We are all in cancer’s waiting room
With the old toys over here, and the shitty old magazines over there
And the clock on the wall that says “Time’s Up”
Outside there may be a plane crash
Or a car crash or a slab of concrete falling from the sky
But really–cancer’s waiting room is where it’s at
It’s where we all end up
Only a matter of time, only a matter of where and when and how far gone
What will it take, what will it cost, to stave off the inevitable
Winners and survivors, yes, but what do they get?
Just another pause in the action before the fun begins again
Needles hooked to tubes hooked to bottles
A pound of me taken for an ounce of cure, and then …
Well, enough of this. Live your life.
Smell the grass, plunge the earth, bury yourself in life and love
Then see what grows from that fertile mound.
We drove across land that is not ours
nor ever
cultivated & subdivided
empty strip malls financed by indifference
blood splashing against the wheel wells
at 80 miles per hour
tires red with the gore of innocents
brought & bought & left behind–
fend for yourself
This is what ‘independence” means
or maybe “in the tenements”
or perhaps “in the tents”
bought & paid for on the field of nowhere
the stark plains of abandonment
dark, overgown, festering
Water pools black by the river
an ocean of regret that ebbs & flows
oozes out of tar pits & over curbs
of an America lost abirthing again
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.
One of my verbs for 2018 was “read”. And I have read, a lot, but mostly only for pay, except for my brief foray into Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and that night in Colorado when I read almost an entire issue of the Missouri Review cover-to-cover. The other night, though, I finally finished Jeffrey Toobin’s book American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst. True, I had to renew it three times, and it’s eight days overdue from the library, but still … finished.
Midway through the book, this passage stopped me:
Patricia was alive only because of several improbable twists of fate. If, back in San Francisco, Cinque had not assigned Patricia to the same team as Bill and Emily . . . If Bill weren’t going stir-crazy in the Fifty-Fourth Street house and thus volunteered to run errands . . . If DeFreeze had accepted Mizmoon’s recommendation that Angela, rather than Patricia, join the Harrises on the errands in Inglewood . . . If Bill hadn’t been caught stealing the bandolier at Mel’s, causing the split with the other comrades . . . If the other comrades had met up at the drive-in, as planned, and persuaded Bill, Emily, and Patricia to rejoin them . . . If the comrades had all stuck together, as they had done from hideout to hideout, month after month, then Bill, Emily, and Patricia would also have been inside the house on Fifty-Fourth Street. And they would all be dead.
The passage introduces many of the characters in Hearst’s story, members (the “comrades”) of the Symbionese Liberation Army who kidnapped her in February 1974. Donald DeFreeeze, aka Marshall Cinque, was the group’s leader, and Bill and Emily Harris, Patricia “Mizmoon” Soltysik, and Angela Atwood were other SLA members. It captures the moment after an FBI raid finally caught up to the group. DeFreeze, Mizmoon, Atwood, and three other members were killed by flame and bullets in “the house on Fifty-Fourth Street” in Los Angeles, on May 16, 1975. Patricia and the Harrises were on the lam at the time, having been involved in a shootout at Mel’s sporting goods store. They watched the raid on television in a motel room.
But it was the first line that stopped me: “Patricia was alive only because of several improbable twists of fate.” If Toobin’s book has a fault, this is it: the belief that there is anything unique in this statement. We all can look back on our lives and see our present situation as nothing but the end result of a series of “improbable twists of fate.”
However, at the end of the book–after Hearst has gotten a slap on the wrist for her involvement in a bank robbery that resulted in a bystander’s death, had her sentence commuted by President Carter, and received a pardon from President Clinton–Toobin writes that the socialite-turned kidnapping victim-turned-revolutionary-turned criminal “led the life for which she was destined,” “notwithstanding a surreal detour in the 1970s.” By living out a life of relative wealth, privilege, and comfort after her ordeal and crimes, her story, “as extraordinary as it once was, had a familiar, even predictable ending.”
For some reason, the idea of “privilege” is triggering for some, but Hearst’s status as an heir to William Randolph Hearst–the 19th-century publishing magnate who created the Spanish-American War and was the model for Orson Wells’ Charles Foster Kane–clearly influenced her “familiar, even predictable ending.” So how about people with fewer means?
I’ll offer myself as an example. In the fall of 1985, I was a sophomore in college in Kansas City. The previous summer I had worked full-time in the coffee shop of a hospital, and I kept that job on a part-time basis into the first semester. But there were complications. I had moved off-campus and had no car, so getting back and forth was a challenge, as was school–so I quit the job.
That fall I had also enrolled in a French literature class, and in that class I met Laura. A few weeks later she set me up with one of her sorority sisters, with whom I shared another class. Both of them worked at an independent drugstore on the Plaza.
Around mid-October, I looked at my finances and realized that I needed to find a job by mid-November at the latest. One day the delivery driver at the drugstore was fired, and the second sorority sister–whom I was, by that time, dating–suggested I apply. So in early November I marched myself to the Plaza, met with the manager, and was hired to start working the same day.
Laura and I, studying hard October 1985
Getting to and from the Plaza was a longer walk than the hospital, but it was a fun job, delivering prescriptions to mostly older folks in the Plaza’s postwar high-rises and the surrounding area’s stately homes. It more than sustained me through the following summer.
Now: “Improbable twists of fate”? Yes. Taking the right classes at the right time, meeting the right people at the right time … but there is more at work in this story. Being in college to start with is number one–an option that is still not available to all, even less so with today’s tuition rates. But also having been raised with the skills needed to present well in an interview and the gumption to go to that drugstore out of the blue played a role. And being a preppy white college kid certainly didn’t hurt.
In the longer view, where I am now–building a writing business while job hunting–is not where I thought I’d be at 52, but it’s not terrible, and I think it is leading to something, though exactly what is not clear now. Ellen’s job, supportive relatives, lots of friends–they help me in my quest. Maybe whatever this is leading to will be my “familiar, even predictable ending”–another member of the scribbling class, recording what I see around me, and within me, to share with others while surrounded by family.
It wouldn’t be a bad outcome, especially since I didn’t have to be kidnapped or rob banks on the way to getting there.
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.
Lauded as the Pony Express riders were, their cargo also attained mythic status by connecting civilized East with uncivilized West. As Mrs. Louise Platt Hauck stated in 1923, “Letters from the far east, the south,and the great middle west were speeding toward the land of gold and danger, of hope realized and hardship endured–California. These, freighted with importance as they were, were but symbols of that effort which was seeking to establish a direct communication between the telegraph and the frontier country so lately settled.”
President Lincoln’s inaugural address reach California via Pony Express more quickly than any other communique.
Many of the land-speed records set by the Pony Express writers were connected to important events happening “back east.” News of President Abraham Lincoln’s election–significant, given the conflict between the town’s southern leanings and the Pony Express’ Union-saving purpose–reached California in eight days; President James Buchanan’s farewell message made it in seven days and nineteen hours; Lincoln’s inaugural address broke all records by reaching San Francisco in seven days and seventeen hours.
In the 1924 promotional Union Pacific brochure, Miss Mary Pack’s essay connected the Pony Express with the railway company’s new cross-country line. “It is a far cry from the days of the Pony Express and its daring riders to the present luxurious mode of travel on Union Pacific limited trains,” the brochure stated above an illustration of an “old gentleman and his grandson” riding aboard a train:
But the span of one human life covers the period, and the central picture below might easily represent one who had lived through it, relating to his grandson some of the thrilling experiences with which he as a boy was so familiar. They are seated on comfortable cushions of the latest all-steel Pullman car, speeding along over the perfectly ballasted roadbed of the Union Pacific in sight of the historic old trail over which the throughbred horses of the Pony Express strained flesh and sinew to keep East and West in quick communication at a time when the nation faced a serious crisis. The “ponies” made the trip from the Missouri River to San Francisco in an average of ten days. The old gentleman and his grandson were carried from Chicago to San Francisco in less than three days.
So when Southwestern Bell or the Pony Express Community Bank or the Pony Express Motel use the ever-present symbol of the Pony Express rider, what are they making use of? It is, first of all, a great-looking, easily accessible, and instantly recognizable logo, but it also connects disparate businesses with rugged individualism in the face of adversity, independence, and freedom from a government that doesn’t understand what it takes to get the job done. As a promotional brochure for the Pony Express National Memorial puts it in a section called “American Principles,” “The Pony Express stands for the principles upon which America was founded: resourcefulness, ingenuity, daring, and vision. The legend and legacy of the Pony Express glorify the risk-taking spirit of the American entrepreneur; the courage, endurance and loyalty of the individual riders; and, the resourceful teamwork which contributed to an informed and enlightened citizenry.”
The Pony Express and railroads were part of a vision of westward expansion, from civilized east to uncivilized west.
However, the city has not always cherished its Pony Express heritage. A photograph in Miss Mary Pack’s 1924 promotional piece shows the current Pony Express National Memorial on Penn Street not as a museum, but as the site of Voltz Manufacturing Company, offering metal welding, nickel plating, and wire works. The 1930 WPA Guide, meanwhile, devotes only five lines to the Pony Express in its St. Joseph section and two lines in the Transportation chapter. Perhaps the growth of the automobile and the rise of the Interstate highway system, which my dad helped to engineer and build, led to a rising nostalgia for the days when horses provided the fastest form of transportation.
The reality is that the “important grain, livestock, manufacturing, and wholesale center” that was St. Joseph is gone, as shown by the vacant warehouses downtown and the abandoned stockyards on the city’s south side. The manufacturing center has shifted to new industrial parks on the east side as brave entrepreneurs and visionaries work to breathe new life into downtown. The riverfront, once the center of commerce in St. Jo as in all river towns, is underutilized, save for a casino and riverfront park. The riverfront’s most prominent feature is the double-decker Interstate 229, opened in the early 1980s. It towers over the park and cuts the riverfront off from downtown. Various plans have been floated for the land over the years, including a marina, a theme park,a wilderness experience area, a Wild West riverfront village, a wetlands and marsh, a western history interpretive center, and an Amtrack Station.
Interstate 229 flows south between the east bank of the Missouri River and downtown.
As for downtown, in the 1970s St. Jo joined many other medium-sized towns across the county in replacing streets, many of them named for Roubidoux’s children, with a pedestrian mall. In 1997 I met with Nancy Sandehn, president of the Museum Hill Neighborhood Association and a civic booster. She told me that as streets were replaced with beautiful brick sidewalks, merchants were advised to keep their shops open past 5 p.m. But though people were moving into the nearby Museum Hill District to restore the elegant Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne, Tudor Revival, American Foursquare, and Bungalow/American Craftsman homes, the merchants could not rationalize the expense of keeping their shops open later. Instead, a hardware store and other businesses across the river in Elwood, Kansas, reaped the benefits of the rehabbers’ dollars.
The Wyeth-Tootle Mansion in the Museum Hill District has long served as a museum.
I believe St. Joseph does have valuable assets, however. Its park and boulevard system, as I mentioned, is largely as it was when I was growing up alongside it in the 1970s and ’80s. And unlike Ward Parkway in Kansas City, which is home to the city’s old money elite, or the Paseo, which runs through what is now a very impoverished part of town, St. Joseph’s Boulevard is surrounded by largely middle- and upper-middle-class homeowners who are committed to maintaining its integrity.
In 1992, a developer wanted to put a gas station and convenience store on the site of an old railroad berm near the entrance to one of the stretches of boulevard. Residents raised $120,974.09 to buy the land back. “How soon before there are hot tamele stands or pizz joints at the entrance drive to Krug Park,” the News-Press and Gazette asked, “or a yogurt parlor in the Civic Center or a shopping mall at Huston Wyeth Park”
A creek in the Parkway approaches our back yard.
But the residents’ efforts, like the Pony Express, was doomed from the start. The developer’s insistence on getting every last penny for the land, down to the last nine cents, suggests that he didn’t seriously think they would come up with enough money, and he was right. There is now a King Convenience store at the intersection of Messanie Street and Parkway A. Meanwhile, extensive commercial development has moved to the city’s north side, far from downtown, and high-end subdivisions have followed.
Did the WPA Guide have it right eighty years ago, that, in spite of such assets, St. Joseph would rather “keep its sidewalk lounging chairs, and cling to the river and to memories of the wagon trails and the Pony Express of its early days”? Or will it find new ponies on which to hitch its future?
