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.

A Pudding-Related Miracle

We had a bit of a scare in Nashville last week. The Elliston Place Soda Shop - "Nashville's oldest continuously operating restaurant in the same location" - announced on Monday that it had failed to renew its lease and was closing its doors immediately. It had been, as its qualifier-laden billing suggests, operating in the same location for a very long time, since 1939. That's practically paleolithic by Nashville standards. The reasons for their closing were the usual things: the recession, rising rents, a dwindling customer base. Elliston Place is a typical Southern meat-and-three, or at least what used to be typical, the type of place where you choose your meat, choose your three vegetables (both macaroni and jello count as vegetables, and are among the only items not cooked in pig fat), and follow it up with a shake or some pie or a bit of banana pudding. Unlike most of the other meat-and-threes in town the atmosphere is more retro diner than grungy cafeteria, with red vinyl stools along the counter, formica tables, mini jukeboxes on the tables, and swirls of neon here and there. Well, here, it looks like this:

The entrees and sides are fair-to-middling - you can certainly get better greens and ham elsewhere - but the banana pudding is superb, and the shakes (I hear) are quite nice.

Those of us who care about this sort of thing were quite upset when we heard the news, but I was especially sad. The first time I ever visited Nashville was with Joey in the summer of 2008, and the Elliston Place Soda Shop was our point of rendezvous. He was driving east from Oklahoma City, heading back to Washington after a visit with the family, and I was driving west, killing time between the end of my year in Philadelphia and the beginning of my year in Northampton, in a gap between leases. Neither of us had ever been to Nashville - we'd driven through many times, but never stopped - and so we decided to meet up and explore the place for a day or two. The Elliston Place Soda Shop was recommended in Roadfood, our compass and sextant on all road trips, so we fixed a time to meet there, Joey performed his Priceline wizardry and found us an amazing deal on a lovely boutique hotel, and we hurtled toward each other down I-40.

I got there first (Joey, typically, got a later start than planned) and wandered around in the August heat for a while, poking around a vintage clothing store, exploring an antiquarian bookshop that I have since learned is run by a reactionary bigot and book thief, and finally giving up and going to get some lunch. I think I had chicken and dumplings, I know I had turnip greens, and when Joey finally arrived he immediately decided to order the most ridiculous thing on the menu: a deep-fried pork chop, with greens and macaroni on the side. We also ordered a bowl of banana pudding and split it, at which point both of us nearly exploded.

Then we explored Nashville. We walked down Music Row, thinking we might find some music there, but all we found were office buildings and recording studios. We went downtown and snickered at the kitschy souvenirs - the confederate flag bikinis, the Elvis snowglobes - and spent a good deal of time poking through the Charlie Daniels Museum (free admission!), where we bought matching Charlie Daniels Christmas bobble-heads ($5 each!) before heading over to the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, where we bought George Jones brand bottled water (it was called "White Lightning," but it really tasted just like water). We went to the Nashville Parthenon, ate cheeseburgers at Brown's Diner (it's not in Roadfood, but it is in Hamburger America, our backup guide when all the Roadfood places were closed), listened to some bad music at the Tin Roof (Joey had read somewhere that it was a good place to spot celebrities - it wasn't), and then the next morning we ate sweet-potato pancakes at the Pancake Pantry, possibly the greatest pancake experience either of us had yet had at that point in our lives.

It was a pretty typical Doyle Brothers City Blitz, the sort of thing we'd done earlier that summer in Berlin and Hamburg and would do again in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Madison a year later. Armed with our guidebooks and laptops we would find the coolest neighborhoods, the most ridiculous food, the quirkiest roadside attractions, and then proceed to wear ourselves out trying to squeeze every ounce of experience out of these places. We would walk and walk and walk, often down streets that hadn't seen pedestrians since the advent of the streetcar, popping into bars here and there, muttering jokes and making each other laugh, always assuming that this was the only time we would ever visit this city, always antsy to see more and eat more in the short time that we had there. Relaxed vacationers we were not.

Of course I did return to Nashville, just the next year, in fact, and I've been living here ever since. Had it not been for that first visit with Joey, however, I would almost certainly not be here now. I only applied for my present job after discovering that it was within commuting distance of Nashville, and I only knew that I would enjoy living in Nashville because Joey and I had been here together and had decided, based on our own idiosyncratic criteria, that it was a pretty good town. In some ways it felt like a joint decision between the two of us: it was cool for me to move to Nashville because it was the kind of place Joey and I approved of. And, of course, he'd come visit and we'd do yet more exploring here.

That first visit to the Elliston Place Soda Shop, in other words, knocked over the first in a long chain of still-falling dominoes. For Christmas the next year, after Kate and I had moved here, I gave Joey an Elliston Place magnet, part of a series of magnets and posters depicting famous Nashville landmarks that I intended to spool out to him on birthdays and Christmases in the years to come. The next one I was planning to give him was from the Pancake Pantry, and then if we ever managed to go together to the Donut Den, I'd give him that one next:

So when we heard that Elliston Place was closing, Kate and I decided to go to there one last time for lunch. The day we chose was absolutely sweltering, much like that August day when I walked around the neighborhood waiting for Joey's car to pull up. Unlike that earlier visit, however, this time there was a line out the door of the restaurant and along the sidewalk. Clearly we were not the only ones hoping for one last bowl of banana pudding. We therefore decided, reluctantly, to get lunch nearby and come back later for dessert, but later the line was still too long and the climate was still too wretched, so we came home, bereft of banana pudding and rather despondent. 

But then a remarkable thing happened. On Thursday it was announced that the owners of the restaurant had come to an agreement with their landlord, and the Elliston Place Soda Shop would remain open for at least another five years. I was giddy with relief. Maybe the crowds of suffering customers outside on the sidewalk had had something to do with it - maybe they'd convinced the landlord that the place could still make money, maybe they'd given the owners just the sort of financial boost they needed to afford a slightly higher rent - or maybe the real estate gods had simply recognized how important this place was to me and decided to intervene (the real estate gods have had a lot to answer for lately and could use some good PR). Somebody said early last week that it'd take some sort of miracle to keep the Elliston Place Soda Shop open. Well, miracles have been performed for lesser things than this.

Now I have decided that I owe it to Nashville, to history, and to my memories of my brother to eat as much banana pudding from the Elliston Place Soda Shop as I can, as frequently as I can, in order to help them make rent in the years to come. I may even tuck into the occasional deep-fried pork chop, and I will tip unreservedly.