Day 316, January 25, 2021
Big Yellow House in Lenox
Tonight's soundtrack: A 3 hour long compilation version of "Dark Star" discovered in an interview with Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes (Thanks, Claiborne!)
Sometimes, when I start writing, I feel like I need to put on sunglasses, or blinders, like those things they put on mules so they continue walking forward and don't get distracted by all the things going on around them. It is as if my mind knows, that just beyond my peripheral vision, one of the Christmas cactus buds is falling off and dropping to the floor, and it is almost impossible to not turn and look, wait for something to happen.
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| Franklin sat in a nice window of sunlight today. |
Mr. Smith lived in a grand old victorian on the edge of Lenox center. The year we rented an upstairs apartment from him I must have been three or four, I don't remember my brother being born yet. It was one of those marvelous houses where it seemed every room held some kind of secret just waiting to be found. In one sitting room, for example, besides a mobile bar cart and the typical soft loveseats and chairs, there was an extensive collection of ceramic, plastic, and stuffed pigs. Pigs of all color and pattern. Every permutation of pigs one could imagine.
Even at that age, Mr. Smith seemed like an old man. He drove an antique Mercedes Benz, walked phantom-like through the raspberry hedges collecting berries for jam, and chopped the wood for his famous cookouts (no charcoal briquettes allowed) with an axe. He also made the most fantastic potato salad I have ever tasted (no mayonnaise).
He had the posture of a crotchety old man who swore too freely, pretended to be annoyed by small children, and didn't like you touching his cats. But in reality, I think he was one of the most full of love people I have ever met and his smile and laugh was enviable. Even now I wish I could laugh and smile as irreverently as he did. He was a writer and in addition to his autobiography, a biography of MacArthur, and an infamous how to play baseball book that was dedicated to me (infamous because the printer reversed all the drawings as if to ensure I would never learn how to play ball), he also ghost wrote books by athletes and politicians, and wrote a weekly column for the Berkshire Eagle. But, I was not really aware of all those things at that age. I was not aware that this archetype of the crotchety old man would become one of my favorite kinds of human beings. What I was aware of was that, when I woke up early in the morning and slipped out of the apartment, crept down the main staircase, and followed a side hallway past a pantry beset with bees, the pig's sitting room, and a tight narrow staircase, I would come to the first floor kitchen where Bob would be already working his pot of raspberry jam, or home made baked beans, or whatever else he had put into motion before a 4 year old child had even climbed out of bed.
He would make a show of being put upon to suffer the indignity of minding a little child. But soon he had me eating a little breakfast, maybe drinking some orange soda, then he would slip into a side room off the porch, one he never let me enter. I only pieced together what existed in there through the crack in the door as he slipped inside, shutting the door tight behind him, and from what I could make out through the dusty windows. Mostly piles of newspapers stacked waist high, books on almost every surface that wasn't covered with newspapers, and two desks. Each of the desks had its own typewriter, which I later would learn was so that if one typewriter malfunctioned, he could switch to the other without stopping his train of thought.
Also, in the writing room was a chest that I imagined was locked to keep little prying fingers out, because inside were a collection of board games that he would pull out and play with me.
It was around Bob that I heard my first stories that were too precious for the tender ears of a child. It felt like getting to see an R-rated movie before you are 18. I would find myself laughing along with Bob and whomever had come to visit, and invariably someone would turn to me and ask, "Do you even know what you are laughing at?" The answer was no, not really, but maybe just a little bit. The same would go for the politics that were discussed when the editor for the paper came for drinks and conversation. There was one famous story about how when John F. Kennedy stopped through Lenox and met Bob, he was eulogized at a later campaign stop about how the politician had stopped in Lenox and talked with a farmer. They all had a good laugh at that. There was also a visitor who once said he knew the true story of what happened at Chappaquiddick, and proceeded to tell the story in such detail that it was both shocking and unfathomable to my tender ears.
I think Bob would probably say something like, If you are a fool enough to leave a small child in my care, then it is not my fault that he comes home damaged by what he hears... or something like that.
When my father was a small child, a man who was conducting a children's choir noticed him, and pulled him aside, marked him as different from every other child in the choir. He noticed my father as something special. I feel the same way with Bob. Something in Bob noticed I was listening closely. Something in him knew that we were kindred sprits separated only by a lifetime of living.
Bob told me the story about the pigs. First, he made sure I understood that pigs are smarter than cats, they are smarter than dogs, and some pigs are smarter than some humans. When he was a boy he had a pet pig, but times were hard and things got bad. Things got so bad that they had to kill his pig so that the family would have something to eat. He didn't go into great detail, this was not a storytelling story, it was a story told by absences and silences. I feel like I pieced together the story word by word, a sentence at a time, told over many small moments so that over the decades that I knew Bob, I pieced together the story about why he had such an affinity for pigs.
I wonder if he knew then, at the age of 4, that this little kid looked up to him, that he had filled my head with a possibility that had never existed there before. Once I found out that Bob was a writer, and I learned what it meant to be a writer, I imagined that as my future. I had no real concept of what that would mean or what form that would take, but I just felt like it was a thing that gave my life purpose.
Even now, after all these years, in addition to being a father, a dean, an academic, a husband, a chicken owner, I am still a writer. It is how I process the world and make sense of my place in it. I feel lucky to have met Bob during his time on this Earth.
How lucky we are to know one another and experience each other on this journey.
Sending you all love and strength,
Leo
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| A nice purple that spilled out of my burrito last night. |
From Our Friends:
From SABER's Striving towards inclusion in academic biology series:
Addressing students’ basic needs with a culture of caring during the pandemic
https://asu.zoom.us/j/86593325821
From the Poetry Center at Smith College:
From the 5 College Center for East Asian Studies:
From the Mass Cultural Council:
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| The moon last night. |
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