Inventions we could live without

Don't throw tomatoes at me.  I think fast food is one of the worst-ever inventions America has dreamed up.  Too many calories.  Too much sodium.  Too little restraint.  A burger joint on every corner, a bulge in every waist.

Along with that, I'd throw in reality TV, Disney World, and fake nails.

What would you add?

How hot is it?

It’s hot. Hotter than hot. So hot that words can’t capture it.

How do you describe the heat that has wrapped its suffocating hold around our necks, squeezing the breath out of us?

The words themselves are clichés. Baked? As crisp as a Viking Range on broil. Steamy? Worse than a Roman bath on steroids. Sultry? More than a King Kong jungle.

You’d think the South would be accustomed to this, but au contraire. It’s torture just to survive a walk across campus. Forget the yard work we started with spring-like enthusiasm. Forget the leisurely evenings on the patio. Forget the resolution to take walks around the block. Even my dogs hide from these much-too-early dog days of summer.

There’s one word I like that seems to come close. Use it if you will. What we have here is a desiccating June.





Andre Dubus

We set the appointment for a crisply sunny September day.  He was to meet me following noon mass at the campus Catholic church, a ritual he observed every day.

It was my first encounter with Andre Dubus, the noted American short story writer and, for that semester, a writer-in-residence at the University of Alabama.

But nothing went as planned.  He emerged from the church, and I emerged from my car, introducing myself as I walked toward him.

“I can’t talk,” were his first words.  Shorter than I, with a powerful chest and arms, this man with the cheeks of a Santa and a slightly graying beard—a former Marine--looked at me and shook his head.

“I just can’t do this,” he said.  “I’m too emotional.”  His damp eyes were sorrowful, a contrast with his powerful physical presence.

“We’ll have to reschedule,” he continued, my introduction still stammering on my lips.

And because there was nothing else to do, we did.

New to my job and to my graduate studies in English, I had prepared for the interview by reading his award-winning short work.  I was ready with my lofty questions and literary analogies, but I wasn’t ready for Andre Dubus. Nothing could have prepared me for that.

So a few days later, I knocked on the door of his campus housing, and we settled in to his study for the interview.  I know some of what was said, because I still have a copy of the published article.  But I have no idea how the 15-minute interview became a three-hour conversation that took its own detours, driven by the electric curiosity of the interviewee.  I just knew I was in the presence of a personality that filled the space around it and somehow enlarged it.  The conversation was energizing and exhausting.

I left that day with my book signed. We never had the drink.

I thought of this as I recently read the haunting memoir by Dubus’ son, the very talented Andre Dubus III.   The oldest of four children of Dubus and his first wife, the son tells a story of life on the edge. 

Parents divorced.  Talented, famous father working for a professor’s meager pay and often absent.  Mother struggling.  Growing up in the rough parts of Boston, often scrounging for food and too often involved in fights that escalate toward violence.  Embracing the violence by learning boxing. Drifting in and out of jobs, relationships. Finding writing as a redemption and, ultimately, knowing his father as a friend.

He movingly writes about his father’s last years and death in 1999.  The elder Dubus had stopped on a freeway late one night to assist stranded motorists, when a car veered toward the group.  Those of us who had known Dubus, even briefly, heard about the tragedy and were on email lists seeking support to help him through a bad time.
  

Because of the accident, Dubus had one leg amputated and lost use of the other.  He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, from his son's account at peace with himself.  The eldest son and his brother built their father's casket themselves, and Dubus was buried in Haverhill, Mass.

One of the only stories by his father that Andre Dubus III mentions in his memoir, Townie, is one that, many years earlier, I asked the elder Dubus about.  It’s called “Killings.”

Here are the published question and answer.

"On the August morning when Matt Fowler buried his youngest son, Frank, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months, and four days, Matt's older son, Steve, turned to him as the family left the grave and walked between their friends, and said: 'I should kill him.'" --Killings

We had talked about the influence of Catholicism on his writing.  He said it was "entirely" influenced by his faith.  

My question:

"Does a story such as 'Killings' illustrate this principle?  Is the empathy for character there?"

His answer:

"That's not a Catholic story.  That's a father story.  That story was based on a killing which actually occurred in Massachusetts.  In that incident, the father did not kill the murderer.  The murderer was sent to jail for five years.  When he was out on bond, the young man's mother kept seeing him--in the grocery store, in the drug store.  Two friends approached the father and said, 'Do you want me to kill him?'

So I thought:  'What if the father agreed?'  That's where that story came from.  If there's any Catholicism in it, it's one of the universal truths of Catholicism, and that is in the moment that he pulls the trigger he has violated his harmony with nature, and he will never again be back in harmony with nature, because he has killed.

My sense of fatherhood has influenced my writing because I've been a father since I was 22 years old.  I don't remember what it's like not to be a father.  If someone killed a son of mine, I hope that I would have the moral courage to kill that person--if my son didn't deserve to die.  If someone killed my daughter, it wouldn't matter whether she deserved it or not.  I'd go kill him."

Mama tried

She really did.  She did her dead-level best to teach us manners.  With every breath.  It's a Southern thing.

There were hard-and-fast rules.  Never sing at the dinner table. Never talk with your mouth full of food (who wants to see that, for goodness' sake?).  Everyone knows you keep your mouth closed when chewing.  And you better keep one hand in your lap when eating.  By the way, slow down--are you going to a fire?

There were five kids and only a certain amount of energy to corral us into something presentable.  But my mother valiantly tried.  She never stopped giving it her best shot, long after we were adults who should know better.

Some rules related to dress.  No, you are absolutely not going to town in those shorts.  Just scandalous.  You will wear something that covers you appropriately.  No, you will not wear white shoes until Easter.  And surely, you're not wearing THAT in public?  My mother--a beautiful seamstress--knew quality clothing when she saw it.  And she better see it on us.

But the most important rules related to relational behavior.

We knew to say "yes ma'am" and "no sir" under penalty of corporal punishment.  We knew not to "talk back."  Heaven help one of us who interrupted a speaking adult.  Children should listen first and talk when asked.  And then it better be something worth hearing.

We were taught to respect our teachers, our elders, and ourselves.  We knew the difference in being "polite" and "showing off"--behavior that earned us "the look."  Because we were taught the proper way to act.  We were expected to be "well-behaved" representatives of our family.  Sometimes we even succeeded.

When I listen to the casually insulting conversations around me today or the bombastic, self-parodying, self-absorbed incivility of television commentary, I can only reach one conclusion.

Their mamas must have failed miserably.

Re-Purposed

There's something about giving new life to the dead and dying.  Our town is rich in imagination and possibilities for the would-be forgotten structures of another era. 

In another life, the Ritz (above) was one of two movie theaters in this small Mississippi community.  We could, literally, walk from our home on Main Street, pay our 25-cent admission, buy a box of Milk Duds at the counter, and halfway through "The Blob" find a moist chocolate puddle in our hands, squeezed to a sticky pulp during the scary parts of a movie that now seems silly.

Today the former theater is a beautifully restored facility that has new life as a conference center.  A new generation is discovering it as a location for wedding receptions, proms, and civic meetings.  The adjacent Ritz Cafe in an earlier time was the F.W. Woolworth, the place my brother once spent an entire $5 for Christmas gifts for the whole family.  We all received a box of Luden's cherry cough drops, and he bought himself an airplane model.  Who's seen an F.W. Woolworth in decades?  Wedge salads and tomato basil soup have replaced it here.

Farther down the street a flower/gift shop is in the home of a former drugstore, a longtime institution in a once-thriving downtown community.  The orignal  owner's name is still carved in marble over the entrance, but today the space dispenses calla lilies and tablescapes.  The police department has reclaimed a former television station; an appliance store houses the spirit of a long-forgotten department store; and a bank anchors the corner where fashionable ladies once bought fine clothing.  On another corner, the Methodists have reinvented a former hotel as retirement apartments for the elderly.

I love seeing the morphing of places I knew in childhood into something vital and imaginative.  I live in the same house I did as a child, but the town around me is completely new.

It makes me wonder if we can do the same with our "old" selves.

Words that aren't

Is frumpled a word? If not, it should be.

I have an image of wrinkled, unkempt, dowdy, unpolished all wrapped neatly into a compact two syllables. Far better than frumpy because it says so much more. Why use just one paltry word when you can merge two?

In the list of words that haven’t yet made it into their proper linguistic respectability, I could suggest a couple of others. My mother used to insist someone was flustrated, thereby neatly combining frustrated and flustered. Usually, I was both by the time we had a conversation requiring that word.

And perhaps we could introduce parsinickety, someone who is both parsimonious and persnickety, a fussy miser. I know plenty of those.

It's called mincing words, I guess.  It could be a lot of fun.  Do you have others?