A Small Planet, Out of Orbit

Monday was Camille’s birthday, she turned 23. She was five when I met her, an extraordinarily beautiful little girl with hair sticking out in all directions and falling down socks. She is my husband’s younger daughter, but neither of us have had any contact with her for over three years, and then that was just a note of condolence on the death of my father. June will mark four years since we’ve seen her.

As a little girl she was easily amused, and when lifted out of the shadow of her older sister, shone brightly. One birthday brought the requisite Breyer horse, a battery-powered Japanese “pet,” picture books, and a long long rainbow colored ribbon on a short wooden stick. Camille carried the ribbon stick into the yard and spun with it, the ribbon rippling and floating around her. She spun and dance and rippled through the yard, the rainbow leaping and curling. When she finally stopped, she wobbled drunkenly before collapsing in a dizzy giggling heap.

I knew when I started seeing Elmer that there were children in the picture. I’d first met him when he brought his young daughters to the Public Library where I worked. In one of those strange bits of irony, their mother had worked there before me. Three years before she had taken the two girls, then age four and two-and-a-half, and moved out.

Both of the girls were adopted from Korea, but they are not biological siblings. They’d each been about 6 months old when they’d arrived; first Tai and a little less than two years later, Camille. In a newsletter for the inter-country adoption agency, their mother (who is a twin) wrote unabashedly that they’d sought a second baby because she thought her daughter deserved a sister.

Twenty years ago there was still considerable stigma in Korea to having a baby out of wedlock. Most infants, like Tai, were relinquished at birth. Not Camille. Her biological mother struggled stubbornly to keep her, and lasted four months before delivering tiny Jun Ok to an orphanage. In 1992 while combing the agate type section of the results from the Barcelona Olympics, Elmer found listed a South Korean runner, the same unusual name, the same age; further testimony to the tenacity and grit she passed on to her daughter.

Both girls were lovely children, but in terms of temperament they could not have been more different. Camille was stoic and shy and thoughtful, Tai was impulsive and outgoing and dramatic. Camille was content to amuse herself; Tai sought the spotlight.
Tai needed the attention and she demanded it, further casting Camille in the role of someone’s sister. It’s not much of a life, always riding in the backseat.

After Elmer and I married the girls became the subject of an enormous tug of war with his former wife. She wanted more child support. She wanted total control, she wanted me gone, she wanted, she wanted. I’d been a stepchild myself, but never in the midst of anything like that.

Once when the kids had been with us, I’d gone to get my hair cut. The older one got her hair trimmed, and Camille got her first “professional” haircut—nothing extreme, a long pixie cut that didn’t stick out all over. When we returned the girls to their mother for her four days you think we’d had them tattooed or something. It didn’t matter that the girls were thrilled with their new “hair-dos.” We got a letter from the lawyer, proscribing any further haircuts.

Camille’s first grade teacher wanted to hold her back a year. The argument for retaining a child working happily at or above grade level was unclear. The teacher had made a play for Elmer when he was single, maybe that had something to do with it. Elmer insisted that Camille be moved forward and she was.

At the end of the second grade, the issue of retention came up again, and this time it got so ugly we just gave in. The principal seemed to be mystified by the decision, murmuring cryptically that “still waters run deep.” One of the reasons for retention cited by her teacher and mother was Camille’s “small stature.”

Tai had been identified in kindergarten as “talented and gifted.” We worried what kind of message this would send, to be “red-shirted” for the second grade when your sister was regarded as some kind of wunderkind.

Their mother barred me from any input into educational decisions; never mind that three days each and every week I helped them with homework, fed them dinner, gave them baths, tucked them in, read them stories.

Of course, now no one repeats a grade in grammar school. Experts are in nearly unanimous agreement that the experience is more damaging than it is helpful. If Camille hated repeating the second grade, she never showed it. But then, there was so much she never showed.

It wasn’t all Sturm und Drang. There were ballet lessons, swimming lessons, riding lessons. Family photos show the girls happily hiking in the mountains, in front of waterfalls in Yellowstone Park, in the rodeo parade. There are snapshots of raven-haired children hunting for Easter eggs, visiting ghost towns, crying to be let off of the tiny roller coaster at the fair.

There were trips to Disneyland, weekends in Forest Service cabins, crossing Lake Michigan on the ferry, toasting marshmallows on the beach at Spider Lake. Pictures show them at the Field Museum in the shadow of a dinosaur; or at the Shedd Aquarium, noses pressed to the glass. Here they are at the San Diego zoo; in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. This one’s Seattle, where they’re peering up at the Space Needle.

Leafing through photo albums reveals a veritable parade of kids and dogs: here is Camille hanging around the neck of our gentle giant, Chumley; there’s Tai holding cute little Sadie in their arms, both of them lying on the couch draped over Delia the Foxhound.

There are scores of photos of them with their baby brother.

And Christmas, always too much Christmas. One of my closest friends was with us one Christmas morning and she still recounts how overwhelmed the girls were wading through the packages, so much so that they hardly responded at all to the stacks of gifts.

There are the photos of Camille doing the Macarena in a local production of Aladdin. Here’s one of Camille with a gaggle of girls at her swimming birthday party at Chico Hot Springs. This is Camille lacing on ice skates. And Halloween! Here’s Camille as a black kitty cat, a ladybug, a horse with an enormous papier-mache head.

Camille’s love of horses was legendary. From My Little Pony to My Friend Flicka, she adored them all. If there was a pony ride, she was on it. Breyer model horses lined her bookshelves, interspersed with horse books of every size and shape. She had a horse themed birthday party with a horse-shaped cake, horse-y favors, and many little girls clambering up on our old patient palomino for a walk around the pasture.

One autumn I won a fellowship from the Montana Arts Council, a considerable sum of money. I used most of it to buy what I thought (having been horse-mad once myself) would be the most perfect Christmas present ever for Camille: a Welsh pony. She was very pretty, white with a perfect little Arab-style head, tiny ears, big brown eyes; and she was 11 years old, exactly the same as Camille. She was delivered on Christmas Eve and we hid her away in a box stall in the barn.

On Christmas morning Camille unwrapped a tiny lavender and turquoise halter that wouldn’t have fit anything on the place. She looked baffled.

“Maybe you should see if you can find something it will fit,” I suggested. We all put on coats and hats and tramped through the snow to the barn. I think she was thrilled, but who knows. I had visions of her spending hours brushing and combing the pony, taking long idyllic rides, braiding the pony’s hair.

But those were my memories from my life and it didn’t work out that way. The next day Camille took the pony for a ride. About 100 yards from the barn she fell off when the pony startled and she never rode her again. In the end, she didn’t even look at her.

I’d made a mistake. As a child I had loved horse books, and toy horses and horse pictures as a fill-in for the real thing. Camille just loved toy horses; she wasn’t really interested in having a living, breathing pony of her own.

By this time Camille was coming by herself to spend time with her father. We had come to an impasse with her older sister and insisted that she get therapy. Her mother had not agreed. We said Tai couldn’t come to stay with us until she got the help she needed. That was a mistake, too. We’ve could have done an end-run on the therapy thing, but we were tired of fighting.

In the sixth grade, Camille grew absolutely silent. I’d pick her up from school on Thursday afternoons and the ten-mile ride to the farm often passed without much comment. It went like this:

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“How’s school going?”

“Okay.”

“Anything interesting happen today?”

“Not really.”

Maybe it was puberty. Maybe it was some permutation of the attachment disorder that affects so many foreign adoptees. Whatever it was, eventually I just gave up, and we rode in silence.

The many friends she’d had as a child had dropped away one by one. She would still talk with her little brother, but most of the time she withdrew to some other place. One Friday night, her father went into town to pick her up at a middle school dance. She had begged us to let her go. Elmer asked her if she’d had a good time. She was silent. When he asked again, thinking perhaps she hadn’t heard him, she burst into tears.

“It was awful,” she sobbed. Not only had no one asked her to dance, not a single person had spoken to her all night long.

She was still crying when they got home and when I asked what was wrong, Elmer filled me in. But Camille had something to say too, now that she was allowing herself to vent.

“I don’t know why I have to come here every week,” she screamed. “I don’t know why I can’t just live with my mother.” Elmer and I looked at each other.

“Go get your stuff, honey,” I said, “your father will take you home.” And he did. And she never lived with us again. That was probably a mistake too. We probably should have said “Because we love you and because we think it is good for you to have your father in your life.” We should have hung on; instead we let her go because that’s what we thought she wanted.

After she moved out, my mother and I were cleaning out under the bed. We found the usual stuff you might expect under the bed of a 14-year old girl. There were 7-up cans, a book ruined where something got spilled on it, panties stained with menstrual blood, all manner of paper, including some pages that looked like they’d been ripped from a journal. One of them was full of rage and fury, mostly directed at me, and the worst invective she could come up with was “stupid lesbian dyke bitch.” The other entry was how thrilled she was that we were going to Disneyland again.

Through High School we didn’t see much of Camille. We all made a trip to Missoula and I suggested she choose the restaurant for dinner. She chose a Japanese place and although her father and her brother and her sister had to tiptoe around the menu, she and I had a good time.

Her sister knew how to work the system. We could go for months without hearing from either of them, but just before Tai’s birthday, or Christmas, contact would be suddenly renewed. Tai lobbied for a car for her 18th birthday, and she lobbied hard. When the birthday arrived we all went to dinner to celebrate. We gave her a Matchbox car. The next little package she unwrapped contained a key to a 16-year-old Mercedes sitting in the parking lot. I’d snuck out (“Just have to get something out of the car!”) to stick the balloons to the antenna.

We figured we’d give Camille a car too, when she turned 18, but she never learned to drive. She did well in high school, her grades were excellent, she spent a lot of time drawing and painting. One of her pieces was in a show at a local gallery; I used it to accompany a story on the exhibit opening. If she was pleased with that, she never said.

Elmer and I went to Lethbridge, Alberta one weekend. The University there was said to have a strong arts program and it was good value given the difference between the Canadian and American dollars. At 350 miles away it was closer than some in-state schools. Lethbridge has a large Asian community and we thought Camille might feel some sense of connection there, instead of one of just a handful of Asians. Her mother wanted her to go to a Junior College in Powell, Wyoming (180 miles away) and it was to Powell she went.

Graduation came and went without notice or invitation. Father’s Day came and went without a word. Elmer met with her to fill out some paperwork that would allow her to collect a thousand dollar scholarship, a benefit offered by his employer. He took her to dinner at a Mexican restaurant (her choice) and as she did every time she went out to eat from the time she was a little girl, Camille ordered the most expensive thing on the menu.

We didn’t really see her again until her older sister got married in Iowa. Tai had asked her father to walk her down the aisle, so Tai’s mother had declined to attend, and Camille came out to Iowa alone. It was June and hotter than, well, it was hot. The wedding was set for late in the afternoon, (when the day is at its hottest, naturally) and when we drove up from Des Moines, we found the bride fuming in the church kitchen and that the number one bridesmaid (that would be Camille) locked in a tiny bathroom in the church basement. We could hear her sobbing from outside the door.

Tai’s soon-to-be mother-in-law was tapping on the door, talking through it, negotiating.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’ve got it under control,” is what she said, but what she meant was “Butt out.”

I almost did. But then I remembered that little girl and her rainbow ribbon. I remembered reading themThe Animal Family, remembered them listening raptly. I remembered them laughing together at Disneyland. I remembered their tenderness with their baby brother.

“Could you move out of the way, please,” I said to the mother-in-law. I wasn’t asking. “Camille, it’s Larkin. Would you let me in please, I just want to talk to you.” She unlocked the door; I stepped in and we locked the door again. She had tossed her John Deere green and yellow satin dress on the floor and was sitting on the john in the most amazing bustier I’d seen.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a great, um, whatever that is.” Camille grinned through her tears. So we sat there in a bathroom the size of a closet in the stifling heat talking about what a butthead her sister could be.

In the end, she put on her dress, washed her face, put her makeup back on, went and stood next to her sister, actually smiled and had fun for the rest of the weekend. Before we left, I gave Camille a little pendant, a circle of diamond chips and sapphires set in sterling. I told her when I gave it to her that I hoped that she would remember every time she saw it of the continuity of the family circle. I wonder if she still has it.

At Junior College, Camille met a guy who convinced her to drop out and marry him. We weren’t invited or even informed. Tai told us that Camille is angry with us because we didn’t buy her a car (though she never learned to drive) and she is angry with us because we didn’t give her money for her wedding (which we knew nothing about at the time.) Sometimes you can’t win for losing.

Once I had a little money, I thought maybe we should give her some, even up the score with her sister. (Of course I had forgotten about the pony, and the scholarship money and the orthodontia . . . ) But she didn’t return her father’s phone call. And then the money went, as money will, for something else.

Camille doesn’t talk to her sister anymore either. They had a falling out after Camille told Tai that her children will burn in hell because they weren’t baptized in the Baptist church, merely christened in the Methodist church. I guess her fellow is of the speaking-in-tongues, serpent-handling, holy-rolling variety of Baptists.

I don’t understand people who elect to leave their families. My own stepsister had a very fractious relationship with her father, and she would take long sabbaticals, but she always came back, even the one last time to speak at his funeral. I remember my stepfather dancing with Elmer’s little girls at my wedding. He was miserably sick with shingles, but there he was out on the dance floor, one little girl on each hand. Our family stories are interwoven, we become are our own little universe.

Last summer, a birthday card from Camille addressed to her mother’s sister was mis-delivered to our house in Montana. Elmer was furious. It has been years since Camille acknowledged his birthday or mine or her brother’s. But here she was sending a card to her aunt. He was ready to turn his back for good. But you can’t do that to your youngest daughter, I told him, not to the twirler of rainbows, the girl who could write in perfect mirror-writing cursive, the most expensive dinner date ever. You have to hang in there.

So every Christmas and every birthday that come we send her something. Sometimes it isn’t much; there have been some lean years. A little cash, a trinket or watercolor block or a scarf, and a card that says we love her. We don’t know where she is. We heard that she works in a pet store in Billings, Montana. Maybe that’s true. I hope she’s happy wherever she is. We just send it to her in care of her mother.

We did our best. Was it good enough? I don’t know. Did we make mistakes? Of course. People make mistakes. I hope that one day she will choose to come back into the fold. I hope that when that day comes that it won’t be too late.

That little girl, I still keep her in my heart. Twirling in the late afternoon sun, a small planet all her own, spinning, slightly wobbly, out of orbit.

The Thinking Man

an endorsement

 

Often, when an endorsement is written, there’s a little disclaimer at the end of it – in fine print– revealing that the writer has some other, additional relationship with the subject of the piece.

Given the manner in which David Esrati approaches the hail of ideas, people, conundrums and opportunities that come flying at him each and every day, it is more appropriate to put that disclaimer right here at the beginning, right up front where everyone can see it:  I know the man.  And the “how” of that says much about the extraordinary person that he is.

A year ago this spring I wrote an essay about the discovery of the body of a young woman, Heather Walker, in a trashcan on Dayton’s east side.  I found that David Esrati had also made mention of the murder on his own website www.esrati.com, and referenced a long ago controversial Esquire magazine cover by George Lois of a woman in a trashcan. There are plenty of websites that feature crime; it remains a compelling subject for many readers. Fewer are those that mention an erudite magazine in the same breath.  I left a comment on Esrati’s site and included a link to my own piece.

It wasn’t long before I heard back. David Esrati suggested lunch, but I was literally leaving town the next day for the whole summer and had to put him off until the fall.

I had been back in Dayton just a few days when he got in touch again: he had not forgotten.  After agreeing to lunch, I did a little research. I found a photograph of David Esrati in a black ninja-style hood at a City Commission meeting, and an account of his arrest. I dug further in court records and found an opinion by the Second Appellate Court. It made for fascinating reading.

Esrati had appeared in the hood at a Commission meeting in February 1997 to protest secret closed meetings the Commission had been holding to discuss eliminating public comment at Commission meetings. 

Federal and state “sunshine” laws require that all meetings and records of public regulatory bodies be announced, and open to the public. There are a few well-delineated exceptions to this, generally in instances where a person’s right to privacy is at stake – the performance review of a city employee, for instance. Removing the public’s right to comment would not have fallen under the very narrow strictures that allow for closed meetings.

David Esrati donned the hood at that meeting in silent protest, and was ordered arrested by then Dayton Mayor (and current US Republican Congressman) Mike Turner and was charged with four misdemeanors, all of which were later dismissed by the Municipal Court.

At great expense to taxpayers, the City of Dayton appealed to the Second Appellate District Court of Appeals, who affirmed the lower court’s decision and dismissed the case with prejudice. The City of Dayton again appealed, this time to the Ohio State Supreme Court, who declined to hear the case. The opinion stood affirming David Esrati’s constitutional right to freedom of expression and asserting that Mayor Mike Turner had lied under oath about the incidents of the meeting.

As a journalist, Esrati’s protest interested me. Not just because it made for good copy, and not just because it allowed one overblown politician to be hoisted by his own petard, caught on the hook of his own lies. Not just because  the sunshine laws are near and dear to my heart. But rather because open meetings are of essential importance to ensure fair governance. Still, I’m not sure I would have gone to jail for them.

I was late for our lunch meeting (the garage door wouldn’t close) and arrived flustered. Everyone in the room seemed to know Esrati. He pointed out various people and their respective roles in Dayton as movers and shakers. Some waved, others looked away frostily. Over the course of lunch we talked about Dayton, and how I’d managed to land there. I’d much rather be the interviewer than the interviewed and I was ill prepared.

Still, regardless of what David Esrati thought he saw before him (a somewhat rumpled middle-aged woman who wrote well and talked too fast, perhaps) I know that he saw this: a potential resource for his own business (a remarkably sophisticated marketing firm The Next Wave) and two “problems” to solve.

How much money is there to be made in writing about crime? he asked.

Not much, I admitted.

Had I met many people here yet?

No, not really I said.

He thought he might be able to find me some job-writing gigs. He also had some ideas as to how I might meet kindred souls in Dayton.

This is how David Esrati works. He wants to fix things. In ad agency parlance, he’d be The Idea Man. He has a keen sense for what might not be working quite as well as it could, and he has ideas, not just for better widgets, but for better schools, better economies, better government. But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. First to address the matter at hand:

David Esrati is running for City Commission.

Dayton, a city of 160,000, is governed by a four-member City Commission, with Mayor Rhine McLin at the helm and a largely invisible city manager in the works. Only one commissioner, Dean Lovelace, survives from the 1997 lawsuit debacle. The two commissioners who vie with Esrati for the two open seats are Joey Williams and Nan Whaley. 

Williams is a black man, a senior Vice President for Chase Bank and a second term member of the Commission who has been somewhat decried as “spineless” for abstaining from the vote on contentious topics.

Nan Whaley, freshman commissioner, is as whitebread as her Indiana upbringing. Lacking much in the way of real world experience, she is a fervent proponent of “landbanking” which many rightfully fear paves the way to seizure of property by eminent domain. She is a student at Wright State University.

The Commission’s Mission is stated as follows : “As stewards of the public trust, our mission is to provide leadership, excellent services, and participatory government to enhance the quality of community for all who live, work, raise families, play, or conduct business in Dayton.”

While the mission statement is fairly standard boilerplate adopted by commissioners in many American cities, it is the Commission’s “Vision” statement that is frighteningly rudderless and confused: “Dayton is a community where people choose to live, work, play, and raise families.  We serve as a regional leader and resource in offering cutting-edge services to our many customers.”

While Dayton is certainly a community where people live, work and play (would there be a community without that?)  this struggling city can’t be considered a “regional leader,” given it’s locale less than 70 miles from Columbus and Cincinnati, cities that really do “lead” the region.

The precise definition of a “resource in offering cutting-edge services to our many customers” is a mystery. One wonders who are the customers of this city, and what “cutting-edge services” are they being offered. This is Dayton’s official “vision.” No wonder we’re in trouble.

“I’m running to make Dayton a better place,” Esrati says  “where we can have an intelligent conversation out in the open about how to solve our problems.” He has a pretty firm grip on what ails Dayton and its government.

When asked what he thought are the three biggest problems facing Dayton, he went not to the nut and bolt answers that most would: jobs, economy, development. Those are issues that every city faces. Instead, his answers went to the heart of Dayton’s problem. The city, he says, is plagued by its poor self-image.

“It’s our perception of ourselves,” he explains. “No one is going to believe in Dayton until we do.”  He points out that the public’s perception of Dayton Public Schools is largely misinformed, and that the local media does tremendous damage by playing up every crime story, even those as penny ante as stolen holiday decorations or a convenience store break-in.

David Esrati believes that the problems in city government hinge largely on a climate of reactive politics instead of pro-active decision-making. He is unhappy with Priority Boards, which he believes disenfranchises the voter and adds another layer of bureaucracy with which the public contends. He would like to see better delivery of basic services and a feedback mechanism through which the public could effectively communicate their concerns with their elected representatives.

“I believe we need to re-task the City Commission as a board of directors who must keep the City Manager focused and on mission, with clear goals and objectives. However, that which you don’t measure, you can’t improve and without some kind of tracking system for complaints and requests, we can’t even start making the kind of changes we need to see if we want to make Dayton great again,” he explains.

A long time champion of Dayton, Esrati’s platform is plainly available through his website where he comments daily (sometimes more often) on issues confronting our community. Through the forum, he has already engaged the community in an often-lively debate about the challenges the city faces, but it is a far cry from doom and gloom. Indeed, some of the nicest things ever said about Dayton, and the people that call this city home, and the businesses, fledgling and otherwise that take root here are among the entries on Esrati’s blog.

He gets some ribbing for his ego, but nothing of worth was ever achieved by sad sacks. David Esrati’s Achilles’ heel is not his arrogance so much as that he sometimes forgets to sell himself, playing up his struggles more than his considerable achievements.

The Next Wave is where Esrati spends most of his waking hours and the work he does there is exceptionally fine; he has a knack for making stuff look good. His philosophy as a businessman carries over well into political currency.

~From the Next Wave website:

We had a different vision: The Next Wave is here to help people stay ahead of the competition, not abreast of it. We actually study marketplaces and people and buying habits, and we create a brand experience that is bigger than just advertising. We do it by finding honest positions that our clients can own and that set them apart from the standard price-and-product, dog-eat-dog world of mediocre advertising that tries to sell something rather than build value in the consumer’s mind and the client’s balance sheet.

David Esrati can do a lot for Dayton with those same skills. He understands what appeals to people, and how to create desire for a particular kind of experience. Those talents and his experience would be invaluable assets to helping Dayton pull itself up by the bootstraps.

Unlike many of Dayton’s critics, Esrati is quick with a list of what makes Dayton vibrant. He grins as he recounts them: “We’ve got a lot of water, a temperate climate, a great location. We aren’t in an area known for devastating natural disasters.  We have a reasonable cost of living, a decent cultural scene, something for almost everybody. We’re a diverse city, with great post-secondary educational opportunities and a tech-driven work force.”  He pauses for a minute and then adds. “And people are nice here. Not fake nice, but genuinely nice.”

There’s probably nothing on which David Esrati doesn’t have an opinion. I don’t agree with his philosophy on the Death Penalty, for instance, but it seems unlikely that he’d have the opportunity to implement it from the City Commission. He is passionate for education, and for the arts, for economic development, and historic preservation and for justice. Oh, and ice hockey. 

 The son of a journalist, he has been schooled from birth on the importance of education, information and rights, both civil and human. David Esrati has a tendency to call people out on their bad decisions. Maybe that’s not popular, but it is essential. There’s already too much laissez-faire in the city government.He sees clearly through the Oz-like machinations that so many politicians engage in.

Yes, he can be abrasive. But you know that under the bluster is a rock solid support, a dependable man, a thinking man who will put Dayton’s best interests first. It will take vision and creativity and ingenuity to help get Dayton back on the right path. In a place that prides itself on being a city of originals, no one could be better suited to serve than David Esrati.

Writer’s Block

I haven’t written anything in weeks. For awhile there, the writing was a daily ritual, and missing a day left me feeling like I’d done something dreadful: forgotten the baby in the shopping cart, or neglected to feed the dog, or change my undies. It was as regular as breathing.

Then I missed a day. Or two. Or three. Nothing awful happened. Occasionally kind people rang up and said, “Where are your stories?” It was nice to know they cared. I wrote some more. Then I went on a trip most of the way across the country. I packed the laptop, thought I’d carve out time for myself to scratch out a few thousand words each day. Who was I kidding? I wrote not a thing.

One of the worst fights I ever had with my father was ostensibly about writer’s block. We were sitting in a wonderful restaurant (now gone) in Livingston, Montana. It was the former Bucket of Blood Saloon that had been carefully and lovingly made over into an establishment of the highest order by the esteemed writer and painter Russell Chatham.

It was my favorite restaurant ever, anywhere. It was a folded linen napkin sort of place, but not stuffy. This piece is not about the restaurant, though. I am wandering. My father, an English professor, was in town for a visit, and we’d gone to the Bar and Grille and had a wonderful dinner: carpaccio, salad caprese, roast duck and a really good Cabernet, or two. 

He is telling us that he thinks my 6-year-old son should take lessons in the martial arts. My husband and I look at each other and smile a bit. This is a topic we’ve discussed.

“Well,” say I, “we’ve talked about it but we think it would just give Julian an excuse to kick people.”  My father, out of the blue, quietly explodes in front of us.

“Well, it would give him some self-discipline,” he hisses. “Something you never had.”

It wouldn’t have surprised me more if he’d reached across the table and slapped me. In those days I wrote copiously for a local weekly, turning out all manner of stuff from investigative reports on murders to groundbreaking ceremonies for new bank branches, a survey of Thanksgiving traditions to the nitty gritty of the police blotter, with book reviews and a personal column thrown in for good measure.

“I write more than 5000 words a week for publication,” I tell my father, tears welling in my eyes. “That takes a little self-discipline.”

“I want some respect!” he roars back. And so I get up and walk out, trying to get out the door before I start sobbing.

It was my mother who unraveled the mystery for me. She understood that I was defending myself with my declaration of  weekly achievement. She also saw that my father, from whom she was long divorced, saw my statement as a dig. “He has a hard time finishing anything—articles, essays, the Berryman book,” she said. “He thought you were throwing that in his face.”

My father is gone now. We never really discussed what happened in the Livingston Bar and Grille that night, though I did address it once in an email in the last months of his life. I told him that I was just trying to defend myself and that there was no insult, subtle or otherwise, intended for him. He didn’t respond to that, perhaps he didn’t even remember the incident.

But when I was sorting through his office at the University, I saw why he had never finished the book on John Berryman. He began in 1970. Berryman leapt to his death from a Minneapolis bridge in January of 1972; it would have been an ideal time to publish a book about the poet. In Dad’s office there were two filing cabinet drawers filled with material about Berryman: poems analyzed down to their last syllable. I asked Dad, then speechless from laryngeal cancer, what to do with the files. “Pitch them,” he scribbled on a legal pad. I did pitch some of them, but I packed up just as many and carried them home.

They stand in their boxes, not just in homage, but also as a cautionary tale. I, too, fall so easily into the research trap.  The research is fun, the quest for the unknown, the thrill of discovery. I have my own 20-year-old book project in file folders. At some point you have to stop researching and start writing, but by then, you’re so deep into the research that you don’t even know where to start.

But that’s not exactly the kind of block I’ve had lately. You know how it is when you wake up in the morning after strenuous activity the day before and you don’t even really want to move, because you know its going to hurt? It’s more like that. That famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining where Jack Nicholson has typed the same sentence thousands of times onto reams of manuscript paper, that made my heart ache. Not because it was showing that he was losing his mind, or that he was about to become a murderous killer, but because I understood. It is the ultimate spinning of wheels: All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.

It isn’t that I don’t have anything to write about. I have a list of stuff I want to write about, plan to write about. I interviewed a local figure here a few weeks ago—no, it’s at least a month. He’s running for City Council. He’s a fan of my work and I know he’s been wondering where the hell the piece is. But I couldn’t write it. Not in these last weeks, it would have read like it was written with a stubby crayon. I was like a literary drunk, couldn’t put one word in front of the other.

Opening lines come to me in dreams. And closing lines. But I never even open up the word processing application on the printer—the modern equivalent to rolling the paper under the platen of a typewriter. I’ve had no blank sheet to stare at, because I have simply looked away. I’ve played hours of Snood (one of Dad’s favorite pastimes too, as it happened) I list stuff on eBay and track it from hour to hour, minute to minute. I read the news from many different major papers from different corners of the globe. I participate in forums. I wander around the kitchen looking for something to nosh on and then I come back, sit down and log on to Facebook.

Today, a good friend of mine, a writer, a woman with three young daughters who gets up at five in the morning (so she has time to write) told me that she had signed up to Facebook just to keep up with me. I was so ashamed. I know she didn’t mean for me to feel ashamed, but I did. I felt like a fraud. Writer! Feh! Who am I kidding? I am a dabbler, a dilettante, a pretender.

And yet….

When the words come they are like cool water on a tear stained face. The pages fill with word after word that not only march along together in formation, sometimes they dance like Alvin Ailey across the page. Sometimes they lift off like herons rising from the wood. And sometimes they plod along like little tired children, but at least they move. Those are the good hours. Those are the times that I feel light, energetic, even, dare I say it, immortal. This is not to say that the writing is easy. It isn’t. Sometimes you have to wrangle sentences as unruly as broncs and just as dangerous. Sometimes more dangerous. It’s nearly impossible to stop until I’m finished and sometimes the sun has gone down and come up again before the last bit of punctuation hits the page. It’s a weird combination of exhilaration and exhaustion to finish. My poor husband: I’ve woken him up many nights to have him talk me down so that I can sleep.

I don’t think it’s like this for everyone.

It isn’t like this for me every time. The more pedantic pieces don’t consume me so much, but they don’t give so much in return either. Yes, its fun to write about weird McDonald’s commercials, but it’s kind of like eating McDonald’s food, it doesn’t really sustain me. On the other hand, I can no more write every essay from the core of my very being any more than I could survive while bleeding all over the pages, and honestly, who would want to read a steady diet of that?

There’s a funny story about William Faulkner, who before he became a literary lion worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He too suffered from Writer’s Block—spending too many interesting evenings at cocktail parties, screenings, the Brown Derby.  Finally, after a particularly frustrating day trying to write at the studio, he told Howard Hawks that he was having a hard time concentrating and that he was going to go home to write. Hawks said fine, and a few days later he checked in at the hotel to see how Faulkner was coming with the script. “Oh, Mr. Hawks,” the desk clerk said, “Mr. Faulkner checked out on Monday.” He had returned home- to Mississippi- to write.

Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t have a door on my study (a soon to be remedied situation) – and I am more productive late at night when the dogs and cats and child and husband have curled in their respective beds.  The television is silent. But on the other hand I am used to writing in a newspaper office with phones ringing and an offset press running in the next room. I have had private offices, solitude galore, where I did not write a lick.

My friend Rose (not a writer) says I should relax and let it flow and she’s more right than she knows. But it’s easier said than done. On the Internet (oh the wonderful, horrible, fantastic and terrible Internet, waster of time, master of research tools) there are all kinds of helpful people wanting to cure my writer’s block.

Drink coffee. Exercise. Dance. Listen to music. Eat healthy snacks. Yadda yadda yadda. We know all those things, don’t we? I’ve got my coffee cup. I’m listening to the Afro Cuban All Stars, music that can be incredibly conducive to writing, and yet. (Wait, you say, you’re writing this, aren’t you? And yes, but this isn’t really writing. This is like a pianist playing scales or a skater warming up, a painter cleaning brushes. This is the writing you do when you are getting ready to do some writing.) It’s a damn good thing I’m not Scheherazade… a thousand stories indeed, I’d have been dead a month ago.

I know what I have to do, and this is a start. I have to make deadlines for myself and I have to Honor Those Deadlines.  Oh, yes, and that other thing.

Just.

Put.

One.

Word.

After.

Another.

And make them dance.

Give Me That Fish

Sometimes you just have to write about the mundane. You find you just don’t have the wherewithal to write about sadness or faith or even the last thing left in Pandora’s box: hope. What is left then is either a blank canvas and hours wasted noodling around because you know you need to write, but you’re not strong enough for writing your heart. That’s when you write about McDonald’s instead.

Unless you’ve been in a cave since sometime-before-Mardi-Gras, you’ve seen the ad. If you’re like most Americans, you probably know every word to the jingle. Love it or hate it, McDonald’s Lenten season commercial for their Filet-o-Fish sandwich has achieved a kind of pop culture status that the Super Bowl spots only dream of.

Easter has come and gone, Lent’s been over for weeks and McDonald’s has ended the promotion, yet people still crave the singing fish. Views of the multiple listings for the spot on Youtube topped two million last week and continue to climb; the first one posted garnered 10,000 views in the first hours it was available.

Since it appeared, Freddy the Fish’s 15 seconds of fame has been parlayed into mashups and remixes by DJs , it’s being played in clubs, there are parodies, children sing it, cats sing it, hell, I even sing it. (Not on Youtube, though, you’ll be glad to know.) You can get the jingle as a ringtone for your cell phone.

 

Give me  back that Filet-o-Fish

Give me that fish

Give me back that Filet-o-Fish

Give me that fish

What if it were you hanging

up on this wall?

If it were you in that sandwich

you wouldn’t be laughing at all….

 

When they were looking for a way to promote the fish sandwich during this year’s Lenten season, McDonald’s turned to Arnold, a Boston ad agency. (You can blame them for the Carnival Cruise beach ball ads, along with “Powered by Tyson” and spots for Ocean Spray.) The catch? (Sorry.) The same spot had to work for both English and Spanish-speaking markets.

Pete Harvey, senior ad man at the agency, gave them “Freddy the Fish.” (For the Spanish markets, the piscine star was presented as “Pepe de Pescado.”) Brainstorming in the aptly named “Fish Bowl” conference room, one staffer recalled a decade-old hit novelty item “Billy the Big-Mouthed Bass,” an animatronic rubber fish that sang “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and “Take Me to the River” when passersby set off the motion sensor.

Though Freddy bears more than a passing resemblance to Billy, he is actually a real fish, a pollack, prepared by a Los Angeles taxidermist. (Both pollack and cod are used in the Filet-o-Fish, but the crew decided that the cod was “too scary looking.”) Freddy’s head and tail are activated by remote control. Nonetheless, Gemmy Industries, the manufacturers of the original Billy, were flattered by the imitation. One of their veeps sent a thank you note to McDonalds, and they are introducing a recordable Billy Bass that will be sold through Cabela’s, and a Billy Bass app for your iPhone.

The agency supplied the lyrics to the New York music production company, Pulse Music and composer Josh Peck sent back seven different interpretations of Freddy’s song.  Just before presenting the last variation Peck told the firm “We don’t think you’ll go with this one, it’s the most weird.”  That techno-meets-garage-band sound (“the most weird”) was the unanimous favorite.

“It was the one everyone wanted to hear over and over again,” Pete Harvey told USA Today. “There’s more risk with jingles, but also more reward.”  In scouting out a location, a garage was found that had a Billy Bass already mounted on the wall: they had found the right spot. Ray Conchado, the actor who plays the head-bobbing man eating the sandwich, said he started out eating the whole sandwich with each take. After a few takes, he learned to just take a bite.  J.R. Reed, who portrays the dumbstruck friend returning a borrowed drill, gets the most comment at our house. “The look on that guy’s face is just great,” my husband has said each and every time we’ve seen the spot.  Or even just when talking about it.

Give me that fish.

Every year McDonald’s sells 300 million Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, and twenty-five percent of those are sold during Lent, the forty-day period between Ash Wednesday and Easter during which many devout Roman Catholics give up eating meat.  McDonald’s isn’t the only fast food giant to cash in on this fish-selling opportunity; every chain from Burger King (BK Big Fish replaced the long standing “Whaler” a few years ago) to Rally (Deep Sea Double) to Arby’s (and their touted “fish shaped” sandwich) is in on the act.  As you might expect, the regular fishmongers like Long John Silver and Captain D.’s really step up their ad campaigns too.

We’re not Catholic; we give up nothing for Lent. (I’d be happy to give up housekeeping and overcooked vegetables, but I guess that’s not really in the proper spirit of the thing.) But we do eat more fish in March, and that is due in some small part to the McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish promotions.  Though my husband was pretty upbeat about Rally’s Deep Sea Double, I wasn’t impressed. The fish squares were dry and had a kind of bitter aftertaste. They were too crunchy, and the cheese, well, I don’t know. I just didn’t care for it.

In fact, I generally can’t abide fast food fish. (Yes, I confess, I’m one of those peculiar people that peel the batter off the shrimp.) But that particular combination of the Filet-o-Fish: a tender square of fish, a bit of tartar sauce, a little cheese assembled tidily on (and this is the important part) a steamed bun.  A remarkable number of consumers complain that McDonald’s only puts half a slice of cheese on the Filet-o-Fish. Hello? They’ve only put half a slice of cheese on the sandwich since 1982, when most of the malcontents hadn’t even been born yet.

It’s less a cost-cutting measure than a means to reduce the calorie and fat content in a sandwich that some people might choose as a healthier option to the Big Mac. You could do worse in that respect, the sandwich weighs in (sorry) at 350 calories, 16 grams of protein and 16 grams of fat. An odd side notes here is that two diet websites list the calorie/fat count of the Filet-o-Fish at 450cal/26g and 380cal/18g but those are anomalies, most independent sites agree with McDonald’s own nutritional analysis.

The phenomenon of Freddy the singing fish’s popularity generated a considerable amount of press, not just in trade journals like Brandweek, but also in the “generalist” newspapers, like USA Today and in all manner of websites. Many of them include comment sections, and the comments have run the gamut from “I can’t stand this commercial, I turn the channel every time it comes on” to “I love this! It’s my ringtone.”  (And complaints about the half slice of cheese.)

The real puzzle in the comment section is the invective that pops up fairly regularly. They’re not just critical of McDonald’s, they are screeds: apoplectic rants about the American institution, and its sandwiches. Do vegetarians write them? Sometimes. Are they written by animal rights activists? Probably. Are they written by former employees—some of them, without a doubt. Why do these people even read articles about singing fish commercials if they are going to make their blood pressure go through the roof? It would be less deleterious to their health if they just had a couple of Big Macs and chilled.

It made me think of the Internet rumour a good friend sent me a few months ago, urging me to boycott McDonald’s in a show of support for American cattlemen. The rumour purported that McDonald’s was going to be buying uninspected South American beef, raised on pastures that used to be rainforest, cutting into the livelihoods of ranchers across this fair land. Most of the other big burger chains (Burger King and Wendy’s predominantly) do use South American beef. (And all beef, imported and domestic, in this country is inspected, so that part was just a bugaboo.)

McDonald’s is the single largest buyer of U.S. beef, its not surprising that American cattle producers would be worried that the chain was looking elsewhere for their patties. The problem, according to McDonald’s, is not that there isn’t enough beef produced in the U.S. but because most of the beef here is grain-fed, there is not enough lean beef available here. Therefore, McDonald’s began importing grass-fed beef from Australia and New Zealand; those imports account for about ten percent of the beef they use in this country.

Unlike most other fast food chains, McDonalds has become the standard bearer in environmental conservation. (When they gave up Styrofoam use, it cut Styrofoam demand in this country in half and rainforest conservation via their refusal to use South American beef.) They were among the first to provide better nutritional choices and full disclosure of nutritional analysis.  In philanthropic endeavors, they provide 6,000 bedrooms every night for families of ill children through nearly 300 Ronald McDonald houses (serving more than a million families every year) and through Ronald McDonald House charities, providing hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and program services to benefit children worldwide. 

Because they are so ubiquitous and because every McDonald’s in America can be mapped on their website, they have also become a cog in the vast network that compromises dog rescue and the transport system that makes it work, not just for pure breed rescues, but for shelters across the country in their efforts to place dogs. You’d think people could find something more worthwhile to be enraged about.

We stop at McDonald’s pretty routinely. My father made McDonald’s his regular stop for pee breaks, and when we’re traveling we do the same. When my son was little he and I used to go through the local Drive-thru after school for an order of French fries to share. When I was little you used to be able to go to McDonald’s, get a hamburger, fries and a coke and still get change back for your dollar. I even remember the commercial for it. “Sir? You forgot your change.”  The greatest food? No, probably not. Maybe the most reliable fast food, though, and always, always, the comfort of the familiar.  My Mom usually ordered the Filet-o-Fish.

 

Halfway Through the Wood

for Doug on the loss of his Dad, and in loving memory of  Larry Vonalt.

Last week we attended the funeral of a man we’d never met. I could not have told you much at all about him. I was four states and 900 miles away when I learned of his death. My husband read the obituary to me over the telephone, both of us learning that this gentleman had served in two wars, worked for the telephone company, he was 82, and he’d been married for 56 years. In addition to his wife, he is survived by four children, four grandchildren, a brother, a sister. While recounting the news of his death to my mother, tears spill down my face.

No, we’d never met Edsel Peters. If we’d seen him working in his yard or fishing at the lake, we would not have recognized him. But we mourn his passing because his youngest child, his baby boy, is our good and loyal friend. The kind of friend that will help you unload a moving van full of furniture in hundred-degree heat, who shoots baskets with your kid, a man of wit and grace and excellent humor. If the measure of a man is in the children he leaves behind, then Edsel Peters was a very fine man indeed.

Losing your father unmoors you. It doesn’t matter how grown up you might be, how accomplished. Suddenly you are rudderless, flying blind, walking the tightrope without a net.  Three years ago, when I told my friend Judy that my father had died, she said, “Oh honey, you’ve done lost your right arm.”  It was the absolute truth. I lost my sense of navigation. I was clumsy with grief.

Judy’s own father, Virg Lovell, has been gone forty years or so. He spent years raising and showing Foxhounds, and it was Judy, not her brothers, who followed in his footsteps, from the time she was two years old. Seventy years later, Judy’s still raising and showing Foxhounds, maybe the best in the country. She still talks about her father like he might well walk through the door.

We carry our fathers with us; perhaps in a gesture, a certain turn of a phrase, a predilection for Miracle Whip on our fried egg sandwich, maybe a tendency to sing along with the car radio. I wonder at times about my mother’s father, Bennie Lee Ouzts, who died after being injured in a logging accident when my mother was just twelve. Did he look out across the horizon lost in thought the way my mother does? Did he throw his head back when he laughed the way his sons and daughters do? I never saw my Nana do that, but each of the six children do.

There aren’t many photographs of him. In my mind’s eye, he looks like Gregory Peck (though my mother will no doubt say “Of course not”) and I know that his nickname for my mother was Cooter (after the snapping turtle) and I know that his death became a kind of wound for my mother that never quite heals.

My Nana’s father died when she was just a girl as well. If I knew the exact circumstances, I have forgotten them. What I remember is that his death meant that my grandmother had to quit school in the 8^th grade and go to work in the cotton mills. In the last hours of my grandmother’s life, my mother sat at the hospital bedside, watching Nana sleep. Suddenly, my mother said, Nana looked to a place somewhere above the doorframe, lifted up her arms the way a child will when she wants to be carried and whispered “Papa! Papa!”

For me the first death in the family was my father’s father, my Grandpa Paul Vonalt. He died just shy of 80, after an illness. I was an adult by then, and the news, conveyed to me by telephone did not dissemble me the way I expected it to. I felt very sad, missing in advance the unassuming man who taught me to fish for bluegills, sharpen pencils with a Swiss Army knife, how to paint hex signs. Every summer visit, he’d loan me his green Huffy 3-speed bicycle to tool around town.

I expected to go to Grandpa’s funeral. It was just a day’s drive, and I made plans to go. But my father told me not to come. He said that it was too risky with the February weather, that Grannie and Grandpa knew how much I loved them, that I didn’t need to come out, that I shouldn’t. Being that this is an extended family that reassembles for fish fries and baby showers and 40^th birthdays, I was puzzled by my father’s insistence that I stay in Boston and not come.

It was only after his funeral that I truly understood why. My father needed that time to be the grieving child. Consumed by sorrow for the loss of his father, he didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to be there for me. I knew this finally because when Dad died, it was my husband who stepped in to care for our son and guide him through the loss of his Grandpa. I was too shattered to be anyone’s mother.

Daniel Sullivan was the first of my friend’s fathers to be lost. His daughter Noelle has been one of my closest friends for nearly twenty years. When I first met Noelle, her father was in remission. It didn’t last. I didn’t know what to do and I wasn’t the friend that I should have been. We were new to this, to facing the unthinkable.  Dan Sullivan fought the fight long and hard. I wish I could say that I was present for Noelle; that I provided tea and sympathy, a kind ear and arms to shelter in. But I wasn’t, at least not in the way I should have been. I didn’t know what to say, and I was a little bit afraid. If Noelle’s father could so easily slip away over the edge, what about my own?

In truth I had two fathers and in the end, I lost them both. My stepfather, Humphrey Clarke Booth, died while brushing his teeth, shooting straight to the sun, gone before his body hit the floor. That was always his style anyway. He was in England, the news came by telephone.  This is the man who taught me to drive, (“remember to speed up in the curves”) bought me my first horse, my first car, ordered me my first Martini. He soothed my broken heart, smoothed the oft-ruffled feathers between my mother and me, and made damn sure the lunch ladies in the English primary school never again made comment on the way I held my fork. His death, instant and far away, was also a strange kindness, a leg up on being an orphan before I really had to face it.

And even then, I came undone. I stayed out all night, writing, drinking. When I slept it was fitful. When I ate, it was a dozen raw oysters and a few Bombay Sapphire martinis every night at the Livingston Bar and Grille. One night it was one of the wait staff that drove me home. Other times I’d crash on the studio floor of a painter friend. Finally I asked a woman I knew for something to help get me out of the fog. She gave me a prescription, but no one remembered to tell me that I shouldn’t wash it down with gin. That landed me in the world of ipecac and activated charcoal, discussing a Thomas Jefferson biography with one of the ER docs in between wretching. The next morning I felt much better, as if somehow I’d got my bearings back again.

My stepsister read Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night” at her father’s funeral. At the time it struck me as a peculiar choice, one made only because it is a plaint from child to father. And you, my father, there on the sad height/ Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears I pray / Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage rage against the dying of the light. Reading it now, I realize that it is absolute stricken wail of a child. It’s beautiful and it’s brilliant, but that doesn’t disguise the primal nature of the plea:  Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, Daddy, don’t leave me.

My father told me he was dying by asking me if I wanted his poetry books. My father and I had many of the same poetry books. (Perhaps another shared quality, like the way I hold the steering wheel, or a preference for Cabernet over Merlot)  He was an English professor; I’d grown up reading Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and for a while was a poet myself. Some bookshelves bow under the weight of those slender volumes. If my father was offering me his poetry books it was because he would not need them anymore. That was in August. He taught his last class in December. He was dead the day after Christmas.

In the months between August and December, I wrestled with my father’s impending death. He was dying from laryngeal cancer. There had been immense amounts of radiation, and finally in a last ditch attempt the previous January they’d taken out his larynx, and made a permanent hole in his throat, given him a little black box on a cord around his neck in exchange for his voice. It was supposed to be the price for a cure, but they didn’t hold up their end of the deal.

It’s a parlor game to ask what you would do if you knew you only had a year, a few months, a few weeks left. I don’t know what my father might have said when the question was just hypothetical. When it was real, he went on with his life as he knew it. He drove down to his office at the university, met with students, taught classes, stopped by the Chef’s Pantry for good wine and roast beef and cheese on the way home. He took his wife to dinner, they listened to music. He sent emails to old friends and family members. They scheduled times for people to visit.

I suggested that we might come for Thanksgiving, and was told, no, Michael and his family were coming. I’m an only child. Michael is the son of my father’s wife. It was a stinging knockdown, one that left me sitting in tears. I wanted to finish the unfinished business; I wanted to clear the air, set things right. My father just wanted to go on with his life as he knew it. He asked for suggestions for the memorial service. I made them. He said he’d check with his wife. I lost my temper and reminded him he had other family. He sent back a six-word email “Why don’t you just cool it?”

I carefully crafted an email about how upset and enraged I felt about his impending death, how I wanted to set things right between us. He wrote that he didn’t want me to feel enraged. How could I help it? I wasn’t ready. Grave men near death, who see with blinding sight / Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay / Rage, rage against the dying of the light. It seemed that I could do nothing right. There are platitudes about having a chance to say goodbye. Sometimes it’s easier if you lose your father while he is brushing his teeth.

We went to see my father in the middle of December. He was clearly near the end. Dad went into the hospital to have a feeding tube put in. From his hospital bed, he wrote directions on a half-size legal pad as to cleaning out his office at school. I might have spent hours at his bedside, but instead I went up to the university and packed. Every few hours I would return to the hospital and ask what to do about various papers, or files, or stacks of literary journals. “Send them,” he scribbled, or “Take them if you want them,” or most often “Pitch it.”  I took all the poetry books.

The doctors thought we had another month. They were wrong. As we drove away that night, through a snowstorm to Kansas City on our way back to Montana, I could not stop crying. My heart knew what my head could not yet accept. We promised to come back in two weeks. The last thing my Dad said to me, his mouth silently forming the words was “I’m sorry.”

“Me too, Dad. I’m sorry too.”

We got a phone call on the morning of the 26^th. Dad had been admitted to the hospital, this was it. He might have until the close of day. I called every airline that flew out of Montana. If I could get to the airport in the next twenty minutes, I could catch the last flight that would have made a connection to get me to St. Louis at ten o’clock that night. But the airport was an hour and a half away.

“I’ll drive you to Missouri,” my husband said. “Don’t worry, I can drive straight through.”  Straight through was1400 miles in the snow. I shook my head. He wasn’t even conscious anymore, it was time to act like the daughter of the pragmatist he was. The day seemed to go on without end. When the phone rang again about 8 p.m., it was all over. If we’d started driving, we would only have gotten as far as Denver.

My husband’s father died a long time ago, and when I’ve asked him about it, he changes the subject. Oh, he’ll say how he got the call. How no one in his family had told him that his father was dying. That he flew to L.A. by himself, as his first wife declined to accompany him. He’ll recall how he found a cash register slip on his father’s dresser for six Porterhouse steaks that were on sale at a great price.  His father had bought them just a few days before he died and now Porterhouse steaks are forever entwined with that memory. The stories my husband tells about Pon Lieu are the stories of his life and never of his death. When I asked once how his father had died, Elmer said, “I think he just gave up.” I don’t have to ask him how he felt to lose his father; I know the answer to that.

I envy my friends who still have their fathers, and especially my cousins, the children of my father’s brothers. I worry about my husband and our 14-year-old son, who are caught up in that push-me-pull-you of adolescence. I can’t stand to hear them yelling at each other. Don’t they realize how precious is the time they have together, how we can’t really say which memories will linger on, which parts of the relationship become the legacy carried in one’s heart? 

Worse still is my husband’s younger daughter from his first marriage.  She is so caught up in her own anger and self-pity that she has excluded her father altogether from her life. He hasn’t heard from her in three years, and any attempts he’s made at communicating have gone unanswered. I want to take her by the shoulders and say “Don’t you realize?! Don’t you know how much you’ll regret this when it’s too late?”

It was only after my father’s memorial service that I learned from strangers that he had been proud of me, that he thought I’d turned out just fine despite everything. One person after another recounted for me the things Dad had told them about me. Sorting through his boxes and files, I found letters I’d written as a child, pieces I’d published in high school, poems I’d worked on, and reams of newspaper stories I’d written. I can’t help but wonder how different those last months might have been if only I’d known.

Driving in the car one morning the spring after my father’s death, I heard a bit of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Wood on the radio. I’ve seen the play, and I turned up the song.

People make mistakes. Fathers. Mothers. People make mistakes. Holding to their own, thinking they’re alone. Honor their mistake. Fight for their mistakes. One another’s terrible mistakes. Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what’s right. You decide what’s good. Just remember: someone is on your side. Someone else is not. While we’re seeing our side maybe we forgot. They are not alone. No one is alone.

I’m a little abashed to say that I found the answer to the father-child conundrum in a Broadway song. All that expectation, all that disappointment, all that dependence and love and struggle. But there it is: People make mistakes. Fathers. Mothers. People make mistakes. In recognizing my father as only human, I am able to accept having to let him go. I am glad he went gentle into that good night, and suffered no more. I miss him every day. I wish he could have come farther along the journey with us, but sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood. Still, we carry his map and his compass.

After the funeral of our friend’s father, I wanted to say some of these things. At least I wanted to say it gets better. It won’t always hurt so much. Your questions won’t have answers but the questions grow quieter in time. I wanted to say you won’t always feel like a fatherless child. You never stop missing your father, but you grow stronger in time.  But I didn’t say any of this. I just hugged our friends and said how sorry I was.

 

Sherman in the Snow

 

It always snows on Easter in Montana. It doesn’t matter if there’s been a deluge of warm spring days. It doesn’t matter if it’s an early Easter, or a late one as it was that year. The weather gods care not if the City Fire Department colored 3000 eggs for the annual Easter egg scramble (and why they go on doing that since it always snows is a mystery to me) the forecast for Easter is always snow, and that Easter was no different.

Finishing up the last of dishes from Easter lunch, I grinned as I watched out the window at our old Chesapeake Bay retriever playing in the snow. Pushing 16, Sherman’s enthusiasm for the weather made him seem a young dog again. He loved being outside, in water if at all possible. Snow seemed a reasonable second. He stuck his nose in the juniper bushes, dislodging a small avalanche onto his head. He rolled and gamboled through the drifts.

My husband and I are hound people, and when Sherman came to live with us we had a kennel full of rescued coonhounds. When you read, “kennel full” you should realize that means they were in the house too: on the sofa, under the kitchen table, underfoot and in the way, vying with our toddler son for attention. 

Six years before that Easter Sunday, Sherman was my mother’s project. Daily, she passed by a trailer court where a dull brown dog was endlessly tethered to a doghouse. One afternoon before Christmas, she stopped in at the trailer and inquired if she could visit with the dog. Yes, they said, she was welcome to play with the dog, his name was Sherman and by the way, they were looking for a good home for him, if she knew anyone that might be interested. 

The neighborhood children who teased him at the end of his chain marked Sherman’s life at the trailer park. He’d been maced a few times by the meter readers. His pelvis had been crushed when he was hit by a pickup, but the owner thought enough of the dog that he paid to have him put back together again. Sherman was seven years old, the owner thought, but he might be eight or nine, even.

Rescued dog stories are supposed to have happily-ever-after endings, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. My mother already had a big male dog, a middle-aged golden retriever named Gus. Sherman and Gus hated each other on sight.  Mom kept a couple of horses out at our farm and she brought the dogs out with her in the afternoons. Gus in the back seat and Sherman behind the barrier, snarling at each other the whole way. 

Sherman would romp in the dog yard with the coonhounds while our son Julian threw tennis balls for Gus out front.  Only two years old, Julian couldn’t toss the ball far, but Gus didn’t mind. He retrieved the tennis ball faithfully each and every time. Occasionally a passing adult would lob it a greater distance to reward the dog for his patience.

One afternoon the gate to the dog yard didn’t get quite closed. Sherman came charging around the front of the house, tangling with Gus, fighting with serious intent. Julian was knocked to one side, fell down and began to cry.  Hearing the fracas, my mother came running from the barn.  The dogs didn’t kill each other, but they could have, had they been allowed to continue.

I saw the question coming weeks before she actually asked. Did we think that Sherman could stay with us for a little while?  The dog’s temperament made me somewhat anxious. Julian was only two and not entirely sensible about dogs. Sherman was a sweet dog much of the time, but we agreed we couldn’t trust him around our son, not after the treatment he’d had from the kids in the trailer court.

“Okay,” I told my Mom. “He can stay here with us for awhile. We’ll see how it goes.” And for the most part, it went pretty well.  Sherman was a little grumbly at times, demanding to be fed or let out with something that seemed a lot like ferocity.  We were careful around him, taking pains to avoid confrontation, never leaving him unsupervised, trying to keep him in a place where he wouldn’t get himself into trouble.

“You cannot touch him when he is eating or sleeping,” we told Julian over and over, with great emphasis. But Sherman thought Julian was great, just the right size to have his faced licked, while Julian giggled hysterically.

“Not so fun to throw the ball for Sherman as Gus, Mommy,” Julian said to me one day.

“Why is that, Jules?” I asked calmly, though my blood ran cold. When had Julian been throwing the tennis ball for Sherman?

“Oh Daddy lemme throw ball some times but Sherman dunnit like to give back,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Gus always drop ball on my foot, and slimy.” 

It was poor judgment to try to remove anything from Sherman’s mouth, and being a retriever he almost always had something in his mouth. Socks, a toy dinosaur, Julian’s tennis ball, an ornament off the Christmas tree, pens, pencils, pocket calculators, bags of pasta.

He’s the only dog I’ve ever known that had a real yen for uncooked noodles. He’d sit in front of me while I was dropping spaghetti in a pot and beg for some. Left in the kitchen alone for just a few moments, he could open the cupboard, pull out a bag of egg noodles, consume half and leave the other half scattered across the kitchen floor in the two minutes I was gone.

In time we realized that Sherman would happily relinquish whatever treasure he had in his mouth for a dog biscuit. He was playing a game with us, of holding various objects ransom for a Milk Bone, and he’d trained us well.

Some nights, coming up hard on deadline, I often took Sherman with me when I went to the newspaper office. At first I took him because he looked and sounded ferocious enough to dissuade anyone who might show up with bad intentions. What I found is that he was good company, listening patiently while I read a story out loud looking for errors; sleeping peacefully when I needed to work without interruptions.

We’d had Sherman for two years when I took him with me up to a Forest Service cabin one October. I was working on a story about a long-lost route pioneers threaded through the mountains.  Sherman and I set off together in the little pickup truck, with the big brown dog riding shotgun for a few days in our own Walden.  Halfway up the mountain road, I stopped the truck and let him out to ride in the truck bed, driving ten miles an hour up the logging road to the cabin. He was ecstatic.

It was late afternoon when we arrived, and as I unlocked the door and pushed it open, Sherman rushed in, immediately seizing a box of rat poison left on the floor. I didn’t think about Sherman’s game. I didn’t think about his supposedly unpredictable nature. I put my hand straight down his throat and pulled that box of rat poison right out. He and I stood there and looked at each other, both of us just a little stunned.

I never again had a problem taking anything from Sherman’s mouth, though occasionally I would play along and give him a cookie for ransom.  He continued to buffalo the rest of the family for Milk Bones.

Sherman often slept beside our bed at night, and if I went to bed first, he would hop up in the bed next to me. When my husband came to bed, Sherman would growl at him. It sounded very convincing.  I had to get up, walk around to the other side of the bed, take him by the collar and say “Sherman, knock it off.” He’d grin up at me and clamber down off the bed, follow me around to my side and lie down on the floor.

Sherman and I often traveled together, retracing the steps of Lewis and Clark, covering the circuit of small town rodeos, searching out the western roots of long dead movie stars. He was an excellent companion. There’s something very nice about the loyalty of the sporting dog. Free from the tyranny of the nose that rules the hound, Sherman was happiest following alongside.

There were frequent inquiries: what kind of dog is that?  If you could cross a Labrador with a bear that might approximate the Chesapeake Bay retriever. Their coats rough and wavy, their bearing noble, their hearts deeply loyal. Generally polite, they can take awhile to warm up to strangers, but the devotion they show their owners knows no bounds. The bottom line for these dogs, for Sherman, is that he would give his life for mine.

In hotels and sheepherder wagons, forest service cabins and motor courts, when I lay down for the night, Sherman settled on the floor right next to the bed. He chose the spot where I’d have to put my feet should I get up while he was sleeping. He didn’t want me to slip away while he was in dreamland, and he stood between me and whatever went bump in the night.

Together we covered a lot of ground: up to British Columbia, along the Flathead lake shore, east to the plains, retrieving timbers from the Mighty Mo. We sat together atop a boulder in the Charles M. Russell National Wilderness Refuge having driven all day without seeing anyone. We went west to the Oregon coast, exploring lighthouses and rocky shorelines and the great wide sandy beach at Seaside. 

On the beach Sherman ran like a dog one quarter his age, crossing back and forth in and out of the surf. We shared cheeseburgers on the boardwalk, which meant trying to get his out of the bag and unwrapped before he ate it, and then trying to keep him out of my lap while I ate mine. He was certain I needed help with it.

Now, though, time was catching up with him. He had a persistent cough, not wracking, but there all the same. His vision was probably reduced to light and dark, basic shapes and forms. Sometimes you had to call him more than once.

“I need to take the old guy on one more road trip,” I thought, watching him playing in the late afternoon snow. Hanging up the dishtowel, I went to finish up a short article that was due on an editor’s desk in two days. Julian was sugared out on Easter candy, constantly appearing at my elbow to show me or ask me or tell me. His Dad was napping on the sofa in front of the television. 

When I heard the ticking stopwatch theme of “Sixty Minutes” I realized it was time to feed dogs. I scooped kibble into stainless dishes, and then stopped, a little panicky around the edges. Where was Sherman? It was long beyond dusk, and Sherman had not come in. I opened the door and called his name into the still and snowy landscape. Surely he was just curled up against the house, or sleeping in the barn. I expected his smiling face to appear in a rush before me.

“Sherman,” I called. There was not even a rustle in the darkness.

“Have you seen the dog?” I asked my husband.

“Which dog?”

“Sherman. He was playing outside earlier.  Did you let him in?”

“I thought I saw him….” My husband’s voice trailed off as he moved through the house, calling the dog’s name. I shrugged into my winter jacket, laced up my boots, found hat and mittens and a flashlight and went out.

The snow had stopped and before me the world sparkled, a wonderland of smooth white frosting in the moonlight.  There were dog tracks around the house, lots of them from his afternoon antics, but none went off in any particular direction.

“Sherman!” I called. The driveway was smooth with a deep cover of snow, unmarred by tracks of any sort. The ponies blinked at me sleepily as my flashlight beam found them dozing in a corner of the pasture. “Sherman!” The aspens whispered, but no brown dog came barreling out at me.

In the distance I could hear my husband calling “Sherman, Sherrrmmannnn” I crossed the bridge over the creek, but it too was covered with undisturbed snow. I found tracks on the other side: deer, a small padded track, maybe a weasel, maybe a barn cat; but nothing, nothing that could have been a dog.  There had to be something. If not tracks, then some other sign of a disturbance, a struggle, blood; but the fields of unblemished snow stretched out endlessly. 

“Sherman!” I called, sliding down an embankment, brushing the snow off my jeans.  What if he needed me? What if he was hurt somewhere and couldn’t answer me? I searched along the creek banks, peered into gullies, struggled through briars, tearing my coat.  “Damn,” I said, inspecting the tear. “Sherman, where are you?” To the south, in Farrell Lloyd’s pasture, cows shuffled in the night air, stirring sleepily. Nothing was amiss but my missing dog. 

Years ago, we lost a small dog in the brush. She trotted off one morning and was never seen again. Months later, another of our dogs walked straight up to me and delicately dropped a tiny jawbone on my foot. The county coroner, a family friend, verified that it was indeed the jaw of a small dog. 

We knew that we had an elderly mountain lion living at the far end of the property. He had made a bad end for many of our barn cats, and we surmised that he had been Sadie’s last encounter too. I couldn’t help but think of the lion as I searched.

But cats and a 15-pound dog are prey of a certain order; Sherman weighed ninety pounds and was, even at his advanced age, able to summon ferocious bravado. Surely an old lion wouldn’t bother with such a struggle? Surely a lion wouldn’t come right up the house? I hadn’t seen any lion tracks among those in the snow outside the kitchen window.

The sleepy cows added some measure of comfort as when a predator is in the area, all the animals are on high alert, not dozing contentedly on a hillside.

Still, dread was beginning to form a lead ball in the pit of my stomach.  I peered into the long abandoned chicken coop, slogged my way through the snow to another outbuilding along the creek. Empty, and silent. 

“Sherman,” I called. “Where are you buddy?” The creek burbled.  Could he have stumbled in? Or jumped in intentionally, not realizing how swift and cold it was with the combination of spring melt and new snow?

He would cheerfully go into frigid waters after a duck, but I couldn’t think of anything that would have enticed him into the creek late in the afternoon. There was, after all, no one to retrieve for. And anyway, the creek was still shallow enough that his body could not have floated freely to the Yellowstone, it would have been snagged along the bank, here or here or here.

My wool mittens were wet and soggy from searching and my toes numb with cold; I hadn’t stopped to put on an extra pair of socks on my way out the door.

Along the banks of the creek, east of the house, in a grove of willows I found dog tracks.

“Sherman!” I called with renewed intensity. “Sherman . . .” A rustle, near the creek. “Sherman?”  A low bark answered me; my heart leapt. “Hey, old pal, what are you doing?” 

I still couldn’t see the dog, but I heard more rustling, another single woof. Finally, my flashlight beam lit on the figure of a dog climbing up the side of the ridge: our neighbor’s blue heeler, headed south towards home. I sat down in the snow and cried.

Sherman wasn’t asleep in the barn. He wasn’t waiting for me by the door. He wasn’t resting under the junipers. He wasn’t drowned in the creek. There were no tracks up to the road, but I went up there anyway and walked along the highway, looking for a huddled form. There was none. Where could he be? He wouldn’t have gotten into a car with a stranger. He wouldn’t have trotted off to town. Everything he loved was in the house at the end of the drive.

Inside the house, I shed coat, hat, and mittens and called the Sheriff’s dispatcher. “Has anyone reported finding a dog? Or the body of a dog?”  No one had. I left a message on the answering machine of the Humane Society. Many times through the evening I went to the door and called.

Julian went to bed, asking as I tucked him in: “Do you think Sherman is okay?” 

I kissed my eight year old on the forehead and said, much more brightly than I felt “I bet Sherman will be here in the morning when you wake up.”

But he wasn’t.  Sleep makes you forget, but as soon as my eyes opened grim reality flooded in. Sherman! He was missing. Driving Julian to school, I scanned the horizon for the dog or for something that might have been the dog. There was nothing. My husband went to work, I kept searching.

My heart leapt when the Humane Society called, but they just wanted more information about my missing dog.  “Yes, he had a collar,” I told them. “Yes, he’d been wearing tags. No, he wouldn’t have gone with anyone, and besides if anyone had approached the house the other dogs would have gone bananas.”  My mother came over to help me look.

“Sherman!” we called, our voices trailing away in the Montana wind.  The other dogs barked and fussed. After some consideration I let one of them, a blue tick hound named Sophie, out to help look. Delighted with her newfound freedom, Sophie took off full-tilt for the pastures and meadows behind the house and headed towards the mountain range.

One day came to an end and another began, without a sign of our woolly dog. I continued to search. Sophie, the errant hound, returned grinning. As we drove down the driveway after school on Tuesday afternoon, I spied something in the west pasture. A dark brown fuzzy heap collapsed in the snow.

“Oh no,” my husband said sadly.

I got out of the car wordlessly, walking towards the mound in the snow, tears welling in my eyes. I couldn’t quite comprehend how my wonderful old dog, my brown clown, had become this bundle in the middle of the pasture. Perhaps a heart attack felled him in his tracks. Had he been caught up somewhere and used the last of his life forces to extricate himself, dying on his way home? As I drew near I began to laugh. It wasn’t Sherman in the snow at all. It was the head of an enormous buffalo.

Our neighbor to the west was new to country living. No doubt he’d bought the head of a domestic buffalo from a slaughterhouse and left it outside to “cure,” as he had so many other things. Sophie must have found the head, gnawed the ears and horns and tried to drag home her treasure.  I left it there in the pasture; let the neighbor draw his own conclusions.

The Humane Society never had a dog that matched Sherman’s description or even a sighting of one. The Department of Transportation didn’t find him by any roadside. None of the neighbors found him in any of their outbuildings, or pastures or creek sides. There was never a single call on the any of the “lost” ads we ran in the local papers. We never found a trace of Sherman.  Not a bone, not a scrap of fur. Sherman was simply gone.

In time, we constructed a plausible story to explain the end of his life, saying simply that we’d lost him to heart problems; the coughing, he was fifteen after all.  We always say how he’d been playing in the snow in the hours before he died, an example of the Chesapeake zeal for life.  With close friends we examined the mystery, how had the dog simply disappeared? Maybe he’d crawled into the brush and died, I just hadn’t been able to find him.

Maybe that was it.  Because people look askance if you told them what you knew to be the truth: that your great old dog, your truest friend and your protector went straight up to heaven, leaving no tracks in the snow behind him. 

A Hymn for the Lost

 

Mysteries in the Washoe County Coroner’s Office

The first person on the list is a fisherman. Perhaps his name was Don, it was tattooed on his left arm. He was still wearing his waders when they pulled him out of the Truckee River thirty years ago this July. You think someone would have missed him. You know, at work, near the vending machines. “You know Don went fishing up near Reno, but he still isn’t back yet. I wonder what’s up with that.” You think that somewhere there would be a house where the newspapers were piling up, or a car found abandoned along the river, with the billfold locked in the glove compartment. You would think in all this time that someone would have come looking for Don.

Instead, as the oldest case, he heads the list of 42 sets of unidentified remains in the care of the Washoe County Coroner’s office in Reno, Nevada. Sometimes there isn’t much to a set of remains: the upper part of a skull, maybe a complete skull and tibia. Still, those were enough for a forensic anthropologist to determine that the former was a young man, somewhere between 16 and 24; and the latter a Caucasian man less than 35, who stood about five foot nine. Sometimes the remains are considerably more than a skeleton. Sometimes it’s the body of someone so recently deceased you can almost hear their soul departing. Sometimes there are plenty of answers, just not the most profound one: Who?

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.

Northern Nevada is God-forsaken. Interstate 80 arcs across the top half of the state, passing through one of the emptiest places there is. This is not to say there isn’t beauty there, because the Sierras can be breath-taking, and there is certain poetry to the wide, wide expanse of the great basin. But on the whole it is mile after mile after mile of nothing. Most of Nevada is owned by the Federal government (don’t ask why), and it has long been known as the state of easy divorce and even easier weddings. Gambling is legal throughout the state; and in half of the 16 counties, so is prostitution. There are 2.6 million residents, and all but fifteen percent of them live in Reno or Las Vegas. The rest of the state is the sort of place where someone might go to be lost.

Perhaps that’s what happened to the thin young man with long black hair who rode his bicycle to a quiet industrial neighborhood in Sparks, and died there of a morphine overdose sometime in September of 2001, while the rest of the country could not stop thinking about the World Trade Center, could not stop talking about their grief.

Or perhaps the middle-aged man, who a few days after Christmas shot himself out in the desolation of rural Washoe County, his 9mm pistol in the sand beside him. Or the little old man, “elderly,” the report says, whose bones were found a few miles outside of Goldfield, once a boom town, now just another tiny place in the desert, somewhere between Death Valley and the Nevada Test Site. Where was he going? Where did he come from?

The Washoe County Coroner’s office has examined each of these 42 sets of unidentified remains, but they didn’t all come from the one county. They came from all across the northern half of the state, and even across the border, over the Donner Pass and into Truckee, California. They are under the jurisdiction of 19 separate agencies, including county sheriffs, city police departments, the Nevada Department of Investigation, the FBI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The remains have come from as far south as Tonopah, as far east as just this side of the Utah border. It would seem fair to say that if you die in Nevada, suddenly or mysteriously, and you are not in Las Vegas that you may well end up on the table of Dr. Ellen Clark, or Dr. Katherine Raven the Washoe County medical examiners.

 

Of the 42 unnamed decedents, 35 of them are male. Thirty-three are white. 15 died in a manner that has been undetermined, seven died accidentally, ten were murdered, nine killed themselves and two died of heart disease; one of those a 50-year old toothless white man crossing the street in Reno. The other was young man, in his twenties. Nearly six feet tall, he weighed only 111 pounds and wore his brown hair close cropped. His body was found near the railroad tracks outside of Wendover, where he’d been observed wandering the day before. When he was found, on September 4, 2001 he was wearing only soiled briefs. Somewhere, somebody is wondering what happened to him.

Some of the circumstances of these deaths are depressingly commonplace: the body of a newborn baby girl found in February 1982 at a dam at Lake Tahoe; young men murdered and buried in shallow graves; a black man near Floriston, CA (January 1984); a man of undetermined race one mile west of Gyser Ranch (July 1988); a white man two miles north of the Interstate 80 Jessup exit, Nevada (April 1996). In March 1992, the Nevada Highway Patrol got an anonymous tip that led them to a grave east of Highway 338 in Lyon County, Nevada. There they found the body of a man with reddish hair, somewhere between 35 and 50, six feet tall. Rural Lyon county is something beyond rural. Without the telephone call, the body never would have been found. If only the caller had thought to leave the victim’s name, too.

 

Three of the deaths involved cars. You’d think that authorities would be able to find out something by tracing the cars. Even without valid tags, there are VIN numbers. Even if the one on the dash is gone or melted or crushed, there is usually one on the engine block as well. (It’s also surprising that so little is said about the make and models of the cars involved.) Nevertheless, these three gentlemen remain unnamed.

In July 1980, a short black man in his late twenties held up the Nevada Savings and Loan in Sparks. He fled the scene pursued by the police, and while traveling eastbound on the interstate, lost control of his car and struck a “fixed object.” He died from blunt force trauma.

Another holiday-time suicide was revealed in January 1984, when the remains of a white man were found inside a parked automobile, 45 miles east of Ely. A hose ran from the exhaust into the car’s interior.

The sadly comic and strangest of the deaths involving cars is another suicide. On November 9, 1986, in Reno, a man was witnessed sitting in the rear seat of a white Ford Pinto, “fanning” flames as the car became engulfed. He made no attempt to exit the Pinto, and his body was consumed in the fire, leaving his size and race undetermined. He must have been so frustrated. Remember that the Pinto had real problems with leaking gas tanks and explosions.  Surely he thought, “Well, this will explode and that will be that.” Then he could hardly get the thing to burn.

The suicides carry with them an extra sense of poignancy. Perhaps these people were right, perhaps they had no one who cared about them. Does someone miss the tall thin man who hanged himself in an abandoned building behind the Maverick Gas station in McGill, NV back in 1984?  He was found wearing a blue Air Force jacket.

Or the middle-aged man who decided while sitting on the banks of the Truckee River one summer day in 1987 that he couldn’t take anymore? He had to go to some lengths, use some ingenuity to kill himself with a shotgun.

One February morning in 1992, the employees of Summit Envirosolutions came to work at their office in a light industrial complex in Carson City, and found an old man sitting against the wall of the building. Why there, one wonders, did he decide he could go on no more, and put a bullet in his head.

Pity the poor railroad engineer who was the unwitting accomplice in the death of a very short middle aged fat man whose last decision was to step in front of an eastbound passenger train. Or the housekeeper at the Colonial Motel in Reno, who one hot August morning, opened the door to one of the rooms, finding the guest had used an elaborate IV device to end his life.

He’d checked in under a false name, Carlos F. Otero, using an address in the Bronx that wasn’t his. He intended to slip away under the radar, perhaps to protect the person who aided him in sliding across that threshold.

“Carlos” died from a dose of Thiopental. The drug is used in small doses to help induce anesthesia, and in some instances as “truth serum.” It also is the drug of choice for euthanasia, and in 35 states is used for execution by lethal injection. Someone helped “Carlos,” and someone knows who he was.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
 I have already come;
’Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far 
and Grace will lead me home.

Out in the middle of the Black Desert is a little tiny town called Gerlach. It’s north of the interstate by 80 miles or so, train tracks run through there. In 1991 the desert outside of town became the site of the Burning Man festival, which brings upwards of 40,000 people into the desert the last week of every August. 

The bodies found along the road to Gerlach predate the Burning Man, (with one exception, and he was actually found south of the interstate, near Wadsworth) but it is a strange thing that of 42 cases of unidentified remains, five of them would turn up, out of the vastness of northern Nevada, along the road to Gerlach.  One was just a partial skull of a teenager, another the scattered skeleton of a young woman, possibly white or Native American. She had distinctive dental work. Another skeleton, this of a young man not yet 30 was found with a .22 caliber revolver nearby.  The body of a petite young woman was found in a shallow grave 11 miles north of Gerlach. She was wearing an unusual gold bracelet.

It can be something as small as that left to distinguishes this human from another human. An unusual gold bracelet, or a pile of bones and a silver ring with stones, blue and red. Charred bones found after a range fire, indicate men dead long before the summer fires. The skull of a Native American man found on the road to the Winnemucca airport. Another skull, one with a hole, not from a bullet, but from a craniotomy. 

The Homeless live among us virtually unseen, and die that way too. In Los Angeles County there are 800 unidentified remains. Many of them were homeless people; when you consider that the average homeless population in Los Angeles is around 60,000, a remarkable number come to the end of their earthly life with their identities firmly held.

In death, though, it isn’t so easy to tell whether or not someone was homeless. A man wandering the tracks in his underwear may well have been; who can say about a set of charred bones? Perhaps the older man with a full white beard found at the bottom of a ravine in his cowboy boots and fleece-lined jacket, perhaps he was homeless. Maybe he was just a rancher.  In any case, no one has stepped forward in the last twenty years to claim him as one of their own. A man in his sixties found dead in a homeless encampment probably was indeed homeless, but what about the man found one summer morning under a mattress and sheet of metal roofing off an unpaved street in Sun Valley?

The police report notes that the area was known for “illegal dumping.”  They describe the man as between 40 and 50, wearing full dentures (“Hang on a second, let me put my teeth in”) clad in brown corduroy trousers and a white t-shirt. He was barefoot. The report notes, wryly “No cause of death was determined. However the body and scene indicate the man did not walk there and cover himself with the mattress prior to his death.”

In Washoe County, “death by misadventure” often arrives via the Truckee River, which has given up three of the nameless dead. Each of them around 30, all men, one was said to be “fully clad in casual style clothing,” as opposed to, say, formal wear.  The most recent, a decade ago, was a tall man (6’2”) with long brown hair, found wearing only white undershorts and black shoes, and described, curiously, as “found entwined in an orange traffic cone.”

Twenty years ago this week, a young man was found under five feet of snow near the Heavenly Valley Ski Resort. He was white, just shy of six feet tall, with a 30-inch waist, no more than 35 years old. He had all 32 teeth, in excellent condition. They don’t know how he died, perhaps exposure. Has someone been wondering for two decades what became of their adventurous son, their daredevil brother, their best friend from high school?

The women, though, six women and a baby girl, they all were murdered.

The baby left at the Lake Tahoe dam 27 years ago, does her mother still think of her?  Is someone looking for the 60-year-old woman who was found in 1990, mummified in the sagebrush two miles south of Wendover? The woman with the distinctive dental work, her skeleton scattered in the desert on the road to Gerlach, surely someone wonders what happened to her.

Coming up out of the Truckee Meadows, the Mount Rose Highway comes up over the Carson Range of the Sierra Nevadas and summits at a beautiful alpine meadow the locals call Sheep Flats, before descending down to Incline Village on the north edge of Lake Tahoe. Sheep Flats is a favorite recreation spot for tourists and residents alike. On July 17, 1982, the body of a young woman was discovered there. She had been shot to death.

No doubt the Washoe County Sheriff’s office thought it wouldn’t be long before she was identified. She was in her late twenties, maybe thirty. The report reads, “The victim had not been there long and was clothed. She wore a bathing suit on under her clothing. She also wore a blue top, blue jeans and yellow tennis shoes . . . the victim is believe to be of European descent based upon an inoculation scar and unique dental work. Although many leads have been pursued, her identity and whereabouts prior to her death are still a mystery.”

The bulletin issued by the Sheriff’s office includes both a color photograph from the morgue and an artist’s interpretation of what she might have looked like imbued with life. Hazel eyes and sandy hair, a fair complexion, well-arched brow, the kind of forehead people used to call “intelligent.” Isn’t somebody looking for her? Was she so all alone in the world, in her blue jeans and yellow tennis shoes? Perhaps she is not just of European descent, but maybe a European tourist, her stuff left behind in a hotel room, or carried back to Europe by her killer with a story: she ran off, she married an American, she doesn’t want us anymore.

Eleven years later, another woman, this one found on the other side of the state, seventy miles east of Elko, on the north side of I-80, in a place described in the police report as “a vast and desolate desert bisected by one of the nation’s busiest highways.” She too, was white, between twenty and thirty, of average size and weight, blonde with brown eyes.

Under clothing the report reads: pink nail polish. She was naked in the desert, her arms extended to each side, legs slightly parted, posed as if crucified. They think perhaps she’d had a baby. There was a scar on her right calf, an assortment of moles and marks like most of us have. The medical examiner noted them with great care, measuring and describing each one. Her teeth were in excellent condition, though it was noted that she was midway through having a root canal. Did the dentist’s receptionist sigh with disgust when the girl didn’t turn up for her appointment? It is believed she was killed elsewhere and dumped at the site, toxicology reports show the use of alcohol and evidence of smoking pot. She was shot twice with a small caliber bullet, one bullet pierced her heart.

It seems so strange that no one would come looking for this particular young woman, so much so that she has her own MySpace page “JD 93 Elko Nevada”, and I CARE, a website devoted to missing person cold cases, carries scans of every newspaper story about her.

There’s not been so much attention paid to the woman whose body children found in a rock pile in Reno in June 1997. In her early to mid-thirties, she was white or maybe part Native American. She wasn’t very tall, about five-two and the most distinctive thing noted about her was a metal plate in her jaw. Her cause of death was not determined, but to borrow from the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, it’s unlikely she buried herself in a pile of rocks.

She was certainly into western culture, found wearing dream catcher earrings, a black bolo tie with an arrowhead, a yellow metal and copper bracelet, a silver ring with a red stone. She was dressed in a western-style multi-colored shirt, blue jeans (size 10); white socks and gray tennis shoes, and wearing a black long sleeved jacket.  Around her neck there was also a silver necklace with a silver whistle: many women have worn them for safety. It’s too bad it didn’t work for her.

The most recently found unidentified woman was black. She was dumped naked from a car along a dirt road off the interstate, near Mogul, Nevada, west of Reno. She was wearing just a silver ring on her right hand. About 30 years old, she’d seen some hard times. The medical examiner noted that the woman’s toenails were very long and were thickened and irregular. Her teeth were in poor condition and she was missing literally half of them. Her face showed healed fractures of the nose and jaw, on the right side. It may have caused her face to seem lopsided. Her body was found July 25, 2003.

When we mourn as a country, we often read out the names of the dead. We did this at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan; the names of the Vietnam War dead are poignantly carved into a field of black granite. We see these names and those people become more real to us. That these 42 people in Washoe County, these 800 people in Los Angeles county, these 4,797 people across the country, dead and unidentified and claimed by no one, that they are stripped of their names does not make them any less real.

The US Department of Justice has recently launched twin databases under the acronym NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons system.) One database is that of missing persons, the other is that of unidentified remains. They are working on developing the software that will cross-reference both sets of data in hopes of finding some matches. They are unwieldy and balky to use. Data hasn’t been entered in a very consistent manner, some records are excellent, some are so vague as to be rendered meaningless. You ought to be able to search via date or hair color or by distinctive gold bracelet, and you cannot. But it is a start.

Some of these people were truly lost. They were the last of their families; perhaps they were friendless in this world. But not all of them. Some of them are probably blamed angrily for their absences. Some of them might be missed every day, longed for by people who wonder whatever happened to their daughter, son, mother, father, brother, sister, friend. They need an answer, as do those who found the remains, whose startling discovery is etched forever in their mind, an endless mystery.

The last entry in the Washoe County Coroner’s list of unidentified remains is from May 8, 2005. A young man, white, slight of stature. He was wearing a black long-sleeved sweatshirt, gray-green slacks, a brown leather belt. His hair, black and wavy, was two centimeters long. He leapt from the roof of Reno parking garage. It was very early in the morning when he stepped out into thin air. Had he lost too much at the gambling table, was there a fight with a girlfriend? Did he have any idea when he was having his last hair cut that in a matter of days it would come to this? When he pulled on his trousers many hours before and fastened his brown leather belt, it probably never occurred to him that he would end up among the lost.

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail, And mortal life shall cease, I shall possess within the veil, A life of joy and peace.

 

 

Let Us Now Praise Tim Horton

Last fall, I lost a dog. Every day for ten days I got up after a few hours of restless sleep and took my son to school. The next stop was Tim Horton’s for coffee, thus beginning another day of searching alleys and abandoned houses, handing out flyers, walking the aisles of the animal shelter. Had I the strength I would have done this 24 hours a day. But this story is not about my search for the dog, it is about Tim Horton.

The dog? Oh, you want to know about the dog. Well, okay, but then after that, it’s about Tim Horton. On the night of the ninth day, I got a phone call from a nurse at the local Hospice. They had seen my dog, she’d come up to the doors, looking for food. It was the first call I’d had. That night we tracked her through the woods behind the Hospice and across their park-like campus but came up empty-handed. The next day, very early, after a trip through Tim Horton’s drive-through, I went back to the Hospice and searched. And waited. And searched. At 2:30 in the afternoon, she crept out of the woods and seeing that it was me waiting for her, she flew to me.

Those mornings I could have made coffee in my own kitchen. The freezer has organic Nicaraguan French roast beans, fair trade Sumatran, a bag of Eight o’clock that my husband is very fond of. No, I went to Tim Horton’s because it made me feel hopeful. The window of the drive-through would open, and a friendly person would take my money and hand me a hot coffee in the Tim Horton holiday cup.

They always had a day-old Timbit (or as my son likes to call them “bits of Tim”) for my retriever, sitting in the seat behind me. He would sometimes startle them, sticking his big brown head over my shoulder and through the window in anticipation of his treat, but they always laughed.

Each night when I finally gave up and went home, I’d set the empties on a shelf in the garage. They joined the other Tim Horton cups there, lined up like little soldiers waiting for Macy to come home. And when she did, the cups all went unceremoniously into the trash.

For those of you not versed in the parlance, Tim Horton’s is a chain of coffee and doughnut shops (or as they like to put it “Baked goods, always fresh!”) established in 1964 by Canadian Tim Horton, a defenseman for the Toronto Maple Leafs. (Who had previously tried his hand at a Studebaker dealership and a hamburger stand.)

Tim had been signed to the Maple Leafs in the fall of 1952, when he was 22 years old and played for Toronto until 1970, during which the team won four Stanley Cups, and Tim was named to NHL all-star teams seven times. He was tremendously strong, yet calm under pressure, earning few penalty minutes for an enforcer-type defenseman. (Gordie Howe called him “Hockey’s Strongest Man.”) Between 1961 and 1968, Tim Horton played in 486 consecutive regular-season games; that stood as the NHL record for consecutive games by a defensemen until 2007.

He had an unusual method for handling players that were fighting him: he’d wrap his arms around them in a giant bear hug and squeeze. It’s said that the Bruins’ Derek Sanderson bit Tim hard, on the ear, during a fight. The story goes that Sanderson felt one rib snap, then another and was desperate to escape the veteran defenseman’s embrace. Or maybe he was just dreaming of doughnuts.

Tim Horton was never known to be vicious or sneaky though and earned the respect of fellow players throughout his long career. When coach Punch Imlach was fired from the Leafs in 1969 following a humiliating playoff defeat, Tim left soon after, finding a new berth first with the New York Rangers, then a single season with the Penguins before arriving at his old coach’s new team, the Buffalo Sabres, in 1972. Imlach wasn’t the coach anymore, he’d been sidelined by a heart attack, but he remained with the franchise as GM.

Then, very early on the morning of February 21, 1974, in the pre-dawn hours, Tim Horton was coming home to Buffalo from a game in Toronto 90 miles away. He was trying to avoid a traffic stop by Mounties (he’d had a few drinks after the game) when he flipped his DeTomaso Pantera and was killed. (The car, a gift from Punch Imlach, was an awful car anyway. Too little weight for too much engine, the steel unibody construction had a poor fit and finish. Many Panteras broke down on the Ford test track. It’s said that Elvis Presley shot his with a handgun when it wouldn’t start.)

Like the rest of the Pee Wee girls hockey team, I wept at the news. With a child’s grief, I put a stripe of black electrical tape across my 1973 O-Pee-Chee card and tacked it to my bulletin board. I may not have even noticed Tim Horton before (I was really a Flyers fan) but now I mourned him. For the rest of our season I finished off my long braids with black ribbon.

After that, though, tears long dry, Tim Horton came to mean doughnuts. There was only one Tim Horton’s on Prince Edward Island. It was in the capital, Charlottetown, on University Avenue. Every trip to Charlottetown- picking up someone at the airport, going to the high school drama competition, our annual high school football game with Colonel Gray, Christmas shopping- every trip meant stopping by Tim Horton’s to pick up a dozen doughnuts. There are nearly two dozen Tim Horton’s on the island now. Charlottetown’s paper, The Guardian reported in a story last July that the three Tim Horton’s locations in the city are causing traffic problems as the drive-through lines back up onto city streets.

It’s been twenty plus years since I was last on the Island (and yes, I went to Tim Horton’s on my last trip there) but I found my Tim Horton’s fix in other places: Vancouver, Cranbrook, Lethbridge, Calgary. And then a few years ago, Michigan! The migration south over the border has begun. Now there are nearly a dozen Tim Horton’s in the Dayton area.

A confession is in order here about Tim’s doughnuts: I don’t love them anymore. I don’t know if it’s just that my taste buds are more developed now or if the doughnuts have declined since my childhood (so many things have) but really, they are just okay. It’s a funny thing about those fried rounds of dough: people are very opinionated about what makes a good one. I am sort of partial to the fare offered up at Dunkin’Donuts, but Krispy Kreme—no thanks. (Even if it is fun to watch their Rube Goldberg contraption make them.) Jim’s Donut Shop in Vandalia is said to have excellent doughnuts, but we haven’t tried them yet. The best doughnuts I ever ate were made by Margie Collins in the basement of the Redeemer Lutheran Church. It doesn’t matter though, because Tim Horton’s isn’t really about doughnuts anymore, it’s about coffee.

There are more conspiracy theories about Tim Horton’s coffee than any subject save the American government. It is the “double-double” (two creams, two sugars) that regular drinkers describe as addictive. There have been university studies and chemical analyses, there are web-pages dedicated to the topic (“Tim Horton’s Coffee aka Canadian Crack,” “Tim Horton’s Crack Identified,” “Tim Horton’s Introduces New Crack”—okay, so the last one was about their breakfast sandwiches, but you get the picture.) You have to pry their cold dead fingers from around the cup.

My old high school friend Richard doesn’t understand the fuss, calling the coffee “Generic, but consistently okay.” Perhaps, like me, he is drinking the coffee black instead of ordering the fiendishly addictive double-double. (230 calories, 12g of fat) The Double-double is so pervasive in Canada, that the term has gained entry into the Oxford English Dictionary. As a beverage, it has been endorsed by the law enforcement community in Police Link .

Richard may not be vulnerable to the Tim’s addiction, but my friend Jan doesn’t go into work (for the Canadian Coast Guard) without her extra large Timmie’s in hand. As it happened, during the weeks that Macy the dog was missing, Jan’s profile photo on Facebook was a photograph of a Tim Horton cup sitting on a console at Jan’s work. Every day, she wrote to ask how the search was going, to reassure me that the dog would come home, to ask how I was holding up, and every message that she wrote bore that image of the Tim Horton’s cup. I don’t think I ever got around to telling her that I saw picture of the cup as a gesture of solidarity, a badge of courage, a sign of hope.

Yesterday, my husband and I were sitting eating chicken salad sandwiches at the Tim Horton’s less than a mile up the road from where I was reunited with the dog. (Oh yeah, you can get lunch at Tim Horton’s too.) With a nostalgic smile I pointed at the door to the restroom, the sign says “Wash Rooms.”

“Canadian-speak,” I said. Since I drink my coffee black, I’ve never tried to order a double double there, but I’m sure if I did they’d know what to do. On the shelves are bags of coffee beans from the sustainable coffee program that Tim Horton’s has developed in Guatemala to benefit coffee growers, and their communities. On the walls are photographs of the summer camps Tim Horton’s sends underprivileged children to each year. Behind me there is a poster of Sidney Crosby, “the kid,” a hockey phenomenon signed to the NHL in 2005 at the tender age of 17. Sid was a member of the Timbits hockey program in 1993, and he is shown with a little girl and a little boy from the contemporary program which provides local hockey associations in the Canada and U.S. with jerseys, participation medals, hockey jamborees and for some, the chance to play hockey as the intermission feature at select NHL games.

Later, I will read that altogether the Timbits sports programs supports more than 200,000 children in not just hockey, but lacrosse, soccer, t-ball and baseball, along with sponsoring free swimming at community pools in the summer and free skating at community rinks in the winter. I’ll read about the Smile Cookie program that contributed over two million dollars to support children’s charities in Canada. But first I have to finish the cup of coffee on the table in front of me. It’s brimming with hope.

Breathless

by Larkin Vonalt

 

A young woman is standing on the sidewalk in front of a printing business. It is the end of July in Ohio and it is hot, already more than 80 degrees that morning. She is holding a cold glass bottle, a chilled SoBe for her boyfriend. She is seven months pregnant.

The boyfriend arrives, and if he isn’t thrilled to see her, he is very pleased to be met with the ice cold drink. It will turn out to be the highlight of an otherwise wretched day. His paycheck bounced. He’s living with a new girlfriend, who is 22 and demanding. He wants to marry her, he thinks, but he still has some unfinished business.

Heather, 7 months pregnant, has been evicted from the apartment they once shared, and is basically living on the street. He is concerned about her, about his child whom she carries. She’s on a waiting list for Section 8 housing, but until then, she’s sleeping rough. He is hoping to convince the new girlfriend, confusingly also named Heather, to let the pregnant girl come live with them.

We know this because Anthony Shuri, the boyfriend, has written about it in his online blog on OKCupid, a website not so much for dating but for hooking up. In his profile, the 31-year-old refers to himself as Nibbles the Owl, and he says he’s really good at “oral sex, driving, smoking pot and making as ass of himself to impress women.”  There is a photograph of a pudgy man of mixed race (“Yes, the fat one is me”) standing next to two women: one skinny as a boy, (“Rachel giver of advice,” he writes) and the other, in shorts and a t-shirt, her hair tucked behind her ears, is “Heather (Momma).” Her name is Heather Skelly and she is 23 years old.

By the end of August, Heather has moved in with Anthony and his girlfriend. Online, the girlfriend rages:

Get you and your pregnant ex girlfriend out of my apartment. The shit is your fault. You CHEATED on me and expect me to be ok with you having her live with me.. You just stare at me when I try to tell you how I am feeling.. You never say ANYTHING to make me believe that you want things to be better. I have been faithful to you since day 1 and I always turned my head when you spent the weekend in batavia.. and then you said you were still in love with her.. but you wanted to see what would happen with me.. Then You got HER pregnant. Just one month after I found out you had been sleeping with her and I thought it had stopped. Jump ahead about 6 mo and you get evicted.. because of her.. and we get a place together.. after a month of being with you, to myself, what I had wanted for so long I come home from work one day and find her shit in the middle of my living room floor, and its still there. All I want, have ever wanted, was to me with you. Why else would I put myself thru all this.. I just want us to be happy together, I keep waiting.

A day or so before Anthony had posted a coy, online apology that his girlfriend initially thought was addressed to her. But upon re-reading it, she realizes it is not about her at all. She thinks (perhaps correctly) that it is a message for yet a third woman, Brooke, a woman consumed with knitting and at some point, anyway, consumed with Anthony. She had used him for a model for a knitted hat she designed and wrote, in reference to that: Beware the obsessive man, though. As I was knitting the navy and white hat (see left), he said, “Ooh! What’s that?”I said, “You don’t need another hat.” He said, “Yes, I do! I only have two! What could I say? It’s his.

The photographs on knitty show Anthony in a blue jacket and a knit cap, reading. It makes you think of someone reading in a prison yard. There’s no doubt that the women in Anthony Shuri’s life would describe him as resembling Adam Duritz, the frontman for Counting Crows. If one can judge from Brooke’s online knitting blog (which puzzles Anthony) she seems to have her life a bit more together. Perhaps the knitting gives her focus, she quotes “knitting calms the drunken monkey of the mind.” Still, though, imagine the incessant click click click of knitting needles as the soundtrack to this story.

Imagine too, Heather Skelly. Hugely pregnant, sleeping in a cramped apartment with the boyfriend who left her and his new girlfriend; all of her worldly goods piled in the middle of the living room floor. She has nowhere else to go. Her suburban life came crashing down when she was a teenager. Her mother died suddenly of a heart attack when Heather was 15, her father two years later from cancer. Heather was left in the care of her older brother, Guy. But now Guy has drifted away too, living in his car, on the streets. Anthony is being self-righteous; he has to be there for his son, he has to put the child’s well being first. As if she is nothing but a vessel. She is grateful to not be on the streets, but it is a small enough gift.

Two weeks later, Anthony’s girlfriend has news for him, presented with a plastic stick on her outstretched hand. She too is in the family way, with a due date in May. On September 13, he writes: Two lines …not one, not none, but TWO lines… uh… whoops. Time to panic.

The next day, he rails about wanting to be a good father: Why is it automatically assumed that I won’t be a good father simply because we aren’t married? This is one of the dreams I’ve had all my life, for fuck’s sake! Some boys want to be firefighters, some boys want to be astronauts, and some boys want to be racecar drivers.. but you know what I want? Huh? I want to be a good father. If that makes me a bad person, then fuck you.

He has his chance soon enough, for five days later, Heather gives birth to Dominic Alexander. He has arrived a few weeks early, weighing in at just over five pounds. It must be a relief to be in the hospital, where at least no one is screaming. Heather’s experience of the birth is described off-handedly by Anthony as “a twelve hour Morphine nap followed by fourteen minutes (his emphasis) of intense pushing.”  The very next day he is vilifying her in order to prop himself up, but a day later finds comfort in something his boss says to him, that this is his chance to be a hero. “I don’t have to impress anyone else in the world,” Anthony writes, “because this boy is going to worship me for the rest of my life.”

When the baby is ten days old, Heather tells Anthony about a program she’s found that will shorten her waiting time on the public housing list. It should have made his day. She and the baby would be safe; they would be out of the newly pregnant girlfriend’s apartment. Heather would be on her way to putting her life together for herself and her son. But Anthony’s chief response is concern: will the program allow him to see the baby?

The boy is not even a month old before Anthony is weighing what’s in it for Anthony.

Seriously, aside from all the feel-good crap, what’s the point in my “taking responsibility” here? Pros: someone to get child support from, “male role model”(which seems rather pointless at the proposed 2 or 3 days a week), unconditional love (which is, admittedly, a really big one )and…? Cons: G/F hates the idea, “momma”‘s friends won’t talk to me, I have no legal rights in his care or upbringing, child support is money I can’t afford to spend (right now), Children’s Services wants me to take time off work (that I need to PAY child support) to take parenting classes (for my 2 days a week??), mom wants to switch from breastfeeding (which is by FAR superior to formula), simply so she won’t have to feed him as much (and I can’t say “Don’t do that, it’s bad for him”, because I have no rights)… I just keep running this list through my head over and over, and yet, other than guilt, and Dominic’s need for a “role model”, what’s the point? Tell me that, if you can.

For the next month Heather and her son don’t make enough of an impact on Anthony’s life for him to comment, even though they are still living there with him and his girlfriend. He is caught up instead with having heard from the “girl he lost his virginity to” and her claims (unfounded, says he) that he is the father of a child she gave up to the foster care system. He refers to the woman, Kelly, as “pure evil.”  Then, on November 6, a two-line entry: “Dominic and his mother have moved to a shelter in Xenia. God this sucks . . . I miss him already.”

Heather and Dominic find refuge through the Interfaith Hospitality Network of Greene County, part of national network formed to provide assistance to homeless families. As part of the program, the network runs a “Day Center” where clients can make phone calls, and receive training in job and life skills, like budgeting, nutrition and parenting. Local churches on rotation provide overnight shelter. It’s only temporary, two months, and Heather is still living out of a suitcase, but it is surely a blessed relief after the apartment.

Very quickly, Heather finds a job. She meets Nina Ivy through the Interfaith Hospitality Network, and is hired to work at Custom Care Cleaning in Xenia, a housecleaning company providing services to the elderly. Nina Ivy describes Heather as a “real hard worker,” “very determined,” and “very sweet.”  Heather must feel the best she’s felt in a long time, she’s finally starting to get her feet under her.

Two days before Thanksgiving, Anthony Shuri posts his second-to-last entry on his blog.

Okay.. I tried. I tried not to be bitter about this, but I can’t help it. Dominic’s mom get cash assistance from the state of Ohio (thanks, taxpayers), foodstamps from the federal government (thanks again), free clothes from various churches, and on top of all that, she should start getting child support soon… but the funny thing is, if I complain about it, I’m a horrible father, and of course, as pointed out earlier, just the fact that I got her pregnant means that I, and I alone, have ruined her life, and made Dominic’s worthless… but that’s okay, because I’m being “responsible”. Did I mention that I haven’t worked this week because my paycheck from Friday still hasn’t cleared? No, I guess I didn’t. I work all week for a sack of shit who can’t even make sure there’s enough money in the account for me to cash my check, but if I complain, I’m being irresponsible. Well, you know what? Fuck you. Tell me why the hell she is a more worthwhile parent than I am, or shut the fuck up.

The last entry of “Nibbles the Owl” is in January 2007 and consists only of the lyrics of “Bliss,” by the band Hinder, the theme of which is “I don’t wanna know it’s over.”

In May, when his girlfriend gives birth to “Nathan,” Anthony is a father again. Anthony takes Dominic a few days a week. Heather must still find him charming, as sometime during the heat of July, she finds that she is pregnant again. DNA tests will show that he is the father. Anthony, still, is trying to make a go of it with the girl he lives with, Nathan’s mother. In October, he travels to Everett, Washington with the girlfriend, and both boys, Dominic, age 11 months and Nathan, five months, to visit his adoptive mother, Vivian.  Vivian Shuri has photos made of the occasion, of her assembled family. In the pictures Anthony posts on his MySpace page, they look like a jolly, overfed family.

Did the girlfriend hear the echoes of Brooke, though, who had made this trip to Everett before her? Click click click. The only comment on the pictures is from “Kelly,” who muses that she wishes that her long lost daughter might have been included also.  (Kelly continues to be a constant, lonely presence on the social networking page.)

On Friday, November 17, 2007 Nina Ivy calls the police. Her usually reliable employee, Heather Skelly, hasn’t shown up for work for four days. Ivy is concerned. When police arrive at the apartment on Superior Avenue in Fairborn, they find Heather naked on the bathroom floor. She has been strangled.  She has been dead since Tuesday.

Dominic is found safe at the apartment of his father’s girlfriend. It takes the police four months to come for Anthony Shuri. First, they had been sent looking for a red herring, that “suspect” turns out to have been in the county jail at the time of Heather’s death. The autopsy reveals that Heather is four months pregnant, and we know what the DNA tests show. The autopsy also reveals semen in the vaginal vault; tests will show it is Anthony Shuri’s.  On March 6, he is arrested without incident.

The red file jacket in the Greene County courthouse tells the story in one word, writ large in magic-marker: Murder.

At last there is news coverage of Heather’s death. Until reporters find the charge on the Greene County court docket, the end of a young woman’s life on the bathroom floor of a Fairborn apartment didn’t merit their attention. The only photograph they can come with for her is the one on her Driver’s License.

Fairborn Police believe they have a pretty good idea of what happened in the apartment. Detective Lee Cyr tells a reporter from the Dayton Daily News that they believe that Anthony Shuri killed Heather Skelly to stop her from telling his girlfriend that she was pregnant by him for the second time.

Shuri’s friends will say this isn’t true, that Anthony loves children, that Heather and the girlfriend are “acquaintances,” and probably it is true that Anthony didn’t care if his girlfriend knew or not. But did he want all that grief all over again? We know how well it went down the first time, because he told us. Click, click, click, click, can’t you hear those needles making fabric of the yarn?

In the four months Anthony has to dream up a story to tell the prosecutor he comes up with a doozy: Erotic Asphyxiation.  Some like to call it asphyxiophilia. In either case, participants seek to enhance their sexual experience by being deprived of oxygen in the moments leading up to orgasm. (For a while there seem to be a rash of young men accidentally killing themselves masturbating in nooses. That’s auto-erotic asphyxiation, a term that was mistakenly used more than once in the reporting of Heather Skelly’s death.)

It’s a dangerous practice and people do die. Asphyxia is achieved by a number of methods, but most frequently the partner performing the asphyxia puts significant pressure on the carotid artery. This is an important detail, as the manner of most accidental deaths that occur in during erotic asphyxia are from ventricular fibrillation, caused by the interruption of the electrical impulse to the heart, which in turn was caused by the interruption of the blood supply via the carotid artery. Heather Skelly was strangled.  Strangulation, during mutually agreeable erotic asphyxia is almost unheard of.

There is one other inconsistency. Generally when someone dies during intercourse, the partner calls 911. Perhaps they try to revive their partner. They don’t drag the naked body of their partner to the bathroom, put on their pants and go home. In Seattle, Anthony Shuri’s mother, Vivian confirms that erotic asphyxiation is a practice that her adopted son engages in. While one readily expects that a mother might say any number of things to protect her son, who would think that the son would discuss such unusual sexual habits with his mother, especially when he was struggling just to find a way to tell his Mom that his girlfriend was pregnant.

He went away and left her body cooling on the floor.

Anthony Shuri was charged with murder, reckless homicide, involuntary manslaughter and illegal termination of a pregnancy.  His attorney told reporters that he felt the prosecutors had a weak case, given that they had added the reduced charges and that it had taken them four months to bring any charges at all. Additionally he felt that the fact that Shuri was having intercourse with Skelly when he murdered her clouded the issue. “Apparently we have a sexual component to it, which instantly gives a defense to it, opposed to normal murders which are usually more black and white.”

The defense attorney also admitted that he’d never even heard of erotic asphyxiation, let alone been involved in a case that centered on it. Nonetheless he  is convinced of his client’s innocence, telling the Greene County News that the Fairborn police were mistaken in their theories. “Clearly, he did not have any anger toward her about the child, otherwise he wouldn’t have been having sex with her.”

Anthony Shuri left her on the bathroom floor. Walked away. Told no one.

Who knows why Greene County prosecutor Stephen K. Haller offered the deal he did. Repeated phone calls and an in-person visit to his office in Xenia failed to gain an audience with the man. The deal was if Anthony Shuri pleaded guilty to two counts of reckless homicide, which would result in reduced prison time, the other charges would go away.

Could Haller have won a guilty verdict from the jury? You bet.

Was there motive? By the boatload.

Evidence? Enough to make Horatio Caine smile.

Are there holes in Anthony Shuri’s story? Holes big enough to drive a truck through.

Half an hour on the Internet would have given Stephen Haller enough information about erotic asphyxiation to show that Anthony Shuri was lying. He just couldn’t be bothered. Perhaps the good people of Greene County will remember this when he stands for reelection, but it’s doubtful.

Heather Skelly’s friends turned out to see Anthony Shuri plead guilty to two counts of reckless homicide. Nina Ivy was there. Gale French was there. She told the Dayton Daily News that the relationship between Heather and Anthony was “never good,” and described Anthony as “overbearing, demanding and abusive” towards Heather. She came to court on May 15, 2008 hoping to see justice for her friend. She went away disappointed.

Reading the trial notes in the red-jacketed folder in the Greene County courthouse reveals Common Pleas Court Judge Stephen Wolaver seemed frustrated at the few options presented to him by the prosecutor’s deal. He invited Anthony Shuri to make a comment, but for once Anthony Shuri had nothing to say. Judge Wolaver sentenced him to the absolute maximum sentence the charge of reckless homicide allows: five years for the death of a 20-week fetus, five years for the death of Heather Skelly.

He left her on the floor.

Heather’s son, Dominic, just 18 months old at the time of his father’s sentencing for the death of his mother, is living in Seattle with his grandmother, Vivian Shuri. He will be just shy of 12 when his father is released. Somehow it seems unlikely that he will worship Anthony in the way that Anthony thought he would.

Anthony’s girlfriend is still in Kettering with her son, waiting for her man. Through MySpaceshe is in regular contact with Kelly, the woman who claims to have borne Anthony Shuri’s first child. Somewhere in Ohio, Brooke is knitting. click click click click.

One of Heather Skelly’s neighbors, Mark Neyman, paid for Heather’s cremation and claimed her ashes. He is trying to find Heather’s brother. “She was a sweet girl,” he told the Greene County News. “I can’t think of a bad thing to say about her. She was never in a bad mood; she would do anything for anybody. Unfortunately, she would do anything for Anthony, too.”

 

 

 

Sixteen

 

a love note

There was an email from one of our closest friends this morning, wishing us a very happy anniversary.

“Hmm,” I thought. “She must have the date wrong.” Glancing up at the calendar, there it is written in my own clear hand “Anniversary,” in today’s little square. When my husband comes in from working in the raised bed where we’re planting this year’s herb garden, I grin at him and say “Happy Anniversary, honey.”

“What? Are you sure?”  We married on the first day of Spring, sixteen years ago. You’d think we’d be able to keep track.  By the end of the day, we have marked this occasion poking around in a junk shop, stopping at a restaurant for a couple of excellent hamburgers, then on to the hardware store for a new sprayer for the faucet on the kitchen sink.

Like our marriage, it is a companionable and comfortable outing. We share a few private jokes, and nudge each other occasionally over our “date.”  Hell, we look like a Cialis commercial, who needs Hallmark and a trinket in a velvet box? I’d rather have peony bushes to line the front walk anyway.

This is the first anniversary we’ve spent away from the place where we met, wed and spent most of our married life up ‘till now.  Funny how that distance gives you an extra dollop of nostalgia, and over the course of the day I’ve found myself thinking quite a bit about that blustery March day in Montana sixteen years ago.

East coast wasp-y girl writer marries Los Angeles native Chinese railroad man father of two small girls. Their mother departed the scene long before I arrived; he and I met in the public library where I worked at the circulation desk. I had no idea he was as old as dirt as he seemed (and seems) very cute and boyish. We had a guest list as long as our arms, having decided to invite everyone we ever knew. What was remarkable is how many showed up . . . including Sir Brian Corrin and his lovely wife, Sheila, who popped across the pond for the occasion. 

The best man, Webb Hardenbrook Green, had been my landlord in Boston. The maid of honor was also a man; Colin Burns, artist and lead singer of a death metal band. (Don’t be silly, he wore a tuxedo.) The other bridesmaids, in tea length periwinkle velvet, included my dear friend Noelle Sullivan (who sent greetings this morning) and sang Handel at the wedding and is herself a girl-writer, and Sheryl Dahl, a fifth generation Montanan, baker and bon-vivant. Elmer’s beautiful daughters in English lawn dresses led the procession; now they are both beautiful grown up women, married as well.

In the days before the wedding, we filled the church with tulips and pussy willows; branches cut early and brought inside to leaf. (March in Montana is very, very unpredictable.) The church had been used as a set in Robert Redford’s movie A River Runs Through It the year before. It needed little beyond spring flowers and a few exuberant swags of tulle to look festive. Grannie, my father’s mother, arrived at the airport looking every inch the Hollywood dowager, complete with big hat and small entourage. 

Members of the wedding, guests, family poured in from across the country, arriving in flurries of excited greetings, warm embraces, laughter. Late on Thursday evening we’d gone in search of food and drink. Parents and stepparents, grandmothers and minor rock stars, English peerage and Montana railroaders, we eventually landed at the Timber Bar, in Big Timber, about 40 miles east of Livingston. It was a pretty quiet night at the Timber, a Montana workingman’s bar, linoleum floors and schoolhouse lights. When the front door opened, we looked up to see who it was, and to our surprise ten more wedding guests walked in. 

Rehearsal dinner had been in Sam Peckinpah’s old apartment in the Murray Hotel, not just for members of the wedding, but for all of the out of town guests and some of the in town ones too.  As we left the hotel, mist was swirling in the streets.

It was a four o’clock wedding, which leaves too little time to do much and too much time to do nothing. There were flowers to be fetched, a sweet pea bouquet like that my Grannie carried 57 years before. Last minute hair issues and a missing bridesmais. (She turned up.) My mother and my Nana and my groom sat at the kitchen table assembling the last of the programs, each decorated with a Chinese paper cut, each bound with a sewn binding of gold thread. I tried to eat breakfast, French toast, my favorite, but I swear it tasted like cardboard with maple syrup on it. Joan Hartwig, an expert in Shakespeare and a friend of my parents since graduate school, buttoned up all 35 buttons on the back of my velvet dress.

The ride to the church was in a horse-drawn carriage (two matched black Arabians) and at the last minute my stepfather asked me if I’d like him to ride along and you know, I was really glad for the company. I had two fathers at this event, and given my concern for bruised feelings, I chose to walk down the aisle unsupported by any man’s arm. You know, I’d been an actress and a performance artist in college; surely I could manage a two-minute trip to the altar. You wouldn’t believe how long the first two minutes and seven seconds of Claire de Lune seem when you’re shaking in your pale silk slippers.

Upon the altar, I realized that I’m wearing a ring on the third finger of my left hand, a little gold circlet, an everyday sort of ring that I’d forgotten to remove. “The wrong ring!” Silently, discreetly and only in a tiny panic I slipped it off and palmed it into Colin’s hand; I think he probably still has it.

Webb had the right rings in his pocket: mine a ring Elmer and I bought in a pawn shop with money unexpectedly left to me by my stepfather’s late mother, Mary Killick, a woman who saw good in everyone and who was charmed by Mussolini. Elmer’s ring is the one I’d worn on my middle finger since I was 15, it was my father’s wedding ring from his marriage to my mother.

The vows were complex. (Hey, I was a writer-girl and former performance artist, what did you expect?)  They were a combination of homily and prayer, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rainier Maria Rilke, the traditional Lutheran marriage service, not asked and repeated, but answered from memory. When Elmer married the first time, in a civil ceremony Alaska in 1968, he was struck dumb: instead of saying “I do,” he was only able to nod. (Yeah, yeah, we know.)

He and I practiced and practiced and practiced. He memorized his lines until he could have said them in his sleep. At least that’s what we hoped. His voice rang out strong and true to the last line of Rilke “With only this one dream, You come, too.” During the recitation of his vows, he never once wavered, finally arriving at the great long riff that is the pinnacle of the Lutheran intent: “that I take you to be my wife from this time onward, to join with you and to share with you all that is to come: to give and to receive, to speak and to listen, to inspire and to respond, and in all circumstances of our life together to be loyal to you with my whole life and all my being, until death parts us.” The tears welling in my eyes spilled over.

The ebullient notes of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring filled the sanctuary, and we dashed down the aisle to receive guests at the back of the church, who kissed our cheeks and went outside to stand in the drizzle tossing rice. The Chinese say that all the rain that falls on your wedding day are tears you won’t have to cry in your marriage. Such pragmatists, the Chinese.  My groom and I and the little girls climb into the carriage for a ride through the rain to the Park and down Yellowstone Street to the Depot, a handsome Italianate railroad depot designed by Reed and Stern, they of the Grand Central Terminal fame. People come out on their porches to wave as we pass by.

Meanwhile, back at the Livingston Depot, a fully loaded coal train has rumbled by. A coal train is extraordinarily heavy and it can send significant vibrations through a building. Before the wedding, our friend Sheryl, baker and bridesmaid painstakingly assembled the exquisite wedding cake at the Depot, hurried to change her clothes and rushed to the church by quarter to four. (That’s where she was.) But the rumbling of the coal train had set the cake to shaking and it had slumped, a delicious disaster on the cake table.

No one tells the bride anything when something goes wrong. I missed Sheryl long before I realized the cake wasn’t there.  I would survey the room occasionally, greet guests, tip my head to Noelle, and mouthe, “Where’s Sheryl?” She’d shake her head, shrug a little. Finally I sent Webb to see what he could find out. I swear he and Noelle exchanged a look. Webb came back and whispered in my ear.  When they took us to her, Sheryl was sobbing. This was worse than the cake. Cake is just cake even when it’s your wedding cake.

It wasn’t so bad that it couldn’t be served; it just didn’t look the way we thought it would. And it was the incomparable Velvet Underground Cake, from the recipe they used at Rosie’s Bakery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Here’s the recipe.  They don’t credit Rosie, but they ought to, it’s definitely hers. It takes at least a day to make this cake and it is worth every minute of effort.)

“Well,” I said,  hugging Sheryl, “let’s just eat it.”

The best man found a wedding crasher, a middle aged woman, crouching in the coatroom behind the coats. She had snuck in to hear the band, she was “auditioning” bands for her daughter’s upcoming nuptials. As it turned out,  that particular band couldn’t be had for love or money (though I remember we had them for $600). We’d engaged the MSU Jazz Swing band to play jazz standards. The day before the wedding (yes, one day before) the director, Glenn Johnson, called to say he was very sorry, he forgot the students would be gone on Spring Break.  But, he was quick to add, he said he knew some jazz musicians who would be willing to fill in this one time, friends of his, if that would be okay.

It turned out to be far better than okay. The friends, as it happened included seriously well-regarded musicians like Eric Funk and Kelly Robertie, among others. It’s like expecting a cover band and getting the real thing. Not only that, they had a bigger repertoire, more Gershwin, and Eric Funk can sing. And they didn’t usually play wedding gigs, so they were having fun, breaking into a series of lively polkas, when one of my husband’s co-workers started the rest of the railroaders to pinning currency to my dress. Sometimes traditions just happen to you.

Somehow we miscounted tables, and didn’t have a place for the musicians to sit during breaks. So they sat with us, dispensing advice on marriage and love and the blues, eating roast salmon and medallions of filet and game stew. You can imagine the advice, but they offered it tenderly.

And not once, not twice, but three times they played us our song, Eric Funk talking over the piano . . . “The more I read the papers, the less I comprehend, the world with all its capers and how it all will end. Nothing seems to be lasting. But that isn’t our affair; We’ve got something permanent, I mean in the way we care. . .”  And then he sang Gershwin’s very last song:

 

It’s very clear

Our love is here to stay;

Not for a year

But ever and a day.

The radio and the telephone

and the movies that we know

May just be passing fancies,

And in time may go.

 

Many things have changed since that day in March. Those musicians have scattered, they don’t play together anymore.  Sheryl has closed her bakery. The pastor was sent to a church in the far corner of the state. I haven’t seen Colin since the day we put him on the plane. My Nana is gone, and so is my stepfather, and so is my Dad. We’ve left Montana.

 

But, oh my dear,

Our love is here to stay;

Together we’re going a long, long way.

In time the Rockies may crumble,

Gibraltar may tumble,

They’re only made of clay,

But our love is here to stay.