My Mother as a Five-Pointed Star

The holidays bring out the dead like dust on Christmas ornaments.  Here is the knitted green and white stocking embroidered BECKY in red block letters pinned to the sofa every Christmas morning of my childhood and stuffed with gifts. Here are the hand-painted red candelabra that Mom brought back from Sweden after her divorce, braving her fear of flying to visit a dying man she had loved as a teenager. Here is the Christmas-cookie-thin five-pointed gold star etched NANCY RICE above birth and death dates.

“Mom as a Christmas-tree ornament, that is beyond tacky,” I complained when first retrieving the star from its plastic baggie inside the Christmas-tree-edged mailer from the funeral home.

But my soon-to-be-ex husband said it was “kind of festive,” and proceeded to attach it to a branch of the tabletop tree that Mom had bought years ago in Florida. Since I didn’t know whether he was being sincere or sarcastic and since the holidays tended to manufacture more marital discord than elves made toys—fights had erupted over broken glass ornaments and a shortage of wrapping paper--I decided not to object. The ornament stayed right where he had placed it, on an upper branch of the fake forest-green tree with its tiny, phallic-shaped lights and Lilliputian Santas.   

When we divorced six years later and divided up our stuff, I got the tabletop tree and the ornament, along with the Swedish candlesticks and my childhood stocking. The first holiday season, heady with the mulled-wine independence of keeping Christmas any way I chose, I considered leaving the tree and its creepy star in the basement of the rental unit where I had moved.

But I had a lot of time on my hands during that first post-divorce Christmas—my son lived mostly with his father and I had only brief filial sightings. To avoid feeling sorry for myself, a female Scrooge supping alone on grog and gruel, I fled not further away from Christmas but deeper into it, like a driver in a winter storm steering into the skid.    

After inventorying of my remaining Christmas-themed items—a tin full of reindeer cookie cutters, a couple of stained red felt tablecloths, my mother’s gargantuan Christmas tree stand that some wag at The Christmas Tree Shops had dubbed “The Last Stand”—I made an executive decision: time to restock.

Money was tight that year—I got my tree at Ace Hardware, when they went on sale for $10 a pop—but fortunately my redeemer was at hand: in the aisles of The Fisher Home of the Hospice Shop in Amherst, where Christmas could be had for a song, or, to be more precise, a Halleluiah chorus, recorded on a gently used Mormon Tabernacle Choir CD. At this elegant thrift store on University Drive, staffed by a platoon of welcoming, elderly ladies, I filled up shopping basket after shopping basket: I scored Santa tea towels, gold-tipped ceramic angels, Reindeer pillows, Frosty the Snowman candles, garlands of colored Christmas lights, boxes of antique Christmas ornaments.

Coming home with my Christmas booty, I spent afternoons descending into the twilight and obsessing: three Christmas pillows on the couch or two? Two strands of chili lights on the bookcases or one? Christmas wreath or antique horn above the pellet stove? One afternoon, with the thrilling strains of the Messiah urging me on, I clumped down to the basement, hauled my mother’s tiny tree from its cardboard box, smoothed out its arthritic branches, set it on an antique end table, plugged it in, and pondered: Star? Or no star?

In the end, I let the star stay on the tree, where it remains on the same end table in yet another rental unit. When my son comes home from college this year, we will bake Christmas cookies and play Handel’s Messiah and talk about his grandmother in the days before she became a five-pointed star and I will tell him, as she told me over and over again: “Your presence is the best Christmas present I could ever have.”

All posts copyright© 2014. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Late Afternoon on Onota Lake

I wake with it in the morning as I swallow fish oil pills. I meet it while filling out financial aid forms for my college-aged son. It follows me driving to the post office to mail the electric bill or waiting in line to buy Greek yogurt at Whole Foods. It is there in the rear view mirror of my heart, as I rise at three in the morning, padding to the bathroom to down a fistful of homeopathic sleeping pills, as I pull the covers over my head, hoping they will rock me to sleep. I imagine placing it under the bed, letting it remain with the box of old yearbooks and yellowing obituaries.  

But the mind refuses to be cajoled. The image will not let me go. It starts gently, with nearly inaudible softness, like the opening bars of Fur Elise. It moves outward toward a nearly still body of water, a lake named Onota. It pools wider to include a moment in time, four o’clock on an early June afternoon when the din from the motor boats and jet skis has died down, when the sun is lower above the trees on the far shore, but there is still plenty of warmth and daylight. This is the hour when he might have hauled out the scull to row it to Appletree Point or settled in one of the paint-chipped Adirondack chairs, bare feet resting against pine needles, and finished the Times’ crossword puzzle, nursing a cup of black coffee and waiting until five when he might replace it with a glass of Chardonnay.

But the mind is nothing but a master of legerdemain because these images are buried deep in the past like arrowheads, and on this late afternoon in June in two thousand and fourteen, he is no longer anything resembling the man in the photographs on the memorial table beneath the white tent, he is a collection of bone and ash, and I am not his twice-married sixty-year-old daughter, to whom he once said kind or cruel things, I am a solitary figure among others, sister, brother, nephews, grandchildren, each of us taking a handful of ashes and walking silently to the water’s edge and flinging it among the muddy leaves and mating dragonflies…  

My hands are dusty, clay-y with him as I rub them together, brush them off while walking back up the steep, root-thick path to the cabin and parking lot. I have let him go, consigned him to the waters of Onota Lake, where he will travel southeastward to mingle with the Housatonic River and southward again 149 miles to Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean.

I have let him go. I do not want to let him go.

Weeks later, I learn that Onota is a Mohican word that means deep blue.

It is a small thing, a clue in one of his crossword puzzles, but for now it is enough.  

All posts copyright© 2014. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

How to Live to 90: In Memory of John Hamilton Rice

Published in “The Hampshire Gazette”

Father’s Day--June 20, 2009 

Read at Memorial Service at Onota Lake Camp 

Berkshire Natural Resources Council 
Pittsfield, Massachusetts June 7, 2014

My father, who turned 90 recently at his assisted living facility in Maine, would just as soon have let the day go by without blowing out one birthday candle, but we three children, who are getting on in years ourselves, needed some fanfare.

After much e-mailing, Dad and Janet, his companion of many decades, agreed to attend a dinner party at my sister's in New Hampshire. There were 16, including in-laws, grandchildren and various significant others. A Civil War-era cannon was fired; meat was roasted on a grill; tributes were read. This is my tribute - I am his younger daughter from his second marriage - which I wrote as a half-mocking, half-serious self-help treatise about how to become a nonagenarian based on what I learned from him.

Run. Get up every morning and run two miles before breakfast, when others in the household are still sleeping; run in the dark, in the rain, in the snow, in summer heat that ripples the blacktop, run so hard so that your face drips with sweat, soaks your faded tee-shirt, darkens your gray athletic socks, makes your daughters hold their noses and cry "Pee-you" when they hug you. Run every day for 30 years, Sundays and holidays, on business trips and vacations, until your hips will no longer carry you, and then walk.

Read. The New York Times, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Savage God. The Lives of a Cell. A Brief History of Time. Read everywhere -riding the chairlift at Bousquet's with The Brothers Karamozov in your parka pocket; it's only a 10 minute ride, but after you've pulled down the safety bar, settled your skis on the painted rung, slipped your poles along your wrist, you can telemark into another world larger than all the blue hills of the Berkshires, the world of the Grand Inquisitor that poses the only questions worth asking: Is there a God? And why does He permit some to be happy and others to suffer?

Play. Play the piano because you always wanted to and were never allowed to as a child because your parents said it was for sissies, for girls. Play Chopin the Prelude in C, the Nocturne in E Flat Major --late at night when everyone else has gone to bed. Play even though it's hard to stretch your arthritic fingers across those octaves, hard to capture all the subtle crescendos and diminuendos, play even though you ll never sound like your concert-pianist teacher with her nimble, fairy fingers, play because it moves you, because it holds you in the moment, because it makes you forget about everything you have lost.

Laugh. Don t take anything, especially yourself, too seriously, because it's all passing, the tragic and the comic, and nothing endures, even the wittiest remarks, the family dinner years ago when you said to your 38-year-old younger daughter, when she couldn t seem to settle on an occupation or a boyfriend, much less a husband, "You know, Becky, life isn't for everyone." You laughed. She laughed, even though the joke was on her. The fool, you often pointed out, is the wisest man in Shakespeare, and he who laughs lasts, as your favorite bumper sticker says.

Eat. Fill your plate. Take seconds. Take thirds. Steak, scalloped potatoes, Cole slaw, Stickie buns, anything chocolate brownies, chocolate ice cream, chocolate turtles nestled in gold paper and tucked in gold boxes from the candy store that the smiling salesperson saves just for you, that you squirrel away in the top right hand drawer of your desk and munch on to sweeten all those nasty chores like staying up late to finish your taxes.

Drink. Raise your glass. Make a toast. Chardonnay. Sauvignon Blanc. Pinot Grigio. You're no oenophile, you don t really get terms like nose and palette. You'd be just as happy with a $10 bottle of Fat Bastard Chardonnay as with a $200 dollar bottle of Chateau Margeaux. But you drink because you love the taste of the sweet-sharp, oak-like bouquet swilling down your throat, love the altered state that makes death and taxes fly away, the buzz that fills the world with oxytocin, makes everything worthy of your attention.

Change. Stop drinking. Eat less. Travel to the North Pole. Take a dip in the frigid, 40-degree waters. Leave the western Massachusetts city you were born and raised in, the county where you have lived nearly all your 85 years and move to an assisted living facility, Piper Shores, on the coast of Maine. Join a weekly men's doubles group, even though you hate doubles. Walk four miles a day. Walk the flat hard sand of Higgins beach at low tide, in summer and in winter, in rain and in snow.

Break your hip a week before Christmas, recover in Holbrook, the acute care wing which you wouldn't enter when first touring Piper Shores. Stay there for three weeks, even though the food is terrible and the demented old folks give you the willies. Learn to use a walker, learn to get around with a cane. Return to your condo. Take up all the scatter rugs so you don t break the other hip. Walk the paved lanes near Higgins Beach, enjoy the spectacle of dogs off their leashes chasing seagulls, even though you ve always hated dogs. Vote for Barack Obama, even though you ve voted the Republican ticket for most of your life.

End every telephone conversation with your partner, your children and grandchildren with the words, I love you, even though you come from a generation that isn t comfortable expressing sentiment. Hug your friends and family at the beginning and end of every visit. Say, Thank you for coming, say I love you, say I love you.

Copyright 2009, Daily Hampshire Gazette, All Rights Reserved.

Never Miss a Funeral

“You can skip a wedding, but you should never miss a funeral,” a friend observed, after I called to gush about how healing it was to attend a relative’s memorial service recently. My friend explained that her father always said this and that she didn’t really know what he meant by it and that she couldn’t ask him because he was dead. But she observed that weddings, with their trumpet calls for the future, were simpler affairs, whereas funerals with their requiems for the past took us into deeper places, and in these places we found wisdom. 

Waking at four in the morning, skittish at the prospect of driving from western Massachusetts to the Cape, logging the first 85 miles to the Courtyard-Marriot Motel in Milford, where I was meeting my sister to carpool the remaining 100 miles across the Bourne Bridge and down the mid-Cape highway to St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Chatham for our uncle’s memorial service, I would have preferred to be heading to a wedding. 

The last time I had seen my father’s younger brother, who passed away this past December in Charlottesville, Virginia at the age of 89, was at another funeral--for my grandmother at the First Congregational Church in Pittsfield, Mass. That was thirty-one years ago, and in the intervening decades, the family had split asunder, like an ancient tree whose branches needed to be lopped off to avoid the ravages of Dutch elm disease. I had never met my uncle’s grandchildren or great-grandchildren. I had never been to the house on Dune Drive where the funeral party was gathering after the burial. Though our DNA washed through us strong as the tides along Chatham Bars beach, I wasn’t sure I would recognize my relatives, or they me.

It would have been easier to stay away,to let bygones be bygones,

but my father and his younger brother had reconnected over the telephone shortly before my uncle’s death—“laughing and joking as if they were boys again,” so my father’s longtime partner had reported. In my condolence letter to my cousin, I confessed that I didn’t understand why the two brothers had been estranged, but that it didn’t matter anymore, and that I myself had warm memories of my uncle, his gentle smile, his skill on the tennis court, and regretted that I had not known him better. I wrote, too, that I had fond memories of that side of the family: the very first wedding I had attended had been that of my cousin’s and his wife’s and that I could still see the crowded ballroom of the Pittsfield Country Club, where the reception was held, with the bridesmaids in pastel gowns, the men in dark suits, and that it was, to my 12-year-old romantic soul, a scene of transcendent bliss.

My cousin e-mailed back saying that he also didn’t understand the brothers’ rift, but that he and his wife, Peggy, (they were still married after 40 years) and brother, Tony, appreciated my letter and hoped we could come to the memorial service in June.

My sister and I signed the guest book in the anteroom of the chapel and shook the hand of the rector, who, in a curious six-degrees-of-separation connection, was the son of one of her friends in New Hampshire. As we took our seats in a back row and scanned the program, she asked what was the difference between a pastor and a rector, wondering whether she had committed a faux in addressing her friend’s son as “Pastor.” One was for Catholics, one for Protestants? I offered weakly. It occurred me that my ex-husband would have known, but we were divorced so I wouldn’t be asking him, and I was filled again with sadness for all family rifts, those that could be mended and those that could not. 

“Oh look, I said, “glancing through the program, “the 23^rd Psalm, and in the King James version. Ma loved the King James Bible, and always said it was the only one worth reading.” Ma was our grandmother, the one whose funeral we had all attended 31 years ago, mother of the man whose life and witness we were celebrating. The sixteenth-century words of the Psalms were working their miracles upon our diseased family tree, and it already seemed as though our collective cups were indeed running over. 

Then the organist started playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” a bit louder and a group of people started down the aisle, and I whispered to my sister that there they were: my older cousin, wide-browed, bow-tied and erect, and his younger brother, bearded and bespectacled with that same lantern jaw that my sister and I had: family.

My cousin, Peter, brown hair now flecked with silver, whom we always referred to as young Peter, to distinguish him from his father, spoke first, pointing out that the reproduction of the seascape on the program’s cover had been done by his dad, who had taken up watercolor in his retirement. I turned the stapled pages and peered at the swathe of water through marshlands, thinking initially that it had been a Winslow Homer or Marsden Hartley. Peter’s wife Peggy, who stood beside him on the podium, then spoke about how her father-in-law had had a show at the assisted living facility where he spent his last years, and how proud she was of him. 

Next up was Peter’s younger brother, Tony, talking about his dad and how he would wrestle with him and his brother every afternoon after he came home from work, how his dad taught him to appreciate classical music as well as how to cook, and how, more recently, Tony would call from Arizona, and he and his dad would get to musing about Roman history (Tony was a schoolteacher) and an hour and a half later, father and son would hang up the phone.

Two granddaughters then spoke, their voices breaking with emotion as they talked about their Bompa. The youngest grand-daughter, very pregnant with her second child, read her remarks from her I-phone, which she said was somehow fitting as her Bompa had been curious about iPhones, computers, Facebook, and Twitter, and was always asking her to explain whatever newfangled device she had.

We then filed out into the memorial garden where we watched as my uncle’s ashes were tucked into the edge of a rich green lawn, lush with the rain that had been falling steadily for the past few days. Then we repaired to the house on Dune Drive, and there was a lot of hugging, eating, and drinking, and we stayed and stayed and talked and talked—to the cousins and their children and their children’s children, and to friends of the family that had been at Peter and Peggy’s wedding reception at the Pittsfield Country Club in 1968 and it seemed that the thirty-one years were all collapsing into seeds of sea lavender waving in the mist on the marshes, into grains of bony ash secreted in the loam of the memorial garden.

Never miss a funeral. Your own will come soon enough. In the meantime, you will remarry yourself to the world.

All posts copyright© 2013. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author.

Saved by a Blue Tag Sale

On sunny late August afternoon when I should have been working but wasn’t, when I might have been doing the laundry but wasn’t, when I might have been swimming across Puffer Pond but wasn’t, when a sort of MacBethian gloom was threatening to overtake me and it seemed that life as a divorcee in the twilight of middle age was one frogmarch to the grave, I jumped in my car and drove to Salvation Army.

Many other people must have been similarly afflicted because I could barely find a place to park. Once in the store, I grasped the simpler explanation: It was Family Day, and there were fifty percent off on all items with blue, yellow, or green tags, which is to say that nearly everything was marked down. There were four cashiers, and they couldn’t keep up with the demand: the line snaked past the books, beanie babies, and shoes. There were mothers with shopping carts full of clothes, girls in tiny jeans scoring microwaves, teenage boys looking for that special baseball cap that would up their coolness factor on the first day of school.

I had actually come with a mission. I was in search of a cheese grater and a shower caddy, my ex having ended up with the cheese grater, which I had failed to replace all these months after the divorce due to my poor executive function and housekeeping skills, factors which were one of the many causes of our divorce. I could not blame my lack of a shower caddy on my ex—I had actually never owned one, since I always preferred baths, but my new home (the second in seven months, a long tale that does not improve with the telling) had a shower but no bathtub. After having spent the last several months bemoaning the fact that I was being deprived of the one pleasure that I had always counted on (retreating to the tub when the going got tough), I decided to stop whining, embrace showering, and get a shower caddy.

I had already priced both of these items at Bed Bath & Beyond, and I figured if I could save ten or twenty dollars by getting them used, I would be doing my budget a favor.

There are shelves and shelves of household items at the Salvation Army on Route 9 in Hadley—coffee mugs, teapots, covered casserole dishes. Used dishes are so plentiful that they are displayed in monochromatic color combinations: all white on one shelf, all blue on another, and so on. But among all this cornucopia of cast-off housewifery from the dead, the divorced, and the displaced, there was not one cheese grater. Ditto for the shower caddy. However, I did spot a particularly handsome steel-cased Thermos with a blue plastic lid for $1.57. I didn’t need it, as I had recently purchased a handsome pink-and-silver travel mug from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, but I decided that a little proactivity was not a bad thing. Despite all my best efforts to control my Attention Deficit Disorder (no doubt yet another cause of the divorce), I was not likely to hang onto my pretty Canadian mug for more than a few weeks.

But, Mon Dieu, the line! After deciding that the mug was really worth the wait, I rewarded myself with a handful of peanut M &M’s from the candy dispenser by the exit. You only got four M & M’s for your quarter, and that they were stale, which I thought a bit cheesy but which also reminded me of that great Woody Allen joke about the two old ladies at the resort at the Catskills, one of whom complains that the food is terrible, to which the other answers, and so little of it!

It was almost four o’clock, which meant I would not be getting to my favorite thrift venue in the Pioneer Valley—Hospice Shop of the Fisher Home, where I had, over the past year, scored tea towels, cushions, and curtains as well as, just last week, a beautiful Red Sox cap for my son. But no worries, the Goodwill in Amherst stayed open until seven.

The problem with looking for specific things in thrift shops is that you rarely find them, which is to say there was neither a cheese grater nor shower caddy in the entire store. However, I did spot a box of perfectly good Van Gogh note cards from the Museum of Fine Arts for $2.50. “The House of Auvers” with its swirling blues and greens and white breathy clouds was on the cover. Inside was the radiant blue-and-gold figure of “Postman Joseph Roulin,” as well as “Enclosed Field with Ploughman” with its spectacular waves of blue and gold and the virtually unknown “Ravine,” A very cheery, older woman spotted the cards in my red plastic basket and said, “Look at those cards! You just never know the treasures you’re going to find here!” The young woman working the cash register confided that she had almost bought the cards herself, and then launched into a long narrative about her love affair with Van Gogh and a recent trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York expressly to see “Starry Night.”

“Everything changes,” Ovid observed, long before the advent of thrift stores or the profusion of divorce, “nothing is lost.” When I returned home, without the items I had been searching for, but with a new-to-me cup and nearly new box of cards, I felt changed, saved by a blue tag sale. All posts copyright© 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Blues if You Want (And Can Afford Them)

“For the record, I did not sleep with Bill Matthews. Which is not to say that I didn’t have my chances…”

My two breakfast companions in the Red Mill at the Vermont Studio Center, the famous poet, Stanley Plumly, the less famous novelist and my dear friend, Christine Lehner, erupted into raucous laughter. It was not the sort of thing they expected to hear over bowls of granola from VSC’s Grants and Publicity Manager.

“That would put you in the minority of women he was friends with,” Stan Plumly said, chuckling and smoothing back a strand of snow-white hair. His hair was amazing. Thick as the mane on a Shetland pony, white as bleached bones, it looked as if it had been blow-dried that morning. I considered complimenting him on it, and then thought he might take it the wrong way.

“To say we were friends would be pushing it,” I said. “I met him at Breadloaf in the eighties. Bill was a Visiting Writer, very much the big man on campus, dispensing wisdom and ministering to a gaggle of female groupies. He read an essay about Bellagio, not the resort in Vegas but the artist’s retreat funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which, in the first century, A.D., was inhabited by Pliny the Younger.

I approached Matthews afterward and told him how much I admired his essay, explained how my first husband, Leonard Feldstein, had applied to Bellagio and been turned down, how the rejection was hard, because Len adored Lake Como and would have thrilled to the princely routines—elegant meals, scintillating conversation, walks along ancient cobbled paths—that Matthews so winningly described.

“I was younger and prettier then,” I continued, to which Plumly interjected something sweetly complimentary to the effect that I hadn’t lost my charm, “and Bill and I ended up hanging out together. He got me into Treman Cottage, that house on the Breadloaf campus that you cannot enter unless you are a fellow or above…something I didn’t know until I arrived, which appalled me, though not enough to boycott it, which I should have done if I had had any integrity…”

“O.K., O.K., spare us the lecture,” Christine said, “and cut to the chase. How did you almost end up in Bill Matthews’ bed?”

“Well, we had spent most of the night drinking martinis in front of the fireplace at Treman, and Bill offered to walk me back to my dorm, which was just down the dirt road. It was a warm, moonlit night and you could see the Big and Little Dipper and Orion and a bunch of other constellations that he could name and I couldn’t. We started talking about our lives; he was between wives and I was between husbands, and next thing I know we were going at it in the hallway outside my room and he was murmuring into my hair, 'We could really get this thing right this time…'

“It was the sort of line he must have used dozens of times with other women, but I remember thinking, This famous poet wants ME!”

“And then,” Christine interjected. "Que Pasa?”

“I don’t know, I guess my guardian angel was looking out for me because, after kissing him back, and I will say this for him, drunk as he was, he was a good kisser. Anyway, sirens went off in my brain and something screamed, ‘Stop! This guy is gonna break your heart.'”

“So that’s it?” Christine asked.

“Not exactly. We kept in touch over the next few months. He moved to a tiny place on the Upper West Side that he later wrote about in BLUES IF YOU WANT. I moved from Illinois to D.C. to go to graduate school.

“He was a great letter writer—this was well before e-mail. He always wrote back within a few days and his sentences were eloquent and polished. I remember he once said that a writer is someone who loves sentences, and you could see that that was true for him, that he loved sentences.

“We met again here at Vermont Studio Center in the fall of 1993. We had lunch at a little restaurant in a nearly village that backed onto a river. It was mid-November and we were the only people in the restaurant and Bill was turning on his usual wit and charm, flirting with the waitress, with the owner, with me. I don’t know how many times he had been married and divorced; how many affairs he’d had, but I was still dazzled by him…

“Four years later, I was scanning the obits in The New York Times and read that he’d dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 55.”

“Getting ready to go to the opera,” Plumly said, shaking his head. Plumly explained that Matthews had begun, at his doctor’s urging, to cut back on his drinking and smoking, but it was too little too late.

We were quiet for a while, sifting through our raisins and sunflower seeds, each lost in our reveries on why we were here instead of not here, musing wordlessly upon the strange bedfellows of art and death. I thought of Bill’s eloquence, the lines that I remembered either from his poems or from his conversation—one that has always haunted me about how “the work of the body becomes the body of work.’

Years later, I was walking to my mailbox in front of the ramshackle Victorian house that I’d just moved into after my divorce from my second husband, and came upon a letter from Bill’s son, Sebastian, on Vermont Studio Center stationary, asking me to donate money for a room in the new Maverick Writers' Studios building that was to be named in honor of Bill. It was a long and heartfelt plea, a writer son’s eloquent tribute to his eloquent dad.

Had I but world enough and funds, I mused, had I been as famous as Bill—president of the Poetry Society, tenured professor at CUNY, a regular at Breadloaf and Bellagio, I would have been delighted to dig deep into my checkbook, but I had not reached even a modicum of his acclaim. I was poor and underemployed, with little disposable cash. Across my mind, like a plane of light in an Italian quattrocentro painting, fell a line from one of Bill’s poems from TIME AND MONEY about "how the rich are marrying each other.”

I wasn’t rich, and yet I was rich in remembrance of Bill. Sebastian asked me to give what I could, and so I did, and here it is, my gift to the tall, long-limbed seducer who loved sentences.
All posts copyright© 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Blue Laws

Until some three years ago, I spent nearly every night of my one, precious life in either a mildly or not-so-mildly inebriated state. It was as if the glass of wine, always at my side as I made dinner, shucking corn or slicing tomatoes, were a sort of lover, ever ready to overlook my flaws—how I left too many gossamer hairs upon the shorn cobs, how I never made Apple Brown Betty, how I failed in ways large and small as a wife and mother. The five, ten, or fifteen ounces of Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay (I rarely drank red, even though it was meant to be healthier) was always ready to whisper endearments in my ears, to tell me I was merveilleuse, extraordinaire, magnifique, to fill up my silences with sweet-talk.

I never got the shakes when I went without a drink, but I did experience a kind of silent-screaming panic. I remember going down to visit my ninety-something father-in-law in Richmond, Virginia, who had long since stopped any regular imbibing of alcohol, as it seriously messed with his head, to say nothing of his sense of balance, and panicking because he didn’t have a corkscrew. There were silver-and-nickel-plated knives and forks, plastic spoons, crumpled napkins, multiple packets of Sweet N’ Low…but not one corkscrew in all the wax-paper-lined kitchen drawers that I ransacked.

Going door-to-door in his suburban neighborhood, I rang bells, rapped on windows, like some mad-dog Jehovah’s Witness. I didn’t want to chat about the holidays, didn’t want to talk about whether my father-in-law was still driving or going to the Y. All I wanted was the silver gizmo that might unleash the firewater from its bottle and deliver me, at least for the next hour, of self-loathing and despair.

“Everything in moderation,” advised the Roman philosopher Petronius, “including moderation.” But we Americans, unlike our older, wiser European counterparts, despise moderation. We are all sinners in the hands of an angry god, in need of thundering preachers to keep us from drinking ourselves into a stupor every day of the week, which is what our illustrious ancestors loved to do, from the folks who stepped off the Mayflower right up through Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Our founding fathers began their drinking in the morning with hard cider and continued right on through the day with beer, wine, and spirits. The early colonists were forced to institute “blue laws” which put all kinds of restrictions on the consumption of alcohol, banning the purchasing of beer or wine before noon on Sunday, something that remains on the books in most states today, which always shocks me when I try to purchase a bottle of white before noon at my local Whole Foods.

Why blue laws are called blue laws is shrouded in mystery. One theory goes that it was because of the color of the books in which the laws were first printed; another that it was the chosen shade of the stockings of those pesky ladies who tried to better mankind by lobbying for repressive laws.

What we do know is that blue laws didn’t succeed in curbing the early American’s passion for drink, a passion that his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren took up with equal ardour until an entire temperance movement sprung up, which finally succeeded in 1919 in writing an amendment to the constitution to ban the sale of alcohol in every state in the union, as well as in parts of Canada. And of course even this most ultimate of blue laws didn’t do much to stop drinking, which continued in speakeasies all over the country and which was trucked across Canada and into the United States, entire fortunes including Joseph P. Kennedy’s being made on the illegal profits of bootlegging.

My first cousin, Lisa, died at 45 of acute alcohol poisoning, unable to face a single day, let alone the rest of her life, without the rivers of vodka that she poured down her throat. Her funeral, held on a sunny April morning in a gray granite church in Penetanguishene, Ontario, Canada, overlooking the agate waters of Georgian Bay, where she had passed many a drunken afternoon lounging on the decks of friends’ boats, was one of the saddest events I have ever witnessed. Her eighty-three-year-old mother, wheeled in on a stretcher from the local nursing home, wept with a copious and terrible abandon. Afterward, the mourners gathered in the dark smoke-filled Canadian Legion. Her friends cried, smoked cigarettes and knocked back shots of tequila.

It was enough to turn me into a teetotaler. But like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s legendary malcontent Miniver Cheevy, I had simply accumulated one more story to despair about, one more reason to have another drink.

Lao Tzu says that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And so it was with my drinking: I made one small and subtle change in my alcohol consumption, which, though I could not have predicted it, changed my behavior conclusively. Three years ago, I joined a writing group in Northampton, which met every Wednesday night from 6-9:30 p.m. A hearty dinner of pasta and oven-baked squash was served at 6; drinks were strictly of the seltzer and juice variety; coffee pots were always full.

But this wasn’t a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, though several members were recovering alcoholics. After dinner, we had a moment of silence, then retreated to various parts of the house to spend an hour with our laptops, returning after an hour to read and receive comments.

Even if you were Miniver Cheevy himself “sighing for what was not, and dreaming of Thebes and Camelot,” you were not allowed to say: “That was nothing like Euripides.” Instead, you had to be positive; you had to find the firewater phrase, perhaps even just the single word that bootlegged your consciousness, that lit up your heart.

The adventure did something to you, made you feel full and unaccountably happy. All these strangers scribbling down the bones of their lives, speaking of divorce, loneliness, heart disease, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s, and you had nothing to do but listen, you wanted to listen, and for the first time in many decades, you didn’t think about how you couldn’t get through a night without a drink, you thought only about stories and similes and how amazing that people could spend an hour drinking deep of themselves and coming up with such treasures.

When you returned home well before midnight, you were too loaded with words to do anything but climb into bed. And so it was that you passed one night without alcohol and you slept a deep, dream-drunk sleep and when you woke, you thought, “piece of cake to go without a drink,” and if you could pass one alcohol-free day, surely you could pass another and another, and before you knew it, you had had five, ten, fifteen alcohol-free days, which you tracked with blue stars on your calendar. After a year, you counted up 150 days of stars.

And so it was that you learned to pass your own blue laws, learned to drink occasionally and moderately…and even though the shadows of a winter afternoon approaching five o’clock still make you yearn for the deliverance that only a glass of maple-colored wine brings, you know you can go without.

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