Other

• Meter Reader

  In the summer of 1973, I was employed as a substitute meter reader by the Department of Water & Power in the city of Los Angeles. My daily uniform was a grey shirt, green trousers, and a brown leather holster that hung from my belt and carried a metal, two-fingered tool used to lift the metal covers of the water meters.

  It was good job, and there was no marking time. When you finished the day’s route, you were finished for the day, regardless of whether it was noon or nearly nightfall.

  Those who had a regular route and were good at it finished by noon at the latest. I was a college kid, a teenager subbing for adults on vacation or out sick, so I had a different route each day.

  I would get the day’s assignment in the morning, in a black binder. The binder might be thick with pages if it covered apartment buildings, each unit with its own electric meter. Or it was a thin book, sometimes the hardest to complete, with its handful of addresses in the canyons. I read in Watts, neighborhoods made famous by riots and beatings, and in Venice, up and down Washington Blvd, with its surf shops and karate studios. I read Sunset Boulevard, to the east, which was seedy, and west to Pacific Coast Highway, where the Self Realization Fellowship maintained its Lake Shrine.

  It was a simple job, though it was sometimes made more challenging by the ingenuity of residents who would opaque the glass faces of their electric meters, thinking that if the Department could not record their usage, the city would not charge them. Jim Morrison had it right: People are strange.

  Speaking of doors, meter readers rarely went to them. It was considered foolish to interact with the public. The meter after all was the property of the utility, and as such no permission was needed to read it. It may be your backyard, but it’s our meter – that was the attitude.

  Some people of course enjoyed having their meter read. Some who were at home all day and in no hurry would offer overripe bananas, or watermelon wedges, or drinks from a cup that probably had been washed at some point in the past. But for every ten kindnesses there was somebody who had chained a mistreated dog to a metal stake in the front yard. Or they tied their Doberman by a fraying rope to the tree shading the electric meter, which was mounted on stucco at the back of the house. The moment when the rope breaks, and the dog’s fur is up in a ridge on the back of its neck, and the spittle’s flying, that’s a moment of truth. In the movies, this would be one of those sequences that Sam Peckinpah might have chosen to show in slow motion. In life, however, it’s over before you know it. When the rope breaks, the most surprised of all is the dog. As soon as its momentum allows, it takes off for the open gate or jumps the low fence toward freedom. In my time as a meter reader, I was only bitten once, and by a Chihuahua, with its owner standing in the yard next to me in her slippers, chatting about the price of electricity.

  Meter reading is solitary work, but as with any such occupation the loneliness of its practice brings its practitioners together. There was a bond, a camaraderie among meter readers. Whether you ever met your coworkers or not, we were in uniform and a corps. We even had a coded language. Like hobos with their secret signs, we left each other notations in our black binders to warn or instruct a future reader. “Bad Dog” meant bad dog. “Fox” meant a sexually attractive woman; an added exclamation point suggested you knock on the door and ask permission you didn’t need to read the meter, for the opportunity to see her.

  Each page in the black binder was a handwritten record of the success or failure of all the readers before you. These were “the reads,” penciled in month after month. Some addresses truly presented a challenge, but if the reader before you could get the read, you were expected to as well. No excuses. Surely you could find the water meter hidden in the creosote bush a hundred and forty three paces below the hilltop house on Mulholland, if you followed the diagram a previous reader had sketched in the binder – an X-marks-the-spot kind of drawing, like a treasure map.

  Like the Boy Scouts, meter readers were prepared. Every reader carried a scope, no bigger than a forefinger, on a chain around his neck. A “Use scope” notation in the binder was a tip to get the read off an electric meter without going into a “Bad Dog” backyard. The maneuver, which using involved looking over a fence, was also called “jacking the Doberman.” Residents with locked gates or inaccessible yards would call the Department, protesting the accuracy of their electric bill, because they believed no one could monitor their usage. But electric meters didn’t need to be seen up close in order to have the usage recorded. Like clocks, they could be read from the positions of the hands on their five individual dials, and these positions could be “scoped” from quite a distance.

  Meters in their glass cases were read backwards, five dials from right to left. Glancing through the scope, you repeated 9-3-6-5-6 and wrote the numbers down in that order, right to left, recording 65,649 as the read in the black binder. It was fast, and speed meant everything to most readers. They would write while in motion to the next address, penciling their numbers in stride. That’s how some could finish a route by ten in the morning. They held second jobs, or looked after rental properties, or did whatever they chose with the rest of the day.

  About some meter readers you really had to wonder. To get to a meter that was once in plain sight on the outside of a house but had subsequently disappeared within an added-on, screened-in and locked up family room, you had to follow instructions to stick your head in the doggie door, use a flashlight and a mirror, and observe from your hands and knees the reflected image of the dials. Who was the first to figure that out?
  The helpful note in the binder also said, “Dog is slow.”

  It was only my summer job, only two and a half months. It certainly wasn’t an internship at Goldman Sachs. But a summer job reading meters did offer brushes with fame, if not fortune. I read Cary Grant’s water meter – or so it said in the black binder. Robert Miles Runyan, a graphic artist I had heard of, was on one of my routes, his name an elegant proclamation over the lintel of the doorway of a two-story brick building in Playa del Rey, blocks from the beach. His electric meter spun, probably powering pencil sharpeners. On another route, I walked past a cyclone fence, some sunflowers, and the name Mario Savio on a strip of green Avery labeler plastic on the mailbox.

  Cary Grant was the exception. Our black books never provided names, only addresses. So it was by surprise that one day while reading on Washington Boulevard in Venice, looking for meters in the interior closet of an unsigned building, I walked into the design offices of Charles and Ray Eames. The building was mostly a shell. In the antechamber were a series of freestanding exhibit panels, with images of Jefferson and Franklin, and the text on the panels was in French. Qu’est que c’est? It turned out that the panels were part of an exhibit bound for Paris, which the Eames office was preparing in celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial, three years away.

  I walked through the building, finding open space and offices, a few people, and no one interested in preventing me from wandering around. I had a conversation about the exhibit panels with a young woman who said she lived half the year in Venice, Italy and the other half here, in Venice, California. Just to keep up, I said that I was a writer. And that is how I ending up being hired to write a speech for Charles Eames, which he was to give to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. Charles was not around, but Ray was, and she told me to just drop by after I finished my route and come back as many afternoons as it took. So I did. I worked on the Eames speech in an open office where the woman from the two Venices also sat, distracted by her and by the TV that was always on, broadcasting the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings.

  Was that speech ever given? It seems as unlikely as a dream. So, for that matter, does dodging an angry dog tethered to an electric meter, or recording the water usage of Cary Grant.

• The Death of a Colleague

  John Edmund Stone
  1930 – 1983

  The name on the door of his office was John Edmund Stone, and this touch of formality suited his personality well. He was a reticent, self-effacing man who would go to lunch at 10:30 to avoid the crowds and who, as one of his woman friends put it, would have had to have worn a hat with a plume if he had been any more gentlemanly in his personal relationships. John Stone, who died a few weeks ago at the age of fifty-two, was a co-worker and friend of ours for almost twenty years. Despite his shyness, he managed to engender in those of us who worked with him a respect bordering on awe for his abilities, and since he was utterly disinterested in self-promotion, we are perhaps the only ones who know the depth of his contribution to the success of our organization over the years. John was quite simply a brilliant and incisive writer. When he wrote an annual report, he elevated the craft of corporate writing. When he essayed a message to the shareholders, it was everything such a piece of work should be. John could take the germ of an idea and turn it into something wonderful, and everything he wrote, whether personal correspondence, a speech, a corporate brochure, was gentle in nature. There was nothing strident either in his work or about his person. He worked with a respect for clients and their ideas, and no matter where an idea came from, John could and did write pieces that brilliantly embodied it. Oddly enough, he didn’t think of himself as a writer, though he earned his living at it for thirty years. The talents he prized most in himself were reading, listening observing, learning. The way John worked, every assignment was a marvelous chance to learn something new. He was a quick study and took research upon himself as a pleasure. Research for John didn’t mean looking up a particular fact to bend to his purposes; it meant probing a subject until he had real understanding and the ability to impart it.

  John came to our organization by way of the catalog department at Montgomery Ward in Chicago (briefly), Fort Bliss in El Paso (even more briefly), and Glenn Advertising (later Bozell & Jacobs) in downtown Dallas, where he worked as both writer and account executive for a number of years; but the foundation for his skills was put in place at the University of Chicago, which he entered after declining scholarship offers from both Harvard and Yale and from which he was graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and as a Master or Arts in the humanities. John was able to bring an enormous resource of literary reference to bear on his work as a writer. An adventurous reader with a wondrously retentive memory, he saw the connections between each of his projects and the work of other writers; he was never working in a vacuum. So it was that he was able to begin one annual report with a stanza from the 17th century Englishman Andrew Marvell and to base another entirely on the poetry of American Indians. As with most things, his love of literature was sincere and his knowledge of it deep. The books in his personal library ranged from the Greeks to the recently published multi-volume biography of Henry James. These and other literary interests nourished him and, to an extent, isolated him as well. In his reading, as in so much else, John was his own man. He didn’t need or seek large numbers of friends; he enjoyed people, but was happy to be alone. Many an evening he spent by himself in his apartment, with its very French chandelier and its Chinese opium bed with carved wooden legs; there, he tended his plants and listened to Wagner or Strauss. John lived for years in an upstairs apartment that was wired by one of his three brothers so that a switch at the foot of the stairs simultaneously started a water fountain and a recording of operatic music—a highly theatrical effect to say the least. It is typical of him that despite a lifelong interest in music he played no musical instrument. He was content to be a listener—a very good one—and saw in that a necessary and satisfying function. After all, a symphony, as he said, has to have its audience.

  John was extremely sensitive to the requirements of his own life and in a business that attracts its share of characters he was as individual as anybody. He was equally sensitive to other people – one of the qualities that made him so effective as a writer. He could write anything for anybody and required very few hints and scarcely any guidance. What he needed was a session in which he would sit, meticulously dressed, the long ash of his cigarette burning down heedlessly as he absorbed the essence of what you wanted to say, even if you were yourself incapable of saying it. As a smoker, John showed a certain disregard for his physical health. He was also one of those who when the urge to exercise overtakes them will sit down and wait for it to pass. He loved to eat, particularly sweets. He could rhapsodize over Bananas Foster and he waxed indignant at the memory of the airplane food he was forced to eat when an assignment required him to travel. His habits led to overweight, high blood pressure, and other medical problems, which eventually led him to change his diet and – occasionally – to take a walk. The only reason John lost weight was because he had to; nevertheless, he had shed fifty pounds and put his medical problems behind him at the time of his death. John was a tranquil person. Not that he was without strong feelings, likes and dislikes. But he viewed the things that displeased him with an even temper and a sense of humor that was dry, sardonic, and as self-effacing as he was. Because he was a private person, there must be great areas of John’s life that no one knows. But we know he was not restless, not at odds with himself, and that people who worked with him remember him with respect and affection. He was killed this past January 21 in an automobile accident – someone else ran a red light – and on that day he because our loss. Since you are a friend of ours, he became, in a sense, a loss to you as well.

• There Are No Italians in Italy

  With fewer than 2,500 people, Italy, Texas is too small to merit inclusion in Table 60 of the most recent Texas census, which provides estimates on “Selected Ancestry Groups” throughout the state. The group categories of Table 60 are Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Scottish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Other, Multiple Ancestry and Ancestry Not Specified.

  One might say that as far as Table 60 is concerned, there are no Italians in Italy. For that matter, neither are there any Italians in Roma, a tiny South Texas roadstop.

  At last count there were more than 14.25 million people in Texas. But there isn’t a single Greek in Athens, an East Texas city of some 10,000. (There are 23 Italians, however, alongside 18 Scots, seven Poles and 4,242 folks of unspecified pedigree.) There are seven Portuguese in nearby Tyler, seven Hungarians in Victoria and seven Ukrainians in Waco. Fredericksburg in Central Texas may appropriately record more German ancestry than any other. But there are more English than Irish in Dublin (758 to 22), and more English than Irish in Shamrock, Texas, as well. Is there an abundance of Jews in Temple or of Catholics in Trinity? Table 60 doesn’t say, since it records ancestry groups by nationality rather than religion.

  “The one being abhorrent to the powers above the earth and under them is the hyphenated American….Be American, pure and simple.” Theodore Roosevelt

  Sorry, Teddy. Texas is not now nor ever has been pure and simple. Texas is home to the hyphenated American, from Afro- to Mexican- and every shade, creed and nation. The assimilation of even “white” ethnic groups is incomplete in Texas, and its completion is largely unwanted—after all, who would want the state’s white ethnics to be so colorless?

  Unlike the urban Northeast, where crowded immigrants assimilated from one generation to the next, Texas was uncitified well into the present century; there simply was no New York here for immigrants to crowd into, no pot in which to be melted. In 1900, Washington County was the richest, most populous county in the state, without a single significant town.

  Rural Texas was spacious enough to accommodate independent ethnic settlements, with little need for outside contact. And so, in small communities, generations of Texas lived out their lives as Czechs, Norwegians, Germans, Poles or Danes. The evening bells, Abendglocken, were run at sunset every Saturday in Fredericksburg. On the 24th of December, the children of Gillespie County would recite in hopes of the morrow: Ich bin klein, mein Herz ist rein; soll neimand drin wohnen als Jesus allein. “I am small, my heart is pure no one shall abide there save Jesus alone.”

  With such a past, even those hyphenated Texas whose communities no longer exist belong to a community of memory. And if it is odd to speak of the ethnicity of third or fourth or fifth generation Texans, who are mostly assimilated, it is often these generations who revive their ethnicity in nostalgia for a culture about to disappear or a language no longer spoken.

  For some, ethnicity is reclaimed in celebrations that circle the state like endless theme parties. The German Texan appears at the Boerne Berges Fest in June, at the Wurstfest in New Braunfels in November, in Fredericksburg at Eastertime and in July at the Brenham Maifest. Norwegians hold a Smorgasbord in November at Norse in Bosque County. Poles observe May 3 as Polish Constitution Day; the same month, Czechs sponsor the National Polka Festival in Ennis. There are Greek festivals, Charro Days in Brownsville, and a Crawfish Festival for the Cajuns of Beaumont-Port Arthur. Scots attend the Gathering of the Clans. Tigua Indians in Ysleta del Sur, an El Paso suburb, honor their patron, St. Anthony, on June 13th.

  Unfold a map of Texas, and you open a catalogue of local ethnic groups. In towns like Blementhal, Frelsburg and Weimar in Colorado County, or Eckert, Kreuzberg, Luckenbach, Mecklenburg and Rheingold in Gillespie County, one can hear the heaviness of an oompah melody and sense the German ghosts gathering for a beer or to play skat and pinochle.

  Bringing names as charming as eye charts, Czechs left their homes in Bohemia for places like Praha, off U.S. Highway 90 between Flatonia and Schulenburg. The Dutch established Nederland in Jefferson County and the Danes settled at Danevang. The Poles from Silesia, who arrived in Galveston in 1854, went inland to found Panna Maria, North America’s oldest Polish town. They then settled Czestochowa, Kosciusko and St. Hedwig. One can still read Polish on the grave markers of the Panna Maria cemetery.

  Ten miles west of Clifton, among the hills and woodlands of Central Texas, not far from Norse or Cranfills Gap, Norwegian names on headstones in the cemetery at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church are reminders that as recently as a generation past, Norwegian was spoken in the shops of the towns of southwest Bosque County. And ten years ago in Brazos County, near Bryan, one could find Ferrara and Restino, Salvato and De Stefano on rural mailboxes in a countryside first farmed by impoverished Sicilians.

  Many of our county names have a Scottish brogue: Austin, Cameron, Cochran, Dawson, Houston, Williamson and more. Indians are remembered at the mention of such places as Waxahachie, Quanah and Karankaway Bay. Spanish place names, the deepest brand of all, are too many to single out.

  In the early 1920s Harry K. Johnson, a builder of interurban railways in Mississippi and Louisiana, came to Texas to construct a line between Houston and Baytown. Purchasing several thousand acres in Harris County, Mr. Johnson laid out three townsites and named them Highlands, Little Mexico and McNair. Highlands land was sold to whites only, little Mexico to Mexicans and McNair to blacks, who were not called blacks at the time.

  Such a division was in keeping with social propriety in Texas; and to a disappointing degree it still is. Despite the ethnic diversity of Texas, most seem to see the state through tricolored glasses: white, black and brown.

  In political years, this division is Anglo, black and Hispanic, as Anglo comes to mean white persons of non-Hispanic descent, rather than Americans of British origin. It is a crude way of dividing Texans, reductive and dishonest, unjust to our origins and our variety, and it has crude uses for those who care to keep brown and black away from white. (For example, one way Texas school districts responded to the mandate against school segregation in the 1970s was to integrate Hispanic and black schools, leaving Anglo schools untouched.)

  If state government forecasts come true, Texas will be home to some 27.8 million people by the year 2000. Of those, 14,354,264 will be Anglo and 2,327,928 will be black; 11,153,252 will be Hispanic, roughly three times today’s estimated 3.8 million Texas Hispanics and more than the state’s current Anglo population.

  Hispanics, a majority in the Texas past, seem also to be our future. There are many places in Texas today where it would be foolish to speak of Hispanics as a minority group. In Los Ebanos, 80 miles northwest of Brownsville, only one of the 800 residents is Anglo and he is known, not without affection, as El Gringo. As for the other 799, they are part of an American Hispanic population now exceeding 20 million. And with a portion of their population undocumented, Hispanics are undercounted.

  More than a third of the Mexican Americans in the Southwest today are Texans. In general, they are young, Roman Catholic and were born in Texas of Texas-born parents. Their great-grandfathers probably came north to avoid the revolutionary upheaval in Mexico during the first two decades of the century, when a tenth of Mexico’s population emigrated. Many now live in city barrios like El West Side in San Antonio, Loma in East Austin and Little Mexico in Dallas; in the colonias (Mexican settlements in small towns); or close to the border in the Rio Grande Valley, where those who cross from Mexico enter a state that is geographically and historically the land of their ancestors.

  In sense, many Mexican Texans have never left Mexico. For them, Texas is el Norte, and their hearts are South. Arnulfo Castillo, a folk poet born in Guanajuato who has lived in South Texas for more than 30 years, told folklorist Inez Cardozo-Freeman: “One morning, on the tenth of December in 1942, when I least thought of it they invited me to come live in the North and without recalling that in my songs that I had composed I always said I was a good Mexican, on this day, I abandoned my land, that little ranch which was the cradle of my childhood, that beautiful and warm land that saw my birth, where men are born with faith in God and the hope of cultivating the earth….I live in the North,” Castillo continued, “but always I remember with sadness and longing my Mexico.”

  In the 1950s, The Dallas Morning News reported the dedication of a city hall specifically “for Negroes” in Italy, Texas. The News editorialized that it was “an outstanding instance of practical interracial relations that might well be emulated throughout much of the Southland.” The dedication left Italy with a “white” city hall and a “Negro” city hall; a white mayor and city council and a powerless Negro mayor and city council whose function was to advise the whites. That such an arrangement seemed a model worthy of emulation rather than contempt not so long ago is some measure of the progress in Texas racial relations.

  For years, the relationship between Texas blacks and other Texans was a strange one, combining an intensity of feeling with a scarcity of contact. “I still clearly remember,” W. Silas Vance wrote in Life and Leisure at Lucky Ridge, a memoir about growing up in a tiny white community at the end of a dirt road in Wise County at the beginning of the twentieth century, “when, at the age of 11, I saw a Negro while on a visit to Decatur. There was no opportunity to question the Negro, but when my older sister pointed him out on the sidewalk as we drove down Main Street, I stared at the man with the curiosity of a boy at his first circus.”

  Unfortunately, for some 130 of its 150 years, Texas laws and customs exhibited not curiosity, but a conscious hostility toward black Texans. Slaves until the Civil War, and unfree until a Union general stepped ashore at Galveston in 1865 to proclaim U.S. sovereignty, the state’s blacks are only now overcoming suppression some may be willing to forgive the past but it still lives within them.

  When Moses Austin entered Texas in 1820, he brought $50 in cash and a black slave worth twelve times that. Most of the Anglos who settled Mexican Texas were Southerners, accepting the economic advantages of slavery. Indeed, after 1836 the Republic of Texas not only permitted slavery, its laws ordered free Negroes to leave the state. The Texas Constitution of 1845 plainly endorsed slavery, stating that all slaves “shall remain in the like state of servitude.”

  Texas lawmakers were still at it 80 years later. State legislators spent decades keeping blacks from voting in Democratic primary elections, beginning in 1923 with the passage of a law that flatly stated, “In no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic primary election held in the State of Texas, and should a negro vote…such ballot shall be void and election officials shall not count the same.”

  Even after a black dentist from Houston’s Fifth Ward successfully opened the Democratic primary to all voters with Smith v. Allwright in 1944 (a suit represented before the Supreme Court b Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), a few Texas counties continued to use private white primaries. For much of the state’s history, white Texans have truculently proclaimed their resentment of orders from the federal government; the shame is that such orders have been necessary to ensure fairness and decency.

  These days, Texas laws contributing to the degradation of black Texans have been scrubbed away, but it is surprising how recently they existed. In the 1950s, Jim Crow laws required segregation in schools, state parks and intrastate transportation, and forbade intermarriage. Reminders of race and place were daily. Public facilities were restricted; common courtesies were denied. Blacks used restrooms and fountains marked colored, or they used none at all. Sometimes facilities were unlabeled—the tile on a wall in a downtown department store in style-conscious Dallas was tastefully color-coded, black and white. People understood.

  White Southern Baptists spoke particularly loudly in the 1950s and 1960s in favor of barriers between the races in Texas. Dr. W.A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist in Dallas, egregiously supported segregation. So did the Rev. Carey Daniel. In 1955, Daniel, pastor of First Baptist Church of West Dallas, vice-chairman of the Texas Citizens Council for Continued Segregation, and cousin to the governor, Gov. Price Daniel, wrote to The Dallas Morning News, “The Lord Himself was the original segregationist. When he separated the black race from the white, He did not even put them in different parts of town or even in different countries. The black race had a continent to themselves.”

  In a state overwhelmingly opposed to integration, Criswell and Daniel were representative men.

  When Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot was first performed in 1908, marriages across ethnic lines were uncommon. In contrast, today some suppose that white ethnic Texas is vanishing into that melting pot. They point to Italian Texans—or, rather, they say they can’t point to them because Italians qua Italians have assimilated.

  They have a point. At one time three were newspapers directed solely at Italians in Texas, but the last one ceased publication in 1962. Once, one could find Italian beehive ovens in the Central Texas countryside near Thurber and Dickenson; today, such aromatic distinctions are gone, replaced for the most part by factory-made bread.

  Through the state, white ethnic organizations that were founded for practical purposes now exist mostly for sentimental reasons. The fraternal societies established by Texas immigrants to provide insurance or to care for the sick or disabled – for example, the Ceska Katolicka Jednota Texaska, the Czech Catholic Union of Texas organized in 1889—have seen their roles superseded by government agencies or private non-ethnic corporations.

  For some, ethnicity is today little more than a shared interest, no more confining than a mutual interest in boating might be, and in some cases it is an interest free of all genetic moorings. At the Dallas International Bazaar each spring there are booths sponsored by the Scottish Society of Dallas, the Dallas Chinese Lions Club, the Vietnamese Kung Fu Association, the Czech Catholic Club, the Italian Club, the Vasa Order of America (Swedes), the Friendly Sons and Daughters of St. Patrick, among others. But bloodlines are not a requirement for membership in the group. You don’t have to have an Irish father to be a Friendly Son. And anyone can join the Scottish Society who is, “by desire or affinity associated with the Scottish peoples.”

  Perhaps the truth is that the stock in the Texas melting pot is not as lumpy with ethnicity as it once was, but neither are we a watery bouillon. For white ethnics, languages and cultures may have almost disappeared, but people within the group still identify themselves as Italian or Czech or Norwegian, as though belonging to an extended family. People are still disinclined to let their ethnic past be forgotten.

  Teddy Roosevelt was not the first or the last American to suggest there is something un-American in the retention of ethnic identities. Nor is anti-ethnicity a no-nothing position. Sometimes even those who applaud or defend ethnicity have mixed feelings about its official recognition.

  The federal government has taken note of ethnicity in one fashion or another since 1850, when statisticians responsible for conducting the census determined a usefulness for measuring the population according to country of birth. It was a concern prompted in part by a rise in immigration to a nation that had no immigration policy.

  The ethnic interests of the government are not without controversy. One year, the census placed Mexicans in a “non-Caucasian” category, with the exception of the “white” Hispanics of New Mexico and Colorado. The Mexican government and Mexican Americans, upset with being “non-white,” protested. In the 1960s, civil libertarians feared that probing into ethnic origins raised the specter of government persecution and called for the abolition of all race and national-origin questions in government statistics, college admissions or job applications. The American Civil Liberties Union attempted to have race deleted from the 1960 census schedule, and one state went so far as to eliminate race and color from its birth and death certificates for one year; but such actions aroused the suspicions of the ethnic groups themselves, who saw in them a conspiracy to obliterate their identities.

  At UT”s Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio, schoolchildren on field trips and other, more voluntary visitors can handle Indian drums and tools, pluck cotton from its bale, go inside a sharecropper’s cabin, examine an old butter churn, watch corn being ground and reflect on the strange beauty of carrying the name Moczygemba from Southern Poland to Central Texas in 1853, as the pick their way through a football-field sized exhibit floor where exhibits representing some 26 different ethnic groups are on display.

  The emphasis of the Institute’s exhibits is historical, but the message is contemporary. As Texans, we are separate in our origins and in that separateness there is something worth celebrating. Real Texans not only each quiche they eat lasagna, kolaches and smorgasbord. Nor is there a single ethnicity that dominates. Like the country, the state is too large and our peoples are too few. We are not uniform, nor is there a representative one of us; but ours is a pleasing diversity. Maybe the simple lesson in the variety of our peoples is the impossibility of ever describing the state in simple terms.

  Figures on ancestry or ethnic origin may seem to suggest that everyone can be assigned an ethnic category, or that such assignations are obvious. Not so. For many Texans ethnic identity is simply problematic. Surveys revel that half the population cannot identify its ethnicity at all. Even census figures are approximations; at best they are rough, limited by the abilities of the census-takers and the veracity of respondents. How, for example, is the census to count Mexicans living in Texas illegally? Census data is a cornucopia of ethnic information but from it we learn that people all over Texas either don’t know or won’t say who their ancestors were. There is no place of any size in the state without somebody of either unspecified or undisclosed ancestry.

  If the mosaic of white ethnicity in Texas is a fading pattern, It is mostly because white ethnic groups that once formed separate communities are now physically less divided from one another, their coming together made inevitable by the movement of Texans from the countryside to the city. Good jobs, not good will, have melted ethnic Texans. All over the state, rural settlements that were home to homogenous communities have disappeared from the map, swallowed by big city opportunities. Assimilation in Texas is as much a matter of highways as ways of the heart. Isolated communities held on to isolating folkways. But as roads through rural Texas improved, rural Texans took them to the city, and few returned. The children of Texans who were born, married and died speaking German, Czech or Polish—people who had never seen a Jew, black or Hispanic in their lives—now live in Houston or Dallas. Those left behind in the Danish community of Danevang are left explaining Danevang’s demise matter-of-factly: “People went away to shop, they went to the movies, they met non-Danish and married….”

  “Contented people,” a European observer wrote of those who came to America, “do not emigrate.” Like the rest of America, Texas was peopled by the unhappy. Disasters brought us here: famines, epidemics, persecutions, insurrections. Yes, and slavery. But, in general, the journey for ethnic Texas has gone from worse to better. Color is still a bugaboo, a barrier difficult, some would say nearly impossible, to cross. Time is helping, although our embarrassing history is evidence that the persistence of ethnicity is coupled by equally durable bigotry. Perhaps a line from Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo, purely Sicilian, applies to the prejudices of our present generation of Texans, 150 years after the birth of the state: Finche la morta, che la speranza—“as long as there is death, there is hope.”

  *

  The essay above was published as Lone Star Lineage, in Texas Celebrates! The First 150 Years, issued by D Magazine/Southwest Media Corp. 1985

• Romanian Holiday

  I am in business class, though I have no business flying to Romania. Dallas to London to Bucharest. The traveler at the window seat next to me has two phones and a laptop. At Heathrow, a soccer team boarded. Dark skins, all of the players. From the window of the plane, I can see squares of brown and green fields. Grimy Bucharest, surrounded by agriculture.

  *

  I am hiking in the woods above Brasov with Costin, who is both my guide and my driver. This mountain we are on is called Timba, and the trail is right on the edge of the town, as though a forest were a city park. We are showered by the gold coin of leaves. Costin tells me about the richness of the country and the madness of its people. He points to church spires, talks of competition between beliefs and the envy of the believers. Romanian for “church” is biserica. It sounds to my ear the same as Romanian for “cat.” In Bucharest, I had a different guide, Lisette, and she had laughed at this confusion of my American ear.
  “I worship cats,” she said.

  *

  I spent my first two days in Romania with her. We tour in Bucharest She points out the Saxon buildings, which are elegantly joined, like layers of cakes. They are centuries old. I remarked to her how sad and contemporary it was, all the graffiti defacing them. Her name wasn’t Lisette, but something like that. I am sure it started with an L. Like so much else, Lisette’s name has tumbled in my memory. I can almost see it. It is falling, reaching out to me so that I might pull it back and remember, but I cannot grasp it.

  *

  In Viscli, I am eating a pear that Costin finds on the ground under a tree. He picks up one for me and one for him. Viscli is a Saxon village, with a history going back to the 12th century. It has a white fortified church, which we go into, though there is little to see. Prince Charles has visited Viscli. It is a claim to fame of a sort – it has made Viscli a tourist attraction. The prince owns a property in Romania, apparently not far from here. And it is rentable. A tourist can stay in a prince’s room.

  When I was planning my trip, I looked into spending a night there, but chose otherwise. In part, because I am here solo. Had I gone with Debra, the lure of sitting on a toilet owned by a celebrity would have been too much for her to resist.

  *

  On to Sighisoara. Each of these places has its particularities. It is all foreign to me, so much unknown, but I might say the same thing about neighborhoods in West Dallas or south of the Trinity or east of Central Expressway. There are places downtown in my own city where I can’t get the order of the streets right, no matter how many times I have driven there – Elm, Main, St. Paul, Harwood. What ones are one way, and which way. I don’t know my own neighborhoods, even less my neighbors.

  So many details, who can know them all?

  There’s a saying, God is in the details. But if He is everywhere, then He is in the generalizations, too.

  *

  In Sighisoara I am staying the night in Casa Fronius. No one else is here, other than a British family, twelve of them traveling together. I see them at breakfast in the downstairs dining area at Casa Fronius. I have my table to myself. They greet each other with kisses, taking their places at one long table. They are on day three of their five-day bicycle trip – the grandfather, a smart-looking grandmother, two daughters with their husbands, the sons-in-law, their four handsome children.

  Three of the grandchildren are tall, athletic young men. The granddaughter, Daisy, is seventeen, a beautiful young girl and the last to come down to breakfast.

  I enjoy being here by myself. But what might it mean to have such a family? How much more satisfying to be a grandparent traveling with these daughters and sons-in-law, and with the youngest children, young adults in fact, all treating each other as though truly they enjoyed the company and delighted in being together.

  I know nothing about this. It is outside my experience – not as a child, not as an old man. Maybe briefly, in the few years before Dolores’s death, and when our children were very young. And even that was not the same.

  *

  Thursday now, in Piatra Neamt. Coffee this morning in the Ceaulaul Hotel, near the Princely Court. My hotel is named after the mountains nearby.

  I have my several Romanian phrases, just as I did with Russian phrases when I went to Moscow and St. Petersburg a year ago. Those Russian hello’s and thank you’s have disappeared from my tongue, and their equivalents in Romanian will go the same way.

  Da, ma scuati, multomesc, and the always useful nu vorbesc romansche – it’s not much, but it is enough to win a smile in the coffee shop.

  *

  I visited the synagogue Baal Shem Tov in Piatra Neamt. This wooden synagogue dates from 1766, ten years before the American revolution and six years after the death of the Besht, who was not from here, but from somewhere that was Poland then and is now Ukraine. The synagogue was locked. I walk to the city archives next, in order to ask about Isaac Reegler, who might have been born February 11, 1887. Ancestry has suggested there was also a half-sister, Rose. Costin explains my interest to a woman at a desk. This was my reason for coming to Romania in the first place. It was the precipitating event. Isaac, my mother’s father, someone I never knew, came from Piatra Neamt.

  *

  Costin arranges a second visit to the synagogue Baal Shem Tov. When we arrive at the wooden synagogue, he calls on his cell phone, and someone comes down the narrow side street to unlock a front gate and then the door to the building.

  It’s Emanuel Nadler. Emanuel has the responsibility to show the synagogue to tourists. I don’t ask whether it’s a job or a sacred duty. Emanuel is not much older than I am. He’s an interesting man, a poet of some distinction and also an art historian. He has published both art history and his poetry under his more Romanian name, Emil Nicolae.

  I spend thirty minutes, maybe more, with Emil. In looks, he is practically the twin of Robert Rendell, the Patton Boggs attorney I know from the Harvard Club of Dallas, whose more distinguished brother, Ed, is a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. And his face is familiar in a more general sense. I can see in the faces of Jews in Romania that their kinsmen are praying alongside me when I sit in my seat at Temple Emanu-El back home. They are my kinsmen as well.

  Emil is fluent in French, more so than in English. So I try out whatever is left of my high school French in conversation with him. I am able to tell him that I am a poet too. He warms to the information and gives me a book of his poems, which is for sale in the synagogue. He also sells me one of his more scholarly works, a hardbound biography of Victor Brauner, which is a catalog of Brauner’s work. Like one of my grandfathers, Brauner was born in Piatra Neamt. My grandfather Isaac was a tailor’s assistant. Brauner was a surrealist painter between the wars and a friend of Andre Breton.

  In those years between the wars, there were 14,000 Jews in Piatra Neamt. They were forty percent of the population. And the Jews of Piatra Neamt were never deported during the war. They wore the star, and some may have been killed, but most survived. According to Emil, it was only after the war that the Jews left Piatra Neamt. Under communism, Ceaucescu allowed the State of Israel to buy their legal emigration. It was a money-maker.

  Emil, or Emanuel, was born after the war, in 1947. He and his parents didn’t leave. But there are very few of the Jewish families left on his block.
  “Another block over, all the Jews left,” he says.
  Neighbor influenced neighbor. Emil says only 145 Jewish families remain in Piatra Neamt, and most of them are intermarried. Those who still come to the synagogue Baal Shem Tov are either elderly or women. It is difficult and rare to have a minyan.

  *

  Costin has picked up a river rock for me from just beyond the Bicaz Gorge. I also have one of the golden leaves from a tree in the Carpathians in my pocket. I don’t know the kind of stone and ask Costin the name of the leaf.

  That task of naming was our first task, assigned to the first man, whose name was Adam. It was delegated to Adam by God. The name of the first woman was Ishah, taken from man, but she was also called Chava – love, the mother of life, designating a specific woman, that one. Everything has two names at least, the general and the specific. For the stone and the leaf in my pocket, I know only their general names.

  *

  Does every movement of every leaf in every breeze have a purpose? Surely it falls for a reason, if only a reason a scientist might explain. In that scientific sense, it lands with a job to do, decomposing as part of a grander composition.

  Is the I am of the leaf, or of a river rock, any less than my own I am? The rock will be in the river as the river moves on. It will be in the river when I am bones. A river of time flows over me, smoothing whatever was rough in me, vanishing whatever distinguished me.

  *

  Friday, at Casa Roata.
  Costin and I go to dinner together in Gura Humorului, in Suceava; this is northeastern Romania, where we are visiting the painted monasteries.

  Costin’s engaging. His own business is Carpathian-adventures.com, but I found him through Exeter, which sells luxury travel experiences. I must be paying many multiples of what the trip with him might have cost had I contacted him directly.

  *

  Our goal today is Suceavita Monastery. Just before we get there, we stop at one of the wooden houses that are converted into shops, with crafts and other souvenirs for tourists. I bought a heavy fabric with gold threads. Through Costin, the shopowner tells me that it was a skirt made for a Romanian girl’s wedding. The shopowner has a longer conversation with Costin, who translates as I listen. The shopowner has visited the United States. Her daughter is Georgette Dane, a winemaker for Chloe Wine Collection, which is part of The Wine Group, one of the bigger producers in Northern California (Benzinger, Franzia, Cupcake, and other brands). The woman has been to Monterey and knows the aquarium there. Also, to Southern California, because her granddaughter is in medical school at UC San Diego.

  *

  Sunday morning.
  The fly in my room at Casa Roata has nowhere to go. It came in uninvited, as we all do, and with no intention to stay. The buzzing is bothering me, as if it were pleading with me. I open a window. I unlatch a door.

  There are several families staying here in the cottages of Casa Roata, which is a sort of Disneyland Romanian place in the country. They are native Romanians; so, tourists in their own country. Even for them, Casa Roata is a stage set.

  I am not sure where Costin is staying. He will be by later in his car. We are leaving today, and traveling through Maramures. We will stop to see wooden churches on the way to Sighet, Ellie Wiesel’s home town. He was deported from there, first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald. Costin has offered the opinion that Wiesel was a fabulist. Costin has lots of experience with Jewish tourists and tours. It is something Jews do, visiting the sites of their grandfathers’ lives, or where they lost their lives. Costin is used to it.

  *

  Dinner tonight is at my hotel in Sighet. Gradina Morii, where I am staying, is impressive. Behind it, a river, and a bridge I walk over in the late afternoon. For dinner, I am seated alone at a circular table six feet in diameter. I am the old man looking at the attractive young in a hotel restaurant.

  What dignity is there in eating alone? Or in feeling disqualified by age from winning anyone’s attention?

  But then I have always been uncomfortable with my age. As I have noted to myself many times, my age has always been like the porridge that is either too hot or too cold. For years, I thought I was too young. Then one day I felt too old. Somewhere in between, I must have been just the right age but never realized it.

  I have heard of body dysmorphia. Could I have age dysmorphia? When I was twenty, I thought I had little to offer. Now, nearing seventy, I am convinced that no one wants what I have. So the years have gone. I am amazed by stories of physically unattractive old men who seduce by the force of their personalities. Or more likely by the power of their fame or status. Louis Kahn, for example. That is a triumph of self-confidence.

  *

  We had stopped earlier today at Costin’s house in Maramures, where his dog bit me on the leg. She was a small dog, and her bite didn’t even break the cloth of my jeans. Vulpix – Foxy – that was her name. She was only recently delivered of a litter of pups. So she was protecting them. Bellied, drooping, and hostile.

  On our way to Sighet we also stop at a “living museum” that Costin knows. It is part of his job to make sure he takes me to see whatever is supposed to be interesting, even when there is nothing to see. The museum–a shop, really–is on the roadside. The manager is an old woman who knows Costin well enough. She tells him about the suicide of a gambler in the village. Costin does not know the man, but it is news. So it is shared. There must be stories like this every day at home as well. I never hear them though. Am I moving too fast to even listen? Traveling through Romania, and constantly on the move, I am still going much slower than I do at home. And here there is nothing else for me to do but listen.

  *

  I have lost track of the dates; is this the 27th, which I thought was yesterday? It of course doesn’t matter. Only my date of departure needs to be unmistaken.

  Daylight savings time ended this morning in Romania. Costin is driving, I am the passenger, and we are on our way from Sighet to Cluj Napoca.

  What do we talk about? I have spent more uninterrupted time with Costin than with anyone within memory – not just more over these ten days, but more than in the past ten years. Debra and I see each other two nights a week. If we are in the car together, she is on her phone. If we are at her house, she is asleep after dinner in front of the television. So, our conversations rarely amount to much.

  Costin and I talk about whatever we can think of to pass the time sociably. He comments on the roadside sights. A huge house we pass is “owned by gypsies.” He talks about the weather station where he works, which is up the mountain from his house. It is only a seasonal job. Costin will sleep there for weeks, when he is not working as a guide. We talk about past events in both of our lives. Or about money, or politics. He points out the light in the clouds above the roadway.

  We are passing towns where there are two-story homes on the street. Massive, new construction, some houses only partly finished, their magnificent roofs sheathed in a silvery metal that looks like a tinsel.
  “Gypsy homes,” Costin says. “They like shiny things.”
  They are homes, he says, “built for display,” with many more rooms than the owner needs. Built with money gained working abroad or through schemes.
  “What schemes,” I ask.
  “Importing untaxed cigarettes.”
  He says the gypsies build the houses but don’t know how to live in them and often don’t even want to. They might burn a fire on a living room floor, as if camping inside. Or invite their horse inside.
  “The tin decoration – all for display, it’s gypsy nobility.”

  I think that is what every aristocrat does with his castle. Costin and I had visited a castle in Bran only a few days before.

  *

  I’m in Cluj for the night. For once, at a relatively modern hotel. There is a performance tonight at the ornate provincial opera house in the city, so I decide to go. The opera is Offenbach’s Orphee aux Enfers. In the seat next to me by herself, a young woman who is in Cluj on business. She speaks English and is from Piatra Neamt, but lives in Iasi. She is in sales, repping French manufacturers of lace from Calais. She calls on interior designers in Cluj, to influence them, so that they will specify French lace for their clients.
  Noapte buna, I tell her, trying my Romanian.
  Buna sera, she corrects me.
  It’s only evening. Noapte buna is something to tell a woman when you say good night.
  The young woman wears a black pants suit. She is also wearing flesh-colored stockings that come only to the top of her thick ankles. It is not an appealing look. Especially for someone who sells elegant French lace. Lace is a whisper. The fabric of her stockings is a growl, or a horse laugh.

  When do the divisions of time start and stop in Romania? When is it morning, then day, then evening, then night?

  *

  A Monday.

  Today, I’m taking pleasure in what Iris Murdoch called “sheer, pointless, independent existence.” She was speaking of animals, trees, and stones.

  *

  Am I missing my “significant other,” who declined to come to Romania?

  Debra’s lack of interest in me and what I do is disappointing, but it is also liberating. Yes, it provokes me, if I am inclined to feel unappreciated. I tell myself I deserve something more. But can’t I as easily be grateful for it? I am on a solo trip to Romania. It is one of Debra’s unintentional gifts. I have no one to share it with, which can be sad; but, on the other hand, I do have this trip for myself. And Debra’s a poor traveling companion anyway, overly concerned with comfort, worrying about whatever she left behind. She subtracts as much as she adds when we travel together.

  Also worth considering: How am I any different? Am I interested enough in Debra’s occupations and preoccupations? I may be more polite than she is. I will ask her what she thinks. I will listen to her as she repeats herself. But do I have any deeper share in her experiences than she has in mine?

  *

  Costin drives me from Cluj across the border with Hungary to Budapest. This is where he turns back for home. I’m staying in the Four Seasons Gresham Palace, overlooking the Danube. Luxury, for the end of the trip. This hotel is art nouveau, but imperial, with a million mosaic tiles in the lobby, and too many sparkling chandeliers.

  I’m an underdressed guest here. Costin and his t-shirt and jeans are off in the night, alone in his Toyota, back to Romania.

  *

  In Budapest, a new guide. Julia Lengyel is a Jew who tells me she didn’t learn she was Jewish until she was sixteen. In her twenties, she applied to a program for “Jewish youth,” even though she was over the program’s age limit, and spent a year on a kibbutz in Israel. Her Jewish father had lived in Budapest throughout the war. She tells me that he “had the luck not to be murdered.”

  Julia studied economics in Budapest at the Karl Marx School of Economics, which was renamed after 1990. Her mentor there was Ivan Tibor Berend, the Hungarian historian and former President of the Hungarian Academy of Science. Also, former member of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, and now a professor at UCLA and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  I look Julia up on LinkedIn. Under Education, it says she has her Masters in Judaic Studies from Corvinus University in Budapest. On LinkedIn she is “following” both Corvinus University and the Hard Rock Hotel Budapest.

  Julia has two sisters. One of them a half-sister, “from my father’s second marriage, after my mother died.” This sister lives with a husband in Switzerland. The other is a cellist in Toronto who plays with Wellington Chamber Music and freelances with The Guitar Guys.
  So, both live elsewhere.

  Leaving home is an Eastern European thing to do. My grandparents did it. Julia’s sisters did it. For many, life is like the sun, it moves to the west.

  *

  Auden in The Enchafed Flood describes the sea as “that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is liable to relapse.”

  This is not a comment on the crisis of climate change or the threat of rising ocean waters, flooded shores and drowning islands, dismissed by some as simply “the weather,” which we have always had.

  I have the book with me at The Four Seasons Gresham Palace and am misusing my time reading in the hotel room.

  *

  Budapest’s central District V is a fairytale respite from the Romanian countryside, painted churches and Gypsy houses. From the window in my room at the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace, there’s a view of the Chain Bridge that crosses the Danube. Around the corner, I can visit a gilded Gerbeaud, which is a coffee house that could as easily be called a cake house. It is on the other side of Joseph Attila, a street named after a poet. I hardly know where I am in Budapest, but it is a pleasure to be lost here. I have little sense of the city. I set out walking the first night around the few blocks that I think I know. I can be anxious sometimes about getting lost. My sense of direction is very poor. It is much the same in my life. I have the sense that my life is only a street or two, or at most only a neighborhood.

  *

  Joseph Attila, did I write your name down incorrectly? Did the sign say Joseph or Jozsef? When I look you up online, Jozsef seems to be your last name.

  Born 1905 in Budapest. Father, a soapmaker; mother, a laundry worker. Somehow you attended the Sorbonne and the University of Vienna. Career: poet and translator. There is a translation of your poems published in 1973, the year I dropped out of Harvard, edited by James Atlas, who was at the Harvard Advocate a few years before I was. Here’s more, from Wikipedia: You were treated by psychiatrists for depression and schizophrenia as a child. When you were an adult, you were sent by the state to a sanatorium. You never married but fell in love frequently with the women who were treating you. Your father abandoned the family, your mother died when you were a teenager, you described yourself as a street urchin, you edited a literary journal, you joined the Communist Party. And on it goes. Attila Jozsef committed suicide 1937 in Balartonszarszo, is a village along the southern shore of Lake Balaton in Hungary.

  Why did you kill yourself in 1937? Did you smell what was in the wind?

  According to Wikipedia, the poet was 32 in 1937 and living in the house of his sister and brother-in-law in Balatonszarszo. He was “killed while crawling through railway tracks and was crushed by a train.” It’s accepted as a suicide in part because he had attempted suicide before. Also because he left five “farewell letters” the day he died.

  Attila Jozsef or Jozsef Attila is buried in Budapest. From one of his “farewell” letters: “Well, in the end I will have found my home, the land where flawless chiseled letters guard my name above the grave where I’m buried, if I have buriers.”

  *

  It is easy enough to get lost, in a foreign city or in one’s own life. I have never confused my first and last names, but I have often misunderstood what to do first and last.

  Sometimes it is only by narrowing the path that I am able to know where I am. The narrow path has its downsides though. It can even have dangers, though not likely as lethal as crawling along a railroad track.

  *

  My last night in Budapest. It goes how the last of anything goes – not much energy, just drifting, not doing much. I am not trying to get the most out of the hours that are left. I am thinking instead about the travel back to Dallas.

  That’s typical. People do not rise up at the last, they lie down.

  *

  These travel notes are handwritten in a small black journal with a leathery cover that has a snap to keep it closed. There are two or three pages in this journal from before Romania. The first writing in it starts with a mention of London, a trip I took with my children after their mother died. That was twenty years ago, when I went on a “family trip” with what was left of our family. I had forgotten those notes and never transcribed them.

  How to describe the journal? Meaning, the physical notebook. I look up “snap cover journal” and find “Notebook in Faux Leather Snap Cover – 4 x 7” on Amazon.

  That’s what I have – 4 by 7, faux.

  I might still transcribe these first few pages, but they are not travel notes any longer. They are time travel notes. I could rewrite them, interpolating and updating and adding, even contradicting what I wrote back then, in the light of what I know now.

  I could do the same with any recollection, whether from twenty years ago or yesterday.

  *

  Something I read and want to copy down:
  A child fears separation from his parents. A lover fears separating from the beloved. At the same time, we may want to leave, risking an unknown tomorrow, almost preferring it to more of the same.

  If security is what you need, and comfort is what you love, and you want the respect you imagine that others have for you, then, yes, stay where you are.

  You can continue to worship at the altar of routine.

  *

  The weather is changing. The unstable spring is gone. Summer is past reckoning, and the sweet interval of fall has vanished. I am into winter, cold and dull. I am feeling my aging. What did Ben Jonson write, that age was misery? It is not that simple, neither the weather nor my aging bones. It is storming outside tonight. The wind is doing damage. I am trying to sleep but can only dream. And in this dream I am sawing broken branches of the live oaks, my holy trees of life that have broken off in the storm. I am cutting the big branches until they are in pieces light enough for me to carry, one after another, into a fire.

  ***

• Turn of the Year

  i

  Yearend is a time to walk through the events of the year past. At life’s end, however, going back can be a complicated journey. And a stumbling, melancholic one. Be not solitary, be not idle, Robert Burton recommended in The Anatomy of Melancholy, as one of his cures, steps he thought as effective as a trip to the physician or the apothecary. I have substituted for both at different times in my life, making use of psychiatrists and pharmacists. And here I am trying to write down my thoughts about failure. So being solitary goes with the territory. Siting in a chair, tapping on the keyboard of a laptop, looks very much like idleness, at least to the outside observer. Then again, there is no outside observer. And that is a relief. Since no one is providing a target, I have no mark to hit. There is no test, so no right answers. No prizes, and no punishments either. I have always admired the wisdom of Kohelet, available wherever Bibles are sold, or given away, or placed in a pew: whatsoever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.

  ii

  Sooner or later, every man is a failure in his own eyes is another admirable aphorism. I don’t know who said it or where I read it, but I get it. I too have the conviction that I have failed. And not just failed at this or that. Failure can become the label that you attach your yourself, like a name tag on a sticky white rectangle peeled from a roll and then pressed onto your breast pocket. You have written your first name and last initial on that rectangle, using the black Sharpie pen that the host at the check-in table has provided. Or you own the nicer, metal tag, the one that has your first and last name debossed on a strip of metal. That is the manufactured one that comes with the separate button of a magnet and the warning do not use with pace maker.

  iii

  Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy has the pull of the all-you-can-eat restaurant. The concept is tempting, but the experience is mixed and the result is often regret. The fat paperback on my bookshelf has an introduction by William Gass, and a second introduction, this one from the 1932 edition, by Holbrook Jackson. I have freed it from the shelf and am weighing it in my hands. There is also a “Note On The Text.” According to this Note, several pages long, no original manuscript of The Anatomy of Melancholy exists. For the five versions printed during his lifetime, Burton made changes and added material. The text in my paperback follows edition number six, which was the first printed posthumously. If I were Robert Burton, I would be digressing now, explaining the complexities of the word “posthumous.” How, in Latin, posterus can mean “coming after” and postumus, the superlative form, might or might not mean “last.” Burton might have added that when Latin was a spoken language, postumus referred to the last born of a man’s children– particularly to those born after a man died. From there, piling on, he could note how “umus” in postumus became entwined with “humus,” meaning “dirt” or “earth.” And so it came to be confused with the very earth where a child’s father is buried.

  iv

  Amy Edmondson’s Right Kind of Wrong is on a desk upstairs, in a room I sometimes call “the study.” This book is “a masterclass in navigating failure,” according to Angela Duckworth, the author of Grit, who is quoted on the front of the book’s jacket. Right Kind of Wrong has the subtitle The Science of Failing Well. Angela Duckworth repeats her endorsement on the back cover. She praises Right Kind of Wrong as “a master class in navigating, and even seeking out, the inevitable failures that pave the way to success.” So, failure is inevitable, it should even be sought.

  v

  Management consultants and academics speak of the opportunity to “fail well.” But what is being praised at the Harvard Business School is not failure; it is learning from failure. Thomas Edison will be quoted. I have not failed, the great inventor declares in prefaces and first chapters, I’ve found ten thousand ways that won’t work. That is all fine. Learn and move on is a wonderful strategy, if you can bring it off. But what if your sense of failure is bedrock, not a stepping stone toward success. What if it is as vast as the vista ahead, in the aftermath of giving up. It becomes the final grade, the conclusive assessment, a summing up. It is a black mood you are not moving beyond. There is no curtain you can part, dispersing the convincing darkness with the sunshine that is there, just outside, all along.

  vi

  There is the notion that failure can turn into honor eventually, if you live long enough. Or the transformation may occur posthumously. Those unrecognized during their lives will be lionized after their deaths. Van Gogh is the standard bearer. Franz Kafka, too. I have Kafka on my bookshelves and on the tops of tables. In the hallway, Complete Stories. In another room, The Castle. The slim reprint of Kafka’s Letter to My Father on a desk upstairs is from the Kafka Museum in Prague, from its gift shop. Other editions I have seen of this little book translate it as Letter to The Father, which is a crueler title. I never wrote letters to my father, who died at ninety-four, less than a year after he tripped and hit his head on a concrete stair on his way into a movie theater, to see Tom Cruise in Valkyrie. The day before his fall, he was in robust health, and his subsequent decline was steeper than the stairway.

  I do have one or two letters from him, however. They are more like notes. He wrote his messages in block print and, typically, sprinkled them with capitalizations in the middle of his sentences. If I wrote back, it was only to “Mom and Dad,” as though they were one person. And this was in the years well before email, when addresses were physical and a married couple had the same one. I may not have seen my mother and father as individuals then, or not clearly. A marriage can do that, it can be a kind of eclipse. From a child’s point of view, it fuses them into parents and thereby hides each one.

  vii

  Kafka’s Letter to My Father has nothing do with my father. For that, it would be better to choose a baseball book, the biography of Sandy Koufax that he might have given me. So look for Sandy Koufax, A Lefty’s Legacy, by Jane Leavy, and find it on a high shelf in the hallway. It turns out to have been from my father only by proxy. My son has a message for me from 2002 on its first blank page. Dad, it says, I remember you telling me about seeing Koufax play at Dodger Stadium so I got you this book. Ben is misremembering. The night game that my father and I went to was at the Coliseum, not at Chavez Ravine. More formally, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, on August 31, 1959. Dodgers versus San Francisco Giants, Koufax pitching, Johnny Roseboro catching. My father and I are sitting down the line from first base in the bleacher seats high above right field. Koufax strikes out eighteen.

  viii

  What is failure, really? Is it the gap between who I thought I would be and how things have turned out? Maybe that is just a failure of wisdom and a lack of acceptance. Failing is inevitable just as the failure to stay alive is inevitable. For parents, having children can be a response to that inevitability. A father might think he will still live on earth in the genes of those who come after him, however difficult it may be to remain satisfied with that kind of immortality. As the father of adopted children, I need some other death denying illusion, to use the language of Ernest Becker, whose The Denial of Death is buried on a desk downstairs, under Bittersweet by Susan Cain, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and Love Poems of Pablo Neruda.

  ix

  It is also possible to embrace failure. It is possible to joke about it. To belittle it, by belittling yourself. Ornella Sinigalia writes about the use in China of the term “diaosi,” which means something like “loser.” She says it became trendy among the generation born after the 1980s to poke fun at their own low status.

  Some ambitious winner has even started a business called The Failure Institute. The premise of his business is that we all need to free ourselves from the stigma of failure. The need is desperate, according to the text I find under the About Us navigation on The Failure Institute’s website. The Failure Institute is a global movement. It has chapters in some three hundred cities around the world. Its “signature events” are called Fuckup Nights. And the lessons learned from more than one million participants on these Fuckup Nights are distilled by The Failure Institute into “content and community for top companies and organizations around the world.” The slogan of The Failure Institute? Failure sucks but instructs. Private events, workshops, newsletters and reports, blog posts about authenticity and vulnerability, “how to turn failure into opportunity,” and the off-rhyming slogan are all part of the sale. This is not parody, though you might fail to see how it could not be.

  x

  If I need a definition of failure, I can look for it in the two-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary I received as a graduation gift after high school. It is on the lowest shelf of one of the seven bookcases that are built into my hallway. This dictionary is one of five or six books my parents gave me over the years, most of them for birthdays. Six or seven, if the two dark blue volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary still in their slipcase count as two. I need to stoop all the way to the hardwood floor in the hallway to find it. The slipcase has a small tray at the bottom, with a tiny knob I can pull to slide the tray outward and reveal a magnifying glass. It is day time, but a magnifying glass is helpful in the dim hallway.

  National Geographic Atlas of the World was also a gift from my parents. It is slipcased, too, on one of the shelves behind the downstairs desk. Most mysterious, my parents gave me P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, a dusty, unread book, its pages a terra more incognita than Papua New Guinea or Antarctica. I can see its jacketed spine on one of the upper shelves in the hall. “By the author of Tertium Organum,” it says on the cover. “The famous Russian philosopher’s story of his quest for a teaching which would solve for him the problems of Man and the Universe.” I never got further in this book than the message my mother wrote on an empty page facing the inside front cover. “For your 16th birthday,” she writes, “with hope that this book will answer some of your questions that we do not know the answers to.” My mother was solving a problem that I did not have, because I would never have asked her questions about Man or the Universe. And my father might not have heard me even had I asked him. You can picture him sitting in his recliner, listening to the ballgame, an ear plugged by the earpiece of his transistor radio. Now might be as good a time as any to read this neglected gift. More than sixty years have passed, and I have never found the miraculous, whether by searching or by accident. Still, In Search of the Miraculous has a message worth finding this morning. “All our love always, Mother and Dad,” it says.

  xi

  The Wislawa Symborska paperback on a hallway shelf is a travel souvenir. It comes from Masolit, a bookstore in Krakow. My memories are sketchy of the years-ago tour whose primary destination from Krakow was Auschwitz, and very little comes to mind of Krakow, other than the name of this bookstore and Symborska’s Collected and Last Poems, at eye level in the hall. Symborska is a canny trickster. Who else would have written In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself? I take Collected and Last Poems from the shelf and open to page 227 in order to read the end of this poem again.

  On this third planet of the sun
  among the signs of bestiality
  a clear conscience is number one.

  In translation, it reminds me of Auden. His Collected Poems, the hardback, sits on a shelf nearby. So does the thin Penguin paperback of Auden’s Selected Poems that I have owned for fifty years. And a badly used copy of A Certain World, Auden’s commonplace book, its paperback cover missing, its spine broken, and the unbound pages held together with a rubber band.

  xii

  The Tao Te Ching asks: “Success or failure: which is more destructive?” Also, “Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky. But when you stand with your feet on the ground, you will keep your balance.” The Tao Te Ching is resting somewhere on these bookshelves. When I go to find it, the book I remembered as the Tao Te Ching turns into The Parting of the Way, an explanation of Taoism by Holmes Welch. Joseph P. Walcott is written in blue pen on the inside front cover. I remember Joe, someone I met in Berkeley, the year I dropped out of college. Long stringing hair, looking like Jesus as Jesus might have looked on a college campus in 1973. I must have borrowed this paperback from him and then never returned it. Passages in The Parting of the Way are colored over with yellow marker. There are terse margin notes in the same blue pen. Confucius vs Legalism, for example. I see a Yes above two underlines in a margin alongside a sentence Joe highlighted in yellow. On page fifty, the passage that he colors asks, “Where are those mysterious peaks for which Lao Tzu is famous? They have been right above us all the time, shrouded in obscurity. Let us go up and explore them.” In that margin, Joe has written LSD, with another double underline. (It is 1969 after all.) His also comments or copies halfway through the book: Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak. That is all fine, but where is the Tao Te Ching I am certain that I own? I keep looking on hallway bookshelves. Another book about Taoism, The Shambhala Guide, has a promotional card inside from The Pristine Mind Foundation. This book is crisp as a cracker and looks as though it has never been opened.

  Eventually, I find two different translations of the Tao Te Ching on different shelves in other rooms. Both are handsome, jacketed hardbacks, with unworldly illustrations. They are like art books. I probably bought Tao Te Ching A New Translation, calligraphy of Kwok-Lap Chan, and then forgot it entirely. Years pass. And then I bought Tao Te Ching, An Illustrated Journey, translated by Stephen Mitchell, with the delicate scene on its cover from the ink-on-silk handscroll Twelve Views of Landscape, Southern Sung dynasty, early 13th century.

  xiii

  Ursula Le Guin, whose father wanted pages of it read at his funeral, translated her own version of the Tao Te Ching, in order to “catch the poetry.” She writes that the Tao Te Ching is “the most lovable of all the great religious texts.” She also reports that absolutely nothing about it is certain other than that it is Chinese and very old, written maybe 2500 years ago, and only maybe by someone named Lao Tzu.

  xiv

  Tao Te Ching can be translated as The Book of the Way, but for some reason its title is usually not translated. There is a marketing advantage to leaving it untranslated, an added authenticity to the brand. There are books whose difficulty is part of their appeal. I have Finnegans Wake on a shelf somewhere, never read, not even attempted. Today, late in December, I am leafing through the Stephen Mitchell translation. Mitchell in his introduction to Tao Te Ching says “there is practically nothing to be said” about its author. He then says, “Like an Iroquois woodsman, he left no traces.” Are the habits of an anonymous Iroquois so well known by every reader? Stephen Mitchell ends his introduction with a comment on translation. “If I haven’t always translated Lao Tzu’s words, my intention has always been to translate his mind.” That is also a mysterious notion.

  xv

  Both of the Tao Te Ching books present the text in a series of short sections typeset as if they were poetry. In Stephen Mitchell’s version, “Failure is an opportunity” appears as the first sentence in the poem he numbers seventy-nine:

  Failure is an opportunity.
  If you blame someone else,
  there is no end to the blame.
  Therefore the Master
  fulfils her own obligations
  and corrects her own mistakes.
  
  This assessment of failure does not appear in the other Tao Te Ching. It is a very different book, its sections are not numbered, and each of its poems is called a chapter. Still, it has plenty to say about failure. The chapter forty-five poem begins:

  A great thing done is never perfect.
  But that doesn’t mean it fails:
  it does what it is.
  
  As a kind of repudiation of “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” chapter sixty-three begins:

  The sage does nothing,
  and so he never fails.
  
  Joe Walcott thought Tao Te Ching was deep wisdom. He said so to me. The flap of the jacket cover of Tao Te Ching A New Translation asserts something similar. It says Tao Te Ching is expressing “divine truth.” But then, those who know do not say, and those who say do not know.

• The World's Greatest Books

  The seven bookcases that cover the length of the hallway are in dim light. The twelve volumes of The Complete Works of Mark Twain on the top shelf of the first bookcase are bright spots, their spines and covers as yellow as bananas. They sit on a shelf above Sandy Koufax and also have a connection to my father. What the connection is, I do not know, but I have the belief that there is one. These books remained in my bedroom in Los Angeles throughout my childhood. Decades later, they were stored at the Oceanside home that my parents moved to. And then, after my father died, I took them. They are small books, but thick, clothbound, and
  they fascinated me when I was a teenager, though not enough to have ever read them. I like the banana yellow of their covers and how the name of each volume is set in gold on bands of crimson. On all the covers, gold laurel leaves encircle an embossed profile of Samuel Clemens in a crimson oval, and, outside that circle, there is a second circle of embossed five-pointed stars. Under that, the writer’s signature, also in gold.

  I have not looked at a single page in these books in over fifty years. In the dim light, I am holding Volume 8, The Mysterious Stranger. There are crosshatched illustrations on the endpapers that depict characters from different stories. This is the American Artists Edition of The Complete Works of Mark Twain, published by Harper & Brothers, copyright 1922 by Mark Twain Company. My first-generation American father, who never went to college or ever read an assigned book, is a mysterious stranger himself. Both my parents are. I cannot picture either of them buying this twelve-volume set, but here it is in the hallway.

  ii

  These are the twelve Twains, in order: Pudd’nhead Wilson, The American Claimant, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court, The Mysterious Stranger, The Innocents Abroad, The Gilded Age, A Tramp Abroad, and What Is Man. Every American knows Tom and Huck, or used to. But who is Pudd’nhead Wilson?

  iii

  In my childhood bedroom, the twelve Twains rested on one of two shelves made of particle board and supported by metal brackets that hook into slotted metal tracks. The tracks are fastened to the drab green, textured and synthetic wood of the bedroom wall. The longer of the two boards sags under the dark blue burden of an Encyclopedia Americana. These encyclopedias are long gone. I do still have A Treasury of the Familiar, though — one of the “extras” that the publishers of Encyclopedia Americana threw in as an incentive to buy the complete set. It is in a bookcase behind my downstairs desk. Edited by Ralph L. Woods, A Treasury of the Familiar is a sort of greatest hits album in one dark blue volume. Much of it is poetry, though not all. I am looking into it this late December morning. If I wanted to, I can read Elbert Hubbard’s A Message to Garcia or George Washington’s Farewell Address, and plenty of Robert Burns or Robert Browning, in these 750 pages of the formerly familiar. What I remember is only the epigraph from Alfred Noyes’s The Barrel-Organ, which remains just as it was, in front of all that follows:

  And the music’s not immortal;
  but the world has made it sweet.

  In the “Index by Authors” at the end, the longest list by far belongs to “Anonymous.” There is no named author for Polly Wolly Doodle or The Boy Scout Oath.

  iv

  Each of the Twains has its own uncredited illustration facing a title page. In my bedroom as a child, I would open these books only to look at the dreamy color scenes. The one that I loved most is in Volume 8, The Mysterious Stranger. Three young men are in the snow, they may be out hunting. One holds a crossbow. He squints, seeming to look right at me. The other two, on either side of him, also peer forward. The three are wearing feathered caps. They have leggings and jackets, outfits that belong to another time and a far-away country. Behind them, on top of a rocky ledge, distantly and under a dreamy sky, there is the castle with six turrets. All is pastels and sunny on the page. Even the silly caption is transporting. Eseldorf Was a Paradise For Us Boys. These seven words worked like a spell. I never read any further, and
  whoever the mysterious stranger was, that remains a mystery.

  v

  These books are ghosts; or, they are the hosts of spirits. They speak about the past, if only in a whisper. My father is resting under the covers of the Mark Twains. My mother uses a Russian mystic to write to me about my childhood. They are among voices in a crowd on my bookshelves. Bertha, my mother’s oldest sister, talks to me three shelves below The Complete Works of Mark Twain. She is someone I never met, but her twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books have exhumed her and reburied her in the casket of a mahogany bookshelf built into the hallway.

  vi

  Bertha Reegler had rheumatic fever as a child. She dropped dead at age twenty-six on the living room floor of an overcrowded apartment in East Los Angeles, astounding and terrifying her three younger sisters and her mother. That was in 1940. The twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books she left behind are in precarious shape. On most of them, the spines are naked. What little is left of the faux leather paper that used to wrap around their edges will crumble when I touch it, exposing more of the fabric and yellowed glue underneath. I have seen these books in one house or another for seventy years, and have never looked inside them or read even their titles until this morning.

  vii

  Bertha was the star of the family. There was a brother, my Uncle Harold, though by 1940 he was already out of the apartment where the four sisters lived with their immigrant parents. Bertha must have been ambitious. She was interested in a high culture as foreign to her mother and father as Moldova and Bucovina are to Echo Park in East L.A. Or maybe a nice-looking salesman simply knocked on the door to their apartment. An offer was made. Buy a book a month, for practically nothing. If that is the story, then at least twenty months could have passed before the catastrophe on the living room floor, as Bertha collapsed, blood at her mouth.
  When my mother described it to me, she did not explain what caused what, or exactly what happened, other than the death was sudden. Was it heart failure? My mother was a teenager then, so old enough to know. Maybe the family was too traumatized or intimidated to ask for the medical explanation. Like so much else in my family history, the explanation is not sought until there is no one left to explain. Whatever was so promising in Bertha, those promises were not kept. My mother held onto all Bertha’s books however. Not just The World’s Greatest Books, but others still on my shelves as well.

  viii

  I have a photograph of my Aunt Bertha. The shelf that holds The World’s Greatest Books is deep enough to also hold a small, hinged gold frame in front, a double frame for two images. In the style of the times, Bertha’s photo is tinted. She is on the right of the center hinge, and the tinted photo of her father, Isaac, is on the left. I never knew Isaac Reegler either. I was one year old when he died. In his photo, he wears a very wide necktie with tinted blue stripes, and he looks a bit like Lee J. Cobb at his angriest. The photo of Bertha is textured with riverine cracks, as though her face had been printed on a geologic study. I slide out the cardboard from the back of the frame, in order to free her photo and turn it over, to see if there is any information, a date, her age. No, nothing. My family is like that, too. No one I grew up with thought that their lives might have any resonance beyond the day to day.

  ix

  Has anyone ever read all of The World’s Greatest Books, copyright 1910 by S. S. McClure? Has anyone anywhere done that, since their publication by McKinley, Stone and Mackenzie? These twenty volumes are high culture, with faux marble endpapers and frontispiece portraits, and simply owning them is a signifier. They stand for something. When I pry out Volume XIII, Religion and Philosophy, bits of the binding flake off like old skin. When I open it to the table of contents, the front cover separates and falls to the floor. Under “Religion,” its list of excerpts goes from Apocrypha to Zoroastrianism. There is Koran and Talmud, and snippets from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, and from William Penn’s Some Fruits of Solitude. All of these excerpts are preceded by scholarly summaries. “Philosophy” in Volume XIII begins with Aristotle but only gets as far as Epictetus. Looking for Volume XIV, I pull out five other tightlyshelved books, doing even more damage to them. The wrapping around most of the spines has disappeared entirely, and the set is not in numerical order. “Philosophy,” Hegel to Spinoza, is in a crumbling Volume XIV that then moves on to “Economics,” from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to a slice of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

  x

  Volumes I through VIII of The World’s Greatest Books are entirely Fiction, with the authors excerpted in alphabetical order. In Volume I, Edmond About and Harrison Ainswater are among the greatest. Volume VIII ends with Emile Zola. Looking into the steady eyes of William Thackery, whose portrait is the frontispiece in Volume VIII, I wondered what Nanny, my grandmother, must have thought about any of this. As her family struggled to make rent or pay bus fare, what did Nanny say when these books showed up at the apartment? Does she welcome Sir Thomas Browne and Edward Bellamy? “Mama,” Bertha tells her, “These are for me.” And after her favorite daughter’s sudden death? “Keep them,” she says, and Bertha’s kid sister, my mother, did.

  xi

  There are no complete books in The World’s Greatest Books. The set is a tasting menu, with nothing too filling. After the eight volumes of Fiction, the next two are Life and Letters. Then comes
  Ancient History/Medieval History, one volume; Modern History, one volume; Religion and Philosophy, two volumes; Science, one volume; Poetry and Drama, three volumes; Travel and Adventure, one volume; and, last, Miscellaneous Literature and Index in the same twentieth volume. Each book has a frontispiece, a colorless portrait or a ghostly photo of an author, Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Volume VI, for example, John Lothrop Motley in Volume XII. Excerpts are always in alphabetical order by author’s last name. So, Volume I, Fiction, begins with Edmund About. Volume XIX, Travel and Adventure, starts with Sir Samuel Baker and ends with Arthur Young. Ancient History/Medieval History, Volume XI, is different. After the frontispiece portrait of Edward Gibbon, its table of contents has “Ancient History” and, under that, four categories — Egypt, Jews, Greece, and Rome. Herodotus writes about Greece, Josephus and Henry Millman about the Jews. Then, under “Medieval History,” another four categories — the Holy Roman Empire, Europe, back to Egypt again, and then England. Volume XII, Modern History, follows its own pattern. After a portrait of John Lothrop Motley, “Modern History” is granted to America, England, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, India, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and The Papacy. The authors are modern, but they are not always contemporary. Voltaire covers Russia. India goes to Mountstuart Elphinstone.

  xii

  How did S.S. McClure decide who belongs in The World’s Greatest Books? Maybe it was a matter of availability, or the laws of copyright in 1910. Why does an excerpt of Henry Milman’s History of the Jews appear in the “Ancient History” section of Volume XI? According to the editors, “The appearance of History of the Jews in 1830 caused no small consternation, but among the Jews themselves it was exceptionally well received.” I doubt it. Henry Hart Milman, Doctor of Divinity in London, born in 1791, buried in 1868 in St. Paul’s Cathedral, served as Dean at St. Paul’s for nearly twenty years, and this is how his excerpt from History of the Jews begins in The World’s Greatest Books: “By the destruction of Jerusalem, the political existence of the Jewish nation was annihilated; it was never again recognized as one of the states or kingdoms of the world. We have now to trace a despised and obscure race in almost every region of the world.”

  xiii

  The joint editors of The World’s Greatest Books are Arthur Mee, Founder of the Book of Knowledge, J.A. Hammerton of Hammerton’s Universal Encyclopaedia, and S. S. McClure. In American publishing, S. S. McClure, whose name sounds like an oceangoing vessel, was in fact a big fish. He was a journalist, editor, and publisher. In 1884, McClure established the very first U.S. newspaper syndicate. In 1893, he co-founded McClure’s Magazine, which championed long-form investigative journalism. It was ground-breaking; its work came to be called muckraking. McClure’s Magazine ran pieces by Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson. McClure was also in business with Frank Doubleday. Their partnership, Doubleday & McClure, became just Doubleday after McClure left. By 1911, McClure had left McClure’s Magazine as well. That year, the magazine published his “autobiography” as a farewell.
  It was ghostwritten by Willa Cather.

  xiv

  Willa Cather is a ghost herself on a shelf in the hallway. She haunts an unread blue green hardback Death Comes for the Archbishop, a decommissioned library book I must have found at a used book sale. Turning its pages this morning, I come to the author’s biography. Born in Virginia, moves west as a child to the hardscrabble farm, graduates from the University of Nebraska at nineteen, begins teaching and working for newspapers in Pittsburgh. Then this: “It was in these years that she wrote the brilliantly original short stories published in 1905 under the title The Troll Garden. The manuscript of this book came under the eye of S. S. McClure, who telegraphed Miss Cather to come to New York, where he offered her a position on his magazine.”

  xv

  In honor of Aunt Bertha, I am reading three selections that S. S. McClure chose for The World’s Greatest Books. First, some pages in Volume I, from the fiction of Edmond About. Then, Mountstuart Elphinstone on India, and, last, an excerpt from the “travel and adventure” of Arthur Young. These three because I know nothing about them, just as I know almost nothing about Aunt Bertha. Her heart may have failed before she had time to read the three that I am choosing. It is also possible that her goal was never that, but something far less time- consuming. She might have only wanted to be the kind of person who would own The World’s Greatest Books. If so, she did not fail. There was time enough in her brief life for that.

  xvi

  The editor’s note in The World’s Greatest Books says of Edmond About that he is “the most entertaining anti-clerical writer of his period,” and his Le Roi de Montagnes, translated as King of the Mountains, “the most delightful of satirical novels.” Even with twenty volumes to fill, I would not include Le Roi des Montagnes, but here it is, its first chapter filling the first pages of Volume I. Edmond Francois Valentin About, born 1828 in Dieuze, France, died in Paris in 1885, buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery. One rainy afternoon in 1973, after reading my daily lines of Il Paradiso in a Paris café, I walked over to Pere Lachaise to see where Jim Morrison is buried. And if I passed the grave of Edmond About, I was unaware of it.

  xvii

  In 2017, before ten days in India — the Delhi, Jaipur, Udaipur, Agra, and back to Delhi circuit of the first-time tourist — I bought two picture-heavy guidebooks and three histories of the country. Those include a very thick paperback now at the end of the hallway, India A History by John Keay. I never read Mountstuart Elphinstone however, whose The History of India is excerpted on pages 246 to 258 in Volume XII of The World’s Greatest Books. According to an editor’s note, Elphinstone arrived in India in 1795. So, 222 years before I did. And he remained there for over thirty years. Mentions of his History of India do make it into John Keay’s India A History, both in the bibliography and in six separate entries in John Keay’s index, under Elphinstone, Mountstuart, administrator and historian. According to Keay, Mountstuart Elphinstone is among “the most outstanding scholar-administrators in the employ of the English East India Company.”

  xviii

  The selection from Arthur Young’s Travels in France in Volume XIX of The World’s Greatest Books is nine pages. In 1784, Arthur Young started writing about agricultural conditions in England.
  In 1787 he was invited by the Comte de la Rochefoucauld to do the same for France. According to the editor’s note, Travels in France is “the most reliable record ever written about French rural conditions.” The selected excerpt, which reads as a diary, has nothing to do with rural life. “At Versailles,” the entry for May 27, 1787 begins. “After breakfasting with Count de la Rochefoucauld at his apartments in the palace, where he is grand master of the wardrobe, was introduced by him to the Duke de la Rochefoucauld.” Arthur Young mentions the ceremony he attends that same day with the Duke. The king, Louis XVI, is present “and seemed by his inattention to wish himself ahunting.” Marie Antoinette is in the room as well. The French Revolution is two years and two months away. “The queen,” his entry concludes, “is the most beautiful woman I have seen today….” Bertha, forgive me, but I do not have the stamina to make the journey through all nine pages, despite the editor’s note that says Travels in France “is as popular as ever today.”

  xix

  Francois de la Rochefoucauld, 2nd Duke of La Rochefoucauld and the writer of Les Maximes, was not the Rochefoucauld who brought Arthur Young to a ceremony with the French king and queen. The writer of Les Maximes died in 1680. Arthur met a descendant, maybe Louis Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, the cousin of Francois’s great grandchild Alexandre, the 5th Duke. This 5th Duke only had daughters surviving him, so, following the rules of salic law, Louis Alexandre inherited the dukedom. It was an unlucky inheritance. Louis Alexandre, defender of the American Revolution and friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, was murdered in 1792 by a mob ahunting aristocrats.

  xx

  A three-ringed binder that I am certain is somewhere on a bookshelf behind the desk downstairs protects the xerox of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims that I made decades go. And with the stamp of the public library from 1981 on its title page. Found it. There is also a forgotten loose sheet in the binder, folded into a square. This loose sheet has nothing on it besides this single sentence in blue ink: Le pays du marriage a cela de particulier que les estrangers ont envie de l’habiter, et les habitans naturels voudroient en etre exiles. Forty-three years ago, when I was four years into my first, longest and happiest marriage, I must have copied this sentence down from a French edition of Les Maximes , which is also xeroxed and in the binder.

  xxi

  Wedged on the shelf next to the green binder, a faded red spine. The Droll Stories of Balzac, Blue Ribbon Classics, with illustrations by Steele Savage, is another of Aunt Bertha’s books that I took from my parents’ house. When I open the cover, I find a message from my mother penciled on the page that faces the title page. Happy Birthday, Bertie, from Ginny. Which birthday? It could have been the last, the birthday a month before Bertha died. My mother was seven years younger than her oldest sister, so would have given this gift when she was still just a teenager. I am flipping through the Steele Savage illustrations in black ink of bosomy maidens and cowled, leering friars.

  xxii

  The twelve Twains and the twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books are not the only sets on my shelves. There are twenty-one books of the World Book in a freestanding bookcase in the back room that has become a den. They speak volumes about the misadventure of providing my two children, resistant at first and eventually hostile, with “enrichment.” Then there is Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, behind the downstairs desk. It is one of the five volumes in a never-read set of World’s Great Thinkers from Carlton House publishers. In the preface to Philosophical Dictionary, an uncredited editor writes that this Voltaire book “does not demand continuous reading; but at whatever places one opens it, one will find matter for reflection.” This is true enough. I am reflecting right now on how these five volumes got onto my bookshelves, and I am drawing a blank. They might have been Aunt Bertha’s as well, a doubling down on her dreams.

  xxiii

  Voltaire is only one of the five great thinkers from Carlton House. The full house includes Bacon’s Essays, The Philosophy of Spinoza, The Philosophy of Plato, and Sigmund Freud New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Copyright on the Freud is from 1933. In the Plato book, I discover a receipt stamped Los Angeles, April 24, 1947. So, seven years after Aunt Bertha’s death. This receipt has nothing to do with World’s Great Thinkers. It is a ticket – the kind of cheap colored paper ticket that comes off a spool and might be good for admittance to a movie theater in 1947 or a ride at a fairgrounds. I also find a bookmark in Bacon’s Essays, separating the 56-page introduction from the very first essay, Of Truth, where Frances Bacon begins: What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

  xxiv

  The six-volume set Psychology, The Study of a Science covers half of an upper shelf in one of four built-in bookshelves in the small room where I sit at night. A veneered table – the downstairs desk — is piled with more books. Most are still waiting to be read, like the disheartened girls leaning against the walls or on each other at a junior high dance. The six volumes of Psychology, The Study of a Science were never mine. My first wife was a psychotherapist, and though I never saw her reading them, she brought them with her into the marriage. On the same shelf, the dimpled white spine of The Family Interaction Q-Sort, a self- published dissertation for her doctorate. It, too, will never have another reader.

  xxv

  Do my Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks qualify as a set? I have two dozen of them, these Ballentine paperbacks, the Tarzans and John Carter of Mars series, and they were a thrill sixty years ago. There are other sets on other shelves. There is the two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holyroyd, two volumes of The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, two volumes of the Journals of Andre Gide, and the green, jacketed three-volume Letters of John Addington Symonds. Years ago, I dipped into the four volumes of George Orwell’s writings, which are on a shelf in the hallway. On the other hand, the four volumes of Thousand and One Nights have never been opened. Same with the four slipcased books of The World of Mathematics, with commentary and notes by James R. Newman, which I must have wanted to at least try when I bought them in the late 1970s. I can probably find the definition of a set inside them, but it would not help.

  xxvi

  I cannot know what unreachable shore of culture or assimilation my aunt was pursuing in The World’s Greatest Books. For my grandfathers and grandmothers, not being pursued in Dubrowna or Piatra Neamt was enough. They left no books behind as clues that suggest otherwise. In this way they are more aligned than Aunt Bertha was with the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching. In the Stephen Mitchell translation: In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. in the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped. The way of the Tao is to know and do less and less, until arriving at the condition of “non-action.” That would have appealed to my grandfather – my father’s father, who did not know exactly where he was born. “It was near the Dnieper River,” he said. He did not know what his family name was, either, before it was changed. “Something like Purkin,” he said. As far as I know, he had come to America by himself as a child in 1905. He drove a cab in Chicago during the Al Capone days but had nothing to say about it. By the time I knew him, he was no longer working. He was smoking unfiltered Camels and driving the 1954 Buick that I dreamed would be mine as soon as I turned sixteen, though my parents stopped that, because, as my uncle Hy confirmed, “An old car will dollar you to death.”

  xxvii

  Stephen Mitchell continues:
  When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
  True mastery can be gained
  by letting things go their own way.

  This was not, however, the way of the children of the immigrants. Bertha did not share the approach to learning or to life that Lao Tzu praises. When she bought The World’s Great Books, she was not letting things go their own way. She had a project, and she was getting things done, and she was not nearly done, when time ran out.

  xxviii

  Of all the sets of books read and unread on my hallway bookshelves, the heavyweight is The Five-Foot Shelf of Books. It comes in at fifty volumes. These fifty fill two shelves completely. And the five feet may have swelled over the years. When I put the tape measure to it, The Five- Foot Shelf of Books measures more than sixty-seven inches. All fifty belonged to Dolores before our marriage, and I never saw her open one. Until this morning in late December, neither has anyone else.

  xxix

  The Five-Foot Shelf of Books is branded Harvard Classics, with a Veritas seal in gold on their crimson spines. Unlike the twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books, which are crumbling, these books do a better job of faking their belonging in a world of wood paneling, lamplight, leather armchairs, and English accents. Their crimson covers, gold type, curlicue embellishments and marbled endpapers almost look real. America is a society that promises its members to be free of the limitations of class. To be self- made. Who would want The Five-Foot Shelf of Books? Someone who sees a relationship between self-made and self-taught and wants fifty volumes of it. For what purpose? In the bound Reading Guide that comes with the set, that purpose is declared. These fifty books “will carry you forward upon that road to
  the high goal toward which all of us are making our way.” All of us know what that high goal is. And, since we do, the Guide also assumes that we all share it.

  xxx

  When P.F. Collier & Son persuaded Charles W. Eliot, a retiring Harvard president, to select and introduce what Dr. Eliot called “this great company of the wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting minds of all ages,” it knew there was a market. P.F. Collier published the first twenty- five volumes in 1909. The rest appeared the following year. Fifty volumes, twenty-three thousand pages. Something must have been in the water at New York publishing houses in 1909. That was the same year S.S. McClure secured his copyright for The World’s Greatest Books. By then, waves of immigration had brought my grandparents on my mother’s side to the Lower East Side of New York City. Maybe what was in the water was the sense that The World’s Greatest Books might clean up the children of the unwashed. By 1910, seven out of ten people in New York City were immigrants or their children. They became part of the market for The Five-Foot Shelf of Books. The wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting minds of all ages was what Dr. Eliot prescribed for these newcomers from Southern Europe or, even stranger, from Galicia and the Russian Pale.

  xxxi

  In Volume 1 of The Five-Foot Shelf of Books, there are over a hundred pages of Journal of John Woolman. I have never heard of John Woolman, but an excerpt from his Journal is included in The World’s Greatest Books as well. Woolman, who was born in New Jersey in 1720, devoted his life to agitation against the practice of slavery. He was the son of Quaker parents and influenced the abolition of slavery among the Society of Friends. According to the introductory note in Volume 1, “no small part of the enthusiasm of the general emancipation movement is traceable to his labors.” Was John Woolman someone “every schoolboy” knew in 1910? By the time I attended the local public school in Los Angeles fifty years later, John Woolman had dropped out.

  xxxii

  Page six of The Reading Guide that comes with The Five-Foot Shelf asks What Shall I Read Tonight? And follows up with How often does that question come to all of us, as if this were not a question but a statement of fact. This query comes from a far-away world, one with no television sets, no internet, no smartphones. There was no radio, either, in 1910. In many homes, Americans were still reading, if at all, by gas lighting or candlelight. The Reading Guide goes on: “We want something to carry us out of ourselves, to take us a million miles from our humdrum existence.” It says these fifty books of The Five–Foot Shelf of Books will meet the need. They will “bestow pleasure, self-satisfaction and the joy of mental growth to each man, woman and child with impartiality and in infinite variety.” Maybe so. My fifty have sat quietly on two shelves for decades, like children seen but not heard, and mostly not even seen in the darkness of the hallway. The Reading Guide warns about this on page 6. “We urge you,” it says, “to keep at all times several volumes easily at hand on your desk or table to read and browse through. Don’t put your set away in a distant bookcase where you must go to get them.” This good advice was not taken.

  xxxiii

  Two years after publication, P. F. Collier and Son told Dr. Eliot that a half-million sets had already been placed “in the homes of enthusiastic purchasers.” Also, “a stream of unsolicited letters of approval has come from these owners.” The Reading Guide includes a testimonial from one of those enthusiastic purchasers that P.F. Collier refers to. “My first reading,” a woman writes, “gave me a pleasure likened unto finding small particles of gold.” The Guide continues like this for ten more pages. It plugs Magnificent Special Features that include introductory lectures, footnotes, and general Index. The Guide begins to read like an extended script by Ron Popeil for the longest infomercial ever, although the vocabulary is statelier. But wait, there’s more. After prefaces and promotions, the final seventy pages of the Guide are the Daily Reading Guide. This is Dr. Eliot’s 15-minute-a-day program, which he declares “a substitute for a liberal education, to anyone who would read with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day.”

  xxxiv

  I am considering the January through December calendar in the Reading Guide, with its daily assignment “that will take you out of the rut of life in the town you live in and make you a citizen of the world.”

  xxxv

  December 31. The end of the year at last. With no intention of following the program, I am curious what my assignment would be for New Year’s Day. It is Read from Franklin’s Autobiography, Vol. 1, pp 79-85. In fifteen minutes of “leisurely enjoyment” I will get Franklin’s Advice for the New Year, which includes “Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.” I do not know if I am up to it. Maybe I should try it, if only for the month ahead. If I start with Benjamin Franklin on the first of the month, what will my assignment be at the end of the month? For January 31, Read from Don Quixote, Vol. 14, pp 60-67. A small illustration appears in the Guide, a drawing of a knight on horseback poking a lance into the blades of a windmill It comes with a caption, too. Don Quixote, the ambitious amateur knight, was well ridiculed for his pains. Just for fun, I skip ahead to April Fool’s. Dr. Eliot takes the day seriously. He assigns me Browning’s Poems from Vol. 42, near the end of a three-volume sequence, English poetry, from Chaucer to Whitman. For February 14, his advice is Read Pascal’s Discourse on the Passion of Love, Vol. 48, pp 411-421. November 13 will be my next birthday. What should I be reading then, if I am getting with the program? The Confessions of St. Augustine, Vol. 7, pp 31-38. Austere, but not wrong. I will be turning seventy-three.

  xxxvi

  New Year’s Day. As I knew I would, I forget about Benjamin Franklin. I will never read St. Augustine either. Not next November or in any of the five or maybe ten Novembers that might be left. Aphorisms could be the better choice. La Rouchefoucauld and his Maximes are still dozing in a green binder. So much wisdom, and impossible to take it all in. Mark Twain is excellent at maxims, too. If I looked hard enough, I might find some of his inside one or two of the yellow Twains in the hallway, but I am not looking for them there. I have one of them by heart, which is probably the best place to keep it. According to Mark Twain, or so he reportedly said, the two most important days in life are the day you were born and the day you discover the reason why. And if that second day never arrives? It hardly matters. I am lucky to have had the first day. Just being born will have to be enough.

• Disconnected Shorts

  i

  I am at Tom Thumb, my local grocery store. A boy and girl are ahead of me in the check-out line. I have my shopping cart with nothing but two bags of ice that are already beginning to melt. They have a wagon with their groceries. It’s a rusted, once red wagon, the kind a little kid might ride in or pull. Addicts? Street people? They are in their twenties, probably in their early twenties. The girl is homely, overweight, with a stud in a nostril. The skinny boy who was with her is sleeveless and tatted. The goat’s beard sprouting from his chin is as unkempt as pubic hair. The girl moves ahead, passing the register.
  “Hey,” the guy says, “I thought you were paying.”
  He takes out his wallet. He fishes for a card. He seems unfamiliar with the checkout procedure and accidentally pushes one of the “do you want to donate” buttons that the credit card reader displays at the grocery store before it shows you your own charges.
  The cashier thanks him for his donation. He is flummoxed, but at last he gets his card into the slot. My ice is still waiting.
  The cashier looks down at her screen.
  “It says insufficient funds.”
  He tries again.
  “No,” the cashier says, shaking her head.
  The boy steps out of the narrow lane to where the girl was. He protests to himself and to her,
  “I don’t know,” he says, “the money’s there.”
  My ice is melting. I push my cart forward to the credit card station and tell the cashier I will
  cover it. $42, plus my ice, plus whatever donation the guy has picked. The couple looks at me.
  They hesitate. Of course I consider that this had been their plan from the beginning.
  “It’s okay,” I tell them, “I got it, it’s not a problem, you guys will figure it out.”
  Maybe that was their plan from the beginning, but I doubt it. They don’t look like the people who made plans.

  ii

  “The only thing I know about life is that it goes on.”
  That’s what Robert Frost said, or some variation of that.
  Life is the answer, then, when someone asks, “Hey, what’s going on?”
  My more usual given answer is “Nothing” or “Nothing much.”
  Today, plenty is going on. Droplets of sunlight are falling on a wooden deck. There are puddles of it on the oval stone top of a wrought iron table where I’m having breakfast. Rye toast, butter and jam, and dark coffee made from beans that came all the way from some plantation south of the equator to be in my backyard. Ben and Eden and Jason are in their rooms not doing homework. They have better things to do. In the sense that anything is better than reading about The Atlantic Experience or solving numbers three through twelve in Chapter 2 of Forms and Functions. I have sections of the newspaper in folds, and I have more time than there is news. Time enough to read an obituary. Its column of story supports a black and white photo of the deceased. He died at seventy-nine but has a picture that must have been taken from his high school yearbook, as though his heart had stopped at the prom rather than at the hospital. He doesn’t look like the type who enjoyed doing his homework either. Maybe he spent his Saturdays skipping stones or stealing cigarettes from his mama’s purse, in those months before he enlisted in the service. He is survived by picas of relatives, sons and daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and a complexity of seemingly unrelated last names. So I have come to an understanding. Life in fact doesn’t go on. Not for the dead, who may go on to life everlasting, for all I know, but that isn’t the same thing. It isn’t much, this simple thing I do know. And it’s what Robert Frost must have meant. Life only goes on for the living. Some may think it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing.

  iii

  My high school French had years of rust on it by the time Dolores and I went to Paris. I wanted to go back and see, at least from outside, the apartment on Rue Cardinal Lemoine where I stayed for two months in 1973. That was the year after I dropped out of college. And I wanted to ride the Metro, where a stranger had handed me his Walt Whitman, Selected Poetry as he was leaving the train car, a Penguin paperback with a matte black cover. A gift, and for no reason. And I wanted to walk around Paris again, but this time without the weight of loneliness that I had carried twenty years earlier. So we went. When we rode the Metro, Dolores was robbed by a Gypsy boy, who took her wallet out of the purse she was carrying over her shoulder. As it was happening, I knew and didn’t know that it was happening. I had noticed as the boy moved over to us in the crowded train car, his breathing was hurried. He seemed anxious, as if something were wrong. It didn’t occur to me immediately that he was a thief. Or that it was Dolores he was about to pickpocket, lifting her red wallet from the wide-open mouth of her purse. But almost immediately, the moment after it happened, as the train car doors opened and the boy disappeared, I knew. We got off the next metro stop, for the Louvre, then backtracked one stop to catch the boy. Of course we never did. But we did find the red wallet in a metal trash bin, and that was bonne chance, as a policeman told us later; even though the money was gone, it was merveilleuse, finding that red wallet with its black snap unsnapped among the cigarette butts, discarded metro tickets, and the wads of Kleenex. That wallet in the trash may have been the most amazing of all the sights we saw in Paris. It was more thrilling than the Invalides and the onyx tomb of Napoleon. It was more surprising than the Pei pyramid at the Louvre, or the Burghers of Calais at the Rodin Museum. The credit cards were gone, though. That was tant pis.

  iv

  Jesus had a smart mouth. He was Jewish and I know the sort. A smirking Jesus who would talk back, the Jesus who would say, “Thou sayest so” even to a bully named Pilate who had the power to crucify him. They say he was a carpenter. But the Jesus I knew growing up in Los Angeles hated shop classes and never took carpentry. His dad owned a sweater business. His mom was frumpy, though not frumpy enough to be a virgin. Her son may have preferred to think of her as one. No doubt; how could he think anything else? Also, his name wasn’t Jesus in Los Angeles. It was Richie or Mickey or David. And he had a comfortable boyhood. Though he never thought he would end up in the suburbs. That was his dad’s heaven, it wasn’t for him. The Jesus I knew went to UCLA, married, took a job, earned a living. And twenty years after turning thirty-three, he abandoned any thought of a living a remarkable life. He traded that in for the expectation of an unremarkable death. Cancer, heart disease, maybe, but definitely not the fate of a carpenter nailed to two pieces of wood. Yes, he had his dreams. And they might once have included a girl named Mary, but none of that dream came true. He wasn’t that Jesus, the Jesus who knew from the beginning how everything was going to end, because his dad was God and, somehow, though it is hard to understand, so was he.

  v

  I like the airy spaciousness of it out here. The empty phrases, the fake, hearty greetings and howdy dos roaming on the great windy plains are always polite, and they never quite touch each other. It’s big enough to accommodate all the farewells in the world, with room to spare for the see you soons. The have a nice days have a plateau all to themselves, distant from the what do you says and that camaraderie on their distant butte. I like the requests that are commands, the exhortations to be well, to take care, to keep in touch, though they are hardly robust enough for the out-of-doors and seem more at home inside; for example, at a barber shop, where I might be reading men’s magazines and nodding at a push broom waltzing with the footrest of a Koken chair. In that undemanding environment, my greatest challenge is to turn pages without moving my head, while the barber shaves my neck and makes one-sided conversation. How was your weekend he might ask. Or, more in the moment, how’s it going. Going to hell in a handbasket would not be the right reply. Fine is the answer. Not that there’s a need to answer questions like this. Whatever I might choose to say has been said already, many times, which is what they all say.

  vi

  She told me she wanted to be around people who brought out the best in her, who lifted her up, and asked me wasn’t that what I wanted too.
  “No,” I said, “not at all.”
  “Look at that guy.”
  We were driving on the access road alongside the freeway and coming to the signal at the cross street. A panhandler stood on the corner. He had no sign. He was wild haired, dark black and probably ill.
  “There’s somebody living in the now,” I said. “No past, no future.”
  “How can he do that?”
  “He can’t do anything else.”
  “We need the past for our identity and the future for our fulfillment.”
  “That’s just us,” I said.
  “He’s not happy,” she said.
  “Me neither.”

  vii

  I dreamed of a country whose aristocracy included Prince Matchabelli.
  The citizens there had two noses and only one eye.
  Perfume, which accounted for ninety per cent of GDP, was more valued than beer.
  It was a land fearful of succession, of what might happen when the prince ascended to the throne. Revolution was in the air.
  The young hated the given order, while the old, stinking of envy, refused to cede.
  But that was in a faraway place and a long time ago.
  What now?
  The moon has already risen.
  It is the dawn of a new age, if it can be called dawn, when it isn’t the sun in the sky, but only the pale, bald duffer of a moon.

  viii

  If I had only a minute that I could count on, counting isn’t something I would do. If there were only thirty seconds left, would I have time to worry about the time?

  What would I do, with no time to think?

  My children dislike me, but they are far away.
  Forget eating and sleeping, or pissing and moaning. No time for any of that. I can’t decide, but my indecision is wasting time.

  I might observe and listen, use the eyesight that I will lose, or the hearing that will soon be deaf to every sound.

  I no longer need any alarm to wake up; the whispering of the morning is alarming enough. I see my reflection in the window. The branches of the trees outside are turning into silhouettes. I don’t know their names, these trees, or the names of the grasses beneath them. I might think of the psalm, through the righteousness of charity I shall behold Your face.

  The light is failing. My vision is no bigger than a pinprick. I have no clearer way to see the big picture than in miniature.

  There’s only a moment left, then half a moment, and then half of that half, an infinity of halves that will never run out but that ends nevertheless.

  ix

  Imagining an author with his quill and ink pot. He writes in longhand. He stares into the embers of a fire in the fireplace in his library. He has his pipe, its bowl blackened with use. He isn’t worried about dying of mouth cancer though. More likely, he has already contracted syphilis, in his twenties. After writing tonight whatever it is that longhand and his imagination allows, in the time he has, he looks ahead to going insane in his forties and finding himself – if by then he even knows himself – in an asylum. And two years later, dead. This could be my story if I were writing in longhand at the moment, which I am not, preferring instead the nearly inaudible tapping of my fingertips on a keyboard and the restless hum of the hard drive as it labors to perform whatever tasks of fetch or save that I command.

  x

  Every trip leaves its residue of memories. Some are as atmospheric as the hazy air of the Monteverde Cloud Forest. On a road map for Costa Rica that I unfolded, our route was traced in green marker. After renting a car in San Jose, we had driven northward. Dolores had written, “Nissan Sentra, $486, 11 days.” I remember Arenal, the volcano that emits small puffs far from the highway. And even though the Monteverde Cloud Forest was fewer than a hundred miles northwest of San Jose, the road was slow. It had collapsed in places. One of the holes we drove around was bigger than our Nissan Sentra.

  Quakers were the ones who had preserved Monteverde and its cloud forest. They had arrived in Costa Rica in the 1950s, looking for a country with no draft and a negligible military. When we decided to go forty years later, we were only looking for somewhere to get away during Spring Break. On the handout from Hotel Montana in Monteverde, Ulises Rodrigues, Manager, and Wilberth Parajeles, Assistant, welcomed us cordially. “We do not consider you and your family or friends as a number,” they wrote. “For us, you are a very special person.” In the Jardin de las Mariposas in Monteverde the blue morpho butterflies were the size of Chinese fans. They fluttered across our faces in the greenhouse and in the screened flyway. They were captives, and captivating.

  I care about a good night’s sleep, but that is no explanation for why I kept so many hotel brochures from a trip to Costa Rica. I even saved the pocket folder, with stationery, maps and menus, from Si Como No, a hotel in Manual Antonio on the Pacific Coast. We stayed two nights there. As with so much of this, my memories are more snapshots than footage, isolated moments and not coherent sequences. Si Como No was the dream of Jim Damalas, who checked us in and showed us to our room. He told Dolores that he had come to Costa Rica on a visit, just like us, but he was never leaving.

  Inside the pocket folder, a business card from Restaurante Super Mariscos Sarchi Norte, Rigoberto Rodriguez Soto, Proprietario. It’s still there, still simplemente deliciosio, though now it’s abierto todos los dias, whereas the back of the business card that has been sleeping in a manilla folder these past thirty years in a Hon cabinet in my garage says Cerrado los Martes. I’ve kept this card with its warning not to show up for mariscos on Tuesdays at Restaurante Super Mariscos for three decades. It has moved with me from one house to another. It has kept me company in secret through marriage to Dolores, widowhood, even during a brief remarriage and divorce, and now in the long aftermath.
  Si como no?

  xi

  I found a folder stuffed with various testing our son had gone through, most of it related to school admissions, but not all. Also, a stapled seven pages on Child Development Characteristics and Milestones. It is comprehensive, providing age markers that start with At Birth and proceeding month by month for the first twelve months, then jumping by three-month intervals. After the At 2 Years mark, the intervals widen further, with gaps of one year all the way to childhood’s end at 16 Years. For every time period, the expected behaviors are numbered, with eleven at 1 Month, starting with Lifts head slightly while lying on stomach, stares at surroundings and avoids mildly annoying stimuli. There are many expectations for the first years. Fourteen milestones at four months, twelve at six months. At eighteen months, there are fifteen. Walking takes little attention, seldom falls; builds tower of 3 or 4 blocks; turns pages of book 2-3 at a time; biting prominent. And so on. At age ten, however, less is expected. The numbers fall off considerably. For Year 10, there are only four, and one of them is Likes secrets, magic, mystery and detective stories, secret languages and coded messages. By Year 16, only three milestones. The experts who provided those must have been very optimistic. Their three expectations of teenagers include Generally easy-going and gets along well with parents. Number three, likes cars and musical sound-system equipment, seems more realistic. My son is thirty-nine now and probably still likes cars and musical sound-system equipment. Also video games and watching a flat-screen television. He lives alone, is morbidly obese, hasn’t held a job in two years, and I would not describe him as easy going or getting along particularly well with his surviving parent. I try to tell myself something I read somewhere, “He’s not my problem to solve, he’s my brother to love.”

  Child Development Characteristics and Milestones stops at Year 16, even though the expectations we have of others, and for ourselves, continue for the rest of our lives. Who doesn’t have a list of expectations, unwritten though it may be? They are more often millstones than milestones. And what is failure, other than the absence of check marks on that invisible list.

  xii

  I have pages of boilerplate evaluations from teachers in the private schools that my son attended. At age seven he was “working on skills for slowing down, organizing his materials and working independently.” He “likes our group activities.” He “especially enjoys music and show & tell.” Some got closer to what was transpiring. He was “learning to use his language in an appropriate social manner. He has shown improvement in this area. He will continue to work on expressing his need verbally instead of physically. We will continue to reinforce appropriate behavior.”

  Thank you, Miss Banker.

  My notes on his learning differences are full of abbreviations – May interact poorly w/peers Probs w/being like others. The social symptoms are all over the place. Some might be applied to any of us at one time or another. Clowning – cover up dep/inadequacy. Need to be in control – frustrated if thwarted – can be struggling w/others…

  I also have the records of tests he took in the offices of therapists and other educational experts. Handwritten notes, interpretations of scores. Measures of this and that. All of it needs to be shredded. Finding it would do nobody any good.

  Of course I have two adopted children, not just one. Both went to private schools, though not to the same ones. My daughter’s earliest reports were typically songs of praise. Her indifference to pleasing authority or climbing any ladder came later, along with cutting and an untested, amateur diagnosis of sociopathy.

  xiii

  One of my former wives liked to quote Auntie Mame. You know, “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death,” that kind of thing. And why not? Mame is a winner. First in a popular novel, then a popular play, and then the smash musical. She’s an overachiever. And like so many of those, she has a sidestory as well. When Everett Edward Tanner 3rd, under the pen name Patrick Dennis, wrote the novel in the 1950s, he said the story was based on his real aunt, whose name was Marion Tanner. But in the wake of the success of book and play and musical, when Aunt Marion began referring to herself as “the real Auntie Mame,” her nephew denied it. It offended him. He was a novelist, he insisted, not a memoirist. So Everett and Marion had a bitter falling out. Some years later, when his aunt was on hard times in a brownstone in Greenwich Village, Everett described her as “more evocative of a bag lady than anyone’s idea of Auntie Mame.”

  xiv

  I read somewhere that the only things we truly own are those we give away. That is as far from the truth as any wisdom could be. It’s too clever by half, which is another saying that never made sense to me. If it refers to the person who is “too smart for his own good,” why wouldn’t it always be better to be smarter? Even if only by half. That said, I do agree with a variation on the sentiment. The metaphorical mountain of our possessions will always, at least metaphorically, own us.

  xv

  I used to study mathematical logic. By used to, I mean for a semester or two. Talk about too clever by half. I was fascinated by the notion of incompleteness, which philosophers of logic apply to mathematical systems. When Kurt Godel published his “incompleteness theorem” in 1931, he was demonstrating that within any coherent mathematical system, where being true means being proven, there would always be a statement that was true but that could not be proven. It sounded to me like an argument for the existence of God. Or that’s how I remember it. It’s a baffling notion in any case. Also, in a different context, obvious. What is true in our lives that we can never know to be true? Lots of things. Life is not mathematical. The living are not subject to proof.

  xvi

  Frances’s hoarding was obvious. Rooms could barely be entered, and there was dirt, not just debris. Her house on Elsbeth was inhabited by someone who took no responsibility for the future. She was in her nineties, and if the mess she would leave behind ever weighed on her, she wore it lightly. It’s true, the disorder in France’s house did have its own quality of orderliness. For one thing, everything was in a container of one kind or another. Mostly in boxes. Some in the same box that her purchases had originally come in, but most in the kind of cardboard boxes that grocery stores throw away or stack alongside their dumpsters. As someone the agency had sent over to help, I imagined that my difficulty would be with the quantity of what was in the house. I couldn’t help but wonder what principle of selectivity, which seemed to have never been applied to the collecting, I might apply to the removing. But the actual difficulty was something else entirely. It was that Frances wanted no help. This was simply her situation, and she was fine with it.
  “Where do I start,” I said, as much to myself as to her.
  “Get out of my house,” she said.

  xvii

  Reading names on a list of attendees at my wedding forty years before, I was looking for a takeaway before throwing the list away. I knew these names, or most of them, or had at least heard them spoken. The woman I married, a brief marriage, had put check marks by each name and noted the gifts given. This omelet of names and notes was not nourishing. It had once been very specific, but forty years later the names had become random, as if the somebodies in my former life could have been anybody.

  And me, too, might I just as easily be somebody other than who I am now? If i were in a slightly different orbit, say, and subject to a different gravitational pull. One look into the heavens is enough to convince me of the arbitrary nature of my life. And yet, it seems equally plausible to say that my life could not have been otherwise. I have moved in many directions, but the moves I made could only be made from where I was a moment before. So every past moment is a link in a chain, and I am chained to it.

  xviii

  Much has been written about the association of flowers with death and mourning. Lillies are displayed at funerals. Carnations or chrysanthemums are brought to a grave. The reasons why are buried on the blog of 1-800-Flowers, under the category of Fun Flower Facts, subcategory Sympathy.

  Flowers and the dead have been together forever. According to the blog, flower fragments discovered at burial sites during an excavation of the Shanidar Cave in Northern Iraq were used as evidence that flowers had been placed on the graves in 62,000 B.C. That’s one reason flowers at funerals got into the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest form of human ritual. The post on 1-800-Flowers.com also points out that decoration or an expression of sympathy may have not been the strongest motives for flowers at funerals in the past. Before the practice of embalming, which has never been universal, flowers were used to cover the stink of decaying bodies.

  Is this true? I don’t know. Who says so? At the bottom of the 1-800-Flowers post there’s the author’s photo, a headshot of a young woman. Blonde hair, but with darker roots, so someone not entirely opposed to deception. The post also provides her bio: Amy graduated from Hofstra University with a degree in Journalism/Public Relations and put her studies to good use, frequently contributing articles to various websites and publications. She is a native New Yorker but has once called Paris and Brussels home. When not writing, you can find her painting, traveling, and going on hikes with her dog. I believe her. I have no need to find her — painting, traveling, or otherwise.

  xix

  The point at which the future is foreclosed, when certain possibilities are no longer possible, begins at birth. How long we might hold onto the illusion that we can be anything we want to be, as our parents might have encouraged us to believe, will depend. In part it will depend on temperament. But mostly it depends on how much we are in touch with reality, that jailer of dreams, and with our bodies, which sooner or later will remind us to act our age. The mirror is not an ally. And if we hope to never mind the truth, we also need to stay away from cameras. There are angles from the side or from behind that show us things we are better off never seeing.

  xx

  I don’t know how old my father was when he lost his job. I can’t ask him, he isn’t alive any more. And I don’t remember exactly when it was probably because I wasn’t that interested at the time. At the time, my own life was all that interested me. What I do remember was coming home from college and learning it had happened. My father had been the rep”– the manufacturer’s representative – the “rep” — for the upholstered furniture made in a factory Andy Sorenson owned in East Los Angeles. What I mainly remember is how strange my father looked, because he had dyed his hair and not professionally. So instead of the grey that I remembered from before I left for that semester, the summer when I returned my father had odd brown hair. Not dark brown, but lighter, reddish brown. It wasn’t a color that belonged with the face underneath it.