Youth

My father's namesake in a photo taken in September 1897, when he would have been about six. According to the inscription on the back, part of which is not legible, the location is Seventh Avenue and Thirteenth Street in N. Y. City, by which I assume Manhattan is meant. I would like to think that the object he's holding in his hand is a pencil box.

The boy later served in the First World War and received a Distinguished Service Cross, which I still have, for his actions at Meurcy Farm on August 1, 1918. The award was posthumous, as he died in battle on October 15th of the same year. The Army chaplain Father Francis P. Duffy decribed him as "one of the best liked youths in the regiment."

Fugitive lyrics

In 1975 I took a course taught by a folklorist who had a parallel career as the producer of a number of commercial recordings of folk music. Though the course was aimed at grad students and I was only a sophomore, I was allowed to enroll, which probably wasn't such a great decision all around as it turned out, but the semester did at least leave a few lasting impressions. In particular, I recall two songs he played us in class that came from recordings he had made in the course of field work in the UK. I still remember parts of them almost verbatim (no doubt because they were off-color), and since I can't find any trace of the exact lyrics (though they must be documented somewhere), I present them here.

The first was a version of the notorious comic song known as "Seven Nights Drunk" or "Our Goodman." The premise of the song is that the singer, a habitual drunkard, is being cuckolded by his wife. When he presents her with the evidence of this, which is increasingly unmistakeable as the song progresses, she blames it on his drunken befuddlement and comes up with one far-fetched explanation after another to account for what he thinks he sees. A typical first verse goes as follows:

As I went home on Monday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a horse outside the door, where my old horse should be
So I called me wife, the curse of me life, will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that horse outside the door where my old horse should be.
Ay you're drunk, you're drunk you silly old fool
As drunk as drunk can be
That's a lovely sow that me mother sent to me
Well it's many a day I've travelled, a hundred miles or more
But a saddle on a sow, sure I never saw before.

The lyrics go downhill from there, depending on the version, but the final one below is typical:

As I went home on Sunday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a thing in her thing where my old thing should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that thing in your thing where my old thing should be
Ah, you're drunk,
you're drunk you silly old fool,
still you can not see
That's a lovely tin whistle that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But hair on a tin whistle sure I never saw before

The last verse I remember was similar, but instead of a tin whistle it's "a rubber tree" or "a rubber tree plant," and the last line (which I've probably Americanized) was "But a rubber tree plant with hair at the roots I never done seen before."

I haven't been able to identify the other song, which was sung by two British sisters who weren't professional performers. With the tape recorder running the song had a refrain of "Just you remember when you're kissing your man / he's trying to get another kiss from you as soon as he can!" Only when the machine was turned off would they agree to sing the saltier version, which ran "Just you remember when you're kissing your man / he's trying to get another rattle out of your tin can!"

Looking back now, I wonder how much my memory has distorted the details. (Did I, perhaps, borrow the "rubber tree plant" from "High Hopes"?) But in a way that distortion is the whole point: that's how oral tradition twists and preserves material from one generation to the next.

Intruders

For a couple of years when I was a kid my father and I used to traipse through the woods on what had once been farmland, looking for old foundations that might indicate a household dump somewhere not far off, where, if we were lucky and dug carefully with a trowel or a shovel, we might find patent medicine bottles in amber or cobalt blue, or maybe even a handblown flask whose glass would be flecked with bubbles of nineteenth-century air. If we were on water supply property we'd bring our fishing rods for cover — angling was permitted, trespassing was not — but as far as I remember no one ever called us on it, and encounters with anyone else in those woods would have been few and far between. Now and then we'd find a ruined building that was still standing, surrounded by vegetation, its insulation mixed with mouse nests and its shingles decaying, but those were too new to bother with, offering nothing but beer cans and waterlogged magazines.

My father was a surveyor by profession, and the company that employed him secured a large contract for laying out lots on a tract of a thousand acres or so that had been purchased for development. Most of it was second growth woodland, hilly and criss-crossed with stone walls, but there was also a low area that still served to grow corn up until the time the developers started work. There was an abandoned house still standing on the property, and under the pretext of reconnoitering for purposes of the survey we went one day to take a look around. I don't remember much about it now except that the building had at least three stories and must have been a comfortable farmhouse a few decades before.

We found a way in and walked the rooms. How many years they'd been unoccupied is hard to say; there was some story about an elderly widow living in a nursing home who had finally died. Certainly there was nothing useful still in the house; whatever furnishings had any value had long been sold or taken away by relatives or just looted, and the only thing I remember with certainty is that there was a cupboard that was still — bizarrely — neatly stocked with glass jars of vichychoisse or borscht. As we were exploring we heard footsteps on the wooden floor and a kind of desperate wail, and after a few seconds a very large and frightened Great Dane appeared. It couldn't have been left behind by the former owner — it had been too long — and no doubt it had found a way in as we had, and maybe couldn't find its way out. My father shooed it away and it disappeared deeper into the house.

We left empty-handed. The house was torn down not long after. There's no trace of it now.

"What Is Jazz?"

The poem below was printed in a local newspaper in 1966. As the name of the poet would mean nothing to anyone who didn't know her personally I choose to keep it private.

What Is Jazz

jazz is America's song
it's freedom
it's bebop and blues
it's bourbon street and harlem
jazz has a pulse
not a beat
(jazz is a live beast
not a metronome)
it skids and slides
it laughs and sobs
jazz can talk
it talks about yesterday and tomorrow
but mostly about today
about right now
about steamy cellars, hot coffee
and that guy sitting next to you
his troubles
his blues
and that girl he loves
jazz is young
it's always the new thing
it's always out
it wanders
alone
it's tough; it's gutsy
jazz is brave
it does what it feels
not what's right
not what's good
jazz is people who are out
people who walk the streets
it doesn't hide
lice on rats
cold-water flats
jazz gets in
it's real
it's dirty
but jazz never lies to you
it tells you when it hates
it tells you when things are rotten
then it throws back its head
and laughs
it says
man, don't let things get you down
relax baby
enjoy yourself
like this, man
then it bops off
and lets off with a good earthy roar
and ya smile and say
hi bud can I buy you a beer?
what is jazz?
jazz is life, fella
jazz is life.

Chicoutimi

One year when I was a kid we took a family camping trip to Quebec. I don't remember much about the trip except that we stayed at least a night or two in both Montreal and Quebec City; by now whatever specific memories of those cities I obtained at the time have long since merged with those of earlier trips and a later one I made as an adult. But I know that we headed north out of Quebec City, probably traveling through the Parc national de la Jacques-Cartier, stopping at campgrounds that I remember as being sparsely occupied, and here and there fishing meandering streams and ponds with cobbled shores. The road snaked through swamps and forests, and there were probably beaver lodges and maybe a moose or two. It was a Francophone area, and one morning when I was dispatched to fetch water from the campground's well a boy a year or so younger than me (he was the son of the couple who ran the campground) ran ahead of me, took my bucket, and worked the well-pump for me. When he was done I said merci — probably the only French word I knew — and he responded merci beaucoup, distinctly emphasizing the second word. Was he correcting my manners, or simply acknowledging that I had respected his assigned domain? For a long time I puzzled over the significance of this trivial exchange.

We continued north, heading for a small city that is today simply a borough of the larger city of Sanguenay, which stands on the river of the same name. I don't know why we had chosen that destination — possibly it was just mere curiosity — but as we entered the city we could see the river ahead of us, or at least that's how I remember it now. As we passed through an intersection a car ran a red light and collided with the front bumper of our truck. No one was hurt. When the police arrived they spoke to the young woman who was at the wheel of the car. Permis?, they asked. She didn't have one. She was barely older than I was, and had taken her parent's car without their knowledge.

Calls were made to insurance companies and, language barriers having been overcome, a local body shop was found. We probably spent a night in Chicoutimi, but if so I remember nothing about it. As soon as the damage was set to rights we headed south for home.

Missed connections

There were plenty of other kids in the neighborhood when I was small, and most of the time I played with them, but I had another friend who lived maybe three or four miles away, which meant that for us to get together, outside of school, one of us had to be driven. There wasn't, in the end, anything particularly special about our friendship, and I long ago lost track of him, though we never had a falling-out. What I really remember about him is that for a long time I had it my head that there was a trail through the woods that began somewhere not far from my house and came out near his. I don't remember why I believed this. It may have originated in a dream, perhaps a recurring one, or maybe it just arose somewhere along the permeable boundary between the real and the imaginary that often characterizes the mind in early childhood. Perhaps in some alternate world the door to which was only briefly open in those years there really was such a path.

The truth is, though, that I did live in a neighborhood largely surrounded by woods and abandoned fields, and though I knew those spaces fairly well when I was young, knew how to access them, knew what wonders or secrets they had to offer, that time is long past. I don't live there anymore, though I'm not so far away that I couldn't go back and take a look around if I really wanted to (and if the current homeowners weren't alarmed by the sight of a strange man wandering around just outside the perimeter of their back yards). In the end, though, that territory is no longer mine. It was a child's world, defined by coordinates of time and space that I've long since breached.

There were trails through those woods, and no doubt there still are, though they may be different from the ones I knew. The curious thing is that of all those pathways now closed off forever the one I remember the clearest is the one that never existed at all.

Thirst

I grew up in a community of eighty or so houses built on a hill leading up from a small man-made lake. In the winter you could see the lake from our house and watch skaters in the distance, if there happened to be any; in the summer the view was mostly occluded by trees. At the summit of the hill there was a water tower, which I suppose is where our water must have come from, after having been pumped up to it from a well somewhere.

The tower, which was set in a patch of woods not far from the uppermost stretch of road, wasn't particularly imposing; I suspect it was only twenty feet high or so. Nevertheless, there was a tale connected with it, of the kind that was told to (or by) half-believing kids around the fire on summer nights when some of us got together to camp out.

The story was that the tower, the inside of which no one I knew had ever seen, was inhabited by some kind of water-dwelling creature of an unknown but uncongenial kind. In normal circumstances it remained safely inside the tower and bothered no one, but it was said that one year, when there was a drought and the water level in the tower fell precipitously and stayed low for a good part of the summer, desiccated bodies — squirrel, cats, who knew what else — were found in the surrounding woods. We avoided the area at night, just to be sure.

Life Underground

When I was a kid I lived in a neighborhood that overlooked a lake, and when we had nothing to do my friends and I would sometimes go down the hill to its far end, where there was nothing much but woods, and hunt for newts or tadpoles in the little stagnant pond that collected in the shadows just across the road. Trout-lilies and wild leeks grew around its edges, and there were trails that led off to places known and unknown.

Just up the road a group of older boys had excavated trenches twenty yards or so back in the woods, covered them with old doors and cast-off plywood, then concealed them under branches, dirt, and leaves, forming a network of winding subterranean passages we were strictly forbidden by our parents to play in, for fear that a cave-in might bury us alive. Naturally we disobeyed a little, and crawled darkly through, inhaling the smell of cool, raw earth. There wasn't much in the tunnels — a stray armored beetle that had fallen in was about all — and I don't remember ever seeing the older boys using them, but they exerted a fascination nonetheless, as if they stood ready for some unspecified but promising future use. It was the height of the Cold War, and people were going underground, digging fallout shelters, tunneling under the Berlin Wall, looking for places to hide. The trenches must have filled in long ago.

Botany

He sought out inconspicuous things that could be only be found by those who already knew that they might be there. He learned that in early spring, if you looked carefully, where the back roads wound through woods, the little flowers of hepatica, unfolding from delicate stems, might be discovered rising a few tentative inches above the remains of last year's fallen leaves, barely visible even to those who passed that way on foot. In the weeks to come they would be joined by anemone and bloodroot, Dutchman's-breeches and trillium, Jack-in-the-pulpit and columbine and dog's-tooth violet, all of them hidden away on shadowy slopes or at the edges of swamps and streams. There was an old cart path, long disused, that ran for a mile or so through the deepest woods, past great outcroppings of rock, and if you were lucky and knew where to look you might come across lady's-slippers, sturdy yellow or pink orchids, sprouting up in tiny colonies here and there, just a few, concealed by boulders and brush until you were almost upon them. Where the brush had been cleared and the canopy opened to let in the full strength of the sun, the colonies disappeared, and it was said that the plants were impossible to cultivate, no matter how hard you tried.

If you crouched down at the base of beech trees, whose giant, smooth trunks, unless they were very well concealed, were invariably scarred with the initials of putative or intended couples, you could often find Indian-pipes, pale, waxy saprophytes that had no chlorophyll of their own and seemed relics of a radically different world. Unassertive and opaque, they did no harm and offered nothing. On the trees and the forest floor there were mushrooms in all sizes and shapes. He knew none of their names nor which would be infallibly fatal if eaten, and so he left them all alone.

On some afternoons, when he climbed to an elevated clearing surrounded by decaying paper birches, he knelt down on the moss that covered the weathered stone and found the red-capped stalks of the lichen they called British soldiers.

Weapons

Every autumn the fire department put on a turkey shoot as a fund raiser. No turkeys were involved — or rather there were turkeys but they were already firmly dead, frozen solid, and stowed in the back of the rescue truck. Instead, the men paid a dollar, lined up, and took turns firing shotguns at a beer coaster attached to the end of a wooden arm. As soon as a shot was fired, the arm would be swiveled away behind a protective barrier, and a man hidden from sight would set a fresh target into place. The coasters were marked with numbers, and once all of the shooters had taken a turn the results were tallied; the contestant who had pierced his target with the greatest number of pellet holes was awarded a turkey, and another round began. There was beer in abundance, cola and hot dogs for the kids. The women, who didn't shoot, stood off to one side.

The boy had never fired a gun before, and could barely wield the heavy shotgun, even though it was the lightest gauge. The kick from the exploding shell left his shoulder sore for days. He competed three times, and never nicked the target.

Many of the men in the neighborhood were hunters, and some belonged to hunting camps upstate where plumbing wasn't part of the package. One winter a man shot a bear, brought it home, and slung it over a tree branch that overhung the road in front of his house. The schoolchildren walking down the hill to the bus stop in the morning gazed up at the icicle of frozen blood that descended from the animal's snout. Someone must have said something to the man because the bear had disappeared by the time the kids came home.

Two houses up the road lived another man and his family, three or four little kids including twins. He had poor vision and an out-of-state driver's license, and he belonged to a patriotic group that sometimes left leaflets on parked cars. It was said that he owned a mortar and had once demonstrated its use to some of the neighbors by firing a can of peas into a nearby pasture full of cows. Once some boys playing in the woods behind his house found a wooden crate with stenciled markings; it seemed to contain some kind of canisters or shells. The boys left it alone, and kept their discovery to themselves. The man dug a fallout shelter deep beneath his lawn and stocked it with provisions in case the Russians attacked. One morning the state police came, seized a quantity of firearms and materiel, and led the man away in handcuffs. A year or so later the family moved away.

Memorial Day

The children were darting in all directions, in blue Cub Scout uniforms with yellow neckerchiefs if they had them or play clothes if they didn't, giggling and hollering and playing tag in the clearing beneath the high pines, ducking behind the enormous trunks, tracing circles around the hulking clapboard frame of the community house. They had marched in the parade, following the band, and had kept as still and silent as they were capable of doing while a bugler played "Taps" and the white-gloved firemen stood crisply at attention. The brocaded flags, borne on poles by the color guard in white helmets, hung laxly, barely stirring in the diffident afternoon breeze. When the riflemen shouldered their arms and aimed into the distance, the children had plugged their ears, then gasped as each salvo of blanks echoed around their heads. The cloud of smoke soon thinned but the smell of gunpowder, acrid but alluring, continued to filter through the crowd.

Later, when the coolers were hoisted out and set down on a patch of lawn, they lined up two by two for sodas, grape or root beer or orange, fishing them out of the melting ice and waiting while the grown-ups plunged can openers through the tinplate tops. Through the triangular holes they sipped the sweet cold liquid that tasted of wounded metal and gingerly waved off the yellow jackets that hovered around their hands. Finally they lined up again for paper cups of vanilla ice cream, which they scooped out, quickly before it could melt, with little wooden spoons. Then they ran off again to play until it was time to go home.

The stone

The field had been abandoned two years before. Someone had come and hauled off the cattle for the winter and in the spring they didn't come back. It had never been much of a pasture anyway, soggy in spots and overgrown with brambles and scrub in others. Left to their own devices the handful of cows must have gone half-wild, their hides a tangle of burrs and beggar's ticks by the time they were rounded up. After that nobody had scythed the grass and without the cows' patient grazing the vegetation had grown up, little sumacs and maples had sprouted and taken hold, creating a new green canopy just a couple of feet off the ground.

The boy hiked down from the road above, the cuffs of his jeans swishing through the high grass, until he came to the little stream that lay just behind a perfect colonnade of cattails. No more than two yards across and half that deep, its waters barely seemed to move, though if the boy dropped a leaf on its surface it would drift slowly off until it disappeared from sight. The stream bed was smooth and yellow-brown; if there were stones buried in the ground beneath they had long since been covered by centuries of silt and fallen leaves. There were tussocks at the water's edge that made for unsteady footing, but a few strides further off a great flat slab formed a bridge across the water, whether set there by a glacier or by some farmer's hand the boy didn't know. He could kneel on the stone and peer into the darkness beneath. In one corner, in perpetual shadow, a spider sprawled in readiness at the edge of an unbroken web.

It was only when he clambered to his feet again and stood blinking in the sunlight that he noticed the pickerel. It lay still and solitary in the water a few feet upstream, its narrow crocodilian snout aimed towards him, its lateral fins pulsing steadily, holding it against the current. The boy figured it couldn't have been more than eight or ten inches long. Its sides were covered in reticulations of green and white, and he thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.