When we run out of room to remember
I Knew a Guy in Miami
I knew a guy when I was living in Miami. I’m blanking on his name, so I’ll name him Mike. This was back in the 70s, and I could not have explained then nor now what the hell I was doing in that part of the country. Looking for a job like a blind man looking to see, I arrived just in time for the 1970s’ recession to crush South Florida.
Mike was a draftsman in the firm with my buddy, Lewis in Fort Lauderdale, and I needed to learn how to play guitar. That was the mission statement. I had a cheap nylon string guitar and was disinclined to practice, if always persistent in dreaming of it. I knew you had to work at working, but working at something to entertain myself, I hadn’t learned that one yet.
On the weekend, I drove the 67’ VW from Coral Gables to Boca Raton where Lewis and Alice lived. The said VW had done trips on I-95 from Connecticut to South Carolina—what was another two states south?
Lewis and Alice were not living in Wonderland. Boca Raton, tale of the rat, is a suburb north of another suburb; as a state of mind, Florida is mainly a suburb, and that’s where they’d landed. So I drove from Coral Gables to Boca Raton more times than my young bride thought was appropriate. After the glory of Yale, I’d shrunk to a low level intern in a large Miami architecture/engineering firm paying diddly squat, and badly needed something to improve my moral. I was a mediocre guitar player—not half as good as Lewis, but I was learning. And we’d gotten good at singing harmony. Swear to god, I could sing back then.
Lewis had a keen ear for music. It was what we held in common, design and a love of music. Except he could listen to a tune, find the chords, finger pick the licks and teach me. Taught me the intro to the Dead’s Friend of the Devil and Blind Faith’s Can’t Find My Way Home among others. We’d played together in the hovel on North Clemson Avenue before I split for grad school and Lewis moved to Florida, so two plus years later we picked up again. Somewhere during which I bought a big body Gibson steel string from a guy who needed cash.
He and Alice were renting a house with another pair of Clemson graduates, one of whom was a serious pot head—he’d start the day with a joint before heading off to work at a construction company, and recovered the baggie immediately upon return in the afternoon. Nice enough guy, but he appeared to have a problem. Lewis and Alice were less inclined, and I didn’t have the cash to keep up with the dude, though the weed in Florida was always just off the boat, fresh and potent. As in Didion’s San Francisco, stoners abounded in Miami.
I think Lewis might have come more often down to Miami if he’d been more welcomed by my terribly introverted bride, shy of her own shadow in those days. He did travel our way to do a 3-day cram session for the architectural licensing exam, which we both passed on the first try. The cram sessions were repeated drills at test taking to get the timing down. The trick was to finish the straightforward questions and go back to tackle the harder ones. Five or six hours of testing one day, followed by the same the next day. Two years out of grad school and bing! we were both architects.
Though, the main story is about Mike. He was a for-real southern country boy, laid back and crazy for being in the outdoors. He’d camp on a minute’s notice. We went camping one weekend on the south side of Lake Okeechobee half way to Orlando from South Florida. Lake Okeechobee is a broad, shallow water, black as night from the sediment. If you dip your head six inches below the water line, you can see nothing. It’s fed by all the shallow creeks flowing lazily into it, along with the Kissimmee River. It’s a caricature of a river—like Florida is a caricature of a place to live.
Kissimmee River photo by Tony Santana, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1995
“The original meandering river path was widened, straightened, and excavated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers between 1962 and 1971 for flood control in central Florida. As of 2007, the Kissimmee River Restoration Project is underway to restore parts of the river to its original condition.”
from Wikipedia article on the Kissimmee River
Florida has more environmental sins to atone for than most countries, but only because the landscape was too fragile to be run over by bulldozers. I sketched out an after-the-collapse story of how fast Florida could overgrow every man-made thing and keep on going—wistfully. Jungles are amazing when you see them up close.
Mike had brought a haunch of wild boar he planned to share, the meat from a previous hunt. My new bride, Carlyn, insisted we bring store-bought steak—no boar meat for her. That evening, we ate, and they waited. And waited. Boar meat, for those not familiar, is nothing you can cook over an open fire in under ten hours, or take a sledge hammer to it for tenderizing. Though after several hours they ate it anyway.
Sometime after midnight, Mike decided we needed to take the canoe up the creek to set a trout line for the next morning’s breakfast. The whiskey had had an effect, but Lewis and I helped Mike launch the canoe and we proceeded up-creek with paddles. Cedar Creek was appropriately named. It would have been easier to walk, seeing as the water was twelve inches deep at most and we were forever bumping into the cedar knees we couldn’t see. But eventually the trout line was set, no one fell over or was left behind, and we returned to the camp fire for more alcohol, though by then we were well onto la-la land.
Carlyn had gone to bed.
Sometime the next morning, Mike headed back out in the canoe to check the trout line, and behold, we’d caught fish. Breakfast! Scrambled eggs and pan-fried sunfish and at least one catfish Mike gutted without spiking himself. So here’s the thing about fish in shallow Florida creeks: they taste like the creek bottom, because that’s what they’ve been eating. Breakfast was not any better than the previous night’s boar meat.
Something about that trip—and the industrial sized mosquitoes—put Carlyn off from camping again.
On another, more memorable occasion, Mike took his kids fishing in Florida Bay. As he told the story later, they packed his pickup and trailered the outboard boat to spend the weekend camping and fishing.
Florida Bay is a tame part of the South Atlantic wrapped to the east by fragments of dry land called keys, though they are neither key nor shelter when a tropical cyclone visits. Florida itself doesn’t so much come to an edge on its south end the way it’s depicted on maps. Rather, the land gradually becomes less and the water more, ending in a gorgeous maze of mangrove swamp. It’s the tail end of the Everglades. And the fishing, by all accounts, is great. You putter up these narrow waterways between green walls of mangrove forest that are so dense you can get lost. Or if you’re importing a shipment of Colombian Gold, let’s say, you can become invisible in a hurry. Smugglers and anglers coexisted side by side.
One morning, Mike woke to see a Coast Guard cutter—or not that big—not far from their campsite. Stuck. They’d been chasing a drug runner until they’d hit the sandbar. The smugglers had been dumping bales overboard to lighten their boat, presumably to get over the sandbars, and escaped into the mangroves. And their pursuers were stuck.
Mike, being who he was, launched his fishing boat from shore, and set out to help. He threw a line to the Coast Guard sailors, and together they worked their boat free.
I suspect the Coast Guard captain was a bit chagrined at the situation, and no telling how long they’d have been stuck waiting for a rescue, but in any case, as the crew was hauling in the abandoned marijuana bales, they tossed one to Mike for their thanks. I don’t think the grass was great, having been marinated in salt water, but the story most definitely was worth it.
After the Colombians had several gun battles spraying up and down I-95, I was thinking it might be time to leave Florida. That, and the house break-ins with the occupants being held for hostage—one of which happened to friends after we’d left. So I packed a large Ryder truck with household stuff and our three-year-old son who loved road trips, and drove north to another large den of sketchy lawyers and thieves, Washington DC.
When we run out of room to remember
Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom mourning Prince Philip—photo by Jonathan Brady, © 2021
On the front page of the New York Times, when I saw it, I wanted to cry.
Few choose to write about old women—they’re old—and past meaning much except to their young grandchildren who mostly view them as these outside-of-time oddities who brush off the current fads in fun and games to advise their little halflings to study their world, telling them they are bright as stars and will grow up soon enough. Along with all the other realities kids don’t buy into—seeing, when you’re eight, it’s not possible you will ever grow up.
But old women know different; they’re well-versed from long years.
Some children don’t know their grandmothers—for reasons of living too many states away, or coming from fractured homes, or saddest, because their grandmothers cannot be trusted to tell truth. And some old women never become grandmothers, which they may believe is their right, though it isn’t.
Old women aren’t so different from old men, of course, but old men are the secondary subject of this piece.
After a life of ceremonies, glittering occasions, worshipful subjects, butlers and footmen, diplomats, presidents, a life as sheltered and grand as any, in the end she sits flanked only by candles, and in the reddish hue of the quire’s polished wood pews—alone.
The journalists wrote she insisted on sitting alone to mourn her husband of 75 years. It takes a certain strength to do that. Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, and Prince Philip were married for longer than a majority of people are granted to live. Still.
Time bends a back, this inevitable and very real weight.
Day by day, as the big event itself becomes increasingly obvious, how does one face this end of life? Assuming one’s allowed to survive to a natural end. We may know the outcome intellectually and have no insight as to the route, and it’s the route that worries us. “At least, I hope to have my—” fill in the blank. Other than working to stay healthy, keeping engaged with living, remaining curious, Montaigne said not to worry. He meant it as a wasted effort, pointing out the obvious. On this subject, he wasn’t an ironist.
“If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”
from Montaigne’s Essays
Some will say “Of course, Prince Philip lived so long—if you don’t work for a living.” But two months from 100 years old is still impressive—and his wife the Queen is just a couple years younger. My question is, what do you do with a hundred years? And it would be nice to know you have that long, so you can plan it out. What a sad state, to be at death’s door at one hundred, and realize you haven’t done diddly squat for the past three decades. To be sure, being English royalty offers as many interesting experiences as one could imagine staying entertained. Though I wonder how Prince Philip felt about it—how Queen Elizabeth feels. Good enough to make up for a bent back and shaky voice?
It seems a strange silence wraps the Queen’s life, in spite of living so much of it in the public eye, perhaps because of it. It’s an enigmatic life this old woman lives.
The attending photographer, Jonathan Brady, and certainly the editors who selected this particular photo from the host he shot that day, understood the image conveyed the doubling of her life as queen and a woman toward her own last years. What’s been cropped from the photo is the flag-draped casket just before her—and the multitude of heraldic flags hung overhead in the high vaulted chapel. History.
What is it like to live so close to a nation’s history?—to the world’s?
Seems that this single woman, out of the millions that have gone before her, and ones to follow, this old woman will be remembered in ways not given to most—and this will her primary distinction. For most of us, a modest headstone with dates will serve. For her, a private chapel in amongst long dead royal cousins.
The English mourn Prince Philip, her consort, and as well they know what is coming. In some ways it suggests England’s aging into its own twilight. We in the former Colonies around the world may not feel connected to this royal family, but it is difficult not to feel some kind of pull. Even those like myself who descend in bloodlines mainly one island over.
I used to think of myself as an Anglophile. I was a history buff from when I first began to read books. Read tons of the history, read histories of English kings, queens and prime ministers. Read a biography of Jennie, Winston Churchill’s American mother, then followed that by reading Winston’s biography of the Duke of Marlborough from Queen Ann’s days, his three-volume history of World War II.
We in the United States have experienced few presidents as skilled with a pen as he. Racist? By today’s fairest judgment, yes. Wrong side of history if you consider the English Empire, yes. But America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand are descended from that island. Europe has been influenced, India, even China, though that may be soon gone. And if the culture of England hasn’t always been for the best, it’s been far from the worst. America owes its laws and its founding to England.
When I see an old woman slightly hunched in her widow’s dress, so poignantly alone, I see the person. So to the old lady in a hat, alone in her chapel, I tip a baseball cap and as Montaigne said, ‘don’t worry.’
The Quire of St George's Chapel, by Charles Wild, from W.H. Pyne's Royal Residences, 1818
The Center Will Not Hold
The Center Will Not Hold is a 2017 documentary film on Netflix about Joan Didion directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne. The phrase “the center cannot hold” is from W. B. Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming, and is probably the poem’s most famous line. Yeats was imagining a battle from back in the days when soldiers marched at each other like automnatons when one side gave way.
Didion herself took Yeats’s anchoring line from the same poem to title her first book of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Yeats has been well plundered by the Didion-Dunne clan toward worthy causes.
Watching the film, what held my attention was the sight of the then eighty-two-year woman (another old woman). She had been a sophisticated, model-thin woman in her younger years, though now her features, her obvious frailty, and in particular her skeletal hands, were prematurely aged compared to her voice, still clear. And her hands stayed in constant motion like emphatic adverbs while she talked. Nervous energy, and I wondered, had she always displayed this? Didion’s language, so detached and unemotional, was belied by her feathering fingers.
Toward the end of the film, Didion is shown receiving the National Medal of Arts from Barack Obama. She has to be helped to and from the stage, and in a touching moment, Obama is helping her like he had assisted his own grandmother. When our national leaders show their humanity in un-staged moments, as Obama does in this, we can see ourselves in them.
President Obama Awards the 2012 National Humanities Medal to Joan Didion—photo provided by Obama White House Archives
Writing in the New Yorker magazine, Rebecca Mead describes the ceremony:
“The film is a model of empathetic reporting: by its end, the viewer’s stand-in is President Obama, who, after bestowing upon Didion the National Medal of Arts, in 2013, holds her antique hands with a carefully calibrated balance of respect and tenderness.”
from The Most Revealing Moment in the New Joan Didion Documentary by Rebecca Mead published 2017 in The New Yorker magazine.
That moment in the White House was my ‘most revealing,’ although Rebecca Mead writes about an earlier scene in the film that she feels epitomizes Didion’s career—her cool-eyed detachment as a journalist. When we hear this old woman explain being capable of witnessing a five-year-old child on LSD, enthused knowing she’s captured an important story, we understand who she is at her professional core—a reporter. Mead shows her respect for a fellow journalist: it is easier to be a shocked and crying witness to what is the child’s tragedy than it is to report on it unsentimentally—and she chooses the harder task.
“Writing about the kindergartener on hallucinogens raises a wider consciousness that we are living in a world in which kindergarteners are partaking of hallucinogens. Fair enough. But what makes Didion’s words to Dunne so compelling is that she offers no high-minded defense of her motivation, beyond that of writing the best story she can write.”
from The Most Revealing Moment in the New Joan Didion Documentary by Rebecca Mead published 2017 in The New Yorker magazine.
It’s happenstance, this juxtaposing a photo of Queen Elizabeth in widow’s garb sitting alone in the Windsor chapel—and the documentary on Joan Didion after a life of her own late tragedies. In the present day, I’m sure there are those who consider a queen an anachronism past any useful purpose. She is that for most of the world, though not for the English. And others will accuse Joan Didion of creating her fame by writing laser-focused pieces on other folks’ misfortune and disfunction, and yes, she did that, brilliantly. It’s happenstance. Though, what they hold in common is looking back, still this late in both their lives.
Time is not a constant, yet living is consistently hurrying toward the same conclusion. I rise each morning hoping to find a subject worth writing and not embarrass myself. Some days the subjects come easier than others, but I’m willing to listen to these old women.