Asleep in the Deep

ASLEEP IN THE DEEP A Leo Rudovsky Adventure (The Last One, in Fact)

The green arrow flickered off and the yellow on, but Rudovsky made the left turn anyway. Ten weeks of no rain had left a coating of reddish dust on the roadway and just about everything else. The air seemed gauzy and desiccated. Leo Rudovsky decided to check the air filter next time he had the hood up on his aging Ford F-100 pickup truck. Sunday. After church, Rudovsky performed a few desultory chores around the house. A prickling around his eyes and the bridge of his nose made him feel for all the world as if he were about to cry. Then it was time to go. The heavy cargo in the bed of the truck had taxed the springs to the limit, and he had no idea how he’d get the thing offloaded without a crane. There was no way he and Ed Harris could do it alone. “Christ.” Harris invaded Rudovsky’s thoughts. “It feels like I’ve been eating this goddam dust since the beginning of summer.” “You have been, I guess,” Rudovsky said. “It coats everything, including your lungs and your stomach lining, I bet.” “What are we gonna do with that cargo of yours when we get to the cemetery?” “Don’t know for sure.” Rudovsky swiped at his forehead with a bandanna handkerchief. “They have cranes to lift these things, don’t they?” “Yeah. I think so. But I bet you got to order them in advance, and I bet you got to have a grave already dug. You ain’t done any of them things, right?” A cloud passed from in front of the sun; the heat intensified more than the light. The truck seemed to bank like an airplane, tilting left as Rudovsky guided it around a downhill left turn. He double-clutched and tried to downshift to ease the strain on the brakes, but everything seemed to go wrong at once. The transmission stuck in neutral, and Rudovsky couldn’t get it back in gear; every attempt produced nothing but a clanging, grinding sound. The shift lever thrashed as if it had a rebellious and violent plan of its own. “Come on, damn it,” Harris shouted over the roar of dusty wind in the truck’s open windows. “This road goes downhill for a mile and turns hard right at the reservoir.” Rudovsky pushed the brake pedal and the truck slowed almost imperceptibly. Seconds later, a smell of hot metal filled the cab, mixing with the oily dust. The speedometer showed fifty and climbing, but the tachometer reported that the engine was idling, completely out of gear, at less than 1,000 RPM. Rudovsky yanked on the emergency brake and the lever came off in his hand. For the first time that summer, he turned to his friend and grinned. “We appear plumb out of options, old boy,” he said. “Never particularly expected to be buried at sea, but I always liked the idea. Asleep in the deep, or whatever the sailors say.” “Goddammit, man, you’re nuts. Run it into a ditch or something.” “No, I’m going to splash it. Save yourself if you want to try.” In the distance the reservoir, almost twenty feet below its banks, presented a muddy-looking surface on the other side of the wooden warning barrier at the bottom of the hill. Harris looked quickly at Rudovsky and saw the grin of madness. He opened the door and rolled out aiming for a hummocky patch of dry grass. He hit with a thump, threw up a cloud of dust as he rolled like a rag doll thrown across a dance floor, and lay still. Rudovsky watched in the rear-view mirror as Harris rolled over and got to his knees. That was the last thing he saw. And that’s how Leo Rudovsky and his beloved wife of thirty years came to be entombed in a Ford F-100 pickup truck in the silt at the bottom of Mahoney’s Reservoir. Requiescat in Pace

VARMINTS AND OTHER VICTIMS

A .30-06 hunting rifle to shoot rabbits in the kitchen garden – Dad might as well have used a bazooka or a box of hand grenades. But that’s how Dad was. When he decided to plant a garden, he decided at the same time no damn varmints were going to get away with raiding the fruits – or the vegetables – of his labors. As a boy of eight, I loved the oily smoothness of the bolt action. Dad let me work it a couple of times, standing behind me and holding the weapon in front of me so I could unlock it, slide it back, slide it forward and lock it again. “A boy should learn about firearms,” he told Mom when she objected. I can still imagine the smell of his Vaseline hair tonic as he put his head next to mine and showed me how to work the thing. He showed me the clip where the ammunition would go; he showed me how the sharp-pointed, brass-jacketed cartridge – “round,” he called it – would slip into the chamber and be ready to fire as soon as he released the safety. As far as I know, Dad never got any rabbits, or any other damn varmints. Only one shot was ever fired from that rifle during its brief sojourn under our roof. Dad didn’t fire it. I did. That shot seriously wounded all but one of us. It killed my baby sister.

The Family Genius

Jerry may not have been the brains of the family, but he sure knew a good thing when he smelled it. His brother was the one with the chem lab in the basement and the imagination. Kid brothers tended to be like that. It’s why Jerry and Kevin made such an effective team. Kevin dreamed up the crazy ideas and Jerry figured out how to put them into action. And that’s how it happened with Skunk Shot®. Kevin mixed up a secret brew of ingredients – he wouldn’t tell anyone just what it was, but the result was that the entire family fled in haste from the house on a bitter Saturday afternoon in February, after opening all the windows and turning on the attic fan. Jerry found himself at an uncharacteristic loss for words when he tried to remember the stench. “Like a fifty-year-old backyard privy on an August afternoon” was how he tried to describe it to me. I’ve smelled the stuff, and that isn’t even close. It can make your eyes water and stimulate the gag reflex at the same time. But that Jerry! Even when he’s holding his nose and trying to keep from throwing up, those wheels in his head are always turning. They made the initial discovery five years ago, when Kevin was 15 and Jerry was 17. Today, Skunk Shot® (Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.) is the prime police tool for flushing [suspected] drug dealers out of abandoned buildings. Those kids are fixed for life, even if you have to edge away from them in crowded elevators.

So Who's Complainin'?

OK, I’ve used up my ration of kvetching for this week. Thanks for your patience, everyone (whoever you are). Steve, Mitch and Wes, thanks for your words of comfort. Besides, it’s Friday, it’s after bizness hours, and the world is looking just plain rosy. I’ve always maintained that weekends are like sex: even when they’re not so good, they’re wonderful. The dog days of August are sweating their dreary way down toward the glory of autumn. And in a few months we can start bitching about winter. But for now, I ain’t complainin’. Sorry, Dad. Remember, I'm still an apprentice curmudgeon.

Well, That Last Post Didn't Work, Did It?

Thanks for the e-mail, Wes (my friend Wes Loder, folks. Buy his books, The Golden Horn (novel) and The Nikon Camera in America, 1946-1953 (nonfiction) on Amazon.com). This is called I'll Scratch Your Back If You'll Scratch Mine. And the rest of you: How may I help you today?

Hello? Hello?

When I got sucked into setting up this blog, I was led to believe it's an interactive experience. Well, so far I feel like one of those crazy people walking down the street talking to himself. It's kind of discouraging. The counter tells me people are peeking in here every now and then. Why not drop me a note while you're in the neighborhood? You can tell me my writing sucks or whatever your heart desires. Or maybe I should just cultivate voices from outer space. Oh, well....

Gatsby

The eclipsing moon was a hard-edged wafer in the night sky, with a fat bite taken out of the upper left quadrant. Spheres passing in free-fall, Naomi thought, casting light, shadow and gravitational pull on one another. These things move according to laws which govern their movements, and in that sense are no freer than we are. She shivered as she gazed at the vanishing moon another long moment before the surprising October chill sent her back into the warmth and garlicky fragrance of her kitchen. The place seemed empty without the dog under foot. He’d been gone less than two weeks, but the pain of separation had not lessened even a little. Gatsby – what a name for a Chesapeake Bay retriever. The Great Gatsby. The late Great Gatsby. Since he’d died, Naomi and Jack had been grief-stricken and reticent with each other like the parents of a murdered child. Except for the ticking and pinging of the coal stove as the metal expanded and contracted, the house was silent. Jack drifted into the kitchen like a boat that had slipped its mooring. He avoided Naomi’s raised-eyebrow glance and busied himself at the sink, scrubbing baked-on grease from a cast-iron Dutch oven. “When you’ve finished that, why don’t you light a fire in the other room?” Naomi said. “Already did.” Jack rinsed the pot and scrubbed it with a clean dish towel. “Thanks, Hon.” Naomi stepped up behind her husband, quietly on slippered feet, put her arms about his neck and rested her cheek against the left side of his head. “Don’t do any more dishes. Pour us a cognac and let’s just go sit by the fire. Dishes’ll keep until morning.” “Look at the moon first,” Jack said. The disk of the moon had metamorphosed into a dark copper shadow, with only a fingernail of bright silver on its lower edge. The night was still and cold, except for an intermittent mewing screech from the woods across the creek. “Raccoon,” Naomi said. “Eclipse must have him upset.” “Gatsby....” Jack’s voice caught in his throat. “Bastards.” “I know, Honey. Gatsby would have howled at that moon. Or at that raccoon. He was always howling at something. That’s probably why someone poisoned him. But we don’t know who. What’s done’s done. Let it be.” “Let it be like hell.” Jack pulled open the door, held it for Naomi and followed her inside. He grabbed the Martell VSOP bottle and two big snifters from the cabinet beside the kitchen hearth. For Naomi, there was more to it than grief, really. It was sad enough that Gatsby was gone, but Naomi was frightened at the thought someone had killed him. She slept no more than half an hour at a time. Sudden noises startled her – especially when she was alone in the house. She felt violated somehow, raped, taken against her will, assaulted and battered. She felt certain Jack sensed it, too, but in the way a man takes it when he’s been robbed or ambushed. She was sure a bubble of rage was building up behind the stricken look on his face. She hoped she’d be able to help him – without being destroyed herself – when it burst. In the meantime, Naomi steadied herself with sips of brandy, tenacious skirmishes with housecleaning, and cultivation of the herb garden in her kitchen windowsill. Jack prodded the burning logs in the fireplace, sending a spray of embers up the flue. “Seems to be drawing all right, “ he said. “Remember how Gatsby used to love a fire?” “We should go away for a while,” Naomi said.

Drought

Is it ever going to rain? Chad Stark wondered. Bright late-winter sunlight made sharp-edged shadows and showed the leaves and windfall twigs on the dead front lawn in sharp contrast, like corpses on a battlefield. But was it ever going to rain? If it didn’t -- and soon -- there would be hell to pay come summer. Cat crept up behind Stark and placed a mug of hot coffee on the table in front of him. He turned and buried his face in the powdery smoothness where her robe had fallen open. She murmured, then giggled and backed away, gathering the robe about her and knotting the belt. “Cut it out,” she said. “I’ve got work to do.” Oh, sure, Stark thought. You’ve got work to do. And I haven't? “Come on,” he said. “All work and no play, you know....” “All things in due season, big fella.” Cat rumpled his hair. “Get your mind back above your belt and drink your coffee.” Stark worked his jaw and listened to a sound in his right ear like waxed paper being crumpled. It reminded him of times he went swimming and came away with an earful of water, except now he couldn’t make it go away by smacking the side of his head with the heel of his hand. Something else busted loose from the old airframe. Things falling apart in preparation for the great cosmic worm feed. “Hey, Cattie,” he hollered over his shoulder. “Listen to this and tell me it isn’t clever: all humanity’s falling apart in preparation for the great cosmic worm feed. I just made that up. How do you like it?” “You’re nuts, that’s what I think. Cosmic worm feed, my Aunt Fanny. And didn’t I just say to get your mind above your belt?” “So what’s below the belt about a cosmic worm feed?” “I thought you were speaking metaphorically. And autobiographically.” She laughed. It sounded to Stark like a seal barking. “Sorry,” Cat said after a moment, appearing in the doorway in slacks and a sweater. “That last, in itself, was a bit of a cheap shot below the belt, wasn’t it?” “Oh, dear,” Stark said, grabbing a banana from a fruit bowl on the table, peeling it ape-fashion and taking a huge bite. “Our conversation seems to have degenerated into descending degrees of silliness.” He sounded as if he was speaking with a mouthful of banana, like the late President Lyndon Baines Johnson. “Anyway,” Cat said. “If it doesn’t rain sometime soon, there won’t be any cosmic worm feed because there won’t be any cosmic worms. We’ll all just lie where we drop and crumble to dust in the merciless sun and blow away on the blistering wind. How do you like them apples?” “Won’t be any apples, either. God’s taking away the forbidden fruit along with the worms that live in ‘em. He tried a flood and it didn’t work. Now he’s gonna turn us all into beef jerky.” “Or maybe it’ll rain buckets tomorrow and we’ll be back to saddlesoaping the mold and mildew off all our leather stuff. You never know.” Stark finished his banana, stood up and tossed the peel into the sink. “I’m going out for a while,” he said. “Water doesn’t just disappear. It has to go somewhere. Maybe I can find it. You know? It evaporates, sure, but then it has to condense somewhere, doesn’t it? Matter exists as solid, liquid or gas, but it exists. Remove just one subatomic particle and the whole thing comes down like a house of cards, doesn’t it?” The sun had gone higher in the sky. Chad Stark kissed his wife and picked up the forked stick in the kitchen corner and went out in search of water.

A 1903 Pennsylvania Coal Patch

Stedman – a coal patch town in the Laurel Creek valley of the southern Schuylkill-Carbon anthracite field in Pennsylvania. It's a place of steeply sloping mountains with long ridges, plunging into a narrow valley where the creek makes barely a trickle in late summer and thunders like a runaway train after a heavy rain or sudden spring thaw. The mountainsides are forested with hemlock, mountain laurel and new-growth hardwoods. Most of the mature hardwoods in the valley have long since been harvested for mine timbers. Rising to a height which challenges the mountains is a huge bank of cast-off mining refuse called culm, through which the women and children of the village sometimes clamber with baskets and burlap sacks. They collect bits of coal out of the slag, to warm their homes and cook their food – a practice which the Allegheny Anthracite Company officially forbids but most often tolerates as a matter of keeping the peace at no additional expense to the shareholders. In 1903, the dominant structures in the valley are the Company's No. 3 colliery buildings. Of these, the largest is the breaker, built into the hillside with trestles and inclined planes attached to its sides, anchored to the earth like the tendrils of a parasitic plant. At its highest point, the breaker towers to 150 feet above the valley floor. Two hundred yards to the west of the breaker is the head of the mine shaft, a vertical tunnel piercing the earth to a depth of two thousand feet, passing through strata of quartzite, sandstone, shale, slate and three major anthracite coal seams – the Bushkill, the Hauto, and, at the deepest point, the Tuscarora. Constructed at the head of the shaft is the headframe, a skeleton of wood and steel with two eight-foot sheave wheels at the top, over which steel cables run from the machinery shed to the cage, a steel structure which is raised and lowered through the shaft, carrying workers, supplies, tools and coal. In a long, sooty brick shed with four tall black smokestacks are the boilers and machinery which drive the hoisting apparatus and the pumps and ventilation fans which keep the underground tunnels and slopes and drifts of the mine tolerably dry and free of dangerous gases. Smoke billows from the stacks when the boilers are fired and the mine is working. The main street is Allegheny Street. Unpaved, the street and its tributary alleys are frozen and rutted in winter, and a hogwallow of mud or a dust bowl the rest of the year. Allegheny Street is a half-mile north-south thoroughfare which runs uphill from the colliery gate on the north to a dead end on the flank of Fleming Hill on the south. Halfway up the street, Saint Gabriel's church and parish school dominate a full block. Across the street is the smaller Welsh Methodist church. Across the valley, one can see the gilded bulb domes of Saint Cyril's Russian Orthodox church, the newest church in Stedman. At the top of Allegheny Street is The Manse, the home of Christopher Ingram, superintendent of the No. 3 colliery. This house is made of red brick, with steeply gabled slate roofs, beveled glass windows, a turreted entry foyer and a wide, dark-green-painted wooden verandah on three sides, commanding a panoramic view of the colliery directly below and the sweep of the Laurel Creek valley to the east and the west. The earth under the village and the entire valley has been drilled and tunneled and blasted into an anthill of giant proportions. Every so often, a parcel of ground will tremble and yawn when the roof falls in on a stretch of the workings below. Below the surface, as miners work into the coal seams, moving away from the shaft or the slope, they leave pillars of coal to hold up the roof. When they come to the end of the seam, they turn and work back the way they came, removing from the pillars as much coal as they dare. This is called robbing the pillars. It's the most dangerous work in the mine. Every miner and laborer who works at robbing the pillars prays that, when the roof falls – as it almost certainly will – it will fall behind him, not on him or into the gangway between him and the way out. The houses in Stedman are of simple wood frame construction, with board-and-lath siding, built side-by-side, two dwellings to a unit, four rooms each, two below and two above. Henry Gwynn, like many others in the village, has built a crude breezeway in the back, which leads from the kitchen to a shed. When the heat of summer descends in late June, he dismantles the coal stove and moves it, piece by piece, from the kitchen to the shed. It remains there until early October. Heat from the stove is a blessing in winter, a curse in the summer. Read more in Up Home: Stedman 1903-1909, coming in the fall from www.windstormcreative.com. (Couldn’t resist inserting a plug).

A Salute to the Food Cranks

The weasely little corn-rowed guy with the mop and the yellow plastic “Wet Floor” sign always seemed to want to swab the deck around my table while I was trying to enjoy my daily late-afternoon Flame-Broiled Double Whopper® with Medium Fries and Large Coke®. I’m all for cleanliness and industrial hygiene, but this did dampen my appreciation of the ambiance just a bit. Thank God the food was so good. I mean, who cares about a little gastro-esophageal reflux, a little intestinal gas, a little weasely corn-rowed guy with a mop and an attitude, when you can look forward, every day, to a delicious, nutritious, succulent Flame-Broiled Double Whopper® with Medium Fries and Large Coke®? Lord knows, I didn’t always dine so handsomely. I used to eat a lot of junk, I’m sorry to say – oatmeal, bran muffins, leafy green vegetables, fruit, chicken, fish. Garbage like that. Just remembering it makes my stomach queasy. My favorite meal in those days consisted of wood chips, fat-free dried celery and diet water. I kept a framed picture of the Official Food Guide Pyramid® taped to the ceiling over my bed, so I’d be sure to see it last thing before lights-out at night and first thing at reveille in the morning. I just knew that, by sticking faithfully to the Gospel According to Susan Powter, I stood a good chance of adding a month or two to the life of my carcass – assuming I didn’t get mixed up in a nuclear war or a collision with an eighteen-wheeler. I know, I know. I was misguided. I bought into all the stuff the Nutri-Nazis were ramming – literally – down our throats. All that stuff about how a little dab of real mayonnaise would make your coronary arteries clog up like a sink drain full of cat hair. Respectable citizens shunned people like me who fell from the straight and narrow, and cast them into outer darkness (with weeping and gnashing of teeth – can you blame them?) for uttering the phrase “red meat.” Doctors insisted the words alone were carcinogenic.

Of Time, Courtship and the Rat Race

Maybe she actually had spinach between her teeth when she smiled; maybe my memory is just having a little fun at her expense. Frankly, I don’t remember. It was 36 years ago, give or take a month or two. Thirty-six years ago in Princeton, New Jersey, where we fetched up one evening after a random drive in the country. I’d been out late the night before, a novice newspaper reporter covering a warehouse fire somewhere on the north central Philadelphia waterfront -- around Front and Spring Garden Streets, as I recall. The following day I was going to State College to report on the student situation at the convergence of Earth Day 1970, the Cambodian incursion and the Kent State shootings. In the midst of all that scurrying about, while we dined at the Nassau Inn in Princeton, I asked a girl to marry me; she smiled and said yes. But I can’t remember whether or not she really had spinach between her teeth. I wouldn’t testify to it in a courtroom. Today, that string has long since played itself out. The girl who may or may not have had spinach between her teeth and I are divorced and in some ways I feel as if we were never married. In other ways we remain firmly bonded -- by the fat alimony checks I was sending her every month until just recently, for one thing. Parts of our marriage live on, too, in our children, no longer children but young women in their early thirties starting to travel their own paths through the world. I seldom see them these days. When I do, I notice resemblances and changes which seem to have appeared out of the ether, flitting ghosts haunting their earthly houses before the earth has settled around their bones. Taking the time to watch over my daughters as they grew to maturity has been the supreme joy of my life -- purchased at a definite price. In our line of work, it seems, time is money and money is the measure of your worth. Time spent with children doesn’t generate money. Then again, I don’t believe those who try to dictate policy in our line of work have the last word on the measure of anyone’s worth. The passage of time is a slippery thing, all right. It happens whether we pay attention to it or not. Sometimes, in our inattentiveness, we wonder where it went. Sometimes we pay so much attention we become obsessive about it, and I think that gets us -- me, anyway -- into a bit of trouble. According to the watch that shackles my left wrist, I’ve now used up half this morning’s allotment of personal writing time. Waiting in my briefcase is the appointment book which will rule the remainder of my day. On my desk at the office is the time sheet on which I will try to capture and hold as much as I can of today in six-minute billable bits. Some clever fellow in the Israeli Army is credited with the observation that we finally reach an equilibrium of sorts when we spend all of our time documenting the things we don’t have time to do because we’re so busy documenting them. When I ponder that observation, I wonder whether I could survive off this treadmill, out of this rat race -- and learn once again to measure time by the turn of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the sea tides; the subtle, hardly noticed changes in children as they grow; the receding memory of a courtship in which the girl may or may not have had spinach between her teeth when she smiled and accepted the boy.

Leadership

What's the essence of meetings, you ask? Meetings are events in which people come together and engage in a species of trial by combat called Leadership. Leadership consists of raising your voice and talking faster and faster until you drown out all the other people at the meeting also trying to do Leadership. It consists, too, of listening to people for as short a time as possible, and then only for the purpose of interrupting, raising your voice and disagreeing. There's an awful lot of self-righteousness in it. Kind of a Darwinian natural-selection thing – the mule that brays the loudest gets the oats; I'm smarter than you are, my ideas are great and yours are trash – that sort of thing. It's a bloody waste of time, for the most part – although occasionally someone tosses off a good joke and for an instant people laugh, forget about Leadership and start acting like friends; then the meeting becomes something more akin to a party. But soon someone furrows his or her brow, wipes the smile off his or her face, cranks up his or her vocal cords and starts doing Leadership again. The atmosphere darkens and the clouds close back in. That's when one not born to it starts to doze and doodle on one's notepad, and finds it necessary to stand up and move about if one doesn't wish to embarrass oneself by starting to snore. So, at a recent meeting – which had run true to form with lots of extraordinarily ripe Leadership getting done, where now all hands had begun to stir in their chairs and look at their watches and fold up their portfolios in anticipation of an end to the proceedings – one of the subcommittee chairmen suddenly quit in a final heroic, suicidal burst of Leadership. Well, talk about your sudden changes in the weather! Meeting just about over, everyone more or less satisfied with the amount of Leadership they'd inflicted or endured, and this subcommittee chairman just says, "I'm leaving." Just like that. "I'm outta here." Got up from the table and walked out the door without looking back. My goodness, but you should have seen the storm of Leadership that burst over the meeting in the wake of that little episode: it was the Tower of Babel revisited, with a vengeance and with many, many noisy efforts at Parliamentary Procedure (which is a sub-category of Leadership). Now Leadership and psychology and revisionist history and self-righteousness coalesced as if focused through a lens to a tight bright hot little spot of energy called I Told You So. That's what meetings are for; that's what Leadership is. And, if you ever find yourself wandering in some dairy farmer's meadow, mind you don't step in the Leadership.

Erica

Brooksie, you can rest easy. Your daughter’s a lovely girl. I met her (quite by chance, as you shall see) when I was wandering without destination sixty miles from home yesterday. She noticed I was wearing a Dartmouth Class of 1998 Parents’ Weekend T-shirt. “Did you go to Dartmouth?” she asked. “Yes, but not in 1998. That was my daughter." “My father went to Dartmouth,” she said. “What class?” (Just making conversation, you see.) “I don’t know. Back in the Sixties sometime.” “What’s his name?” “Brooks. William Brooks.” “Bill Brooks?! Played soccer at Lower Merion?” “Yes.” “And at Dartmouth?” “Yes.” “Social chairman at Alpha Theta?” “I don’t know about that.” “English major?” “Don’t know.” "Trial lawyer? Practiced in Norristown?" "Yes." “Died in Alaska? Misdiagnosed appendicitis?” “Yes.” “That last was a real tragedy. He was a classmate and fraternity brother of mine. We lived under the same roof for several years. What’s your name?” “Erica.” Later in the day, I pondered the confluence of coincidences which had produced this little tableau. I had chanced to stop into a Bertucci’s restaurant for lunch while driving around Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania visiting boyhood haunts. Erica had chanced to be the waitress at my table. I had chanced to be wearing a Dartmouth T-shirt. She had chanced to be a friendly sort. I racked my brain last night trying to come up with the word that describes this sort of thing. It came to me this morning: Synchronicity.

Слава Богу, что Сегодня Суббота!

Slava Bogu, shto sevodnya Subbota! Thank God it's Saturday! From the time I was a kid between the ages of five and ten, Saturdays were holy days, not in any religious sense, but just because they were days of the most perfect, delicious freedom. No school. Pancakes and sausage for breakfast. Saturday morning errands riding in the rumble seat of Pop's beloved 1930 Ford Model A roadster. Life was good. Even if it was raining (we didn't ride in the rumble seat then). To me, the magic of Saturday begins on Friday evening. The weekend describes an arc which ascends to its zenith on Saturday evening, then descends to the mournful Sunday evening realization that soon it'll be time to climb back onto the treadmill for another week. Imagine Sisyphus eternally rolling his stone up the hill, only to watch it roll back down again. Except on Saturday, one hopes.

Why "Son of a Curmudgeon"? (reprise)

Over the years, people have called me a son of many things, most of them based on my supposed relationship to female dogs. But why a Son of a Curmudgeon? It started one winter day, just before Christmas, in the early 1960s. Our family had gathered in the living room. My brothers and I were taking bets on whether or not the Christmas tree would remain standing under the onslaught of Mom’s relentless tinkering with the ornaments and placement of the lights. Everyone was in a festive, poisonous humor. The language was quite inappropriate for the season. We decided to take a break for family photos. What a great idea! I can’t remember which moron came up with it, but at least it promised to sidetrack momentarily the strife over the tree. We started with Dad. We sat him in a straight-backed chair, handed him a walking stick, and told him to look as crusty and disagreeable as he could -- not a difficult assignment under the circumstances -- while one of us took the picture. I wish I could show you the result, but it's lost to posterity, more's the pity. Pop looked like one of those sourpussed elderly gentlemen you sometimes see in old studio photographs, their necks clamped in steel and celluloid to prevent the slightest appearance of comfort or relaxation. From the day it came back from the photo shop to the day it vanished into the ether, that portrait was titled “Curmudgeon.” Dad decided he enjoyed the role and refined it considerably during the remainder of his life. Happily, he could toggle it on and off at will, and never lost his capacity to enjoy or share a good joke or a conversation. As the years go by, I find myself wondering if curmudgeonliness might not be an inherited trait. There are times I feel an almost overwhelming urge to growl at someone.

An Excerpt from My Book

Here’s my Daddy home from another shift in the pit, jolly with the dust in his throat washed down – washed down with a shot of Old Overholt and a long Yuengling porter. My Daddy with his drooping dusty moustache and his briar pipe – he gets a new one every Christmas from Uncle Hugh in Wales – his face never clean, it seems, but cleaner than clean to me. Tattooed for life where powdered carbon has dusted its way into every cut and shaving nick on his face and hands and other places you’d never imagine. My Daddy giving me a quick arm around the shoulder, his grin a beacon of good humor from the black of his face, crinkling crows’ feet around his eyes. And now, here’s my Daddy home for the last time... “Davey. Help me here.” Mary took Henry’s shoulders and began to roll him onto his stomach. “Take his legs, son. Turn him when I count three.” She counted. On three, David grunted and twisted with all his strength, wincing at his father’s weight and bulk and how tons of stone had smashed that weight and bulk into a pulpy mass, now oozing slowly as it warmed after three days’ entombment. And on the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures. The sentence from the Nicene Creed played over and over in David’s head. Reluctantly the corpse rolled and faced the broad plank floor, leaving a spot smeared with something wet and black – a devil’s brew of coal, water, blood. Up Home: Stedman 1903-1909, Chapter One (excerpt)

First Post

Well ... uh ... hello. I feel as if I'm standing behind my mother's skirts on the first day of school and hoping the earth will just open up and swallow me whole -- that is to day, tongue-tied. But I'm sure I'll get over it. That first day of school happened so long ago (1951, to be exact) I'm not really sure it ever happened. More later. Call this a sound check.