It’s confirmed. I’m certifiable. Not crazy, but more and more I find myself thinking and acting like a writer, which is almost the same thing. When I’m writing, which can go on for so many hours I forget the time, I sink into a warm bath of satisfaction and well-being, intermixed with moments of an exhilarating free fall into panic and terror, which can go on for so many hours the clock is all that's left in existence. And I think that’s perfectly OK. I’m not saying I’m perfectly OK; normalcy has its downside. But the struggle for words, which can get bloody, is a life every bit as keen at the edge as the struggle to cross an eddy line, to recapture a memory, or to make that next small affirming step in understanding someone we love.
I keep a notebook and pen on the table by my side of the bed, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a great idea and write it down. Doing so plays havoc on my sleep, and in the morning when I look at what I wrote I sometimes scratch my head in bewilderment. But I have one foolproof test of whether what I wrote might be useful: my handwriting. If you’ve seen it, you would think that in a just world I’d be jailed for committing some kind of calligraphic assault on anyone who reads it. The test works like this. If I can read what I wrote, then I chalk the sleep-depriving experience up to a useful exercise and not much more. But if I can’t, then it’s probably the greatest thing I’ve written and I have to hope that the mere fact that I wrote it will jog my memory enough that I can recapture a little of it in the sentient morning.
What I wrote early this morning is legible, more or less, but I’m tied to it, win or lose. You’ll see why in a moment. But first, what was I writing about?
At 3:00 a.m. I awoke from a strange and vivid dream, and I wrote it down because it seemed like one of those dreams freighted with deep significance, box cars of Freudian symbolism that, when deciphered, would unlock hidden reservoirs (to mix metaphors) of my subconscious. Or, as I said, it’s just strange and says nothing about me.
I’m dreaming that Carol, my wife, and I live in Mt. Lebanon, a suburb south of Pittsburgh where we grew up, but we live in the very house we live in now, in Auburn, Alabama. We also happen to still own our first house, in Bethel Park, a suburb that shares a border with Mt. Lebanon. This is one of those “real time” dreams (I’m sure there’s a technical term for them), the kind that begins right where you are: in my case, in my own bed, at the house in Auburn, sometime around 2:30 in the morning on Friday, July 29, 2011. Carol and I have decided to spend the rest of the night at the house in Bethel Park. So we load up the two-wheeled push cart parked in our driveway; it's as big as the back half of a Conestoga wagon, and we've filled it with a surprising amount of junk for what will essentially be a four-hour sleepover. Don’t ask where the cart comes from. We have a perfectly good Volkswagen Jetta with a two-liter turbo that unleashes 200 horses at 4000 rpm, but it’s the cart we’ll take. I must be dreaming in Old West.
I’m pushing the cart up Route 88, a narrow, windy two-lane highway that links Mt. Lebanon and Bethel Park, just past the entrance to South Park. Carol’s in the cart, still in her pajamas, with Fast Eddie, our Maltese, on her stomach. She’s surrounded by books and by the mail that awaited us when we got home from a recent trip. There are no cars on the road, and I have this crazy notion that I can push the cart at the speed limit. But progress is slow. I push, I pull, held back by dream-world gravity, which answers to no law of physics. Fast Eddie keeps jumping out of the cart and I have to chase him down in the middle of the road. A couple of times I overturn the cart; it’s heavy, and those big wooden wheels wobble like a drunk. Carol takes it all in stride, laughing at my pratfalls (dreams sometimes mirror reality), surrounded by dog, books, and mail.
And it doesn’t help matters that there’s a live tiger running loose. Except that it’s not really alive; it’s a statue that’s come to life. This I can’t fathom. So far as I know, there are no tigers, living or statuesque, anywhere south of the Monongahela River until you get maybe to the National Zoo, but there’s this one, hiding in the shadows between Brightwood Drive and Logan Road, waiting in ambush, a nightmare with red eyes, like Dracula’s in the moonlight. A Freudian would say that this is my id monster. We all have one, that horror of beastly, uncontrollable urges that are the real us, deep and roiling, prowling and waiting for the right moment to pounce on our ego and devour it. I can hear it, padding softly through someone’s front yard, behind the hedges, me smeared with barbecue sauce. I know it’s a tiger because I saw it come to life in front of the Ivy Inn on Castle Shannon Boulevard. In broad daylight. While I push that cart. While Carol flips through Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (a book about writing, wouldn’t you know). Fast Eddie’s ears perked, nose to the wind. He knows something’s wrong.
I should explain the tiger. It’s the mascot for Auburn University. A few years ago someone got the bright idea of putting up statues of tigers all over Auburn. It is estimated that there are some twenty of them, comprising a plaster-of-Paris menagerie of multi-hued felines, trolling the town like sailors just off the aircraft carrier after 6 months at sea. They’re in front of schools and banks and mounted on pedestals in parks; there’s one at Toomer’s Corner, a big orange and blue (the university's colors) monstrosity with a body shaped like a potato. Others are painted a dizzying array of untiger-like pigments. Not one that I’ve come across is the color of an actual tiger. How one got in front of the Ivy Inn is anyone’s guess. (Come to think of it, I do have a guess. On NPR I heard a story about a cougar—a mountain lion, a puma, a “painter,” as James Fenimore Cooper’s Nathaniel Bumpo calls them—that was struck by a car and killed in Bristol, Connecticut. Scientists examining its DNA determined that the cougar was from South Dakota. Yes, it had walked all the way from the Black Hills to Bristol, a distance of some 1500 miles, avoiding cities, the Great Lakes, and turnpikes, stalking purposively like a shadow from Mordor visible at the fleeting edge of vision, only to be T-boned by a car of unknown make, probably while jaywalking.)
“Honey, did you bring the key?”
No. Did you?”
“No.”
I don’t know who’s speaking what. It really doesn’t matter. There we are, in the middle of the night, somewhere on Route 88, Carol, me, Fast Eddie, books, mail, lumbering veggie cart, and no key to the house, which really isn’t ours anyway and hasn’t been since we sold it in waking life in 1977. So I tell Carol I’ll drop her off at the Bethel Park house and hustle back to the Mt. Lebanon house and get the key and hustle back to the Bethel Park house so we can go inside and go back to sleep. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes. Dream time. However, a small ray of rationality slips through a crack in the door of my sleep-veiled unconscious to remind me that (a) there’s no way I’m going to make the Bethel Park house before daybreak, and (b) it’s a 10-mile round trip, at least, between the two houses, one of which, recall, is actually 850 miles away in tiger-infested Auburn.
I don’t know how we got to the front porch of someone’s house. I don’t know whose house it is and where we are. I’m asking for a ride. In broad daylight. Dreams follow their own logic. Fast Eddie, all five furry pounds of him, is ready to rumble with a pit bull that has Fight Club trophies in a china cabinet. Carol’s thumbing through the Spring 2011 issue of Southern Humanities Review (full disclosure: it’s published by the Auburn English Department). And I’m negotiating for a ride with five or six people who can’t seem to understand a word I’m saying. A pickup would be nice, to carry the cart. I offer to buy a tank of gas. No takers. I throw in a case of Iron City Beer.
And I wake up. Or maybe I’ve been awake all along and have just been letting my synapses fire whichever way they will, just to see what will come out of all that electrical mayhem going on inside my head. So I get out of bed, grab my notebook and pen, tread softly to the kitchen, sit down at the table, and write the dream down, though in a much more truncated form than you’ve just read.
I turn on a small lamp. An old mantle pendulum clock, handed down through Carol’s side of the family since the Civil War, ticks loudly on a bookshelf in the front hallway. Mark, our son, is reading for his PhD exams, which he takes in September, and I can hear the rumble of his television through the heating grate in the floor. Our cat, Murphy, wants to sleep in my lap. (Yes, we have a dog named Eddie and a cat named Murphy. Totally serendipitous, that.) We have a number of antique lamps (circa 1920s) around the house, the kind that have a receptacle in the base for a small bulb, and we turn these on at night, so the house is suffused with a soft, electric glow. I decide not to have a cup of coffee, just in case I think I can get back to sleep. And in the most presentable crabbed handwriting I can muster at this dark hour, because I want to read this later, in the hour of light, I start writing.
And that’s how I discovered the real first sentence, the one that’s true and that starts to crack me open like an egg, to an essay I’m writing called “The Man with the Third Arm”: “The last time I saw my mother alive, she’d been dead for four hours.”
This also calls for explanation. My mother died around one o'clock in the morning on January 27, 1996, at my sister’s house in Spring Hill, Tennessee, about 30 miles south of Nashville. I found out about it at seven o’clock that morning, when Jan called with the news. What killed my mother was emphysema. For the last year or more of her life she was confined to bed, tethered to an oxygen tank, imprisoned in a small but comfortable spare bedroom on the first floor. Just walking her from the bed to the dining room table was a fifteen-minute ordeal that required rest stops. She could barely make it through a sentence without needing a minute or more to find the breath to finish it. But sentences she had, lots of them, often connected to photographs of her girlhood, Jan's and my childhood, the good years of her marriage to my father, sentences which she laboriously, patiently and lovingly, delivered, like breast milk to an infant. She would speak those sentences and no river on earth raged fiercely enough to wash her words away or drown out the sound of her voice. She was also reading books about mountain climbing expeditions to the Himalayas. I think what drew her to them were the descriptions of young, strong, virile men gasping for breath in the thin atmosphere. They told her she wasn’t alone.
If you’ve done the math, you’ll figure out that when I saw my mother alive four hours after she died, it was two hours before I knew she was dead.
That’s right, a dream. We’re driving north up I-65, between Montgomery and Birmingham, on the way to Spring Hill. Suddenly we’re passed by an SUV going dream-fast, but not so fast that I don’t get a good look at the woman sticking her head out of the passenger-side window, looking back at me. She’s beautiful, as beautiful as I remember my mother being when I was young. Her hair is a wind-blown gold, not the ropy white and gray of her encumbered old age. Her skin is fresh and smooth and white, like a bar of Ivory soap, not the mottled sallow that pocked her wrinkles and folds in her dying year. She’s wearing her trade-mark fifties housewife glasses, which make her eyes sparkle, exactly as I remember them. And she is laughing, gulping in volumes of fresh, clean air, and her laughter contains all the words I need to hear. “Look at me! I’m free! I can breathe! Look at me! I can breathe! I’m free!” And then the SUV speeds away and disappears over a hill, somewhere between Prattville and Heaven.
I woke up crying, more in relief than sadness, gladdened by her release from the grip of tanks and tubes and bed pans. I had a class at 9:00 o’clock, but as I sat there in bed, trying to stifle my sobs so as not to wake Carol, I knew there would be no point in my getting ready. But Carol heard me anyway, because she sat up and asked what was wrong. I don’t remember what I said, but it was either “I think mom’s dead” or “I think we’ll need to start packing.” Or both.
Somewhere I want to be able to write, Yes, cigarettes killed my mother, but they were also the gateway to a happiness that had been denied her during all the trying years of her later life, after the divorces and the onset of her illness. They made her suffer, and her suffering made us suffer with her, but in her dying year, between breaths that came with increasing difficulty, she told me the stories that I want to capture before my own breath slips away. Cigarettes were no different in agency than a runaway car, the strain of too much fatty foods on the heart, a bullet, or the slow, gentle easing away of life into that goodnight in the middle of a dream, when everything will be instantly made clear. Cigarettes, automobile accident, the endless sleep of sweet reason: what's the difference? The question sounds perverse. We’re conditioned to think that death is a kind of rattling ugliness, and that some kinds of deaths, death by smoking, for example, are uglier than others. But I think my mother understood that words are immortal no matter what, that they are more powerful than all the bringers of dead silence you or any god can conjure, and to her dying breath she never gave up the fight to speak her words. I last spoke to her on the phone the morning before she died. The conversation was necessarily brief, and I did most of the talking. She said she would call the next day. Of course, she never did. Not by phone. But I still hear her words, as clear and as strong as the words she spoke when I was a child.
Only if we want them to, only if we are not frightened by their possibilities, do words escape the death sentence we can impose on them. And then our mothers live again, and it is no dream.
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