Wounded, Not Dead

“Wind up wounded, not even dead.”

That's always been my favorite line from Springsteen, though "you ain't a beauty, but hey you’re alright" is a close second.

It has always resonated with me. What happens, if, expecting to "go out in a blaze of glory," instead you fail in the attempt? You couldn't even get martyrdom right.

How long does the wound last?

We know it never goes away, whatever the wound is. In fact, for years I have savored mine, sweetly. Francine has often said that when she first knew me, if I was meeting someone new, they'd know the whole morbid history within the first ten minutes.

Tending the wounds.

The great thing about literature is there's an ending, maybe even a consolation. And sometimes, real life is like literature.

I got some consolation this past Summer, in ways that I am still processing, and please forgive me for telling the story if you've heard it, or parts of it before.

You all know the extremely difficult relationship I had with my father. To be honest, it really wasn't a relationship. By the time he passed away, we were totally estranged, though through the mediation of Christopher, he occasionally gave me some money those years I didn't work. We were so estranged that I did not visit him on his deathbed.

At the time, I though the only reason my father was trying to patch things up was his fear of Judgment.

I told my Uncle that-maybe it got to my Dad.

I thought I was standing up for some great principle by refusing to see him.

What did that principle even mean?

Fast forward to 1997. One of my cousins from the UK (who I had never met, and still haven’t met), put together a book listing all the-then descendants of my Irish grandparents, Edmond English (who I had known as Edward; in fact, Chris’ middle name was Edward) and Helena (who I knew as Helen) Cusack. I and my father were named after her father, Thomas Patrick Cusack (though I am not a Junior because my middle name is Robert).

I was estranged from that part of my family, so I put the book away without doing anything about it. 

A few years later, my cousin Anne, who lives in Iowa of all places, one of the daughters of my Uncle John (he passed in 2010) contacted me, having gotten my phone number from the book. John and my dad were very very close. What happens in a very large family is that there are three or four siblings you end up being close to. For my Dad, it was John, Larry, Lizzie, and Alice. So, in a sense, it was a descendant reaching out to a descendant, across time.

I ignored her.

The night before Sandy hit, though, Anne called me to make sure I was alright.

This time, I didn’t ignore her.

Over the past few years, I have been in touch with her often and have gotten to know her well. I also learned one hard-to-forget fact about my dad, which I have told some (if not all of you), but that is something I do not want online. It was something that was so shattering, so wounding, that by the time my father was my 27-year-old dad, he was a broken man.

For a certain type of Irish-American, every St. Patrick’s Day is a time to think of Ireland. Though during their lifetimes I loved my Mom more, even adored her, I think the reason Irish culture has always resonated with me was because it was a way to get at the Dad I never had. This year, I again thought of Ireland, but I decided that this was the time to “go over.” (The Irish always say, “When are you coming over?”). I think part of the inspiration was Anthony and Alysa’s trip to the Ring of Kerry last year.

Through Anne, I met her sister Mary Teresa online, who, along with her husband Pat and their daughters Cliodhna and Aisling, hosted me the first day Francine and I arrived, a Friday. They live in a really nice house in Passage West, a suburb of Cork City. As an aside, I found out a lot of my cousins are in the caring professions-Mary Teresa is a social worker/ nurse at a government-run facility for people with autism, and Pat, retired Navy, is a social worker/ psychotherapist with a practice he runs from their house.

That first Saturday morning, he cooked us a full Irish breakfast.

Amazing.

Later that morning, he drove us to Blarney Castle, where we didn’t actually go to the Castle, but had some coffee and shopped for some Aran sweaters. (My Aunt Eilie had made one for my dad about 40 years ago, which I retired about 10 years ago).

In the afternoon he drove us to Kilfinane, a small town in Limerick, where we stayed with my Aunt Ann for the weekend. My Aunt Liz was also visiting with her daughter Clare.

Three months later, I cannot get over how absolutely heart-stoppingly beautiful everything was! The green is just a different green than the green that greens here. If I can swing it, I’d like to live there whenever I “retire.” I started researching how to get dual citizenship last year, and will put it on the front-burner next year. I want to go every chance I can afford to and have the time.

But as beautiful as the land was and is, and how I understand why the Irish love their land so, and how the land just LIVES with the past, that’s not the most important thing, though maybe it is related to the most important thing.

Cullane Middle, about 40 minutes from Kilfinane, is a townland in County Limerick. A townland is basically a crossroads, with maybe three or four cottages next to each other. The nearest actual town, with a current population of 333, is a pleasant little place called Ballylanders. It comes from the Irish, Baile an Londraigh, or “Town of the Londoner.” That might explain my last name. I have always suspected the fact that “English” was an Irish last name was a bit of the Irish humor. It is also about 14 kilometers from Mitchelstown, a town known for its cheese and other dairy products, with 3,300 residents.

One of the cottages in Cullane Middle is the house where my father was born. He had (I think) 14 brothers and sisters, born between 1924 and 1944, though I can’t imagine there were more than 8-10 siblings living in the place at any one time! The house is currently owned by his brother, Larry, and Larry’s wife, Mary. One of their sons is also named Tom English, and he lives in Moscow.

My visit to the old family cottage, Sunville House, was the central reason for my trip. Aunt Ann drove Francine, my Aunt Lizzie, and her daughter, Clare, to the house late on Sunday afternoon. I had heard that Larry was very shy (I think he is a retired prison guard), and not necessarily very friendly. I was a little nervous because of that, and also because he was very close to my father and might be a little angry for my estrangement.

When we first got there, he did seem a little depressed, and was lying in bed, under the covers, watching the Kilkenny vs Galway All-Ireland Hurling Semifinal. (The room where he was watching TV was the actual room where my father was born.) I didn’t want to push it, so I was quiet myself. Uncle Larry said we’d watch the game until the end (about 20 minutes), and then we’d join the women in the kitchen. We talked a little bit, and slowly but surely, he warmed up to me. He gave me a picture of himself with my Irish grandmother from the 60s and a sliotar (pronounced “shlidder”), or hurling ball. It’s a lot like a baseball, but harder.

When the game was over, we walked to the kitchen, where a kettle of tea had been made and my Aunt Mary was serving cake and sandwiches. The Irish drink tea almost all the time; there’s always a kettle at the table and one boiling on the stove.

I sat down. Then it hit me-all the emotions of a lifetime came over me, my relationship with my father, his relationship with my mom, Chris, and me, what it must have been like to live in such a beautiful country, how my family thought it was a bad idea for him to go the States, fragile and broken at 22, what he must have been like before that, when he was a boy, how I treated him when he was sick.

I lost my composure, and had to leave the room. Francine immediately followed me to make sure I was OK, and I was crying, saying “he never had a chance, he never had a chance, I was too hard on him.”

After I calmed down, I went back to the kitchen.

Then, like the Irish often do, we decided to sing. I sang “Four Green Fields,” one of my father’s favorite songs. I had a very palpable sense that he was singing through me, especially to his brother Larry and his sister Liz, and adding and taking lifeblood from my family. I also had a great sense of being part of a stream or a river-my individual existence didn’t matter so much. I was just one expression of the English life-force (Auntie Lizzie said she could tell that I was an English just by hearing the way I talked, and Francine said there was a certain family charisma I shared).

There is something to the Christian metaphor of Heaven as a banquet; I felt as if somehow the Divine cracked through. I did not despair that some day we were all going to die. I knew that there would be other, similar, Tom Englishes, maybe others who fancy themselves Kings of Rock.

Epiphanies end, unfortunately, but when I hugged Uncle Larry for a last goodbye, I felt I was a source of some consolation, too. In me, he was able to see his brother who he missed.

Wounded, not even dead.

Maybe I was lucky after all to tend that wound-from its nagging hurt I was able to create some happiness.

Here are the pictures from our trip.

The first link is to Francine’s album, the second is to mine.

https://1drv.ms/a/s!Ao1bH36neWScmF2rhET2KXD21A-5

https://www.flickr.com/photos/142224243@N04/albums/72157669869437520

Who is Xeno?

The thing that stood out as the biggest departure from the play in Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time was her concentration on the relationship between Leontes and Polixenes (Leo and Xeno).  At first, I really appreciated this.  Their boarding school relationship was more interesting than the whole baby drop episode. And over time, I thought Winterson did a great job fleshing out Leo's character into something recognizable and believable.  He's a narcissist and materialist (very Trumpian) who only grudgingly and almost imperceptibly gains some small wisdom through the extraordinary and implausible action of the play.  But it seemed to me that Winterson set up Xeno as something more; more self-aware, more depth, more understanding.  But for me, the follow through on his character just wasn't there.  After the action shifts to the younger generation, which wasn't all that compelling, I kept waiting for Xeno's return, but it came with a whimper, rather than a bang.  It just never seemed resolved.  I found the denouement "Xeno came and stood beside him.  He put his arm around Leo. Leo was crying now, long tears of rain. That which is lost is found." a trite and insufficient resolution.

Winterson writes (pg. 270) "Polixenes, who has our sympathy in Act One, proves himself as conventional and irrational as Leontes, when in Part Two he tries to wreck the love between his son, Florizel, and Perdita with death threats as sexually sadistic as anything dreamed up by Leontes".  In the play perhaps, but this is largely missing from the cover version!  I liked her general point that the Romances are about forgiveness, and overall I enjoyed the book.  But I've never seen The Winter's Tale as she does - "a private text for me for more than thirty years".  I'd put it way down the list of plays that remain in my consciousness and occasionally surface.  Perhaps that's why I didn't appreciate this more.

But I remain engaged and enthusiastic about the Hogarth series; and to this blog, dedicated to its exploration and discussion.  I put aside Shylock Is My Name, but will gladly pick it up once everyone has weighed in on The Gap Of Time.

Still Life With Psychiatric Hospital

I wrote this last week to Rob and Rich. I thought this prequel might provide background to my real blog entry (below). Sorry for hogging all the space to get started. Who's next?

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At the start of the summer, I had some big plans to be productive which, for an English nerd, means writing. I had some time and some good ideas and I was ready to get rolling. My summer Harry Potter class loomed in July, but I could handle that. It was fun, in fact, to plan for each day of that course. I had a commitment in Kansas City grading AP exams, a task I truly despise, but we needed the money, and so I said yes. On the way there—the first week of June—the air conditioner in my car died at the Illinois-Wisconsin line. The temp that day soared into the high 90s and I was driving right into that flaming orb for hours and hours. I got dehydrated without really feeling it coming and then started feeling really, really rotten somewhere west of St Louis. GPS took me to the nearest hospital, and the good folks there rehydrated me and monitored me for two hours while I recovered. They seemed a little surprised to see me for some reason. A half dozen nurses were in my room at one point just chatting. It was a fun night in the emergency department. I found out later that this hospital was actually a psychiatric hospital for women that has a lightly-used emergency room due to the regional trauma center just a mile down the road. I was big news in this place, a patient neither female nor in need of psychiatric treatment. Funny!

I spent the following week at Tim’s in St Louis recovering and waiting for the heat to break a little bit. I got a ton of good Harry Potter prep done that week, part of which I spent at the Wash U library. Super impressive. Finally, I just decided to drive all night to avoid the sun on the way home to Appleton.  That brought me right up against the start of the Harry Potter course still feeling a bit hazy. I jumped right back into my second job as a college counselor. On my return, my dean asked me if I would help him do some personnel work at UW-Manitowoc. I said sure, and that brought a fourth job into my summer, one that required a lot of travel. It more or less killed my late June and all of July for writing, but we need the money. I kind of like academic hiring process, anyway. Lots of interesting people out there.

Why is money so tight these days, you ask? Well, Gwen (who is 12) is playing hockey now at a very high level. She’s got a lot of travel opportunities these days and has already met informally with a college coach (RIT). Exciting stuff. The newer news is that Imogen spent three weeks in Brooklyn this summer dancing at a pre-professional program in classical ballet. There were fifty girls in the program and two were asked to join the year-round professional training program. Imogen really wants to make a go of a professional career in ballet, and so we pulled the belt even tighter and said yes. We had to figure out a way for her to live, and so the tentative plan was for her to stay with my parents in North Haledon, NJ (next door to Jeff), and commute each day. That’s expensive and time-consuming. Our preliminary budget put us well over two grand in the hole every month. Then Liz’s miraculous wedding happened, and we got to talking to one of my first cousins, Katie, a woman I had not seen in decades. Her dad (my uncle) married into Oklahoma oil money—lots of it—and now Katie happens to have an extra apartment that they never use on 72^nd St between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Katie offered it to Imogen for as long as she wants it. Is that incredible luck, or what? But Imogen in NYC on her own didn’t sit right with us, and so now Susan is quitting her job and moving with Imogen to NYC from September to May to be her stage mom. If she is able to make some money while Imogen dances, then we might be able to pull this off. If not, then we’re truly sunk. Bankruptcy sunk.

But my philosophy has been that we get only one chance to raise our kids. We’ll have plenty of time (we hope) after they’re out of the house to try to work out net worth back to zero before we retire for good. And so we’re going for it. Banzai. No regrets. The full monty.

I am here in Milwaukee tonight at the rink typing this while Gwen skates with her team, the Milwaukee Jr Admirals (an affiliate of the AHL team of the same name, minus the Jr). I finished my second day of school today and am too tired to think about sleeping, let alone the two hour drive I have home tonight from this rink. We’ve got no money. I’m working three jobs. Our little family is splitting into two pieces for the foreseeable future, and I desperately miss my wife and daughter already!

If I think about all of it, I feel something like vertigo.

Writing helps.

See Me Feel Me Touch Me Heal Me

I looked at the photos John Hyland posted after the NJ weekend for Mike’s dad’s funeral. In everyone, you guys—my old friends—were touching. Either an arm around a back or just shoulder to shoulder. The kind of human contact at the center of happiness. I am glad there were a bunch of us to mourn Mr C’s passing and to celebrate his life, but, man, I ached for not being there to mark this sad occasion together. There is nothing in my life that comes even close to what I used to have with you guys. I hope hope to be more present to you guys soon. Maybe we’ll move back east. Maybe.

Imogen’s new ballet school is at the tippity top of Jay St. in Brooklyn, right at the base of the Manhattan Bridge. Actually, it is about a block north of the east end of that bridge, and between her school and that massive, deafening structure (the B, D, N, and Q trains rattling above) is a new park. It snakes along the shoreline (a word I would not have formerly used to describe the intersection of crime and toxic waste that was this park of Brooklyn back in my day) of the East River from above the Manhattan Bridge to below the Brooklyn Bridge. It doesn’t quite hook up with the Promenade, but it’s close. Highly recommended as a destination if you are looking for something new and cool to do in the city. It even has a beach, another word I never thought I’d put into the same paragraph with “East River.”   

Between Imogen’s new school and the park along the river are two businesses of note. First, there’s an all rough-around-the-edges café with fifty-pound burlap bags of coffee beans strewn in every corner and tables made out of giant spools and beat up leather couches and whatnot. One afternoon in August, I sat in there with Susan, who was reading, for a few hours waiting for Imogen’s class to finish for the day. I had nothing at all to read (I tried stealing Susan’s book while she was in the restroom, but that didn’t take), and so I people-watched the millennial hipsters who filled the place. Without exception, they were hooked into an electronic device. Mostly laptops, but plenty of phones. Every single person. Number of people reading a book or newspaper? Zero. Number of people talking to others nearby? Zero. Occasionally, sure. But their main action—90% of the time—was staring at their screens. I felt like an alien. Usually, it is impolite to stare, but these people had no idea I was watching. Oblivious. Totally hooked into whatever fascinating thing they had in front of them. Don’t get me wrong. It is not their problem. Let them have this world. They cannot screw it up as much as we did. But I wonder where we’re heading as a species and society when this prototypical public space has become so changed so fast.      

The other business of note between Imogen’s school and the river? I thought it was just a bookstore, but then, when I strolled inside, I discovered that this is the HQ of Melville House Publishing. I had heard vaguely of Melville House before now (how could I ignore the familiar family name?), but I didn’t know much about it. Desks in the back, all open to each other. Spiral staircase to the loft where maybe a half dozen employees sat and did their thing. But up front is a small bookstore full of Melville House books. I love the cover designs; that’s the first thing that hit me. Because I had time, I browsed the several hundred books in stock until I settled on one. It is orange, has a guitar pick prominently on the cover, and it is titled In Hoboken. Christian Bauman wrote it. Ever heard of him? I brought it up front to the young millennial who was staring into a laptop before, during, and after my transaction with her and brought it back to the café to sit again with Susan.

It took me a dozen pages to get into it, but once I dropped into the groove, I was in. The story is about this young folk singer / guitarist who just got out of the army who returns to Hoboken to see what he can get started again with his old friends. Rich would find a ton familiar about it. The Hoboken landscape is lovingly and (I hope) accurately drawn, populated with “suits” who gravitate to the south end of the city, the PATH station and the fashionable bars in its two-block radius. Thatcher is the protagonist (probably too strong a word—read on), and he sleeps on the living room floor of a friend, gets a job in a detox hospital for poor people, and spends the rest of his days at Maxwell’s. While I was in, I really liked it. Bauman is a masterful writer who has created a dozen strong and memorable characters here. He breaks a ton of point of view rules—sometimes switching POV within a single sentence—but in endearing ways. These characters felt real to me as I was reading but, ultimately, the whole thing fell a little bit flat. The old adage: a reader will forgive everything at the start of a story and will forgive nothing at the end. I would have been fine to have just a glimpse into the lives of these Jersey denizens, but then the novel gives us a ton of closure, some of it arriving a bit too coy for my liking.

The thrust of the novel, though, is that we all need each other. That solo artists end up miserable and those who seek to make connections (even if they don’t survive to the novel’s final pages) make a bigger difference that anyone else. And so throughout the book, we have these solo folkies playing “wooden music” (love that term—I hadn’t heard it before) who come alive when their friend comes on stage to provide a few harmonies. A rule of good fiction writing is that action occurs in scenes. And, unless you’re Jack London (when is the last time you reread “To Build a Fire”? If you answered more than, say, six months, get reading!), those scenes are built on interactions among characters. True to that rule, In Hoboken drips with characters who orbit each other and continuously collide, aggregate, and pulverize. Life, in other words, as previous generations knew it:   

Most of the room behind the stage at Shannon was filled with an old brown couch. Thatcher sat on one end working through his second gin and lime and something in a plastic cup, talking to a serious kid in a flannel shirt writing in a notebook.

“That’s the Village Voice, Mary Ann whicpered to Loum pointing at the serious flannel.

“Listen,” Thatcher was saying, using his free nad to emphasize, “it’s not a direct line on the heels of this or that, per se. It’s a new thing, man, altogetehr new. He took a slug of his drink wating for the serious flannel to catch up with his notes. “Having said that, let’s be clear: there’s tradition, and our embrace is real. But it’s varied, man. You got your straight up Johnny Cash and your Jerry Lee Lewis boogie-woogie shuffle beat over here”—he held his hand out and wiggled his fingers—“and your Pretenders and The Clash and whathaveyou over here”—the hand moved, fingers wiggling; serious flannel licked his lips—“but down here, man, from out of nowhere, down here it’s The Weavers, baby, standing straight across the stageand singing the truth, man, singing the truth.” Thatcher took a drag on his cigarette. “And we’re all of that, man.”

“Good God in the morning, he’s excellent slinging the bullshit,” Mary Ann whispered. Then, even softer, “Who are The Weavers?”

Thatcher leaned closer to the kid. “You seen how we line up straight across the stage? That’s The Weavers, man, comin’ at ya.” Flannel nodded his head—good shit.

James stiuck his head in, pointed at Thatcher. Let’s go, son. We have to clear the room and warm up.”

Thatcher shrugged. “We’ll talk more after the show, he said and shook serious flannel’s hand.

With the kid gone, James squeezed himself and guitar in.

“You just kicked the Village Voice out of the room,” Thatcher said.

“Nothing for him to write about if we suck,” James said.         

As you can see, there’s a lot of fun to be had just bouncing along with Thatcher and the gang as they try to get something musical and romantic going among their group of about a dozen friends. NYC is ever present, and a couple of chapters are set in Boston. It really feels as if Bauman has the feel of it right, and that's huge.

The big question is what is worth anything in a world where the painter who lives downstairs with his mother creates art that nobody really likes. A world where the musicians play and sometimes it goes well and sometimes it doesn’t but nobody seems really fazed either way. A world where people seek connection but also destroy big pieces of each other by being careless with themselves and others. That is the part that I really don't think this book gets right at all. Actions have reactions and then fallout. Gatsby nails it, of course.

I am almost finished watching the first season of Stranger Things. One of the happiest aspects of this series for me is that it is set in the mid-1980s, and era conspicuous for its lack of cell phones. Sure, the inability to instantly communicate is a big plot driver, but these characters are invested 100% in the line of sight around them. They go into a café, and people notice them. One goes missing, and people care. The boys play D&D (I highly recommend the opening episode just for the depiction of some mad DM skilz on display) and talk to strangers. That café in Brooklyn near Imogen’s school? I have the feeling that the main monster in Stranger Things could walk in there, muster up its best scare, and not a single hipster would notice. Just not real enough.

I do wonder where we’re heading. Notwithstanding the collapse of the Earth’s ecosystem, the end of evidence-based decision-making, and our embrace of technological alienation, we might yet be on the cusp of some golden age. I have never been one to adapt well when things of value seem to be slipping into oblivion without a fight. That’s what it kind of feels like these days. Stranger Things and In Hoboken both take me back to a time when a guy like me—an introvert who craves human contact—could walk into a café and expect to share in a space with others, even silently. I generally don;t like being observed. I like to glide about unnoticed. But I guess I like it to be my choice. And I guess I like to think I live in the world that contains connected people, even if I am not among them.
Like Father Kelly's old line: "Relax, Bill. You are among friends. They are not your friends, but you are among friends."