A house in summer

Forty or so years ago, my mother, brother and I spent our first night in the house in Douglas Avenue in Springfield. It was summer, and hot, like it is today, the kind of hot that makes you break into a sweat the moment you open the door in the morning and the first breath of air wafts over you; Midwest in the summer hot. We had moved from Arizona, and a different kind of hot. The day we arrived, there was no electricity and no furniture. We slept on lawn furniture in the living room waiting for the morning, when the movers would come and someone would connect the utilities.

The windows were open, exposing me to a world of sounds that I, who had never been in the Midwest, found very odd: the humming of crickets and the myriad of crawling creatures that populate a Midwest night. It felt like sleeping under mosquito netting in a tent in the middle of the jungle. Outside, things were growing with abandon. We had come, it seemed to me, from the desert to live in some wild, untended garden.

Another sound I wasn't used to was the sound of trains. At that time, freight trains traveled along two corridors through downtown Springfield, so there was a fair amount of traffic. The low, mournful whine was unsettling. It seemed not only unfamiliar, but a bit sinister. On that first night, when I slept fitfully because of the heat and the strange, new surroundings, the moan of the freights took on a new dimension. I had dreams that people were speaking to me, asking me why I had come to this new house. I woke with a start to hear a freight train rumbling and sounding its horn a mile away. I had translated the foreign sound of the trains into voices in my dreams. I remember getting up the next day being glad that our electricity would be turned on and we would have air conditioning that night, so we wouldn't have to sleep with the windows open and hear the trains.

It's funny to think about that night now, as I sit listening to a train in the distance on a swampy night in Springfield. The sound has retained its strangeness and mystery, but has lost its foreboding. In fact, I think a lot about those trains, particularly when I'm here. I usually hope that I'm not just hearing some short haul train shuttling cars between local freight yards. I'd rather it's a freight bound for Omaha, or Memphis, or New Orleans that will be traveling through many different localities all night long, interrupting the sleep of people like me. Or maybe the Texas Eagle is hours late out of Chicago and is just coming through, the sleepers, lounge car, and coaches full of revelers glad to be on a journey, and full of a thousand stories, a thousand secrets. They are travelers, and so am I. I can't help but hope that we will all arrive safely home.

Percy, Kierkegaard, Crawfish and Beer

In Walker Percy's The Moviegoer there's an epigram from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: ". . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."

Yes, I know: What, exactly, does that mean? I'm still not sure. But years later, Percy, in an interview, elaborated on the subject:

Interviewer: You've lived a fairly privileged life. Why such despair? 

Percy: Who says I despair? That is to say, I would reverse Kierkegaard's aphorism that the worst despair is that despair which is unconscious of itself as despair, and instead say that the best despair and the beginning of hope is to be conscious of despair in the very air we breathe, and to look around for something better. I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?

No sir, it doesn't sound like it.

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

When I heard that Maurice Sendak died, I was taken back to the rickety old apartment on Main Street in Evanston where we lived for twelve years and our children spent the first years of their lives. It could have been any time between the year 2000, when Violet was born, and, say, 2007, when Silas and Hazel got tired of having me read to them. It was just before bedtime, or late at night, when the books came out, maybe as a matter of nightly routine, or maybe in a last-ditch effort to lull a child to sleep who had been up far too long.

I remember a rocking chair, a long day that needed to draw to a close, a drowsy child on my lap, a fervent prayer that she, or he, would go to sleep soon, and a book. That book may have been Where the Wild Things Are, or Outside Over There, or one of the Little Bear books, or a number of other Sendak offerings. (Of course, there were other books, but these, at one point at least, were regulars). I had my favorites, as did my children, but I liked them all. They carried the distinctive mark of a gifted illustrator, and, in the first two cases, a storyteller, who wanted a child to enter fully into his world, and who gave the feeling that he wanted the child to understand something about the storyteller as well.

I respect Maurice Sendak because, like the best authors, he followed E. B. White's advice never to talk down to children. In his books there is wild fantasy, and whimsy, and humor, but also fear, uncertainty, and conflict. Children know all these things from real life, and Sendak knew that, in order engage children, you had to produce stories that, though fantastic, told the truth, that had that element of comfort and risk, of going somewhere far away, having an adventure, and then coming home. The best possible tribute I can pay to him is to say that, as I read those stories over and over again to the point of memorizing them while sitting in that rocking chair, I often enjoyed the journey as much as my children did.

A colleague of mine wrote, "Thanks for the wild adventures, Mr. Sendak. May you now find peace at the end of your own." I could not have put it better.

My father's world

Freiburg, 2010

My father likes talking about his past. He tends to tell me the same things over and over again, but I see him infrequently enough that the stories don't have a chance to get old. Plus, I've always been interested in hearing about his past, and particularly about his childhood growing up in Germany before, during, and after the second World War. It reminds me that history is personal. Decisions that drive the world in one direction or another may be made in the meeting rooms of heads of state, but we all have a history. It's the drama of our own lives, the thousands of triumphs, tragedies, joys, and sorrows we've all experienced. In my father's case, his own childhood just happened to coincide with a pivotal time in the world.

A frequent topic of his reminiscences is his mother, my Oma, a strong, indomitable, but loving and gracious woman who lived in Germany all her life and endured not one, but two world wars. Her husband-to-be went off to war, and returned without his legs, having lost them at Verdun. She married him. She saw the gradual falling apart of her country once again during World War II, but kept her family together, as battered as it was, and remembered that dreadful and chaotic era to me only with the words, "that was the worst time." She had about her an air of dogged perseverance, tenaciousness, that I will always remember and admire, a quality that stayed with her throughout her life, even when times got better for her and her country. 

Oma taught my father to fend for himself, probably because she knew, from experience, that there would be times when there would be no one else you could depend on. If something broke, you didn't throw it away, you fixed it. If your socks got ripped, you darned them. Who else would do it for you? She taught him to sew, and he has been grateful for it all his life. And, to this day, if my father gets a rip in his socks, he doesn't throw them out and go get another pair. He takes out a needle and thread, and carefully sews them up. And, when he's done, he says, out loud, to no one -- but, of course, to someone -- "thank you, mama."

I've always liked this story because it makes me think about the many ways people from our past continue to be present in our lives, even when they've traveled on to other things. It comes to mind when I think about what I'm giving to my own children, and especially now, as my father sits in a hospital in Germany, recovering from an ailment that was nearly fatal. It looks like he's marshaled all the reserves of his legendary stubbornness and will live to fight another day. Whatever problems I've had in the past with my father, I'm glad for that. Get well, Papa. There are still socks to be mended.