“Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.”

Erol Ozan

We’re driving to California in hopes of seeing our son. We’ll have to find him first. I’m not sure where to start, but we’re on the road from steamy Birmingham to the hard sluicy Mississippi rain and sun-streaked clouds in Louisiana to sunset over Monroe as we make our way to Shreveport for the night. Our little dogs accompany us on the journey; two tiny traveling companions with thoughts and opinions, but who get the backseat to themselves. Birmingham to California is 2030 miles or thereabouts. 2030 miles — three days driving straight or six or eight hours a day on the road. We mix it up out of necessity or duty or just for fun.

How many times have I made this trip? How many times have I tried to make the geography of the Deep South rearrange itself to move closer to California? I knew a moonshiner, Popcorn Sutton, who drove from Maggie Valley, North Carolina to Needles, California and somehow deduced, “yep, that’s far enough” and turned around and drove back home. That is what his former partner, Ernestine, a dear friend, told me once.

“Popcorn decided he needed to see California and drove straight through to Needles without stopping except to get gas, and once he got to Needles, he decided that was as far as he needed to go and came on back home.”

I wrote a picture book about Ernestine called “Ernestine’s Milky Way,” but there was no room in the book for Popcorn Sutton.

I had a great uncle, Clarence Joseph “Clair” Baker, who wanted to be a cartoonist and left his boyhood home of Leavenworth, Kansas to follow his dream, but also only made it as far as Needles, where he became a railroad man. That’s the story, anyway. What is it about Needles — a town in the Mojave Desert called the gateway to Route 66? No one in the family knew why Clair gave up his dream of being a cartoonist. No one knew why he became a railroad man. It was my grandfather who told me of his brother Clair’s dream of cartooning. Clair had an Uncle Frank who was a tailor in Needles, so maybe Uncle Frank set him on the straight and narrow upon Clair’s arrival in California. Drawing pictures? Hollywood? Cartooning? Get a real job.

Of course, I don’t know if this is true, but it’s how many of the men and women in my family still speak when the topics of “job” and the “arts” come up together. The family creed has steadfastly remained — “Many are called, few are chosen.”

According to Wikipedia, Needles was “founded in May of 1893 during the construction of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway.” Clair wasn’t born until 1900, but I’m sure there was plenty to do when he migrated decades later to California and wound up working on the railroad. Somewhere in there, Clair married Genevieve or “Babe,” as they called her, and they had a daughter, Patsy, who grew up wild in California, so they sent Patsy to live in Leavenworth with Grandmother Barbara to “calm her down.” After Clair died, they found Patsy trying to break into the cemetery to get to him, my mother told me.

With the help of a cousin, I discovered Clair is buried in Colton, California, three hours west of Needles, so how did he get there? And finally, in my meager attempts to find more biographical information about Clair and Needles, I learned that Charles Schulz, one of the most famous comics creators of all time, was from Needles. So, is all this some fabrication or a story changed over time? When my grandfather grew into his dementia, it was Clair he called out for in the night. He was living with my parents in San Diego, California, and he would call out “Clair! Clair! Clair!” Did he think of Clair somewhere in California, or was he dreaming of being a boy again, Clair just one year older in the bed next to his in their Leavenworth, Kansas bedroom?

My grandfather, Jerry Baker, did go into a career in the arts — playing the Wurlitzer for the silent movies and later running movie theatres and making music for skating rinks. I found a letter he wrote matter-of-factly about money troubles and new business ventures to his brother, John, and John’s honest reply of bank notes and foreclosures, the universal reply of all people who are responsible with money to those whose careers (the pesky arts) could be deemed otherwise.

Anyway, we’re driving to California to see our son, whom I never told to study business or get a teaching degree. He graduated with honors with a degree in film studies and a minor in comparative literature from UC Santa Barbara. He’s made movies, been in bands, written poetry and screenplays, played baseball, ran cross country, sang in the gospel choir. I have a whole chronology. A therapist said I should create a chronology of his life from the very beginning. The therapist didn’t say, “Create a chronology, so you can see where you went wrong,” but I added that part myself.

So, this story isn’t about the moonshiner, Popcorn Sutton, or about my great uncle, Clair Baker. Popcorn Sutton cooked mountain moonshine and once even said to me, “Don’t tell nobody where my still is.” I had no idea where his still was, but I guess he thought Ernestine had told me, but she hadn’t. I was staying at a cabin Popcorn built for Ernestine with my youngest one summer up on Johnson Gap, working on a children’s novel set in Maggie Valley. Popcorn’s moonshine serviced a lot of people who were “bad to drink,” as they say in the South.

“Mama’s bad to drink” or “Daddy’s bad to drink.” It was said that Clair’s daughter, Patsy, was also “bad to drink.” My son was also bad to drink from about age sixteen or seventeen and anything else he could get his hands on. In a dream last night, I was crying to some official blank-faced someone in robes that I didn’t know if my son drank to self-medicate in the beginning or if all the drinking and drugging flipped a switch in his brain and voila — schizoaffective disorder.

But I’m still relieved to be going home to find our son who lives on the streets of Los Angeles. It’s hard to know where to begin to look, but we have some clues. And, just like geography is an immutable fact of life, so is my son’s schizoaffective disorder that came either due to years of meth or because of self-medicating with meth. What came first? The chicken or the egg? He’s also had almost sixty phone numbers, and each one is going to stick until it doesn’t, because he thinks I have powers 2030 miles away in Alabama that make him lose his phones in California. I want to say, “If you really think I had those kinds of powers, don’t you think I’d have healed you by now? Got you clean?” But my son doesn’t believe he’s sick — it’s the rest of us who are loony-tunes.

There have been so many cross-country trips ever since I took a job in Birmingham but called California home and so began a two-state life. My son wasn’t sick when I took the job, although he’d just received his first DUI at the age of twenty, and it was out of my hands to fix or smooth over anything. I’ve traveled by planes, trains, and automobiles back and forth from California to Alabama. I’ve traveled with my three children, my parents, my husband, and at least one or two dogs every time, and even as of late, a school bus.

My husband won a blue school bus in an Instagram raffle from Van Life, and we drove that blue school bus from Salt Lake City to San Diego, Los Angeles, and back to San Diego, and all the way to Birmingham. We drove that blue school bus around Los Angeles looking for our son last Christmas, but we didn’t find him. He was out of touch until February, but by that time we were back in Birmingham. It’s probably a good thing, because he would have begged us for the blue school bus. For years, he has wanted us to buy him an RV from a police auction in downtown Los Angeles, but we have refused. We’ve seen the RVs where his friends live in Lincoln Heights, Echo Park, and Silver Lake. The answer is not getting him an RV.

Even if we find him, I must be prepared for anything. But now, here in Shreveport for a night with Kiffen and the dogs in an Airbnb of a gritty little guest house behind a sad brick house with a For Sale in the front yard, is the before time. The miles along I-20 and the highways to Austin through Horton Foote country are the in-between/limbo time where I can imagine that I-20 and every switchback, which will lead us to Route 66 and Needles and beyond, also contain secret passages and tunnels to time travel back in time to find a son — a boy — who once up a time lit up the world.

Postscript I: My cousin, Ken Baker, sent me all the files to find Clarence J. Baker’s obituary, which said he was a “timekeeper for the Santa Fe Railroad for 37 years,” so maybe his dream of being a cartoonist was just that. My mother, who will be 91 this month, loved his daughter, Patsy, whom she said was so much fun and kind to her, just a few years older — a dashing teen from California sent to the Kansas relatives to set her on the straight and narrow.

Postscript II: My grandfather, Jerry Baker’s organ music is on a Facebook site called “Forgotten Roller Rinks of the Past,” and the first one says, “Sample of Jerry from the movie Carnal Knowledge.” His organ music is in the skating rink sink from the film “Carnal Knowledge,” but he and my grandmother used to take the “Legion of Decency Pledge” with the Catholic Church, so I don’t think they ever saw the film. That story went, “Papa Jerry made some skating rink music for an R-rated film.”

Postscript III: I’ll be editing this and adding pictures on Substack.

https://www.womenintheatre.com/

Women-In-Theatre or W.I.T. introduced me to actors, writers, and directors working in Los Angeles Theatre. I was a playwright with an MFA from Tennessee with some awful plays in a steamer trunk that we used as a coffee table. I had a lot to learn, and I learned it in small indie theatres where we had staged readings of new work. I brought the baby with me, since my husband often came along to act in the readings, and we couldn’t afford a babysitter.

Without these opportunities in Los Angeles, I couldn’t have honed my craft as a writer. Along with other women playwrights, we were lucky to get professional actors to read the lines that we rewrote again and again. My first play, I am a Futon and Other Umbilical Tales became Blood and Marriage, which led me to an agent, which led to my first book deal, so two kids and seven years later upon our arrival in Los Angeles, I finally had the beginnings of a career, and it all began with LA theatre.

Many of those little theatres along Hollywood’s Theatre Row are now on the chopping block zoned for redevelopment. A rally to “Save the Complex” is planned for Saturday, October 22nd at noon followed by a press conference at 1:00 pm inside the Complex’s Ruby Theatre at 6476 Santa Monica Boulevard.

The Complex’s founder, playwright-producer-actor-director Matt Chait states, “After thirty-three years of The Complex, and twenty years of theater before that, we will be losing our lease at the end of December. The building is for sale. However, it was just discovered that our building is eligible for landmark, historical status at the local, state and federal level. It is also in the national registry. The landlord’s plans to destroy the building and the warehouse behind it, which are part of the same parcel, and build a high rise, will not come to fruition if we get that historical, landmark status.”

Besides the historical value of Theatre Row, home of Hollywood’s Fringe Festival, it has a huge history of work being developed on these stages: homes for new plays, improv groups, film festivals, and acting classes. According to Laura Foti Cohen of the Larchmont Buzz:

· Julia Sweeney created And God Said Ha at the Complex.

· Axl Rose took singing lessons on the second floor.

· Jason and Justine Bateman’s father Kent ran a repertory company that showed off his two wunderkinder.

· Don Cheadle produced, directed, and acted in multiple shows.

· Quentin Tarantino rehearsed The Hateful Eight.

· Dancing at the Blue Iguana was created from improvs done in a studio that was set up as a strip club.

· Stephen Soderbergh’s Full Frontal and the cult film Chuck and Buck were shot at the Complex.

The Complex is essential to the Hollywood Fringe Festival and an integral part of Theatre Row, which is critical to developing the voices of new playwrights. My playwriting led me to write novels for both adults and kids along with personal essays and picture books — every piece of writing I’ve done can be traced back to working with actors and directors, who welcomed new voices in theatre, helping to shape so many new playwrights, past and present.

We also raised our three children in these independent theatres along Theatre Row where we not only took them to plays, but they all performed in children’s theatre or with professional theatre companies in Hollywood with beloved directors who encouraged them to write stories and perform them, teaching them so much more along the way.

I’ve also taught theatre classes for kids in these spaces. Once, my youngest, three at the time, refused to say her first line of dialogue in the play, shouting from the stage, “I need my script!” Although she couldn’t yet read, her big sister handed her the script, which she held upside down, and only then recited the first line and the play began.

For more information on the Rally to Save Theatre Row and the Hollywood Fringe Festival:

Saturday, October 22nd at noon followed by a press conference at 1:00 pm inside the Complex’s Ruby Theatre at 6476 Santa Monica Boulevard.

Press/media contact: Philip Sokoloff, (626) 674–0504, showbizphil@gmail.com

My father was a football coach, who did not have time for music or much of anything else besides football, but one day, in Ames, Iowa, when he was coaching for the Iowa State Cyclones, he brought home a little 45 RPM record called “Sweet Thang” with Loretta Lynn and Ernest Tubb on the label. Maybe football practice was short that day or it was an off-week, but for Dad to bring home a record to play for us kids was unheard of when there was Nebraska and Oklahoma to beat.

Mom was the music person. She taught piano lessons and sang classical music with the Ames Choral Society and later joined the Iowa State Chorus. She’d leave the babies, Casey and Keely, with the babysitter so she could go to rehearsal in the mornings.

But she did not like country music. She made it clear that it was for commoners. She kicked off the dust of her childhood home in Mexico, Missouri, and she wasn’t about to raise kids on country music.

But Dad loved it. He called us into the living room that day to play “Sweet Thang” on Mom’s pristine Yahama stereo that you had to press down upon to open the lid, and it unlatched with a neat click.

“Y’all kids get in here and listen to this song! It’s funny as hell!” I remember him calling. He even needed to put a little plastic insert into the middle of this tiny record to make it play on Mom’s stereo.

When Mom had first gotten her new console stereo a few years earlier, which also had storage space for records, my brother, Duffy, and I couldn’t figure out how to open it. We were five and six. Mom was napping with the new baby, and we wanted to play a record. We pushed and tugged at the lid. Nothing worked. So we tried to pry it open with a fork. That didn’t work either, and when Mother discovered our handiwork, she nearly lost her mind at the chipped wood from those fork indentations.

We were banned from going near the stereo until we were older.

But all was forgiven a few years later when Dad brought home “Sweet Thang.” I remember him getting so tickled at the lyrics, and he would just laugh and shake his head. He played it several times, and he let me play it over and over too. I imagined the man sneaking out of the house at sundown, while the lady was washing her hair. It was a song with a story, a narrative that I could follow, and I could feel this woman’s rage when she goes to find her husband in the bar. It was funny and real — I’d never heard a song with a story before except for Catholic hymns, and they didn’t have the drama of “Sweet Thang.” Dad tried to sing along with Loretta and Ernest, but he couldn’t carry a tune.

Did Mom yell, “STOP!”

With four kids ages seven and under, she probably did.

I can’t remember if more Loretta Lynn albums filled our home. Maybe one or two along with “A Taste of Honey,” which was more Mom’s style.

Cue Herb Albert and the Tiajuana Brass.

My second Loretta story came in high school. My friend, Pattie, and I were both new to Knoxville, Tennessee, and we were homesick for our “real” homes. She had moved from Miami, and I had moved from Pittsburgh. Dad went from coaching the Pittsburgh Panthers to the Tennessee Volunteers. Pattie and I were students at Knoxville Catholic, the only Catholic school in town on Magnolia Avenue in East Knoxville.

We joined the CYO, a Catholic Youth Group, that went on trips to the Smoky Mountains, visited old folks, and volunteered to babysit at Sunday Mass. Anyway, Pattie was so much fun and a bright spot, my first real best friend, and we learned there was going to be a talent show celebrating the new gymnasium at Sacred Heart School.

Dour Father Julius, the principal, wanted to christen the new gymnasium the “Retreat Center,” but it had a basketball court, so nobody was going to call it a “Retreat Center.”

There was no formal practice for the Talent Show held one evening in the springtime. We just gave the sound guy our records, and he played them, and somehow there was a fairly good crowd to celebrate the new gym and watch kids perform.

Pattie was a ballerina, so she decided to dance in her toe shoes with a parasol to Jennifer Brewer’s song, “Sweet Old-Fashioned Girl.” It’s a mix of sweet verses with a raunchy chorus, and if you can imagine a redhead twirling across the stage, all joy and light, and then shimmying and shaking it hard to the chorus. She stole the show, and I thought it was the most brilliant and inspired piece of dance ever performed.

I decided to sing a Loretta Lynn song, and I thought the funniest one was “One’s on the Way.” There’s even a monologue in the middle where the husband calls home to utter chaos and eventually hangs up on the wife. So I stuffed a pillow under my dress, messed up my hair, and sang the song because I could match Loretta’s pitch. I was petrified waiting to go on and then once I was up on stage, I trusted Loretta’s words and sang the story.

After it was over, everyone congratulated us, but we heard later from Pattie’s mom that Father Julius was not pleased and claimed our performances showed loose morals, promoted teen pregnancy, and had no place in a Catholic talent show.

It was so interesting to hear this news, not upsetting, but shocking and kind of exciting. We had no idea we had been rebellious. It was kind of wonderful since we were considered “good girls.”

But when the film, Coalminer’s Daughter came out, that sealed the deal, and I fell in love with Loretta for life watching Sissy Spacek play her to perfection. I played that album all the time and watched the movie and dragged friends to see it. I’ve watched it so many times that I can and have quoted lines back and forth many times with beloved friends, Michael and Jim, from my theatre days, who love Loretta too. I also sang all her songs for my freshman-year roommate, Nicki, who preferred Pat Benatar, Barbra Streisand, and Air Supply, but somehow was amused by my late-night Loretta performances.

I adored Beverly DeAngelo’s performance as Patsy Cline in Coalminer’s Daughter and always felt bad she didn’t get to play Patsy in Sweet Dreams when the role went to Jessica Lange. I even wrote a play about Loretta, Pasty and all of them called kd lang and me about a Nashville housewife who falls in love with kd lang. And I loved how kd lang brought them all together to sing a Honky Tonk Angels Medly — Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells, Brenda Lee, and kd lang.

My kids grew up on Coalminer’s Daughter, and they loved it too, even if they didn’t have much of a choice.

On September 10, 2001, I took my ten-year-old, Lucy, to see Loretta perform at a venue in Orange County, California. We drove all the way on a Monday night, a school night even because I wanted her to see Loretta in person. There were tables on this balcony overlooking the stage. I sat in a chair and Lucy sat under the table pressed up against the bars of the balcony, watching Loretta sing. We played her music all the way home.

The next morning, the world changed when the planes flew into the towers. I kept thinking about Loretta and the concert the night before when everything seemed so normal and sweet and easy.

During the dark days and years following 9/11, I looked at my kids and thought of my husband, Kiffen, growing up one of 13 children. And I began to write my first children’s novel, Gentle’s Holler, and there wasn’t a day I didn’t think about Butcher Holler writing that book. I kept thinking about those mountains as I tried to write about a little girl who wants to write songs and see the world beyond Maggie Valley, North Carolina. I imagined my own sister-in-law, Tomi Lunsford, growing up and writing songs, and so my character, Livy Two Weems, was kind of a combination of Tomi Lynn and Loretta.

Three of my sisters-in-law used to sing with their father, Jim Lunsford, in a singing group simply called, The Lunsfords. Jim sadly died long ago at the age of fifty of a heart attack, but I often wish my sisters-in-law would make an album. They still sing together to this day at family weddings and funerals and parties, and they are so good. I also learned that Tomi Lynn and her sisters, Nancy and Teresa, and Jim, were guests on something called “The Bill Robinson Show” with Loretta. Upon hearing of her death, Nancy wrote, “I remember Loretta coming out to chat with fans while her hair was still in rollers. What a down-to-earth mountain girl. May she rest in peace.”

Jim Lunsford was a fiddle player on the Grand Ole Opry and played with Reno and Smiley and the Smoky Mountain Boys, and CharleyPride even recorded some of his songs, including “Blue Ridge Mountains Turning Green.”

Here is a song that Tomi wrote for her mother, Frances, who died last year and raised 13 children, and 8 were still kids at home when Jim died. When she died in July of 2021 in Nashville, Kiffen and two of our three adult children were there, Lucy and Norah, along with many siblings and nieces and nephews, celebrating and loving Frances. As she lay dying and even after she was gone, they sang her favorite hymns around her bed for hours, and when the funeral home came, they walked her outside into the night singing, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” I later asked Lucy if it felt like a dream, and she said, “I don’t think I could ever dream anything that real.”

When I was on a book tour in Alabama in 2007 with my dear late friend, Sally Nemeth, also on her book tour, we explored Birmingham together, a place I knew nothing about then, and Sally took me everywhere. She had to move to Alabama when she was in high school like I had to move to Tennessee, and we bonded over difficult uprootings as young teens from the North to the South.

As a fifteen-year-old, Sally came home from her first day at the local public high school in Mountain Brook and asked her mother, “What’s a sorority?” and burst into tears.

On our exploration of Birmingham that day, we came upon Loretta Lynn’s empty tour bus and I took a picture of Sally in front of the bus. We both wrote Loretta love notes of gratitude and stuck them on the bus window.

I don’t know if she ever got them.

When my father became ill with dementia a few years ago, I played him “Sweet Thang” and his face lit up listening to the song again. I also played him, Freddie Fender, because he loved to dance around with Mom in Knoxville on the shag carpet to “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” when they threw parties for the other coaches and their wives in the rec room that had a pool table and a wet bar with pictures of mascots, National Championship plaques, and pompoms as the decor.

The day after Dad died, it was strange to wake up in a world without him. It felt like somebody had torn out a piece of the sky.

I counted on him to be here.

I want to tell him about Loretta. I want to talk to Sally about Loretta, too, about the time we came upon her empty tour bus in Birmingham out of the blue. Sally died not long after Dad of cancer a little over a year ago, which is still something that is so unfair and something I hate because I miss her, and I can’t quite believe it yet. She should still be here. And I counted on Loretta too — to stay.

But part of me will forever imagine Loretta right up there in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, or on her ranch in Tennessee, singing her songs. Sometimes over the years, especially when I need to remind myself how to be brave and hang in there, I watch Coalminer’s Daughter and remember everything Loretta ever gave me with her music and stories.

Sally Nemeth in Birmingham, Alabama holding our books by Loretta’s tour bus in 2007.

I’m doing a Lenten 40 Days and 40 Writes since I haven’t really “done Lent” since high school, and that was usually trying to copy whatever my best friend, Pattie, was giving up — salt or chocolate or sweets or whatever.

I’ve honestly never read the Bible much except at Mass in the Sunday Missalette. But each day in Lent of 2021, we get a prompt and some readings or psalms, so I read them and the prompt and then I write a letter to either my father or to my son. My father is gone now, a little over two months, and my son is out there in the wilderness of LA on the streets, but this is the first time I can talk to them both without either of them interrupting.

I believe they would each agree they knew how to interrupt a story to state an opinion or foist an argument up on the scene to stir things up. Once my father and my son had a bet — my son bet he could tell the difference between a democrat and a republican just by looking at their pictures.

My father said that was nonsense (he didn’t say nonsense). My son won the bet easily. He got every picture right. That was 16 or 17 years ago.

Time is funny that way.

Here is a link to the program run by Robin Rauzi, and I’ve done several variations of fiction and nonfiction, but this is the first time I’ve only written letters, and it’s something that would never have occurred to me to do without the structure of these “40 Days and 40 Writes.”

https://40days40writes.com/

It’s now Day 21 and this is a letter to my son.

***

“Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,
for his wonderful works to humankind.
And let them offer thanksgiving sacrifices,
and tell of his deeds with songs of joy.”

Psalm 107

Dear Son,
“The wind blows where it chooses.”

That is the writing prompt for today. I could substitute many words for “wind.”

Addiction blows where it chooses.

Obsession blows where it chooses too.

You grew addicted, and I became obsessed.

But what if, just for today, I did not imagine you cold in your tent waking on the chilled hard cement.

What if, just for today, I did not picture you homeless and whiling/wiling (?) away the days, all promises, hopes, and dreams dashed.

In this moment of quiet in the early dawn, your father has brought me a steaming mug of coffee with foamed whipped almond milk resembling the head of a root beer float on a summer’s day. We have a new steamer from Cousin Mo, which makes for fancy coffee.

In this moment of quiet in the early dawn, I get to write you a letter and describe things to you without any hope or expectation, and it gives me such solace to write to you, dear son.

In this moment, cooper hawks fly over the warming hills of Echo Park where palm fronds, cypress, and eucalyptus trees dot the landscape, and I get to watch it all from my treetop bedroom. And by the way, are you listening to the owls at night from wherever you are? I’ve never heard so many owls on my nightly walks through Elysian Park.

So, what if, just for today, instead of waiting (wallowing) in fear and dread and the steady thrum of missing you, I imagined your beautiful sunlit life full of friends and strangers connecting in all kinds of precious moments I will never see, but that’s okay.

What if, just for today, I remembered the time you climbed to the top of the tree to wave and laugh (there were so many treetops) or the time you scoured up “monkey space,” a place you named located in your grandparents’ backyard perfect for exploring or the time you held a blue lemonade stand with chocolate chip cookies — five cents a glass — ten cents a cookie — with your sister on a street with very few cars passing midday.

What if, just for today, I let go of the loss that presses like a stone on my heart, and I turn toward the sun and trees and the jasmine now blooming.

Oh, I must tell you, that I have a new 90-year-old friend, Ann, who adores Olive. She loves her big eyes, and Ann melts on Zoom when I show her Olive.

“That little doggie, oh, that little doggie.”

So I made Ann a book of Olive pictures, and Ann said, “Olive’s eyes are the eyes of God,” and Cousin Mo laughed and said, “That’s a pretty big responsibility, Olive.”

Your grandmother says Olive’s eyes are more the eyes of Loretta Young, certainly not God.

Anyway, the chimes are ringing outside, and your father has left to face the beast of LAUSD for another day. He has to get weekly COVID tests now, but so far all are negative.

We’ve each had our first vaccines.

You came home a year ago to live because of the pandemic and stayed six weeks — gardening, painting, and playing music, obsessing over the benefits Turmeric and Peanut Oil too.

I was in Alabama, but you and your father were together, and it seemed like a good thing. But we could not change your mind when you decided to leave, and that’s okay too.

“The wind blows where it chooses.”

What if it’s all okay?

What if everything is simply okay?

I love you dearly, and I hope your day is easy and sweet and full of good things, my radiant son.

Love,

Mama

March 5, 1935– January 8, 2021

Joseph Anthony Madden, a former college and professional football coach, died on January 8, 2021 in San Diego, California. He was 85. The cause of death was vascular dementia. Madden is survived by his wife, Janis Baker Madden, of 60 years, and his four children and their spouses, Kerry and Kiffen Madden-Lunsford (Los Angeles), Duffy Madden (San Diego), Casey and Misty Madden (Chicago) and Keely Madden (New York City). He is also survived by his brother, Lefty Madden, and his sister, Sally Pilkerton of Silver Spring, Maryland and many nieces and nephews who adored their Uncle Joe. His youngest brother, Michael Madden, preceded him in death in 1979, as did his beloved nephew and namesake, Joseph Anthony Pilkerton, in 2020.

Known as “Curby” to his grandkids (because he hit every curb driving on the “wrong” side of the road on a trip through England, Scotland, and Ireland) he took great pride in his seven grandchildren: Flannery, Lucy, Norah, Liam, Sidney, Kolya, and Casey.

Joseph “Joe” Madden was born in Washington DC on March 5, 1935 the eldest son of Mary Patricia Morris Madden and Dr. Joseph Anthony Madden. He attended St. John’s Military Academy where he liked to emphasize that he entered as a private and graduated as a private because of his dedication to sports where he lettered in football, boxing, and baseball. Upon graduation from St. John’s in 1953, he attended the University of Maryland on a boxing scholarship and boxed for two years until Maryland dropped the program, upon which he became a student trainer for the Maryland Terrapins football team.

He graduated from Maryland in 1959 and accepted his first coaching job at Father Lopez High School in Daytona Beach, Florida where he began to build the football and basketball programs. The first football season they had a limited schedule, so Father Lopez played their games at the Daytona Speedway. In the second year, they joined the St. John’s River Conference, and by the third year the team won the conference championship. The coaches displayed the winning scores on the school crosses adjacent to the gymnasium, much to the consternation of the principal, Sister Bernadita, who also refused to allow school dances to be held in the library, Madden’s idea, since he didn’t want the students scuffing up his basketball court in their dance shoes.

Madden met his wife, Janis, a music teacher, and they were married on December 27, 1960 in between football and basketball season with Madden’s players in attendance. He designed the wedding napkin that read “Follow Jan and Joe on the Green Wave” along with the team schedule to build up support for his players.

He became a graduate assistant with the Mississippi State Bulldogs in 1962 where he met Johnny Majors and would later go onto coach with him at three teams. After finishing his Masters degree at Mississippi State, Madden was on the job hunt, and it should be noted that Janis typed him sixty coaching job application letters before he finally landed the job at Morehead State in 1963.

In addition to coaching at Morehead State, he also had to teach health but preferred to be at the football office getting ready for Saturday’s game. He’d have Janis circle “key health points” in the text, and then he would scrawl a daily lesson plan on the board. His students rarely saw him.

At the end of the semester, he was actually in the class looking over his grade book and saw that one student had made A’s on all the tests but had terrible attendance. He called the student up and said, “You made an A on the tests, but you didn’t come to class? How am I supposed to pass you?”

The student replied, “No offense, Coach, but I was here more than you.”

The student received an A.

Also, at Morehead State, the coaches’ wives listened to the away games at the local bowling alley at a table reserved especially for them, because the bowling alley was the only place in town that got reception in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky.

Madden then went on to coach for the Wake Forest Demon Deacons (1964–1967) including the season Brian Piccolo led the nation in rushing. He then joined Johnny Majors and his coaching staff at the Iowa State Cyclones (1968–1971) coaching the defensive secondary. He became the defensive coordinator for the Kansas State Wildcats in 1972 for a year and then rejoined Majors at the University of Pittsburgh for the Panthers (1973–1976).

Over the years, Madden’s teams made it to the Sun Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Bluebonnet Bowl, and he coached at the Hula Bowl with Majors and Don Shula after winning the Sugar Bowl. Pitt won the National Championship at the Sugar Bowl in 1976 with Tony Dorsett, Heisman Trophy Winner, and Bear Bryant declared Pitt’s defensive secondary the finest he’d ever seen.

After winning the National Championship at Pitt, Madden went with Majors to the University of Tennessee (1977–1979) where he coached the defensive secondary for Tennessee Volunteers and was Assistant Head Coach.

After leaving Tennessee, he then spent the next eight years in the pros, as special teams’ coach for the Detroit Lions (1980–1984), on the defensive staff of the Atlanta Falcons (1985–1986) and finally with the San Diego Chargers (1989) back on special teams.

Upon retiring from coaching, he began several business ventures and devoted himself to Janis’s career as a music teacher with the San Diego School District and supported her by attending student concerts, trips, and competitions. They also traveled to college football reunions at Iowa State and Pittsburgh and Wake Forest to visit with players and coaches over years.

He and Janis were active members of the San Diego Mission, Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá and took choral trips to Ireland and ran Irish bingo booths for fundraisers and participated in the Festival of the Bells. Although he could not sing a note, he was an honorary choir member by show of support. They never performed his favorite song “Unchained Melody,” but that never stopped him for attempting to hit the notes with Janis coaching him.

Several of his former Pitt Players also sent their memories:

“My condolences to the family. I am so stunned right now. He was responsible for my success at Pitt. The reason why our defensive secondary was so good back then was because of Coach Madden. We were so prepared. Coach, thank you for everything you ever did for me. I will never forget you. We’ll miss you and love you forever. I am grateful that the last reunion I was able to thank Coach for having faith in me. He helped me become Pitt’s all-time interception’s holder and an All-American. If it wasn’t for him, that would never have happened. Every day, we would watch film and he would show me what to expect when the opponent would come out in certain formations. He and Coach Majors were responsible for me staying at Pitt during my freshman year. I will never forget Coach Madden. May God bless him and his family. “Bob Jury, defensive back

“My condolences to the family. Coach Madden was a great man and a big part of my life.” Jim Morsillo, defensive tackle

“Coach Madden recruited me to Pitt. He wasn’t my position coach, but always checked up with me while I was there. He was a good man.” Thomas Brozoza, center and guard

“Prayers to the Madden family. I had the pleasure of knowing Coach as a player and a coach. We had many laughs and great stories.”Ray Olson, offensive guard

“To the Madden family, I send my condolences and prayers. Even though I was a student manager, Coach Madden, having met my parents at the weekly Beaver Valley Golden Panther Club meetings, he would regularly ask me, “How’s your mother and father?” He was a true gentleman and coach and at a few of our reunions, he enjoyed them as much as we did. Hail to Pitt, Coach Madden, Peace.” Richard J. Gradisek

“A very good man with high performance standards. He taught you more than football.” Mark O’Toole, defensive secondary

“I remember releasing outside the linebacker and laughing as everyone ran by to stop Tony. It was a great design along with the Hook and Slide pass against a 5.2 defense. A great play on 3rd and 6+. Robert Haywood was the best passing QB over the middle. Tommy Y. picked it up well from the Youngstown “KID” Matt C. The real gentleman on our Nat’l Champ team. Grateful for this experience. Really heartbroken over the passing of our Coach Madden. He always believed in US! Thank you Coach and family. “Jim Corbett, tight end, #81

“Coach Madden was my coach as the left-side cornerback, and he was great. I was a junior college transfer and an unknown, starting our first game under Coach Majors against heavily favored Georgia. Coach Madden came up to me before the kickoff and explained because I was an unknown, they were going to test me, so to be prepared and to try and go deep. I was ready and almost intercepted that first pass, and to start the second half, when Georgia tried going deep again, I did pick it off. It was because Coach Madden understood opposing teams’ strategies and prepared us.”Jeff Hartin, cornerback

ON RAISING A FAMILY

Madden had many well-known lines over the years raising a family like members of his team, and here are a few:

“Get your ass in the car!”

“Say good-bye. We got ball games to win!”

“Knock off that Helen Keller bullshit! Nobody’s going blind in this house, and you know why? Because I said so that’s why!”

“When I say jump you don’t ask why, you ask — how high?”

“You want to live in the same town your whole life? What kind of life is that? Me clocking in at five like some bank clerk to help you with your homework. That’s a bullshit life.”

“I don’t swear in church, dammit!”

“It took me six months and a lot of Scotch to get through that sumbitch.” (after reading his daughter’s first novel, OFFSIDES)

“I gave you my best material.”

“I get to write the disclaimer.”

NICKNAMES FOR THE BOYS: Slick, Big Time, Partner, and Turkey.

NICKNAMES FOR HIS KIDS FROM OLDEST TO YOUNGEST:

Gertrude Marblecake

Sammy Junkyard

Dickie Dustmop

Fannie Fat Buckets

ADVICE ON MIDDLE SCHOOL PROBLEMS

“You go tell that Ann Spicer to go defecate in her head gear.”

ON BOYFRIEND PROBLEMS

“He aspires to mediocrity.”

ON GIRLFRIEND PROBLEMS

“Thanks a lot, Big Time. Kept your mother up all night worrying over your sorry ass.”

LIFE ADVICE

“Don’t let the doorknob hit you on the ass.”

“Keep tossing your hat in the ring. Those sumbitches are going to toss it right back out and you just keep tossing it right back in.”

ON CAMPING OR THE WILDERNESS

“Don’t ever ask me to shave out of a coffee can.”

ON HIKING

“Why would I climb a hill without a golf club in my hand?”

ON ART

“Three pubs to every museum! That’s the rule.

ON STARKVILLE

And a perspective on Starkville, Mississippi to his weeping young wife on their first night in town at the “Blue Belle” diner right after leaving Daytona Beach, Florida — “Janis, you got to give this town a chance. We just got here, honey.”

ON POLITICS circa 1983

“Dad you’re just a big American capitalist!”

“You bet your ass I am!”

ITALY

On Madden’s only trip to Rome to see the Vatican for the first time in the summer of 2017, he spoke to everyone in English.

To the taxi driver, he asked, “How’s business?”

To an older woman walking in the street while a moped sped past, he yelled, “Hey watch out, lady!”

To the grocery clerk, he inquired, “Where’s the tonic water, sir?”

To the waiter who didn’t laugh at his joke, he mused, “That guy didn’t crack a smile.”

When the people didn’t respond, Madden said, “Okay, whatever, have it your way.”

But to the Uffizi museum guard in Florence, he said, “How are you? Mind if I sit here? My wife is in the bathroom. Quite a place you’ve got here.”

And she smiled.

The tour guide laughed and said, “I have never seen that museum guard smile. Never. He talks to her like she understands him.”

And later that same day, Madden said to a little Italian boy who dropped a toy in the toy store, “You dropped that. You going to pick it up or what?”

The little boy stared at him and then picked up the toy and put it back.

Our tour guide said, “Ah, now I understand. This man speaks all languages.”

***

One of Madden’s favorite memories was dancing at his granddaughter, Lucy’s wedding in Chicago in 2019 and meeting his new grandson-in-law, Trent.

As a boy, Madden, a native of Washington DC, climbed to the top of the Washington Monument and threw his baseball cap out of one of the top windows and watched it sail to the ground like a red-tailed hawk on the breeze.

A celebration of his life will be held this fall at the San Diego Mission after everyone has received the COVID vaccination. The San Diego Mission Choir will be singing for their friend. Donations may be made to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Other links:

I Am Not John Madden’s Daughter

https://www.latimes.com/.../la-xpm-2007-jan-01-oe-madden1...

Bowled Over by Christmas

https://www.latimes.com/la-oe-madden25-2008dec25-story.html

Of Football and Flamenco

https://www.salon.com/2000/04/14/flamenco/

He used to watch Fox News and state his opinions. Loudly.

It was a dark time. Years and years of Fox News and Rush.

When we brought our kids to visit they’d grab the heavy iron crucifixes off of the wall and go looking for vampires. They called Jesus the “Sun God” instead of the “Son of God.”

My mother despaired at their lack of formal religious training, while I drank up the shame and guilt with glasses of box wine, and my husband fixed broken doorknobs and replaced lightbulbs or did other handy jobs around the house, taking nothing personally.

Rhetoric from my father in the dark days:

“Teachers need to be held accountable!”

“Do you pay your taxes? Do you take government assistance? You don’t? Then you know what you are? Conservatives in disguise.”

It was unbearable, but now all that is gone with dementia.

The gift of Alzheimer’s.

My father, a former football coach, watches the NFL on Netflix. He points to the teams and says, “Look the Lions vs. the Patriots.” “The Eagles vs. the Colts.” “The Redskins vs. the Cowboys.”

He watches the highlights of each game yelling at the TV like the coach he once was. He wakes up in the morning looking for his players or he wants to jump in the car and get on the road to go recruiting.

Sometimes he thinks he’s in Virginia, and he needs to get back to California. He no longer drives, because when he did, in the latter years, he developed a “I’m coming through!” attitude at red lights.

Stop signs were merely a suggestion. It was terrifying to ride with him, and we convinced the doctor to take his license away.

When he asks to drive, Mom will say to him, “You’ve had three strokes and your brain isn’t working right, and so the State of California took away your license.”

He will ask for the car keys anyway.

Or he will address an Uber driver with a curt, “You know where you’re going?” Or say, “Take a left here.”

Once, he packed six pairs of shoes and a large statue of Jesus holding a lamb to take on a recruiting trip.

Fortunately, Mom had hidden the keys.

I found him sitting in a chair last summer, smiling, and I said, “How are you, Dad?”

He said, “Great. I talked to Ralph Hawkins today.”

“You did? Where?”

“In heaven. Ralph is in heaven, but I felt like talking to him. So I called him up.”

The name Ralph Hawkins is mythological in our family. Ralph and Dad were boyhood friends in Washington DC, who grew up to both become football coaches in the NFL. Ralph taught my dad about the NFL in third grade at St. Ann’s in Washington DC.

Nine-year-old Ralph said to Dad, “Joey, do you know who has the best uniforms in the league?”

Dad said, “What league, Ralph?”

“The NFL!”

“What’s the NFL?”

Ralph said, “The National Football League. And the Green Bay Packers have the best uniforms.”

Dad said he went home and asked his mother, “How does Ralph know about football uniforms and the NFL?”

His mother, our grandmother, who became GrandMary, said, “Well, his father takes him to NFL football games.”

Dad’s father, a dentist, did not take him to games. His father, our grandfather, whom we called, Daddy Dear, took him on long hunting weekends.

Dad hated hunting and hid in the barn and slept whenever possible, while the men went off to hunt. In the freezer in the basement in DC often sat the spoils of the latest hunt from Daddy Dear — a frozen duck with all its feathers or some quail.

Dad was beaming, so I said, “What did you and Ralph Hawkins talk about?”

Dad smiled, “Well, I talked. Ralph listened. He’s in Heaven. I told him what I was doing and what I wasn’t doing. And he just listened.”

Ralph Hawkins was a name I heard all my life. He was married to Carol and they had three daughters. Ralph welcomed Dad into NFL when Dad first got a job with the Detroit Lions coaching Special Teams. Ralph Hawkins coached for the Seattle Seahawks. He was a great wide receiver in high school and college. Dad and Ralph went to St. John’s Military Academy in high school in Washington DC.

I once went to a girls basketball camp at St. John’s one summer while staying with GrandMary, and I drank grape soda when I got thirsty.

Dad entered St. John’s High School as a private in high school and graduated as a private. Dad didn’t even make Varsity at St. John’s but Ralph did.

And in high school, St. John’s played the Wilson, the local public school, and Ralph, a wide receiver, had a wonderful game and caught a ton of passes from the quarterback, Bobby Reece, another legend. Wilson won the public league, and St. John’s won the Catholic league.

Then Wilson and St. John’s had to play each other, Dad explained, and Wilson won. But Bobby Reece and Ralph Hawkins played well.

So many myths and legends.

At the dinner table, later that same day, with everyone gathered, my sister, Keely, made us play a game of gratitude — to say something good that had happened that day.

Our brother, Duffy, said, “Come back to me. I gotta think.”

Keely said, “Well, I’m glad I discovered a pool so close by to take the boys. We can even walk! It’s amazing.”

Mom said, “Well, I’m happy that the City of San Diego sent me my new parking pass today. I was on the phone a while but it got done, thank goodness!”

Then it was Dad’s turn, and he said, “Well, I talked to Ralph Hawkins today.”

Mom looked alarmed, her eyes wide. “What are you talking about? Where?”

“Here. I talked to Ralph Hawkins right here, Janis. I felt like talking to him.”

Mom said, “Ralph was here?”

“Hell no, he wasn’t here. He was in Heaven. So I called him up and we had a talk. And he listened.”

Mom relaxed and said, “Well, that’s all right then.”

“You bet it was,” Dad said.

I remember once I called home years ago, and Dad said, “Ralph Hawkins has dementia. Carol has him going to adult day care. And he said, ‘Joe, I am having the time of my life, singing and dancing. Every day. A bus picks me up.”

At the time, Dad had said, “Poor bastard. Poor Ralph.” Ralph was in his sixties when dementia hit. I suspect it was CTE — “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy” — although I didn’t know it at the time.

Dad is now 84, and he goes Adult Day Care and sings and dances, but he calls it “The Club.” A van picks him up. Steve drives the van.

Recently, Dad asked Steve, “Where are we working out the players today?”

Steve said, “What players?”

Dad said, “My defensive secondary. I need to tell them where practice is.”

Mom said, “There have been no players since 1989! Snap out of it, Joe!”

But Dad couldn’t snap out of it.

Steve, who knows this disease, said, “Oh, don’t worry about it today. Practice is on Thursday, Coach.”

Ralph Hawkins. Bobby Reese. Joe Madden.

People used to me, “Aren’t you proud of your father? It must be so cool to have John Madden as a father.”

I would say, “John Madden is not my father.”

Myths. Legends.

I said, “Dad, did you talk about anything else to Ralph?”

Dad said, “I told to hug the hell out of my parents, Jesus Christ, would you do that for me, Ralph?”

Then we kept on eating dinner.

The moors of Yorkshire

• This essay was inspired by Lee Martin’s Mad-Libs for Nonfiction Writers where I took three words — an adjective, an object, and an abstraction and threw them together. Plump, Olive’s purple harness, and grace. Here is the link:

http://leemartinauthor.com/2012/09/mad-libs-for-creative-nonfiction-writers-a-new-exercise/ )

***

I can’t find the purple harness again (or the car keys for that matter). I take the purple harness off Olive, the wiener dog, each night and stick it somewhere where I’ll be sure to remember the next morning. I never do. Okay, sometimes I do. But when I forget, if I let her outside, exuberant pup, without her harness, which has her tags, and she goes missing, what will I do? Race through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama screaming OLIVE OLIVE OLIVE COME HOME?

Note: (Olive no longer needs a harness but rather a sling for her back legs. When I first wrote this story she was a jumper and broke her back jumping off the bed. Surgery, healing, the works. Another story. Dachshunds have notoriously weak backs. She stumble-trots about with a wobbly gait in the backyard and digs ankle-cracking holes bigger than herself with her front legs, and she may occasionally drag herself drunken-sailor-like along slippery wood floors if we don’t hop-to when she barks for attention. We have to express her bladder three times or four times a day, which sounds worse than it is. I wrote a picture book called “Who Will Squeeze Olive?” It has not sold.)

We found her at the Birmingham Humane Society by the airport where a large, tattooed man, Phil, who worked there, cradled her in his arms for an introduction on Valentine’s Day 2011.

I don’t want to lose my sweet and uncomplicated dog. My dog (and this statement will make sound like my mother a little) keeps me sane. But maybe that’s okay. Emmylou Harris brings her dogs on stage. (I digress.) “Shovels and Rope,” husband and wife musicians, bring their dog too. They sing a raucous/playful song about addiction called “When the Devil is All Around.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1n7FAsiezo

More digressing…

I think about Branwell Bronte sometimes — the brother of three brilliant sisters, who was an addict too — tippling on opium and gin at the apothecary and Black Bull pub, respectively. (There is a reason I think about Branwell.)

But unlike my mother, I will never give a dog the same name as any future granddaughters or grandsons, because of the alliteration.

Lucy and Little Bit just sound right together. You don’t mind, do you?

I have let that one go even when I hear stories of her Lucy jumping up and eating a block of cheese off the counter and digging up the roses. That is not my Lucy. That’s my mother’s Lucy, a crazy yellow lab mix. But Lucy, the lab, keeps her sane, along with her other dog, Little Bit, who is not little.

My mother used to say, “I tell dog stories. I don’t tell kid stories. You won’t hear me boring people with stories of my remarkable children, but ask me about my dogs. Then I’ll tell you some stories.”

It’s true. We thought our dog, Clancy, a black lab, was our sibling. He lived 16 years. He chased us on sleds and tore our knitted caps off, shredding the tassels in the Pittsburgh snow.

But I’m all for dogs and sanity living so far away from the life I created once upon time that had a menagerie of animals with two dogs, two cats, three finches, a hermit crab, three kids, and a husband.

And so Olive, who is not fat, not even pleasingly plump (I used to read novels populated with “pleasingly plump” characters when I was a teenager). Anyway, this dog eases my head and heart and makes our temporary-but-not-so-temporary Alabama home a kinder and more loving place to be.

Olive howls on cue and greets everyone with joy. She adores Norah, our sixteen-year-old, and cuddles on her bed during hours of homework.

But when I think of Olive’s purple harness I think of holding onto things — holding onto the life I created that morphed into another life, cleaved between Alabama and California. And for a while we said we could do it. We said we could handle it to get the kids through college. We got two through college between 2006 and 2013. We’ll be in debt forever with their college loans, but they graduated from good schools and are finding their ways in their careers.

One has a job she likes but has made her want to seek out graduate school. The other is still searching though he would assure me that he is not searching, and maybe he is right.

What do I know?

In another life on the west coast and for a while (too long) my husband, Kiffen, lived with our adult son and an adult nephew and a boarder, a middle-aged actor, who churned up the juicer in the kitchen with greens and vitamins but devoured donuts and cookies in the room downstairs. The actor wore a lot of purple and had a dog, Sissy, who did not wag its tail. Instead, Sissy scowled. The dog, in my opinion, was judging us, and yet, who could blame Sissy, the judgmental dog, who lifted her leg on couches with a sneer at the chaos around her.

For back then chaos reined and rained.

To bear the raining/reining chaos of Christmas the year it was its worst I donned a man’s suit like armor so I wouldn’t cry in some dumb lady dress and morph into one of Picasso’s weeping women.

I needed to man up in the suit.

As a joke my mother called it, “Mr. Kiffen’s Boarding House.” It sounded like an uproarious British sitcom. (It was anything but…)

How is life at Mr. Kiffen’s Boarding House?

Hahahahahahahahahahaha.

And daily, during this temporary living arrangement, Mr. Kiffen would come home not only to an adult son playing music or tearing through the house like a gremlin searching for spare change or food, a sleepy adult nephew, a boarder juicing and/or praying or watching “Big Bang Theory” with a judgmental dog. Mr. Kiffen, a teacher, came home in one of his colorful ties of a Van Gogh sunflower or frolicking wiener dogs— and mind you — he came home from wrangling second graders at a Title One School to wrangle the borders and then the visitors of the boarders.

I’ve recently learned the expression “mission creep” and the situation in our house — the chaos — was turning into mission creep.

Mission creep: “a gradual shift in objectives during the course of a military campaign, often resulting in an unplanned long-term commitment.”

What went from being a normal abode where people strove to live in harmony the objectives shifted with no end in sight.

No, besides the son, nephew, and boarder, Mr. Kiffen came home almost daily to also find a down-on-their-luck father and son duo who began showing up to do odd jobs around our home in exchange for storing their own temporary life in our garage and to take occasional naps on the couch. They installed a toilet for the boarder downstairs and fixed a bike.

Later, much later, I found out that this father and son duo also sold speed and heroin. Who knew speed was meth?

(Who could be so dumb not to know that?)

Hello mother, Hello father…

I found out everything (let’s not exaggerate — I found out some things) from the sleepy nephew who woke up when the demon came and blew our family apart.

But that’s another story too.

We don’t live in that house anymore. In the middle of everything our landlord decided to sell it. We’d lived there fifteen years. The sleepy nephew moved to his studio in Hollywood to make it in the music business and then back with his mother in New York. The actor with the judgmental dog moved far away too. Who could bear it?

An intervention happened too.

It did no good.

But I went with Mr. Kiffen and my parents to the Betty Ford Family Treatment Center for a week of family therapy in the desert to learn to cope through role play and lecture. We signed a paper not to drink. My father said, “I never signed a paper.” And so drank his Costco-sized bottle of red wine out of a red solo cup.

I joined him the day I had to talk to an empty chair and role play that it was our son.

That week, a nun gave the most radiant talk I have ever heard in my life about grief and loving. Afterward, when I had I pulled myself together, I ran her in the hall and fell apart all over again trying to say thank you. She held me for a long time as I cried and said, “You have loved someone. You have loved someone so well and so strong.”

I don’t know for sure what became of the drug-dealing father and son who did odd jobs to keep up appearances. They took their temporary lives elsewhere, and I heard the father went to jail. Once, I saw the son washing his hair out of his car with a water jug. I took a picture of his license plate and sent it to the neighborhood watch block captain. (I was that person.)

By that time, my husband had warned the son to stay away.

KEEP OUT. YOU SHALL NOT CROSS.

I did not nor do I wish the son or father grace. Grace was in short supply that year. Maybe it still is for me regarding them.

In Alabama, girls from Norah’s classes are named: “Katie-Grace,” “Hannah-Grace,” “Emma-Grace.”

And if you can stand one more detail, in the middle of all that — all what?

Just this: We had to put down our own old dog, too, Bascom, a dog who was never once judgmental, and also a wiener dog.

My husband named our dog for his great uncle Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the minstrel of Appalachia. We got him as a puppy when the kids were tiny. They adored him. They made a movie starring Bascom called “The Patient English Dachshund” after seeing “The English Patient.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPKpU14Kqqw

Bascom was eighteen, blind and deaf. We kept his ashes, which our son later absconded with in a rage (he loved his dog). For a while Bascom’s ashes sat on a bar in an illegal after-hours club in Los Angeles, but he’s home now on the mantle in a box that says “Bascom.” The legend goes that one night 200 drunks raised their glasses for Bascom, the wiener dog, at the bar in a kind of impromptu toast for a life well lived.

We spent $250.00 to have Bascom cremated. We did it because the kids didn’t get to say good-bye. One was in Alabama, one was in New York, and we didn’t know how to reach the other because the intervention didn’t go the way we hoped.

Here is a link to Bascom’s namesake:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkoIKMcFAX8 (Preview)

We moved away from “Mr. Kiffen’s Boarding House,” and our landlord sold the place for a million dollars.

Houses cost millions in LA.

We have never owned a home. We aren’t alone. See: “Los Angeles has highest percentage of renters in the US.”

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2013/12/los_angeles_has_the_highest_percentage_of_renters_in_the_us_1.php

Now Mr. Kiffen lives alone now with one cat, Daisy, in the shadow of Dodger Stadium. He wants his wife and daughter to come home.

Maybe enough is enough.

In the meantime, I no longer clip on Olive’s purple harness, but instead I put her back legs in a sling, and we take a walk in Alabama and imagine lives in Los Angeles and try to figure where home is and how to get there from here.

We don’t know where our son sleeps at night or how he lives.

The years go by.

A boy on our old street, a heroin addict, died. He was one of my one son’s best friends.

And I think of the Brontes on the moors of Yorkshire — three sisters sword-fighting with their brother, Branwell, as children. Branwell was the gifted son, the one who got painting lessons and was so adored and beloved for all his brains and talent. I think of my own three children playing in the house, racing under trees, a jasmine King Kong topiary and later a treehouse built a long time ago by Kiffen and our son.

We used to shape the leaves into the name of the youngest fairy child, on the floor of the treehouse, so she would think the fairies visited. The middle child took pictures of everything so there is proof of these years.

A friend from England visited and advised me to buy birdhouses and call them fairyhouses, filling them with treats.

I dream of time-traveling to fix it all.

Then I take ecstatic Olive to the backyard in Alabama and toss her treats, so she’ll use her legs again, racing (stumble-trotting) toward the reward in order to get strong.

It’s the first Sunday that feels like fall in Alabama, and I wake up knowing I need to go see Jewel today. I’ve only had one experience with hospice before, but it’s been so long I have to make myself remember. Then I do. My grandmother, Mary Patricia Morris Madden, died on River Road in Bethesda, Maryland in her daughter’s home on the farm under the care of hospice. We were all with her. It was a weeklong procession of cakes, casseroles, and rosaries. I wrote a story about it in 2000 for Salon because I was writing a shadow soap opera during the week of her death. GrandMary, my grandmother, was born March 16, 1913 and died October 1, 1999. She was born so close to Saint Patrick’s Day she claimed it. The essay was called “Death and the Days of Our Lives” and it was about getting to be with my grandmother during her last week of life when Norah was a baby. It was about arriving on a hot September afternoon and leaving on a cold October morning.

Here is the link:

http://www.salon.com/2000/08/21/irish_eyes/

This is the beginning of that essay:

“Monsignor said we can use ‘Danny Boy’ but not ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ at the funeral Mass,” explains my aunt Sally. We are at the wake for my grandmother, whom we called “GrandMary.” She lay in her casket, dressed in the sky-blue dress she’d worn at a granddaughter’s wedding. She wore her glasses too; rosary weaved between her fingers; magenta fingernail polish. Aunt Sally’s two daughters had painted them the night before she died; GrandMary’s chest rose and fell in bursts of breath as the sisters lovingly manicured each nail.

“Why not ‘Irish Eyes’?” I ask.

“It isn’t Catholic enough for church. The Irish tenor is afraid to sing it without Monsignor’s permission.” Aunt Sally sighed.

There was an audible groan from those standing closest. It was one of the GrandMary’s few wishes; she rarely asked for anything for herself. It seemed such a small thing too. But I knew no one was going to call Monsignor on it because it was also something she would have hated for us to do. We’ve got “Danny Boy,” now leave it alone before Monsignor axes that one too. God love him.

“You should have just asked for forgiveness,” says my mother. “Not permission.”

“That’s right,” says Aunt Sally. “What are they going to tell us? That she can’t have a funeral Mass at St. Ann’s ever again?”

But I don’t think about any of this as I go to visit Jewel somewhere between Hoover and Bessemer, Alabama. I bring a tiny old-fashioned bottle stuffed with mostly baby’s breath — dyed different colors — raspberry, orange, white, and purple flowers. This is my first experience with “service learning” where we go out into the community to connect with people in Birmingham whose stories don’t often get told; whose voices and stories are often cut off from the everyday freedoms of being healthy and doing something as simple as taking a walk.

I teach creative writing, and my beginning nonfiction workshop visits adult day care at McCoy in East Birmingham in groups. The advanced workshop does hospice with each student having his or her own patient. It feels weird asking my students to do these things — to visit the old, the sick, the dying — without doing it myself too. (Although, I have plenty of excuses as to why I shouldn’t have to do it, but I also want to do it — I mean part of me does — the other part would like to go to the movies, but today I’m going to see Jewel.)

The GPS leads me to a shuttered gate somewhere on the border of Bessemer. I only know Bessemer from a sad DMV office that doesn’t process driver’s licenses after 1:00 pm and Gip’s Place, an old-time juke joint, that is only open on Saturday nights where they begin with a prayer and proceed to sing, dance, and play the blues until around two in the morning. Ten dollars and a string of Mardi Gras beads is the wristband equivalent at Gip’s. BYOB.

Jewel’s home is another kind of joint all altogether. The gate appears locked, but I get out and fiddle with the chains to discover it’s not really locked. I unthread them and they come apart. I open the gate and get back into the car to wind up to the top of the hill where I come to a sprawling facility in the middle of well-manicured lawns. I see no one but plenty of buildings. I walk around and see a few folks who are clearly visitors. I don’t know Jewel’s room number or even which building, so I call Julie, our hospice guide, and she directs me to the correct building.

There is a secretary at the front office. She is not chatty nor interested that I’ve come to see Jewell, so I over-compensate by saying “Yes ma’am” too much. This softens her a smidge. She directs me to sign in and mark the time.

When I ask her the time, she replies in the voice of someone who gets asked that question too often: “There is a clock right there on the wall beside you. But you’ll know that next time you visit.”

I mark the time as 4:07 and thank her, and she smiles briefly, but there is a couple behind me, so I don’t linger to ask about Jewel. I wonder if there is a football game on, since the place is so quiet. It’s Sunday — maybe a pro game? Saturdays in public in Alabama — stores, roads, parks — are so quiet during football season since everyone is tethered close to the game.

I make my way to Room 47, but the nurses say I must have the wrong Jewel. Then they correct themselves and say I have the right Jewel. There are two Jewels here, apparently, with the same last name. Is that possible? I follow the nurse to Room 47. Jewel is in there in her bed, attached to oxygen and television. She looks at me and says, “Where you’ve been? My feet are throbbing. I just need to leave them alone. My legs are short. See.”

She doesn’t want me to turn the television down, and then we are talking about how much we love coffee. She’d like to make me a cup of coffee. I say lame things about coffee being so good. The television and oxygen machine are on loud. I ask her about her favorite kind of coffee but she doesn’t answer.

It’s clear that she thinks she knows me, and she talks about people I don’t know as if I do know them, but then she says, “You look good. You’ve have had a real hard time of it, haven’t you? And you look good.”

(For a minute, I wonder if she’s some kind of seer. How does she know about my hard-living son and his demons in Los Angeles that wake me up like clockwork in the middle night as I wonder where he is sleeping? But she can’t possibly know. She just thinks I’m someone else who’s had a rough time of it.)

She talks about how she fell down hard. “One time I fell and broke both vertebrae in my neck and I broke my arm. Got up in the morning and made a pot of coffee. I dropped my coffee and it went everywhere. I had to leave it alone.”

I make a lot of sympathetic responses, and then I ask if she has kids.

“Two,” but she doesn’t elaborate.

The television is so loud I turn it down. She looks at me as if to figure out who the heck I am, and then she wants to get up, so we can go get coffee. She throws the sheets off determined to get up. She can’t possibly get out of bed, but I go to get the nurse anyway, to be safe. The nursing station is empty — only cookies and some of kind of orange punch are at the nurses’ station. I come back in the room with juice and see the call button. I turn it on and hope the nurses arrive soon.

She says, “I can do a lot for myself and they won’t let me.” She tries to get up but her body won’t cooperate.

“Your color is really good,” I tell her.

“Yes,” she nods and we confuse each other a while making conversation, and then she wants to the television changed to Channel Six. She keeps talking about Vicki and I ask, “Is Vicki your daughter?”

She replies, “Wild too.”

Two nurses come in and say to both of us, “What are you doing, lady? She can’t get out of bed. You can’t get out of bed, honey. She will try to get out, but she can’t get out. You’re to stay in the bed.” Their voices are kind and full of good humor.

I thank them for getting her back in bed and comfortable again.

“I’ve a lot people come by to see me,” Jewel says after the nurses leave.

“I’m sure you do. Where did you work?” I ask. “Go to school?” But she wants to talk about Medicare and insurance and how it’s good enough for her and she’ll leave it alone on the advice of her old boss. I’m not sure what she’s talking about, so I ask her again about work, school, and where she grew up, trying to tease out a memory.

But these questions are of no interest to her. So we talk about other things, and I pretend to understand her stories about supervisors, wild children who need a talking-to (not that it did any good). She said she was recently hired for a job, and they’re glad to have her working for them because she’s a good worker and they can depend on her. I cover her up but she wants her hands uncovered so I bring them out. They are little claws. She wants to get her leg back up right and says, “I can do it myself. I don’t need a pain pill.”

I find some pictures on her bedside and show them to her.

“I can’t see them.”

I put them closer to her face.

“That’s a good picture.”

“Isn’t that sweet? They’re pretty. Are they your girls?”

“Can I have those pictures? Put them in an envelope so they don’t get all bent up. Did the coffee taste good?”

I tell her yes, the coffee was delicious.

She looks at me again. “Do you still work down at the sheriff’s office, Vicki?”

Now I get it — I’m Vicki, and I work at the sheriff’s department.

“I work in the English Department now at UAB. I teach creative writing. I like to write stories.”

She looks baffled. “Fix that blind.”

I fix it. “Is that better?”

“I fell and hurt my elbows. The doctor operated, and we rode and rode to another hospital. I had to go back two or three times. Some days it just ‘frust-er-ated me.’ Because I had to wait and wait.”

She says she went out today for tests and had to wait and wait some more. Somebody wanted to give her pain shot, and she said to the woman, “What’s it gonna do? Drive me nuts? And the woman said, ‘It’ll help.’”

Jewel talks some more about a woman who gave her a shot who actually needs to retire. “We’re going to make her retire, and her sister will stay with her. She’ll like that.”

I ask if she has a sister.

Silence.

“Do you work anywhere?” she wants to know.

“UAB. In an office.” I try to keep it business-like.

“Are you still in the sheriff’s office, Vicki?”

“Yes, I am still in the sheriff’s office.”

Then I because I don’t know what else to say, I go to my default mode and say, “My father was a football coach.”

“Mine too. A lot of times when I think I’m having heart attack I just breathe and stay still. Then I can go to the doctor and they can figure it out.”

I ask if her daughters visit her, and I try to describe my girls and boy. Lucy, Norah, Flannery.

Silence.

“Do you like the flowers?” I put them in front of her face.

“They’re so pretty.”

We talk about how it’s important to leave flowers alone so they won’t droop. She discusses a contrary worker, whom she didn’t like at all at first, but who grew on her, but that worker never could leave the flowers alone and made them droop, fooling with them too much.

Then she says, “You had a baby. You have two children now.”

“Actually, I have three.” I hold up three fingers. “Two girls and a boy.”

“Well, y’all didn’t waste anytime.”

I nod, but I don’t say they are 26, 24, and 16.

Jewel doesn’t like the orange punch at the place, but she tolerates it. She looks sleepy. I ask her about her grandchildren, and then someone from across the hall howls, “Momma! Momma! Momma!” It’s haunting. Jewel doesn’t notice. “Momma! Momma! Momma! Momma!”

Jewel talks about her eyes and how they give her trouble and she’s had operations. I wonder how much she can see. She wants to know again if I still work at the Sheriff’s Office, and I ask her if she’s ever worked there. She doesn’t say. We sit in a silence for a bit. I tell her it’s almost Halloween.

“It’s good to see you, Vicky,” her eyes begin to close.

“Do want to sleep? Are you sleepy, Jewel?” I want to call her by her surname, but I can’t remember it at that moment.

“Yes. I’m sorry. What are you going to do? You going to go back to work at the sheriff’s?”

I tell her yes and that I’ll visit her another time.

She smiles at me and says, “I love you.”

I say, “I love you too.”

“Promise you’ll come back?”

“I promise.” I wave and walk out into the hallway and take a deep breath. Old folks are gathered in chairs out in the lobby. If I were kinder, I would sit and talk to them for a minute. Two women smile in my direction, and I know they would probably like to talk. Maybe next time. I walk outside into the warmth of October glad to have met Jewel and glad to go home to my daughter and dog, who will be waiting for me. I think about my son and wonder where he is, and I think about Jewel and wonder how she got the name Jewel. Who named her Jewel? Then I drive away.