Two from Former Students
Stories From My Mother
by Amy Carpenter
Have you eaten potatoes recently? I bet you have. Between mashed potatoes and French fries you’ve probably had at least three servings of potatoes in the past week. My family tends to eat more than that. In my earliest memories I can remember my mother peeling potatoes almost every night for supper. Her thumbs and hands are scarred from cuts and she would give me the carrot peeler to help her. I would stand on the kitchen stool slowly rotating the oblong root, taking off the brown skin and listen to her. Sometimes she would tell me stories about how when she was young, she knew first hand how this vegetable got out of the ground.
My mother would tell me stories about potato harvesting and my aunts and uncles pass down their experiences to me as well. “It’s a thing of the past now,” says one of my uncles. Labor laws, machinery, outside competition and chemical pesticides have killed the Maine potato economy and the Maine
If you were a farm kid, no matter how young, you helped pitch in. My mother started working in the fields at the age of nine for 30 cents a barrel. By her senior year of high school, the amount paid per barrel had only risen 20 cents. At least if you worked on a harvester you got state minimum wage-$3.35 an hour.
One of my aunts tells me, “The one day I worked on a harvester, I felt overwhelmed by the noise and vibration of the machinery and picking potatoes was like a nature walk compared to that.” At least if you worked in the field your greatest danger was a rotten potato in your knee.
“You could loose a finger on a harvester, working in the pit”, my mom said. No one knew anyone who really had lost a finger but there always was that threat.
“You wear layers,” my mom says. Undershirt, t-shirt, long-sleeved shirt and sweatshirt and long johns under your jeans but still you shiver in the early morning frost. Girls wore bandanas to hold their hair back, their ears tucked under the dingy paisley print to protect from frostbite. When I was young my mother would tie my hair up in a bandana with the tips of my ears covered when it was cold. She told me that that was how she wore her hair and I was proud to do the same.
It wasn’t just farmers and farmers' children who harvested. “You could always tell the Townies apart,” my mom laughs. “They couldn’t pick as fast and always came in the morning clean. For us, we couldn’t get a bath until Saturday night and we didn’t have enough clothes to be wearing clean ones everyday.” Every night before dinner the children would wash their faces and hands like they were wearing white gloves and masks above their real identities.
When you got to the field the field boss was already there. He handed you your tickets, tough pieces of oaktag with a number corresponding to your name, and told you to mark your section. Potato rows were long and you worked across them, not down them. Then you got your basket, a woven wooden one made from brown ash straps. The local Maliseet tribe made these baskets and they held about one fourth of a potato barrel. One Maliseet man brought his entire family every day to the harvesting, all ten children, and he wouldn’t straighten up all day, working furiously for every last cent.
One of my aunts remembers, “Once in the field there are the smells – earth, decaying tops and diesel fumes from the tractor as it chugs by bringing up the first rows of picking for the day. When we were quite young, our Dad would have chocolate bars tucked in his clothing. As he dug the sections his children were responsible to pick, he would drop a chocolate bar into the row to raise our spirits as we came upon it leaning over our potato baskets.” Only the youngest of the children crawled through the dirt to gather the potatoes. Everyone else bent at the waist and got used to the pain by the second or third day.As every barrel was filled and a ticket squeezed underneath the top band the potato truck would drive by, a young man driving, an even younger boy standing on the flatbed operating the hoists and rolling the barrels as they were brought up onto the truck. “One of the boys sang “You Are My Sunshine” to me every time he came around to my section”, my mom recounts. “I turned red every time which is why he kept doing it.”
And so it went until the crop was in. As it got later in the season my mother remembers crawling inside one of the cedar barrels and pulling another one on top of it to block out the wind. But after all these years, this is what they all remember.
“Autumn leaves… colors bright everywhere…running through the fields. In and out of the trees and up and down the nearby gravel pits. Yelling…screaming…dancing. Weary muscles, bent skeletons, tired, dirty and mashed potatoes for supper.”
These are the stories my aunts and uncles tell me. These are the stories that my mother tells me.A Day in Spring
by Terri Moody
When I met you I was had one foot in the door and you were already in, and almost gone. Maybe always wanting an older brother was what attracted me to you and all the crazy things you liked to do, all I know is I do not regret it at all. I blame it on the mixture of a beautiful spring day, and living in a town like this. How could I say no?
We met outside and left for that cute little breakfast shop on the boulevard. I got a fruit salad and you got eggs over easy with toast. We had already got caught once, but for some reason we still did not care, it was like there was a magnetic force pulling us outside from the walls of high school and we did not ignore it. I can see us now, walking down Stacy Boulevard to the little beach on the end near Stage Fort Park. The thing about leaving school on an early spring day is you will usually get sunburned because otherwise you have not been in contact with her concentrated rays for at least eight months. I could feel my skin getting hot as we walked down those old stairs to the small beachfront.
We sat for awhile, not saying anything because we did not have to. The water sparkling in front, the sand a cushion beneath, the sky and time seemed like they would never end. Time felt like it would never end, the sky looked so high above us, and the ocean skyline looked like it was impossible to reach, kind of like the end of the rainbow. Or like how you could never really dig to China no matter how hard you tried.
As we looked closely at the dark sand, where it became wet. We noticed movement. There were baby rock crabs making their way to ocean. Just like baby turtles would, they scrambled towards the water. I got up to go help some of them to the water's edge, but decided not to because they were so small and there were so many that I would have to step on them if I was to pick some up and walk them down to the water. You were just like these little creatures; you were getting ready to leave your home. I knew that someday soon you would go off into the ocean, and I would be stuck here on the beach. Three years seemed so long.
It wasn't, and you still come back to the shore.
Three from Brevity (a magazine of short Creative Nonfiction)
Vitamin M
By Jehanne Dubrow
In the Navy, Vitamin M is the cure for all ailments. Ship medics prescribe extra-strength Motrin, thousands of milligrams, twice, three times the recommended dosage to treat headaches, hangovers, back pain, stiff necks, fever, carpal tunnel, plantar fasciitis, even acne. My husband, in his nine years of military service, has adapted easily to the ibuprofen diet. He believes in the remedy of the stiff upper lip. When he slices his finger while trying to open a valve, he seals the red line of skin with super glue. When he slips on the destroyer’s metal deck, he wraps his ankle in duct tape. He is an engineer, his body a piece of machinery that can be jury-rigged to keep working.
On my side of the family, we make an art form of complaint. Although we no longer speak the mothertongue of Yiddish, we still cherish our infirmities as though they are silver candlesticks smuggled over from the Old Country. Today, I could hear my mother upstairs, reciting hers: a sprained wrist, heartburn, eyes scratchy from a night of insomnia. My father listed his in response. If I had made the mistake of entering the room then, I would have been interrogated about my own cuts and bruises, had I eaten anything, and wasn’t I looking a little pale.
Away from the ship, away from my parents, Jeremy and I try to find a mean between ignoring health and embracing hypochondria. It is one of the many compromises that marriage has forced on us. Jeremy has learned to visit the dermatologist, whenever I panic about a dark spot the size of a pinhead, which may appear on his neck one day in August. And I have learned how to avoid flu season, thinking myself into a stronger, sturdier body, one immune to sneezes and mucus. I have learned that a brief history of bowel movements does not make for good conversation.
This evening, after leaving my family’s house, we discuss the possibility of a deployment to
When we talk about deployments that could happen, Jeremy tells me, “Everything will be fine,” in a low voice, like a doctor reassuring a patient.
“If you were to see terrible things,” I demand, “terrible things in war, would you ask for help when you came home?”
“Everything will be fine,” Jeremy answers.
“What about PTSD? Would you handle that on your own?” I say, imagining all the other husbands who, like mine, drip super glue on their abrasions.
“Everything will be fine,” Jeremy repeats.
This is Jeremy’s Vitamin M. Everything will be fine. Often I swallow the words he gives me. They are smooth gel caplets that go down without any problems. But often I stay up, long after he has fallen asleep in the bed beside me. I listen to him breathing and watch the intake of air, the long pause of his chest before exhalation. And I wonder about the speck of movement at the corner of my vision. Maybe it’s cataracts, I think, or glaucoma. Blindness. Or something is coming, still too blurred and distant for me to discern.
The Potato Harvest
By April Monroe
This is the morning that summer ends. In one hard frost our garden has become an abandoned battlefield, the last vestiges of the living lay stiff and frozen, black wilted zucchini leaves like limp umbrellas stand as pathetic monuments, tattered flags, over what was, only yesterday, a vegetable garden. Potatoes love one heavy frost. It gives them weight and tough skins, and prepares them for the long months in the cellar. But two hard frosts will kill them, so the harvest contains uncertain urgency.
The seasons change violently here. Summer steals away like a casual lover in the night, and winter finds us like a flood, filling something. It is to be expected. Still, every year that I wake early, instinctively, to harvest the potatoes, I am disillusioned by my garden's easy surrender, the hasty defeat that comes after the long months of my ridiculous labors, bearing them up from seeds.
Two of my children are babies yet, swaddled in a state of perpetual intoxication, eager to touch, to speak, to wander this mean world, still quick to fall asleep and hard to wake up by accident. But this year,
My daughter is seven now, and already I see the ways of women settling on her, the lilt to her hip, the shape of her neck as she turns to look at me, her breath like tiny clouds, the beginning of loveliness in her step.
Today, the walk to the garden is a long one. All summer it has been a meandering stroll over hot dust and through breeze-bending trees. But today the frost slips up our muslin skirts, seeps into our feet. Winter whispers to us through our summer clothes, and the minutes elongate with every crisp step.
Once there, we squat in the potato patch and claw the dirt earnestly, prying the potatoes from their solid bed. When one of us unearths a gangly bunch of them, we hold it up to the other before we sever each individual from the thick root that connects them. See here? Evidence that we have grown something. And here, the last to come up, the uterine potatoes we buried in May that sent forth these others. They are all soft black rot now, and when we throw them over the fence, they splat and make a dark stain on the earth.
Above us, the geese make their annual exodus. It is a bizarre orchestra of avian screams – the sound we have heard all our lives, yet not heard. So together we pause briefly and listen to what passes over us for a moment, before we begin again the work of harvesting potatoes.
Becoming a Sanvicenteña: Five Stages
By Kate HopperStage 1: Fear
The old highway to San Vicente is nothing more than a dirt road. At the height of the dry season the landscape is leached of color, the road pale as bone. We bump in and out of potholes, my American advisor filling the Peugeot with 400 years of Costa Rican history: the Chorotegan Indians, the Spanish conquistadors, ceramic arts, tourism. Dust billows through the open windows, and I cough, struggle to catch my breath. Against the vinyl seat, my legs are slick with sweat.
Stage 2: Uncertainty
I stare into the smiling faces of my host family and laugh when I don’t understand their rapid Spanish. “¿Cómo?” I ask, again and again. The youngest boy is thirteen. He watches me eat my rice and beans on the front porch, his dark eyes amused. “What?” I ask, but he shakes his head. After two weeks he finally he tells me: “You are as white as a milk worm.”
Stage 3: Enthusiasm
Behind the house, Betty fills the mouth of the metal grinder with kernels of wet corn, and I turn the handle, my arm pumping in circles. Strings of dough spill into the wide bowl below, but Betty says, “Más rápido, hija.” Faster, daughter. I smile and crank the handle as fast as I can. When I’m finished, I sit in the cracked rocking chair, my shoulder aching, and watch as Betty kneads the dough smooth, spinning a handful between her palms until it’s a disk. She rearranges the burning logs until flames engulf the lip of the comal, and when she drops the tortilla into the concave plate, it sizzles loudly. She motions to it with her lips. “Do you want to flip it?” I nod, eager for an opportunity to earn the name hija. But the fire is hot on my face and arms, and I pause too long. Smoke begins to curl from the comal. Betty gently pushes me aside and flips the burning tortilla with her fingertips.
Stage 4: Withdrawal
In the late afternoon, I sit on the front porch with a cup of sweetened coffee, hoping for a breeze as I wait for the cañero truck to mark the end of another day. Before I see it, I hear it: the rumble of its diesel engine, the clatter of wood and metal bouncing over pot holes, jostling the men in the tarp-covered cajón. As it drives by, I can’t make out the men’s faces; all I see are hands and arms, disembodied, jutting into the still-hot sun. These appendages are dark and muscled from twelve hours a day slashing tall stalks of sugar cane to the ground. Sometimes as the truck passes, someone raises a finger or two, and I raise my hand in response. But mostly their hands stay where they are, holding tight to the wooden planks, steady against the bucking of the truck.
Stage 5: Understanding
In the semi-darkness of the dance hall, I sit next to Sara, my host sister. The band has finished its set, and for the next fifteen minutes, the stereo will blare music: salsa, merengue, and piratiado, my favorite. I take a sip of beer, and when I look up, the lead singer of the band is standing before me, arm outstretched, palm open. I have watched this man dance with women between sets in San Lázaro, Guatíl, and Las Pozas. I have watched the way he twirls his partners, floats them across cement dance floors. Tonight, no one else is dancing. I swallow hard and resist the urge to shake my head. I take his hand, and when we step into the middle of the room, I hear a murmur: la gringa. I try to focus on his palm against my lower back, his fingers clasping my own, the old-fashioned music. I have practiced. I am ready when he turns me, our feet forward and back together. And as he spins me around and around, I catch Sara’s eye and smile. She raises her eyebrows and nods approvingly. I recognize faces in the darkness outside, pressed against the chain-link fence. A thumb goes up. Someone yells, “Bravo, Katty!” When I sit back down at the table, I’m beaming. “Now I’m a real sanvicenteña,” I say breathlessly. “Sí,” says Sara. “For now.”
One from The Best American NonRequired Reading
The Dreamer Did Not Exist
By David Gessner
1.
The pig sizzles on the spit, its eyes not so much blank as boiled. It is now the middle of my first term as an academic, a professor, but at the moment I bear more resemblance to Cro-Magnon man, intent on tearing apart my prey. I rip skin from the pig’s body and delight in its taste on my tongue. I am drunk by the way. I especially like the skin.
My new job is to teach other people how to write, and I am surrounded by fellow members of my tribe, writers all, who tear along with me at the porcine carcass. But if what we have in common is wielding words, at the moment are communication is decidedly non-verbal. Though we say little there must be a genetically encoded social pleasure in standing around a kill. It just feels right. We grunt with pleasure at the food.
2.
Artists, writers, and poets all have pat answers when they are asked why they do what they do, and I’m no different. Usually my reply is a soft one peppered with the word “love” (as in “I love my work” or “labor of love”), and sometimes if I’m feeling fancy and literary I throw in a Robert Frost quote about “uniting my avocation with my vocation.” When less inspired I resort to some well-worn variant of “I write because I have to.” Whatever. These are nice answers, all of them, but the truth is it isn’t something I have thought too deeply about, and if I did I suspect the true answers would be significantly darker and less verbal. A series of angry but self-asserting grunts maybe. A howl or a pounding on my chest.
In fact, as I turn toward rooting out a truer answer, I can’t help but suspect that my current obsession with words is entangled with my first obsession, the one that plagued my late childhood and early puberty. I was a fairly normal kid, if there is such a thing, good at sports and not ugly, and though my brain teemed with the usual childhood insecurities, many adults seemed to be fooled into thinking that I was a confident and relatively healthy-minded young man. They were wrong. Below my ready laugh and not unpleasant exterior lurked a dark obsessive fear of nonexistence.
I think I was around 10 when I had my first crisis of being. This was not a Sartre-like intellectual consideration of nothingness that provoked mild nausea, but a visceral sensation that induced something close to real madness. A sudden and overpowering sense that there was nothing in the world: that the world and, more importantly, that I didn't exist. This sensation provoked something wild and strange in me, a pure panic reaction that the child psychiatrist who later observed me described as being like "an LSD user on a bad trip." Not the kind of thing young parents want to hear about their 10-year-old.
It all started when my dear dog Macker died. Macker had been my lifelong companion, brought home from the pound the same month I was born. His death was an ugly one: he ate some of the salt that was used to melt the ice on the roads in Worcester , Massachusetts
I called it "the feeling" and though it began with thought it ended in outright panic. It was a little like walking up a mental staircase where each step was more frightening. It all began with the fact of death, but that was just the first step. Next I'd imagine how it felt not to exist at all, and it felt like nothing, as well as nothing I could imagine. But with some effort I would manage to put myself in this state of not-being, and with that I would begin to sweat and grow nervous. At that point I wasn't quite terrified. Not yet. Terror was the next step and with it I left logic behind. In my solipsistic manner I reasoned that if I didn't exist then nothing else did either. It was about then that "the feeling" usually took over.
It is impossible to exaggerate the sensation of terror that came over me as I ascended the next step. Suddenly, I was certain at that moment that I did not exist and, equally if not more terrifying, the world did not exist. I was nothing--not even something that might have ever existed. I pounded on my chest to remind myself that I was solid, but it did no good. I reminded myself that I had to exist because I was the one thinking these thoughts, but that didn't help either. I felt like an imaginary wisp, a fleck of nothingness, a passing thought in someone else's mind. Worse, it was as if I were merely a fleeting second in someone's dream, but I was even less than that: the dreamer did not exist.
While my logic might have been faulty, the power of what I felt was undeniable. I ran through the house like a lunatic. I had a room on the attic floor and when "the feeling" hit I would sprint down the stairs screaming. Once I picked up a painting and almost smashed it over a chair--after all, it was nothing—only holding back at the last second.
Usually the first person I encountered was my sister, Heidi. Heidi and I were close but it still surprised her when her lunatic brother came charging down the hall and hugged her tightly in his arms. I needed to hold something solid, to prove to myself that something did indeed exist, and Heidi usually existed. But even squeezing Heidi like a boa constrictor I couldn't make her feel real to me. I would sprint off to find my mother, then clamp onto her as tightly as I could, trying to find something real. But it didn't work, it never worked. Though she felt substantial enough, I knew the truth, knew she was just another illusion.
I tried desperately to explain how I felt as if that would somehow reduce the horror.
"Nothing is nothing!" I yelled at first, getting my words mixed up in my panic. "Nothing is nothing!"
"Of course nothing is nothing," my mother said with a gentle smile.
Couldn't she see the awful truth? Why was she smiling? Was she crazy?
"But don't you understand: nothing is nothing!"
She smiled again and suddenly I realized my mistake.
"Everything is nothing!" I screamed.
I wanted these words to strike her with the force of revelation, just as they'd struck me. She, after all, was the person I was closest to, the person I had come from. But I couldn't make her see, no matter how I tried. She would pat me on the shoulder and assure me that it would be all right. But it wouldn't, I knew that, knew that nothing would ever be all right again.
One time I had the doubly unpleasant experience of having the "feeling" strike when my father was around. While usually intimidated by him, that day, overwhelmed by my obsession, his presence hardly mattered. He was just another whiff of "nothing" (though, granted, a more substantial whiff.) I charged around, throwing things, screaming, "EVERYTHING IS NOTHING!" (I'd gotten the words down by then.) At first he yelled back, angry, until it finally dawned on him that I was, at that moment, almost completely out of my mind.
He looked at the frothing maniac who was his first born.
"Calm down, David," he said. "Just calm down."
He rapped his knuckles on the coffee table to show me how hard it was.
"This isn't nothing," he said. He touched his own burly chest. "I'm not nothing."
He had the right idea, I'll give him that. But it didn't help. I stared for one intense second at his puzzled ape-like face. Then I sprinted off down the hallway, screaming and yelling.
"David!" he yelled. "David Marshall Gessner you come back here this instant!"
I didn't come. He found me out cowering in the garage.
"Look, David, just try and calm down--"
"You don't understand!" I yelled.
He'd had enough.
"I understand one thing, my friend. I understand you don't see how lucky you are. Lucky to live in this house, to have food on the table, to have two parents. Do you realize there are millions of children starving and dying of disease?"
I looked up at him as if he were the crazy one.
"I'd like to be starving or dying right now!" I screamed.
And I believed it! Believed that I alone was cursed with this awful understanding, an understanding that made starvation and disease look like child's play.
I ran away from him, down the street into the neighborhood. I couldn't listen to him and his logic. Didn't he understand? Everything was nothing! I did not exist!
Of course "the feeling" didn't happen every day, but it happened often enough to cause my parents serious worry. It wasn't particularly pleasant for them to suddenly be contemplating turning in my Pop Warner uniform for a straightjacket. Though I tried to convince my mother it would do no good, she finally dragged me off to see a psychiatrist. With the first one I got nowhere, but the second was different. I was twelve or thirteen by then and I folded my arms as I sat up on the couch, convinced that mere words couldn't change "the feeling."
"I won't try to 'cure' you," he said. "All I'd like to do is teach you how to relax yourself. So that when you have your 'feeling' you can use these techniques."
He was a bearded black man who smoked a pipe and seemed very calm and wise, but deep down I knew mere "techniques" didn't have a chance in hell against "the feeling." Still when he asked me to, I stared at the spot on the wall.
"I'm going to hypnotize you, David, but it's not like in the movies. Anytime you want you can come out."
I nodded and counted backward. The plan was that, while under hypnosis, he would teach me self-hypnosis. Then, when the feeling came, I would simply calm down. I went along with him, knowing full well that I wasn't about to close my eyes and count backward when the real thing returned.
And, just as I guessed, it did return. But then, slowly, mysteriously, it faded. Maybe I was just getting older, growing out of childhood logic, or simply getting used to the idea that I was "nothing." By the time I got to high school I was only experiencing it about once a year, then not at all. I never believed I was cured, (and I still don't, I suppose) but, on the other hand, I have to admit it stopped. Whatever the reason, the feeling finally faded away.
3.
The dead pig tastes wonderful and I nod and smile at the other writers. But then, just as I am becoming fully immersed in this mindless pleasure, a grad student of mine begins to talk about God. Which makes me shift uneasily. I’d rather stay focused on pig. One thing I’ve learned about this new place where I find myself is that the air is thick not just with humidity but with religion. There is much talk of the Lord. Just this morning I drove to get my coffee behind a pickup with a bumper sticker that read “Live hard, pray hard.” There are signs like this everywhere (as well as countless flags, both American and Confederate). I am not sure if people are actually any more religious here, in a deep sense, but they are quicker to bring up religion, to display it, to drop Jesus’ name. Of course it’s as easy to be a regionalist as any other kind of bigot so I need to watch myself.
The boy keeps talking and I find myself backing away. I mumble a full-mouthed apology and shuffle off to the woods to piss. On the way back I make a detour by the keg. Then, when I see that the god-talker has moved on, I sneak back for another go at the pig. Yes, there is something naturally religious about the sacrifice on the spit, but maybe with more of a pagan flavor. The hog has given us the greatest gift. The unworded must die for the word-makers. I take a long pull on my beer and once again partake of the body.
4.
The word “nothing,” which had so terrorized me as a ten year old, lost its power in my teens. My family occasionally attended a Unitarian church, with a minister who was less like a preacher than a good humanities lecturer in college, a man only slightly this side of an atheist. Fittingly, for a Unitarian in central Massachusetts , I spent my high school years worshipping at the church of Thoreau
5.
It occurs to me now that while I thought of myself as burningly unique back then, many of my concerns were in fact socio-economic, and, moreover, regional. My family was well off enough so that I did not have to concern myself with putting food on my plate, with the contemporary equivalent of hunting, which freed my mind for other terrors. The regionalism came out perhaps in my Unitarianism, my overriding love of the Concord
It was while I was away at school that the rest of my family moved South. My mother and three siblings were stunned by the move, which would later assume a mythic quality in family history. I, already safely tucked away at school, was the only member of my family who was spared.
6.
We eat our pig deep in the woods. Earlier my wife, my two year old daughter, and I drove across the bridge over the Cape Fear River and then north on a road more like a path. The land here is full of live oaks and long leaf pines, as well as a few abandoned refrigerators and washers. The smell is of pine flavored with the smoke from the pig. I talk for a while with Elton, the old man who is letting us use his woods, and he gives us a tour of the one room cabin where his grandmother grew up. When he shows us his stuffed bobcat and raccoon, my daughter points and makes monkey noises. We take a buggy ride through the woods in the dark, which seems quaint at first until the horse balks at some tree roots and then rushes forward, nearly throwing my daughter and me from the buggy. Suddenly it is not play, and I clutch her tight during the last few hundred yards as the horse trots through the dark woods, pulling us bumpily along. We survive, and settle down around the fire. I help myself to yet another plate of pork, which is still succulent. We all stare at the fire and drink while some of the students play guitars.
I note thankfully that the god-talker has left. I sing along with my fellow writers, my fellow pagans, my fellow pig-eaters.
7.
If I sometimes stereotype the Southerners around me, then they stereotype right back. Since I come from the North, from Massachusetts Aue
I was eighteen when my family first moved to North Carolina Egypt Charlotte
School was just out and I was visiting my family at the time. My father and I and some other men got out to the barn early, at the crack of dawn, to start roasting the pig on a spit. No matter what you choose to baste the animal with, booze is the true lubricant at any celebration of pig. The men all drank heavily, and before long we were savages around the fire, a Southern version of Lord of the Flies. And if we were acting out that classic book, there was little doubt who was playing the bullying part of Ralph. My father downed a six pack of Schlitz before noon and got that glimmer he always got in his eye when he drank. He took the pig’s head and put a baseball cap on it and jammed a Lucky Stripe in its mouth and hooked a Schlitz around its ear using the plastic six pack loop. He then somehow managed to hang the head over the barn door so that it greeted people when they arrived.
Of course the guests didn’t start to trickle in until late in the afternoon, giving us long hours to achieve almost complete inebriation. When my sister Heidi's new Southern friends arrived they immediately got me stoned. This was a bad combination of intoxicants for the teenage me: the pot made me paranoid, the alcohol violent. The next thing I knew I was alone in the back of someone's car and that someone, a real Southern boy, was in front flirting with Heidi. They passed me a bowl and I lit it and pulled the smoke deeply into my lungs. Some time went by, and, apparently, though I’d passed the bowl back up front, I’d forgotten to pass the lighter. The Southern boy asked me to pass it, but in doing so he made a grave mistake. He mispronounced my last name.
"Gezz-ner," he said. "Pass the lighter."
I tightened.
"My name's not Gezz-ner. It's Gess-ner."
It was then that my sister's new friend made another fateful error, one he would soon regret. He laughed at me. I can’t remember exactly what he said after laughing, but through the haze of pot and alcohol this is what I heard:
"Gezz-ner, Gess-ner. Gessner is a nothing."
What the poor kid was probably trying to say is "Hey, it's nothing. Don’t worry about it." But what I heard was something like this: "YOU ARE NOTHING."
In a flash I was over the seat and was on him. A second later we were out of the car rolling on the dirt, fists flying. I punched and punched, a savage attack that he could in no way have anticipated. My family's new Southern friends all gathered round to watch the fight. As was the custom, as is the custom everywhere apparently, a primal chant began, one word over and over: “Fight! Fight!”
Somehow, later, it was all right. I apologized profusely, the way I always did back then. Later we shook hands, though the boy was still understandably confused about what he had done wrong. As it turned out I’d picked the right kid to attack: Many of my sister's friends came up to me to say that they’d often wanted to beat the crap out of old what's-his-name. I was forgiven and the night turned wild. The music cranked and we all danced like dervishes in the barn. My father spun my mother across the floor, my little sister Jenny leapt and whirled, Heidi and I danced in a mad flight of self-forgetfulness.
We were the Gessners. No one could say we were nothing.
8.
Tonight is not quite as wild, though with the guitar strumming, and the fire flickering, and the good bloated feeling in my belly, it’s not bad. When my wife says it’s time to bring my daughter home I decide to stay and get a ride with one of my students. Now I can really drink and I begin to tilt the beer cans more aggressively vertical when I lift them above my mouth. By midnight only a small band of us remains and when we are not singing we stare into the fire as if looking for the answer to something vexing. Really we just like the way all that flickering looks, like a great animated painting, the whips of orange and blue and white, the ash rising as if bobbing in an anti-gravity chamber. The fire tightens our faces so that we feel like skiers in the lodge after a day in the cold. We have done nothing more than eat pork and drink beer, but we feel the healthy glow you get after a hard workout. The woods are dark around us.
My father was an ambitious man and ambition lured him south. A chance to run his own company, a larger company, a chance to be king of a wider realm. Now, like my father before me, I have pulled up stakes and landed in North Carolina
But my father was susceptible to phantoms, too. Gessner is a German name and sometimes I wonder how much our heritage affected my family’s melodramatic, not to say operatic, concept of ambition. During the last years of his life my father indulged himself in what amounted to a Teutonic version of roots. By that time the Berlin Wall had come down and he had begun to seriously explore the possibility of extending his kingdom beyond the borders of North Carolina and buying his great-great grandfather's textile company back in Aue, in what had been East Germany
9.
The three students who are left are all in a class I teach called “creative nonfiction,” whatever that is. One of them pulls out and lights a cigar, which at this moment seems an inspired act. We pass it around, sharing saliva and pig juice, all of us growing stupid with beer. This stupidity manifests itself when one of the students asks me how I feel about memoir, which many critics have deemed a sure sign that our civilization is crumbling. At the moment I am only slightly less interested in this topic than I was in talking about god. “Jesus, this cigar is good,” I say in response.
Not long ago I read an essay called “Whole Hog” by a fine writer named Tenaya Darlington. She wrote of the joys of “big meat,” of “something slow roasted that leads to the unleashing of energies.” A pig pickin’, according to Darlington , is a celebration of “joyous crudeness” and at its center are the central facts of fire and smoke: “The whole affair is testament to the power of fire, our innate attraction to it, the strong sense of community it awakens.” I want to articulate thoughts like these to my students but find my tongue and brain will not obey. Instead I point my beer at the fire as if to say “Look,” and take another puff on the cigar. Soon I am bogarting it, suckling it, ignoring all those warnings about not inhaling and pulling in the sacred smoke.
10.
What is the craze for memoir all about? Doesn’t a lot of it come down to just this:
Here is my life. I lived. I made my mark. Don’t forget me, please.
But does anyone really believe that that mark, that any literary mark, is even mildly indelible? There is a reason, of course, that few people these days talk smirklessly about “immortality.” Science has extended our perspective so that the time between us and Shakespeare becomes a mere speck in contrast to geological time, a speck that can only seem significant, if not large, in comparison with the earth itself, the tiniest fleck of nothingness in the vastness of millions of galaxies. Hard to believe anyone is reading King Lear in the Omega galaxy. Hard to believe the words of Shakespeare would survive a supernova.
In his brilliant book, The Denial of Death, Ernst Becker argues that much of our energy, much of our creativity, much of our life, comes from our attempt to deny the essential fact of our existence: that that existence will end. Whether we consider ourselves life-affirmers who claim the fear of death has no hold on us, or “realists,” who admit to living in death’s shadow, we are all, according to Becker, both terrified and propelled by our not-so-happy ending. We throw ourselves into frenzied attempts to fill up the nothingness with “something,” hurling our objects of work or art--our creations--into the void. At the same time we try to make a name for ourselves, knowing that the worst thing we could be is a “nothing.” Speaking not just of artists but of human beings in general, Becker says that in our realization that we are nothing, we fight to stand out, to be something, trying to build a narcissistic shield around ourselves that keeps death out. We see this need to win, to be fist, most obviously between children as siblings, but it is also obvious enough in adults. Becker writes:
But it [narcissism] is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation. When you combine natural narcissism with the basic need for self-esteem, you create a creature who has to feel himself an object of primary value: first in the universe, representing in himself all of life.
The next step is finding obsessions that reflect ourselves and our shining narcissism. For artists, obsession obviously comes in handy. It not only gives us the energy and power to create the artistic object, but it fills up our minds in a way few other things could. But can obsession fill the death hole? Of course not, though maybe it is out of nothingness that we all begin to create. If the world doesn't exist then we will make our own world. Maybe all this fever of creation, this need to be special, this frenzy--what Thomas Wolfe called an "enormous task of excavation" of self--this creation comes at least in part out of the terror of pure emptiness, the terror of the end. The need to fill the void, to make something out of this vast sense of nothing. Extreme fear of oblivion creating extreme creation. We hurl ourselves against the death void.
In the end, Becker acknowledges, death wins. “All paths of glory lead but to the grave.” The least hard-headed moments in Becker’s book are when he reasons that, since everything man does is an illusion, why not pick the best, the highest, illusion. This is Becker’s somewhat convoluted path back to the spiritual, to god. But there is another path to take, another choice. What if we acknowledge that all our dear passions—ambitions for fame or spirituality—are illusions, and then go trudging ahead without them. Of course illusions will still tug at us, most of us do not have the discipline of a Zen master emptying his mind, but even if we sometimes go where they tug, we give up, at least, on the idea that these obsessions offer us any real protection against the big D. What then? What are we left with?
Well, nothing really. But on the other hand, everything, all that is solid--the world. Terrifying as that world is once stripped of illusion.
11.
My father, that master pig cooker, feared death his whole life. But when it actually came he responded well.
I was with him during his last days. His death took over the book I was writing at that time. I typed and scribbled straight through those final days, taking few breaks except to care for him and write his obituary. My father was only fifty-six when he died. Two years after his death I faced another. I hadn’t gotten close, really close, to a dog since Macker, but as I was falling in love with my wife, I also fell for her dog Zeke. Zeke was a curmudgeon who bit many and loved few. Part Saint Bernard, Part Collie, he took his last watery breathes in the garden behind our house. Zeke’s death has stayed with me, in no small part because of how startling it resembled the death of his fellow curmudgeon, my father. Both animals breathed long labored breathes as they closed in on death, then shallower gasps at wider intervals as the moment approached. Both, Zeke in the unplanted mud of the garden and my father in his hospice bed, seemed ready to let go before hanging on and fighting back, this pattern repeating over and over. Their eyes looked off behind them and away from us, but they were clearly aware that we were holding onto them. The sheer physicality of the moment was like none other, the only thing comparable for me being the final moments of my daughter’s birth.
Another way that the two deaths were alike: neither took solace in religion.
My father was a non-believer until the end. Did this soothe him? Doubtful.
But after knowing him my whole life I would have been shocked if he made that cowardly retreat in his last hours.
Don’t get my wrong. I am full of admiration for the man of faith who stays faithful in the face of this sternest test. That is every bit as admirable as my father’s death. But what is not so admirable is, having lived one way, trying to suddenly fudge things with the end near. “I’m sticking to my guns,” my father said in his usual business man vernacular. And he did stick to his guns.
I, like my father, am a non-believer. So what does that leave me with?
Quite a lot it turns out. For one, this world—its smells, its tastes, its feel, and of course its other people. And if I have learned one thing in the years since “the feeling,” it is that the world exists quite separate from me, thank you very much. But what it doesn’t leave me with, in the end, is the self. When I die I am gone. Kaput. Poooof. I can’t imagine that I will turn to prayer. As for ambition, what will that get me? Perhaps a slightly longer obiturary.
But this is too glib an answer. Even if my work is not remembered, it gives me much. Not the least of its gifts are that it fills me up while I am here. But it is more than that. In the end my work is the something I make out of the nothingness, even if it does not help me escape oblivion. It is my sacrifice made at an empty altar.
12.
The night is fading, the pig is picked. Our pagan rituals are done and soon all that will remain will be bones and bellyaches and hangovers. Only Elton and one other student, my ride home, still sit with me around the dying fire. Not much stands out from the black except for two similar sights: the fire’s red embers and the taillights of the straggler car existing through the woods. I feel beery and deeply tired. I stand up and thank Elton, then tell my ride I am finally ready. We stumble off into the dark night.
