Cinema Paradiso

The last time I saw Joey was Memorial Day weekend of 2010. We spent the weekend in Asheville, NC, the two of us and our girlfriends. We walked and drove around. We ate and drank. We met up with a couple of friends of mine who lived in the area. It was a good trip, pleasant in the way that long weekends are supposed to be, but nothing extraordinary: just one in a series of meetings we'd had (and, we assumed, would continue to have) at different spots around the globe, and by no means the most exotic. One day I'll write down the details of that weekend as I remember them, but that's not what I want to do today. I only mention it because today is also Memorial Day, and so it's got me remembering.

What I want to write about is how my brother helped me learn to love old movies. There's some irony here, because when we were young he was as fussy and narrow-minded about movies as a little kid can be. He'd storm and rage for days if ever we went to see something that he'd already decided he would hate. The Little Mermaid, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Benji the Hunted: his violent opposition to these films was legendary, even if it was, especially in the latter case, also somewhat justified. I suppose both of us could be pretty unpleasant when we didn't get our way, but when it came to movies it seemed to Joey that he got his way less often than I did, and this made him doubly angry. It wasn't just the movie, it was the injustice: sibling rivalry can be a zero-sum game in that way.

Despite the occasional battles, however, our tastes usually overlapped. Many of the films that are most deeply etched into my soul - Clue, Three Amigos, Back to the Future 1-3, Beetlejuice, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Ghostbusters, Spaceballs, Spies Like Us - were ones that we watched together as children, over and over and over. (We also watched, at Joey's insistence, hundreds of hours of Wrestlemania and New Kids on the Block videos, but that's a subject for another day.) Today the elves at Netflix look at my taste profile and recommend (and I quote) "critically-acclaimed gritty foreign dramas" - but in 1987 those same elves would have looked at our VHS shelves and decided that I liked "idiotic contemporary comedies starring former cast members of Saturday Night Live."

Happily people's tastes evolve as they grow older, but sometimes it takes a bit of a push. My push came from a confluence of circumstances involving my mother, my brother, and the American Film Institute. In the summer of 1998 I returned to Oklahoma after living for a year in Ireland. I had one year of college to go and many new ideas about my intellectual and cultural superiority to the rest of America, but before moving back to New Orleans for my senior year I spent one last summer living with my brother in the house in which we'd grown up. My mother had just married her second husband; they had bought a house several miles away but hadn't yet sold the old one, and so for three glorious months Joey (who turned seventeen that summer) and I (who turned twenty-one) were permitted to live on our own in the old house. Actually, we weren't quite on our own: midway through the summer our mother's brother, momentarily stranded between marriages, moved in with us. This angered Joey quite a bit, not because he had anything against our uncle (they got along wonderfully) or because it limited our freedom in any way (our uncle was, and is, much more likely to get the cops called than either of us), but simply because he hadn't been consulted. In his eyes, such a major decision affecting his life (those are almost his exact words) shouldn't have been made without his input. He ranted and raved about this for a couple of days until it became clear that our uncle wasn't going to interfere with our freedom in the least - and, indeed, might end up corrupting us more than we would have corrupted ourselves - and then he calmed down.

So what did we do during this summer of freedom? Did we host cocaine parties? Did we set the carpet on fire? Did we fill the fireplace with jello? We did not. Mostly we worked at our summer jobs: I'm not sure where Joey was working that summer (probably he was waiting tables), but I know I was working the overnight shift at a loading dock, driving a forklift and paying my Teamsters dues in the one job I've ever done that actually qualifies as "work" in the sense that my great-great-grandparents would define that term. During the day I slept (or tried to sleep), and each evening I phoned the warehouse to see if they needed me to come in. If they didn't, I had to find a way to fill the nighttime hours. Many nights I drove out to the Kettle, a sort of downmarket Denny's (I know!), to play spades and drink coffee with friends. Most nights Joey would hang out with his own friends - doing what, I don't know - and sometimes I would see him and his friends at the Kettle. Our friend groups overlapped like that. We were almost all male, and, like young educated men in small towns all over this country, we mostly sat around on those long summer nights trying to make each other laugh. If I'm funny today, it's largely because of those nights I spent at the Kettle trying to one-up those friends of ours who remain among the sharpest wits I've ever known.

Some nights, though, neither Joey nor I felt like going to the Kettle. This, after all, was the year that the American Film Institute (an organization with which neither of us had been familiar) released its "100 Years, 100 Movies" list, which purported to rank the hundred greatest films of all time. That might not seem like such a big deal these days, when approximately 65% of the internet is composed of such lists, but at the time this was a novel idea; indeed, I believe it was this list - and the debate it provoked - that was largely responsible for the endless lists of "greatest" whatevers with which we're beset today. I also believe it was this list that made Joey such a listophile (if I may coin a term): after that summer he was always finding and completing "best of" lists of one sort or another, although now that I think of it several of his youthful obsessions (learning facts about all of the Presidents, memorizing baseball statistics) do suggest a predisposition for this sort of thing. The nice thing about the AFI list, and others like it, is that it saves you time and effort: somebody else has already done the work of figuring out what the best movies (or albums, or books, or whatever) are, so all you have to do is track them down and watch them (or listen to them, or read them, or whatever). It means fewer dead ends and less precious time wasted. That's why I find such lists appealing, anyway, and I'm sure the same was true for Joey, only more so. He was always finding ways to avoid expending effort.

I forget how many of the AFI 100 I had seen when the list came out, but it couldn't have been more than 40. Joey and I had a printout of the list, or perhaps a magazine article about it, and we checked off the ones we'd seen - I, being four years older, had seen more than he, but not by much. And so without ever formally agreeing that this is what we were going to do, we began renting all the movies on the list that we hadn't yet seen. He would come home one night from Blockbuster with a copy of The African Queen (#17), or I would bring home Bonnie and Clyde (#27), and, if I didn't have to work and he didn't have plans with friends, we'd sit together in our childhood home and watch these old movies. We had both seen old movies before, of course, but we hadn't seen many, and what we had seen were mostly those interchangeable and interminable John Wayne movies that they were always showing on basic cable. Like most kids of the late twentieth century, we believed old movies (especially black and white movies) must be dull, earnest, and irrelevant. Neither of us expected to be roaring with laughter at Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (#51), helplessly charmed by Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty (#86), or humming along with Gene Kelly to Singin' in the Rain (#10). There were plenty of duds on that list, of course. I never have understood the appeal of Montgomery Clift (A Place in the Sun, #92) or why The Jazz Singer (#90) is considered "great" rather than just "significant," but for us the list's benefits certainly outweighed its costs.

Many of the movies that we devoured that summer have never left me. They're as much a part of me as my nose. This was when I first spent time with Woody Allen (Annie Hall, #31), the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup, #85), and Charlie Chaplin (The Gold Rush, #74; City Lights, #76; Modern Times, #81). This was when I first paid serious attention to Hitchcock (Psycho, #18; North By Northwest, #40; Rear Window, #42; Vertigo, #61). This was when I fell in love with Ingrid Bergman (Casablanca, #2) and Shirley MacLaine (The Apartment, #93). It was when I learned to love musicals, or at least some of them (An American in Paris, #68). I appropriated the nameless dread that infused Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (#50) and ran with it for most of my twenties. I began reading detective novels after watching and loving The Maltese Falcon (#23) and Double Indemnity (#38). Over the following years I let the list guide me to other movies that weren't on it: more Hitchcock, more Ingrid (and then, why not?, Ingmar) Bergman, more Woody Allen, more Bogart. In the summer of 1999 I moved to Boston for grad school, and during the first few lonely years I haunted my local Tower Records like a ghost, looking for more old movies, foreign and domestic, until I'd exhausted their supply.

Our summer of movies made me ravenous; it liberated me from the tyranny of the multiplexes and whatever new swill the studios were trying to get me to swallow. I learned that there were hundreds, even thousands of movies that had already been made that were much more funny, touching, erotic, and surprising than the mainstream commercial films we'd been force-fed as kids. This realization was, and remains, exhilarating. I would undoubtedly have had it eventually, of course, but to have had it in this way - in a single summer, with my brother, in what I knew would be our last time in our childhood home - made it uniquely powerful. Quite apart from the impact on our own individual tastes, that summer helped Joey and me understand how to relate to one another as adults. We'd grown apart a bit as teenagers, and once I went to college the distance became greater. But now we had a new set of words to add to our old private language and a new shared outlook by which to judge the rest of the world. What began with movies soon spread to music and books: our tastes converged, our conversations became longer, and we began to experience the world, once again, with one another's help and through one another's eyes.

A few days ago I decided that I would put all the winners of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, going all the way back to 1939, into my Netflix queue. I've seen a few of the recent ones, but most of them I've never heard of. Many of them (weirdly) turn out not to be available on DVD, but many of them are. Some of them are three hours long, and nearly all of them are in foreign languages. Fifteen years ago it would never have occurred to me to do such a thing, and not only because there was no Netflix back then. Long foreign films whose chief distinction was that they had won some fancy award in France, of all places? Pish.

These days, thanks to Joey, my plan seems like the most sensible thing in the world. Farewell My Concubine, anyone?

Something Happened

When I started this blog I chose not to discuss the way my brother died. I chose instead to write about my memories of him and how I was handling the loss. It was a deliberate choice. The manner of his death is something that I can't spend a lot of time thinking about without feeling my brain start to crinkle like a wad of paper. To discuss it in a public forum, among potential strangers - or, perhaps more pertinently, among people who knew Joey and for whom this is also a difficult topic - seemed too risky. But as time passes (it's now been two and a half years) and the earth begins to regain a little of its old solidity, I'm beginning to think this is something we should at least begin to talk about, if only because talking about it might be a good way to think about it, and I haven't really found a good way to think about it yet.

Here, briefly, is what we know. On July 3, 2010, Joey and a friend spent the afternoon and evening drinking and watching the World Cup at a Washington, DC, bar. Late that night they parted, the friend to his home and Joey on the way to his girlfriend's place near Dupont Circle. The friend says Joey didn't seem that drunk, although he has since had second thoughts about this. Sometime around 3am a subway driver pulling into the Minnesota Avenue Metro station saw Joey lying on the track. It was the last train of the night, running on a special holiday schedule, and I don't believe there was anybody else on the train. The train didn't stop in time. He was still alive when rescue crews arrived, but he died shortly thereafter in a Maryland hospital.

That's all I know. I don't know why he was at the Minnesota Ave. stop, which is nowhere near Dupont Circle, but it's likely that he fell asleep on the train and got out at that stop (which is not in a great neighborhood) intending to catch another train back into town. I don't know how he ended up on the tracks. Either he fell or he was pushed; a deliberate jump is out of the question. The friend with whom he had spent the evening told me, quite eloquently, that he prefers to think that he fell, since that's the option that leaves more good people in the world. It almost certainly wasn't a robbery, since nothing of value was missing (although I believe they never did find his phone). I haven't seen the medical examiner's report - it might contain some more information, but it can't answer any of the important questions.

Immediately after his death I didn't much care how it had happened. The old cliche from a hundred movies and TV shows seemed perfectly adequate: "What does it matter how he died? Knowing what happened won't bring him back, will it?" While I accepted the wisdom of that cliche, I also felt determined to avoid falling into another, that is, searching for the "closure" that would supposedly help me "move on" once all my questions had been answered. This was the sort of thinking that justified people calling for the death penalty for the murderers of their loved ones. It was the sort of thinking that furrowed the brows of my classmates who didn't understand Samuel Beckett, that sent people into hysterics over the last episode of the Sopranos. I didn't want to be the sort of person who needed all of life's question's answered, everything tied up with a nice little bow and ready to be placed on a shelf. It wasn't that I was enjoying the mystery of it; I just didn't want the mystery to matter to me. The important fact was clear - he was dead - so what did it matter how he got that way?

That's what I told myself. But here's why I was wrong: we live our lives as stories, we make sense of our own existence through a sort of ongoing private narration, and where there's a great big gap in the plot - a gap, in this case, created by the absence of security cameras in the Minnesota Ave. Metro station - the mind will keep trying to fill that gap, whether we want it to or not, forever. So rather than becoming a mere blip in the story of your life - a missing page, a sentence redacted - it becomes a stumbling block. A scratch so deep in the record that the needle keeps skipping backward, over and over, so that you keep hearing the same few seconds of the song but never, ever, hear that next note. That's why it matters how he died. It's not because knowing what happened that night would bring closure, but because it would give me a story I could tell, about my life and his, that I would know to be true.

For the first year or so the story I told myself was that he must have just slipped somehow. He was a big, clumsy guy. He'd been drinking all day, and, drunk or not, he was sleepy, possibly confused, certainly not in top mental and physical form. It makes sense, but I don't know that it's true, and so my mind keeps returning to it and offering other possible explanations.

About a year ago I awoke from a dream convinced that he'd been murdered. In the dream someone had said to me, "It's as if a professional swimmer had drowned in his own swimming pool." Joey had spent much of his adult life riding the Washington Metro. He'd also spent much of it drinking. And he'd spent a fair amount of time doing both. How likely was it that, even sleepy or slightly intoxicated, he would have been so incapacitated as to fall on a subway track? Didn't it make more sense to think that he'd been pushed? Maybe they'd stolen his phone. Maybe he'd refused to hand over his wallet. Maybe there'd been a fight in the station and he'd gotten caught up in it.

This is what I'm talking about. Not knowing what's true means that I have to keep returning to this moment and trying out different scenarios. It means I have to keep thinking about it, even if I don't want to. And I usually don't want to.

But let's stick with this possibility for a minute. If he was murdered, then there's someone out there who killed him. If that person's out there, shouldn't they be punished? How? What if they do it again? If he was murdered, should I feel some affinity with the families of other murder victims? Should I recoil at the way movies, TV, and books casually traffic in murder as a compelling plot device? I certainly recoil from the (suddenly amazingly common) use of train and subway accidents as storytelling devices. Am I the brother of a murder victim?

I had been giving this line of thinking a rest recently, until the the story of the subway death in New York - the one that appears to have been perpetrated as a hate crime by a mentally disturbed person - began popping up all over the internet. I still haven't read much about it, but it led me to take seriously a possibility that I hadn't really considered before: that someone may have pushed Joey just for the hell of it.

So what am I supposed to do with that?

The New York tragedy did generate one news story that I felt compelled to read, about the horrific experience this can be for the drivers of the subway trains. Here it is, if you're interested, but be careful: it's not easy reading. The article says that there were 55 subway deaths in New York City last year, which seems to me neither high nor low - just sad. I have thought about the woman who hit Joey and what she must have gone through, though I confess it hasn't been foremost in my mind. This article makes me wonder if there's maybe some way to contact her. It also makes me wonder if she'd even want to hear from us.

I don't want to give the impression that I spend all of my time dwelling on the early morning of July 4, 2010, rehearsing scenarios and trying to find someone to blame. I don't. But it is an itch I can't scratch, and if I'm not paying attention to something else, it often claims my attention. I'm dredging all this up now because I'd like to hear how others have dealt with this. I'm not searching for hypotheses, necessarily, although anything that helps us get closer to the truth is certainly welcome. I'm mostly curious to know whether anyone's shared my experience, or if you've found ways to make sense of it in ways that have eluded me so far. Please post as many comments as you'd like below.

Reading My Brother's Books

Toward the end of The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, the narrator, Maurice Bendrix, comes across a pile of old children's books that once belonged to Sarah, his dead lover. Maurice is now living in Sarah's old house with her husband Henry, the man Maurice and Sarah had been deceiving during their affair (it's a long story), which gives him time to rummage at leisure through her fairy books by Andrew Lang, "many Beatrix Potters," and several others. In one Beatrix Potter book Sarah had written her name in pencil. In another she had written "Sarah Bertram Her Book. Please ask permission to borrow. And if you steal it will be to your sorrow." These, reflects Maurice, "were the marks of every child who has ever lived: traces as anonymous as the claw marks of birds that one sees in winter. When I closed the book they were covered at once by the drift of time."

A few pages later Maurice encounters another of Sarah's old books. This one had been given to Parkis, a detective whom Maurice had employed to spy on Sarah and whose son had developed an attachment to the woman they were following (it's a long story). Parkis has returned the book, an Andrew Lang fairy book, because it was exciting his son. The son had taken ill with a mysterious fever and stomachache; when the ailment cleared up as mysteriously as it had arisen, the son said that it was the deceased Sarah who had come to take away the pain. He read in her book something Sarah had written as a girl - "When I was ill my mother gave me this book by Lang. / If any well person steals it he will get a great bang, / But if you are sick in bed / You can have it to read instead" - and believed that Sarah's ghost had written it just for him, to make him better. Maurice, a rationalist and atheist, dismisses the story as a mere "coincidence," but the coincidences have begun to pile up. An atheist friend of Sarah's has seen his facial deformity disappear. Sarah's mother has revealed that Sarah had been baptized a Catholic as a young girl, and a priest has insisted that the adult Sarah, ostensibly an atheist, was starting to become interested in Catholicism before she died. A true believer would see all these coincidences as little miracles, or at least as evidence that Sarah was still operating in the lives of those she'd left behind, but Maurice tries to resist the idea.

Nevertheless, by the end of the book he's begun to question his atheism. He's arguing with God like this:

You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest. I hate You, God. I hate You as though You existed.

That last bit is quite brilliant, and it reminds me of the opening line of Julian Barnes's Nothing to be Frightened Of (about which which I've written previously): "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him." By the final paragraph Maurice hasn't abandoned his atheism exactly, but he can't shake the sense that Sarah's spirit is still alive in the world. The book ends with this prayer: "O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever." And when he says that, we know that he'll continue to be visited by Sarah, and perhaps by God, for the rest of his life.

I read all this in Joey's copy of The End of the Affair, which I fetched, along with several of his other books, from our mother's attic last year. Unlike Sarah's books it contains no inscription, but it is yellowed and creased like many books that had the misfortune to be used (I almost said abused) by my brother, who was famously careless with his possessions (as anyone familiar with the long, sad demise of his Honda Accord will tell you), so it's kind of like it's inscribed. How it got this way I will never know. Stuffed into a backpack and crumpled under larger, stronger books? Spilled from a suitcase or a duffel bag and then trampled as it lay under scattered clothes? Forgotten in a car seat and kicked by heedless passengers? His copy of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I "borrowed" from his shelves years ago, is in a similar state, as is his copy of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which I also have. In the attic I also found a signed first edition of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh with substantial water damage that almost certainly appeared after the book sold for $20, the price marked in pencil on the first page. In one of the other, as yet unplundered boxes in our mother's attic, I know there sits a ridiculously mangled copy of David Foster Wallace's gargantuan Infinite Jest, which I spotted on Joey's bedside table a long time ago. One day I'll get it out of the attic and stick it in our fiction section, where it will sit unread until some curious visitor grabs it, notes its well-used condition, and flatters us by assuming that either Kate or I must have read the thing (and then perhaps dragged it several miles down a dusty country road).

Not all of Joey's books are in serious-to-critical condition, of course. I retrieved several pristine first editions of books by people like Steinbeck and Hemingway from the attic, books that must have been gifts (probably from our father) and that Joey almost certainly hadn't yet read. I retrieved a good academic edition of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (which I know Joey read and loved), a nice 1940s hardcover of Ulysses, an only slightly tattered The Moviegoer, a couple of decent Waughs, and a nice, big edition of a William Faulkner biography with a bookmark halfway through and a packet of photographs stuck under the back cover (showing, I gather, scenes from a trip my father made to visit him at the University of Virginia). There is also, speaking of UVA, an unread copy of Poker Wisdom of a Champion by Doyle Brunson, a gift Joey received probably because of the author's name, not because he had any special interest in poker. Inside is a card dated April 23, 2004. It says: "Dear Joe, This past semester I knew I could always count on you - no matter if you were busy or had a class, and for that I am very grateful. Thank you for always helping me when I needed you. Sincerely, Peter." (I don't know who Peter is - maybe one of you UVA folks knows?) There is also a book by Martin Hauan, in a plastic cover, called He Buys Organs for Churches, Pianos for Bawdy Houses. Inside is an inscription from Martin Hauan himself, which reads, "From one student of Oklahoma's politics to another. Best to you always." I doubt this inscription was for Joey - the internet tells me Hauan died in 2001, and Joey did not really become involved in Oklahoma politics until 2004 (when he worked on the campaign of a Democrat running for US Senate) - but I'm sure there's a story behind this book, which has a bookmark from the Full Circle Bookstore at the end of the first chapter, showing that Joey at least made an attempt to read it.

In every book I have that belonged to Joey I have installed either a bookplate that says "From the Library of Joseph P. Doyle" (Tina gave these to him; he never decided which books he wanted to put them in) or a Snoopy sticker (which Tina has also put into the books of his that she has). These books sit on our shelves, snuggled up with our own books like good friends. I like the idea that as our children grow and begin exploring our collection (we will require all of our children, however many there will be, to be avid readers), they will be able to know at a glance which books belonged to their Uncle Joey. They, like we, won't really know which ones he read and what he thought of them if he did, but I will be able to assure them that the bruised and battered ones, the End of the Affairs and the Infinite Jests, were indeed well-used.

As for the The End of the Affair itself, I know that Joey really liked it. He mentioned it to me more than once when Graham Greene came up in our conversations (which he did more than you might expect), but what exactly he liked about it - whether he enjoyed its subtle affirmation of Catholicism (if, indeed, Joey was a true-believing Catholic), its evocation of London during the Blitz, the caustic narrator, the comic private eye, or the way it dissects the intertwining nature of love and hate - either he didn't say or I have forgotten. I do know roughly when and where he bought it: the Borders on Northwest Expressway, in Oklahoma City, within roughly a year of May 7, 1999 (as a former Borders employee, I have the power of deciphering the stickers they put on the back of their books). That means he probably read it at the age of eighteen or nineteen, most likely during a summer at home, either before or after his first year of college. A book like that, with its weighty themes and big, unanswered questions, can mean a lot to a kid that age.

Everything that I've just said adds up to the strongest possible argument against e-readers that I can imagine. Everything that I've just said would be impossible to say or to know if my brother had done most of his reading on a digital device where words have no more permanence than they do in an email inbox or a facebook feed. And yes, I recognize the irony of my saying this in a blog, and no, it doesn't bother me one bit. By all means, folks, use your Nindles and Kooks or whatever as much as you want, but for the sake of those who come after you - indeed, for the sake of those who come alongside you - buy and read lots of real books, too. Bend them, crease them, circle passages you love, put stickers in them, forget them in the back of your car, drop them in dirty puddles, abuse them ruthlessly - even the ones you love - especially the ones you love - and then put them somewhere they can be found by someone who might care that you once held them in your hands, who might treasure even the stains from your greasy fingers, and who will wonder what you made of the words inside.

My brother's books are among the most direct links I have to the life he lived and the thoughts he thought. I could have read The End of the Affair on my phone, I suppose, but then I wouldn't have gotten the chill that I got when I read the part about Sarah's old books and the way she seemed to be still alive in them. I've often written here about the coincidences - or, if you prefer, the small miracles - that have happened from time to time since Joey's death. This was a big one, and, like the others, it made me feel a little less lonely and a little more open to the possibility that we don't really disappear when we die.

Green Shoots

Two and a half weeks ago we had a daughter, Rose Elizabeth, born a few days after her due date and after a spell in the hospital during which she exhibited no great urgency to sally forth into the world. In this she somewhat resembled her absent Uncle Joey, who sometimes needed a cattle prod to get going but, once underway, could thrash through the world like a newborn, or at least like someone to whom all things were new.

Rose is an incredible creature, all squirms and appetites and growth, and it hardly seems possible that Kate and I alone should be entrusted with the responsibility of keeping her safe and fed. She is also, now that she's out, a completely separate creature from either of us - absolutely dependent on us though she is, her little growing mind and body are now all her own, and the path she follows from now on, and what she thinks about it all, will be hers alone. 

When we lost Joey, we lost a world. His consciousness and all that it contained - that little spark behind his eyes that held all of his thoughts and experiences and dreams and doubts - vanished utterly. Like archaeologists excavating a buried city, all we have are traces of that world from which to piece together a partial picture. But by creating Rose, we have created a new world - one to which we likewise only have indirect access, but that we know is churning and expanding nonetheless. That doesn't mean that her presence somehow makes up for Joey's absence - in some ways it makes his absence more glaring - but it does serve as a reminder that death has its counterpart in birth, that new plants grow from soil fertilized by those who have come before.

That image - of life growing out of death - is one of the recurring motifs in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. When not swaying with Rose or photographing Rose or feeding Rose (and sometimes while feeding Rose) I've been reading Justin Kaplan's biography of Whitman, the contribution of my father-in-law David to last Christmas's book swap. It's a luminous and tender biography of a man that I really didn't know much about, despite having borrowed one of his poems for the title and spirit of this blog. Among the biography's virtues is that it spends as much time illuminating the meanings of his art as it does narrating the events of his life; it's a bit like taking a poetry seminar with an unusually erudite professor. Kaplan identifies many animating ideas in Whitman's poetry (urban life, democracy, love of all sorts), but one of the most powerful and persistent is summarized in the image of grass growing from the grave. This is from "Song of Myself":

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

And then, a few lines later:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

The eponymous leaves of grass, then, are those which are found in a graveyard. They begin as the smallest of sprouts, and they are nourished by the dead. As Kaplan says, Whitman saw "the earth as a vast compost heap and life as the rich leavings of many deaths." Here's another statement of the same idea:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

And so this is what I think about as I watch my daughter sleep and listen to her cry: in all sorts of ways her life will be nurtured by the life that has disappeared. She is a sprout (though not the only sprout) growing out of what remains of my brother's brief existence on Earth.

Rose is a fortunate baby. There is a great crowd of people out in the world just waiting to help her grow, to ply her with books and toys, to squeeze her cheeks and calm her sobs. That crowd is precisely one individual smaller than it should be, but she'll feel his presence nonetheless. Uncle Joey will show up in her grandparents' love and in her father's tenderness, when her father manages to be tender. He will show up in the home that her parents will make for her, which will be full of stories about him and books that belonged to him and music that he loved. He will accompany her on family road trips. He will bequeath to her, I hope, a love of travel and a restless curiosity about the world.

Whitman's poetry is famous for its gusto, for its delight in the sensuous, earthy pleasures of the body and of American life. Joey was a bit like that, and I hope Rose will be, too. Like Whitman, Joey was a big, gentle guy whose social self did not always match his exuberant private self. After one of his famous rambles through New York City, Whitman said, "Wasn't it brave! And didn't we laugh (not outwardly - that would have been vulgar; but in the inward soul's bedchamber) with the very excess of delight and gladness? O, it is a beautiful world we live in, after all!" Joey could almost have written that himself, especially the bit about vulgarity. Also like Joey, Whitman could be a lethargic fellow; he once claimed it was a family trait "to tide over, to lay back on reserves, to wait, to take time." Joey would have fit right in with the Whitmans in this respect; it remains to be seen whether Rose will show a similar set of inclinations, but if her lackadaisical entry into the world is any indication, this seems likely.

I want to be sure I'm making myself clear. I do not expect Rose to resemble Joey in any significant way, nor do I especially want her to. She is not a replacement for my brother or some kind of compensation for his loss. She must not be burdened by his memory, expected to live up to him, or come to resent him (or me) because she's had to grow up in his shadow. She must and will be her own person. But the world she lives in - the air she breathes and the food she eats (especially if that food is listed in the Roadfood guide) - will have an unmistakable Joey flavor. And as long as she loves her life as much as Joey loved his, it matters not one bit whether she resembles him in any other respects.

In the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman offered his readers some fatherly advice. It's the kind of thing Joey might have told her someday - not in so many words (there are way too many words here for Joey), but in spirit and by example.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air each season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

It's good advice; with a little help, I bet we can plant at least some of these ideas in Rose's little brain.

From Hitch to Eternity

This past Christmas, like the Christmas before, we held a book swap in Joey's honor. Friends and relatives from around the country submitted books that we associated with Joey or that we thought he might like, and a few of us gathered in my grandmother's living room in Oklahoma to swap the books and tell stories. As with the previous year, the assortment of books was pretty diverse - they ranged from Larry McMurtry and Annie Proulx to E. Nesbitt and PG Wodehouse - and together they formed a touching, and quite accurate, picture of the world that Joey inhabited. There were funny books and English books and really quite formidable books, the sorts of books you'd read on a dare: a 500-page travelogue (Blue Highways), an omnibus collection of short novels (the Wodehouse), a biography of Walt Whitman, a collection of Twain essays.

I don't know for sure, but I believe my contribution may have been the most formidable of all. Arguably, by Christopher Hitchens, runs to over 700 pages and is roughly the size and heft of a newborn. It's a collection of Hitchens' best essays on political, literary, and cultural matters. The range of topics is truly Joey-like in its scope and sweep, with a particular focus on British novelists of the twentieth century (Orwell, Wodehouse, Waugh, Maugham, Greene, Ballard), political conflicts and personages (Jefferson, Lincoln, etc), tendentious pieces propounding outlandish positions for the sheer contrarian joy of it (e.g., "Why Women Aren't Funny"), and a handful of pieces about what it means to live the good life ("Wine Drinkers of the World, Unite"). Joey undoubtedly read many of these essays in the Atlantic or Slate, but I would have given him the book anyway, so that he could catch the ones he'd missed. Although he certainly didn't agree with Hitchens about everything, I know he admired him. He may even have run into him a time or two in Washington, DC. The last time I was in Washington with Joey I kept saying to him, while we were walking down the street, "Hey, is that Christopher Hitchens?" Eventually he grew impatient with me and said, "You just think every guy with long hair is Christopher Hitchens," which was true.

Whether they ever bumped into one another or not, the Washington Joey inhabited was quite similar to the one in which Hitchens lived. Theirs was the Washington of bookstores and good restaurants and classy-but-shabby bars, not the Washington of lobbyists and politicians and interns and television reporters. They were intellectuals in a city of soundbites, realists in a city of idealists, connoisseurs in a city of philistines, and readers of large books in a city famous for its short attention spans. Am I being too hard on Washington? I probably am. What I mean to say is that both men simultaneously thrived on the city's energy - its built-in cosmopolitanism, its grandeur and pretensions, its many secret nooks of power and influence - and conducted their lives in ways that were slightly at odds with the city's dominant ethos. When they were alive you could be sure that at least someone in Washington had read Tolstoy or heard of Samuel Johnson, and that was somehow reassuring.

If their tastes were rather similar, however, I don't think their personalities were. Hitchens was a famed conversationalist and a man of unbounded energy (there's a reason why his "best-of" collection of essays is over 700 pages long) who continued to write and read prodigiously right through his final illness. Joey was quiet, parsimonious with his energy, and uneasy in the spotlight (unless it happened to be karaoke night and they happened to have some Johnny Cash songs). Nevertheless, I like to think of the two of them chatting away in some book-lined afterlife, staying up way too late and drinking way too much whisky, energetically debating the affinities between, say, Oscar Wilde and Elmer Fudd. I think they would crack each other up.

Recently the Atlantic (to which we were given a gift subscription by David, my father-in-law, who also happened to get the Hitchens book in the swap) published the essay on which Hitchens was working when he died. It's about the British novelist G.K. Chesterton, who is not much read these days (apart, perhaps, from his Father Brown mystery series) but who was among the most prolific and influential writers of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's typical of Hitchens' later essays in that it's a little less barbed, and a little less coherent, than his best stuff, but that's certainly understandable. The man was dying of cancer, after all, and here he was writing a long essay on a half-forgotten (and by Hitchens not much admired) British writer. Still, it's an erudite and incisive exploration of the moral world that Chesterton inhabited, and it's well worth a read if you have the time and patience. Joey had read at least one Chesterton novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but he didn't much care for it. He read it on my recommendation, actually, but, since I hadn't read it myself (and still haven't), I concede that it was rather an irresponsible recommendation. As I understand it, thar book is about a civil war that erupts in London, pitting the various neighborhoods (the East End, Chelsea, Southwark, etc) against one another. I liked the idea and thought I'd write a similar novel about Boston one day, but the sense that I got from Joey was that, as with much speculative fiction, the idea was rather more interesting than the execution.

Anyway, Chesterton is not the point here. The point is that along with Hitchens' essay the Atlantic printed a short remembrance of Hitchens by Benjamin Schwarz, the editor who'd worked with Hitchens on the Chesterton thing. Schwarz says that the last gift he gave to Hitchens as he was entering the hospital was a collection of Orwell's essays in which Schwarz had inscribed his favorite Orwell line: "One is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals." It's a touching, if somewhat gloomy, sentiment; it gives us permission to go on caring about people despite the risks, and that's a pretty good way to be. I suspect Hitchens, who admired Orwell immoderately (he even wrote a book called Why Orwell Matters) may nevertheless have thought the quote a tad sentimental, but I think Joey (who also quite liked Orwell) would surely have agreed with it wholeheartedly.

And then there's me. Kate and I, as you may know, have for the last several months been creating a brand new "human individual" of our own (although I do believe Kate's doing most of the work), someone to whom we expect to fasten quite a bit of our love. It's exciting, of course, but it's also terrifying, and not just in the way that becoming a new parent is always terrifying. The past few years have instilled in me a very keen sense of the fragility of life and have left me more-or-less permanently braced for disaster, so as I inch toward fatherhood I find that I'm carrying more than the usual bundle of fears and anxieties. But when it comes to fastening my love upon other human individuals, I just don't see that I have any choice in the matter: if life really is as fragile as I think it is (and it is), and if catastrophe really can strike at any moment (and it can), then what the hell's the point of withholding one iota of love (or joy, or humor, or sympathy, or understanding) from my loved ones even for a moment? Carpe diem and all that, right? Or, in this case, carpe baby.

In Praise of Silly

I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this comparison, but I'll make it anyway: grief is like tinnitus, or anyway my grief, in its current advanced state, is like tinnitus. I always hear it, day after day, just ringing away at the same pitch and volume. What changes is the attention I pay to it - loud noises or interesting conversations will distract me momentarily, but as soon as they recede, there's that ringing again. So persistent is it, and so loud, that most of the time it just sort of blends in with the other sounds of the world, as if it's become a part of the world. It rings through every song I hear on the radio, through every thought that drifts through my brain; it doesn't ruin the songs or the thoughts, but it does make them sound different.

Another comparison: grief is like a pair of sunglasses. You can still see shapes, objects, and movement through it, you can still read a book (in bright sunlight) or watch a (brightly colored) movie, but the world as you see it is not as it really is. The colors aren't necessarily darker (for a time in high school I wore these purple John Lennon sunglasses that actually made most colors more vibrant, especially reds), but they're often muddier or less distinct. After a while, you might even forget that you're wearing your grief-sunglasses, but then you walk into an empty, darkened room, and you remember. It's especially noticeable at night.

Speaking of high school: when I was a teenager I wore this black t-shirt with an Edgar Allen Poe quote on it that went, "There are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a hell." There was no image or pattern on the shirt, just white letters on black cotton. I loved that shirt, and I loved the quote, not because I was especially morose or dark (although what teenager is not sometimes morose and dark?), but because of the convoluted, and, to my unformed mind, sophisticated way it expressed what was really a rather banal sentiment. I cherished that phrase the way teenagers cherish favorite poems and song lyrics. I wrote it on notebooks, chalkboards, and several yearbook pages. I think I thought it made me sound mysterious and interesting, although I now realize that I was lucky it never came to the attention of an overzealous guidance counselor, to whom it might make me sound troubled or homicidal. However - and this is my point - now that I've had some experience of tragedy and grief, the sentiment behind the quote, and, more importantly, the sentiment behind my fixation on the quote, seem utterly irrelevant to the actual condition of grief. Grief does not make the world of our sad humanity assume the semblance of a hell; it may make it assume the semblance of a funhouse mirror or an underwater city or a vaseline-smeared window, but not a hell.

Depression, now depression is another thing entirely, I gather. A couple of months ago Kate and I went to see the movie Melancholia, in which a depressed Kirsten Dunst accepts the impending end of the world (a wayward planet is about to collide with Earth) with something like approval. Her sister, Charlotte Gainsbourg, has a young son, and therefore a reason to live, and so she doesn't want the world to end at all, but for Kirsten Dunst human beings (including herself) are horrible and destructive creatures, and they deserve to perish. I suppose I can understand a depressed person feeling that way, but I, a bereaved person, spent the bulk of the movie in a state of heart-racing anxiety because I emphatically did not want the world to end. I guess I'm willing to endure the ringing in my ears as long as I'm still able to hear some music playing over it.

I haven't bothered much with quotes since becoming an adult, but I recently came across something I quite like. Humphrey Lyttleton was a British jazz trumpeter who, in addition to helping lead a jazz revival in post-WWII Britain, was, after 1972, the host of a much-loved BBC radio comedy show called I Haven't A Clue. The show was a sort of quiz show in which a panel of comedians played games and said silly things like, ""Hello and welcome to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. Tonight, we promise you a nail-biting contest. Which will be followed by a nose-picking contest." (That's not the quote I have in mind.) One of the games was called Mornington Crescent, which was a fake strategy game that required panelists to name a series of landmarks or stops on the London Tube, proceeding by a complicated (and ever-changing) set of rules toward the Mornington Crescent stop; the first person to announce "Mornington Crescent!" won the game. Of course there were no actual rules to the game: the whole thing was just an exercise in anarchic silliness. I had never heard of Mornington Crescent until the Scottish rock band Belle and Sebastian released a song by that title, and then I visited the Tube stop in London a few years back, which is in the Camden Town area, a part of London Joey quite liked. Whether he liked the song I don't know; I doubt he'd heard of Humphrey Lyttleton.

Anyway, Humphrey Lyttleton died in April 2008, but just before he did he wrote a note to his loved ones, which read, in part, "As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation." This is the sort of thing that only a mature person, someone who had seen plenty of silly's opposite in life and knew its true value, would say, but it's also the sort of thing that Joey, young as he was, understood perfectly. He was excellent at not taking himself too seriously, and he never, either as a teenager or afterward, put on the airs of a tortured intellectual the way that I did. In that way, he was much older than I was.

Now I find that without him, odd though it seems, I'm probably sillier than I ever was. Silliness helps to shout down the grief, which, for all of its exhausting persistence, is something that really can be shouted down. And it helps to keep me connected to my brother, because when I'm being silly I'm often acting the way we acted together. But it is also a fundamental way of relating to the world that fits more and more with what I've come to value, and, well, it's just more fun to be silly than not to be silly. The tinnitus of grief, or the sunglasses of grief, or whatever you want to call it, is not ever going to disappear. I understand that. But as I get older, and as I contemplate becoming a father (have I mentioned here that we're having a baby in April? I'll have more to say about this soon), I grow further and further away from the moody, serious person I was when I was younger, before I had to deal with any real tragedy. So make mine a Humphrey Lyttleton, and Edgar Allen Poe be damned.

Okie Anglophilia

One of the first books I can remember buying Joey was England, England by Julian Barnes. I knew nothing about the book when I bought it, and I don't know much about it now. It was a case of judging a book by its cover, which I realize you're not supposed to do. I was browsing through some Barnes & Noble or Borders somewhere, looking for a gift for a brother whose tastes I but dimly understood (this was about eleven or twelve years ago, just as Joey and I were starting to show one another our adult selves), when I spotted a slim paperback decorated with a whimsical collage of English kitsch (Shakespeare's portrait, the Union Jack, Big Ben, a double-decker bus, etc.). The blurb on the front cover from the New York Times said, "Wickedly Funny," a blurb on the back cover from the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a wonderfully nasty satire," and that's pretty much all it took. I bought it because I liked to buy Joey gifts that were wickedly funny (or at least ones with pretensions to wicked funniness) and because I thought he probably enjoyed nasty satires, but in my memory the main reason I bought the book was because it was about England. Joey, I believed, had a thing for England.

Looking back, I really don't know why I thought this. I had recently spent a year in Ireland, and Joey and our mother had come out to visit me, but we didn't go to England on that trip. Joey had spent a few days in London during a high school trip, and he may have expressed a fondness for that city and a desire to return, but I really can't remember. (What I do remember is that on that same trip he had visited Paris, where he and a friend were ogled - or perhaps worse - by a creepy French guy in a Burger King bathroom. Or was it a McDonald's?) It may just be that I assumed he was interested in England because I was. Or it may be that England was a natural object of admiration for two boys trying to kick off the redneck dust of Oklahoma, a land of quirky sophistication to which our imaginations defaulted when we thought about places we'd rather be living, simultaneously familiar and exotic, sort of like France but without the foreign language requirement.

Whatever the reason, I bought him the book, and thus began the Doyle brothers' long and companionable romp through the garden of American Anglophilia. Ours was not the Windsors-and-Winston Anglophilia of the American mass media; we didn't give a toss about the Royals or Churchill, and Austen and Shakespeare were only nodding acquaintances. We preferred an altogether less obvious form of Albion-immersion: reading the latest Booker Prize winners, getting our news from the Guardian, listening to the Kinks and the Stone Roses (Joey loved the Kinks and the Stone Roses), posting jokey Facebook statuses about David Cameron and Nick Clegg, peppering our conversation with arch English slang. We renamed our mother's dog using the principles of cockney rhyming slang: his Christian name (of which we rather disapproved) was Blaze, so we rhymed it with glazed, and rechristened him Donut.

One of Joey's favorite Englishisms was "balls," as in "Oh balls!", a phrase spoken in frustration or dismay. It's a replacement for words like damn, crap, and so forth, and he frequently employed it while driving. He got the expression from me, and I got it from my college friend Raj, who picked it up during his junior year at the University of Bristol. It's a sort of riff on the much more common English expression, "bollocks!", but whereas "bollocks!" is too English-sounding and therefore too obvious, "balls!" is subtle and funny without sounding pretentious. This is the sort of thing we went for.

We never visited England together, but we did do so separately. In the summer of 2008, after exploring the Continent for a few weeks with me and Tina, Joey headed up to England on his own for a few days. He visited a friend in London, bashed off to Liverpool, and had some tips for me when I went to London in January 2009 to do research. He sent them to me in a longish email entitled "In Case Yer Not Feeling English Enough." Among other things, he pointed me toward a chocolate store at the Spitalfields Market (he called it Spittlefields); a pub called The George in the East End; and an Oxfam bookstore in Notting Hill where the clerk had agreed to knock two pounds off the price of two books when Joey didn't have enough cash. He also told me about a tweed-wearing man at the Oxfam store who complained loudly about the length of novels and proclaimed "there ought to be a tax." Joey said, "I got the feeling he was a regular." Joey was a fine connoisseur of used bookstores.

Of course, we consumed heaps of British popular culture. I had gone through an "All Things Great and Small" phase as a young boy; he went through a similar phase later in life. He told me how he regretted not seeing the movie "Notting Hill" on his first visit to London, when it was playing at the Notting Hill Cinema, and he subsequently developed a taste for charming English rom-coms,especially if they starred Hugh Grant. Approximately fifty percent of our music listening was done with British bands, and we both got sucked into cheesy British sci-fi (i.e., "Dr Who") through our geeky girlfriends. As with the occasional Anglisicism (not just balls but also dodgy, quid, loo,  knackered, wanker, and so on), allusions to these cultural objects infused our conversations and contributed to the brotherspeak in which we indulged whenever we were together. They were like a shared secret code.

Our transactions with England weren't identical, of course. I became, well, a British history professor (although my primary training as an Irish historian complicates the picture a little), and Joey became a great fan of English soccer (he was a Liverpool supporter). This led him to a more general interest in European and World Cup soccer, an interest I will never possess, although I do enjoy watching the odd match. I expect my career will continue to whip me through England with some frequency: I was just in Oxford last summer, on another research trip, and I even popped over to London one night to catch one of Joey's (and my) favorite bands, Okkervil River (who are, alas, from Texas). Prior to the show I ate a currywurst at a little German sausage shop called Herman Ze German on Villiers Street, and if I could have I would have sent Joey an email directly afterward recommending that he go there the next time he was in London. Joey loved a good currywurst.

But to return to Julian Barnes: I never did read England, England, but a few weeks ago I finished another book of his, Nothing to be Frightened Of. It's a nonfiction work, part memoir, part literary history, part meditation on mortality. Actually, it is all meditation on mortality - the memoir bits and the literary history bits are just different paths into the subject. It is the most death-focused thing I have ever read (and I say this as someone with a sub-specialty in genocide studies), and one of the most troubling, and one of the most reassuring. It begins as a set of reflections about the death of Barnes's parents, but it quickly becomes an exploration of the ways writers, philosophers, Christians, and scientists have tried to understand (and accept) death. It offers no easy uplift or cheap inspirationalism - the title is a play on words, for to Barnes death is precisely a "nothing" of which one should rightly "be frightened". Barnes is clear-eyed and frankly terrified about the prospect of his eventual annihilation, but he's also ironic and self-deprecating, wise, humane, practical, and open-minded the limitations of his own knowledge. Which is to say, he's very English about the whole thing. And as he tries to piece together his past, to make sense of his parents' death, and to understand his own mortality, he turns to his older brother, a philosopher living in France, who is unsentimental and (so he says) untroubled by the idea of his own extinction. At different points in the book the two brothers compare memories and ideas, and it becomes clear that they have spent their (now quite advanced) lives alternately bickering with and reinforcing one another's identities. They are not identical, but they share a nearly identical past, and that helps them situate themselves in the world.

It is a tremendously good book, and it made me want to read everything Julian Barnes has ever written. The first thing it led me to do was to listen to a recent (and rare) interview Barnes did with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's "Writers and Company" radio program. I recommend it highly. Before long I will probably read Barnes's most recent book (the winner of this year's Booker), The Sense of an Ending, which explores the (often distorted) stories that we tell ourselves about our own lives. And someday I will find Joey's copy of England, England, which is almost certainly in our mother's attic, and I'll read that, too.

A Boy and His Dog

One of the last books I gave Joey was Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis. A few weeks ago I found the audiobook version in the library, and I've been listening to it during my commute. I don't know if Joey ever read it: I suspect not, because it's pretty gigantic, and he almost certainly would have told me if he had conquered it. If he didn't read it, he really didn't miss much. Like many writers and artists, Schulz actually led a pretty dull life (no surprise there, I guess), and no amount of narrative embellishment can hide that fact, although Michaelis certainly tries his best. If my attention is wandering while my abridged audiobook meanders through the decorating scheme of every single room in every single home that the Schulzes ever inhabited, I can only imagine what the full-size, 700-page print version is like.

However, the "and Peanuts" portion of the book is mostly pretty interesting. On the one hand, Michaelis does this thing that literary biographers love to do, which is to find real-life models for an artist's fictional characters. Mostly that sort of thing bores me, and mostly it bores me here. But when it comes to analyzing each character's contribution to the Peanuts strip, on the other hand, and when it comes to explaining the biographical and historical significance of the principal characters, Michaelis is really quite good. He's especially good on Snoopy.

Here's the story behind Snoopy. When he was a little boy in Minnesota, Charles Schulz had two dogs: one named Spike, the other named Snooky. Spike was a crazy dog who ate watches and things (if I'm remembering correctly), and he seems to have planted the seeds for the character that later became Snoopy. (Snoopy, of course, would later have a cousin named Spike, who lived in Needles, AZ - where Schulz himself lived as a boy.) When Schulz was first developing the dog character, its original name was Sniffy, but it turned out that another comic strip had a dog of that name, so Schulz had to change it. Just before she died from cervical cancer (the details of which Michaelis devotes far too much attention to), Schulz's mother had said that if the family ever had another dog, they should call it Snoopy. So Snoopy it was. And here's where Michaelis earns back some of my goodwill: he remarks that in adopting that name, Schulz had found a way to stay connected to his beloved, deceased mother. 

Which is precisely what Snoopy does for those of us who loved Joey.

If you want to get technical about it, I was the first of the Doyle brothers to display a particular affection for Snoopy. When I was little, before I even had a brother, I developed a strong attachment to a plush Snoopy toy that I carried everywhere, like Linus and his blanket. Then, at the age of three, I lost it on an airplane. One of my strongest early memories is of the grief I felt upon realizing he was gone - I don't remember where I was or who else was there, but I remember the grief. My parents did what any parents would do. They bought me a new Snoopy, and, if I loved this substitute Snoopy any less than I had his predecessor, I didn't show it. I have him still. He's sitting behind me on a bookshelf, his nose dangling by a few black threads and his white fur matted and begrimed by my own juvenile hands. His ragged appearance demonstrates just how much I didn't mind making do with a second Snoopy.

I imagine most children love Snoopy. For kids of my generation and Joey's, our first exposure to him was through the Peanuts holiday specials and other forms of merchandise and advertising, rather than through the Peanuts comic strip itself. By the time we were old enough to read the comics, we already had a longstanding relationship with Snoopy; indeed, we knew and had opinions about all the Peanuts characters by then. Moreover, the comic strip was not exactly meant for us, although we could certainly be amused by it. Like all the best children's entertainment - Sesame Street, say, or the Muppets - Peanuts worked on at least two different levels: there was the surface level wherein funny-looking children (and their dog) did amusing things, and there was a more elevated level of existential despair, absurdist humor, literary references, and other adult in-jokes that gave the strip a great deal of artistic heft. It is only as an adult that we realize how truly funny Peanuts can be. I know, because Kate and I recently watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," and we laughed harder at Snoopy's prolonged, bizarre fight against the Red Baron than we ever had as children. Kate admitted that the whole sequence simply baffled her when she was young (how does Snoopy's doghouse get those bullet holes in it?), and I remember feeling pretty much the same way.

My point is that, after our youthful dabblings, children of my generation have to rediscover Peanuts in comic-strip form to really appreciate it. That's what Joey did. As a boy he didn't have any special connection with Snoopy or the others, although of course they were always around, but as he became an adult he came to love the comic strips. We both did. The Daily Oklahoman ran Peanuts in full color every day - the entire comics page was in full color, the only worthwhile thing about that paper, we both felt - and when we were home Joey and I both made a point of paging through the newspaper looking for Peanuts. If we were home together, whoever got to Peanuts first would usually snicker and then pass it to the other. We were both discovering that Schulz shared our sense of humor: dry, understated, a little self-deprecatory, funnier if you gave it a minute to sink in than it often seemed at first.

I'm not sure just when or why Joey began to identify with Snoopy. Michaelis suggests that Snoopy is the only true child in the entire strip, and I think that's right. While Charlie Brown is hurling himself at Lucy's football and Linus is exploring theology, Snoopy is living in a world of wild fantasy, trying out any role that appeals to him, whether it's fighting the Red Baron, traveling to outer space, or simply sitting atop his doghouse with a typewriter, trying to become a world-famous novelist. I think one thing that appealed to Joey was the straight face with which Snoopy pursues even the most outlandish activities. Yes, he does yell and shake his fists sometimes, but more often he marches through life with a serene, silent dignity. Michaelis compares Snoopy to Charlie Chaplin, and I can see hints of Buster Keaton as well. Michaelis also compares Snoopy to Don Quixote, boldly confronting giants disguised as windmills, and I can see that, too. It is the enthusiasm and self-possession with which Snoopy lunges toward each new adventure that makes him such a joy to behold, and if Joey couldn't always attain Snoopy-like levels of self-possession, I think he aspired to. And I think he certainly wanted others to believe that he had it.

But the other thing about Snoopy is that he will spontaneously, and without an ounce of self-consciousness, stop everything and start dancing. Snoopy's dance is giddy and unrestrained, a celebration of the wonderfulness and weirdness of simply being alive, and, whether he knew it or not, Joey lived the way Snoopy danced. Joey could do silly dances, too, which were all the funnier because they burst out of such a seemingly cool exterior. People underestimate Snoopy all the time - they think that because he doesn't talk and lives in a doghouse that he's just a stupid dog, living the sort of humdrum life that everybody else lives - but Snoopy knows that his soul contains multitudes, and he'll give you a glimpse of them if you're patient, and if you'll just pay attention. Joey was like that: a big, quiet guy whom you had to strain to hear in a crowded room, but someone who was capable of sudden bursts of energy and whose placid surface concealed a wild, omnivorous love for the world.

Joey was the one who embraced Snoopy during the period of our rediscovery of Peanuts, and I happily ceded him that ground. On Christmases and birthdays we would both receive Snoopy items from time to time, but when they came to me I always felt that they should have gone to him. Several Christmases ago our aunt gave me a new Snoopy doll - recalling, perhaps, the Snoopy dolls of my youth - and I lent it to Joey to keep him company on his drive back to the east coast. He kept it, as I expected him to, but I have it now. It's sitting in our bedroom, wearing a hat patterned after the German flag, which I bought with Joey when we were in Hamburg several years ago. Kate and I take him on road trips with us.

These days Snoopy has become an emblem of Joey for those of us who loved him. Sometimes we seek him out. I recently put a Snoopy decal on our new car, which itself is white and kind of Snoopy-like, and is sometimes referred to as the Snoopymobile. I snuck a Snoopy image onto a recent PowerPoint presentation for my British history class - the topic was (what else?) the Voyage of the Beagle. My family and I frequently use Snoopy for our profile pictures on Facebook. At our wedding, we danced to Vince Guaraldi's Snoopy song (it's actually called "Linus and Lucy," but we danced to it like Snoopy dances to it). And so on.

But sometimes Snoopy finds us. At our wedding, at the B&B at which he was staying, my father spotted a doghouse with Snoopy's name painted across it. Last May, during my fevered ramble through western Oklahoma, I found Snoopy drawn in chalk on a sidewalk outside a Joeyish cafe in Woodward. A few months later, on Joey's birthday, my mother and I stumbled upon a set of Snoopy mugs just before gathering for a birthday dinner, so we bought them and distributed them as party favors.

We may even get Snoopy engraved onto the bench that we're placing near Joey's grave. If that seems insufficiently somber for a cemetery, well, that's the point. It's a way of saying that we the living will continue to dance and to fly our doghouses through the sky. We will let our lives become as big as Snoopy's, as big as Joey's, and when we go to visit him we will sit on that bench and tell him about all the wonderful things that we've done, about how we got shot down behind enemy lines and ended up dining and smooching and dancing with a charming little French girl, about our ongoing quests to become world-famous astronauts and detectives and chefs, about our tremendous ice-skating exploits and our failed political campaigns. And in between visits we will keep all these little Snoopies beside us, and we will watch Snoopy on television, and we will read about him in the newspapers, and we will just laugh and laugh and laugh.

What the Living Do

I'm very conscious that it's been a while since I posted anything. It bothers me that I'm so busy with other things - trivial things, in the grand scheme - that I can't seem to find the time to write about my brother, although of course he's always on my mind. Right now I'm in my office, waiting for a student to finish up an exam, and it has occurred to me to post a link to a poem that I heard on the radio today. Marie Howe is, I gather, a moderately obscure poet who came to the attention of Terry Gross (of NPR's "Fresh Air") recently, after a poem of hers appeared in a new anthology of twentieth-century poetry. The poem is about her younger brother, who died of AIDS in the late 1980s, and it captures something of what it's like to become absorbed with trivialities in the face of profound sadness. Rather than being resentful, however, it suggests that those very trivialities are what makes living so wonderful - to have the luxury of shopping for hairbrushes or searching for a parking space is a profound privilege, because just to be alive is a profound privilege.

Anyway, here it is. My student must be nearly finished by now, and I need to go find my car and start my commute home.

Ways in Which My Brother Resembled Evelyn Waugh

We didn't know what to do last Christmas, so we decided to hold a book swap. Two book swaps, actually: one with the family in Oklahoma City and one among friends in Washington, DC. The book I drew was the one submitted by Kate, a biography of Evelyn Waugh by Paula Byrne called Mad World (Kate, incidentally, drew mine, A Reader on Reading by Albert Manguel). I've written previously about Evelyn Waugh and Joey; Waugh was, as near as I can tell, his favorite writer, and I always sensed that one reason for this was that he found something in Waugh that he identified with, a certain way of relating to the world that coincided with his own. Reading Mad World confirmed this suspicion.

The book is a sort of dual biography, with Waugh on one side and the family that inspired the characters in Brideshead Revisted on the other. It's capably written, but the tone is a bit breathless and the prose a bit platitudinous for my taste; I also felt Byrne wanted me to be more scandalized by Waugh's undergraduate dabblings in homosexuality than I really was. Still, it was an absorbing read. One of its great strengths is that it quotes copiously from what other people said about Waugh as well as from his own private letters. This creates a complex, multifaceted portrait of the man: people look different when we see them through the eyes of those who knew them, and it's fascinating to compare those external assessments with the person's own self-presentation. As I was reading I began to note points of similarity between Waugh and Joey, some of which are apparent in Waugh's novels but others of which I hadn't considered before.

I therefore offer the following list of the ways in which they resembled one another, not because I think Waugh's life somehow holds the key to Joey's, or because I think there's some mystical connection between the two (although I do like to imagine them sipping brandy together in some book-lined corner of the afterlife), but mostly because reading about Waugh helped to clarify and remind me of things about Joey. I am, like most people who knew him, terrified of forgetting what Joey was like, so it's useful to have another person out there whose experiences, habits, and tastes were so similar and so well-documented that they can act as a sort of prompt for my memories of Joey - an external hook on which to hang my own recollections.

The list:

1) Waugh had expensive tastes - especially in hotels, meals, drinks, and books. Waugh always stayed at the finest hotels and consumed the finest comestibles, even when these things exceeded his means. This, as anybody who's been reading this blog knows, also describes my brother. Waugh also had a passion for rare, finely bound books, especially if they were on handmade paper (his father worked for a publishing house and seems to have instilled this taste in him). He once told his wife that if their house ever caught fire, she should save the books first and then the children; children, after all, were replaceable, but the books were not. I can imagine Joey making exactly the same joke (at least I think it was a joke). I plan to return to the topic of Joey's books in a later post.

2) Waugh spent much of his early adulthood leading a peripatetic life. For much of his twenties he traveled the world and wrote about it, priding himself on his ability to pack up all his possessions and move anywhere at a moment's notice. He traveled to Guiana, Ethiopia (twice), the Arctic (where he almost died), and several other places during this period, writing a few jaundiced but mediocre travel books along the way. When he was back in England he stayed with his parents and his friends, drifting from setting to setting like one of the charming opportunists of his novels. Joey didn't live quite long enough to do all the world traveling that he wanted to, but he certainly had a Waugh-like dearth of possessions, and for most of his adult life he also had no fixed abode. The one apartment he did have for a few years in Arlington, Virginia, was certainly fixed, but it was no one's definition of an abode. I know because I tried to sleep on the couch there once or twice.

3) Waugh enjoyed drinking and valued friends who would join him in great bouts of rowdy drunkenness. I'll say no more on that topic.

4) The friendships Waugh formed in college were among his closest and most lasting. Waugh's background was solidly middle-class, but at Oxford he became acquainted with the dissolute world of the declining aristocracy, and this became his preferred milieu for the rest of his life. Waugh was frequently accused of snobbery, and he undoubtedly was a snob, but he always remained one step removed from the callow selfishness and ridiculous excess that characterized the Bright Young Things of the jazz age. Indeed, this is what made his novels so funny: he was simultaneously fascinated by and disdainful toward the people of his own social circle, and he could make them incredibly entertaining on the page. Joey's circle at UVA was not quite of this sort, of course (hi, guys!), but I think he was similarly fascinated and appalled by the moneyed classes that populate that school (an aristocracy of an altogether different sort), partly because his of his own somewhat provincial background. Joey's close friends, of course, were much more like Joey than Waugh's aristocratic friends were like Waugh, but they were similarly hard-won. Like Waugh, Joey took a few years to find his niche. Once it turned up, however, it became a very cozy niche indeed (see #3).

5) During parties or large gatherings Waugh had a tendency to clam up, observing but not joining the mayhem, gathering material for his books. Among small groups of close-knit friends, however, he dazzled with his wit and charm. Many people said that he was the funniest person they ever knew, and this may be why he had so many friends, or at least so many friends of a certain type: his friends were people who valued laughter and abhorred bores. His letters were riddled with inside jokes, many of them so incomprehensible to outsiders that they became a sort of secret code (several of his books were that way, too). If you knew Joey, then you know that most of the above describes him as well. One day I'll print out all of his emails to me and turn to them when I feel like spending a little time in his presence.

6) Although Waugh had a reputation for curmudgeonry, he was really much softer than he seemed. Waugh built his reputation writing scathing, bitter satires of the modern world, but his best-loved novel (though hardly his most representative) is a long, nostalgic paean to a world of refinement, taste, and beauty that he believed was being bulldozed by progress. Beneath the smirking exterior there was warmth and gentleness and a shameless, even goopy sentimentality. Similarly, Joey could often affect weary irritability, and he fairly exuded unsurprisability (except when driving), but you didn't have to scratch too hard to find the goop hidden within. Indeed, with Joey, you often didn't have to scratch at all.

7) Many of their closest friends were women with whom they were not romantically involved. Intimate but platonic male-female friendships shouldn't be that unusual in our culture, but they are; they were even more so in Waugh's day. I think what lay behind these friendships was a respect for women and a genuine delight in their company, and this, in turn, made Waugh and Joey safe and appealing friends. While Joey certainly had plenty of male friends and enjoyed many conventionally male activities - especially sports - he was never a dude's dude. Even when he played football in high school he was never one with the jocks. He was too sensitive and kind (and smart) to ever feel comfortable among the chest-thumping, beer-swilling, fag-bashing knuckle draggers of the world, but in our corner of America there weren't that many alternative models of masculinity around. The company of women was probably, for Joey, a refuge from the coarseness of that world; and of course Waugh spent much of his life surrounding himself with people and things that would shield him from a similar coarseness.

8) Both Waugh and Joey reveled in extended periods of inactivity. In fact, they elevated inactivity to an art form. Waugh frequently berated himself for his laziness, but a lazy person wouldn't write the books Waugh wrote or travel the places Waugh traveled. Joey, I think, would more accurately characterize his lifestyle as one of targeted, carefully apportioned activity. Energy, to him, was a finite resource that one shouldn't squander on just anything, it was something to be saved up, even to the point of hording, and then deployed at the moments when it will be the most effective. With Joey, periods of inactivity were nothing more than latent activity. What might look like lethargy to most people - summers spent lolling on the couch, mornings spent snoozing in bed - were for him simply periods of "resting up" before the next big exertion, like a battery returned to its charger.

There are probably as many differences between Joey and Evelyn Waugh as there are similarities, but the differences don't interest me. What interests me is catching a glimpse of my brother in a biography of someone whom he admired and with whom he identified. It pleases me to think that others who read this book will also, without even knowing it, be reading about Joey.

My Best Man

I got married just about a year ago, and Joey wasn't there.

He was supposed to have been my best man. I asked him a few months before the wedding, on the phone, in the course of a conversation ostensibly about something else. It was our way to bury the lead (as they say in the newspaper business), to act as if nothing in the world was surprising or shocking or scary or exciting or really worth much more than a smirk and a shrug. So I shrugged him my request and he shrugged me his reply, but my heart was racing as I asked him, and I knew from his casual "thanks", offered just before we hung up, that he was touched. It happened just as I predicted it would.

But I really didn't know what to expect from him as best man. Would he try to organize some sort of bachelor party? Would he give some sort of moving or funny speech? I was never in any doubt about who should be my best man - I knew who my best man would be long before I knew who I would marry - but the role of best man would have required something of Joey that was not normally part of our emotional repertoire. To be a best man requires, during the toast anyway, a certain emotional candor: you can joke and tease and tell ribald stories if you like, but at some point you have to become sincere, even a little hokey, as you wish the couple all the happiness in the world and express your unfailing love and support.

Joey and I did not do hokey, at least not in front of each other, and especially not when others were looking. We had both served as best men in other weddings (indeed, I had recently been the dude of honor at the wedding of my friends Emiko and Steve), and, although I don't know anything about the sort of toasts Joey would give, I imagine he went for the same balance of wit and sincerity that I had attempted in mine. But to be honest, had it been his wedding, I would have struggled. The wit would not have been a problem, and there are plenty of embarrassing stories I could have told, but the sincerity? You might as well ask me to take my clothes off and dance on the table. I could do it for other people, but not for him.

When our mother turned fifty, her friends threw her one of those "when I am an old woman I shall wear purple clothes and a red hat" parties. Honestly. I'm not sure what all the components of the party were, but I do know that one element was a sort of scrapbook to which Joey and I were asked to contribute something - a poem, if I'm remembering correctly - and we both complied with the request. Some time later, when we were both back home, our mother offered to let us see the scrapbook, but we both declined. We hadn't seen each other's poems, and we didn't want to. In fact, I distinctly remember explaining to her that I didn't want to see Joey's poem because then I would lose all respect for him, a sentiment with which he expressed his firm agreement. I knew that my poem had been heartfelt and sincere, and I feared his had been the same, and I no more wanted to see his than I wanted him to see mine.

I should point out that we were usually this way with everybody, not just each other; for complex reasons having to do with nature, nurture, gender, a swelling in the part of the brain that controls motor functions, and probably something resembling insecurity, we did not offer the world many glimpses behind the curtain. We were both growing out of it, I think, allowing more and more people to see our vulnerabilities and so forth, but that is much easier to do with people you haven't known your whole life. We had had twenty-eight years of brotherness through which to develop a rhythm, a style of interaction, that was simultaneously intimate - like speaking-in-code intimate - and aloof, and there was no way that was going to change without a prolonged and deliberate act of will. Or wills.

I like to think that he would have indulged in a bit of hokey sincerity in his best-man toast, but I really can't say how likely that was. I do think I had been trying to tear open the curtain a little bit in those last few months. My asking him to be my best man, subdued though it may have been in the execution, was itself quite a bold step in that direction. Several months earlier, Kate and I had decided that we would tell him, before we told anyone else, that we were engaged. That was another heart-racing moment, sitting in a darkened Nashville pub with Kate beside me, as I waited for a suitably inconspicuous moment to tell him our news with as much nonchalance as I could muster. He adjusted himself in his chair and smiled, which was how I knew he was moved, but otherwise he accepted the news as calmly as he would have accepted the news that we were planning to buy a new toaster.

I tried several times in the following days, as we drove together on what would be our last road trip to Oklahoma, to draw him out a little on the subject - I said how weird it was to be getting married, I even asked him if he and Tina might do the same thing someday - but all I got were evasions and monosyllables, although he did finally say that he "wouldn't be surprised" if he and Tina might someday get married. "Well," I thought (but didn't say), "I should certainly hope you wouldn't be surprised."

This is what I was up against. But as I said, this was difficult territory for me, too; neither of us quite knew how to show one another the men we had grown up to be. But I do think we would have gotten there in time, and the wedding would have accelerated that process substantially, whatever sort of toast he ended up giving.

As it happened, four people stood in for Joey on the day of our wedding. Our three cousins - Clay, Michael, and Jake - stood beside me during the ceremony, and my old friend Jason gave the toast. They'll never quite know just what that meant to me. And the wedding, well, if you've been reading this blog for a while - and, of course, if you were at the wedding - then you know what the wedding itself meant. The word that keeps returning to me is "elevated." It elevated me, us, leaving us on a higher plane - permanently, I think - where everything glows just a little bit brighter. It's a paradox, but it's true, that in his absence he somehow became more present, as if his energy and his love had been rerouted through all the other people there. And if that's not hokey sincerity, I don't know what is.

I've just been reading the last of the Tennyson poem tonight, and it also ends with a wedding. Tennyson's sister had been engaged to his friend Hallam (the object of the elegy), and several years after Hallam died she married someone else, in the same church where their father and other family members were buried. The closing sections of the poem explore the way grief can become folded into joy - both emotions are, after all, expressions of love - and there was one section in particular that struck me. The poet is addressing his dead friend, remembering an earlier time when he was able to shake off his grief (when he "rose up against my doom") and hoping that he might be able to do so again now (to "slip the thoughts of life and death" like an "inconsiderate boy"). It goes like this:

Oh, wast thou with me, dearest, then,
      While I rose up against my doom,
      And yearn'd to burst the folded gloom,
To bare the eternal Heavens again,

To feel once more, in placid awe,
      The strong imagination roll
      A sphere of stars about my soul,
In all her motion one with law;

If thou wert with me, and the grave
      Divide us not, be with me now,
      And enter in at breast and brow,
Till all my blood, a fuller wave,

Be quicken'd with a livelier breath,
      And like an inconsiderate boy,
      As in the former flash of joy,
I slip the thoughts of life and death;

And all the breeze of Fancy blows,
      And every dew-drop paints a bow,
      The wizard lightnings deeply glow,
And every thought breaks out a rose.

A sphere of stars about my soul: that was me, pretty much, just about a year ago. And, when I think about it now, every thought does, indeed, break out a rose.

P.S.

An addendum to my previous post:

In another bit of interconnectedness, as I was reading Tennyson's poem I came across a stanza that went, "Adieu, Adieu for evermore", and, glancing down to the footnotes, I saw that Tennyson was consciously echoing a lament by the ancient Roman poet Catullus for his brother. That one goes like this:

Through many peoples and many seas have I travelled
to thee, brother, and these wretched rites of death
I bring a last gift but can speak only to ashes
Since Fortune has taken you from me
Poor brother! stolen you away from me
leaving me only ancient custom to honour you
as it has been from generation to generation
Take from my hands these sad gifts covered in tears
Now and forever, brother, Hail and farewell.

That last line (and probably the rest of the poem) clearly inspired the Jack Yeats painting that I nearly fell into a few months ago in Dublin, which I mentioned some time ago.

That's all for now. I'll have more again soon.

Signs and Wonders

There are times when I feel like something's dragging me around by the nose.

Last week I drove to Oklahoma to spend Joey's birthday with my parents (he would have been thirty). Long drives, like long books, are meditative and they help me feel closer to Joey - especially on the stretch of I-40 east of Oklahoma City, which we drove many times, separately and together, and where stories or fragments of stories jut out like mile-markers along the route: Memphis, West Memphis, De Valls Bluff, Little Rock, Conway, Lake Eufala, Shawnee. Actually, I never spent any time with Joey in Little Rock, but I knew he'd gone there once to visit the Clinton Library and other things, and I remember him encouraging me to check the city out. In the last year I've stopped there a few times - it marks the halfway point between Nashville and OKC and makes a convenient motel stop - and have done a little exploring, but I've really never given the city much thought.

After I'd passed through Little Rock and Conway on Thursday morning I plugged my iPod into our new car's fancy stereo system (fancy because it has an iPod jack) and listened to an episode of This American Life that had been sitting unplayed in my podcasts folder for a few weeks. One of the two stories in that episode was about a troubled teenager in Little Rock and the social worker who tried to help him, and I thought, huh, Little Rock.

When I passed into Oklahoma I put on an album by James McMurtry, which our friend and fellow Okie-expat Adam had recommended to me. James is the son of Larry, the novelist with the bookstore in Texas about which I've written, and I had listened to a few songs and knew that a lot of them were about living in this part of the country: one is called "Out Here in the Middle," and another is a long and goofy song called "Choctaw Bingo," about an Oklahoma family reunion on Lake Eufala. The part about Lake Eufala came over the speakers just as I was about to drive over that very lake, and I thought, huh, Lake Eufala.

(The next few paragraphs might look like non sequiturs, but please indulge me:)

For the past few weeks I've been dipping in and out of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's long poem, "In Memoriam." It's an elegy for a friend of his youth who died suddenly at a very young age. As with Little Rock, I had never given much thought to Tennyson (whom Joey and I had, from a very young age, always called Alfred Lloyd Tennyson); I believe I regarded him as a bit stodgy, although I had never actually read enough of his work to justify such an opinion. Then, a few weeks ago, another podcast to which I subscribe, the BBC Radio 4 program "In Our Time," happened to devote an entire program to the poem, and I decided to check it out from the library and give it a whirl.

Much of the poem is tangled and dense (although my library copy has good footnotes and someone has thoughtfully underlined important passages in pencil), but there is much about it that I like. There's an early passage about how inadequate it feels to write about grief - inadequate but necessary. It goes:

I sometimes hold it half a sin
     To put in words the grief I feel;
     For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
     A use in measured language lies;
     The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er
     Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
     But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

I know what he means about wrapping oneself in words like weeds, and I know what he means about the inability of words to fully reveal the soul. So I kept reading.

There's a lot in the poem to chew on (it's 100 pages long), and I'm considering buying myself a copy so that I can return to it from time to time over the years (Queen Victoria, a great connoisseur of grief, reportedly kept a copy by her beside next to the Bible). It is, among other things, the origin of the phrase, "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all," which has become a bit of a hackneyed platitude, of course, but within the context of the longer poem it still sounds fresh and penetrating.

So one way I've been marking Joey's birthday is by driving and another is by reading. A third is by exploring. On Saturday I went down to the Wichita Mountains, hoping to take advantage of the recent cold front (which had knocked us down to the other side of 100) and do a little exploring among the boulders and buffaloes we had visited as children. I was a bit pressed for time - I had a lunch engagement - so it wasn't as leisurely as I would have liked, but still I managed to see some prairie dogs and buffalo and to get out and walk along a hill for a few minutes. In fact, I gave myself precisely thirty minutes to walk along a path I'd never walked before, hoping that it would lead up a nearby hill, and I became a little discouraged as, nearing the fifteen-minute mark and the point at which I'd need to start walking back, I found myself skirting the bottom of the hill instead of walking up it. Then, at about thirteen-and-a-half minutes (I get very precise about time when I'm on a schedule), I rounded a bend and saw a series of giant boulders leaning upward into a small peak. It wasn't the hill I'd hoped to climb, but I clambered up it anyway, using the boulder-clambering skills that I'd first developed with Joey among identical rocks on nearby mountains in our youth, and sat at the highest point for a few minutes to catch my breath and take in the modest view. Had that small mound been just a little further along the path, I believe I would have turned back before I saw it.

Later that day, back in OKC, I read a bit of the Tennyson which considers the possibility that we're all part of a universal soul, where we will encounter the departed again someday. That idea has always seemed pretty namby-pamby to me, but I read it anyway:

That each, who seems a separate whole,
      Should move his rounds, and fusing all
      The skirts of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul,

Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
      Eternal form shall still divide
      The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet:

And we shall sit at endless feast,
      Enjoying each the other's good:
      What vaster dream can hit the mood
Of Love on earth? He seeks at least

Upon the last and sharpest height,
      Before the spirits fade away,
      Some landing-place, to clasp and say,
"Farewell! We lose ourselves in light."

Those last few lines made me think of my modest perch atop the boulders in the Wichitas. If I were looking for evidence of some such thing as a universal soul, or if I were trying to show that the energy of the departed dissolves into the world and manifests itself in other forms, then finding that boulder at the last minute seems like decent circumstantial evidence, at least.

Circles within circles, one thing points to another, which points to another. My mother and I tried to go to the Full Circle Bookstore on Joey's birthday yesterday (I was planning to buy a copy of the Tennyson as well as a great big Dickens novel), but we got there just a few minutes after they closed. We had time to kill before meeting folks for a birthday dinner, so we went across the street to the mall, and then I suggested we pop by a discount clothing store so that I could buy some shorts. They didn't have any good shorts, but as we were wandering the aisles we found a single box of Peanuts mugs, most of which had Snoopy on them and one of which had Sally saying, in a speech bubble, "Nobody ever tells me anything!" This phrase was Joey's mantra for years - mostly because we often did, in fact, forget to give him important pieces of family-related information, and partly because he enjoyed playing the martyr. So I bought the mugs, on the theory that they were a sort of compensation for not having been able to buy books that day at Joey's favorite bookstore. After a delightful dinner with family and old friends, at a restaurant that used to be another restaurant in which a little baby Joey had long ago thrown a famous temper tantrum, we distributed the mugs as party favors.

The other thing I've been reading lately is Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, which is built around the French dude who walked across the Twin Towers on a tightrope in 1974. I didn't realize this when I started it, but it's mostly a collection of stories about grief, specifically stories about the people who survive another's death and somehow manage to keep making life happen. And I'm pretty sure there's a metaphor there with the tightrope walker who, surrounded by death on all sides, nevertheless manages to hop and wave and feel transcendent up there in the air.

I finished the novel just a couple of days ago, and at the end McCann includes an author's note indicating that the title of the book comes from a Tennyson poem. I read that and thought, huh, Tennyson. The author's note also says something that I quite like: "Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told."

One more thing. Most of the novel is set in New York, but toward the end we meet a character who lives in the South (in 2006) and is working with survivors of Hurricane Katrina. She lives, in fact, in Little Rock, and she spends a paragraph or two in an area along the river, on the outskirts of that town, called the Natural Steps. I'm passing back through Little Rock on my home in a day or two, and I'm thinking, huh, Little Rock.