Bringing Them Back

Me and Mom in a Photo Booth, circa 1965

November is "National Novel Writing Month," and I've taken it upon myself to give it a try.  So far I'm desperately behind where I need to be to actually be finished by the 30th, but I've got something.  I'm never comfortable writing about my writing while it's happening, but I will say this:  It's both wonderful and sad to be bringing back people who have been gone from my life for many years.  The process of writing forces me to have to recall details and moments, to make the characters "come to life."

In this particular story, I am bringing to life a character based on my mother, another on my father, and an older couple based on my grandparents.  All of these individuals died years ago, and as I flesh out these characters, it brings a host of emotions.  In one way I'm delighted to see them all, and then there's that sadness, that reminder that they're gone.  If you've ever had a dream in which your departed loved one appears, then you know the regret that comes the moment you wake up.  

By spending time on this novel, I'm prolonging that dream a bit.  It's difficult to go on, however, knowing it will have to end.  But then, one could easily say the same thing about life.  And yet we go on, and do the best we can, in the hopes we leave some kind of legacy for those who come after us.  

So, for this reason I will continue to work on the novel, continue to bring them all back to life, in the hopes I'll create something that I can leave behind -- something that will live on, long after I am gone.

Beach Landscape with Two Boys and Their Father

The waves roll in, one after the other, after the other, and three heads bob in unison.  One belongs to a grown man, the other two to his sons, one of whom is ten and the other eight years old.  This picture is precious to me, because it actually represents two groups of men.  If the picture were on Polaroid or Kodachrome stock, it might be dated 1973.  The beach could be Fire Island, or the Cape or somewhere along Highway 1 in California.  The man might very well be my father, Hanno Fuchs -- overweight, smiling and hairy.  The boys, full of courage and joyful smiles are likely myself and my younger brother, Michael.

Now if the photo were digital, posted on Instagram or Facebook, the year would be 2013, and the hirsute, rotund man would be me, the older boy would be Diego Reyes Fuchs, and the younger boy would be Jackson Hanno Fuchs.  Apart from the names, the remaining details would be very much the same.

"Okay guys, we're gonna ride this next one!" I call, loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the constantly breaking waves of Cancun.  The three of us fixate on the wave that builds toward us. 

"No, Daddy! The NEXT one!  The next one!" Jackson calls.  All three of us nod in agreement, and we let the wave I'd originally chosen pass, bouncing and bobbing over it, in favor of the whitecaps that are forming on the one Jackson has chosen for us.

"Here we go!" says Diego.  "Ride it! Ride it!"

All three of us begin swimming with the breaking wave, and when I come up from the water, I see that the boys have caught the wave and have ridden it all the way to shore.  Not me.

"I missed it!" I yell to them over the continuous roar of the surf.

"I caught it!"

"Me too!"

I want to stop, to interrupt the game, in order to tell them, to let these two boys know, how incredibly happy this seemingly simple activity is making me.  I want to grab them up and smother them with kisses and tell them of my love for them.  But I know my children; their moods turn on a dime, and this perfection we are sharing in the midst of the planet's tidal undulations is as delicate as a moth's wing.  If I touch it, even slightly, it may turn to powder and blow away.

Because I don't want this moment to end, I stay in it, stay with it, and keep my mouth shut.  I smile with each boy, as we connect -- with each other, and with the tides.  Occasionally, we mis-time a wave, and rather than guiding us gently to shore, it lifts us up like an enemy, dashing us headfirst into the gritty, unforgiving sand.  This is fine, though; this is good.  Part of this whole experience -- an important part, in fact -- is failure. 

I realize now, looking back on all the time I spent on beaches with my brother and father, that body surfing is a life lesson.  Each wave is an opportunity that presents itself to you.  You must decide quickly whether or not to seize that moment, and when you do, there is no guarantee that it will work out for you.  When the opportunity bears fruit, the sensation of gliding along with the wave is almost like sprouting wings and flying.  When it falls flat, you are literally dragged through the grit and muck. 

This was a great life lesson for me, and those beach memories are indelible, as much a part of my heart as the blood that pumps continuously through it.  My hope is that these times will take root in the hearts of my sons, and give them the same comfort they have always provided me, even in my darkest, loneliest times. 

As my wife Jeanette said on the beach today,when we finally decided to come out of the water, "It's so great that you are in there with them, making memories."

Diggin' It

When I was a child, I wanted to be a grave digger.  There.  You see your face?  You see your reaction?  I got that a lot when I would tell people that.  They would ask me the question:  "Danny?  What do you want to be when you grow up?"  And I would say, quite sincerely, "I want to be a grave digger."

You know, as I write the words down, I can see why people responded the way they did.  It's a pretty dark thing for a sweet little boy to say.  Kind of "Addams Family"-esque.  When most people think of grave diggers, they probably think of this guy:

"The Tall Man" from Phantasm, a movie that truly terrified my brother and me

So I can see why it may have creeped some of my parents' friends out when I shared my career aspirations with them.  But, by way of an explanation, I need to share what I was "into" at that time in my life.

I really dug digging.  I used to go out in my back yard and dig holes, just for the sake of digging them.  I wasn't looking for buried treasure.  (I did, however, find the occasional deer jaw, which was pretty cool.)  And I wasn't trying to get to China.  Archeology was a notion I enjoyed, but I wasn't that specific.  I simply liked the experience of making a hole in the ground where there had been no hole before.

I hadn't thought about my grave digger dreams at all, for maybe the last 40 years or more, until this past weekend, when I got out in the yard with my rake and my shovel in order to dig out an 8 x 8 foot patch of grass in preparation for our 4 x 4 raised bed garden we're constructing.  My yard, like many in this area, is populated by a strain of super grass called Bermuda grass.  It grows in a heavy, clay-like soil, and is not your run of the mill pretty sod grass.  You won't find Bermuda grass at any well-manicured baseball stadium or golf course, let me put it that way.  Digging in this stuff should be an Olympic sport.  Or, at the very least, an event in one of those "Tough Man" competitions -- the ones you see late at night on ESPN 2, with giant Lithuanian dudes going up against giant Swedish dudes, pulling trees out of the ground, or doing a 40-yard dash with a refrigerator over each shoulder.

This grass is No Joke.

As I dug out the plot for my vegetable bed, smelling the wormy soil, watching the grub worms roll into shrimp-like balls, and seeing spiders skittering for cover, that simple pleasure came rushing back to me, and I was in the back yard at 18 Hartford Lane once more.  I found myself smiling -- not so much at the nostalgic flashback, but at the simple joy of digging.  It still does it for me.  (The arthritic wrists and throbbing back are new, but hey, that's just part of the package.)

There is a derisive cliche in the world of education.  Some asshole, somewhere along the line, was quoted as saying, when faced with a student who just "didn't get it," "Hey, the world needs ditch diggers, too."  It's a quote I've always hated, but if and when they divide us up, one line for the intellectual phonies, and the other for the ditch diggers, you better believe I am going to reach for that shovel.

(Maybe I'd sneak a pencil into my pocket, too.  I might just want to write about those other assholes, after all....)

Driving from the Back Seat

I'm in the back seat of my father's station wagon, drowsy and comfortable, after some family outing that has made for a full, exhausting day.  Like my brother, I'm lying on the floor back there.  This is in the days before the invention of the child car seat, when seat belts went across your lap only and were considered more or less an optional nuisance.

I drift off, lulled by the repetitive thunking of the uneven asphalt beneath me.  My thoughts melt into each other and make less and less sense, like sentences tumbling off a page, letter by letter, splashing into an unseen pool of water somewhere far below.

Suddenly, I'm sitting upright in the back seat, alone.  I look around for my brother, who is no longer back there with me.  The tires on the asphalt still pound out a steady rhythm, as I look to the front seat and see that my parents, too, are gone.  I reach over the seat, barely able to get the tips of my fingers on the steering wheel.  It's too dark to see what's going on with the pedals, and I can't understand how it is that I'm still moving forward in the night.  But I am.

Thunk, thunk, thunk.

Minimally, I maintain control of the car, and my sense of the road is vague, at best.  Some rumbling suggests I may be veering off to the left.  I know I should pull the steering wheel hard right, but something happens, and I am frozen.  Immediate action is required, but I am paralyzed.

If this dream has any resolution, any finish, I don't know what it is.  I believe it ends in that moment of fear and realization that I can't move.  Usually, when people talk about their recurring dreams, like the one about the math assignment that's due, I forget I have a recurring dream at all.  This one comes up irregularly, from time to time, and feels the same each time.  According to a website called allexperts.com, there is a simple explanation to my dream.

This particular expert tells "Restless Erica," the reader who shares my dream, the following:

Your dream describes an issue in your life circumstances. It suggests you are not in control of your life, that you have "taken a back seat" and allowed the control to be in someone else's hand. Your attempts to gain control or direct your life may feel scary and cause you to "stay in the back seat and duck". Your lack of destination may be causing you to struggle to regain control. 

Well, duh.

I suppose there might be some truth to this, even if it does feel a bit "clap-trap."  Maybe it is time to come up with a new, original plan of action for my family that is uniquely mine.  Texas was my wife's idea, but I've embraced it.  I went to Spain and loved it...because my girlfriend suggested it.  Syracuse University was a great experience, one my father had before me.  A case could certainly be made that I'm a bit of a Restless Erica myself.

I'll give that one some thought, as life continues to move forward on the uneven asphalt of time.  Truth be told, I'm not that concerned about it, and am quite content to lie down, my ear to the floorboards.

Thunk, thunk, thunk.

The Soil Connects

Jeanette, Diego and Jackson, showing off a recent crop of beets in our back yard

Jeanette and I recently began attending something called a "Citizen Gardener" class.  Sponsored by the Sustainable Food Center of Austin, the class is designed not only to help novice gardeners understand what they're doing -- or trying to do -- in their back yards, but also to train a corps of volunteers who presumably will go out and share their skills in community gardens around the Austin metro area.  It's one of those great ideas I wish had been my own, because it manages to incorporate both the fun of gardening with the larger idea of service, and connecting with the community around you.

I'm all for the idea of connecting, though I'll be honest:  this class is more about connecting with my wife and children than it is about any grander sense of the word.  Yes, I do like the idealistic notion of breaking down the barriers between myself and my Fellow Man, but I'm even more excited about doing something special with Jeanette.  My wife and I don't see each other enough.  It's a simple statement, but it's also one that resonates.  It's the kind of sentence you read and then nod your head and think, "You know what?  My spouse an d I don't see each other enough either..."  It's the nature of the world we live in.

So to have an activity, a hobby, or a passion we can share is something I think we've always looked for.  Lately, we've tried yoga, which has been great.   In the past, we've played a little tennis together, worked out at the gym on occasion, and even went roller blading, albeit briefly, which we joke about, because it was supposed to be what we did on our first date, and it only took me about fifteen years to make good on that promise.

Gardening is something that I think will work better than these other activities, only because it ihas always been a connector for me.  When I think of home gardening, I immediately think of my father, out in our yard at 18 Hartford Lane.  (Once again, as my friend Gayle Saks-Rodriguez points out, all roads lead back to Hanno.)  He enjoyed waking up early and getting out into the yard.  He planted many trees, including a row of poplar saplings he ordered through the mail -- forty-inch twigs that became, eventually, a sixty-foot fence of dappled sunlight.  (I noticed last time I passed by the house at 18 Hartford Lane that they'd cut down the trees.  It's their right, I suppose, to prune and start anew.)

In addition, my father grew a beautiful rock garden that flanked the front entrance to our home, filling it with what I remember to be a wide variety of multicolored flowers.  He planted rose bushes and an apple tree.  He had a back patio built, around a lovely mimosa tree, whose leaves I recall being silk-smooth to the touch.

And he did try has hand at vegetables.  The way time distorts memory, I couldn't tell you how many varieties of vegetables there were, or for how many seasons he grew them.  This would have been in the early 1970's, some 40 years ago now.  Of course, when I close my eyes and think back, there were tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers and lettuce, all of it shiny and bright as the produce rack at the supermarket, just after the piped-in recording of distant thunder rises up and the sprayers have spritzed the merchandise.

I do know he tried his hand at corn one summer.  I specifically remember it climbed the posts of our back porch, along with some grape vines.  Where it gets spotty is when I try to recollect whether or not a crop was ever produced.  Things get further confused by a story my father used to tell about his own childhood.  He told it every time we ate corn on the cob, and though my brother and I groaned each time ("God, Dad, not that story again."), it's a good one, and I tell it myself, as I've no doubt my younger brother does at his own dinner table, to his own family, some 1,700 miles away from mine.

When my dad and his family arrived from Europe in 1940 or so, they came together for a dinner at a cousin's house in Larchmont, New York.  It was a big meal -- maybe a holiday (Thanksgiving, if you like) -- and one of the dishes on the table was corn on the cob.  This was exotic to the Fuchs family.  They'd never had it before.  When he and his older brother (probably 12 and 15 respectively) bit into the strange vegetable, they looked at each other, eyebrows raised at the amazing sweetness and flavor.  It was so good, my father told, that they began to laugh, and the two of them continued to laugh, eating ear after ear of delicious sweet corn as they went.  It was for this reason that my father always classified corn on the cob, for the remainder of his life, as either "Laughing Corn" (worthy of his stamp of approval) or not.

I don't know whether the Citizen Gardener course will ever fulfill its promise to connect me and my family with the members of our larger Austin community.  I will say this, however:  Getting out into my garden has connected me to my wife, to my children, and to the memories that keep my ancestors alive within me.  I am creating memories for my own children, just as my father did for his.    And in this way, the class has paid itself back already.  Tenfold.

The author, getting ready to build his first palette composter. 

That Perfect Week Between

It's officially 2013, and in two days, I'll be back at work, wearing the professional mask, or hat, if you prefer, for the first time in a couple of weeks.  I'll have people -- many people -- stopping me to wish me a happy new year, then hoping to get their questions answered, questions particular to them in their particular niche at our school.  I'll wish them well, exchange pleasantries, then do what I can to answer their query.

Then I'll sigh, remembering this quiet time -- the perfect week between Christmas and New Year -- as a fading, pleasant memory.  For now, I bask in it.  I enjoy being in my pajamas on a weekday, sleeping late and sipping my coffee in my sunny home office.

Back when I was a younger person, this wondrous week was when I'd come down from the hinterlands, back to my home in the suburbs of New York City.  Sometimes we had snow, sometimes not.  I can remember Amtrak train rides that were delayed by frozen tracks and fallen limbs from wind-swept trees.  One of my fondest memories is coming down from Syracuse University with my buddy Mignon.  She was kind enough to give me a ride in her dying Scirocco, a car in such poor shape that the heater gave out, causing us to shiver during the five-hour drive home.  To make the time pass, we played travel games like Boticelli and something we called "The Movie Game."  Mostly, we laughed a lot.

My snowy childhood home, One Scott Lane, in Purchase, New York

Once we arrived home, it was all about reunions.  Our friends would find their ways home from the various institutions of higher learning they attended -- places like the University of Vermont, Franklin and Marshall College, Brown and the various State Universities of New York -- and we would reconvene in a number of places.  Sometimes we'd meet up at one of our homes.  More likely, though, we'd end up at one or another of two local bars -- the Cobblestone and the Hilltop -- which sat (and still sit) right next door to each other on Anderson Hill Road, near the SUNY Purchase campus.  They were comfortable bar-restaurants, with decent food and reasonable drink prices.  We were known there, and the bartenders and bouncers were kind to us, so we brought our reunions, and our money, to these two places regularly.

It was good to catch up with friends, to break out the old inside jokes, tell stories of college life, and get happily plastered.  Of course, we did a few things we probably shouldn't have, things we now warn our own children against, but there was a perfection to be had in that week between Christmas and New Years that can never be duplicated.

My Life in Bondage. James Bondage.

Covering a class yesterday at my school, I asked the students what they had planned for the weekend.  Most said they would be catching up on sleep, one talked about a trip to see family down in the Valley, and another mentioned hanging out at the mall.  When they asked me the same, I told them I'd been considering taking my wife out on a date to see the new James Bond movie.

"It's so funny," a boy said, "how they, like, keep bringing him back every couple of years."

I didn't quite know how to respond to his comment.  I suppose it is kind of "funny," in the sense that our taste for this character has not waned since Dr. No was released fifty years ago.  Because I turn 49 next month, I can say that James Bond has been a part of my life during the whole journey, and yes, I have seen new incarnations come and go.

I'm particularly fond of Sean Connery, because I remember how close it made me feel to my father, watching those films.  Connery was always my dad's favorite, though I think had Dad lived to see our present Bond, Daniel Craig, he'd have approved.  Sean Connery had such style and power, and he didn't take himself overly seriously, which helped.  I have strong memories of lying in my parents' big king-size bed watching Bond films with them.  My father loved telling me about all the exotic locations in which they were shot.

Most of my memories of seeing Bond flicks in the theatre were of Roger Moore, in the late 70's and early 80's.  Barbara Bach fascinated me and all my friends, of course.  But I wasn't a huge Roger Moore fan.  He went too far to the tongue-in-cheek side, so that I didn't find his "license to kill" at all believable.  Also, by the time 1977 rolled around, and they came up with Jaws, his rival in The Spy Who Loved Me, it was clear they'd run out of ideas, in my mind.  My brother and I went to see Octopussy when it came out during my sophomore year in college, but we were so addled with all manner of controlled substance, I remember virtually nothing about the movie to this day.

I vaguely recall going to see Timothy Dalton as Bond, and liking him okay, but deciding, perhaps, that my life in Bondage was coming to an end.  Pierce Brosnan was a 007 for the ladies.  He was handsome and charming -- maybe even sexy, according to a few of my female friends.  But I never bought Pierce as an ass-kicker.  Also, 2002, when Die Another Day was released, happened to be the year I married Jeanette Reyes, and we had more important things to worry about -- like buying our first home and having our first baby a year later.  Yes, I took note of Halle Berry's Ursula Andress-inspired bikini, but nothing else stayed with me.

When Daniel Craig took over in 2005, I became interested again.  He was billed as a "darker" Bond, probably because he was really the first 007 who was actually scary.  I had no trouble believing that this man was an assassin.  So I watch Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace every chance I get, whenever they're replayed on TNT or TBS or some other basic cable station.

And I'm now more than ready for Skyfall.  The action is more frenetic than it once was.  The explosions are CG and much, much louder than they were in 1962.  The punches feel real, and the campinesss is still there, but much more subtle.  They still shoot in exotic locations, which I love, and, lying on my king size bed with Jackson, explaining the intricacies of one of the poker scenes in Casino Royale, brought pleasant recollections of my father.  I wonder what Bond will look like when Jackson is my age, in another 50 years......

Beating Sol

In all three of the childhood homes that live in my memory, my mother had a nest.  There was always a special area where she stored the items that came to be emblematic – in my mind at least – of who she was.  My father described it in his foreword to her book, Poems on a Refrigerator Door:

Carol wrote most of her poetry late at night in a small bedroom alcove, surrounded by stacks of books and papers that grew untidily from an underbrush of pens, pencils, emery boards and ashtrays.

Like my mother, my father was a skilled writer, and it’s not surprising he did such a nice job describing my mother’s nest.  One detail that evaded him this time, however, was her playing cards.  My mother was an obsessive solitaire player.  When she wasn’t cooking, reading, writing, sculpting or drawing, she was playing solitaire.  Sometimes we would have to beg her to stop, so that she could help us with whatever it was – finding a lost sock or remembering the name of a movie we’d seen on television. 

“Wait a minute.  I haven’t beaten Sol yet.  I haven’t beaten Sol all day.” 

And she’d play on, until she had the cards in four neat, suited stacks of 13 each. 

I don’t really have a nest the way my mother did, and I’m not the cook, reader or visual artist she was.  I do have a certain urge to put words on paper, though.  And I’ve definitely inherited her tendency towards addiction.  Like her, I’m known to have a drink or two from time to time, and I was once a pretty heavy smoker.  I’ve inherited her love of solitaire, as well.  I can’t remember the last time I played with actual playing cards; instead, I spend much of my so-called “free” time on my iPhone or tablet, flipping over vittual cards, looking to put the red seven on the black eight, wating for that moment, when Sol gives up and the rest of the cards cascade out in bouncing fans, and the words “YOU WON!” appear on my screen, pixels forming triumphant fireworks, and reminding me it’s time to get back to whatever “important” task I was attempting, before taking on Sol. 

My mother was something of a purist, and I imagine if she’d lived long enough to see the technology we now take for granted, she might have thought it a poor substitute for real cards.  She took pleasure, I think, in the minutiae of all that she did, including solitaire.  Shuffling the cards, flipping them sequentially the proper way, were actions that might seem simple to the casual observer.  For my mother, however, they were the intricate machinations that brought her closer to peace.  

What Will Our Children Remember About Us?

My complicated relationship with my number-two son, Jackson, boiled over this morning. In my crazed insistence that we NOT be tardy to school EVER, I rushed the kids out of the house. We were all made cranky and uneasy by the frenetic drive to Manor Elementary. When I was saying “Go, go, go, run, run, run” and pushing them out of the car, Jackson turned to me and said, “Wait, Daddy. I want a kiss and a hug.”

“There's NO TIME!” I implored him. “Go NOW.”

And his face changed. The light in his eyes turned off, and he frowned before slamming the door and heading slowly toward the school door behind his more compliant brother, who was already inside the building.

I stopped, realizing I had a decision to make. I could continue rushing off to work, or I could park the car.

I did the latter and ran up behind Jackson, throwing him playfully over my shoulder, running to the front door of the school. Both of us were laughing the whole way.

When we got to the front desk, I set him down with a couple of minutes to spare before the tardy bell rang. I knelt down to his level and looked at him, wondering if he still wanted the kiss and hug. Thankfully, he did. And it was one of the best kiss-and-hugs I’ve ever had.

I’m glad I made the choice I made. In my mind, it came down to a very simple question: What will my child remember about me when I’m gone? Will he remember the day I screamed at him that there wasn’t enough time to show him the affection he desired?

Or maybe he’ll remember something else. Maybe he’ll recall that morning he was feeling sad and alone when suddenly, unexpectedly, his father came back for him, swept him up in the air, weightless for a moment, before giving him a kiss and a hug, and making him feel so very, very loved.

Staying Home Sick Will Never Be The Same

I became aware of soap operas as a boy, when I would stay home sick from school. Back then, our options on television were slim in general, but during the day? Forget it. The channels we had available to us in the New York Metropolitan area were 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. Occasionally a few VHF channels came through, but they were snowy and/or in Spanish.

Channels 5, 9, and 11 were the local channels, and 13 was PBS. 2, 4 and 7 was where most of the good, or at least decent stuff aired. 2 was WCBS, 4 was WNBC and 7 was WABC, and they still are, as far as I know. Those three channels were the ones that carried the nationally syndicated soaps. My mother was not a huge soap opera fan, but I loved TV as a rule, and the unspoken understanding was that being sick somehow gave me the right to watch television all day long.

I vaguely remember stopping on Days of our Lives and watching for a while, being somewhat interested in peeking in on the lives of adults, with sex and violence, and all the other good stuff they tried to hide from me when I was a kid. Then, I would infallibly get bored and switch either to a game show or, perish the thought, I’d turn off the television and actually read a book.

The soaps made a comeback during high school, when it became a favorite pastime of my little group of friends to get together at someone’s house – usually someone who lived closest to our school, because of the time factor involved – and watch the tail end of All My Children (“All My Kids,” as Maria and her sisters liked to call it) before getting into General Hospital.

At first, we watched it as a goof, while sneaking shots of Southern Comfort and plotting our weekend mischief. But a curious thing happened. “GH,” as we called it, started getting . . . good. But I mean really good. There was Hutch “the baby-faced hitman” (Maria’s again) who all the ladies adored and who was plotting to kill Luke. And there was, of course, that most passionate of daytime relationships, Luke and Laura. Although Luke looked vaguely like Frank Purdue with a blond wig made of pubic hair on his head, and Laura looked like every overly made-up bimbette you saw at the Galleria mall on the weekends, the chemistry and Forbidden Love thing were just too much to resist.

Now it appears that the long-running English-language soap operas are going the way of the dinosaurs. I guess with the advent, and expansion, of cable television, coupled with the virtual extinction of that elusive mythical creature the "Stay-At-Home Mom," they just couldn’t compete. When my boys are home sick from school, the absolute LAST thing they would want to watch would be one of the classic soaps. They prefer the Food Network. (Thanks, honey, for that.)

As it happens, I am home sick from work today, and no, I have no interest in All My Kids or GH. I’ve got hours of DVR’d HBO programming to look at. The world most certainly has changed, but I have no doubt those soaps will take their proper place in television’s Pantheon.

Oh wait, I know. I’ll watch some “Novelas.” Ay, si!

Letters from My Mother

While doing some spring cleaning today, I happened upon a handful of letters my mother wrote me between the fall of 1981, when I went away to college and January of 1987, when I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm about halfway through them and had to stop, because of a heaviness in my heart. Hearing her voice brings her back, but it also reminds me of how much I've missed out on, since her death in 1988.


Writing those words, I came to a chilling realization: In two years, she will have been gone for twenty five years -- the same amount of time I got to spend with her on this earth. That just feels so unfair to me.


My mother was a letter writer of the old style. I have many memories of her sitting on her chaise lounge, spending days on one handwritten letter to her friend Kay, or her cousin Sharon. Her letters to me are chatty, newsy and filled with humor, including a very short story called "McKay," about a lobster I bring home to cook for my girlfriend. McKay is the lobster's name. She often encourages me to study hard ("keep that pretty Runyan nose to the grind-stone!"), but stops at one point -- presumably during one of my early academic slumps -- to say, "Good grades in school are better than bad, Dan, but your happiness is the important thing!"


She takes pride in her artwork, particularly a bust that she created in her YWCA sculpture class. I remember the piece well; it's a woman's head, topping a long, elegant neck. Her hair is in a bun, and she has a faraway expression. It always made me think of Modigliani. I'm not sure where that bust ended up. It may be in my brother's home in White Plains. I'd love to keep it for a time, if it's there.


More than anything else, my mother's letters to me are filled with warmth and love. I often say the thing I'm most thankful for that my parents gave me is the capacity to love.


She ends one letter with "And every night at 7:00 PM, consider yourself hugged -- whether you want to be or not." The one that made me have to stop reading closed with her saying, "I am so very fortunate to have people like you, Mike and Hanno as my family. Don't ever forget how special you are."


She, too, was a special person. I knew it then, and did my best to express it in my awkward, late-adolescent way. As I've said, she would have adored Jeanette and the boys, and she would have been endlessly amused watching me struggle with Diego and Jackson in the same way she and my father did with Mike and me. I'll read the rest of those letters when I feel I'm ready to, and then I'll put them in a safe place, so that I can share them with the boys, and describe the remarkable woman who was my mother.

Movie Memories: R-Rated Flicks of My Youth

This morning, as I enjoyed my day off from work, I surfed the cable channels until I happened upon a movie I hadn't seen since it came out in theatres in 1973. It was the first R-rated movie my parents ever took us to, Day of the Jackal. I got caught up in the story, thanks mostly to some good acting by Edward Fox, who plays the title role. The story pulled me in, and I remembered almost nothing, except for a couple of details, like how he tightened a rope around his arm, a tree and the high-powered rifle, so he could get a steady shot, (see photo, above) and how once he had adjusted his sights, he placed one of the bullets he intended to use on President de Gaulle, and the melon he was practicing on at two hundred yards blew to smithereens when he hit it, dead on.

What I do remember is that my parents' attempt to introduce us to adult cinema at ages 10 and 8 respectively was considered a grand failure and something of a joke. It's mostly sex that got the movie its rating; there's hardly any real violence in it at all, other than the implied violence of what may or may not happen in the climax of the film. And the way that Mike and I responded to the sex scenes was with abject boredom. As the story goes, when Fox is just about to bed down yet another woman he is using as cover, 8 year old Mike says, at the top of his voice, "Oh no. Not again." Apparently it brought down the house.

The problem may have been in the timing. I'm not sure if it was a busy night in the baby sitting pool, or what. But when I think about it a bit, I realize that I may have given my father a reason to think I could sit through two hours of suspense and intrigue and very little action, other than the sex. I had started staying up later on Saturday nights in order to watch Mission: Impossible with my dad. I enjoyed pretending to understand the plot-lines, until I saw the joy it gave my father to explain them to me.

I didn't care much what was going on in the story; I just liked the time with my dad. It was horror movies with my mom and spy movies with my dad.

But I wasn't ready for all the intrigue and, well, "naked ladies," as I referred to them then, The Day of the Jackal had to offer.

My other embarrassing R-rated movie story is the time my mother and I decided to go see An Officer and a Gentleman together. The sex scenes in that movie are extremely graphic and realistic. (Who can forget Debra Winger's famous line, "Pass me a towel, will ya?")

I sank as far down in my seat as I could and waited for the end credits to roll. Of course, it's a great film, but not one a 20 year old dude wants to see with his mom. Oh, God! I shudder thinking back on it all these years later.

Now when I see Day of the Jackal or An Officer and a Gentleman on HBO or wherever, all I want is just one more chance to sit down with either or both of my parents and get their responses once more, the comments I can no longer recall. Like everything else, these movies make me miss my parents. But they also provoke a smile and a sense of gratitude that they've brought the departed back into focus, if only for a moment.

So Much More Than Just "Things and Stuff"

The pages of my mother's scrapbook are yellowed and crumbling fast. The photos, like this one taken in Des Moines, Iowa at 3 years old, are black and white, and they too are beginning to fade. My hope is to preserve this book, innocently titled "Things and Stuff," by scanning its pages and saving it digitally. I'm not sure how well this will work, but it's certainly worth a try. I've talked about doing what Jeanette suggests -- having it restored and/or preserved by an expert in this sort of thing -- but I've never actually gotten around to it, and I'm not so sure that I ever will. Scanning just seems more likely to me.

The title is ironic, in that the things found inside this scrapbook are so much more than mere stuff, and I don't just mean this from my entirely biased point of view as my mother's son. Rather, I believe, the more I study its contents, that this book is an important historical document. My mother was born in 1930, just at the start of the Great Depression. Her father worked extremely hard in the maintenance department on the Rock Island Railroad throughout those lean years, just to keep from going under, the way he'd seen so many of contemporaries do. It makes me wonder how much it cost him to dress his young child in this dress and baby shoes, what kinds of discussions he and my grandmother had to have about whether or not to buy her the doll in this picture, and if they ever considered selling the cast iron Jack Russell terrier doorstop, which I still have today.

As the pages progress, you find newspaper clippings declaring the end of World War II, when my mother was fifteen years old. ("Peace! Remember how it came on the night of August 14, 1945? No matter where it caught you -- on Times Square, Market Square or Main Street -- the big news made a noise like the birth of a bright new world.") Suddenly, the world had changed completely. A new era of prosperity came about, just as my mother was graduating from high school, in 1947. She had no way of knowing, of course, that exactly ten years later, that school, Little Rock Central High, would become the first integrated public high school in the south.

The book has many of the other usual items you'd find in this sort of compilation. In fact, my mother checked off the "rough outline" provided in the book's introduction:

• your pet dance programs
• goony telegrams
• menus from your favorite haunts
• place cards from fun parties
• dreamy birthday cards
• snapshots of friends and fiends
• gift and corsage cards
• items from the school paper
• funny valentines
• a page of autographs from the gang
• invitations

In addition to these items, there are some other interesting things, as well. There are pencil drawings my mother did of her teachers, parents and friends. There is evidence of various honors, including mention of "first place in the statewide short story contest of the Little Rock chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters," "The Distinction of Being the Most Gorgeous Girl, awarded to Carol Runyan on the night of the Delta Phi Omega spring dinner dance, June 23rd in the year of our Lord, 1949," and her signed membership card to the National Junior Honor Society of Secondary Schools. There is a letter from a German pen pal and former soldier named Klaus, dated June 28th, 1948, in which he states, "I was wounded [in Holland] and came to a hospital for three weeks. Then I came to the Air Force headquarters in Berlin. I often saw there Herman Goering, Hitler and Goebbels." Enclosed with his letter is a studio portrait, date stamped April 1943, in which he looks like a boy, leaning forward, perhaps a little bit scared of what his future may hold. Like a movie star, he has signed it "As ever, Klaus." She has several letters from a sailor in the British Navy named Arthur, with whom she also corresponded.

I'm both thrilled and sad to learn new things about Carol as I flip through the decaying pages -- that she was a member of a Masonic girls' group called the Rainbow Girls, that she lived in Trenton, Missouri, Rock Island, Illinois, Des Moines, Iowa, and Molline, Illinois, all before the age of four. I say sad, only because I'd love nothing more than to be able to ask her about all these little gems I've uncovered here.

I believe what I'd like to do is this: I would like to contact someone in Little Rock, some sort of Historical Society archivist, and see what the interest would be in restoring and/or preserving the items in my mother's scrapbook. They might be able to help me find someone in my mother's family or group of friends who is still alive. And if that were the case, maybe I could have some of these questions answered after all...