What would happen, I wonder, If I wrote a poem a day for, like, a year– Would it just become one of those things I do, Every day, Only to survive?
Like feeding the cats in the morning, their crunchy food and treats, George hopping onto the window sill for his, And then their meat at night, rank on the kitchen floor– Martha slinking around the corner for hers, sneaky.
Or like shaving, a daily ritual for me– The feel of a smooth, clean face looking back from the glass, Smelling of water and soap and shaving cream Before I find myself in the shower, again, Rinsing yesterday’s known off to allow today’s evolving mystery.
Would it change me? Make me better? Smarter? More centered? More focused? More myself? Or would it just be one of the many things I do without thinking– Breathing. Dreaming. Eating. Living. Aging. Lying awake at night to think, “Yeah, that was fun …”
And how would I prepare for such a feat? By finally reading the Cohen that’s been on my nightstand for years, Or the slim copy of Howl orthe thicker Leaves of Grass, Both picked up browsing in a used book store, Waiting for ballet class to end.
And what if I tried to do it but failed to do it, even once– Would it become another took for the devil of my mind, Probing me and pricking me and pocking me with regrets, Like running and swimming and eating my vegetables, Now turned as soft and mushy as I sometimes see myself?
Well, I think, it’s like I always say– When faced with the choice of doing something or doing nothing, It’s always better to do something. And the line between the doing and preparing and regretting will erode, Revealing the unity of all our evolving.
Before anything else, and after nothing else, I remember my mother hanging laundry on the line. She and I are on the south side—the short side—of our little, soft-pink house in Cameron, Missouri. The air is clean and damp and warm. A broad expanse of green grass spreads before me, beads of dew sparkling in the sun rising behind us. I am looking to the west, toward St. Joseph, a small city of about 76,000 people just over 30 miles away. My family would move to St. Joseph in April 1968. Because I was born in late March 1966, I would have been barely two years old in my memory, at the most.
Cameron was originally linked by the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad to St. Joseph on the Missouri River and Hannibal on the Mississippi. The tracks ran through the center of town, and the old depot still stands, as a museum. I imagine farmers bringing their crops to town for shipping to the east or west and from there, to anyplace in the U.S. By the time we moved to Cameron, another link between Cameron, St. Joseph, and Hannibal had emerged—a two-lane state highway, U.S. Route 36. It opened in 1922 as Route 8, following the route of an old covered-wagon trail, an big improvement for people wanting to cross the northern part of the state.
Route 36 was important for my family, too. It brought my parents to Cameron in November 1963 after my dad had gotten out of the Army just the month before. A civil engineer, he had begun working for the Missouri Highway Department in Savannah, a small town just north of St. Joseph, before enlisting to avoid being drafted later. He came to Cameron to resume his career with the highway department, and his first job was to help build bridges for Route 36 over the new Interstate 35, heading north from Kansas City to Des Moines, Iowa. He remembers that one job involved a bridge that had a 1,082-foot box culvert that required 26 separate pours of concrete, but almost all I remember of Cameron is watching mom hang laundry.
In that small town, they rented the soft-pink house from a guy in dad’s downtown office. The small, brick office building they worked in is still there, as is the building that housed the dealership where they bought their first car, a dark-blue 1965 Mercury Comet. The single-story hospital where I was born is now a single-story daycare center. The public school where my older sister, Marilyn, attended kindergarten, because the nearby Catholic school didn’t offer early it, is still there, too. But what had been the local community college is now an empty field.
My early memories of the first two years after we moved to St. Joseph are more numerous and a little clearer, but they are not enough to form complete stories. The mystery of my life—as for everyone’s, I think—is how the place where I spent most of my childhood shaped me, for better or for worse.
***
St. Joseph was founded by a fur trader, Joseph Robidoux, in 1843. The town prospered as a jumping-off place for pioneers headed west, but its most famous historical event came seventeen years later with the Pony Express. The Pony Express was a bold experiment to deliver mail from St. Joseph to Sacramento, California, via horseback. Though it lasted just over a year, the Pony Express became forever linked to St. Joseph’s identity and mythology.
In 1940, an archetypal statue of a Pony Express rider on his horse went up downtown. Across the street, the Southwestern Bell building features a triptych relief illustrating the role of the Pony Express, and then the telegraph, in opening the American west—ironically, the telegraph had helped kill the novel-delivery system. A few blocks west, a mural depicts the Pony Express horse and rider morphing into a jet airplane. The German-American Bank building now houses the Pony Express Community Bank. Out on the Belt Highway, near my high school, the Pony Express Motel long boasted a sign with the Pony Express rider astride his horse. The horse’s legs pumped in red neon.
Older cities, such as St. Louis, have long histories of shifting community symbols and identities. Over St. Louis’ 200-plus years, it has been the Mound City, recognizing the Native American earthen ceremonial mounds that once dotted the area; the land of the Crusader King, named for the statue of King Louis XIV erected for the 1904 World’s Fair; and, of course, the Gateway City, due to the glorious Gateway Arch.
St. Joseph, on the other hand, has stuck to its identity as the town where the Pony Express started, plus one other historical event: the 1882 shooting of the outlaw Jesse James. Years ago, visitors traveling west on Interstate 70 toward St. Joseph would find signs promoting the town: “Where the Pony Express began and Jesse James ended,” verbally joining stories of both vision and violence—in other words, the Old West.
In 1968, you could symbolically connect these two events by driving a mile or so south from the Pony Express Motel on the Belt Highway. At the intersection of the Belt and Trevillian Drive, sat the home where Robert Ford had shot James in the back of the head as he straightened a picture. For 50 cents, you could walk through the house and see the bullet hole–even stick your finger in it, before it was framed behind glass.
From the James Home, Trevillian Drive curved around for about a quarter mile to reconnect to the Belt Highway, forming an empty ellipse of earth. Modest homes lined Trevillian Drive on its east side. One of them would be our home from that spring of 1968 until the winter of 1970.
***
Our Trevillian Drive house was very simple. From the street, a driveway, double the width of most driveways because it also served the neighbor’s house, sloped down to a concrete parking area. Mom liked that, dad tells me, because it gave her room for error in the winter—less to worry about sliding into. I remember looking up the driveway from the parking area and feeling very small, the driveway feeling very steep. Beyond the parking area stood a majestic willow tree in the grass of our yard. Marilyn and I played under it a lot, dad says.
Trevillian Drive, 2017.
On the south side of the driveway was a stairwell. If you climbed the stairwell up the side of the house, you could enter on its only floor. Once inside, you could take the stairs to the basement on the left, or enter the kitchen on the right. After the kitchen you entered a floorplan replicated millions of times: dining room, living room, hallway leading back to two bedrooms—my parents’ room and the one I shared with Marilyn—a single bathroom on the left.
That was pretty much it. And though parts of me feel tied to this house, my memories of it are vague and episodic. My sister would have been going to school while I was at home, so most of them involve mom. I remember listening to the morning public-service talk show on KKJO, the city’s AM radio station, in the dining room with her one morning. In my memory, the sky through the dining room window is dark, almost green; while it fills the house with an ominous glow, but dining room feels safe and warm. The radio must have been playing is eerie, three-toned storm alert sound that haunted me for years. I remember watching black and white TV with her during the day. I remember the time I accidentally swallowed a hard butterscotch candy while watching Bewitched and thinking I was going to die; we ended up on that stairwell somehow. Maybe mom had decided to take me to the hospital and it miraculously dislodged or became small enough to swallow on the way down to the car. In any case, I never ate those candies again. I remember the basement seeming like a massive dark place full of old clothes, but it was also where dad’s circular saw and other tools were, which drew me to it. I remember when he built the desk that is still in Marilyn’s old bedroom at our next house. It is built of shiny blonde wood with a timeless mid-century vibe to; we know it will outlast us all. I remember Granny Foote, mom’s mom, coming to stay with us when my brother Paul was born in the summer of 1969, as astronauts prepared to walk on the moon.
***
Some memories may not be memories at all, but extrapolations of memories from photographs. Do I actually remember a particular summer day, sitting in the maple tree in the front yard with the Schubert sisters from down the street, or do I just remember pictures of it? Do I remember the maple tree falling in the yard, or am I confusing it with another tree that came down on the vacant ellipse across the street, during an ice storm, and do I only think I remember that because of mom’s photo of it and her handwritten caption—“The old tree was no match for the ice”? Do I remember the time Uncle Tom and Aunt Sharon drove down from Michigan in the summer after Paul was born, or is it only because we have photos of us all in the living room together?
But memories, whether inspired by events or photographs, are all most of us have of our past—in addition to journals, or the few people still around who remember, or think they do. My fuller memories, the ones that will be the subject of the first volume of my memoirs, do not begin until we had moved to our next house. That house, the one I truly grew up in, the one dad still lives in, is at the end of a block-long street called Plattsburg Avenue. It is a single-block street jutting off of South 28th Street, which was the city’s eastern limit at the time that Ford killed James. I still remember seeing the stop sign at the intersection of South 28th and Agency Road on our early (maybe the first?) visit to the house, and rummaging through its closets with Marilyn, where we found odd-colored, otherworldly rocks and other goodies.
Plattsburg Avenue with “Sold” sign, 1970.
There, I lived an idyllic childhood with Marilyn, Paul, and the two brothers who only knew the Plattsburg house, David and Chris. The house was near a creek that flowed through the Parkway, acres of green space and trees that had been protected from development since the 1920s. I grew up at that creek and in the Parkway—catching crawdads in the summer; “skating” on the ice in our white rubber boots in the winter; sledding down the hills; climbing mulberry trees to pick the fruit and put it in my cereal; playing hide-and-seek in the evening as the fireflies started popping until mom yelled from the back porch to come inside; shooting fireworks; looking for beer cans and rocks; riding bikes with no helmet; wandering the woods and the parks and the streets unaccompanied, with abandon.
Like the Pony Express and Jesse James, all these things happened. But also like the Pony Express and Jesse James, in some ways, maybe they didn’t—or at least, not as I remember them. Time can hide the truth and gloss over the many unromantic parts. My memoir’s goal is to state events as clearly as I can remember them and let the reader decide where their truth lies, because in many ways, I’m not sure myself—or why I remember them at all.
***
The Parkway near our Plattsburg Avenue house.
Almost 20 years after I left home, I went back to St. Joseph for a week to help my dad paint the house. At first glance, not much seemed to have changed in the town since I had left home in 1984. The Parkway and was still a stunning monument to urban planning. The twenty-seven-mile system of gently curving boulevard that winds through the Parkway, connecting the towns north side to its south, was still nestled among its carpet of green. The city was still sharply divided along racial lines, with the black community largely where it had been before, west of 22nd Street, north of Mitchell, and south of Krug Park. The wealthier neighborhoods still looked wealthy, the poorer neighborhoods still looked poorer, and our house still looked like our home—again, for better or for worse.
But beneath the surface, things had changed. When I was growing up St. Joseph had two editions of its newspaper, the Gazette in the morning and the News-Press in the evening. Dad would start and end his day with the two different St. Joseph newspapers. By 2016, the News Press was gone, and the Gazette became the only daily paper in the nation to endorse Donald Trump for president. Today, the Gazette publishes a print edition only a few days a week. While I know this reflects newspaper economics playing out nationally, it represents something else to me. To me, their decline is the cold clanking of the latch on the long creaking, rusty-hinged door of the town’s mind.
Meanwhile, the ellipse of land in front of our Trevillian Drive house is now overtaken by the kinds of urban un-renewal everyone sees when they’ve lived long enough: an auto-parts store, a vape shop, a payday loan place. The Jesse James home long ago moved from the Belt and Trevillian to be part of a museum complex downtown. Many of the trees I remember are gone or dying, and most of our backyard, which used to be full of grapevines and rhubarb and apple trees, is as dead as Perky the Parakeet, my sister’s bird that we buried beneath one of our two apple trees in the late 1970s.
Idyllic. A boy, a his bike, and the Parkway, 1972.
As I prepare to write these memories, this place is what I think of. It is me. Except for trips to Kansas for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and a few occasional lesser holidays, I have few childhood memories that took place anywhere else. It became both a motivating force to do more, and a force that held me back. Either way, I am struck by the many references to roads, streets, and highways. It’s almost embarrassing, how cliché it feels, like the memoirs where every day is sunny, everyone is always happy, and we were so, so much better off then, in almost every way but financially, because we were poor but happy because at least we had each other and that’s all that really matters . . . somehow forgetting about inflation and pay rates or, in my case, the fact that mom had probably been hanging my cloth diapers that sunny morning in Cameron as I marveled at the sun, the dew, and the green wide open.
***
When I was in my 20s, I sometimes did a mental exercise in my journal. I would choose two widely disparate things and write about them until I found a way, in 500 words or so, to tie them together. I even imagined creating a game consisting of a bowl of random things written on pieces of paper—dandelions, steak, the consumer price index. The player would draw two slips of paper from the bowl, with the challenge of showing how they came together through writing.
Back then, my mental exercise was just a chance to show off to myself. Look what I can do with words! But as I’ve been thinking differently about time, I have begun to view the exercise differently. I now believe it is more about uncovering connections that are already there, rather than my ability to pick out odd strands and weave them together.
I think again about streets, highways, bridges, roads. My dad had built bridges connecting two pieces of a 40-year-old highway. Before it was a highway, it had been a covered-wagon trail. Before that it was probably a Native-American trail, following a lucky coincidence of flat lands and few obstructions. The railroad, the river, the Belt Highway linking the neon Pony Express rider at the motel to Jesse James lying on the floor, and at that intersection, the beginning of the tiny street that led to our first St. Joseph home—all of these things connect things and events, both physically and symbolically. All flow together, the Pony Express rider, Jesse James, the Schubert sisters. . . . all are part of my past, all are part of the same road, all are me.
This is why I write about these things. They are connections and intersections of time and history; they join me to something bigger than me. As events, they are fairly banal—no great rise to stardom, no horrific abuse, no real trauma—just a boy growing up in a Midwestern river town at the end of a one-block street. All I can bring to them is my own perception, my own interpretation, even if countless others share the bare bones of my banal experiences. I tell myself: Maybe their banality is their strength. For those who grew up in similar conditions, it’s a comforting way in because it reminds them of what was; for those who did not grow up like I did, it’s a way in that masquerades as a comforting escape.
Either way, I hope the lesson is that if my banal life and perspective is interesting in its own way and worth recording, maybe others can begin seeing their lives as interesting and worth recording. My life gives yours value, and your life gives mine value. The laundry hangs on the line. The highway crosses the state. The creek flows, the trees live and die, the rider rides and the bad guy falls. None of it happens alone. None of it is unimportant. All of it is connected. All of it matters.
In the picture, I am 22 years old. It is Sunday, July 4, 1988. My girlfriend at the time took it.
We had spent the weekend at the Coral Court, a famous, Art Deco, no-tell-motel “motor-court” on Watson Road, which follows part of the old Route 66 in St. Louis County. We checked in Saturday afternoon after meeting her at her friend’s apartment in University City. I don’t remember if we parked her little silver car in the garage attached to our room or not. The Coral Court was a notorious site of crime and scandal, but we were rank crime and scandal amateurs.
We couldn’t even get into proper trouble. That night after dinner, we bought fruit and ice cream at a grocery store, but we had no spoons. We went out in search of spoons, and decided to stop at Jack in the Box on the corner of Watson and Laclede Station Road for drinks. I was driving. Turning left off Watson onto Laclede Station, I didn’t notice the road was divided by a median, and I turned into the north-bound lane instead of the south-bound lane, going the wrong way. Flashing lights–a cop pulled us over. He laughed at us, two stone-cold sober kids, freshly and frequently laid, and let us off with a warning.
Chagrined but safely back in the room, we found Bob Dylan starring in the movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid on the hotel’s ancient TV, which barely picked up the local stations. We watched our hero’s furrowed brow do the acting for him between scrolling horizontal bars. The next morning, Sunday, July 4, she bought me breakfast at Denny’s and we went to Forest Park.
***
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I have other photos from that day in the park. In one, I am rowing a canoe on Post-Dispatch Lake, looking like the cover of Field and Stream magazine. In another, I am studying the brochure from the St. Louis Art Museum. Inside the museum, a passer-by captured us standing in front of Monet’s Water Lilies. We are barely visible because of the lighting, but you can see her dress flowing into the painting; even the colors are right. She got another poorly lit shot of me in front of Chuck Close’s painting Keith–my dad’s name. Chuck Close died on August 20, 2021–my dad’s birthday.
But in that statue picture–with “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven” scrawled above me, and my sunglasses, and my wristwatch, and my plain white T-shirt, not a fashion shirt from the Gap or something, but a Fruit of the Loom undershirt–I am struck not by how I got there, but by what would flow from that day; which is to say, all the things I did not know when my girlfriend snapped her camera.
***
This summer, I spent two months reading Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. In its most famous scene the narrator eats a cookie–a “madeleine”–dipped in tea, and it sets off a flood of memories and associations that fill not only the rest of Swann’s Way, but also the other six volumes of his massive work, In Search of Lost Time.
The climax of the madeleine scene starts like this:
“And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madelein dipped in lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and had to put off to much later discovering why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage set to attach itself to the little wing opening on the garden that had been built for my parents behind it . . .”
The madeleine scene takes place on page 48, at the end of chapter 1. Chapter 2, by comparison–which includes the explanation of the novel’s title and the story of the narrator’s mostly unrequited, prepubescent love for the young daughter of the family’s Combray neighbor, M. Swann–ends at page 191. The next 250 pages are turned over to Part II. It tells another love story, about M. Swann and a woman named Odette–and it is a story that could not possibly have been fueled by the madeleine, because it happens before the young narrator was born, but is written as if he were there and inside M. Swann’s tortured mind.
In one of the biggest “Oh, nevermind” moments ever, after 150 pages of M. Swann obsessing over Odette’s affairs, real and imagined, with men and women, the foresaken lover finally concludes: “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!”
***
My experience with this photo is not as vivid as Proust’s, and it is more a flowering forward than a flowering back. I did not know that day (how could I?) that two years later I would be proofreading the definitive history of Forest Park, or that four years after that I would be working across the street from the park at the Missouri Historical Society’s Library and Research Center, or that three years after that I would be co-authoring a book on the 1904 World’s Fair (the park’s defining moment), or that the next year I would leave that job, and that the Historical Society’s excellent photographer in those years, David Schultz, would give me, as a parting gift, a framed, black-and-white photo he had taken of the Coral Court, just before it was torn down to make way for a subdivision, or that more than 10 years after that I would be driving through the park every day to take my daughters to school, or that 10 years after that I would be paid to walk around the park and blog about the experience.
The picture captures who I was in that moment, and in that moment, my girlfriend, unlike M. Swann’s, was just my type, though of course we were both becoming something else. In the picture I am caught in amber, but it is all the other connections and associations, forward and backward, that bring the photo to life for me, even if they are just accidental anchors supporting an illusion of significance, a dream of fate and destiny and things mattering.
After all, virtually every St. Louisan has chains of Forest Park memories, connections, and intersections. What do they mean, these ties to this place, or to any place–this random rock in space, flowing in what we call time? And what can time really mean, anyway, when all we have is this exact moment? But you don’t even have that, because as soon as you realize you are in it, you have already lost it, and all you have is the current moment. But you don’t have that one, either, do you?
The subdivision developer left part of the Coral Court’s wall standing on Watson Road–or, at least, a facsimile, an attempt to capture what was, and what was sacrificed, similar to how subdivisions are usually named for the things they replace, to preserve an ever-elusive experience of now. But the subdivision where Coral Court was is called Oak Knoll Manor, and while it may have a few oaks, it does not have a knoll, and it is not a manor.
All I can say about any of this, alongside M. Swann, is another “Oh, nevermind”: None of it matters, I guess; it’s not even that interesting–other people have much more sordid tales of young love, and the Coral Court saw countless affairs more sordid than anything my girlfriend and I could have conjured. But for me, these pictures from the 1988 July 4th weekend and their connections are everything, even if they all flow, and only arbitrarily, from one slippery marker in time.
Like most writers, I keep a journal. And like most people who keep journals, I’m not sure why.
My earliest journals are from my seventh-grade religion class. Our teacher, Brother Tom, had us keep them. For most of my friends it was a chore, but the promise of performance and praise touched me. Brother Tom was my captive audience, and my journals were his favorite. I knew this because he would often say so in his comments, which I looked forward to like nothing else every week.
I haven’t gotten rid of many of my journals, though I have gotten rid of some. I remember cutting pages and pages of them up into thin strips in high school. Then mixing up the strips and putting them in separate trash cans. Too embarrassing, I guess, though I’m not sure what could have been so embarrassing at that age. Or how it could be more embarrassing than anything I’ve done or thought since.
But I’ve kept more than I’ve destroyed, and it’s a fairly unbroken record from 1978 to . . . well, to last week, I guess. And again, I’m not sure why I do this. I’m not sure why I carefully note not only the date but also the time of day. I’m not sure who, if anyone, will ever read them. I rarely do.
Sometimes I go back and look in specific journals if I’m trying to reconstruct a fading memory. Remembering who that girl was I did that thing with that time by that place, stuff like that. But usually they just sit in a filing cabinet.
The other day, out of curiosity, I randomly picked one out and started reading it. And it may be the beginning of understanding why I keep a journal.
ome excerpts from the fall of 2013:
9-30-13, 1:41 p.m. How I am feeling: icky. I feel violated by the carpet guy & his mystery 100 ft2. I feel stupid because I said “Nutmeg” instead of “Gingerbread.” I am tired. I am always tired; I could always sleep. What is wrong with me?
10-3-13, 5ish. Starbucks, Webster Groves, ballet night. I did go to work & get Law Daily out but then went home to sleep. I was so tired. Woke up around 11:30 or so, feeling guilty for not being at work—so I started doing laundry & did laundry all day.
10-8-13, 10:39 a.m. Why am I so tired every day. Depression? I sleep fine, go to bed around 10:30, up at 5:30, drink coffee. Today I also splurged on a cup @ McDonald’s so I’ve had 3 & still barely holding my pen up as my mind starts to drift again. So tired.
11-10-13, 8:53 p.m. A quiet Sunday night. Kate & El are watching a movie in our bed; I will sleep in Kate’s room. I am so lonely. I was alone tonight. Kate had her end of year soccer party. I didn’t go.
11-14-13, 4:02 p.m. Why does she stay with me? I’m not just worthless, I’m a strain, an expense. I should be written off like a bad debt. WORTHLESS.
12-4-13, 3:44 p.m. I need validation. I need to feel good. I need to stop doubting myself.
These entries could have been written three years ago. Or last year. Or this afternoon. Yet even in 2013, amidst all the fatigue and loneliness, I was doing a lot. I had a full-time job. I had a family. I was editing a book. I was learning just enough about Carl Jung to allow me to review a book called Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus in Renaissance Florence for the Jung Journal. I was thinking through my own book project, a memoir of growing up in St. Joseph, Missouri. And I was apparently making a second full-time job of beating myself up for not doing any of this fast enough, well enough, consistently enough.
The value of these journals may be that they illustrate the workings of the productive depressive’s mind. The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual lists nine types of depression. The one that comes closest to mine is persistent depressive disorder, or dysthymia. However, it doesn’t quite fit.
One article states, “People with dysthymia often find it difficult to be ‘upbeat,’ even during good times. They might be perceived as gloomy, pessimistic, or a complainer.”[1] This is not how anyone would describe me, except maybe my closest family members—and anyone who might ever read my journals.
I imagine that someone will read my journals, someday, and they will look at everything I have done, and they will think of how I presented to them, and they will wonder, “How can this be the same person?”
It’s a good question. Even today, I am a hyper achiever. Again, on top of a full-time job, I am writing two books, editing a magazine, editing a book, consulting for a bank, editing for training company, reading Proust, and fantasizing about things I may never do—the Jungian analysis of John Lydon/Johnny Rotten, the memoir project, the lines of poetry lying around . . .
And yet, most days . . . life? Yeah, OK, if I must. Whatever. Then I go about filling my day with lists and activities and presenting myself positively, always ready to cheer someone else or make a joke, often at my own expense—and I work, work, work.
My solace now is that I have the journals to contrast how I feel to what I have done—a physical counter to the ongoing weight of worthlessness and failure. It’s the mystery of me, and of the 3.8 million dysthymiacs in the U.S. I am better than I was in 2013, or 2007, or 1983, and yes, I am in therapy, and I have been since I turned 18. Therapy helps. Exercise helps. Getting older helps. Perspective helps.
Passages like this from the 2013 journal also help. It is one of a handful, scattered here and there, in which I finally break away from the day-to-day recitation of fatigue and loneliness and caffeine—places where the sky cracks open before the clouds roll back in:
10-12-13, 11:35 p.m. OK, so forget all that other shit I’ve written over the past 35 years. Seeing Judy Collins in concert has made me want to dedicate my life & writing to finding the truth—that magical hole that can open in time & space, the perfect moment captured like a fly in amber. The pain, the cold, dark pain,. . . . Transcendence, the fog of your breath shading Orion’s belt on a freezing Christmas Eve night in Ellsworth KS ca. 1970 something. “Everything dies, that’s a fact but maybe everything that dies one day comes back.”
I have played a lot of roles in my life. Editor. Historian. Spokesperson. PR flack. Small (very small) business owner. But of all my roles, none has been as challenging as the one I have created for myself now—artist in the digital age.
I didn’t start thinking of myself as an artist until fairly recently. In fact, I winced when I read on my website the other day, “Tim does not consider himself a ‘creative writer.’” When I wrote that, I must have meant, “I don’t write fiction.” Which is mostly true.
But I have always written creatively, though mostly for myself or my family. I have filled dozens of journals over the past 40 years, some of them including poetry. I have also been a creative writer professionally, finding clever ways to make the most technical things interesting for nontechnical people. The audience of “nontechnical people” definitely includes me, which makes me good at it.
In the past few years I have become more intentional in writing poetry, and now songs. And the more I have done it, the more natural it has become. A couple of lines, a beat, or a rhythm come to me, and I sit down and let it flow. The first draft may take half an hour, tops, followed by some worrying over particular words or where to put punctuation, but really, it comes easily to me.
In a way, it’s laziness. I can deliver ideas more quickly, easily, clearly, and efficiently through a couple of stanzas, scribbled down in the heat of that creative moment, than I could in painfully wrought paragraphs.
But in the old days, writing was frustrating and lonely because the only way to get it out there was to get it published. The constant torrent of rejection led some writers to depression and worse. Today, writing is frustrating and lonely because getting “published” is easy, but it doesn’t guarantee feedback, likes, shares, trending, going viral, or any kind of clout—let alone income. This is the challenge of being an artist, literary or otherwise, in the digital age.
What we must do in today’s world—and maybe this is no revelation to anyone who generates any kind of art but me—is that the best reason to do it is for yourself. That’s it. Maybe your parents or spouse or kids will appreciate it, but beyond that … just put your wings on it, close your eyes, plug your nose, and let it go.
I used to get depressed in bookstores. Because it seemed like everyone was writing books. Every poet, every old rock star, every politician, everyone who had an idea of how other people should live. Books everywhere, books by the millions, books for the millions.
Who was I in this mix?
Then I realized that I can do things most of these people can’t. I can write long nonfiction and poetry. Songs and opinion pieces. Remembrances for friends and marketing copy.
I can arrange things. I can take garbled up gobs of nothing and turn it into art, or at least something useful. Sometimes clever. Sometimes funny. Always better.
I have been published in books and magazines. I have read my work at weddings and memorial services.
I have lost jobs. Out of the ashes of jobs I built a business. I’ve been told I wasn’t able to write well enough, and I’ve proven none of them knew what they were talking about.
I now write for one of the nation’s biggest urban parks. A regional bank. A university. The state’s most successful United Way agency. One of the nation’s poorest cities. An international consulting company.
I bring a magazine to life out of nothing four times a year out of sheer force of will.
I have tried to destroy my personal life, but I saved it. I tried to destroy those around me, and I’ve saved them, too.
Next year, I have nothing to prove to anyone but myself.
Social media is full of meaningless, impractical, and sometimes useless “inspirational” messages.
So I’d like to offer 5 easy, no-cost things you can do today to improve your mental and physical health.
Make Your “To Do” List a “Get to Do” List. Virtually every daily chore has an upside. Have to pay bills? Be glad you have the money! Have to clean house? Hey, you have a house! Running your kids somewhere? Congratulations, you won the fertility lottery! You get the idea.
Take the Win. You’ll notice small improvements happening all the time if you are open to them. Look for them all the time–even the ones that seem the most insignificant.
Park Further Away. Don’t stress yourself out, risk your car, risk your life, and risk other people’s lives by trying to get the best parking space in the lot. Who cares? Park further away, where no one else is. No one will ding you with your car door, you’ll get a little exercise, and you’ll be forced to slow down. Plus, see #1: YOU HAVE A CAR!
Use the Stairs. If you’re blessed with functioning legs, take the stairs! No waiting for the elevator, no awkward silence on the way up or down, and you’ll even get a little exercise. Bonus points for bouncing up or mindfully flexing on the way.
Hold a Rock. Hey, the dumbest rock has already survived millions of years longer than you will! And while you can think about how short and meaningless your life is as you hold that rock, you can also realize that it means you can try virtually anything that you’re able to try. Hardly anyone has the power to literally end the world.
They also serve who only stand and wait. –John Milton, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” 1673
It’s less than a week before Father’s day, and I’m proud of myself because I just delivered a perfect dad’s line.
I am in the waiting room of Missouri Baptist Hospital, where Kate was born nearly fifteen years ago. Ellen is having a medical test done. The woman next to me is talking about Justify, the horse who won the Triple Crown Saturday afternoon.
“How’d you like to own that horse?” she wonders to her daughter. “What’d he get, $60 million?”
I start standing to go to the bathroom. Half way up I say, “You still have to clean up after the horse.”
***
My dad must have spent years in hospital and doctor’s office waiting rooms. From the time my mom started losing her voice in the early 1980s, through decades of Botox injections into her throat to temporarily bring it back, to her death, from leukemia after breast cancer, in 2014, the conversations of strangers must have been a soothing companion to him, the rhythm of bad afternoon television and hushed consultations, a dulling balm.
***
Graduation, 1961.
My dad is pre-Baby Boom by about a decade. I’ve often felt disappointed at being post-Baby Boom by two. I would have made a good hippie, I think.
When I was born, he’d already endured the humiliation and banality of military service. He joined the army after graduating as a civil engineer from the University of Kansas. The stories of his service have dribbled out over the years. I think he is saving many more for just the right time.
In 2006, we took a driving vacation with my parents and our daughters to the beach in South Carolina. As we drove across the state he decided to tell us that he’d been there once before, in the army, and had been close to the beach but never close enough to see the ocean. Instead, he said, when the bus arrived from Kentucky, the unit was forced to “double-time it” with their gear in full dress, which they’d already been wearing for hours, through the heat and humidity to their barracks. Many passed out or fell, vomiting into the dunes, on the way.
***
It was funny and sad when he told it, and it left me feeling soft and inadequate. I spent my early twenties chasing girls and going to grad school. It wasn’t a carefree life, but it wasn’t the army.
At 22.
At that time, the late 1980s, my dad was still working as a resident engineer for the Missouri Highway Department, the same job he’d held for about twenty-five years. It was a span of time that seemed immeasurable.
I remember when I was younger going to clean his office, hoping for a peak at one of the Playboy or Penthouse magazines some of his crew kept stashed in their drafting tables. One of the guys had an ashtray shaped like a rattlesnake because it freaked out one of the other guys. The office smelled like cigarettes, because everyone in that office smoked, it seemed, except my dad.
Sometimes he’d take us out on job sites for a Sunday afternoon drive. Bulldozed stretches in the middle of nowhere, or later, along the river, where he was overseeing the project to build a double-deck interstate extension to give easier access to downtown St. Joseph.
I think: What have I built to compare to that? Books and articles, words in the wind.
***
Ellen had to be at the hospital at 6:45 that day. When I said I’d wear jeans because hospitals are always freezing, she said, “You’re coming with me!? That’s so sweet!”
I said, “Yeah, we may as well make the transformation into our parents complete.”
The original spirit of Mother’s Day–to honor one’s own mother, whether she is with us or not, whether we know her or not–is noble (though that honor shouldn’t be reserved for one day a year). But today, the holiday celebrates all women who have had children. My favorite women who have had children grace this page. I love them all, and I celebrate them all today.
But “mother” is a word, like many, that is too narrowly defined. Every woman I know is a mother, but not every woman I know has children.
Being a mother goes far beyond the ability to produce a child–an ability that comes too easily for some and not easily at all for others. Some women want children and some women don’t. Some women can have children and some women can’t. Some women adopt children and some women don’t. But all women create.
I think about this every Mother’s Day. It’s probably because of the challenges Ellen and I faced to have a child, and the possibility that we might not, and then that we did, and then that we might not have another, and then that we did again. That experience placed into sharper relief what a day celebrating women who have children must feel like to those who can’t, or don’t, or won’t, or once did but do no more.
The women who have shaped me and don’t have children are actors, writers, librarians, public defenders, professors, editors, art historians, and museum directors. They think and they act and they choose. They raise hell and they raise chickens and they raise vegetables. They make me laugh and think and feel. They create every day, and they make the world safer and friendlier and better.
Of course, these women have mothers, and most of these women learned how to be in the world from their mothers. And many of them have partners, and those who have partners also live with that person’s mother and the way that mother taught the partner to be in the world. And those ways don’t always match, and a good part of that woman’s creative potential is spent negotiating the differences, and sometimes all they get in return is a broken heart or an empty bank account or a wet towel left on the floor.
And so, they go back to creating a world that either goes in another direction or forgives and starts over, but it is a world that is still creating. Each act of creation leaves scars, and over time scars show as wrinkles, and the wrinkles show more with smiles. Because smiles are often needed to hide the cries that bring new things into the world.
So again this Mother’s Day, I’m thinking about all of my mothers, especially those who create in this world without a special day or cards or flowers or gifts, because they don’t need them. They are the day, the flower, the gift.
The five posts that make up “Down by the River” were adapted from an essay I wrote for the Missouri Historical Society in 1997, after my week in St. Joseph painting my parents’ house. I think of that time now as my professional high point. I was editing a magazine, had two books published with my name on them, and was in the best work environment I’ve ever enjoyed.
Which is not to say that things went completely downhill when I left to join Ameren the next year or any of the other employers I’ve had since–it’s just to say that it was a good time, a time of feeling on top of the world.
When I think about that time and that essay now, and my ongoing efforts to write memoir-style pieces, I wonder how growing up in St. Joseph–a town that once had so much promise only to be felled by circumstance, history, and (in retrospect) bad choices–affected me, and why I felt such a strong need at eighteen to leave it and not go back.
The image of the Pony Express rider, going forward into the unknown with hope and courage, resonates with me. I could have stayed close to home–that’s what my mom wanted for me–but I chose not to stay. And, because she was my mother and indulged me in all my hobbies and fantasies and flights of fancy, she let me go.
Of course, I can’t say with a straight face that my moving to Kansas City, or Columbia, or St. Louis compares in any way with what the Pony Express riders endured during their ten or so days riding hard toward California, but symbolically, it’s similar.
I also feel the violence of my home town–the violence of having briefly lived down the street from where Jesse James was shot carried over into the violence I experience growing up in my idyllic Parkway neighborhood, the violence I saw at my schools and in my neighborhood and as a Boy Scout, violence against person and property. Some of this I’ve explored in Dead Things: A Triptych. Most of it is to come, when it’s time. I live in a violent place now, but as an adult. Then, I was sensitive and impressionable and fearful.
I also understand the ultimate futility of the Pony Express riders. Yes, they got the mail through, just as I have succeeded in publishing books, articles, and reviews with my name on them. But what does it mean in the end? A few dollars, modest recognition, a fleeting sense of accomplishment, and then … the loneliness of the writer.
The best I can say is that had I stayed in St. Joseph, I would not have had most of the experiences I’ve had, and I would not be who I am. Still intellectually curious, still drawn to the fringes of musical and artistic expression, still unsure of my identity as a person, as a writer, as a parent as a husband, but stifled–straining at my bridle like the horse in the statue, trying to move but constrained and guided with a bit in my mouth and a strap across my back.
I am better now, I tell myself, having left. Better for me, that is, because my better isn’t everyone’s better. A lot of my friends have made good lives in St. Joseph, and some have left and returned, reinvented, to breathe new life and perspectives into the community. I can’t picture that fully for myself, but when I go back, as I explore in Running Home and other pieces–when I hold the town up to the light and twist it just right, I can almost see it, can almost see where I fit in this long history. Almost.
But for now there is just me, now, and my little LLC and my little jobs and my little articles. All together, maybe it’s not so little, and anyway, there’s a lot more to do.
