Home > The Diaries > (29)

The Diaries

Four months out -- romancing my reunion

Previous | Next

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent – what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness –
between you, there is nothing to forgive –
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.

It doesn't matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

(It Was Like This: You Were Happy, by Jane Hirshfield)
------------

Good early morning all. It is so good to be writing you today with my cabin windows finally fogged up, covered with moisture. Since Sunday, we have received over seven inches of rain – the first real moisture in over two months. The weatherman reports that we will get more this week and so I will go to town later to pick up seed to sow my bare-dirt pastures in hopes that they will green up again before winter.

It has been a very tough several months out here. The "dog days" of August have been replaced this year by the "dead deer days". A viral disease (epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD)) that normally only kills a handful of deer each year has struck our over-populated deer herds with a vengeance and it is predicted to kill as many as 40% of our deer before the frost kills the tiny deer gnats that spread the disease. Here in my neck of the woods, the epidemic has already killed perhaps 80% of the deer, and the smell of death is everywhere. The disease causes the deer to spike a very high fever and it interferes with their ability to absorb water. So most of the deer are driven to water at the end and die there – in streams, creeks and ponds. I have counted six deer carcasses in the small stream between my mailbox and the paved road (a distance of a little over a mile). And Friday, when I walked a small portion of my land with a prospective buyer, we found three more dead deer. It is all so very depressing, nauseating and unhealthy.

And sad. If you remember, I have written about being greeted by a young doe upon my return to the farm, unafraid of me as she grazed in my yard in the early mornings and late afternoons. She really brought me peace and reminded me of what I had returned to (and hope to maintain) – my wild and hidden hollow home. Last Wednesday, I pulled her dead body out of the creek, not 20 feet from my garden. Her body was so light that I had no problem dragging her myself uphill from the water. I loaded her onto my bush-hog and hauled her body up to my highest ridge, placing her out in the open in hopes that the buzzards would make quick work of her remains. But the buzzards are so engorged by the enormity of the die-off that they did not touch her body for several days. After her, there have been more. Just today, my sadness deepened as I pulled a still-in-velvet buck dead from the same creek, the one who had nuzzled my young doe within sight of my house a month ago (siblings maybe, or soon to be lovers). A first such sighting for me, and now they are both gone.

At this moment, almost one week later, the young doe's remains are dwindling down, but they are still visible. She (and her young buck-companion) may be the first and only deer whose bones I will bury when the buzzards are done. Bury their remains in the old roadside cemetery on my farm, filled with the graves of 30 early 19th century Natchez Trace travelers, their resting places marked with wordless slabs of limestone. Thirty unnamed travelers felled by the vagaries of their adventures, their quest for new lives somewhere else. I will bury my young doe and her young buck with those wayfaring strangers and with two of my favorite dogs – Max, my white German Shepard and Andy, my black one. And now, my unnamed young doe and her young buck – who cared for my land when I could not do so myself.

Ashes to ashes, bones laid next to bones.
The lion will lay down with the lamb,
the young and yearning deer with the dogs.
When it is all over.
When all is said
(or left unsaid)
and done.

But as I said, the dead deer days of August have finally given way to September's cool and mist-filled mornings. And with that change in the fortunes of my farm (and all the life it supports), so too my own fortunes have changed. Not in the sense of employment (though prospects loom on the horizon) or selling some of my land (which also appears imminent), but in my freedom to move around. In a totally unexpected move, my probation officer decided to allow me to attend the 40th reunion of my high school class in my hometown, Columbus, MS. I have received my travel papers (which I must have on my person – as a convicted felon – every time I leave middle Tennessee). And so this Friday, I will wend my way down the Natchez Trace, down the "path of peace" or the "devil's backbone" (depending on whether your historical perspective is American Indian or scared White settler) to the land of my own birth and the birthplace of seven generations of my family before me.

Needless to say, this chance to travel, to see my old friends and classmates, and my family, has got me excited. I am sure that such misty milestones – celebrating the 40th anniversary of anything – help focus all our thoughts on the past. On what it was like way back when, but also on what happened thereafter and what it is like now. Those thoughts have really been my constant companions for the past several weeks, as I prepared to make this first trip out of state in almost two years in order to celebrate leaving my Mississippi home 40 years ago (after being chosen by my classmates as the "senior most likely to succeed"), returning now only because I have the court's "permission" to do so. Humility has replaced hubris, perhaps not a moment too soon.

I do look forward in so many ways to my high school reunion, but mainly as a visual benchmark of where I am now and where I came from. As I come to my 40th reunion, there are certain undeniable facts I must face, among them that I am getting older and have less time ahead of me than I have already left behind me. There are some folks who will be there that I look forward to seeing, but many more old friends who will not be there. Three of my good friends are already dead, others (like my best female friend, BeBe) have severed their ties to my hometown and others have chosen to miss past reunions so I don't expect them to be at this one either. Oh well, it will be informative and definitely nostalgic. Plus I will get to meet a new grand-nephew and the new husband of one of my god-daughters, two people I don't know yet. So all in all, this trip home will be well worth it.

High school for me was a lifesaver, as it is for so many of us (though not all). My folks had divorced when I was nine years old and my mother, my four siblings and I had moved "north" to Chattanooga. I stayed with them for six years, attending Catholic schools (which, despite the omnipresence of black-robed nuns with their rulers and priests with their whiskey breath, were very rough places), excelling in Boy Scouts (which provided a needed respite from our chaotic home) and becoming labeled as a "brain" by my peers. My mother – juggling five kids, a job as an operating room nurse, never enough money but always too many "mother's little helpers" (legally prescribed amphetamines) – would not allow me to participate in sports so that one-dimensional "brainiac" label had no counterbalance. Because we were so poor, she also could not afford to fix our television set when it broke. So for several years, we went en masse to the city library once a week to check out as many books as we could carry home. That emersion in reading started all of us on the right path. At this point, most of her children have advanced degrees and each of us was able to earn scholarships and fellowships throughout our academic careers because of the gift that dirt-poor (and TV-free) living in Chattanooga brought to us.

But life in Chattanooga was very hard in other ways. I was named after my father and any residual/continuing anger that my mother felt for him always was released on me back then. The physical and emotional abuse got to be so frequent that I was ashamed to disrobe in my phys ed classes during my 9th grade because my classmates would see (and comment on) the whelps and scars on my back and legs. Finally, I asked to move back south to live (alone) with my Dad. Through the intercession of an uncle and aunt (Garvin and Gabie) and my parish priest (who later became Tennessee's bishop), that was allowed to happen.

I moved south right before my sophomore year, and immediately set out to become all the things I had not been allowed to be before. I went out for the football team (and struggled as an underweight tackle for two years until my senior year, when I started on both offense and defense until I broke my shoulder). I joined the debate team and, later, got involved in drama, community service and girls. All of this as the only live-in son of a locally prominent physician who saw to it that I was well-clothed, well-fed and otherwise basically left alone. Being left alone was a good thing. It allowed me many days of exploring the woods, rivers and farms of my family's long history there, alone at first and then with guys (and one girl) who became close friends. Though he was quiet and seemed detached (mainly because he was working 80+ hour weeks as a very busy general practitioner), my Dad was glad to have me there with him and proud of me (something that he showed in a number of ways, though some I only recognized years later).

The times were interesting. I graduated in the last segregated, and probably the last drug-free, class at my high school in 1967. So many changes were on the wind. I benefitted from a young radical priest at church who (before he left the priesthood) gave me books to read that I would not find in my high school or city libraries. I was buoyed and emboldened by the wealth of very different friends (because I had finally been allowed to express the many different dimensions of what was me). I benefitted from the reflected respect that I received as my father's son and from the ties that remained from his formerly agrarian life that helped me find work on local farms every summer, pitching hay in 100+ degree summer days for 50 cents an hour, to help me prepare for football. It was all so interesting, so pleasant, so stimulating – so small town life in the still quiescent early 60s. A perfect platform for a slowly-developing subversive, or perhaps just a polyannish yet persistent patriot. (I reflect, you decide.)

Then my senior year, I was elected to a student body office and was named a National Merit Scholar and the world truly became my raw oyster, ready to be swallowed whole. Although I received scholarship offers from dozens of schools (including being approached by two Ivy League schools to play football), I only applied to one – Vanderbilt. It was an excellent school, it was very progressive by Southern standards and (most important) it was within a four hour hitchhike home, back to the willing and open-legged embrace of my high school girlfriend (who had already helped me add sexual precociousness to my developing resume). One of my freshman teachers at Vanderbilt angered me early on by saying that the relationship with that girlfriend would not last the year. He was right – there would soon be other fish to fry (so to speak) – other more worldly women to conquer and then to cuddle (or vice versa).

Even though my life would likely have been very different had I gone elsewhere to school, going "north" to Vanderbilt was also a good place to form myself. I argued with my Dad a few weeks before entering college (about Vietnam and my high school sweetie) and so I showed up to college committed to paying my own way. With a caring, concerned and helpful college administration, that actually happened. I only received a $500 loan from my Dad for my entire four years of college, working my way through school with jobs in the library, the cafeteria, as a research assistant and (my senior year) as the bartender and short-order cook for a popular off-campus hangout. But as enjoyable and world-changing as my time in college was, I have felt no need to attend any of my college reunions. Except one. For my 15th college reunion, I showed up in shorts and a tie-dye shirt, only to discover that most of my hip(pier) friends had not come. So it was Bernie tie-dye and many, many starched and buttoned-down frat and sorority classmates. One college reunion was definitely enough of that, thank you.

But high school – now that is very different. I do want to know where so many of those classmates ended up – physically, emotionally, intellectually, politically – and so I will make that trip south. In preparation, my classmates are assembling an "annual" and a PowerPoint presentation with photos that the rest of us have found and sent in. Searching through my own musty box of long-forgotten pictures, news clippings and other memorabilia, I found a handful to send myself. Of our football team, of five of my best bright-eyed friends, of me holding my tiny girlfriend on my shoulder (and tucking her under my outstretched arm). And of BeBe, who became (during my senior year) my best female friend. I sent those pictures down south, along with my own personal history that included (in part) these answers:

NAME & OCCUPATION OF SPOUSE OR SIGNIFICANT OTHER(S):

Karen Hyatt – PhD candidate in psychology, Santa Fe, NM
Hedy Begay Yazzie – Navajo community leader, Window Rock, AZ
Martha Iversen – Psychoanalyst, San Francisco, CA
Barbara Revo, Labor negotiator, Seattle, WA

CHILDREN & GRANDCHILDREN: I have none, but I am a favored uncle of nine nieces and nephews. My significant others all have children and, with Hedy and Barbara, grandchildren. I have been single for 20 years, but have developed and maintained close relationships with these four very interesting women (among others), who themselves have come to know each other through me. Wish I had learned at Lee High that friendship should be the foundation for every close personal relationship. It would have saved me the "adventures" associated with three failed marriages and BeBe and I might be celebrating our 40th anniversary together sometime soon. (Sigh)

HOBBIES, INTERESTS AND PLANS FOR "THE GOLDEN YEARS": I continue to enjoy life on my 187 acre farm south of Nashville (14 ridges and 13 valleys), and my inclusion in a very close-knit community here. My work as a public health epidemiologist has taken me to many interesting places (e.g., NIH, CDC, New Mexico, Hawaii, Wyoming, Sweden, Belize) and, over the past decade, has allowed me to work with seven American Indian tribes who have taught me a lot. I am also very involved in national efforts to insure that our elections become more secure and verifiable again (see me on film clips at www.eternalvigilance.us). Finally, I am working to return cannabis to the medical pharmacoepia (which led to my recent "adventure" in a federal Bureau of Prisons halfway house. For more information, see www.commonwonders.com/archives/col391.htm and www.saveberniesfarm.com .) I hope to stay active on my farm, in my community and in the political arena for the foreseeable future.

My favorite quote: "We are the ones we've been waiting for."

When I sent this one page summary of my life into our reunion's "annual" assembler, she responded: ‘Bernie, very entertaining – as usual."

So who was this "BeBe", you might ask. Here is how I summarized my first real young woman-friend when I wrote the four women who have all now been my friends for decades – my significant others:

"The woman BeBe I refer to in the updated high school ‘annual' was my best female friend during my senior year -- an artist, a writer, a slight and pretty brunette, my co-lead in the senior class play, the best friend of my girlfriend (who was two grades younger and infinitely more sexually available to me), the classmate selected ‘Friendliest' among our ‘senior superlatives' and someone I grew very, very close to. As I remember, BeBe and I started enjoying long conversations with each other at our local hang-outs after senior play practice. Those conversations continued for the rest of that final high school year together. No topic was off-limits, and that was good because the outside world was changing as rapidly as we were growing up -- Vietnam, civil rights, the emerging counter-culture -- that there was a world of possibilities to parse. We did not hoard the pleasure of each other's company as we might have had we been more traditionally intimate with each other. So those conversations were often raucous affairs with perhaps a half-dozen of our other friends joining in. But I don't remember the others the way I do her – happy, joyous, free, so full of laughter and life.

"BeBe and I stayed in touch with each other throughout college (during which she lost the first love of her life in a car crash). Our senior year in college, BeBe and four of her women friends rented a cabin in the Smokies for their spring break and each of them invited a male friend from their past to join them there. Although by then I was living with the woman (Lillian) who would later become my first wife, I still was honored by the invitation. And I was the only man-friend to show up. As a result, I had a great time with all five of those women, exploring the late fall mountains, building fires for them every morning and night in the cabin's fireplace, doing all the woodsman-like things that I take for granted these days. And talking, once again to BeBe, late into the cold, early spring nights of Tennessee's oldest mountains.

"Then we graduated college and went our separate ways. BeBe met Lillian when she and I lived for a year in Wisconsin and BeBe was in Chicago. But thereafter, BeBe and I have seen each other only one more time -- at my class's 20th reunion. Still emotionally (and perhaps pheromonially) good friends, we danced a slow dance together at the reunion. When the music stopped, BeBe stood on the dance floor for about ten seconds, with her eyes closed and a slight smile on her face. Yes, I know the feeling -- it just gets a little harder to conjure it up as the years slide past (no longer slowly enough).

"It's unlikely BeBe will make it to the 40th reunion. She teaches art at a small college in northeast Tennessee, where her husband teaches English. They have two children, a young man and a young woman. When I sent BeBe the page from our reunion ‘annual' (after finding her again on the Internet), she wrote back a newsy note, saying that they had recently swapped an old drafty house for a more modern one, a home with central heat and a backyard swimming pool. She shared that, this summer, she and her husband Dan had spent the hot days floating lazily in that pool, together.
That is such a pleasant, such a satisfying, soulful image. That quiet, soft and slow, that gently floating life together couldn't have happened to a nicer woman than my old friend, BeBe."

So thanks to all of you once again for the chance to write about and remember those times. I will let you all know how the reunion(s) turn out. In the meantime, I want to end this diary entry with another poem, as apropos to this melancholy moment as the one I started this diary entry with. The first poem (that I found folded among the old pictures and news clippings of my life) was among the letters sent to me long ago by one of my four more endearing and enduring "significant others" – Martha, the San Francisco psychotherapist, one of the brightest and most attractive women I have ever known. Like perhaps (a few) too many, Martha was someone I once fantasized spending my life with, only to trade that in (when we both left DC and she moved west to Montana while I moved south to my hidden hollow home) for furtive and way too-few (though fleetingly fulfilling) weekends together in DC and in New York City, in San Francisco and in Santa Fe, in Yosemite and ... in not nearly enough other places. Thanks, Martha, for still being there, all throughout your ongoing marriage and your two evolving children, and through my own solitary, yet entertaining, "adventures".

This closing poem was written this morning in honor of my high school classmates and of the ways we really were, back when we were too young to know it. Until the next time, enjoy your own encroaching autumn and pray with me for the soon-come end of dead deer days.

Looking Back -- What Really Mattered

Four decades ago and a few seconds more
we left behind our child-like past
we passed together through a common door
to find our futures, at long last.

Though it seemed, so long ago,
that we were different, one from another
we really were much closer,
in our high schoolish laughter
so much whiter, so much straighter,
so much cleaner (though hardly more sober)
than the many others, the ones who
would follow here, forever after.

When, at last, we left the heat
of that loud and musty gym,
clothed in gown and mortarboard,
maroon and white,
into that steamy night
we could not know, could not portend
(did not even comprehend)
that there would be
as many roads, as many trails,
many foot-paths, many futures
leading us away from here
as there were those of us
back then to take them.

We smiled within ourselves and with each other
at our families in the bleachers
at our coaches, at our teachers
Thinking we had arrived, not that we had just started
on the journeys that have now wrapped around
and brought us back here once again,
though older, wiser, fewer now for those departed
from our midst (into the mist)
that we still cannot comprehend.

We look at each other now and try to guess
what bright young thing once filled the dress
of that now laughing gray-haired matron
we try to see beyond the wrinkles
of that bald, still solid patron
who years ago lined up beside us
on the line in that magnolia-scented bowl
were we ever really teammates –
tell me, how did we become this old?

The answer to that question’s easy, though not simple.
We took those first few furtive footsteps
out that common door together, the one we shared
and then some charged and some just sauntered,
others marched or they meandered
down our separate paths, alone or paired.

And all the wonders of the unseen world,
or -- instead -- its sameness, its routine
that our separate lives would bring
marked us deep or marked us gentle
as travelers in time, if not in place
wrote its road-maps on each face
that sit together in this space.

If we would have wondered, if we could have known
where our separate roads would lead us
where our separate paths would leave us
would we have still walked so willing
through our shared, our common doorways,
fleeing from that time’s soft haze
into our own bright, breathless days
that came to mark our means and ways

Well, hindsight’s always perfect vision,
so for me I am still thankful
for those cheap, rose-colored glasses
handed out by fairy lasses
floating just outside our common door
the one through which we left together
that one last time, and nevermore.

Together now, those of us remaining
try to remember, wrapped in soft refraining
of our older, wiser, quieter laughter
what was so important then, what we valued
why we chose that one, or another
to wear the crowns that separated
those favored few from us
and from each other

Now, of course, the answer’s clear
But back then, our choices were so near
to our very young, our unformed views
of what was important, what had worth
what mattered as we strode the earth
that lay ahead, unknown,
outside that common door

Back then, we had few words and fewer crowns,
few worthy attributes than we now know
of what would soon come to really matter.
But today, we could bestow
many more glories, because we now know
what counts as worthy, what we’ve learned,
what’s clearer now than in the youthful haze
that we shared back in those days
when our worlds had not much yet turned.

I look around this crowd-less room,
at the faint, familiar faces – some so fine
of those few friends who have been steadfast
or the ones who slowly faded
or the friendships never made,
their small loss but (so much larger) mine
.
And I see more here to honor,
things we didn’t see before,
that this night, we might give homage
that has not yet been bestowed,
belated crowns to all among us
whose lives have since spun pure gold
from the flax that had been sowed,
that had always been growing just beyond
that long-closed common door.

So step up now or stand in place.
Just know that in your gray-framed face
I see more clearly now and I embrace
the worth that is in each one of us,
what we were given, what grew within us
from the flaxen seeds here sown
in our magnolia-scented world
the only world that we’ve all known.

Besides the ones we thought – back then –
to be most fair, most beautiful and handsome,
today I see ones we could have chosen
to be our most likely to stay well-preserved,
the ones whose soul-lights still burn bright within,
the cutest, the ones most likely still fun to cuddle
the ones most comfortable in their own skin.

Today, besides the ones we deemed most friendly
we could point to, we could choose
the ones most thankful, who are the calmest,
the kindest and the most serene
the sweetest and the most inclusive,
the ones least likely to have been mean.

Today, we could honor others besides the smartest,
we could choose the wisest, most well-rounded,
the best-read and the most open-minded,
the ones most blessed with eloquence
and the ones with the most receptive ear
the ones whose lives were most adventurous
and the ones who have remained
most satisfied with everything that had
always waited for them here.

In the same breath as the one most witty, we could choose
the least caustic, the most refined
the most sophisticated, the most demure
the worldliest, the ones most wealthy in friends and family
the ones whose lives were most filled with laughter,
the most cerebral, most secure.

Together with the ones most athletic, way back when and now,
we could add the ones most healthy, most happy
the ones most different, the least likely to ever change
the always fairest, the most forceful
the most electric, the most well-grounded
the bravest or, at least, the ones least likely to act fearful
the most cautious, the most careful ones,
the ones still most likely to leap before they look
yet also who still smile as they receive
an rueful earful from the rest of us
(the earth-bounded, the hard-working ones).

This list would continue, as it should
if we stayed here forever, if we only could
embrace the more complete knowledge
that we now share for what is real,
what has made -- what still makes --
each of us, nearer now the end,
so superlative, so good.

But, instead, we must remember
that, like everything, this time is fleeting,
that, in this long-awaited meeting,
time is surely slipping, silently, away.
It is not yet midnight, but it is
the evening of our life’s one day.

So we should embrace this moment
– this seamless and solitary night –
we who are now few, we who are still proud,
we who are more wrinkled and more gray,
we who were once and will be forever
the oh so mighty maroon and white
the ones who (long ago) walked together,
magnolia-marked, forevermore,
deeply formed by what we shared,
memories of our time together,
cherished and once so very cared for,
tucked silently and softly, safe inside
our lives’ last common

Previous | Next