The Stars My Destination

The scene I love most in The Tender Bar is when the uncle, the Ben Affleck character, opens a closet stacked with books from floor-to-ceiling and advises his fatherless nephew, an aspiring writer: “Start by reading all these.” 

I met Drago when we were in the eighth grade.  I remember the first time I visited his house.  Like me he was the oldest of seven siblings. He took me down into the basement of his family’s house on Morley Street. Flush with the concrete wall was a sealed wooden door.  The door had a small square opening about four inches square hinged into its center.  Drago opened this tiny door and inserted his, hand, arm, all the way to the shoulder releasing an interior latch and opening the door as if by secret code.  He pulled a string and the room was illuminated.  The sight took my breath away. I was looking at a small room, a cell really, of about 8 by 10 feet. A cot, Drago’s bed, occupied almost all the floor space, each wall was bookshelf from ceiling to floor overstuffed with books, mostly paperback science fiction.  We would read these for the next five or six years. We read the classics, Asimov and Bradbury, Frank Herbert and Philip K Dick. From Vonnegut we would later segue into “literature.”  But what I remember reading most were the work of John Brunner and Alfred Bester.  It was like they were our own private authors.

Bester’s The Stars My Destination may have stuck in my memory all these years because of the quatrain spoken by the main character that appears twice in the book:

Gully Foyle is my name

Terra is my nation 

Deep space is my dwelling place 

Death’s my destination.

 

The second time it appears the last line reads “The stars my destination.”

    After we read this, for a few months we never used the word “home.”  We would always say, “Are we going to your dwelling place now?” Or, “My parents require me at our dwelling place.”

If I remember accurately (questionable) Joyce has Stephen Daedalus do something like this in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: Stephen Daedalus, Dublin, Ireland. . . . etc.  I remember making just such a list as a grade school kid at St. Michaels, as if to ask how many coordinates does it take to locate myself:

David Stevenson

Hathaway Street 
Livonia

Wayne County

Michigan

USA

North America

Earth

The Solar System

 

Apparently this kind of quatrain was popular in the 18^th century with “heaven” always being the destination.  Very aspirational.

            When we moved into the house we now live in there was a shed off the back door.  It was primitive, cement floor, no interior walls, or finish of any kind, a storage shed.  It housed, paradoxically, all kinds of garden toxins and rodents and spiders, as well as ancient, nonfunctioning and abandoned tools.  I emptied all this out and a wizardly contractor/writer friend finished it for me with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.  It is about eight feet by ten with an advantage of being about twelve feet high.  I keep a ladder in there to reach the highest shelves. I am there right now. It didn’t occur to me until writing this that I was recreating Drago’s little cellar bedroom, floor-to-ceiling with books. I wish he were here to see this, but he’s been gone over a year now.  I like to think there’s a glimmer of his consciousness out there among the stars, aware that he lives in the whorls of my memory, forever the skinny-armed eighth grader unlatching his secret door and opening for me that world of books.

            We were selling some furniture on craigslist and a young couple came over with a child about ten years old.  I happened to not be at home.  The couple was long in deliberation and pleasantly chatty, but the kid was bored to death. My wife said to him, “Want to see something?” He did.  She took him out the back door and opened the door to my study. The door opens to three steps downward, so there is very much a cave-like feeling to the place. She reported that the kid walked down the three steps, and looked around at the walls of books extending skyward and turned back to her.  “It’s like a Harry Potter room,” he gasped, “magic.”

So Much Is Lost

 When you’re reading a used book and the previous owner has marked the most bland, unremarkable passage in the whole book.  Through what lens were they reading this book?

 

Though our house is small, our bedroom is large and features windows roughly on the east, south, and west.  On sunny afternoons the space is flooded in sunlight.  We call it The Solarium. Last night I awakened to a bright light coming through the eastern windows.  I realized the trees were lit up by a full moon.  The moon then moved to the south and poured its light through the shore pines outside those windows.  Finally, it shifted to the west and came through the window there unfiltered by trees, illuminating the room in a shadowy bluish light.  Then it dropped behind the house across the street and into the Pacific.

 

Noted by me in Outline: “So much is lost in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments and if you don’t hold on to them, the seas will take them, too.” ~ Rachel Cusk

 

Woman: “Are you feeling okay?  Your face looks puffy.”

Man looks in mirror: “I’m fine.  My hair just looks stupid.”

 

Tsumnami warning!  Stay away from the beach!  Every electronic device in the house is alerting us.  The first wave will hit us at 8:30. Naturally, at 8:30 we walk to the beach. Others are there, too. We wish, I suppose, to meet our fate head on.  No evidence of the tsunami appears.  We spectators are disappointed.

 

I collect agates on the shore.  I pick up even the small ones, small as baby’s teeth. The other day I absent-mindedly found one in my pocket and popped it in my mouth. I realized what I had 

done before I broke a tooth or swallowed. What the hell?

 

On the beach we are approached by a woman and a child with three dogs.  The dogs are a large  Golden Retriever, leashed to the woman, and a mini-Aussie Shepherd and a retriever puppy leased to the child.  The woman says: “The little one’s neurotic.” When we walked away my wife said, “At first I thought she was talking about the kid.”

 

When my wife can’t sleep she turns on a TED talk. In the middle of the night I write down this phrase: “escalation of commitment to a losing course of action.”  In the morning I wonder if this is comment on writing.  Specifically: mine.

 

Thrift store find: The Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa. This book has little drawings marking the passage of its previous reader: little half moons, stars, flowers.  An occasional poem is festooned with underlinings.  Finally, a note: “Consciousness is a problem.” They got that one right.

 

 

 

Our son, gone six years today, visits me in a dream~

 

          Dream from the night of October 3, 2021, annotated

 

 

Dreams are boring, says the main character in Robert Stone’s “Helping.”

 

Never put a dream in a story, said Camoin, who generally had few rules about writing. He believed in what works.  Okay, he said, backing the needle off a tad, You can put a dream in a story if you have to, but it must have absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the story.

 

 

 

My father and I were going to mass in Galesburg.  We were dressed up in sport coats and ties.  He was driving north, presumably from Macomb, and there were snow covered mountains to the west rising above a flat prairie.[1]  My father remarked that sometimes when he was in the shower he could see these mountains out the window and was amazed by them.

 

Bob Dylan’s song “The Girl from the North Country” was playing in the background during most of this dream.[2]

 

We arrived at the church and there was no place to park. My dad kept trying to park on the street, but the spots were not legal. Finally, we decided I would go get us seats in the church and he would park the car.[3]

 

During the dream I heard something crash in the house, but did not investigate.

 

I walked in through a door and was in the sacristy where a red-haired priest was familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. He was not the red-haired priest from the Newman Center at Western Illinois University.[4]

 

I went into the building through the sacristy and into the church.  The seats were against the walls and a small make-shift altar was in the middle of the room.  I found an empty bench on the left and sat at its end, intending to save a seat for my father.  An older couple with a developmentally disabled adult daughter sat down next to me and I explained I was saving the seat for my father.  They said okay, but the disabled daughter was sitting super close to me and kind of hanging on me.  I was very uncomfortable and the parents were pulling her away from me.  Although my clothes were very dressy as I stretched out my legs in front of me I that I was wearing brightly patterned socks that did not match my pants or shoes.

 

During the dream I heard the wind blow a door shut inside the house, but did not investigate.

 

Meanwhile, where was my father?  And why wasn’t mass starting? It was ten minutes after the hour: 10:10. It was taking my father over twenty minutes to park the car.  I finally got up and walked out of the church to find my father.

 

He wheeled up, and now I noticed the car was a big boxy American sedan, from the 1970s.  My father was no longer wearing his church clothes.  Macklin was in the back seat and he had an enormous bag of tacos and a pizza in a box.[5]He explained he had been in the mountains for days.  “Where?” I asked. “Way up there,” he said, “all the way to Lake Constance.”[6] He was dressed in hiking clothes, including his ski pants with suspenders.[7]  He was real happy about his days in the mountains and especially about all the food and we were looking for some place to stop and eat it. That was the end of the dream, Macklin smiling.

 

In the morning I looked for signs of fallen objects or a shut door and found none.  I had been up for a couple hours and wondered why it was still dark outside.  The garbage truck came by and I wondered why it was so late. I checked my watch and it was only a little after six. The garbage truck was on time; I had been awake since around four a.m.

 

The Takeaway

I recorded this dream because in the six years since he passed away I have only remembered dreaming about Macklin two or three times. And, he was so happy in this dream and it made me happy to see him happy.  

 

I think I don’t dream of him so much because he is always on my waking mind. I mean this quite literally. It’s like when you’re writing a sustained piece, a novel, and as you go about your daily life you’re only half in the world because in your head you’re “writing” the novel. Or, like when you’re dreaming, you can be conscious of what might be going on in the waking world: a crashing sound in the house, a slammed door.  Even, I suppose, if nothing has crashed and nor any door has slammed shut.

 

Macklin could eat a tremendous amount of food. I remember driving him to work and he asked if we could stop at McDonalds. Sure. He ordered a large breakfast, and then he said, “Can I have another one?” Sure, I said. Twenty bucks of McDonald’s breakfast.  Aisha and I once asked him if there was anything he wanted us to get for him from Costco.  “Get me some FOOD I CAN EAT,” he roared.

 

I shared the dream first with my wife and my son.  My wife was fearful: “Do you think it means you’re going to die?”  But that’s not how I interpreted it. 

My son said, “Was that heaven inside that car?” 

“Yeah,” I said, “It may have been. Maybe as close as I’ll get to it.”

`           My son and I are planning a pilgrimage to Lake Constance. Apparently, it is a very strenuous hike, even dangerous if you believe the route description (though I doubt it). When you hear a call like this, you answer.  We will tread carefully and listen to the wind, the rock, and the stars. We’ll sleep by the shore of Lake Constance, and, perchance, dream.

 

 

 

 

---

• [1] Macomb, Illinois, our home for 13 years was about a thousand miles from any mountains.

[2] The Dylan/Johnny Cash duet version.

[3] I have never been to the Catholic church in Galesburg and have no idea where it is.

[4] “Sacristy.” This word can only be in my head because I am watching a horror series, Midnight Mass, on television that had a few sacristy scenes.

[5] Macklin passed away in 2015.

[6] Lake Constance.  Never heard of it.  Research shows a famous one in Switzerland and another one in the Olympic Mountains of Washington State. In the dream, I presumed he was in the Chugach above Anchorage.

[7] These are real pants that he left behind.

The Great Old Stadiums of Detroit and Other Memories

                                                

Sometimes when I first awaken I start reading before my eyes are able to accurately focus.  Thus, the other morning I read "Ted Williams lists the books she read while writing her latest novel . . .” And I thought: I didn’t know Ted Williams wrote novels.  And when did he change genders?  Then the words swam into focus: Tia Williams. Tia.  Idiot.  But I thought about Ted Williams.  The last batter to hit for an average of .400.  A baseball career interrupted by serving as a fighter pilot in two wars. 

 

My uncle Chuck talked about seeing Williams launching a ball over the right field wall and out of Tiger Stadium (probably Briggs Stadium at the time, felled by the wrecking ball in 2009).  The amazing thing, my uncle said, was that he had a pin in his shoulder, holding it together.

Tiger Stadium, Michigan Ave and Trumball.

 

My uncle also saw Jake LaMotta fight.  Twice, if I remember right.  LaMotta fought over 80 times professionally and about a quarter of them were in Detroit, mostly at the old Olympia, then home to the Red Wings.  But LaMotta also fought in Tiger Stadium, as did Joe Louis before him. Even if you don’t follow boxing you may have seen Martin Scorsese’s’ version of LaMotta in Raging Bull.  It must have been something to see that rage in person.

 

The last time I was in Tiger Stadium was the year before I left Detroit and also Al Kaline’s last season.  Number 6. In Little League the best player on the team wore number 6 to the envy of everyone else.  I remember watching Kaline foul off about 20 pitches that night and that was when it dawned on me that he was doing it on purpose, waiting for his pitch. This late awakening to a subtlety of the game probably explains a lot about my track career (as Coach George Harrison, our high school’s baseball coach once quipped).  Kaline waited for his pitch and stroked it gracefully into the outfield for a single.  He passed away last year at the age of 85 and had been in the Tiger organization for 67 years. Everyone loved that guy. 

 

I have been blessed to see a lot of amazing athletes do their work in person.

 

We went down to Cobo Arena (“repurposed” 2010—2015) to see Julius Erving play in an exhibition game against the Pistons. Exhibition because he then played in the old ABA, his enormous hand on the old red, white, and blue basketball.  He sported an tremendous Afro, and, as he was known for, defied gravity right before our eyes.

 

I don’t remember anything about the Red Wings game I saw at the old Olympia Stadium (demolished 1987) except for the hushed reverence that moved through the crowd when Gordie Howe took the ice.  Number 9.

 

Once I was running down Golfview, the street bordering Dearborn Country Club. A tournament was going on and as I passed the first tee, which was right next to the fence, I realized Jack Nicklaus was teeing up.  It must have been a Masters Tour.  I stopped and walked to the fence.  I was ten feet away from the tee. Nicklaus teed off. I was amazed by the power and precision of his swing.  When the club struck the ball it was like a small explosion.  I am not a golfer, but don’t let anyone tell you golf is not a sport.

 

My wife happened to be in Louisville when Muhammed Ali died.  She came back with a photograph of herself and Chuck Wepner.  “Who is he?” she asked me.  Chuck Wepner!  He knocked Ali down in the 9^th round!  He almost went the distance, TKO-ed by the Greatest with a few seconds left in the 15^th round.  Wepner has been the subject of several movies, of which one you know well: Rocky.

 

I should have mentioned this above, but maybe it fits better here at the end. Ted Williams apparently was an atheist and had his body cryogenically frozen for a possible return here on earth.  But I suppose he had already attained a bit of immortality.

 

Maybe we all have a dusting of immortality in us, if there’s a spark of us left in someone‘s living memory. I remember best the athletic feats of my teammates and friends and I wouldn’t trade those memories for anyone else’s. I remember playing football our senior year down in Southgate on a Sunday afternoon in 1970.  We couldn’t win the league championship unless we won that day against Aquinas and the teams were evenly matched. Mick DeGiulio, all 115 pounds of him, streaked down the left sideline and our quarterback Pat Sarb hit him on the longest pass play of the season for the game winning touchdown. Number 18. It’s cool to see the greatest athletes of all time do their work in person. But Mick’s touchdown against Aquinas? Man, I’ll never forget that.

 

 

 

 

Sacred Objects: A Photo Essay

I am committed to drastically unburdening myself of material possessions.  This required me to investigate the contents of boxes that I’ve hauled all over the country, but not opened in many years, in some cases, decades. Here’s some stuff I found.

1.     My first rosary.  A gift from my uncle George Harvey, my Confirmation sponsor, 1963. Uncle George died alone, of covid in the early days of the pandemic.  A remarkable man, dearly missed.

 

2.     Stopwatch.  A gift Christmas gift from my father, 1969.  I used to carry this unwieldy object when I ran on the track. Still works just fine.

3.     Salewa crampons, 1971. My first purchase from REI. First worn on Popocatepetl.

 

4.     Mountain Gazette # 30, February 1975.  The only edition of this magazine I saved, except for the one commemorating Hunter Thompson, which I can’t find.  I read Dick Dorworth’s “Night Driving” and within a month loaded up my 1968 AMC Javelin and drove west, where I’ve mostly stayed.

5.      Schonhofen label. When I first moved west I worked making packs with Mike and Margaret Schonhofen. After we dissolved that business, Mike and Marg had their own label before Mike left to design gear, first for Chouinard, then Nike etc. We remain best of friends.

 

6.     Typewriter keys. I hauled this old Remington typewriter around for decades before  finally, reluctantly, letting it go.  I plucked the keys off like a deranged dentist.

7.     Untitled first story (nonfiction) I wrote. Set at a Deroit Lions game. Less cringe-inducing than I expected. Typed on aforementioned typewriter.

 

8.     Wooden spoon. Hand-carved by friend and climbing partner Jim Pinter-Lucke and gifted to me on the occasion of my 30^th birthday, a year before we climbed Alpamayo together. Was really really glad to find this.

9.     Letter from Fred Beckey.  Note the purloined hotel stationery and “postage due.” Classic Fred!

10.  Four copies of Conquest of Everest, John Hunt's story of the first ascent, 1953. Including Assault on Everest, the American version. I am keeping a fifth copy, not pictured here, signed by Ed Hillary. Let me know if you need one of these!

My Last Notes from the MFA Residency, 2021

 

At the end of the residency I collect my notes, sprinkled in with some reading and experiences that occurred during the residency and read them back in a closing address just before we say goodbye.

 

 

Why is it that some words are harder to say than others? (in my notes but unattributed)

 

"Whatever that thing that happens is called." (Daryl Farmer in “Why We Write”)

 

I love when what happens on the page is something that I didn’t know was in me (me, in response to something Daryl said)

 

Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was written in “the blue hour,” the numinous predawn window of time before her children awakened.  Which I like because that’s how/when I wrote my novel, Forty Crows.

 

“  . . . a childhood of utter tedium . . . a soulful girl, she watched the trains approach and depart or pored over the Sears catalog, which she called the book of dreams.” Wrote David Yaffe of Joni Mitchell.

 

I have always loved Joni Mitchell.  Watch a video of her performing when she was young,  Her  smile says, “I am an artist at the height of my powers and I am in love with the world.”

 

“The purpose of the writing comes after the writing.”  Says Sharon Emmerichs, author of The Shield-Maiden.

 

Rick Bass reminds us of the movie Jeremiah Johnson.  I remember seeing that in 1973 and having one of those Rilkean “You must change your life” moments.  I left college the next week.

 

“You know how tight the grains are in a 300-year-old spruce tree.”   We didn’t know, but we trust you, Rick.

 

This phrase from Valerie Miner’s story “Iconoclast”: “Layla, still ascending.” Her characters on an archetypal voyage descending into the underworld and returning.

 

Rick Bass asks: “Have we become so accustomed to ugliness that we fear all beauty?” 

 

“YOU’RE MUTED!” Being the most oft repeated phrase of the residency.

 

“Rain, no game,” said Valerie’s brother, young master of baseball field conditions and brevity.

 

Sunday night my son calls.  The car has died on the Seward Highway just past Beluga Point.  I agree to drive down, call the tow truck, switch cars with him, and wait for the tow.  I only see him once a year, so I don’t mind the fuss.  The tow truck driver arrives and I like him immediately.  He works with great efficiency, focus, and precision.  I don’t know how this works, so I ask, “Can you give me a ride back up to Anchorage? “He smiles, channeling his inner Julius, the Samuel L. Jackson character from Pulp Fiction, “What kind of tow truck driver would I be, if I didn’t give you a ride back to Anchorage?  The ride was slow, all the Sunday night traffic backed up, heading home after a weekend down south, but it was a beautiful night, the pink afterglow of the sunset lingering to the north.  The time was approaching midnight and the whole way back we talked, mostly him, about the pleasures of driving the truck, rescuing the lost, and sometimes coming upon the maimed and dead.  When he got my car settled in at the mechanic’s shop, we shook hands and I said, “Man, you are good at your job.” And his smile lit up the what was now near darkness.

 

“Reality is under no obligation to be interesting,” said Borges. “But you are,” I told our writers.

 

“Trouble, Hold On.”  Being a sign held up to the camera by Ed Allen.

Marcus. Being the name of the tow truck driver.

 

“Listening to music while you’re reading,” Ed said, “is like listening to music while you’re listening to music.”

 

"It was poetry that made history interesting to me.” So said Camille Dungy.

 

My son asked me some computer related question, to which I answer that I don’t even know what he has just asked.  “It’s a mystery to me,” he says, "that they (they meaning the university) continue to send you paychecks.”

 

It’s Hemingway’s birthday a dozen or so facebook pages tell me.  This calls to mind a story Garcia-Marquez tells about seeing Hemingway on the streets of Paris.  It’s 1957 and Garcia-Marquez is unknown, Hemingway, of course, famous.  Garcia-Marquez describes him in cowboy boots, a baseball cap, and somehow incongruous small round wire-rimmed glasses.  He is with his wife Mary Welsh and is obviously enjoying himself in the bookstalls near the Sorbonne.  Unable to bring himself to approach the great man, Garcia-Marquez yells from across the street, “MAESTRO!”  Hemingway turns and yells back, “Adios, amigo!”  It was hard to believe, Garcia-Marquez adds, that he would live only four more years.

 

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the healthy and the kingdom of the sick,” said Susan Sontag, related to us by Tara Ballard.

 

I remember Richard Rodriguez saying to us, “You are here, and you have your pen in your hand.”

 

By the way, Ed went out of his way to say he wouldn’t judge you for not having read “The Wasteland.”  I won’t judge you for not having read A Hundred Years of Solitude.  But we could never be great friends.

 

At the end of one of Ed Allen’s presentations he said “I am lucky.  I get to read what I love and talk about it with people I care about.”  Yes to that.

 

The first day I told James Salter’s story about the French critic, near death, who said “To write!  What a marvelous thing!”

 

Finally, full circle back to Warren Zevon, who I’ve kept in my heart awhile as he asked.  Let’s also take his better known advice to heart: “Enjoy every sandwich.”

Mother's Day on Turtle Island, 2021

Arrived in Michigan the day of my mother’s 90^th birthday and leaving the day after Mother’s Day. Lucky and blessed to spend these days with her.

 

My mother lives on a lake in northern Michigan. The place is wonderfully serene before Memorial Day. Earlier in the week I kayaked out to the wetlands in the rain in the morning. The air was cold but windless and the lake was glassy but for the raindrops. I did not see the heron I searched for until I returned home where it stood in Turtle Town not a hundred feet from where I had set off.  My feet were cold four hours later.

 

Today at the Mecosta Bookstore I found a pristine copy of Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island, unyellowed pages, possibly unread, and priced less than it would have cost in 1969 dollars.

 

O!Coot (John P. O’Grady) mentions in a message that today is Gary’s 91^st birthday.

 

Turtle Island is dedicated to Snyder’s mother, “Lois Snyder Hennessy, My Mother.”

 

Perusing the book, well known to me, I find the only sign of a previous reader, the last sentence of the Introductory Note underlined in ballpoint:  “. . . all share views at the deepest levels of their cultural traditions African, Asians, or European.  Hark again to those roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and then to work together on Turtle island.”

 

My son and I kayak out to the wetlands.  We coast silently past the loon’s nest, the mother flattening herself over her eggs to hide from our view.  We paddle lightly, sorry to have worried her. In the distance I see a line of shining spheres on a log. They look like football helmets lined up for game day. Turtles. We approach as slowly as possible.  The log is about forty feet long. Over twenty-five painted turtles shining in the sun, dropping off one-by-one as we approach. 

 

I am in Michigan for only a couple more days, my wife in Anchorage.  I imagine her receiving the cut flowers our son sent.  She reminds me telepathically from great distance that our son needs to deliver the statue of the Blessed Virgin that we inherited from my aunt.

 

I last saw Gary the pre-pandemic summer in Davis where we talked, as ever, of the mountains of our youth, the Cascades.  And also of the spectacular black and white photographs of Vittorio Sella, which he remembers vividly from the Mazama club house in Portland and I know mostly from books.

 

When you read Turtle Island on Mother’s Day you become acutely aware of the Mother-ness of the work, in addition to the recurring themes of gratitude and stewardship: “all created things are of the mother.”

 

My son has remembered to turn over the statue to me.  It’s encased in bubble wrap and I pack it carefully.  He says he kept it in his attic with its face in the little attic window watching over the street in his blighted neighborhood.

 

When I hug my mother goodbye she says, not entirely kidding, “David, don’t go.” She steps back and adds, “I’ve been saying that for fifty years.”

 

My son drives me to the airport.  I leave Turtle Island with him. Also a copy of The Nick Adams Stories. He says he’s fished the Two-Hearted River but hasn’t read the story. This is somewhat different from others who know the “river” because a craft beer is named after it.

 

Home: the Virgin survived the 3500 air miles intact.  But when we unswaddle it from its bubble-wrap, we discover the statue is not of the Virgin at all.  It is Saint Ann, the Virgin’s mother, instructing a smaller, supposedly younger, blue-clad Virgin, pointing with her index finger at an open book.  Two-for-one.

 

I think my favorite line in Turtle Island is the coda to “Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than 

Students of Zen”: “There is no other life.”