Where the Dogwoods Bloom

      Where The Dogwoods Bloom 







                                             

        I was twelve years old when I first learned my Grandfather was a human being  . Twelve  , or was it thirteen? No… It was twelve .That was the same summer I learned the about the secrets of  time ,and  of God , but the real truth of those lessons would not come home to roost for almost 50 years  , ironically when time was almost up

  The summer in which my grandfather transformed from a  stoic , mythical figure into a mortal man was the summer of 1962. I remember it exactly because it was the summer my parents got a divorce , and I was bundled off to stay with Grandpa in the country.

  I was there through the spring and the summer  .  If I needed confirmation that my young world was coming to an apocalyptic end ,I got it in the fall when school was forsaken and I remained at Grandpa’s farm. 

I remember it all clearly , because this was the first great tempest of my life. Even if I could have become somehow confused of the calendar, one fact remains clear:  it was spring when I arrived at Grandpa Zen’s farm, because the dogwoods were in bloom.

  When change came to my family’s little house on St. Paul St. in Atlanta, it came fast. Months of raised voices and slammed doors gave way to hushed whispers in corners, and quiet phone calls to attorneys.

    As mentioned ,it was the first tempest of my young life ,and it was upon me. The whole world is like that, periods of status ,and periods of violent change. All our lives are doldrums and tempests, and we must learn to languish in the stillness and harness the violence of the storm.

  In 1962 America was beginning to awaken from the post war slumber, the doldrums of the 1950s in which a nation rebuilt, and repopulated. As America awoke and shook off its slumber, it ushered in the tempestuous ‘60s. JFK was in the Oval Office, and more than a year away from the assassin’s (assassins’) bullet (bullets). The war was in Vietnam, and also on the streets of the major cities of the south. America was poised on the trembling brink of change, and the very air was electric.

    I too was poised on the brink of change; a boy becoming a man, and a family becoming no more. I felt no electricity in the air though, only a sense of hopelessness, and a feeling of impending doom.

    Grandpa’s farm was in Zebulon, county seat of Pike, about 50 miles and 50 yrs south of Atlanta. If change had come quick to my home, it was slow to come to Zebulon, and if the world were poised on the brink of explosive evolution, Grandpa Zen’s farm had not gotten the news.

In Pike, the roads were mostly dirt…that red Georgia clay, and the county’s first traffic light was twenty-five years away. The pace of life was slower, the community closer, and strangers would stop on the town square to pass the time of day with conversation.

  My Grandpa Zen was a retired farmer, if there is such an animal. Seems to me that a retired farmer does more work  in a  day than most men in their prime accomplish in a week. Retirement for Grandpa meant selling the pigs and chickens, and planting just one 40 acre plot each year, while the other two rested.

  The chickens might be gone, but my Grandfather was up with them each morning anyway, rising at what is known in the parlance of this crasser era as “the bare ass crack of dawn”. Pappy didn’t do much the first couple hours of the day, that being the time on a farm to tend to the livestock. The stock was gone, long since sold  down to  market, so Grandpa spent the first couple of hours every day  sitting on the porch drinking coffee. About seven he would come in and cook breakfast, and then disappear into the fields .

  Grandpa and I didn’t talk much my first few weeks on the farm. He was the silent type , and I think he sensed that I needed space and silence to deal with my thoughts of my parent’s divorce. By the time I awoke each morning he’d be in the fields. In the kitchen, on the formica covered table, in a basket lined with a dishtowel, would be my breakfast. Breakfast was always the same:  fresh biscuits, homemade pear preserves, and either sausage patties from Sullivan’s store on the other side of town, or salty country fried ham from the smoke house beside the barn.

  There was little to do on the farm besides work. There was no television, only an old radio that Grandpa only cranked up in the evening to hear the news, or maybe on the weekends to try to catch an Atlanta Cracker’s game.

  After the first couple of weeks of tedium, I took to wandering the fields and woods of the farm all day. I’d return to the house for dinner at twelve and again for supper around six. In the south, at that time there were three meals, breakfast, dinner (never lunch), and supper. To call supper dinner, or dinner lunch was to expose yourself to be a bit slow at best, or a yankee at worst.

  On one of my adventures about the farm I discovered my Grandmother’s grave in cool, shaded copse of dogwoods down a wooded trail that meandered more than a quarter mile from the house. The grave was marked with a simple stone, and adorned with fresh-cut wildflowers.

    I had never known my Grandmother. She had died 15 years earlier, before I was born. The date on her stone was March 12, 1947. It felt kind of creepy, down it that hollow with only my unknown, dead grandmother for company, so from then on I tended to avoid that place.

  Life on the farm moved slowly, and time passed slowly. A month went by with my Grandfather and I saying little to each other. We sat through silent dinners went to bed with barely a good-night, and it seemed to be the way both of us liked it. On Saturdays we’d load up into the old farm truck, and drive into Zebulon . He’d give me a quarter for an RC and a comic book and then go down to the co-op. There he’d  stand by the trucks in the gravel  lot with other old farmers, talking about the weather, but saying little, mostly squinting off in the empty distance and spitting in the gravel occasionally. In the mid-afternoon we’d load back up and head back to the farm, to cook a big supper (always roast and potatoes on Saturdays) and maybe some baseball on the radio.

  And so went life on Grandpa’s farm, in that, the last summer of my boyhood.

  The first month went by with no news from my embattled parents, then one afternoon I noticed Grandpa did not return to the fields right after lunch. Two days in a row I watched him disappear down the wooded trail behind the house. On the third day I waited 15 minutes, then followed.

  Not knowing why, I crept along the path silently. Trying to avoid discovery for reasons I could not put my fingers on, I stopped at the edge of the woods where Grandma’s copse began.

  The dogwoods were in bloom, and radiant in their splendor, but my eyes were drawn to my Grandmother’s  grave. Again it was adorned with fresh wildflowers, and my Grandfather sat silently before the stone with his head bowed, and his hands folded in his lap.

I watched him silently for several minutes, until he became aware of me.

“Will, boy,” he said,” its rude to sneak up on people and not say anything.”

In my eyes  ,my Grandfather was a rough, stern figure, and I was terrified that he had caught me spying on him.

  I’m not sure how it happened, I guess my mouth ran away from my brain, but next thing I knew I was talking, and shocked to be doing it.

  “Grandpa, why do you come down here every afternoon.”

  After speaking, I was horrified of what I had done. Grandpa was a quiet man, the kind of man who kept close council; the kind of man you didn’t ask about his business.

  When he spoke I visibly flinched.

  “I miss your Grandmother very much, I come down here each day to check on things, and to be with her for a while.”

  I was stunned at such a personal revelation, so out of character, but what startled me more was the shine in his eyes, set deep in the weathered visage of his face, that I thought  might be tears.

  My uneasiness forgotten, I walked into the copse of dogwoods then,  and stood before my Grandfather.

“Grandpa, what was Grandma like “ , I asked him.

  “ Your Grandmother was a remarkable woman, and I loved her more than I could ever put into words.”

  It was revolutionary to me, that my Grandfather might have feelings, so like the ones raging in me. The feelings that I did my best to keep bottled up. I sensed a true kinship with my Grandfather then, two men, at opposite ends of life, both suppressing emotions that they couldn’t control, and had no idea how to express.

  My  Grandfather and I sat there the rest of the day, talking. He told me stories about Grandma, and of my father, when he was a boy my age growing up on that farm.

  It seemed very unreal to me , and a world of wonder opened in my mind. Suddenly I felt very connected to these people, this place. I felt a sense of family like never before, I was walking on land my father walked before me, land my grandfather wrung a living from, land my grandmother lived and died upon, and was buried beneath.

  He told me how Grandma had died. How she had just wasted away over the course of three years. My grandfather watched heartbroken and helpless as my grandmother slowly slipped off of this Earth.

  “It was in 1944,Will,when the god-damned Army people came in their official sedan with their official letter and told us your Uncle David had died over there on some God-forsaken beach, fighting for control of some ribbon of sand. Your grandmother gave up then, when she realized her baby was never coming home. She lost the will to live, and just slowly slipped away. Elanor loved these damned dogwoods , Will, so I buried her here among them .It was springtime then too, and they were blooming, and to this day the smell of Dogwoods fills me with a terrible sense of loss. Every spring I plant a new cutting down here Will. I do it because She loved them. And I do it because these trees remind me. They remind me of what I lost, but most of all Will, they remind me of what I had.”

  My grandfather and I talked all day and the fields were left neglected  for the day. At suppertime when we went back to the house to prepare the meal I felt closer to my grandfather than I had ever felt to anyone in my young life.

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  The next morning I rose early, and hurried to the front door. There my grandfather sat, in one of the old cane rockers on the porch. He was drinking coffee in the pale purple, predawn light. Tentatively, I went onto the porch and disturbed his solitude by sitting in the other old rocking chair.

  I was shattered when Pappy glanced over at me , and without a word stood, and went into the house. My heart sank into the pit of my stomach, and the slam of the old spring – closed screen door seemed to drive a stake through it and pin in there.

  All the more was my surprise when a minute or two later Pappy pushed back out the door with a cup in either hand. He thrust a cup of that steaming , bitter liquid at me and there we sat- a boy and his grandfather, silently sipping coffee in the dim first light of day . It was the first coffee I’d ever had, and though it tasted awful to me , I was determined to drink every drop. I was so proud I thought I might burst and it was that moment, that morning , sitting on the porch with Grandpa, that I first knew I had become a man.

    So set the cement of the bond we had poured between us the previous day upon Grandma’s grave.



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  That first day of my manhood I joined Grandpa in the fields for the first time, and every day thereafter. There was always plenty to do, and we’d work silently, soaking in the companionship, and relishing the sense of accomplishment that comes with dirty hands and sore muscles.

  Grandpa raised Crowder peas, pole beans, butter beans, okra, squash, tomatoes, cantaloupe, watermelon and corn. There was weeding in the morning, hoeing, or sowing in the afternoon. Grandpa and I worked side by side. I relished our bond, and the feeling that I had become a man.

  Grandpa continued his daily after lunch visits with Grandma, and mostly I let him be during that time. Instinctively I knew that he needed that time alone with her to temper the feelings within that had threatened to wash him away everyday of the last 15 years. Once or twice a week, though, he would clap a hand on my shoulder and say: “C’mon Will, Lets go down and see your Nanny.”

  Those were the days I looked forward to, the times I came to relish. Those days we would sit with Grandma, amidst the dogwoods and talk all afternoon. It was there my image of my grandfather as a stern, stoic figure was washed away forever. Grandpa revealed himself to be as human as I, and possessed of emotions of pain and loss, regret and anger. A little bit of fear, and a whole lot of sadness, just like me. For a while the things Grandpa spoke of made me believe he was as bitter as I felt, but in time I realized it was wisdom; a lifetime of lessons he was trying best he could to pass on to me. 

  “Cherish the time ,Will” he told me one afternoon. “It will be gone before you know it. Eternity is like a bottomless well, and our lives like buckets with which we draw time from that well. But our buckets have a hole in them the water rushes out of, and before we can design a way to drink it most of it drips away.”

  We talked of many things as the spring gave way to summer, and summer in turn grew old. We spoke of life, and death, and what it meant to be a man.

  “ The measure of a man’s life ought not be made in years , Will. Certainly not in wealth , but in lessons learned and wisdom gained…by that measure few of us grow to be men.”

The summer drew on, my skin grew dark, and my muscles hardened from the work in the field. I stood nearly an inch higher than the day I arrived, and in my heart I knew I was a man. I took my lessons of manhood under the dogwoods with Grandma as witness and Grandpa ever my teacher. He taught me many things, but the lesson that seemed dearest to his heart was the nature of time itself, and how precious little we have of it.



  “Man is poor, Will, as destitute as we can be. You see there is no end to time, it stretches on forever at both ends, and yet we get so god-damned little of it. At times I suspect God is having a bit of fun with us all… Life is a short, cruel joke, and we boy, are the butt of it.”

Though he did his best to impart to me the elastic nature of time – how it seems to stretch on forever and then suddenly is gone- it was just recently, almost five decades later, that I finally came to understand the genius of his perception.

“Three things every man should do in his life is fight in a war, love a woman, and write letters about them both.

  “When I was over there fighting the Kaiser in the wet, freezing trenches of France, it seemed like that was all there was to the world. Every second stretched out into an eternity… it was miserable….it was hell. You’d hunker down under the barbed wire , bullets zipping overhead, with your wet socks freezing stiff in your boot while the stench of your friends spilled guts filled your nostrils.  It seemed each moment would stretch out forever…would never end…but those moments were vital Will. In a perverse kind of way you were alive like never before, death all around you, your buddies dying next to you, and you knew… you knew that each second was the difference between life and death, and each second may be your last. I lived a lifetime in each one of those seconds. 

“ When  I came home from the war to your Grandmother I was so lost in love with her.  I was happier than I had ever been in my life. We settled on this little patch of land, were blessed with your father, and your Uncle David, and built a life together. It taught me the joy of living, and the ever hopeful nature of life. Life is good, Will, don’t you ever doubt, there is always hope Will, where there is life and love.

  It’s hard though, oh so hard, to treasure each of those moments. When you’re that damn happy the time goes fast, and twenty years slips by in an instant.

  You know these things without knowing them, you feel them inside, even if you can’t put it into thought. When your grandmother died, I was going through her things, and I found  a bundle of letters I sent back from the war. I found another bundle of the love letters I sent her when we was  a’courtin’. It was reading those letters when I finally came to understand the twisty, tricksy , nature of time”

   

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Summer fell away, and Autumn landed in its place. The hesitant, pale boy that had arrived on Grandpa’s doorstep that  March had been replaced with a darkly muscled young man with two inches too much leg shining from under the cuffs of his jeans.

  It was late September when word finally came that the divorce was accomplished, the battles settled, and that my mother would be coming to claim me and take me to live with her parents  in Memphis.

Again I felt my world crumbling around me, I had grown so close to Grandpa  Zen, to now be taken so far away. I took the news, however, like I knew Grandpa would, with a quiet exterior and an inner resolve.

  September 17, 1962, the day before my mother came to collect me , Grandpa took me one last time down to Grandma’s clearing, down where the dogwoods grew. We stood by Grandma’s grave, me staring at the stone, and he fingering a dogwood leaf.

    “They say our Lord Jesus was crucified on a dogwood tree, and that you can read the story in its blooms. Now I don’t know nothing about that, but I’ll tell you what I do know.

  “They say Jesus died and rose again…BULLSHIT… don’t you believe it boy, it cheapens anything we might learn from what the man taught.  Now Jesus might have been God, I’m not arguing that, but whatever else he was, he was a man- and don’t no man ever get but one chance at this life.

  I plant these damn trees every spring, and every spring they bloom, and they do remind me of my time with Elanor , but they also speak to the cycle of life.

You see the story of Christ’s resurrection is symbolic of the coming of new hope with rebirth of spring. Spring, that’s you, boy, and all the generations to come…but me, me I’m winter, and no man Will , no man comes out of his winter alive.”



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The next day my mother whisked me away to Memphis.

I never did see Grandpa Zen again.

  He died the next spring, felled in the fields by a heart attack, dying in the dirt he worked, and in which his beloved Elanor lay.

  They planted Granddaddy there , where the dogwoods bloom, and the smell of their blossoms still fills me with a terrible sense of loss. They laid him to rest beside Grandma, in the copse of trees they all said he loved so dear.

  I believe I’m the only one that knew the truth: he despised the damn things. He planted them there in remembrance of Elanor, but they also served as symbol : a symbol of our pitiful dominion on this Earth. A reminder of fleeting time and that even Gods must die.



                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

     





Now, it’s nearly 50 years  later, son, and the lessons your great-grandfather tried to sow that summer are finally coming to fruition .

I fought in my war. I did two tours in hell in Vietnam in 69 and 70, came home and loved your mother, and we were blessed with you and your brother.

  I lost your brother, David (named proudly after his great –uncle) to Desert Storm, and your mother to a divorce of my own. Son, I know I’ve been distant over the years.

  I didn’t learn my lessons from the war, because I didn’t write about it like  Grandpa Zen told me-I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  In a way I think I’ve written of that war, and of Grandpa’s lessons. All these years I’ve made a living not sowing seeds, but cultivating stories of nightmares come to life, sowing seeds of fear and harvesting horror. In a way, each of those boogeymen was my way of writing of the obscenity of war, and worse, the tragic nature of time.

  Now I fight another war, a war that I will not come home from, and Grandpa’s lessons come flying back across the years, like pigeons flown home to roost.

  My time is short, and this letter to you must serve for the letters I neglected to write then.

The doctors say it is cancer, pancreatic cancer, God’s way of saying “Surprise, you’re fucked!” They ramble on about metastasized cells and genetic predisposition, insulinomus  , adenocarcinomas  , and insulin production. It all reminds me of something else Grandpa used to say: “Sometimes you can have ten pounds of explanation and not one ounce of meaning.”

The meaning, Son, is that I am in my winter, and I will not come out of it alive. My time has slipped away so fast, and in the end it was so god-damned precious little.

I write this letter because I didn’t write the ones Grandpa told me to, I write it to pass on the story to you , but mostly I write it because it demands to be written.

I know I have been distant to you, and kept close council. Like Grandpa before me I bottled up the emotions that sought like a flood to wash me away, but I have always loved you son.

The lessons of life are our own to learn in such time as we best can learn them. I realize now I did not become a man that summer. By Grandpas measure of a man, the measure of wisdom, I never grew up ‘til in truth I knew I was dying.

  Maybe, just maybe reading this you can come to understand what I have too late.

  I hope against hope that I can make you understand… that you will make the most of time… that you can gain some insight from the time that I spent and the lessons I learned, there, where the dogwoods bloom.



Written for Stacy with all my love,

December 25,26 ,27, 2008