A happy summer clears the air
The Column: 08.14.23
The beauty of this blessed summer is our chance to escape the news and devote ourselves to real life. I sat with my love on a hotel balcony overlooking a marina and we renewed our vow to never own a boat. I got up at 5 a.m. to send a niece to the airport and I gave her several coherent sentences of advice, drawing on my own mistakes. My love and I sat in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and devoured a dozen Malpeques and a lobster roll and scrod, the lights in the domed ceiling unchanged from when I saw it with my dad in 1953. In the subway heading home, she showed me snapshots of another niece holding her baby boy to her breast, minutes after delivery. The mother looked exhilarated, the babe surprised, the papa stunned. We couldn’t stop studying the pictures, the delight of them, which obliterated so much nonsense, the naked lie about the stolen election, the “weaponization” of law enforcement, the banning of books. We were back in the real America.
I wish they’d ban my book Cheerfulness so that more people would read it. I wrote it because the America I know and love is upbeat, enterprising, amiable to a fault, partial to jokes, and the mood of fracture and trauma seems fictitious to me, a far cry from the country that attracted our immigrant forebears. They didn’t cross the border in the hopes of taking vengeance.
Friday afternoon, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited in New York, bound for Chicago and then the Grand Canyon, along with my Londoner stepdaughter and her husband who are ambitious hikers and eager to experience one of nature’s great erosion projects. We chugged through tunnels under Manhattan and then emerged along the mighty Hudson, on our way to Schenectady and Syracuse, and along Lake Michigan through Ohio and Indiana, not far from the route my ancestors David and Martha Ann Powell traveled 150 years ago with a milk cow tied to a wagonload of babies, including my great-grandpa James Wesley. David was infected with the westward urge.
I have no such urge myself and never did. It’s been an accidental life, a twig floating in the stream of life, like the driverless car that Google is developing but one programmed to be directed by gusts of wind.
I love trains. The food was bad but the conversation was good. Something about motion stimulates talk. I come from people of few words; they should’ve gotten on bicycles, it would’ve loosened them up. The train stopped for maintenance problems, then hit top speed to make up the time, so it was a rough ride, a lot of bucketa-bucketa, which stimulated a wild night of interesting dreams: I was in Reykjavik singing in Icelandic, I spoke with my mother who said she loved me, I was in a dinghy with a sail heading up the river to meet my love, I won the Nobel Prize in literature, I fell into a pit of manure but kept my mouth shut, I was sitting in a city room of a newspaper typing on a Royal typewriter and using carbon paper.
I lay awake through Indiana, thinking about my grandfather James, a skilled carpenter who loved books and loved to sing. My dad built our house from the basement to the roof beam. Now I’m eight years older than my grandpa and seven years younger than my father.
So much of the world feels alien to the 81-year-old, which relieves me of personal responsibility; I’m a citizen of a country that is disappearing. So be it. My responsibility is to pay attention. I sat in the dining car drinking coffee as we cruised into Chicago and a Mennonite couple sat down, she in a black gown, he wearing a flat-brimmed straw hat. We spoke and I told the joke about the waitress who came to the Lord after she waited on several men a night. They laughed politely. He said, “Thank you for cleaning that up. Usually it’s a prostitute.”
I hesitate to say this because it’s something my people never said, never dreamed of saying, maybe it felt like bad luck to their cautious Scots souls, but Chicago is approaching and I need to pack my bag, so here it is: these are the days, the time is now; I have never felt so happy as I do now. This will change. But I accept this beautiful summer, happiness is dominant, it diminishes all the miscellaneous.
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The longest train ride I ever embarked on was from New York to Chicago. The rest of the country I’ve seen by thumb. I know train food can be bad and overpriced, but there’s just something about the microwaved Amtrak cheeseburger.
My grandfather on my father’s side was the town drunk. The bartender kept tabs on him for my grandmother. They came from England, were very clannish and had no American friends. My father was born in the states in Hubbard, Ohio in their kitchen on September 12th, a Friday, but Dr. Button tied one on afterward and didn’t register the birth until Monday the 15th, so dad had two birthdays. His father, James Tonkiss, while a hopeless drunk, was a master plasterer who came up with the idea to add color to the plaster to create beautiful pastels. Every so often a company would get him dried out and pay him to come to New York to do ornate plaster work on the ceilings of well known theaters on Broadway. He would complete the job to perfection and their great satisfaction, and susequently return home and drink most of his pay.
My father served in WWII on a destroyer escort in Okinawa. He was happy to join the Navy because he loved the ocean and it enabled him to wipe the slate clean. On the USS Stern 187 he no longer bore the stigma of being the son of the town drunk.
Many years later he and a shipmate located most of the men who served with them and every year they held reunions. Barely talked about the war. Just funny stories. When he died, I continued organizing the reunions and went in his place and made good friends with them and their wives. They are all gone now. But I still have photographs of all of us at a long table at the Neptune Diner and visits to Howe Cavern, the Baseball Hall of Fame and Hershey, Pennsylvania. Each year it was held in a different place. The last one was in Norfolk, VA. Three of the men remained, and we spent the day on a boat cruising all the ships in the Norfolk shipyard. It was a rainy weekend, the kind of rain that chills you to the bone. Norfolk was where they held the first reunion, and everyone agreed it was appropriate to end there. It was sad; my daughter was with me and they loved her, and after saying our tearful goodbyes, knowing we would never see one another again, we left to drive back home to Boston. I miss my father who died too young, every day. His official Navy photograph hangs on the wall in my bedroom along with his dog tags, his metals, and a photograph of him sailing on his beloved 27 foot Tartan, with a beer in his hand, the wind at his back and a look of pure satisfaction on his face.
Garrison, you are and have been such a wonderful and great gift in my family’s and my life. I hope that your heart knows just how well you are loved and deeply appreciated. Thank you for your essays. My wife or so read them out loud and laugh from our bellies. They make our days bright and beautiful …and yes…help us to also remember that there is more to life than malaise. Please keep riding the rails of writing, good health, humor and happiness. Best wishes from Owasso, OK.
Doug and Gerre Schwert