Late One Night Behind Stella Manor

 I was walking along a lonely road late one night in July many years ago. The night screamed with the song of wildlife, proudly declaring in error that this summer would last forever. My steps crunched on the pavement and dirt. I walked by an old home in an old town. It was built back in the centuries when many homes were actually given names. Recently, it had been carelessly allowed to fall into the hands of a man who could not protect it from himself.

Stella Manor, she was called. She was among the many homes in these towns built in the 1700s that saw entire lifetimes come and go through her doors. In that way, she was infinite. But here, tonight, her days are numbered. Miscalculation, desperation, misunderstanding, and ultimate failure to preserve what was and to protect the future all would culminate in a tragic ending. 

As I passed, I heard a booming sound. Curious, I turned down the dirt driveway and peered into the back yard. It was a man much younger than me. He was dumping boxes of papers into the dumpster in the darkness. There was a gravity about what he was doing. It felt like pushing helicopters off carrier decks to lighten the load for the refugees when Saigon fell. Be this Saigon, be this Waterloo, something was happening here.

"Hey!" I called him. But he did not turn. He was not ignoring me; I was out of phase. I could not affect or intervene, even though I wanted to so badly. In the pages that he was discarding, he looked at them briefly. He had carried them across the time and space of his travels. With great sadness, he looked at the pages of his first words in 79, the 100 compositions written in February 1983, the 180 written in March of 1983, The Recital, The Concept of Me II, works that captured his youth, innocence, and beginnings. In great lots, he hefted piles of work that would be lost forever into the dumpster.

What is it that compelled this young man of only 23 to make such a sacrifice? It is clear that he is taking pieces of his very soul and throwing them from the plane. He is about to jump into a volcano; he knows that is what this is, and yet he thinks he can handle it. But the very foundation of who he is already is failing. The integrity of all he has earned over the last year is not as strong or as established as he thought. He is walking upon nothing. He is jumping from piece to piece of the wreckage of the life that he has made, thinking that there is land nearby, never realizing he is traveling with hostiles.

The diary of a teenager who failed to live in the here and now because he did not understand the complexities of his composition. All broke down into strange outbursts and serenades, falling into nothingness. No one will ever know. He could walk those streets again, smell the air of days gone by, understand things decades later, but that was denied in this moment of absolute destruction. Blatant disrespect in the name of honor that writers often choose.

Most of the time, the writer is about to die when he or she makes this terminal decision to not live beyond their physical existence. Right then and there, they play God and decide to deny the very essence that they are to those who love them in the name of privacy, but in reality, fear.

This 23-year-old was practically coveting this passage into darkness, or was he? Although he was alive, he was not in reality. Out there beyond what he had built, he found the living dead. 

Words, words, more words. Beautiful words, boastful words. Shattered words, and loving words. Infatuation only just hours old. Heartbreak and betrayal. These were words that could never be written again, and he was discarding them. 

"STOP!!!! You fool! You have no idea what you are doing!" He stopped. He looked up at the starry night sky. He had been here almost a year and thought he had built an empire. It seemed as though moments ago, he was under that August 88 night sky when everything was brand new and perfect. Here now, he was throwing himself away. He did not know it because everything was chaos. He could not see through the thick gloom of his life at the time.

Back at the home of a friend, his prize waited for him. Everything he thought he wanted. It was going to be perfect. All he had to do was throw as much as he could overboard to make room for this choice. Bliss, freedom, and unsuspectedly dying in a way he did not know was possible.

The weeks that have passed were wild. He broke into this life by taking a stand against treachery and betrayal. He was right, and he was done. On his first day out, he met a beautiful woman who sat and told him of a tragedy so horrific that it broke her family. She was beyond rescue. She would be fine on her own, but he could not figure out where she would land. 

Was it the fact that he had been called out by his mentor? He pointed out the Freidian course that he was taking. But recognizing that would be a call to action, demanding that he change course right now. Don't run with this girl. Don't run away. Take a breath, see his life, and figure out a way to stay alive instead of running ahead of the fatal wave that was right behind him, that had already swept him away the moment he went looking for trouble. One incredible smile on the way to the gallows.

Everything had to be done with stealth, including this tragic moment. Ten years of ink and paper, most of it, treated with such disrespect. There was no turning back, there was no way out of the fall. I watched him with tears in my eyes, because here I was again, and there was nothing I could do. What was about to happen would be his inevitable swan song. This would happen in stages of release, guilt, catch, and release. The road was ahead, and it was hot, coarse, and bitter. It would burn away all of the facades and fantasy. It would leave behind the truth, and I would deny it to the bitter end.

Although I was this tragic person, dumping his very life into this dumpster, the next two months he would live an entire lifetime as if it happened all at once, and then, on the night of September 8th, he would face the end. The morning would come, September 9th, and the realities of everything he had done would fall down upon me. This night too, where he betrayed himself ultimately, and I knew that running was over. Even though I had made it almost 24 years, I was born somewhere in the stark realities that unfolded that Friday night into Saturday.

What was lost in that dumpster will never be again, and I have accepted this. It is the road that brought me here. I am who I am because of every minute and every decision. In my dreams, I have changed it a thousand times, but that is just an echo of my defiance.  I walked back out of the driveway, determined to leave this memory where it lives. The young man packed up the car, knowing what he did would hurt forever. As the lights fell upon the dumpster, a cat jumped up on it as if to ask him, "What have you done?"

He was one hour from oblivion, he knew it then, and I know it now, and there was nothing either of us could do about it.

Resistance, Fire, Oblivion

 In a flash of self-awareness

The brutal bloom of life infused with energy

the promises of hope and productivity

Here it comes, here it comes!

I want it to wash over me like a shower of lightening

No escape, only escalation into action.

Such lofty dreams from one who walks through the smoldering valleys of desolation.

Hundreds of miles of torn metal and toxic fumes, 

there is nowhere to go but through.

You made the choices and planned this journey

A future not so imperfect lay before you

You damaged the impossible reward

All of the time and money spent

What do you show for it now?

What have you done?

Where is it now?

You're not so smart, are you?

Maybe not even a little.

Here, the sun is setting, and you were sure you knew the way back

The reality is, you have no idea where you came from 

You are lost, alone, and abandoned.

What have you done?

What do you do now?

There is no pier of youth to cry upon.

Even though you were dead, you had so much time ahead of you.

There was always time, until there wasn't.

There was always hope that you could still turn around and come home.

Home does not exist anymore.

Photo by Nikolas Noonan on Unsplash

The days that felt like they would never end live only in memories you can see, but they dissolve when you reach out to them.

Moments counted then, too. You did not know it. Will you know it now?

You arrive late to the dinner, and look around.

You know someone here awaits to harm, and someone awaits to rescue you.

The socializing you do is a dance with treachery and hope.

You don't want to spoil the party with your nebulous commitment.

So you go.

You roam the land, cashing checks where you can to get to sunset.

Will you rest in the nighttime hours?

Or will you lament over all that you have not resolved?

You have no answers tonight, 

and none will be gained in the light of day.

Time to make time out of no time.

There is a green light from nine to eleven, 

shining through the years of fog

leading the boat to a shore long forgotten.

After drifting on the dark sea for so long, the light always seems so inviting.

When you get close, 

It could be rest and recouperation.

Or

It could be fire and oblivion.

You can never tell from here.

It is curious how it suddenly cuts through the fog. 

It is stark and direct.

I never knew it could hold so much depth.

You step into the water, pulling the boat onto the rocky beach.

Scraping sounds and sore joints come into focus.

Is it like coming in from the cold?

Is it like being greeted by a friend you never knew before?

There is a feeling of better days ahead.

A year later, you look in the mirror at your shattered face,

and try to understand what went right and what went wrong.

What would you have done if you could know what you know today?

You know for sure that even in safe spaces,

you are never safe.

What it is, what it is, what it is.

Not Soon Enough for Me

 I opened a Chef John Tastemade video. They were over-focusing on his stupid technique. If you can stomach that, you cannot even download or print their recipes. Selling their stupid jars of who knows what on Amazon? Primadonna much? I don't need it. 

I do love Vincenzo's Plate Pasta Grammar reviewing Giada De Laurentiis' videos. And Samin Nosrat: "But I'll never forget the lesson I learned that day; Food can only be as delicious as the fat with which it is cooked. I saw fat as an important and versatile ingredient in its own right rather than a cooking medium."

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

I am currently in a very rough place with coffee. I sail along for several years in a pretty good place, and one day, I am shot down with the likes of a ground-to-air missile. Then, all coffee is expensive. I avoided the price hike for a long time because it took Amazon a significant time to raise prices on our formerly beloved New England Coffee. The pricing assault is not the worst, though. The fact is, I am left wanting more. I can taste the changes (most likely due to supply and sourcing pricing); this stuff is not half as good-tasting as it used to be.

So I brought a couple of bags of Starbucks into the house because they were on sale that week. For Donna, that worked ok because she is a mocha coffee drinker. For me, not as good. Starbucks has a bitter note for me. They also dust with other things, including cocoa. I overdosed on flavored coffee in the 1990's. I am never going back again. 

I was at my local Hannaford (rhymes with "Can't-Afford"). I always referred to them as "Scamaford," but these guys have grown on me a little over the last 6 years, so now, there are actually items that I prefer to buy here. If I had to completely shop here, with their limited produce selection and ridiculously high dry and dairy prices, I would need to take weekly trips to Shaws, for perspective, where they literally hold you hostage with rifles and clean you out of all your money, and your belongings, and perhaps even your offspring. Am I bitter? We now return to the point.

Hannaford had these very environmentally responsible-looking bags of coffee that are green and white: Nature's Promise Organic Colombian coffee. The price was reasonable (by current standards, in 1972 it would be enough to buy the ingredients for a meal for a family of five). The coffee, it turns out, is weak, stale, tobacco-like, and, overall, an assault on the senses. In fact, I would dare say, it tastes like one of Nature's OTHER Promises, if you catch my drift.

One hundred fifty-five dollars is all that stands between me and getting you food on the weekends. It is sustainable, it is the right direction, it has to happen! I am in such a weird spot right now. It is like my own version of "All Good Things." A colossal merry-go-round of untethered collisions across space and time. "No, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no...I love Italian, and so do you... Yes."

Show me your heart in your words, in your drawing on the vessel, the gift comes in, in your food. Make me laugh, make me cry. Feel something, make it real. Be brave. 

Sail on, o mighty ship of fragmentation. What is it that holds you together? The storms of bad decisions, the shortage of needed sustenance, and the aftermath of marauders stealing all power, how do you not just disappear across the night sky until you are nothing?

I know one thing. I want to scream, but I don't know why. When I think of all of the adjustments I made, I think of that lonely 7 Eleven at the end of an 18-mile road, on Padre Island. I turned dials. I filed and sanded. Polished and painted. Desolation was what I was made of. I took apart every conversation that settled wrong in my gut and asked myself why. I charged myself with keeping quiet, not reacting, cool, seemingly cold. Fool the masses, fool yourself.

It's May. Sickness squelches all that I wish to accomplish. It won't hold me down, I tell you! It won't. But as I look out the window, I see the sweet new green leaves contrast against a deep purple sky. Trouble. The one thing I cannot fix or control. 

When I look through the window that is painted silver on the back, it is hard to see because I feel he should have more answers than I do. It is all facade. You know how I can tell. I read the news of the day. It said the current adult generation is at a disadvantage. We held that storm back. Blood, sweat, and tears. We did it. 

What I want to see now is all that I will see in November. What a gift that would be. To know what is truly important. Spring took 100 years to arrive, and now that it is here, I don't even know where to start. I know I am churning and burning, though. Kimchi made, Desert Storm story finished, 1985 finished. I am checking boxes, and yet it never seems soon enough for me.

1985 Chapter 15: The End of the Innocence

 Dad and I sat at the kitchen table at Glenn and Carol's house. It was New Year's Eve, and the minutes were counting down to putting this year in the history books. 1985 had been a very progressive year. Live Aid happened back in July. Ronald Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first time at the Geneva Summit. Coca-Cola introduced New Coke, which turned out to be one of the biggest failures in business history. This was the year of The Breakfast Club and Back to the Future. The wreckage of the Titanic was finally located this year. The space shuttle Atlantis made its maiden voyage. 

Image by Pete Linforth from https://pixabay.com

I could not count the emotional miles I have traveled on this little island this year. When it came to coming of age, I jumped from the plane without a parachute. I got to see things about myself that I did not like and wanted to change, and I made those changes. For a person who didn't really have direction growing up, I figured out that it was up to me.

I actually had my first publication this month. Ray Cushing was the owner/publisher of one of the two island newspapers: The Island News. He loved the article I wrote the year before, which I called "The Art of Sunday Driving." Ray renamed it "Sunday Driving Recollections" and published it in December 1985. Copy of article Click Here I know this was just a small town newspaper, but having my first by-line was surreal.

I did not get paid for the article, but Ray did gift me an electric typewriter. For the last 5 years, I have been working on a story I called Lost in a Strange Life. I was pretty much over the revisions of that story. With the new typewriter, I would go on to write my second story, called Misfits.

The end of 1985 was this strange gathering of fragments, rushing to meet the end of a road somewhere, when I would have to make choices that I had never made before. In 1985, nine space shuttle missions were launched. It was the most ever launched in a single year. What we did not know was that only 29 nine days after this New Year's Eve, all of that would change. The reckless would become humbled. The humble would become reckless. Everything that 1985 began with would be drained of all of its value and become the salvaged cautionary tale that could never be duplicated.

As the holiday passed, the decompressing effect stirred up 1985 for all of us. I could not deny the broken pieces of a relationship that went on far longer than it should have. Dee needed to grow. 12 years of captivity, of which some of the living conditions outright matched those of human trafficking victims. She needed solidarity. I don't think I ever met a person who deserved it more. I had been too young to understand that.

She invoked something in me that I was all too familiar with. My parents separated at 8. We were Title 19 (Welfare) kids. We bounced frequently, moving from apartment to apartment, school to school. We had no car for two years, and during that time, we even went without a refrigerator for a short period. We were poor. The kindness of my Grandfather got us through the holidays, school clothes, and, I am sure, other times when there was just not enough. 

Living life like this conditioned me. I was always trying to make things better. Always pushing against the current. Always taking the answer "No" and making it into a 'Yes."  One time, specifically, was when we were evicted from 541 East Main Street in Torrington, Connecticut, back in April of 1979. My Grandmother, who now lived in a two-room apartment with a kitchenette, took us in. We were pounding the streets looking for a place to live. Agencies, papers, radio ads, and window signs. Anything out there, we tried. 

It was a cool spring evening just after dark when Mom and I pulled up on Earl Street in Bristol to look at a potential place to live. As we were walking into the driveway alongside the house, there were four couples there to tour the apartment, too. My mom saw this and did an about-face, "Oh, we are never going to get this, let's go." I grabbed her by the arm of her jacket. "No!" I said quietly. "You're right. If we get in that car, we will absolutely not get this."

In 1979, there was still a stigma about the single mother when it came to projecting whether they could maintain a good payment routine. The two-parent family seemed more secure for sure. This landlord was a widower, so the fact that there was a single woman looking to rent might have been an advantage. The fact that my mother was walking out to her car one cold morning while the landlord was backing out of the driveway, somehow caused his truck to crash into his own porch railing, might support that he liked her. 

There was another factor. A solid one. He, Jim, had been raising a son who was almost my age since losing his wife. It had been many years. I was not a passive 13-year-old; I was in control. I wanted to show this man that I was not some deadbeat, trouble-making teen. When we got to the basement, my opportunity presented itself in the form of a giant 50-year-old furnace. "Hey, that's one of those old wood/coal burners converted into oil furnaces," I said. Jim looked at me, very surprised. "Yes! How do you know that?" I placed my hand on one of the pipes, "My Grandmother had one of these in her house. There is no mistaking them." You could tell he was more than impressed.

My life was like this. I always found ways to save my mother. She absolutely could have done things on her own, but I also know I did something to tip the scales in a way that complemented her efforts. I did not realize that reflexively, this created in me what someone counseled me years later as my "Superman complex." I applied this so naturally, especially in my relationship with Dee. I spent a good part of 1985 trying to save her, whether she needed it or wanted it. 

All of the pieces were landing where they would. Getting the house, and her ex moving away, and her needing to make all of her decisions. As she expressed her right and desire to be on her own, I wanted to show her that I could still save us. After Christmas, I finally got it. There were 2% of the reasons why we should go on, and 19,678% of the reasons why we needed to separate and see what we could be as individuals and what we could be to each other. 

I told her she needed to move out. It was here that I discovered I had been living in my own nebula. "This is what I have been trying to tell you." As she said the words, it was as if I suddenly had months of dialogue in a foreign language translated. Not only did I see that I was trying to defy gravity, but I saw her kindness toward me. Patience interwoven with frustration. We decided we were still together, but on the last weekend of December, she and the kids moved out. We would "date." Within a month, we had decided the dating would also be over. 

Our relationship was hard to define, and it did not end here. We had several intense relapses the following year, and most people do not know it, but on the 4th of July weekend, on one very crazy Saturday night, she whispered to me, "Let's leave. Take me away from this place!" It was there that the plan to leave Port Aransas started to take shape. The idea was fueled when my Grandmother fell sick, and then I could not stop the momentum. I honestly can say I don't know if I ever would have left if she hadn't said those words to me.

After 1986, we continued as friends, and in my extreme lost state in the late summer of 1989, just before I quit drinking, I actually worked for Dee. By then, she was the Beach Crew Supervisor. She was easy to work with, and we enjoyed a true friendship that stood well on its own during our days working together. Although she had nothing to do with this, I do find it amazing that the last day I ever drank in my life was also the last day that I worked for her. It was a seasonal position, and it had concluded.

While I was working on the Beach Crew in 89, Horace popped up on the beach. He had not changed at all. He was no longer with Dee's sister. He was like a vampire; he just took resources and energy from all of those around them. I yelled his name when we pulled up to him on the beach. He walked around and acted very happy to see me. Then he retracted into a voice I was only too familiar with. The same whiny voice in which he used to advocate that Dee should be with her Ex, or that he and I were with the wrong sister. This time, he was complaining about Dee's live-in boyfriend, whom I knew well, and was a good guy. Horace whined that she would be so much better with me. Some people, you just can't save. I was looking at the living dead. I did not know where his life would end, and in reality, it really did so many years ago.

The moment Dee moved out, everything felt right. She also experienced the same thing. We had made friends and went through a period of change together that was extremely different for both of us. She was breaking out in her solidarity, and I helped her meet ends materially and accompanied her through the breakaway stage. I came of age in a way that could only be described as jumping out of a plane without a parachute. It molded who I was for the rest of my adult life.

When 1984 ended, I was sitting on the couch in that old mobile home where Dad and I lived at the time, watching the New Year's Eve celebration on MTV. I was definitely still a kid. Untested. Inexperienced in so many ways. Over the last 12 months, I have learned a skill in the oil business, and learned how to survive in the rough construction industry socially. I learned how to eat hot baked beans from a styrofoam cup without a spoon. I learned how to back trailers with ease, drive trucks and tractors, and so many other skills.

I learned how to keep my mouth shut. I identified a need to keep quiet, to be stealthy, and to keep strength because of it. Mostly, I learned to see and hear the person I showed interest in. The Superman complex continued for a few more years, and it caused significant trouble for sure. We cannot grow up all at once, but I definitely took the expressway for much of it. 

1984 was good for Dad and me. We had an equal balance of father-son and friendship aspects to our relationship. In 1985, it became more of a friend you like to spend time with, and the friend who makes you mad with their choices, too. Whatever happened in 1985, we learned how to exist in parallel lines, and it worked.

1985 was the year Brooke migrated to Texas, and she was meant to be here. Port Aransas fit her so well that it was as if Dad being there and I being there were almost supplemental. She and I were also true friends, and I loved that so much.

In the coming year, my Grandfather would come many times with my cousin, with my sister Amy, and it became quite normal for him to visit. 

Now, Glenn and Carol's kitchen table. At the same table, I was first introduced to Dee last May. It was just Dad, Glenn, Carol, and me. Dad raised his glass with rum and Coke to us in the center of the round table. "Here is to 86ing 1985." We raised our glasses too. "Here, here."