The Big Room

On Tuesday, the first of this month, I finally moved into the big room: the master bedroom. I slept in there a couple of scorching, humid, windless nights in August because it’s the only room in the house with air conditioning. My mother had A/C installed there years ago over my father’s objections. He was dead-set against air conditioning but I suppose in the interest of keeping the peace he caved on that one room.

I hadn’t been able to make the move sooner for a variety of reasons. For one, I like my old room. It’s cozier than the master and it looks out toward the northeast and the Atlantic Ocean — or rather, it did before the asshole put up the oversized monstrosity on the lot across the street. The bizarrely designed box took the place of the small cottage that had been there for decades; the woman who lived there died and the charity group she left the place to sold it off to the new guy. He’s an architect who ruined a nice, stylish beach place down the street a few years ago and the worked his magic on this beachfront lot. But I digress…

Anyway, yes, my old room is cozy and nice. But it is also small. And the bathroom is down the hall, shared with two other bedrooms on the floor.

The master, on the other hand, has high ceilings, a wide-open floor plan and an en suite bathroom. It also has a view of the Atlantic (to the east and southeast) and direct access to the deck. While not an issue with winter approaching, deck access is nice because that’s where I spend a lot of my evenings at home. My usual spot on the deck, accessed through my sister’s room, faces east and northeast, and while nice, has been assaulted by the aforementioned glitter dome. That the palace is lighted all night also lessens the stargazing.

But at my parents’ corner of the house there’s a wondrous shadow. No streetlights impinge on the sky and the neighbors on that side value the night sky as much as I do. And instead of having to carry speakers outside with me when I chill out on the deck in my old spot, now I’ll be able to simply open a window and turn a speaker to face outside and I’ll have tunes to suit the occasion.

So there were concrete reasons why it took me three months to make the move. But there were also more subtle obstacles to be overcome.

For starters, it’s not my room. It’s my parents’. It’s ALWAYS been their room. Moving in there puts the final touch on the fact that they’re gone and the generations have changed hands. It’s like it’s the next, penultimate step in the path of life: birth, cradle, shared bedroom, own bedroom, master bedroom…casket. It’s been weird enough no longer having living parents and moving into the master bedroom makes that fact even clearer.

There was also one unanticipated consequence to moving into the master bedroom: doing so has made the already-too-big house even bigger. When I occupied one bedroom and the shared bath and the hall in between, I was using a good half of the floor. Now, with everything self-contained in the master suite, I’m using maybe a quarter — and the rest of the floor can essentially be shut down. That’s nice financially — the heat can be turned way down in those other rooms and the sun bakes the master room to a high temperature all winter long, which is nice — but it makes the place a little lonelier.

And finally, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to make the master room mine. I’ve hung some things on the wall and put my clothes in the closet, but I don’t know that anything less than a wholesale overhaul — new paint, new window treatments, maybe new flooring — ever makes it seem like I’m doing anything other than sleeping in my parents’ room. Or maybe that’s just a function of time. I guess we’ll find out.

With the finality of my father’s passing, and the fact that my siblings and I are now the oldest limb on this family tree, everything has become a function of time, and finding things out down the road. I guess all of life for everyone is that way, really, but it’s still weird to make that right turn into the master bedroom instead of continuing on down to the end of the hall when turning in for the night.

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Sidebar: People have asked about the future of the house. The short version is this: The house has, for almost a decade, been owned by a trust comprised of my brother, my sister and me. My sister has no interest in the home but my brother and I do so we’re going to buy out her third and keep the place. At least that’s the plan. We’ll see how finances work out and that won’t be determined for several months. But I’m living here now and have been since the spring, and I’ll stay here for the foreseeable future barring any amazing job offers elsewhere (hint, hint to anyone reading). On the job front, my goal is to set up some freelance projects (another hint, hint to anyone reading) — consulting, writing, editing — so that I can remain here. And in the meantime I will continue to clean and thin out the inconceivable amount of stuff my we-grew-up-in-the-Great-Depression-so-we-saved-EVERYTHING parents had stashed all over the place. One dumpster’s worth of stuff has already been removed and another will be needed soon. I also have close to a thousand books to be donated or discarded — and that doesn’t include the hundreds of books I’m keeping because they’re of interest to me personally or they’re first editions or autographed or an antique or some other reason that gives them a particular value. If you’re a bibliophile, give me a shout.

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Eulogy for My Father

Dad with Sean the golden retriever...sometime in the mid-'80s, I'm guessing.

Dad with Sean the golden retriever…sometime in the mid-’80s, I’m guessing.

As you know, my father was a journalist. In that role, he was a storyteller: he relayed information about lives and events that readers could use to make informed decisions about how to live their lives.

What occurs to me is that what we remember about my father were HIS stories — stories that serve as signposts illustrating a truly amazing, well-lived life.

There were anecdotes about growing up during the Great Depression — with which we would tease him about by saying, “we know, dad, they cut up your little red wagon for firewood when you were a boy” — that provided a background for the person he became.

And there were stories about growing up around Medford, stories he would bring to life for us when he’d show us around that area and point out how things had changed.

And of course, there were the stories from his time during World War II…stories that are all the more amazing to me for having been lived when he was just 20 years old. Pleasant stories such as:

  • Christmastime in 1944, and being so close to a German patrol that he could hear them singing Christmas carols, or…
  • Teasing a newly-arrived-at-the-front soldier by saying they used their bayonets regularly. After pausing for effect, Dad and his buddies showed the newbie how the bayonet was the best tool with which to open a can of food

And of course there were the not-so-pleasant stories such as describing the horrors of tree bursts in the Hurtgen Forest and the horrible weather conditions that winter and the horrors he’d seen.

But there were a lot of other stories — incredible stories, to my mind — that maybe some of you haven’t heard. I’d like to share a couple of them with you.

While a student at Dartmouth Dad met poet Robert Frost, who was in residency in Hanover at the time. Dad told Frost that he didn’t particularly care for poetry and when Frost asked why, Dad said it was because he didn’t like professors dictating what a poem meant. Frost asked for an example and Dad cited Frost’s poem “Birches.” Dad said he thought it a wonderful description of a joy he had enjoyed as a poor boy having fun in the woods, but the professor insisted it was about the poet’s latent desire to commit suicide. THAT got Frost’s hackles up and he gruffly told Dad, “Don’t tell me who that was or I’ll kill him.”

When we kids came along, Dad read us the poetry of Robert Frost.

Some of my favorite dad stories were ones he told about meeting Ernest Hemingway, his writerly idol, in Cuba in the 1950s. Dad was there on business and was introduced to Papa at the famous bar in Havana where Hemingway held court. Dad described a specific location where he’d fought in the war, an obscure spot that Hemingway also knew, and the two bonded. Dad ended up hanging out with Hemingway for the rest of his stay in Cuba.

Years later, Dad would pull a Hemingway volume off the shelf some evenings and read us passages from his work.

And then there was a story that prompted a nickname for my father used by several of the boys who played hockey for him:

While coaching the 78th Division hockey team in Germany after the war, Dad was told to show a visiting Russian man how the team trained and played. Dad said he had long discussions with the man, and diagrammed and demonstrated drills and plays the team. That Russian man turned out to be Anatoli Tarasov, the so-called “Father of Russian hockey” who created the Soviet Union’s dominant hockey culture of the second half of the 20th century. So my father at times would say that he could lay claim to being the founder of Russian hockey.

Some of my teammates and I took to calling Dad “The Founder.” It’s a name that stuck so well that one teammate Tim Caddo, who unfortunately couldn’t be here today, brought it up again in an email exchange this week.

There were many other stories Dad lived and told…to me, to my siblings, to you. I would ask that you remember those stories…and live and tell your own amazing stories.

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Untold Stories

Springsteen asked, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,” but what happens to a story that doesn’t get told? Surely it disappears, right? Evaporates like so much dew as the sun warms the morning. But the events of that story, the lessons, do they disappear too? And the person who lived the story, who dreamed it up and made it a reality, what happens to that person, after he or she has passed on, if the story doesn’t get told?

I ask all of these questions because one of the great regrets I will take to my grave is that I never got my mother’s stories down on paper. Mom, who lived an amazing, interesting life shaping a field that is the coin of the realm in modern-day America, had stories so riveting that award-winning authors and screenwriters offered to help her get them published. Mom always declined, saying that such privacies and privileges had been entrusted to her by her clients, by her place in her industry, and that she wouldn’t betray that trust. I picked up where those writers left off, telling her that just letting people know what it was like to have worked with these famous people on such high-profile movies would suffice, that she wouldn’t have to divulge any secrets and insider scoop.

In recent years, Mom had begun to lighten up a bit. I bought Dragon Dictate transcription software and we created her profile on this laptop. The plan was we’d talk for an hour or two and after a few months I’d have a pile of notes and quotes that I could edit into the book many had hoped she’d one day write.

We did one brief session where she recounted her early days in Brooklyn and Malverne, New York, but then she put me off a few times and I didn’t press her. Months later, she warmed up a bit again and asked if we were going to resume talking but it never happened, not before she took her fall in October and the chance for us to ever talk again disappeared.

I find myself wracked with guilt over having let Mom take those stories with her. Many people have said I could talk to those my mother worked with and get a similar book, but it really wouldn’t be the same. Who can I ask about what it was like to walk down Park Avenue with Marilyn Monroe for a photographer? Countless other similar tales are now gone, and though there are photos to illustrate the events, the faces on the film are mute and they keep their secrets to themselves.

And now I find myself once again facing the similar loss of equally amazing stories. As has been chronicled in this space, my father and I are currently on the outs, not talking, not really getting along at all. We are, to stay with Springsteen quotes, “too much of the same kind,” it seems. But I’ve written before of my father’s World War II service and how I believe it affected everything in his life to this day. Of how he is still in the Ardennes, almost 70 years later. I’ve written that seeing what he’s gone through, what he’s missed out on, is too high a price for anyone or any country to pay. And make no mistake about it: he saw some serious shit at a way-too-young age not to have suffered.

The tales of those experiences, and those of others like my father, shouldn’t be lost to the mists of time. They should be enshrined so that hopefully we as a society can stop making the same mistake over and over and over again. And on a personal level, getting him to share those stories would hopefully give our family something we’re still seeking: an answer to the question, “why?,” that has pervaded the entirety of half a century.

My father also has some amazing stories to share that aren’t focused on war. There aren’t many people left of whom I can ask, “What was it like to drink with Hemingway in Cuba?,” but my father is one such person. I’ve heard the story many times, but to get it on paper would preserve the tale for my nieces and their children and on down the line.

Maybe, as it turns out, I never was a very good journalist, because I don’t know how to break through the wall to get to the great stories. I let Mom’s stories get away and I don’t know how to reach my father to save his stories. And that’s a shame. Because we as human beings think in language, in words, in stories. And we as societies live in the exchange of that language, of those words, of those stories. If our stories don’t get told and shared and passed down, do we really live?

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