her name? </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Trish had been studying fashion design at Parsons. Two parts of my inner and outer worlds coming together, my attraction to appealing visual art and my attraction of appealing women. Visual art, not writing. I had taken Trish on an expense account for something silly to Chicago for a weekend when I was 25. I knew Chicago from when I was 21 and was having what now seemed like serial epiphanies in the Art Institute. Something else in the past to consider in this year 1986 in which so much was coming to me visually, not verbally. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><br /></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"></p>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-11041767775778113022010-12-13T12:25:00.000-08:002010-12-13T12:36:35.229-08:00173 – WHALES<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms'; font-size: large; ">There but for the grace of God go I. These words appeared from nowhere </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms'; font-size: large; ">in this amusing old Mustang I was in, the car itself seeming as relieved as perhaps I should be feeling to be getting away from the White Mountains. This place I had avoided for so long and did not think I had to deal with, except to admire, until this year of exploration when it had become clear to me that I could not live unless I got the old stories straight. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms'; font-size: large; ">Some of my friends from childhood and adolescence were still there up there in the mountains and in the stories. My brother, who had the last of the big family houses, was still there with his English wife, summers in the mountains and winters in a Virginia suburb near the CIA, where he had gone to work. Donald was still there, for him a place to live with no career, his work life apparently having come to an end when, while still in his twenties, he was denied tenure at Dartmouth despite his work on Rudyard Kipling. And Ginnie was back having decided to delete her art career. And Terri, too, was again in this small corner of the world, living in one wing of a family house, White Wings, that was once one of our houses. Hal was coming up from Massachusetts frequently for the hunting and killing of small animals. These people from our summer gang had been out in the world, and now they were back. There but for the grace of god.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Not that I really believed then either in a god or that I could be trapped that way. But in this year of exploration I had realized how much before this year I had been protecting the family and its restricted kingdom, even while I stayed away, even while I made fun of them all. I had blocked off the mental meanderings that might have led me to figure it out, blocked out evidence of the death and abuse just below the surface – and the way they could kill off anything that did not have family precedent. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">And I thought of how it has been when we were all young there. How I had been so sure we would all be so different from the kings and queens of these little kingdoms based on restricted ownership of big summer houses.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">There but for the grace of God go I. An AA term, one of the AA sayings that many of us had fun with, and hated, in the much more free wheeling and open ACOA, Adult Children of Alcoholics, where everyone was out to get the goods on the propagators of horrors in the past. By 1986 I had not had a drink in over a decade – not even when back in the Far East – not even when in a failing marriage – not even when I would have moments of seeming success when a book came out. But I did not associate myself with these AA people we were attacking. </span></span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">In one bleak year, when my marriage was grim and I could not write, I had dropped in with some regularity on an afternoon AA meeting on the Upper West Side, near where I lived then. I kept to myself. I went there not as a participant but to hear the stories of others. Now I thought I unconciously went there looking for some real draw to connections I lacked. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">And now I was thinking as I drove away from the mountains, as I played on the tape deck Judy Collins and James Taylor and Joan Armatrading, whose songs has been accompanying me in this year of battle against the old kingdoms – I was thinking that those words from poor old AA applied to me too. For before this year it has almost seemed like life was over. I had finally had to admit despair, and not of the sweet romantic kind, and also the almost literal loss of hope, certainly the deepest of all the depressions I had known, including the incapacitating ones I had denied, this one feeling like the terminal depression – and all this has changed this year as I pieced the story together, revising the scenes of the past, finding witnesses from the past, finding memories I could trust – and people to accompany me to those ignored dark places. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">As I drive down back roads all the way from the White Mountains, there is a welling up such as has become familiar in this year. Judy Collins is singing a song about a man on a sailing ship who goes all the way to barren Greenland to kill whales. She sings the line, “There is no bird in Greenland to sing to the whale." And on the tape are the actual sad and lonely whistling sounds of actual whales who will not be saved.</span></span></p><div><br /></div>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-28569517090781961632010-12-06T11:48:00.000-08:002010-12-06T11:50:06.927-08:00172 - WREATHS<div><br /></div><div><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I spent my last afternoon with Lauryn while she was making big lush Christmas wreaths from pine boughs with pine cones and bright ribbons, all her materials laid out on the floor of a glass enclosed old porch at her boyfriend’s old Littlewton house. She said she had had this wreath business when she was living in Littleton in the past, so it was easy to get back in it now. This seemed so touching to me: the brave gorgeous girl being independent with something basically artistic, even back in the darkest days.</span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">This warm world of girlfriends and boyfriends and a town where you were known. The pretty girl’s veneer that she was in a world that was light and happy. </span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">But during the wreath-making her son kept appearing. He had lived in Littleton with his grandmother, Aunt Alice, since he was thrown out of the White Mountain School. Now he kept dropping in at the boyfriend’s house. He was a little angry. He said he thought what we were doing was ridiculous He said he did not like not being able to tell his grandmother that Fred was here in the mountains. Everyone, he said, should get along. His tone was arch.</span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Here in the warm world of girlfriends and boyfriends in regular place – with the grandson a messenger from places of a colder, sterner dispensation. Lauryn’s mother using her son to get her back. </span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">When Lauryn was in her first weeks in college in Minnesota – a college she want to because her mother did not want her joining her town friends at the University of New Hampshire – she had called her mother for advice and help. She had found herself pregnant. Aunt Alice had promptly flown out to the Midest and talked Lauryn into having the child, though Lauryn wanted an abortion. I had asked her why she had not done what she had wanted to do. Her reply was, “Because this is my mother.”</span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> Her mother, who had been the designated girl in trouble of her generation, the light airy one who was loved to distraction by her father and more or less openly had affairs that so disturbed people who never spoke of such things. </span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Her father loved her more than anyone else, though she scandalized them. And anyway she stayed loyal. She kept on returning to the White Mountains in the summers, even when she was living in England, and when the going got really tough it was to the White Mountains that she had gone, though to Littleton rather than the correct summer people’s towns. Afterwards she complained that none of the old family friends up there had been welcoming. </span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">She was a problem, especially to my father, who had given up part of his inheritance, and then seen to it that that part and the money that had come to her directly was in a trust set up so that she could never get at the principal. Enough for her to live on but with no extraneous luxuries.</span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">And now it was her daughter, the pretty one of the next generation, who had responded to hard times by returning to the mountains.</span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Lauryn said she wanted me to take me one of the wreaths. She said she really wanted me to have it.</span></span></p></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></div>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-15047140443760383752010-12-06T11:42:00.000-08:002010-12-06T11:48:13.216-08:00#171 – A CAR<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">The next morning Lauryn called me at Terri’s and said she needed a favor. She did not have her own car but someone was going to loan her one. Could I come by, pick her up and take her somewhere. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">We drove to what looked like a gravel quarry turned into a construction area. The man who had the car was there in a long trailer where he apparently both worked and lived. Around the main part of it there were blueprints laid out on drafting tables. He was a tall youngish man, another who had been in high school with Lauryn. A quite well off young man whose family owned the property he was planning to develop. Like the boyfriend, he seemed so delighted to see this woman who still looked like a girl. Was quick and smart as well as lovely, challenged men to be their best, seemed not to have a care, seemed so well-adjusted and cheerfull.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">This man with the trailer, the family business and the extra car was, she told me, the owner of the Littleton diner. This was not the time for my amusing punch line about the specialty of the day being cheeseburger quiche.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-39335489734121617912010-12-03T10:34:00.000-08:002010-12-03T10:51:34.890-08:00#170 – TOWN GIRL<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> I started that day after the moonlight trek on little sleep but feeling new energy. It was as if during the night I had gone into battle and survived. A battle of competing versions of reality, my evolving version and that of the people who had been in those big old houses long before I was born, and during my childhood and adolescence. And it was as if during the night it had become absolutely clear what I had been doing and needed to do – not that I had felt at any time in the past year that the attacks I was making on family were not warranted. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Awake in late morning I looked out my room’s window past the aqua Mustang to the familiar field in front of White Wings. The remaining snow cover was melting. Brown grass was appearing.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Before Terri began bringing in retired farm animals this field had already been like a rocky grazing field – which I knew the people of the past would find classier than a tailored lawn. In my line of sight now was a bushy pine thing in the middle of the field, a pine thing that had many separate limbs growing up from the ground. I took from my very old briefcase my still new drawing pad, feeling that I was in the swing of something natural to me. I sketched the pine thing roughly with one of my still new drawing pencils. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I called Lauryn and we met in Littleton for coffee. This lively though so recently battered cousin I had driven up here to comfort or rescue. She told me now that last night she had forgotten to say she was doing therapy. When she got back from the Middle West, out of the shelter, she had found a new group of therapists had set up shop specializing in trauma right here in Littleton, this old time mill town, where she had gone to high school. I was suspicious since I had been hearing so many stories this past year of people going through years of therapy without every getting at family horrors. Therapists scared of their own stories. But she showed me a brochure that made it seem the new group in Littleton was cutting edge, with an approach that was perhaps not so unlike what we were doing in ACOA without therapists. I showed her the drawing. It was a Juniper, she said. And then she spoke again of how, now that the worst was over, she really wanted to continue her studies to become a landscape architect.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In the evening I went over to the house where her new boyfriend lived with his crusty old mother down by the rushing Amonoosic</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">River, a timeless area of mystery with its weather beaten wooden buildings, some of them solid but some so flimsy you’d think the water could carry them away. Old houses. Old shuttered factories in the background. Old-time year-round people. A place of mystery. And in this place a warm old house where Lauryn had apparently found safety. </span></span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The TV was on and I believed it would always be on. The boyfriend was a friendly man who worked in construction in the summers and was on the ski patrol, based on Cannon Mountain, in the winter. He said that although he and Lauryn were in the same high school class they had been in such different circles that they hardly knew each other. She the popular girl of the time. And then she had gone away to college like so many in the class, to college or bigger places, and he had found himself one of the very few who never left. In the living room of his family house now she was running her fingers through his hair.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">French Canadians down by the river in Littleton. A mill town. The summer people’s shopping town. A real town with its different place in the world. They told me his late father was a legendary figure who had made his living trucking booze in from Canada during prohibition. And the old rum runner’s wife, here dominating the living room even while she simply stared at the TV, she was as solid as the Old Man of the Mountains and nearly as craggy.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></span></p>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-90560653672664085082010-12-03T10:05:00.000-08:002010-12-03T11:00:57.890-08:00#169 – MOONLIGHT<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">I come in late. I think I should be exhausted with all the ground we have just </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">covered at the Clam Shell. But there is an almost full moon that bounces off the early snow that lightly covers the ground, the snow that came as I was driving through the Notch. The cold night air is so clear and fresh, and the past so present, that what I must see I can best see in moonlight.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">I walk out the driveway though the field in front of White Wings to to Davis Road, this birch-lined road of summers, this road where I walked as a child with Gaga, who always had a cane and a floppy sun hat, and sometimes actual dogs though sometimes just remembered dogs, this road where Peter and I laid plans to be welcoming North Country inn keepers, this road I drove when I was 16 with my important girlfriend Ellyse – this road that eventually passes the little summer church where my parents were married and where at 14 in a rare good boy phase I would, with my twin brother, take up the collection, this church that some said was so like something you would expect in England. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">By now I could not stand the sounds of British English for it reminded me of the fake British sounds of these summer people. But that distaste for those sounds was recent. And I still felt the pull of family that centered around the life and work of the grandfather, the writer, that had its radical side that I had tried to concentrate on – though he spent so much of his life here among people as far from old socialist colleagues as my grandfather could get.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">This place that must carry an explanation for the molestation and early death that now seemed the hallmark of a family whose worst failings used to be snobbery – these people whom I had been attacking for a year now, the first year of my life that I have been free of depression.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">I walk, through the snow now, past bare apple trees that in the night look like hanging trees, through the grounds of big houses that look now like gothic novel houses – in this place obscured by family fiction that I am trying to burrow into to find out what part is real. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">There is beauty here in the moonlight. I am looking for more than horror.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">My toes are numb but I walk all the way through pine woods down the twisting drive and look at White Pines against the mountains. From the outside you cannot tell it has been gutted and turned into cheap apartments. It is that house that is always there with the only difference being the cheap tin roof that has been added to what should have still been wooden shingles. The roof now is a giant reflector of moonlight. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">I return to the long drive. I cross Davis road and walk below the Farmhouse, shuttered for the winter, and then I walk up to at a rectangle in the ground that is still clear even with light snow, like something marked out on an area where archeologists plan to dig. This place where the Playhouse had stood. I am below the ominous House on the Hill, owned for some years now by old virginal school teachers who never bothered reviving the family tennis court.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">I pass a drive that may be to where the man my grandmother may have been having an affair with had lived. And I go on up Davis Road. No cars are out and here are no lighted houses, no houses at all before I get to the paved driveway going up beneath large branches to the Mallory’s old place. The chain barrier and the "Beware of the Dog" sign which in September Gillian had pointed out meant hostility to strangers, are no longer there. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">I walked up the drive. It was not plowed but the snow was powdery and could not have been more than three inches. Up the drive, with on the right the long garage where the Mallory's kept their cars, with rooms above for the many servants they brought with them from Philadelphia. Black servants. Enough of them to amuse themselves, people said, since there was no place for Negroes to go in the mountains. Past the garage the tennis court where old family people had gathered, Mrs. Mallory sometimes playing a folky zither, and then the chateau-like main house where people used to go for movie evenings since Otto Mallory did not drink. His death was so ironic, everyone said, hit by a drunken driver while going for his mail in Pennsylvania. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Beyond the chateau at the start of woods there was something that looked like a little house out of a fairy tale that I knew was the house where children had stayed, the counterpart to the children’s house for the Gibbs grandchildren, which had its own kitchen and room for a nurse or governess, and the Boys Wing for us at White Pines, where there was a room for our nurse too. Ours was not a separate house but you got to it through the kitchen and pantries.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">On up Davis Road. Cold but not minding it. Up all the way to that little summer church and just beyond the turnoff up past the Pioneer on one side and the Gibbs house on the other to where the old Sunset Hill House had stood. Had it burned down, or was that just something people said. Had it merely been demolished by wreckers, like the Playhouse? And now I come to the much smaller clapboard place that calls itself the Sunset Hill House but is actually the old building where the summer staff had lived, college boys who were summer bellboys, college girls who were summer waitresses. These older boys and pretty girls who came in from worlds beyond ours and with no family looking on – boys and girls who would not understand our people any more than our elders would understand them. The world beyond.</span></span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"></span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Cambria"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">But here I am in the world within. It i</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:large;">s painfully cold here. My toes ache and my feet are mostly numb. Probably not frostbite yet, but I do think I might be heading back to White Wings just in time.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><br /></p></span></span><p></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><br /></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:16px;"></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15px; "><br /></p><p></p>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-90566950576611848742010-11-24T08:28:00.000-08:002010-11-24T08:30:33.868-08:00#168 – ADRIFT<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">On the news is a horror scene in the subway, a station not far from here. A pursed little man named Bernie Goetz had cornered three black men and shot them, leaving one paralyzed from the neck down. The police catch up with him and there is suddenly a right wing campaign to honor and save Bernie Goetz. It somehow – no mystery to my mind – gets all tied up with the exaltation of Ronald Reagan. Rita is on food stamps and also distributes government food, cheese and honey, to everyone on the block, whether they qualify as officially poor or not. But she is a great fan of Reagan who would take all this away from her. Also, she is Puerto Rican in this time when Washington is in the hands of racists. And now she has become a great fan of Bernie Goetz. And still she is about the nicest person I have ever met.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond; min-height: 13.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">She keeps tabs on everyone in the neighborhood. Judging by her sweet, confident smile, and by the looks of a daughter who comes through, she was extremely pretty when she was young and thin and working as a catalog model, which was how she met her late husband. She rents to me illegally since this is a rent control apartment. She is all over the neighborhood, goes to mass frequently, knows everyone and everything. Although her apartment is cold at night, there is a feeling of plenty – a refrigerator full almost to overflowing, everything from ice cream to apple juice to turkey, sandwich spreads, ham apples, frozen deserts, and there are pantry shelves crowded with other fruits, and canned juices and meats, bread and pastries and crackers and cookies.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond; min-height: 13.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I am lonely here in this rented room that is so cold at night. Its linoleum floor feels refrigerated. And, moreover, I have the illusion I am wandering again in strange towns where I do not speak the language – Sarajevo, Cairo, Tokyo – though I am having this experience right here in New York where there are so many people I have known for so long. My window is on the ground floor, right on the sidewalk on 25</span></span><sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">th</span></span></sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> Street, and there is some sort of bar nearby that at 4 in the morning empties out a batch of men who then traverse the block singing drunkenly. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond; min-height: 13.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">It has become incredibly cold in here. I am reading, and also following on public TV, the Raj Quartet – sex and double dealing, in stifling hot places. Brits in jodhpurs, lovely tragic girls, some dark and some light, the Indians looking as Indian as the Brits look Brit. My old friend John Thackray has me going once a week to a yoga session, which takes place in a high apartment on Central Park West that looks out over the Central Park reservoir, which is so clear in the winter light. Three lithe girls, John and me, and the teacher, a personable out-of-work dancer. There are signs of the times here. Books linking angels to dolphins, and two flotation tanks. John tells me, in his ironically British tones, how you an be put in one of these wet coffin-like affairs in order to have some by-the-numbers spiritual experiences. But the guy who teaches the yoga class is no yoga martinet and is anyway not the owner of the place. John, who is a world class mountain climber and always in first rate shape (though he wasn’t when were friends 20 years ago) says it is the only yoga class where what they say about how to breathe makes sense to him and works. This yoga guy is a dancer who goes to auditions. All the classes are called off when he gets a role dancing and acting in a road company of A Chorus Line. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond; min-height: 13.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I go over to Murray Hill to see my doctor, who is actually the son of a doctor who delivered Peter and me and was a close friend of my grandfather’s close friend, an immigrant doctor with whom my grandfather worked in the settlement house movement early in the century. I like this doctor, who by now is himself getting old, because while we talk he chain smokes and his brash nurse brings him cup after cup of strong black coffee. Once when I was back from abroad and feeling awful he sent me to a series of specialists, all of whom were elderly men with thick accents. He gives me the sleeping pills I want, and I still see him even though he had told me a few years ago my only problem was is that I did not have a regular job. He had held up as an example his brother, whom he said was in the same situation, wanting to be a writer, until he got good job in public relations. He had said I needed therapy, but the kind where the therapist does most of the talking. He doesn’t repeat any of this now, but he does say that nothing physical explains the fatigue I feel, and so maybe I should look at certain aspects of my life. In the past he had said it was probably too late to do anything about whatever it was that kept me awake. My wife went to him once for a checkup and she told me he had said I was a person with whom he would enjoy having a drink.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond; min-height: 13.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">On my way back I run into my Aunt Alice who has just arrived from New Hampshire to spend the winter in a residential hotel in New York. She is full of ideas of things we should do. At the top of her list is the movie Gandhi which is playing on East 23rd and which I do not want to see. I really cannot take these fictionalized versions of real life. I know what Gandhi looked like. I have seen a thousand pictures. He did not like Ben Kingsley going for an Academy Award. Also, in recent years I have found I cannot stand to be in the same room with Aunt Alice, which I have thought might mean there is something wrong with me. She has always been, to the family and myself, my favorite aunt, the careful rebel of her generation. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond; min-height: 13.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Aunt Alice asks me to come to dinner at her club. She say the words “my club” in the English way she learned in her years in London. It turns out, strangely, to be the National Arts Club where some very safe artists have studios and which is stuffier than the Players Club, where my father went when he was in publishing, and nearly as stuffy as the Century, where my father once took me to lunch to tell me I should not take an offered book advance because my grandfather never took money until he had finished a book. For this dinner Aunt Alice brings along the daughter of someone she knows. Match-making is being attempted.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond; min-height: 13.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">The girl, who has a pretty face but wears a tailored suit, talks about a long love affair she had just gotten over. She works at what sounds like a boring job in finance. Her lover, however, was a painter. She talks of the long quiet evenings at his place where she would read and he would paint, and it all sounds so ideal that she must be sadder than she looks. There is nothing much between us, though it seems like there should be. She speaks about how her father has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Aunt Alice talks about her brother, my father, and his long decline into death with Parkinson’s – giving us and this girl, my aunt seems to be saying, the bond of having things in common.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond; min-height: 13.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Garamond"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Near my place I run into a neighbor, Harvey, who had been John’s best man years back when he married an appealing young actress at the Little Church Around the Corner, the Actor’s Church. Harvey is a smart lonesome guy who had a long affair with a woman who loved him but whom he rejected when they were in couples therapy. He works at part-time college teaching and never speaks about ambitions to do anything else. He is amusing in his pessimism about the political state of the world and the sad state of the arts. He lives in a studio apartment in London Terrace, an old middle class and upper middle class development, with strict controls on rents, that covers a full block just west of me. It has a long waiting list to get in. Elliot says it has dawned on him that he has such a good deal he will never leave, though he is unhappy that he did not think at the beginning to go for a one bedroom. I used to think we were at opposite ends – Elliot always down, me usually just back from some adventure or off on another. Now it looks like we may be interchangeable. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><br /></p>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-27171453699476521272010-11-22T08:37:00.000-08:002010-11-22T09:26:21.709-08:00#167-EXPLANATION<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">At end of the summer in Indianapolis I went to Connecticut for a long weekend with them all, Mother and Dad and my brother Peter at our house in Connecticut. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:large;">When I stepped down from the train at the Westport/Saugatuck station what got their attention was the new hat I was wearing. A hat I had seen in a store window on a Friday afternoon and that had seemed just the thing to wear for when I was up in Chicago that night. At the train station in Connecticut, they all said in turn, amused and exasperated, that now he has a pork pie hat. Home!</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:large;">At the beginning of November I spoke to them on the phone, an election night duty call much like a duty holiday call, though like those holiday calls I actually did want these occasional connections by phone back then. When it was clear the awful Eisenhower would win I went to a pay phone on a windy street so as not to be overheard calling home from the United Press bureau. To avoid an argument I skirted the issue of the election. Dad had said he could hear in my words that I had picked up a Middle Western accent, though actually in Indiana some people thought I sounded British. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">The pork pie hat. The hint of a Midwestern accent. Always something that brought me back to a sorry role in the lurking family story, which I tried so hard to sweep under the rug until this time 30 years later when I was at last on the hunt for what was there behind the family façade. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:large;">When in Connecticut on the long weekend I told them only of the up times in Indianapolis. Of getting promoted to covering the Legislature for United Press, of getting bylines. I did not tell them of things that would only bring them back to their constant jibes. For example, this girl I went out with whose father had the Muzak concession for Indianapolis. On the walls of their homey kitchen there were framed sampler style sayings about the divinity of music and its soothing of savage beasts (breasts?) while down in the basement a huge spool of tape, set on its side, was turning night and day sending out the most awful syrupy stuff to every waiting room and office building in Indianapolis. She was a sweet girl and bright, and I did not want them attacking her even though it would only be their version of her and she would never hear it.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Was this why I was so angry? That they could not see beyond themselves? That nothing was meant to be real? It was crucial to their sense of who they were that my late paternal grandfather had been for a time quite famous, an American novelist who had been on most freshman English classes required or suggested reading lists. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I could not talk to them about what really interested me because they could not connect, perhaps, to any stories that they did not themselves create. So I didn’t tell them about the little man who had just been released from prison after 17 years – one of the stories I was on. It turned out he had been the grand wizard or dragon or something of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan in a time leading up to World War II when the Klan had run just about everything from politics to outright crime in Indiana. But he had been convicted after it was found he had kidnapped a girl, forced her into a Pullman sleeper compartment in one of the many trains running up to Chicago, and there he had not just raped her, he had bitten off her nipples.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I had not heard anyone mention the Klan until this guy was released, and now, knowing how it had controlled the state, so much that puzzled me was suddenly clear. The Legislature I had been covering had just passed a law that, if the courts did not object, would mean a 10-year-old child could go to the electric chair in Indiana for nighttime burglary. Everyone knew who did nighttime burglary. Non-white rapists. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:large;">And I had seen the governor, his name was George Craig, standing in the back of a black convertible, surrounded by men with guns, standing as if he had his arm his arm up and out in a way that was halfway between a blessing to his people and a fascist salute. He was driven slowly around the racing oval at the state fairgrounds stadium. He had risen not in the usual ways of politicians elsewhere but through the state police and the American Legion, which has its black marble national headquarters right here.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:large;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:large;"> With this new information about the role of the Klan in Indiana, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:large;">so much fell into place. T</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'trebuchet ms';font-size:large;">he Klan control has been recent enough that almost all the puffed up politicians I covered had to have been members to be in politics. Governor Craig, and cruel, taut senator William Jenner, who had taken over as inquisitor from the disgraced Senator McCarthy, and the obese Senator Homer Capehart whose family manufactured juke boxes that the mob insisted every bar purchase – all these bizarre men. And the Southern racist layout and traditions of the city. And the prevailing suspicion of foreigners, including denizens of the East Coat. And the ever widening use of the electric chair. It all fell into place with this information about the Klan.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">And now 30 years later in New Hampshire on the search for what went so wrong that my cousins were coming to horrible ends, I thought back on that time in Indiana and wondered if there were not some piece of information, such as what came out when the prisoner was released in Indiana, that would be about something so awful that it would explain everything. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-38143147257818983522010-11-21T15:12:00.000-08:002010-11-21T15:17:44.402-08:00#166 - CONNECTED<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">The anger in that sports bar had been connected. Not like the free flowing anger of the past. As in those mornings I would awaken in the first place purely my own, a room with a view over a clean, colorless avenue from a brick rooming house in Indianapolis of all places. Awake and tight and taut and shaking from extreme anger, an anger that could have no end, a floating anger though nearly focused on my parents, on being raised as the dumb bad twin with the bright twin brother, on being belittled. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">But that part would come in and out of focus, for it seemed too flimsy to explain the intensity of my anger. And as I walked through the flat Midwestern city, breathing its unique flat air, on down past its black marble Roman or Nuremburg style national headquarters of the dread American Legion where the Commie hunters marched and schemed, on down past the lazy old Claypool hotel, wreathed inside and out by cigar smoke, where the politicians hung out, and then past small hotels where the small town assemblymen could find inexpensive short-time girls who poured into town when the legislture met, which was for two months every two years, and on down through on of the city’s skid rows, between missions and unsaved sidewalk drinkers, on to the old Indianapolis Times where I was in the United Press enclave, covering strange Hoosier world McCarthy era politics, some by phone, some from over at the grandiose state capitol.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">By this time at 21 I was well beyond family expectations of me. Only my father’s patrician mother seemed to see what I was doing – first by proving to be bright in boarding school, than discovering that there were girls who could like, even love, me. And then I was filling up the school’s trophy case with brass, wood and plastic regional debating trophies that towered over the sad little things won for stupid ball games by my school enemies. And soon I was briefly in Paris, stepping into the paintings I saw there, and later in college finding I could write even though my brother was the chosen writer. But also so many down times when I froze up. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">And this now was an original time, roaming in the unknown Middle West. But awakening under the shadow of the past, and filled with white hot but diffused anger – anger that drifted away as I stepped out into the flat air of Indianapolis and ducked in for coffee next door at a Toddle House restaurant where there was a gray woman behind the counter who had a concetration camp tattoo on her fleshy upper arm. I ordered a cheese omlette, and as usual there were bits of egg shell in it.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">The anger left now that I was walking through the city, left as unexplained as it had arrived when I was sleeping last night. And it is seeming so strange that after all I had done and was doing that I could still be angry at those people I came from. For now I am enjoying this plain old middle America city that I ridiculed in letters to friends. For it is a place of my own. I have been meeting people, the father of a childhood Connecticut friend, this father out here in exile with his own best friend’s wife. And a Marxist couple – the man had been an organizer for the fabled Electrical Workers Union that the McCarthyites destroyed. He and my friend’s father are working for money now, both of them with new identities as machine tools salesmen. And I am writing a novel a night, though it leaves me time for the piano bars and the small hotels and the non-professional girls I meet. I am my own person, an actual reporter and writer and rewrite man in this place that no one I am related to has ever seen. And I am almost feeling at home on the weekends when I take one of the four parallel train lines to Chicago for jazz and Second City and the Art Insitute and big black Southside clubs. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Thirty years later in the summer of deep probing I was thinking of in this time when I was 20. Thinking over my life now that I was on a mission to rescue an abused girl. Thirty years later when the anger was finally becoming focused. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I thought that if I could get at the anger I would know what they did or did not do to me and/or her and/or those other cousins of mine who now were joining the dead.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times New Roman; min-height: 15.0px"><br /></p>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-90705119733773453672010-11-06T08:16:00.000-07:002010-11-11T08:46:39.070-08:00#165-TODD BAINES<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">I make a detour to drive over to the Profile Club. It is closed for the season but there is no gate to bar me. The old clubhouse, nearly as old as the even smaller clubhouse at the Sunset, seems unchanged in any way except a new roof that uses asphalt, rather than wood, for its shingles. Nothing of any importance different since my young days except for the installation of a small swimming pool on the other side of the dirt driveway that passes the clubhouse.<br /><br /> I drive down to the old pond near the fairway where we used to swim. As in the summer, I am looking for memories. I want to play with the picture of myself at not quite 16 standing on a diving board the day Ellyse made her first appearance on a small rocky beach down to the left from where I was standing. I was wearing a brimmed canvas hat I had purchased at a hardware store in Littleton. Showing off, I dove into the water with the hat on, and I swam nearly to the beach underwater, shooting up out of the water to introduce myself to this new pretty girl.<br /><br /> I see now that the pond is still there, but many years must have passed since anyone has been swimming in it. You can hardly see the water for the tall reeds that have grown up. It must have been abandoned when the swimming pool went in. Yet this is still the very pond that is always somewhere in my mind, and it does bring a vivid memory, though not the memory I had planned to conjure up. The scene in my head now is a different one from that same time that will never go away. <br /><br /><br /><br />Poor Todd Baines. He is here at our swimming place at the Profile Club. Terri in her sexy green two-piece bathing suit has just been making a gesture with her index finger and little finger that must be something sexual, since she, at 14, is so well developed she must be very advanced. And Ellyse is here, so young and beautiful. And some of the others, the younger Conrad’s and Colby’s, big families with big summer houses, who had been my childhood summer friends in the White Mountains and were now, in their stages of adolescence, as tall as their elders.<br /><br />Their elders out on the golf course. Men with liver spots on their balding heads, gray haired women in long skirts, with bags of golf clubs each of which is protected by a little knitted sock. Some of the men are very old and here all summer, others not quite so old work in the city and come up on the weekends in Pullman sleeper cars on the overnight train from Grand Central.<br /><br />It feels to me these old people are being eclipsed by our summer gang – Kyle and Larry and Tom and Ted and Ron and Daniel, and these girls I have known for so long who suddenly look like women. Terri and Ellyse and all the others, Nancy and June, and Cassie and Marge, and on and on, here as we are all coming into lives that I think I know will not be like the small lives of the often pretentious people we come from. I make allowances, but I know they are pretentious, for I am a big reader. <br /><br />And here is Todd Baines, with an ear-to-ear, buck-tooth grin, in a category by himself, not connected to the older people, and certainly not to us. We have all heard how he was wounded in childbirth by an incompetent doctor who wielded forceps clumsily. One of the many misfortunes to have overtaken the Baines family – right up there with Judge Baines dying before his pension was due, and so old Mrs. Baines, whom no one knew did not have family money, lives a small life in a cold little house, and confident, good-looking Karen Baines, her daughter, is doing something in the fashion business in New York that has tongues up here wagging. It does not take much to get the tongues wagging in this place which is grandiose but so tiny. It was a big subject when it turned out someone in one of the old summer houses had placed on each bed, of all things, an electric blanket. As if they were criminals. <br /><br />Todd goes out on the shaky little diving board near a sluiceway where water runs off from the spring fed pond. He is wearing old-time swimming trunks that seem to come down to his knobby knees. With a big smile, he leaps off, grabs his knees, hits the water with a loud splash – and from the far shore he is being applauded. Not applauded by people making fun of him. But really applauded by someone who is enthusiastic. A big floppy woman with ribbons in her hair and bright flowers portrayed on her summer dress. Acting way younger than her age.<br /><br />She is clapping with all her might. And people are telling each other the news that this woman is, of all things, Todd’s wife. I am amazed about the enthusiasm of this woman and amazed that the young people here are not making fun of her and Todd out loud. He seems as outside the accepted world here as I was when I started boarding school and found myself the most unpopular boy, and the slowest too, in my class. By now it has changed. Still, I am amazed to see Todd happy. At nearly 16 I have become a champion boarding school debater, and I have decided I am a socialist and a pacifist – and will never be like so many of these people I come from. And I will have beautiful women, like the women Ellyse and Terri are becoming, not like the ladies with socks on the heads of their golf clubs. I am not like these people. And yet I seem to hear myself saying to myself that Todd Baines can’t do that. Todd can’t get married. Todd can’t have happiness.<br /><br /></span>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-81586544907216949812010-10-23T07:31:00.000-07:002010-11-21T15:24:31.480-08:00#164 - SMOKEY PLACE<span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br />Her voice was not English, although that’s where she’d started out, and it wasn’t New Hampshire, though that’s where she’d wound up when her mother suddenly took her out of the Lycée and the ballet school and headed up to New Hampshire with her brother as a possibly last ditch attempt to keep Paul out of prison, he was wanted on so many charges, from carrying a sawed off shotgun to major shop-lifting, and it got worse in New Hampshire, going into kidnapping, I heard, and holding off police officers with his guns.</span></span><div style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br />And then the brother was gone, first into the army – which a new Hampshire judge gave him as the only alternative by then to prison </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">– </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">a time when he had dressed up in special forces clothes, complete with jaunty green beret,</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> had his picture taken and created a fictional story of being a green beret killer in Vietnam – which was not the first time a fictional story of heroism had appeared in this family. From what I had learned in this year of probing nothing seemed unlikely.</span></span></div><div style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></div><div style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">After the hero caper the brother had been killed in a mysterious motorcycle accident, which did not surprise anyone in the family except maybe his mother. But the story was not over.<br /><br />Lauryn did say on the phone that the woman with the French accent was the mother of her new boyfriend, which was all news to me, but she had more boyfriends then the family thought I had girlfriends, though </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> I had been with, and lived with, different women like she had lived with different men. We were the only family members to get divorced, not counting my mother's parents.</span></span></div><div style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></span></div><div style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">On the phone she said that the place to meet that evening was the Clam Shell. I had been there in the summer, this landlocked seafood restaurant in this New Hampshire mill town where right at your table there would be an aquarium with slimy bottom feeding fish and eels. (The slimy live water creatures right at the table where dead water creatures were being eaten was one of the best metaphors I had ever encountered.) </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">She said she didn't mean the main restaurant but rather the Clam Shell’s sports bar upstairs. I had gone out of my way even in drinking days to never go into a sports bar not because I was against the drinking but because I had nothing to share with sports fans.</span></span></div><div style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br />It was a big smoky room with a pool table and long bar. Linoleum tables. Everyone smoking except me – and I had been off tobacco less than a year. It was nice to see her smoke. She did indeed look just the way she had looked all those years ago. Almost 40 now but just like she had always been. And she still had that way of giving you a sympathetic and amused look. There was nothing like her in the family. I asked for matches so I could light her cigarettes.<br /><br />And at first it was like we were getting together socially, as if it had not been four years since we had last met up. Since then, she had left one marriage and taken her son to Minnesota where she was studying landscape garden design, and quickly had another husband then another son. And then this lover who kept on beating her to the point where she was taken away to the shelter. Which explained why she left Minneapolis.<br /><br />I mentioned that I had heard from her older brother Lawrence, who was in the theater but so correct he lived in Princeton, and his wife Margaret, who had been a dancer with Merce Cunningham. I had heard from them that when they were all visiting Lauryn and Lawrence's mother in New Hampshire last year she had suddenly gone berserk. They were watching a made for TV movie that was about a girl who was badly abused, and Lauryn, usually so pleasant, had started screaming. In their account the reason was that Paul had once raped her.<br /><br />And now she was telling me that it was not once but at least hundreds of times.<br /><br /></span></span><span style=";font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br />But the talk wasn’t entirely about what had happened to her. For she seemed to hang on my every word as I told her about what I had been discovering in the past years – tales of fakery and intimidation – what I had learned from Mrs. Marsh, and the bigotry outbreak that had had so much to do with setting off my plunge into the past. And I talked a little about the long standing rivalry between me and my brother that I thought now had been set up, consciously or not, so has to keep us both in control. And then I spoke of this childhood rivalry coming into the present. I told her about how I could so easily have been killed.<br /><br />She said that she herself took heart in her belief that “what goes around comes around,” which I took as meaning justice of the revenge kind in the end. But then as if I had explained nothing she said,<br /><br />"You are so angry. Why are you so angry?"<br /></span><br /></span></div>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-29120482046216868152010-10-19T08:12:00.000-07:002010-10-19T07:54:36.075-07:00#163- MORNING<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />I have a bare room with a comfortable narrow bed on the ground floor of Terri’s wing. I look out on the field that separates White Wings from Davis Road. Across Davis Road there is another field, and then trees that have been allowed to get so tall they hide the lower two-thirds and part of the upper third of the mountain view. We would come out on this field when we walked with our grandfather Gaga. We would go beneath the sheltering long green pine needles, and over the brown needles on the ground on our way to check the level of the spring water wells that they called “reservoirs,” one actually on the path and one over near the Farm House. The reservoirs, big rectangular cement walled containers that rose above the ground and were protected with what looked like small houses, brown clapboard and roofs of weathered wooden singles. Gaga, with his cane and his floppy sun hat, would look inside and say the water level was getting lower, but I could never see the change. Every summer he said it was becoming an emergency, and ordained that baths at White Pines should not be run more than three inches deep.<br /><br /><br />Also on that path my twin and I built a wobbly little tree house with the connivance of two local boys. And then when we were into puberty this path was the route Peter and I took to visit Terri in the bright new children’s wing of White Wings.<br /><br />For a number of years the presence of Terri seemed to change everything here where everything had seemed so set in place. In the years that followed our adolescent summers Terri continued to come to White Wings, this house in which I had spent summers when I was 3 and 4. Her parents spent less time here, but she would come up alone, or with a girlfriend from Grosse Point, as in the summer she had left her the General Motors husband her parents had decided upon for her. By this time she was an adult but still gorgeous and lithe, and by now busy rescuing animals. First a pet sheep who walked beside the pretty girl along Davis Road. Later a rescued cow, and then an amusing little pet pig, and of course rescued dogs.<br /><br />Looking out towards Davis Road and the mountains from the window of my room now in Terri’s wing, I saw in the near distance what looked like a burgeoning low lying pine tree. I brought out my new pad and drawing pencils and I drew it as accurately as I could.<br /><br />Terri was up and out before I awoke. I found the phone extension beside the refrigerator and called the number I had gotten from Rob. A woman with a French Canadian accent answered and put Lauryn on the line. “Fred, where are you?” The way Lauryn spoke it seemed like connecting with family the way family should be.<br /><br /><br /></span></span>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-59138631161424481612010-10-18T08:37:00.000-07:002010-10-18T11:49:04.618-07:00#162 - *BUT THE BEAUTY<span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;" >For so many years I looked at this place – the White Mountains of new Hampshire, the summer towns, Franconia and Sugar hill – the summer families who had always been there – looked at it just as if it was something set in place that could not be much tinkered with</span><span style="font-size:130%;"> - </span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;" >even though I saw plenty wrong. I started going there in infancy. My first memory is one of threatening violence, not actually in the White Mountains, this first memory, but on the way up on a single track rail line built to bring vacationers. I am riding in a Pullman car in which you could smell the coal smoke from a black iron steam engine, and the smoke smell that might blend with the balsam smell from the pine trees all around outside – but on that train, in that drawing room, which was an outsize compartment at one end of a Pullman car, something horrible had happened. I was almost pre-verbal, not quite two years old, but the scene is there in my mind still, the despair of the mother, her head on a table, the sounds of the grandmother, the wailing of my brother peter, and another smell that cut through the coal smoke and the balsam. Many years later when I finally went back in like an obsessed detective I realized years the smell was of fresh blood. Realized<br /><br />That scene on the train always there even as I looked for so long at that part of the world almost uncritically. Not completely uncritically. I was able early to separate far enough to be furious maybe about the area’s anti-Semitism. When a car stopped our grandfather on his walk and a nice looking couple asked for directions to a hotel he told them there were no hotels in the region. Furious. We were right at the turnoff to the Sunset Hill House. But when I objected, at the age ten then, he took me on another walk to explain that this was the way things should be. You have to watch these people, he said, for a Jewish fellow will work harder than anyone else and take some other fellow’s job away from him.<br /><br />The unforgivable bigotry and the snobbery. Yes I was often furious even in this time I remember as a time when I was relatively unquestioning in my mind, though the questions were there, and in this new time of exploration I had spoken about how these people of my family past people should be prosecuted. But also always in my mind, whether there or not, was this haunting sense of the beauty of the place. These mountains laid out in the summer people’s principal view, form the Sunset Hill House and all the old time summer people’s places. Especially from White Pines, which was reached through pine woods by a very long twisting driveway on which you had to keep honking in case someone was coming the other way. And when you reached that house you had the best view of all: out to more woods and to the distant mountains, a view that did not have a sign of a living creature in it if you did not count one place in one of the bigger mountains where for just an instant a cable car would be silhouetted against the sky. The mountains rising at Lafayette to where only scrub pine could live.<br /><br />These White Mountains that sometimes seemed warm , and sometimes gray and black, and are part pure granite and scarred by avalanches.<br /><br />And yet such beauty. Even a rosy orange hue sometimes when at the end of a clear day the setting sun plays on them.<br /><br />The sunset seen from a once perfect place, though in this year 1986 when I got to my own story, not the stories the summer people told, not the stories my novelist grandfather wrote, not the versions of my twin brother – but my own view from this once perfect place, the place where I began to see the possibilities of a life, and where I was mysteriously popular, and fell in love with girls and nature – though in this year 1986 so much of what I saw and felt is mingled with white hot anger.<br /><br />I thought also in the past that it was something wrong with me that made me see death so clearly in that beautiful summer place, but when I began to look only with my own eyes I knew that among much else it had not been a place safe for children of any age. <br /><br /><br /></span>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-17140231264723980992010-10-12T08:57:00.000-07:002010-10-12T08:58:20.723-07:00FLASHBACK I - 1952<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;" >The moment I met up with them the night before sailing I knew I was back in a horribly familiar place. From various parts of the country we had come to the Henry Hudson Hotel over by the West Side highway across from the ships’ berths from where a Holland-American Line student ship would depart the next day for Europe. A half dozen boys and girls were already there, congregating in one of the anonymous carpeted bedrooms, and the scene was dominated by this burly guy Bruce from Akron, Ohio who did all the talking. No chance for me to get a word in, hard as it was to speak at all, and I thought I might never connect with any of the girls there – the sad, puppy-like blonde from California, the olive skinned, sharp featured girl from New Jersey, the firm pug nosed girl from Boston, the intelligent New York girl who said her father was a state supreme court judge. Bruce never stopped talking. Saying the obvious. There we are, he said. Here we are, he said. Now you look very ready, he said. And the girls watched him, and the other boys, who seemed small and retiring, did too. A running commentary as if we are all part of nothing more than his own story. Annoying and frightening for he seemed to have power here. Like the ones who used to make fun of me before it became clear to me and the world that I was bright and that a pretty girl could love me.<br /><br />Out of the blue Bruce started making fun of me, for I hesitated to speak and that seemed to tell him I was an enclosed intellectual. He leapt on my not being able to speak by asking why I was so afraid, asking it a way that did not require an answer.<br /><br />Why was I here? The previous summer while in Europe with the family I had had this idea they all scoffed at that I would become a poet and live in Paris. I had been able to so clearly see myself in a small basement restaurant such as I so far knew only in fiction, a warm dark place with red and white checkered table clothes, glowing candles with cheerful congealed wax down the sides, me and a warm dark girl in black leaning in over the table, forehead to forehead, she making love close up with her eyes as we talked in shared intensity about something. Monet? Keats? Socialism?<br /><br />And there I had been with this fantasy last summer while on the one hand in Paris and on the other back in the family. Which had opened up new worlds but also made it seem to me that I could never get safely beyond the family’s version of my life. In this past year in boarding school, I had in a world beyond the family, and my victories in school had been confirmed by my surpring popularity in summer in the White mountains. But back in the family everything else in my life could seem flimsy.<br /><br />And then our Southern grandmother had offered Peter and me new trips to Europe. There was this outfit called the Experiment in International Living, based in Putney Vermont, that was popular with parents in our Connecticut town. It set up groups of young people for summers aboard to live in foreign families. Most of the groups were for college students, but they had this one group for just graduated secondary school seniors. Not for Paris. Rather for Holland, which I knew mainly from sappy children’s stories about blonde kids in wooden shoes, sexless little blonde girls in dumpy cloth hats. Hans Brinker and his silver skates. Funny little dog pulling little carts. But I jumped at the chance to board a ship again and leave an old life behind. Though I also thought that just maybe what I really wanted was back up to the White Mountains – despite this pull to sail away from whatever it was that bound me.<br /><br /></span>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-66161337003379816592010-09-27T10:51:00.000-07:002010-10-07T17:34:04.467-07:00#161 - AFTERWARDS<span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">I thought it would be nearly dawn but it was not midnight yet as I came out of the Notch. The snow had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. I saw I had not been far from the Old Man of the Mountains, very near to where the trails up Lafayette began. I was not in the middle of the road but not so far to the side that I could not have been hit by some vehicle trying to get through.<br /><br /> The road was of course slippery now. I had not even thought about getting snow tires, and did not even know if people in the north country still used chains. So I moved ahead very slowly. Almost immediately a big noisy plow was coming the other way with chains clanging. It was the first vehicle I had seen or heard since entering the Notch. <br /><br />There was a moon a few moments later as I passed Echo Lake and the turnoff for the Aerial Tramway. And then I was off the interstate and on the remaining segment of the old Notch road that came down Three-ile hill and went into Franconia Village. Gaga, who was not one of the family's alcoholics, had joked about drunk guys taking a car down Three-Mile Hill after skiing and one of them saying “But I thought you were driving.” <br /><br />On past Lovett’s Inn which seemed closed for the winter, on past the dimly lit Aldrich family’s supermarket that had replaced the old Aldrich IGA store. The supermarket had gone up in the early seventies, The old wooden store building, which looked abandoned now, had been rented in the early seventies to young people living communally while they went to a short-lived institution named Franconia College, which never got beyond the old summer hotel that had been meant to be only its temporary headquarters. When it folded, the hippies who had converged here quickly disappeared.<br /><br />Past the old Esso station, then across the rushing Gale River and the turnoff to the remains of an old iron smelter, and up the hill towards Sugar Hill, passing old Iris Farm, which was clearly visible in moonlight, as was the mountain panorama behind it. And I am thinking not so much of death in a white out as of how this place is always as beautiful in sight as in memory.<br /><br /> And I drive on, and if feels more like I am a passenger than the driver and I turn off into the woods and worlds of the past, Davis Road, on to the old family houses, and there is Terri’s mailbox with the silhouette of the murdered Greyhound, and the lights are on in the left wing of White Wings. This comforting sight in the early winter night. As comforting as our imagined inn by the side of the road. This wing that has been turned back to a time before family history. <br /><br />And Terri is awake and waiting, a bundled up house owner who may be as old as me but in whom I still see the young girl – despite the wear of the years. The young girl who had been here when it was first bright and white and shiny, so different from now with the dogs and the pot belly stove and the bare wood and the paintings – the sister of Milton Avery, who seemed to do only Milton Avery’s, and some watercolors by someone else, including one in which the birches and the snow and the shadows from the birches on the snow, the snow whose light has been captured, which is so very close to what I have just seen outside. And it is like the interplay between the Metropolitan and Central Park, and the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Like but not the same. For this is Sugar Hill. <br /><br /></span>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-12962042247239282512010-09-17T11:12:00.000-07:002010-09-27T12:28:03.970-07:00#160 - LUCKY OLD SUN<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Then I remember. The violence of the boarding school before I pulled my own version of power on the place. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">A song from the boarding school time is playing. I have put Willie Nelson on the tape deck. He is from this summer, this time in my aqua Mustang, and he is singing a very old Frankie Laine song. A song that I have not heard since 1950. Nineteen-fifty when I was 15 and the song was everywhere. It was on the juke box in Edgar's Diner in the town. And in the school it was blasted out of dormitory rooms. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">That song which was so stupid when my tomentors kept on playing it, and then seemed gential and sad when I heard it again this summer on a Willie Nelson tape. This new time in which all time sometimes seems to be the same time. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I am back shy but bullying them into respecting me by filling up the school's trophy case. I am awkward but causing them to be consumed with envy because my girlfriend is so appealing. Making them see that my new grades prove I am smarter than they are. When I had done all that I had thought nothing more could go wrong. And now I knew how much unfinished business there still was then, just as I have come to see how much unfinished business there still is now. As I remember where am going and how much is still at stake. <br /><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >Up in the morning, out on the job,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >Work like a devil for my pay .</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >But that lucky old sun has got nothing to do,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" > But roll around heaven all day. <br /><br /></span><br />The family in Sugar Hill, so safe seeming with their popovers, Floating Island and Anglophilia. My grandfather with his distinguished walking stick. My grandmother orchestrating formal finger bowl dinners. Their compliant children. And their children’s children.<br /><br />My generation. The dead or walking dead – suicide, drugs and incest. Me in peril recently, a foreign war zone enemy of my twin in the CIA. Now Cousin Lauryn, the youngest, my favorite, beaten and fucked before puberty, back now, sprung from a battered women’s shelter.<br /><br /> I go for years without seeing those mountains but I know now they are always there in consciousness - even when I am in more honest war zones far away. And in this new time, 1986, I realize that also in consciousness, every day of my life, whatever might be happening, there were and are always songs in my head. Never sung aloud, for I do not sing yet – but always in my head. Songs. A parallel if hidden reality – a world beyond.<br /><br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >Fuss with my woman, toil for my kids,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" > Sweat till I’m wrinkled and gray.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" > But that lucky old sun’s, he’s got nothing to do,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" > But roll around heaven all day. </span><br /><br /><br />So fine, this working man’s chant. In the Mustang I feel so fine, though driving into the belly of the beast. I fear for Lauryn, who has returned… She was going to be a dancer. I drive north to do battle with the ravenous past. Dear lord above, don’t you know I’m pining, Tears are in my eyes, Send down that cloud with a silver lining, Lift me to paradise. The night is blacker than I had expected. I reach Franconia Notch, this mountain pass that takes you into those old summer places, as it has since some point in the early 19th century when pioneers found the way through it. I am deep now in the Notch, with Cannon Mountain rising on my left though it is too foggy to see the Old Man of the Mountains rock formation that juts out precariously high above the small, placid Profile Lake. On my right is Mt. Lafayette, taller and harsher. I am actually up here in the mountains, driving on this very dark night between these two landmarks of the Franconia Range, which you can see from a distanced in the center of the panoramic view from Sugar Hill. There is no starlight, no moonlight, no traffic except me. I sense more than I can see of the icy black granite that rises on either side. <br /><br />In a whirling rush, a fierce early mountain snow storm, like out of the past, it creates a full white-out. Opaque whiteness. I can see nothing in front of the car. I slow to a creeping crawl and pull over to what I hope is a safe shoulder. I stop. <br /><br />Once again, just the sort of thing so feared by the upright people who were my people in the rich houses – the way they feared lightning strikes on golf courses, and the larceny of poor people and brake failures on ill-kept mountain roads, and hunters’ bullets in the woods, and non-Episcopalians, including cute New Englanders who use the adjective “wicked.” No way to tell in the white-out if I’ve stopped the Mustang in the middle of the Notch road where something might crash and crush me.<br /><br />No way to tell if I’m on a shoulder at a ravine with no guard rail. Am I to die here so near to where I began? Die listening to old music and remembering old scenes. Die in this whiteness just as the past is coming clear? <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >Show me that river, take me across, <br />Wash all my troubles away, <br />Like that lucky old sun, give me nothing to do,<br /> But roll around heaven all day. </span></span></span>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-71063470604829834932010-09-17T11:04:00.000-07:002010-09-17T11:12:00.840-07:00#159 – ANOTHER ROUTE<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />On the thruway I have a second thought about my route. Even though I am on a deadly serious mission, I want to make the most of the trip. It could be a mistake to not go up through Connecticut, as in the familiar route from childhood days. There would be a purpose to doing it that way, for surely new memories would appear.<br /><br />Then I have a better idea. I pull in to read a map at the rest stop where Gillian had picked up vending machine trinkets. It has been six weeks but it seems like years – a familiar sensation in this time still in which a whole lifetime is moving along in compressed form. <br /><br />The map shows I can take the Mass. Pike east to connect up with Interstate 93, which has exits for Plymouth where, before there were interstates, I had been in boarding school. And from there I can head up the dramatic way through Franconia Notch.<br /><br />The bare trees and the now brown hills on either side of the thruway are still startlingly vivid in this late autumn air. It is as if I have never seen such a tree, such hill, before. The billowing look had been replaced by an eternal look. And the sky is as blue as remembered skies of winter.<br /><br />It is getting cold. I turn up the heater. I play my tapes. I think of my days in boarding school. Of Kitty up for the school dances. I think of St. Mary’s. I think of bright summers, striped awnings, the vistas when you get above the timberline.<br /><br />I think of the only recent time I was above the timberline. It was when my wife’s son had just arrived from the Philippines and I had taken the two of them up to the White Mountains, which at that time still seemed like a threshold to a full life. I had decided to take them up the car road on Mt. Washington, not the full experience they would have had in climbing Washington but a taste. There had been no warnings about weather, but when we were above the timberline it started to snow. There were no other cars. I managed to turn around, and inch back down the mountain. There were no guard rails<br />.<br />Mama bears and rusty nails and lightning and winter storms in summer.<br /><br />In the evening my wife and I and her son went to a spontaneous gathering of the old gang. A number of us happened to be there. We were at a pleasant simple house that Terri had just rented. For the first time she was going to stay in the mountains year round, and her then husband, a vigorous and open man, would remain in Bedford. The reason was dogs. Terri had about a dozen rescued dogs, too many for Bedford, where her husban had a champion spaniel he took to dog shows. (Also in Bedford he kept a copy of the Social Register at hand. He said it was useful because so many of the people he knew were included.) <br /><br />My wife did not like it in the mountains. She kept saying she wanted to go back early. We stayed in the basement at my Aunt’ s House where on a long ago Christmas trip I had first made love to Christina. My Aunt, whose Anglophile ways included 1940s British cooking, had made a shepherd’s pie for us that seemed to be filled with sawdust rather than meat. We surreptitiously brought Burger King burgers to the basement. A bonding experience.<br /><br />Thinking ahead, I go past the exit for Plymouth that would come out right at my old boarding school. Normally thought of Playmouth would set off sparks in my mind, for this school down here in the lake country of New Hampshire was where I had first realized I could go beyond what my parents and past schools seemed certain was the limited life I would have. But thinking ahead, I continue on to Franconia Notch. I am thinking of the notch now as a route into something soft and affirming though I have been billing this last leg of the trip as the entryway to the belly of the beast.<br /><br />That feeling of hope and pleasure and excitement I had when pointing the car north is back again. Maybe I have been unfair to this influential old place.<br /><br />These two places, the place of perfect summers, the winter place where I came to myself.<br /><br /></span></span>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371115018216027799.post-1659289375458385392010-09-16T09:34:00.000-07:002010-09-16T09:45:37.117-07:00#158 - BACKTRACK<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />As the past kept changing, in my head there were constant revisions not just of what I saw in my life up till this year but even in how it had been at the start of this new time. Just before everything began to change, I had had high hopes for a light, with some earnest overtones, non-fiction, personal experience book to be called Twins in the American Century. Which was someone else’s idea but seemed to interest my agent and a guy at one of the big houses who said they would be sure to take it after I went through the charade of writing a sample chapter that would convince their sales people that if they gave me money there really would be a book. So I had worked late into the night in my bright new apartment in Chelsea, trying to get started. It should have been easy. I had been through this before, these proposals to get advance money. Also, this was not the first time that I was making use of someone I knew. I had met the editor a few years before this in Singapore where he was a partner in a slick illustrated guide-book operation called APA that had volumes out on many Asia places. The editor was a conscious intellectual. He kept telling me then that Singapore was at a vortex. But there was another side to the man. He had this wife who was a lithe and lovely Balinese dancer with whom he had eloped, spiriting her out of her village in Bali. <br /><br />Now the editor was in New York at the same time as me in this time just after my marriage when everything was changing. He had gotten a mortgage and taken the lovely dancer to live in Forest Hills, the ultimate haut bourgeois place. My wife, also young and from Asia, and I had been there for dinner before the dancer left. <br /><br />The editor was still there. And I knew that even his publishing side in Singapore could not have been as unimaginative as it seemed. For I knew from a number of years in Southeast Asia that APA Publications may have held out but it would have been a struggle to not become a CIA front. Travel writing and photography were such good ways to move people around in foreign places. In Southeast Asia nothing was quite what it seemed, and it was hard to find a foreigner out there not working on the side in something devious for some foreign interest – the CIA being the foreign interest with the most money. Even backpackers were put on per diem by this octopus agency.<br /><br />I had reason before this year of change to look at APA’s most recent volume, which was part of its recent move beyond Asia. This one was on Jamaica. The introduction was devoted to thanking and praising the recently installed prime minister, a right-winger named Manley who was as charming and evil as Ronald Reagan. On top of everything else Manley looked like a white man. Practically no one who wrote about Jamaica seemed unsure CIA money had brought him to power.<br /><br />This was when I was searching around for things to do. The reason I looked at the Jamaica book was that my agent was hot in negotiations with Simon & Schuster for a series of little books on the West Indies that would be geared to cruise passengers who had only a few hours to look around. The idea was based on a lie that the West Indies had a brilliant and beautiful colonial history when in fact it had a grim slave worked plantation history. The little books would play up the remains of slave owners’ big houses, and an occasional dumpy fort, as being romantic vestiges of a grand and romantic past. Just the sort of travel writers’ lie I had sworn I would never propagate again. But I needed work, and besides there was this very stylish American photographer I would take along to these island places. She was willing to fly in from Rome to join me.<br /><br />And nothing in my life was what it seemed.<br /><br />And I had not quite realized that fakery in travel writing was the least of what I was about to leave, though it was a blow when the travel book project fell through. My agent called and said we had to drop it because this outfit APA was going into the same territory in a comprehensive way in a new joint venture with a New York publisher.<br /><br />My FBI file from civil rights days? My CIA file from Southeast Asia days? <br /><br />And meanwhile the editor was waiting for a sample chapter in this book about me and my adventures and my brother and his CIA work, this light book that would also honor our internationalist grandfather and would be called <span style="font-style: italic;">Twins in the American Century</span>, this in 1986 which was about the last point when the American century conception was around, something the CIA did not seem to realize. And maybe the last time it was possible for me to go with my family’s white-washed history.<br /><br />The editor’s office was in the Macmillan building which was the most characterless building I had ever seen. A far cry from the days when Macmillan was a musty literary place that published my grandfather. As you got out at a floor in the Macmillan building you were face to face with a receptionist. Every floor looked just alike, the walls always bare. The place had no more personality than the sad State Department building down in Washington. One day I got out of an elevator in the Macmillan building and a very serious receptionist was saying with pride to an apparent delivery person that “this building has many PhD’s in it.”<br /><br />The CIA. Travel writing. The dullness of publishing. Twins in the American Century. <br /><br />As my life changed I began to believe it was to my credit that I was completely blocked when it came to writing that sample chapter that could do so much for my career. <br /><br /></span></span>Fred Poolehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00000674703611167085noreply@blogger.com0