Chevy coupe

“Jesus Christ!”  I blurted out---emphasis on the first syllable, “Je-sus.”  I had tumbled off the bench seat of our old Chevy coupe when my mother slammed the brakes. My head grazed the dashboard as I toppled to the floorboard below. The brown and red threads of the tan plaid upholstery prickled my bare legs as I clambered back on the seat. 

It was 1951 and I was six years old.

The car---I’ve confirmed from photos online---was a 1940 Chevy 2-door business coupe, and about this color. The model was a Master 85, and in the brochure artwork it looks professional but sporty.  

The coupe had its own story and I learned it decades later.

That day we were headed into the city---to San Francisco, 40 minutes by car from our small town north of the Golden Gate Bridge.  I watched my mother grip the gearshift with its milky bakelite-tipped handle as she pressed in the clutch in one smooth, deft motion. She was a good driver.  

In the 1950s medical and dental appointments in San Francisco were expeditions that entailed coat, hat and gloves.  Deckled-edged Kodaks show me in a gray and white checked coat with a matching tam that my mother had sewed. I wore white gloves in little kid sizes that now seem unimaginable---clothes for city sidewalks, not the gravel roads in the county where we lived.

Our destination was 450 Sutter Street, a professional building a few blocks uphill from Union Square and one of the tallest buildings in the city at the time.  A 26-storey art deco tower, its front doors were recessed beneath a gold fan-shaped portico.  I thought my family dentist lived in a temple on the 16^th floor.  When we waited for the elevator in the black marble hallway, I craned my neck to look up at the bronze and silver ceiling. Its dimly lit zig zag shapes made me dizzy. Only recently did I learn they were Mayan revival motif designs. 

For several years my mother regaled friends and relatives with the story about my startling expletive.  As the only child of parents who had---and now it puzzles me---mostly childless friends, I often listened to adult conversation.  Grown-ups told stories about other people, but they also seemed willing, even eager, to tell stories on themselves. Adults seemed to have an invisible protective skin, and they could become a character and be made fun of, be the butt of a good joke. It was something we kids never did.

Grown-ups telling stories---when not at my expense---brought relief from well-behaved boredom. I watched as the launch of some tale snagged the scattered conversations in the room, reeling in the attention of highball-clutching adults. I listened to half-understood words and events that seemed to stretch out as if along a tightrope of telling. The tension clutched my stomach.  Back and forth my eyes darted, from teller to listeners, anxious for some weave or wobble in the story, a gasp of surprise, a sigh of let-down, or a hoot of laughter at the end.

The work of what I later learned to call literary devices seeped unnamed into my brain.   

Sixty years after I banged into the Chevy dashboard, my mother came to live with me in  Michigan.  Unable to manage in an apartment on her own, at age 81 she pulled up stakes on the west coast and moved east to share a house with me and my son. 

And of all places, in Flint.

Family recollections surfaced during the six years we lived together in Flint, and one was the back story to the 1940 Chevy coupe.  We both remembered its faded beige finish and the red pin stripe still visible along its sides the year I grazed its dashboard. According to my mother, she and her older brother had bought the car new in their hometown, Portland, Oregon.  In the course of the purchase, the dealer off-handedly mentioned that delivery charges could be saved if the car were picked up at the factory in Michigan.

Brother and kid sister set out east by train. Grand Northern’s Empire Builder ran daily from Portland to Chicago’s Union Station where they could pick up Grand Trunk Western mainline and get off at Flint.  My mother recalled being told to wait on a Saginaw Street corner for a man who would take them out to the factory---which must have been Chevy-in-the Hole. 

To save money on the return road trip to Oregon brother and sister shared a motel room and my mother remembered sleeping on a trundle bed.  At remote stops along U.S. 30 and the way home, my uncle---a jazz lover---searched out obscure recordings.  Heavy 78s in brown paper sleeves, some of them ended up in our house, gifts from my uncle to teach my mother about jazz.

Four years later, in 1944, my mother got engaged and planned to move to San Francisco where she would be married. Her brother let her take the car---he was headed to Washington, D.C., to work in the Office of Strategic Services or OSS that had been established by Roosevelt in 1942. Off to a glamorous career in the capital, my uncle readily signed over the title and threw in some jazz records. The Chevy coupe became my parents’ first car. 

By 1955, my grandparents lived with us and a more practical family vehicle was needed. One summer evening my dad pulled into the driveway in a 1950 4-door Ford custom six “executive sedan.”  A deep forest green, in the center of its grill a “bullet” jutted out that only underscored the car’s roomy boredom. 

My dad bought it used. We never again had a brand-new car like that sporty Chevy coupe.

I’m still in Flint.  My mother died here in 2008. I drive Saginaw Street and imagine her waiting on one of its gusty corners in 1940, twenty-three years old and never dreaming that she would return to this city where her first car was made. 

Growing up, I’d had to suppress a flinch whenever my mother plunged into the anecdote about my “Jesus” outburst. Now the story seems less attached to me than to places and people that I have loved. The protagonists depart, social conventions change, and places are transformed beyond recognizing. The story remains and now I can do the telling---I did learn to be one of those grown-ups who can tell stories on themselves.

Learning to fish

I have two friends who swim in Lake Michigan.  I know two more who ride in bicycle races like the Tour de Troit.  At least half a dozen acquaintances run or walk in the Crim races.  The parents of a dear colleague and friend skied in Idaho until they were over 80. 

Every year it seems the Flint Journal has a photo and article about old timer hockey games.  I am moved by the retirees who walk with difficulty to the rink, lace on their skates, and swoosh onto the ice---their crinkled faces light up as legs and ankles remember the moves. 

I regret that I do none of these things.   In fact, I have arrived at the end of my sixth decade of life with no athletic skill that, if learned young, you can continue to enjoy it at a later age. 

Then I discovered fishing. 

My partner Dennis would always remark on lakes or rivers we’d pass when we travel by car.  What a great place to fish, he’d say, wistfully.  I had no idea why he’d comment longingly about one body of water or another. 

No one in my family fished. 

As a ten-year-old kid, Dennis went with his parents in the summertime to the Sierra Mountains in California. They’d camp for a week and spend the days fishing at one of the lakes.

Fishing organized the day.  Out in the boat in the early morning, return about noon to the campsite for sandwiches, then out on the lake again in the afternoon.  They would come back with the day’s catch on a stringer.  Dennis and his dad cleaned the fish; his mother fried them in cornmeal for dinner.

In those years, the 1950s, the limit was 15 fish per person.  Some days the three of them would get their limit: 45 fish.  Dennis said that often his mother caught the most fish, even though she often took a book with her out on the boat.  She’d cast her line and then sit in the middle of the boat and read while she waited for a tug on the pole. 

Dennis pondered my non-athletic background; he concluded that I might enjoy fishing. 

My first experience was a couple of years ago; we drove to the Kern River in the western Sierras, about three hours north of Los Angeles.

Dennis packed all the camping gear---big tent, air mattress, stove and kitchen set up, and “sky” chairs.  The sky chairs are a hippie-artisan invention Dennis discovered at the Renaissance Faire one year.  A spider web arrangement of ropes and seating that you hang from a tree like an armchair hammock.  You get up in it and sway in the breeze. 

We had a big ice chest stocked with good food.  Red wine for the evening and an old Bialetti moka pot for espresso in the morning.  Camping with class and Dennis knew how to do it all. 

My task was to learn how to fish. 

We camped by the river, under trees but with enough sandy shelf to walk out into shallow water.  Dennis had equipped me with a rod and reel; he taught me how to cast into the rapidly flowing stream.  At first I got tangled on the rocks, but gradually I cast out farther into the river.  The icy, rushing water cooled my legs in the heat of the July day. 

To my surprise I reeled in a small rainbow trout.  Dennis scooped it into the net.  We caught a few more and we had enough for dinner.   

Alas, this inaugural fishing experience was cut short.  In Bakersfield, the last ice stop before we drove up the twisting mountain highway to the Kern, I’d eaten something that made me very, very sick.  I was feverish and weak, able to fish only for short periods; I needed to sleep much of the day.  The sight and smell of fried fish turned my stomach.  We had to break camp after a couple of days and come home earlier than planned.

My initiation into angling was put on hold.   

Then last week we tried fishing again.  This time we drove further, to the Mammoth Lakes in the eastern Sierras about five hours north of Los Angeles.  We returned to Lake Mary, one of the lakes where Dennis had gone years ago with his family.  We rented a motor boat and set out on a cool, sunny morning in late September.  

Dennis steered us to a quiet spot not far from shore, shallow water.  Through the green glassy water we could see the mossy bottom about 12 feet down.  On the shore, two older men had set up their poles and lines on the rocks at the water’s edge. Their anglers’ hats shaded their faces in the morning sun and their conversation traveled across the glinting water.  When one of the two codgers caught a fish, his pal took pictures.

Over and over, I cast out, reeled back a bit to make the line taut, and then waited.  Over and over, I picked up weeds and bark.  I’d reel in, balance the rod to grasp the line and carefully tease off the mossy tendrils tangled around the fluorescent yellow power bait of my hook and sliding sinker. 

I must have cast out four or five times.  Then came the jerking tug-tug-tug Dennis told me I’d recognize. The fish pulled the pole first left, then right and then in a sharp arc as he dipped downward under the boat. Dennis coached me, “play with him,” “keep reeling in,” “let him get tired out.”   I moved from one side of the boat to the other.  He was now close enough to see his speckled silver sides gleaming.  The smacking tail.  Dennis netted him and into the boat about 12 inches of rainbow trout sputtered and flopped.  

The old guys on the shore applauded. 

Dennis threaded my line onto an orange “disgorger” tool to extract my hook, all the while talking to the squirming fish. "Take it easy, little guy," he murmured as he gently nudged out the hook. When the hook was out, the little trout settled a bit and then lay still in the net on the bottom of the boat, his gills pumping.  Dennis pulled out our stringer and poked its metal point through the fish’s jaw and hung the stringer over the side in the water, anchored in the oarlock. 

This time Dennis and I caught five trout---all rainbow.  Dennis even reeled in a 19 inch fish, nearly 4 pounds.  He cleaned them all and we brought them home, packed in an ice chest. 

The skillet is sizzling now as I write, but I am not sure if I can eat any of the fish. 

I like my fish speckled and glimmering, breaking water in the lake in the warm sunlight.  For the rest---the eating part---it’s not my sport yet.


Read more essays like this one in East Village Magazine at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/en/

Cliché---until it happens to you

It’s the stuff of chick lit and rom-com. An event so cliché-encrusted it sinks right down, sucked into the seabed of ready-made metaphors. 

But that’s the thing about clichés.  Like many life events (divorce being another notorious one) it’s a commonplace---until it happens to you. 

This one is a marker you can’t avoid.  Not a wedding or a funeral---no relatives involved either.  Still, you casually check out plane fares online.  Then in a moment of merlot-induced nonchalance, you snap down the credit card (metaphorically, that is), locking in a five-bill ticket to fly across the country for it. 

Even if you cancel, you’ll be upset for a week just because you got the news.

Welcome to your high school reunion!  The fiftieth.  The merlot does not help with the number.

So, dear reader, I went.

My experience with reunions is limited. The first one was ten years ago---the fortieth from this high school. I confided my apprehensions to my Michigan dental hygienist, Annette.   Italian and well-traveled, Annette immediately grasped the import of the situation.  She geared me up with a regimen of professional grade Crest white strips so I’d be in good toothy shape for pictures.  I wore black and swathed my neck with a silk scarf.  Bella figura, said Annette.

This reunion was hosted by a classmate, Wally, at his historic home in the town of Ross, the most secluded of a string of once sleepy summer towns that stretch across Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The town was named for Gold Rush era adventurer, James Ross, a Scot who’d first tried his luck in Tasmania, and then struck his own gold in California as a wholesaler of wine and spirits.  He took his fortune and retired to the Rancho Punta de Quentin---part of the huge land grant parcel that later became Marin County.  He died in 1862 at the age of fifty.

Over later decades, other settlers followed. The newly prosperous from San Francisco built summer estates in styles that reflected their aspirations and fond recollections of the East they’d left behind. The 1906 quake and fire brought another wave.  Prescient city fathers enacted ordinances to protect trees and prevent noise at the first Board of Trustees meeting in 1908. 

Today large wooded parcels of land still shield residents from highway sounds. The leaves of tall, dense hedges obscure street numbers.  This enclave of old affluence looks untouched since the nineteen sixties when I was in high school.

And so it begins. 

An unseasonable heat wave has settled on Marin County this September Saturday, just when people celebrating fifty years of anything in their lives struggle to look their best.  Small consolation that even residents of Eden suffer summer weather from time to time.

My partner, Dennis, is driving me to the shindig.  His nature is frank and forthright and he’s a reunion veteran, having attended two high schools.  Classmates from both keep in touch and get together every year.  His complete lack of anxiety bolsters my spirits.  “Guys can always shoot the shit,” he says. 

Hand this man a beer.

Meantime, we’ve found what Google maps says is our destination.  A gate opens.  In we roll. 

Velvety black asphalt guides us along a graceful curve and past a gate house to the right.  Beside it, in the dappled shade of the trees, I can just make out a small cannon resting on a two-wheeled gun carriage.  We dead end at a turnaround.  A carport sheltering antique cars on one side, a fountain on the other.

I open the window and ask for guidance from a woman stepping smartly across the pavement, a small florist’s arrangement clutched against her robin’s egg blue shirt, fine dun-color hair pushed back behind her ears. 

“Parking is supposed to be down at the school,” she says, probably exasperated at having to repeat this yet again. I mumble my thanks and close the passenger window, relieved to seal in coolness and composure.  

Dennis backs and fills.  I recall that we’d passed the Episcopal Church down the road on a corner.        

We are not here yet. 

It’s trickier now to retrace the driveway and exit; people spill out of the gate house, clusters  gather on the pavement.  Clearly, they all must have parked somewhere else.   

I turn my head and look back across the grass toward a rambling three-story Victorian house.  Freshly painted and startlingly bright, its wrap around verandah and white wicker furniture inviting on this hot day.  I’ve lived so long in the East that I recognize where these multi-storied frame houses with their Queen Anne turrets and elaborate friezes came from. 

Tables are set for dinner out on the grass. It is the deep, even green of professional landscaping, a miniature of the perfect English lawn that gardeners mow and roll with heavy metal drums for generations.  Across the grass and opposite the house is a pool, its corners bracketed with ornamental cypress like a Roman villa. Beyond the pool two pergolas extend from each side of a pool house. 

I live in Flint, Michigan, a notorious rust-belt GM town. Over the last thirty years it’s become my home, its grit and catastrophe my “normal.”  It is a place pervaded by economic decline that seeps into daily life.  Without realizing it you choose your route to the grocery store by how much urban blight you are willing to pass along the way. 

Five decades away from my native land, its vernacular and costume, and today I feel like a tourist on formerly home turf.  

We find the church parking lot, ditch the car with relief, and walk down Shady Lane (yes, a two-lane road arched with trees), and re-enter through a gate hidden in the hedge. 

From the gatehouse across the grass, a woman calls out my name, her arms raised in joyful recognition; unease evaporates and I am captivated. No one has called out to me this way for many years.  I am here at last.  More exclamations follow, like pops from small fire crackers.  We hug and clutch one another’s hands, reluctant to let go. 

I am moved to see so many people and to remember them by name, to see their faces contoured by time but their eyes and smiles immediately familiar. 

We query one another with a kindly curiosity, gesture our empathy with sighs and laughter,  and then cut short our conversations each exclaiming to the other, “I want to talk to everyone.” 

Our age feels comfortable, while our high school years seem (as indeed they were) closer to childhood than to being adults---so much younger than we thought we were, with our striving to be older.  Some in our class had met in first and second grade.  Others felt like outsiders when they confronted uniformed dyads and triads of primary school friends.  No matter now.   As Dylan wrote in the mid-sixties, “Ah, I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.”

A male classmate reminds me about a time when he’d brought me home after a dance.  All I remember is that I had a crush on him; of the dance or the impressive, gentlemanly transport home?  No recollection.  Again no matter.  As he says “this time our achievement is just getting here, upright and coherent.”  We are grateful.

The classmates who still live nearby get together between the big landmark dates.  Widow and widower, divorced and remarried. Some now tend one another after surgeries. Parkinson’s and MS have appeared. I watch as a former football player gingerly supports the arm of a former songleader. 

As dinner begins, one of the organizers calls for our attention.  In a little speech he asks us to remember those of our number who have died, and also our parents and to think of them with thanks for having sent us to this school.  Succinct and effortless, without pretension.  Better than academic receptions I attended before retirement. 

It is dark when we leave.  The clusters of people standing on the lawn or seated in the white wicker chairs on the porch have vanished; the driveway is quiet.  Lights from inside the carriage house suggest lingering conversations.  The small illumined structure glows in the darkness like paintings of nighttime scenes in Japanese landscapes. In the shadows by the tall hedge I can see five or six people huddled together beneath pool house pergola.

I am tired, my conversation spent.  I want to absorb all the sensations and impressions and then spread them out before me all over again.  To stand back while the others talk and laugh, to have the afternoon linger as the sunlight fades.  To savor it bit by bit, like the concluding moments in a movie where the story has found resolution, and in slow motion the last frames seal the image in our minds. 

Months later the many close-up pictures that Dennis took now roll across my computer screen saver.  Each morning when I open my laptop I greet my classmates as we greeted one another that hot day. Again and again, I look at the faces and the smiles.  And wish them well.

The California that I left no longer pulls me back.  

And Dennis?  He met everyone---not with me, of course, but on his own. Now he’s looking forward to the next one.  Besides, he’d like to talk more to Wally about that cannon. It’s a Civil War replica and Wally fires it---minus the cannon ball---on special occasions.   

Read more essays like this one at in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

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My Mother’s Body

The lilac in my back yard bloomed this spring for the first time since I planted it about ten years ago. In one of my early gardening attempts, I placed it on the north side of the house and too close to the foundation.  It struggled, slow growing in its sun-deprived location.  One of those plantings that should have been removed early, the longer it survived the more misbegotten it looked. It was too strong to pull out.  Each season its woody stems got taller, but its three or four branches produced only large leaves that progressed from light green to a dark, waxy green in summer.  A disappointing syringa vulgaris. My mother had been alive when the lilac went into the ground.   She died at age 91 and has been dead for four years.  And now the surprise: three clusters of blossoms have bloomed at the top of the bush where it grazes the second story---its flowers too high to reach and cut.

Other startling things happened this year.  Getting in to the shower I looked down to see my mother’s thighs. I stared, puzzled at the slack, narrow folds of flesh and the skin with a cross-hatch surface.  The body is mine, but I last saw the flaccid rippled flesh on my mother when I bathed her. Sharp-eyed mavens of female aging term such skin “crapey”.  Can this textile metaphor be apt?  I pinch the skin together in my hands and ponder.  The materials I knew as wool or silk crape made wonderful garments.  The women in my family sewed and they valued crape.  With its soft, submissive hand, the material follows the shape of the body line, comforts the flesh and bones beneath.  In silk the fabric’s complex weave does produce a crimpy surface, but I hadn’t noticed.  


I’ve gotten side-tracked from the shower and sit on the side of the tub, transfixed by my corporeality.  At the tips of my fingers I see my grandmother’s fingernails, narrow and ridged.  I grew up with my grandmother and with the curiosity of a child I observed the details of her body never thinking of it as prophetic of my own.  The ring finger on my left hand crooks slightly sideways as I remember hers did when she was old.  She’s come back to me now, fifty years after her death.  She is in my body, this body which now is becoming the body of my female elders---those to whom I was subordinate, those whom I admired and sometimes feared, those about whom I was curious, and those whom in the 1960s I could disdain.  I am them.

Come six o’clock I’ll raise a large goblet and toast these women and their bodies with red wine.  My mother's drink was scotch.  She wasn’t a connoisseur, but had moved from Dewar’s to Johnny Walker Red.  In the evening she’d pour a couple of fingers and say, at age 86, "I deserve it."  This expression repelled and puzzled me.  A year later, we moved it all---scotch bottles and “Old Fashioned” glasses, along with the chests, pictures, rugs, and clothes.  We crammed it into her one-bedroom apartment in an assisted living complex.  But suddenly the taste for liquor was gone, she said, surprised herself that this long habit of the cocktail hour---the reward of the day---had disappeared and she hardly missed it. 

My grandmother was from Kentucky and drank bourbon.  She said that the tradition was “bourbon and branch water,” a strange expression and the kind of odd phrase an observant child recalls.  Later I learned that branch water meant water from the distillery’s stream that kept the taste of the bourbon pure.  She lived to be 88 and I don’t know when bourbon stopped tasting good to her or reminding her of the South. 


My red wine libation is gentler, especially its lighter variants of pinots, Grenaches, and Syrahs.  Reassured by the diet and health experts that a daily glass is salutary, I measure the pour:  6 ounces is generous, 4 is scant.  I try to hit 5.  If I drink two glasses, the bottles go fast.  A friend is crafting a tray made of wine corks, so I feel helpful as another bottle hits the trash.  For a brief hour or so, my joints and muscles ease.  I remember my mother and grandmother with kindness.


If I am like my mother and grandmother, some twenty-five more years of life are ahead.  I’ve landed in new terrain.  As in a dream I grope intuitively among familiar details that combine strangely with foreign elements.  Like a traveler, I’ve grabbed a guidebook for the major monuments---essays and news reports on age and aging in the New York Times.  Cognizant of a major reader cohort, some Times features reassure an audience purportedly still young---the fifty, sixty, and seventy-year old well-fed and well-educated Americans.  Believers in a “shining future” promised by scientifically supported regimens of exercise, diet, and spirituality.   Relentlessly optimistic.  Other essays are darker. How to obtain care for elderly parents, deal with Alzheimer’s and cancer, broach end of life decisions? Accustomed to a sense of competence, readers seem shocked by the demands of the ancient human family.  Their online comments describe frustration and confusion with these tasks.  Worse, in the shadow of assisting our elders, we touch situations that will engulf us in a few decades.  


Grim. But the mothers in my body signal something else.  They tell me that they are there and powerful.  The burden of responsibility for my mother’s last years of life---once so heavy---has floated away, just like her taste for Johnny Walker.  Now she and my grandmother return in the startling efflorescence of an ordinary lilac, just at the time their genetic traces transform my body. Maybe a reminder of the admirable persistence of life in unappreciated and expected forms.  

 Read more personal essays in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/