Long Time Leaving (6 page)

If Keats had lived to be my age, I guarantee he would have gotten over those particular fears. I have managed, somehow, to live four years longer than my father did, and I'm not saying I'm all gleaned out, but sometimes I feel like a pig snuffling around in the seams and corners of…

No, here's how I feel: like a turkey buzzard trying to make a meal of a squashed possum on the interstate. Slim pickings to begin with, but what's worse is all the interruptions. About the time I get my teeth into something, something happens to throw me off.

I woke up the other morning at 4:30 and ran through the quick orientation that peripatetics often requires. I was in …Massachusetts. At Joan's place. She and I have been a steady couple for eight years, and will be forever I hope, but we each still have a separate house. Hey, it occurred to me, maybe this time of day is a good time to root out a few gleanings. Why don't I go to my house and sit at the keyboard and see?

So as not to wake Joan, I got up quietly and looked in the dark for my pants. Said the great old Massachusetts pol Tip O'Neill: “All politics are local.”
^*
Local, for me, is where my pants are. I keep my wallet in one
back pocket, my notebook/address book/calendar in the other, and my change and car keys in the right front pocket. Skinny-dipping, once one of my favorite things in theory, has always been undercut for me in practice by concern for how my pants are getting along back there on the beach.

It hit me that my pants were in the car. On a tennis court, my essential pocket items make me feel lumpy. While Joan and I were playing tennis the previous evening, I had left my actual operational pants in the backseat. I'd spent the rest of the evening in empty-pocket shorts.

I donned those shorts in the dark. Went to my car and—no sense leaping headlong into creativity—drove to the Sunrise Diner for breakfast. The Sunrise Diner opens well before sunrise. There were only two other cars parked outside when I got there and groped in the backseat for my real pants, to get my wallet.

It wasn't there.
Pants, yes; notebook-and-so-on, yes; wallet, no. I stood there in the darkness and cursed. I'll do that. I'll put too much of myself into being pissed off. But, man, I can't be misplacing my
wallet.

I have had wallet misadventures over the years. Once during a downpour in New York City, my wallet fell into the gutter and was swept off toward the Hudson River. But I found it, soggy but still mine, wedged under a parked car's tire. I have never lost my wallet. In big cities, people frequently take it upon themselves to inform me that my wallet is sticking out. Actually it's my notebook-and-so-on. I scowl at these people. Scattered and distracted as I am on the whole, I keep in touch with the stuff in my pockets, thank you.

But not this time. I retraced my steps of the previous evening. Last place I remembered my wallet being out of my pants was a gas station just before the tennis, while I was getting my credit card out, and you've got your wallet in one hand and your card in the other, and maybe I had already taken the pump-spout-handle thing out, which I do sometimes though I know I shouldn't …Reconstruction! It always makes you realize how little attention you were paying at the time! Suffice it to say that I retraced hard, and exhaustively and furiously, and all the way back to when I was twelve and on a Boy Scout excursion, and one of my fellow scouts lost his wallet, and one of the dads riding herd on us proclaimed that God didn't allow people to lose their wallets for no reason—this scout must have done something wrong, of which this was the wages.
Young as I was, I knew that was bullshit, and I felt myself beginning to turn agnostic. Which didn't bother me. But I can't tell you how deracinated it made me feel, fifty years later, to be at a loss as to what had happened to the wallet in my pants.

I canceled all the cards.
^*
Drove forty-five minutes each way to where you have to go to get a replacement driver's license. Regretted the loss of the lucky two-dollar bill I inherited from my father's wallet. Descended into a mood of profound self-laceration. Switched on the TV just as Aretha Franklin was going into her “Think” number in the movie
The Blues Brothers:
the greatest musical moment in movie history. And not only is Aretha's skirt-twitching, word-up performance enough to make a
dead
man think—here is what she says when her husband tries to tell her, “Now don't get riled, Sugar”:

She says,
“Don't you ‘Dont get riled, Sugar’ me!”

Aw, man. I got unriled. But continued to feel greatly diminished.

And then, just as I was beginning to get riled again because the guy playing Aretha's husband was, incredibly, deciding to go off away from her with Belushi and Aykroyd—then, belatedly but blessedly, a man called to say that his girlfriend, a waitress at the Sunrise, had found my wallet in the parking lot. It must have fallen out of my pants seconds before I stood there beginning to rack my brain, trying to imagine where I could have lost it the day before.

So is there a moral lesson here that might apply to loss of something else, like love or your groove? Could it be: Before you look back to where you last knew you had it, look around where you first found it gone?
^†
Or maybe just: Don't go anywhere in the wee hours.

I'll tell you one thing. The Sunrise Diner is local.

I
n September of 1862, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes got word that his son, Oliver Jr., had been wounded—shot through the neck—at the battle of Antietam. So “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” as Dr. Holmes called himself, set out from Boston (which he considered “the measure of all things”) to find his boy. Along the way, he took occasion to chat with some captured Confederates—“for whom,” he wrote in an account of his quest in
The Atlantic Monthly,
“I could not help feeling a kind of human sympathy, though I am as venomous a hater of the Rebellion as one is likely to find under the Stars and Stripes.”

The prisoners struck him as unable to come up with anything like a principled statement of what they'd been fighting for. One of them was “a wild-haired, unsoaped boy, with pretty, foolish features enough, who looked as if he might be about seventeen, as he said he was.” Holmes tried to draw the young man out.

This struck Holmes as remarkable, because his father had once been “settled for seven years as pastor over the church at Midway, Georgia.” He asked the youth where he went to church, back home.

Well, now. Read today, Dr. Holmes's prose has a whimsicality to it that is about one degree above that of a silly person. When he hears that his
son's wound is not mortal, he effuses as follows: “We shall sleep well tonight; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or, if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall gently narcotize the overwearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber like the leaves of a lily at nightfall,” by which he means that he had a smoke. In his day, however, Dr. Holmes was widely regarded—in Bostonian circles, anyway—not only as the nation's most eminent all-round man of letters, but also as its most enthralling talker. “Holmes talks very nearly all the time,” wrote a friend of his, “but the secret of the charm of the monopoly is the fact that he is, all this time,
broidering on your woof—
apparently dwelling only on what you have suggested, and reading your mind very truly to yourself, only that he makes it seem a good deal clearer than you thought it!”

Perhaps this was how he struck the “Nothin’ ” man, but I doubt it. I suggest that the “Nothin ” man was thinking, “They've caught me, and maybe they'll shoot me, but be damn if they'll broider my woof.” I believe that the “Nothin ” man might agree—substituting “Southerner” for “Irishman”—with Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley:

“ Tis a good thing to be an Irishman because people think that all an Irishman does is to laugh without a reason an’ fight without an objick. But ye an’ I, Hinnisy, know these things ar-re on'y our divarsions. It's a good thing to have people size ye up wrong. Whin they've got ye'er measure, ye're in danger.”

So maybe I should have accepted the invitation I received the other day. A message on my New York answering machine. A student at Rutgers University was going to give an oral report on “good ol’ boys” in her American Studies class and wanted me to come be a part of it. She thought it would be good to have “a Southern writer” there, as a sort of show-and-tell item, I guess.

I have had letters from students asking me, in effect, to write their reports for them, but this was the first time I had been urged to make my way fairly deep into New Jersey to serve as an exhibit. (“Are you sure he's a real one? He appears sort of testy. Could we look at his teeth?”) The caller's accent was regionally indeterminate, her tone neither seductive nor apologetic, just chipper. She left me both a home number and a work number—so she must not be entirely unaware that people have to make a living. I called the home number, during workday hours, and left the message that I had presentations of my own to work on but I wished her luck with hers.

She responded that evening with another message: “I appreciate your
returning my call, and wishing me luck, but I'm kind of disappointed. I wrote in my report that
a good ol’ boy
would
come.
”

So. Did my RSVP enable that Rutgers class to take my measure precisely? I would say not. The truth was, I
didn't
wish that presentation luck. But maybe I came too close to giving myself away. Maybe I should have showed up in jodhpurs and a beret, sworn that this attire was authentic, and offered to clear up or improve upon some other misconceptions.

“The good ol’ boy,” I might have informed the class, “properly pro-nounced
guddleby
—and deriving from the old English expression ‘God'll be with ye [in a moment]’—is a study in contradictions. He will daub himself with an aromatic blend of possum lard and peach juice
après bain
and yet has been known to gnaw off his own hand to avoid telling a lady that she is sitting on it. He relishes a Maypole dance as much as any frolicsome Vermonter, but in his version dogs are involved, and things don't start getting merry until someone is bitten. He does indeed talk and sing—and also prays, gargles, and woos—through his nose, but what is not generally acknowledged is that he reads through it, too. Don't address a good ol’ boy as ‘y'all,’ because he will get it into his head that there is more than one of him and will (1) drink accordingly and (2) demand to know what you have done with the rest of his hats. The first thing he is liable to tell you when you have gained his confidence is that he loves
your
mama, sight unseen, more than you do. Don't contradict him. But don't change the subject, either, for this will lead him to conclude that you lack (1) grit and (2) a kind of human sympathy. Above all, the good ol’ boy—far from being provincial—welcomes new acquaintances of all kinds because he is forever open to learning fresh wrestling holds. What say we go over to one of y'all's house now—I've brought a batch of chickadee gumbo—and take off our shoes?”

But I don't always feel hearty enough, in an academic setting, to pull off such a performance. More and more I am inclined to stay home and read up on things that challenge my own stereotypical notions. For instance, I found it remarkable that Dr. Holmes's father had lasted for seven years as a preacher in southeast Georgia. It had always been my impression that the Holmeses were a long line of Boston Brahmins, and I couldn't imagine such a type laying down the gospel, successfully, for folks way down there below Savannah. I turned to Edmund Wilson's
Patriotic Gore
and Louis Menand's recent book about the development of philosophical pragmatism in America,
The Metaphysical Club,
both of which are highly informative about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and his
background. Midway, Georgia, was established as a Congregationalist religious center in the midst of plantation country. Abiel Holmes—Dr. Holmes's father, Holmes Jr.'s grandfather—went down there as a Yankee missionary.