Home for Christmas

Last week I drove from Nashville to Oklahoma City, and, when I wasn't immersed in the audiobook of Keith Richards' recent autobiography (which, by the way, can be a dangerous thing to do while driving - Keef's world is a bizarre and distracting place), I was thinking about a blog post that I would write on the subject of road trips with Joey.  I still plan to write about this - in fact, I'll probably be writing about road trips, with or without Joey, for the rest of my days, in one way or another - but in the intervening days Christmas has happened, and so obviously I need to write about Christmas, first.

As it turns out, of course, Christmas and road trips are perfectly compatible subjects, at least for Joey and me.  For Christmas is a time of driving.  For us, not only was there the driving that we usually did from wherever we were (Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, DC, Nashville) to where we needed to be (Oklahoma City) - long trips that we often made together - but there was also the driving that we did once we reached our destination.  As the children of divorced parents, we had at least two different family gatherings to attend, two sets of stockings to open, two turkeys to tuck into, two hams, two rounds of hellos and thank yous and goodbyes.  Our parents both lived within a few miles of one another and had gatherings both on Christmas Eve and on the day itself, so it wasn't a matter of going to one family one day and then going to the other the next - it was a matter of being present for both families simultaneously.  This required considerable tactical skill and a whole lot of driving, staying as long as we felt we could at one place before making our excuses and dashing off to another.  Stockings and breakfast at our mother's, then stockings and breakfast at our father's, then brunch with our mother's family, lunch with our father's, and so on, piling gifts into the back seat and trunk after each stop, growing progressively fatter with each round of stuffing and green beans and fudge, until evening, when we'd either attend yet another family holiday gathering or split up and join our friends for Chinese food or beer.

We didn't mind all this running around - it felt good to be in such high demand - but it could be quite exhausting, especially since Oklahoma City isn't exactly notable for its high population density or shortness of travel times.  In Boston I used to joke that where I grew up you can't even go outside to check your mail without driving twenty minutes, and it's certainly true that we couldn't celebrate Christmas without burning through at least half a tank of gas, even if our journeys were confined to a single quadrant of the city.

These peripatetic Christmases made our experience of the holiday unique, something that we shared with one another but not with the other people around us.  It made us a sort of double act, this shuttling between two worlds, and on the road we'd listen to music or gripe about politics or catch one another up on books we'd read or traveling we'd done.  We could only spend part of Christmas with our mother's family or our father's family, but we spent almost all of Christmas with one another.

He was the only other person in the world who knew what it was to celebrate Christmas between these two families.

As children, before our parents' divorce and for many years after it, we usually broke our Christmases into much larger chunks: Christmas Eve afternoon with our father's family down in southwest Oklahoma, Christmas Eve night at our great-grandmother's for our Uncle Jack's birthday party, stockings with the parents on Christmas morning, brunch at our great-grandmother's, an afternoon spent playing with our gifts, and then an evening party with our maternal grandfather's family.  Almost all of these traditions have fallen away over the years, as generations pass and the family evolves, but there are some remnants still.  I hadn't been to Elgin (where my dad grew up and where his parents lived, and where Joey and I would usually stay for a few days, as children, in the run-up to Christmas) on Christmas Eve for many years, but Kate and I found ourselves there this year, more or less by design.  

We had driven down to Archer City, TX, to visit Booked Up, an antiquarian book compound owned by Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove and dozens of other books.  Archer City is the (thinly fictionalized) setting of one of McMurtry's first books, The Last Picture Show, and it is where the movie of the same name was filmed in the early 1970s.  There's not much left of the town - a solid stone courthouse still dominates the square and the Dairy Queen (where McMurtry once read Walter Benjamin) is still serving burgers and shakes, but the oil fields that fueled Archer's growth are nearly tapped out and the wealthier inhabitants (including McMurtry himself) have now scattered across the county into state-of-the-art ranches, leaving the town square to crumble and rust.  At least half of the downtown business district consists of Booked Up itself, which is spread over four buildings surrounding the square and has an absolutely astounding array of rare used books on every conceivable subject.  There's only one cash register in the store, in Building 1, and if you find something to buy in one of the other buildings you have to carry it across the street or across the square to pay for it.  It's basically Disneyland for book lovers, a dusty, withering town out on the West Texas plains, neither on the way to nor on the way from anywhere in particular, where you can take your pick of first-edition H.G. Wells novels, nineteenth-century pulp adventure books, shelves and shelves of French or Italian or Portuguese books (in translation or not), eighteenth-century broadsides, and so on.  It is one of my favorite places in the world, and it was one of Joey's, too.  I believe the first time I was there was with him and our father, although in subsequent years Joey and I tended to go down separately, with friends or significant others, and I have no doubt we could easily have spent a weekend there together, giving each building a few hours of our time by day and exploring Wichita Falls, the nearest metropolis, by night.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Kate and I do just that one of these days - perhaps, indeed, in lieu of taking the kids to Disneyland.

Anyway, on the way back from Archer City we swung through Elgin to visit my Uncle Mike and his family, who live just outside of town.  I took Kate past the house where my grandparents used to live, drove her through downtown Elgin (such as it is) and pointed out the Christmas decorations (wire contraptions of light and tinsel in the shape of Christmas trees) that the town has been affixing to the utility poles since before I was born (although the decorations themselves have changed over the years), and reminisced about Christmas Eves spent eating and opening gifts in Elgin and then racing back to the city for Jack's birthday party.  This Christmas Eve, we visited a bit with the Elgin family and then raced back to the city for Indian food with my mother, father, and grandmother, the latter regaling us with stories of her efforts to break herself of an apparently quite debilitating peanut-butter addiction.  It was a good way to spend that day.

Books also featured prominently on Christmas Day itself, when we held the First Annual JPD Holiday Book Swap.  We gathered at my grandmother's place in the morning with a couple of Joey's friends and a bunch of books, brought by ourselves and sent by FOJs (Friends of Joey) from out of town.  The idea was that we'd each contribute a book that we associated with Joey in some way - something he'd read, something that reminded us of him, something he'd given to us, etc. - and swap it for something else.  Each of us would then commit to read the book we'd received over the next year and maybe find a way to discuss it with one another, either next Christmas or sometime during the year.  His Washington, DC, friends are going to do something similar in January.  It seemed like an appropriate way to mark his absence and to tie all of us, his extended family, together - a good way to share some memories, some fruitcake, and a tear or two - and I hope we manage to keep it up for a few years.  For me, at least, it means that I can continue to buy him presents for Christmas and gives me an excuse to poke around a bookstore for an hour or two with him in mind.  

Not that I really need an excuse.

The Petey Story

I notice I've been talking a lot about gifts here - gifts that Joey gave (or planned to give) me, gifts I gave (or planned to give) him, identical or matching gifts that others gave us.  One reason for this, of course, is that these objects are the most visible physical traces of our relationship, and they immediately conjure up stories, shared tastes, etc.  They are pretty powerful prompts for reflection.  Another reason is the season: Christmas is a little over a week away, and normally I'd be shopping for his gift (Joey was always the easiest person on my list, because, if in doubt, I could always just get him something that I would like to have myself), and then we'd be shopping together for other people's presents, often in a last-minute sprint through Oklahoma City on Christmas Eve.

Additionally, our parents both have birthdays in December, and for a long time it was my job to remind Joey of this fact and to get the gift ball rolling well in advance of the actual day.  We almost always collaborated on birthday and Christmas gifts for our parents, and I'm sure (if I could bear to look) that I have dozens of emails between Joey and me with subject headings like "yer mother" or "yer father" (or, in our more juvenile moods, "yer butt") in which we're working out precisely what we're going to get them for their birthdays and then Christmas, who'll pay for the birthday gift and who'll pay for the Christmas gift, whether one or both of us might have already bought something independently of the other, and so on.  This collaboration started, as I say, because Joey, until quite recently, needed a little prompting to get these things sorted out in time, and I was the self-appointed prompter.  If we collaborated on these things, then we could both be sure that they'd get done.  We always sent separate birthday cards, however (as we did Mother's Day and Father's Day cards), which I imagine was a nice thing for our parents, because you never quite knew when Joey's cards would arrive.  When it did, often many days after the day of the actual event, it would have been like having another birthday all over again.

There's a story that's been running through my head for several months now regarding a gift Joey once gave to me, many years ago, and I'm going to try to get it right:

I was probably ten - Joey was probably six - and we were deep into our Pound Puppy phase.  They all had unique voices and personalities and places in the Pound Puppy hierarchy, and we spent an awful lot of time playing with them.  I'm not sure what we did with them, exactly, but we must have concocted scenarios wherein they would explore whatever environment they encountered - Grandmother's back yard, Grandma and Grandpa's basement, our minivan - and establish who would go where, what sorts of food they'd eat, etc.  It was much more exciting than it sounds.  Well, I had recently lost one of my Pound Puppies, a secondary character named Petey who was not one of the leaders, like Patch or Scrounger, but of whom I was nevertheless quite fond.  He may have been like number four or five in rank, maybe a Lieutenant Colonel or so.  He was white with a squishy horizontal face and brown ears.

I remember being very upset at his loss, and even contemplating going to the Kay-Bee in the mall for a replacement.  But Christmas was coming, and I had a hunch someone might get me a new Petey then.  Sure enough, Christmas morning at Grandmother's house I picked up a package that I knew was a Pound Puppy box - by this point we could easily recognize the shape and weight of these boxes - and inside, sure enough, was a new Petey.  From Joey.  I pretended to be thrilled, but I wasn't: it was the wrong puppy, the wrong model.  He was white with brown ears all right, but instead of a squishy horizontal face he had a squishy vertical one, and his spots were in the wrong place.  He was essentially the same model as Joey's favorite puppy, Rocky, but white instead of Rocky's tan.  I was horribly upset.

A while later, after the other presents had been opened, I was talking to my mother in the den.  I was asking her when we could go to the store to exchange this new Petey for the right one.  I may have asked her if she had a receipt, for she obviously had been the one to buy it, not my six-year-old brother.

Suddenly, behind me, I heard Joey say, "You don't like him?"

I looked at my mother, and my mother shot me the kind of look that is conventionally described as "pregnant with significance."  It was the first time I understood how a look could convey more than words.

I turned to Joey and said, "No, he's great.  I just, uh, may need to change him a little."  Then I started studying his face, trying to figure out if there was a way to make him look right.

I soon discovered that Pound Puppies were really quite simple, architecturally speaking.  Their faces were smooshed into shape by means of a few thin knotted threads that stuck through their cheeks and gave them dimples, thus making their faces either long and narrow or flat and jowelly.  Having discovered this, I went to the kitchen for some scissors, cut the existing threads, got some thread and a needle from Grandmother's vast supply, and spent much of the remaining afternoon figuring knotting and threading, figuring out how to smoosh the new Petey's face together in the right way.

Eventually I succeeded.  The new Petey (Petey 2.0, if you will) still didn't look quite right - the spots were still wrong - but I felt that I had acted quite heroically, saving my brother's feelings while also getting, more or less, what I wanted.  This was to be a skill I would improve upon, with all sorts of people, in coming years.

I'm not sure why that story's been returning to me so often lately.  By no means is it the only Joey story floating through my head, but it is a persistent one.  I think it may have to do with the way it forces me to shift my perspective and to see things from his point of view.  For me, as I said, buying gifts for Joey was pretty easy, even fun, because I could just pretend that I was shopping for myself.  But I wonder if, after this incident (but by no means solely because of this incident), he ever experienced much anxiety about buying gifts for me, about giving me things that would meet with my approval.  And this prompts a more general set of questions, which, shockingly, had not occurred to me until recently.  How much did he worry about earning my approval?  What else did I do to make him feel like he needed to earn my approval?  And did I do enough to show him that he had earned it, or that anyway my approval shouldn't really matter all that much?

I'm sure he knew how much I loved and admired him - I have no real regrets there - but it's natural, I suppose, to wonder.

Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure our mother still has Petey somewhere in her attic, along with all his Pound Puppy friends.  I expect they're going to stay there for a long, long time.

Triggers

The annoying thing about grief, at least this kind of grief, is its persistence.  It just doesn't go away.  Or, more accurately, it goes away from time to time, but it doesn't go away for long - and that's actually worse than never going away.

You wake up and start thinking about what you've got to do today and then boom, it hits you like a sucker-punch, right in the gut.  And then you know that mostly what you're going to be doing today is dealing with this feeling again and again and again, like a boxer on the ropes waiting for a bell that's never going to ring.  You make breakfast, you're thinking about breakfast, you're pouring the syrup, and then boom, sucker-punch.  You get in the car and drive to work, you're caught up in negotiating your way through traffic, your mind's on the traffic, and then boom, sucker-punch.  You're teaching a class, you're completely wrapped up in the causes of the Cold War or the religious policies of the Mughal Empire, you're thinking about the best way to explain these things to your students, you're coming up with lively examples and analogies, and then you turn around to write something on the board, the sea of faces disappears, and boom.  You hope you can catch your breath before you turn around to face them again, and usually you do.

This goes on all day, every day, and it's exhausting.

The grief can be triggered by anything or nothing at all.  For me, there are probably hundreds of little triggers each day.  Sometimes they are explicit and direct.  There's a photograph of Joey on the wall near the hanging baskets in which we keep our garlic, onions, bananas, etc.  It's from our trip to the Upper Midwest, and it shows him staring at two enormous pie shakes at a pie shop outside Minneapolis.  He's wearing a blue t-shirt, which I gave him, on which a cartoon cookie is holding hands with a cartoon carton of milk and saying to the milk, "I love you!"    I'll be cooking away, chopping the carrots and measuring out the olive oil, and then, when I spin around to grab some garlic, there it is.

Gifts that he gave me are everywhere in our apartment: the pie cookbook from which I make most of my pies; the photograph of Ernest Tubb on our bathroom door; the ceramic moose pitcher that normally sits atop my bureau (until recently, when we had to kitten-proof our bedroom and hide all the breakables); the copy of A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor, which he'd lent me and which sits on the to-be-read stack on my desk; indeed, books of all sorts, from travel books to novels, including some, such as William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, that have seeped so deeply into my subconscious that they've become integral to how I see the world; the Bonnie Prince Billy bottle stopper, currently serving as a Christmas tree ornament, which was the last gift he bought for me (but didn't have time to give me).

I could almost tell the entire story of our relationship through the items in our apartment.  There's the Charlie Daniels Christmas bobble-head doll on our mantel that I bought with Joey when we first visited Nashville together (he had a matching one); the photographs hanging on the walls from trips we made to Berlin and Copenhagen; the Christmas gifts from family members who had a habit of giving both of us identical items - pajama pants, shirts, a deck of Oklahoma playing cards - and of which he had a corresponding version; the plush Snoopy doll that was given to me as a gift and that I, knowing he had a special affinity for Snoopy, had lent him several years ago to keep him company on a long post-Christmas drive back to Virginia (Kate and I now take that Snoopy with us on our own road trips); the DVD of  "The Gods Must Be Crazy" sitting on our shelf, a movie about which a very young Joey pitched an almighty fit when our parents took us to see it in the theater.

There are indirect triggers everywhere.  I can't drive anywhere without passing hundreds of thousands of silver Honda CRVs of the sort he drove.  I frequently drive past the hotel where we stayed when we first came to Nashville, as well as the restaurants and other places we visited when he was in town.  Music is a big trigger - we shared lots and lots of music with one another (I'll probably write more about this soon), and at least half of the albums on my iTunes have some sort of Joey association: either I got the album from him, or I gave it to him, or we'd listened to it on a road trip, or he/we had seen the band in concert, or something.

The triggers are so ubiquitous that it'd be impossible to escape them, even if I wanted to.  I can only imagine how much more inescapable they are for my parents or Tina, his girlfriend, who live where he once lived and whose everyday environment contains thousands of such memories.  Maybe, though, it's their very unavoidability that will ultimately make it possible to overcome them - or, if not to overcome them, then at least to absorb them.  If you're forced to deal with that sucker-punch feeling all the time, gradually it becomes less shocking, less disorienting, almost normal.  If you can't escape it, in other words, you have to deal with it.

The truth, of course, is that it often doesn't take an external trigger to set off the grief.  All it takes is to cease being wholly absorbed in whatever it is you're doing.  You stop paddling just for a second, and the waves wash over you.

Windmills (Part 2)

Extracts from my journal, July 29, 2010:

During the time I was home, all I wanted to do, as friends & family cycled through the house with store-bought pies & fried chicken, was to escape into Don Quixote.  It's a good book to escape into: very long, set in a far-off place & time, verbose & redundant enough that the mind can wander from the story & return to it without missing much.  Note: the point was not to distract myself, but to escape into a place of solitude where I could be however I needed to be.  Like going alone into the mountains or to the seashore.  My initial impulse, though, was not to escape but to read it for Joey, because he never got to.  It's a strange impulse - wherever he is, it's unlikely that he needs me to help him experience stuff for him.  Yet it feels right to do things for him - there was much he wanted to do and never got to.  And since we always experienced the world through one another - whether we were together or apart, the kinds of things we did & enjoyed doing were the products of shared taste, done because these were the kinds of things we did, and eventually shared with the other through gifts or stories, often with the implicit purpose of making the other jealous - because, as I say, we experienced the world through each other, it made sense to read Don Quixote for him.  Much else that I plan to do, I think, I plan to do for him & with him, and in that sense nothing's changed.

So would Joey have enjoyed Don Quixote?  It's hard to say.  He would certainly have felt pleasure in completing it, in being able to cross it off his list [he was a great completer of lists] - as, of course, did I.  I think he would also have enjoyed the humor - Joey greatly admired funny literature, and the book (at least in this translation) is quite funny.  He might have gotten bored with the many digressions & subplots (as, at times, was I), and he might have found the modernized translation awkward (as did I).  I think he would have mapped out the places Quixote & Sancho Panza visit, and he might have tried to seek these places out in Spain.  He would not, I think, have enjoyed the self-referencing of the book as much as I, the moments when Cervantes lifts the veil & comments on his own works or has characters talk about reading the book they are currently in.  He would have felt this way for the same reason he didn't watch DVD commentaries - he didn't, as he once said, want to break the illusion that the these stories were real.  He preferred to immerse himself in a story and not think too much about the process by which it was created.  He tried to ignore the artifice and just take the story on its own terms. ... 

I didn't start reading Don Quixote with the intention of drawing any particular lessons from, or parallels with, Joey's life or death, but it did help me think through some things, or at least meditate on things.  It is, essentially, a road-trip story and a buddy story.  It's about love between two men who bicker & love & are loyal to each other like brothers.  Sancho joins Quixote, initially, because he's hoping to become the governor of an island.  But he sticks with him well after it becomes clear that his master is slightly cracked, and his greed gives way to respect.  When he finally becomes a governor he does it well but doesn't enjoy it, and he returns to Quixote out of simple loyalty & love, resolving to sleep on the ground & eat wild herbs with him for the sake of the adventures they'll have.  Quixote, meanwhile, sticks with Pancho even though he's a loudmouth & not much of a squire - more a liability than anything, actually - but he admires his good sense & appreciates that Sancho, uniquely in his experience, takes him seriously.

It would be facile to suggest some easy equivalence between these two characters and Joey & me.  He's not much like either Quixote or Sancho, and I'm not, either.  But their friendship - or kinship - is similar.  They bicker constantly but cling to one another like brothers, and, physical differences apart, they resemble one another in striking ways.  They grab life by the throat, they seek out adventures, they imagine the world to hold great secrets & experiences around every corner.  They make things happen.  They retain their dignity regardless of what befalls them (by dignity I mean respect for themselves, even if others laugh at them).  They have a good sense of themselves - they know who they are & what they value, and to hell with what the people around them think or do.  I can't say that Joey and I shared all of those qualities, but I can say that we aspired to them.  And when we were together we did inhabit our own world, with its own codes & rules.  This was true of our childhood - with its stuffed animals & GI Joes - and of our adulthood - with all its quirky enthusiasms.

I got a bit choked up on the last chapter, in which Don Quixote dies.  I knew he would become disillusioned, but I didn't expect him to die.  Before he died he had talked with Sancho & his other friends about living the life of shepherds in the fields.  He'd been vanquished as a knight, but he refused to abandon his imaginary world.  In the end he recovered his "sanity" and, though he'd taken ill as a result of his defeat as a knight, he died (I think) as a result of becoming "sane." That is, the minute he abandoned his imaginary world, he abandoned his life.  As he's dying, Sancho comes to him and tells him to hang on, to think of all the adventures they'd have as shepherds.  [It's an incredibly poignant moment, demonstrating just how much Sancho's identity has become intertwined with Quixote's and just how much he's come to love the mad old knight.]  And still Quixote dies.

I wonder, though, if Sancho maybe went ahead and played shepherd without him.

Windmills (Part 1)

Sitting in the top right drawer of my desk is a nineteenth-century edition of Don Quixote.  It's a big red thing, lavishly illustrated by Gustave Dore, and is among the nicer books I own.  It looks a little like this:

It's sitting in my desk because I can't decide what to do with it.  It was supposed to be a gift for Joey - a gift for a best man who was just about to head off for Spain and who, I knew, would inevitably plan to read the biggest, oldest, most famous book about the place that he could think of.  If it'd been Switzerland, and not Spain, he would probably read The Magic Mountain.  If it'd been Russia, probably Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov (he'd already read War and Peace, but hadn't yet read much Dostoevsky).  France?  Oh, I don't know, probably all of Proust.

Not that I expected him to read this specific edition of Don Quixote: besides weighing several hundred pounds, the book's translated into a very olde worlde sort of English that is well-nigh impenetrable.  But I figured he could have this on his shelf while he read a more modern paperback edition during his travels.  The last time I saw him he confirmed, thanks to some sly prodding on my part, that, yes, he was planning to read Don Quixote this year, but not quite yet.  He was trying to work his way through some shorter books first, and then he'd tackle it.

I want to emphasize this: my brother was planning to read Don Quixote, a sixteenth-century Spanish novel of roughly 1,000 pages, during his third year of law school - a period when, we can assume with some certainty, he would have had several more pressing (but, to him, less interesting) reading obligations on his hands.  And he would have done it, too.  His priorities were very much in order.

So I felt pretty proud of myself for having found this book, but a little uncertain about how I was going to fit it into my luggage when we flew up for the wedding.  Of course, it never came to that, and now it sits in the drawer like someone else's unopened mail: I can't deliver it or throw it away, but I'm not sure I should keep it.

There was one obvious thing to do, though, after his death.  When Kate and I drove to Oklahoma City for the funeral, one of our first stops was the Full Circle Bookstore, a place that I had visited with Joey just a few months earlier (I had bought a Dickens book, he had bought a Forster).  It's a surprisingly good bookstore for Oklahoma City, with a friendly and knowledgeable staff, roaring fireplaces, free coffee, an excellent selection of local books, wi-fi, poetry journals, rolling ladders, and generally enough warmth and charm to make you forget that it's in a mall.  It's really one of the best independent bookstores in the country, a community bookstore of the sort that is becoming rarer and rarer, where authors and readers congregate and where books are treated like books, not like toasters or screwdrivers or some other commodity that must be shoved out the door as quickly and efficiently as possible to make way for more product.  Joey always made a point of buying something there when he was in town - not, as he put it, because he needed the books, but because he wanted to give them a little financial support (a donation, he called it) - and I had been there with him many times for just that purpose.

So it was natural, I suppose, that Kate and I should go there the week of his funeral.  We actually dropped quite a bit of money on one thing and another - Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy (Joey was a big Waugh fan), a copy of All The King's Men (the last book I gave Joey, which I am currently reading) - and, of course, I bought a Penguin paperback of Don Quixote.  Since Joey didn't have a chance to read it, I reasoned, I would read it for him.  And I did.  Over the next several weeks, as visitors came to the house to offer food and condolences, and as doing anything at all - grocery shopping, television watching, dinner eating - became tedious to the point of meaninglessness, I stole every opportunity to escape with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into the dusty sixteenth-century Spanish countryside.

I do want to say a little about the book itself and how it helped me survive those first few difficult weeks, but this post has already gotten away from me, and now I'm hungry and need some oatmeal.  So I'll pause here and return to the topic here in a few days, possibly over the weekend.