Suicide, fear and loneliness – a night with Hemingway

On October 27, ironically my mother’s birthday, I went to see the Nick Adams Stories with an all-star cast at the SF Symphony’s Davies Hall: Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, Casey Affleck, Bruce Willis, Danny Glover, Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, Rita Wilson (maybe that’s half a star), Joachim Phoenix, Danny Devito, Billy Crystal and Jack Nicholson playing old Papa himself. All were performing in a play written by a friend of Hemingway’s – A.E. Hotchner, for a benefit for Paul Newman’s charity. The money raised went to support the Painted Turtle – the West coast version of the Hole in the Wall Gang in Connecticut; both provide support and a place to find friendship for children living with diseases and life-long disabilities.

In the wake of Paul Newman’s death, the performances seemed to carry an additional weight. The actors read from script books, but occasionally didn’t need them at all. The symphony sometimes drowned out their voices, which was a shame, and generally detracted from the performances instead of adding the emotional depth I think that they were meant to offer. Overall, a good night with some stellar performances and some so-so acting.

I also wasn’t sure that I left with the charitable feelings that the night meant to protract from me. As I sat in the dark, watching the children led onto the stage at the end of the play, listening to Bonnie Raitt singing “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”, I felt manipulated. And I wondered if pity was really the motivator of all charity, when it should be something else. I thought about Leslie Butt’s critique of the “suffering stranger” as a rhetorical device and humanitarianism as culturally constructed. Yet, I still paid my $40 and felt good about it, even if it only pays for one week out of 52 and doesn’t fix any of the structural reasons that these children need help in the first place.

What I did leave the event with, however, were some overall thoughts on Hemingway, writing and death. Basically, I rediscovered what it means to be human. I had forgotten how powerful Hemingway’s simple prose could be. No fancy tricks, no turning books upside down, no footnotes, no clever use of punctuation – just the bare bones human experience to turn around in your fingers like a dollar-coin, pondering what you can do with it.

Hemingway’s character, Nick Adams, is the complete symbol of America. He’s selfish, ego-centric, searching, and alone. He claims near the beginning of the play that he doesn’t love anyone at all. Sometimes, he seems incapable of feeling anything at all. He’s the center spoke in the wheel of activity around him; he records, observes, participates in an off-handed way, but never seems quite fully present. He’s young and brash and naive and foolish and brave all at once.

Nick Adams, for all purposes, is Hemingway – not entirely a fictional character. I’m writing a memoir right now, and I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time wondering how to ’structure’ my own life inot discreet, narrateable tales. The Nick Adams Stories gave me a clue.

The play – and the stories – are all about the same things: fear, loneliness and death.

Hemingway seemed almost obsessed with the truth versus social lies, masculinity in the form of violence or aggression (note all the war and bull-fighting stories), femininity and the ways in which women ruin or poison men’s lives (Hemingway hated his controlling mother, whom he blamed for his father’s suicide), and what it meant to be brave or a coward in the face of life – and by extension, death itself.

Hemingway’s stories reveal a man that desires to ‘be somebody’. That desire drives him out of his home in small-town Illinois and around the world, until he finds himself smack in the middle of WWI as an ambulance driver in Italy. Once he’s on the road, however, he discovers that loneliness and fear follow him wherever he travels. Nick Adams tells us that once loneliness and fear start, they never stop.

In the end, Hemingway discovers that he was always running AWAY from something, but never TOWARD anything. What he was running from was his ambivalent relationship to his father, whom Hemingway thought was a coward for killing himself with a shotgun. Hemingway, throughout his life and his stories, tries to face death head on, to be unafraid in the face of it.

I wonder if, just before he pulled the trigger of the shotgun, Hemingway had his last revelation about suicide and death. It’s not exactly cowardice to pull that trigger, and the false bravado that Hemingway tried to master his entire life was not exactly bravery or courage. In the end, Hemingway ran toward death – like his father before him – and who among us can judge him? 

The last line in the play sums everything up for me:

“You cannot carry the wind, the wind carries you.”

As I write my path through my past, I’ll try to keep the wind at my back, instead of bracing myself against it.

Remembrance of Things Past – for Memorial Day

Proust, as a writer, rambled. In his six-volume opus, he took pages and pages to describe a room or an outdoor scene. He got his timelines mixed up, and often had someone talking to his main character in book four that had died in book two. He was clearly an insufferable snob. But, he is probably my favorite author of all time. Simply because if you stick with him to the end, you feel a sense of comfort about love and loss and the troubled majesty of humanity.

One of the reasons that I love In Search of Lost Time is Proust’s attempt to recover sensations, memories, himself in an earlier time. Reading the novel, one gets the sense that the young Marcel is not the same as the old Marcel – something has been lost. Time ravages not only the outward form of the body, but the inward solidity of the mind. By the end of our lives, we are scattered personalities, having left pieces of ourselves in the past.

For Proust, it is the tiniest thing that sparks a memory: the taste of a favorite food, the sound of a bell, the smell of a perfume, the light falling across a room in a particular way. However, when he wants to conjure up a feeling from the past, he fails – it falls flat. Desiring a return to the past can do nothing; the mind will go where it wants.

It is as though he fears that all the intense emotions that he has felt throughout his life – especially for those who have died – were never really real at all. All the moments of intense joy and pain are chimerical, he cannot recall them in enough detail. That is why, I think, that Proust spends so much of his time in description. It’s as though he is trying to submerse himself in the past in order to recover his loves.

Even his grandmother’s memory has faded. He mourns the fact that he no longer feels the pain of her loss so intensely, that he is able to go on without her. As well as without his great love, Albertine. He questions if his love for these women – his mother, too – was authentic. If it was, then why doesn’t it remain with him? He rebukes himself for living long after they have gone.

On Memorial Day, I think that this sentiment is apropos.

My mother died on Memorial Day a very long 22 years ago. Today, when reading a story about the absence of red, plastic poppy flowers, the traditional button-hole flower of remembrance, I wept. In Peet’s coffee, of all places. I had a Proustian moment of memory – unbidden, unsought, vividly and instantly recalled. I thought of a Memorial Day in the distant past, long before my mother’s untimely death, when she had purchased us both a poppy from a Veteran selling them in front of a store. As I read, I suddenly remembered the old man’s grizzled hands, the white box that held all the artificial poppies, the collection jar. I remembered the thin, green-paper wrapped wire stem that I bent around my finger like a ring. I remembered the black, round center of the flower, and strange feel of the fake petals. I remembered the old man’s cap, and the rows of pins on his uniform.

In essence, I remembered what it used to feel like to be a young child with her mother on an early summer afternoon.

Often, I worry that I have forgotten her completely. Over time, I lost her slowly: first, the tenor of her voice; then, the contours of her face and the color of her hair; finally, what she liked or how she moved. Everything faded into the memory files of my mind, in places that I can no longer access easily – if at all. It sometimes feels as if I birthed myself, as though I never had a mother or a life before the accident. As though everything that happens to me is always in a post-loss framework.

Those moments when I do suddenly remember the past – like today in Peet’s – are extremely painful, but necessary.

The truth is, we never stop missing those we have lost. But we do forget, if not completely. As I age, I realize that nostalgia is a powerful force. The past beckons to all of us, good or bad, and we all – at some point – go in search of lost time or things past.

Read Proust this summer if you haven’t already. There are bits of comfort and wisdom in there, if you are patient enough to discover them. And while you are frolicking on your day off, remember for just a moment those that you have loved, as well as those brave soldiers and civilians that others have loved and lost.

Chapter Seventeen – in Cambodia

The end of June and I have already been in Hong Kong six months. A 29-year-old Indonesian maid contracted Japanese encephalitis from a mosquito bite while working for a Chinese family in the new territories. The disease is so rare that it makes the front page. After testing the family she worked for, the authorities found no other cases.

The weather is so hot and steamy that standing outside you sweat. While waiting for the shuttle bus, I am stationary for less than three minutes. The stop is just outside the main doors of the apartment complex, shaded by a marble awning and surrounded by trees, low bushes and flowering shrubs.

I have my workbook on Chinese measure words and am pouring over it, trying to memorize various characters and sound out new sentences. As I am reading, I shift my weight from side to side and lift each foot off of the ground as if I am marching in place. Left, right, left, right. It is rhythmic and helps me concentrate on the musical sounding pronunciations and rhythms of the language.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a team of three gardeners. Each is wearing a bright orange shirt with green colored pants and white canvas sneakers. They wear straw hats tied round their chins with bright fabric and protective gloves. On their faces, they don white surgical masks. One of them, the only male, is dragging a large plastic barrel on a trolley. The other two are helping to push it from behind. Attached to the plastic canister is a long, white spraying hose which the man occasionally stops to use. He sprays the bushes and into the trees. They slowly make their way around the perimeter of the grounds, the hose hissing as it sprays a light mist of liquid.

I assume it is insecticide they are spraying. The masks and gloves suggest that it is a fairly strong concoction. It is too hot to be wearing so much clothing and I wonder if they like their job.

Once the bus pulls up and I climb aboard, I notice that I have five small round bumps on the skin of my calves. Despite the spraying, I have been bitten.

Half-seriously and half-jokingly, I have been warning my friends about dengue fever. There has been a report that mosquitoes that harbor the disease are at an all-time high. Though no cases have been reported, the government is seriously worried about the tightening circle of disease surrounding us. Already in remotes areas of Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines, the disease is endemic. They are frightened that it might become endemic in the city. There is talk of a major mosquito eradication campaign.

Dengue fever is no picnic. Though almost everyone recovers from the onslaught of the bone-racking pain and fever, if caught a second time it is 50 percent more likely to cause death.

Japanese encephalitis is much worse. Not only does it cause extreme discomfort and a very serious condition, it kills up to one-third of those it infects. While still in New York, I went to a travel medicine clinic to be vaccinated for everything that the doctor could think of – ironically everything except for Japanese encephalitis. I am susceptible.

“No need,” the immunity specialist had told me. “Hong Kong doesn’t have it. It won’t be a problem.”

“I can always get it later,” I said, agreeing. “If I need to.”

“Besides, you want to stay away from mosquito bites in Southeast Asia anyway,” the specialist said. “There’s no prevention for dengue fever and malaria is rife as well.”

“I can always take anti-malarials.”

“Yes,” the specialist replied. “But if you’re like some of my patients, you won’t like some of the side effects.”

“Which are?”

“Severe headaches, bad nightmares, insomnia,” she said and listed each one out on a fingertip. Then she smiled and added, “Plus, if you’re really lucky, they can sometimes, though very rarely, cause psychotic episodes or breaks. Especially if there’s a family history of mental problems.”

“Just what I need,” I said, smiling back at her. “I think I’ll just stick with some serious bug spray.”

“Suit yourself.”

***

The ancient Cambodians had three ways of dealing with their dead. The first involved burning the body and burying the ashes. The second, a makeshift wooden raft was constructed and the body would be placed upon it and floated out on the lake. Finally, since they were surrounded by dense forest teeming with life, the relatives of the deceased would carry the body far out into the surrounding jungle and simply leave it there, unburied, to decompose naturally. As we are bumping down the road, headed for the elephant terrace, I am looking out the car window at a row of smaller temples thinking that I might prefer the last choice.

We have been in Cambodia for only a day and my senses are overwhelmed. Temples rise out of the greenery at scattered points throughout the countryside. In addition to the famous main temple complex of Ankor Wat, there are tens, hundreds of smaller sites in the area. In the past, the entire place must have been filled with people and wealth.

The dark sedan we are riding in pulls to a stop under a shade tree. As we pop out from the back seat, we are accosted by an array of children selling postcards, bracelets, hand-carved wooden toys, woven straw placemats. Each one insists that we buy something. When we smile and shake our heads no, they change tactic. Maybe we only need one thing? But if we do, then we must buy from only them. It is impossible, even if we were interested in purchasing something, to decide from whom to buy. The children are identical in dress, stature, and health. In other words, they are all equally poor.

One boy’s smile is a bit brighter than the others. Instead of smiling for us, he seems to be merely smiling for himself. The top of his head doesn’t even come up to my shoulder. I have to lean my head down a bit to answer him or to listen. His feet are bare and he takes inordinately big strides to keep up with me.

“Where you from?”

“U.S.”

“The capital of the U.S. is Washington, D.C.” He says this matter-of-factly, as if he is showing off at a school competition, rather than trying to sell me trinkets or souvenirs.

I notice that his white-striped shirt is unbuttoned and his smooth, brown-colored skin is gleaming from sweat. His hair is cut short and when he smiles, his teeth appear as white as an ad for teeth whitener. Despite myself, I cannot help warming to him a little.

“That’s good,” I say.

Encouraged, he tries something else. “The U.S. has 285 million people.”

“Wow, that’s more than I know. You must be the best at your school.”

He doesn’t really understand me. I wonder if he goes to school at all, or if this is his full-time occupation. If I buy something from him, will his parents be pleased?

“The capital of Maine is Bangor,” he says brightly.

I am impressed. Some Americans wouldn’t know that fact. If pressed, I would have had to think about it for a moment.

“You buy from me when you get back.”

I smile at him. Trying to give him a false promise, I steer myself away from him and follow closer to our guide, Mr. Choeun.

“You buy only from me, okay?” he asks, still smiling.

He is still asking the same question as his voice fades into the background. The children are not allowed to go into the attractions. I don’t know this for certain, but because they never follow us, I assume that they have been warned from hassling the tourists too much while they are visiting official sites.

“Does anyone ever get bothered by this?” my husband asks as he pulls up the rear.

Choeun shakes his head and laughs a little.

“Oh, no,” he says, “most people understand. It took me awhile to get used to it, but now I don’t mind.”

We follow him up some stone stops to the top of the terrace. Since I am directly behind him, I am following his footsteps exactly. He must know which stones are better for holding our weight. Rundown, some of these sites are a bit dangerous – loose rocks, sections falling away, no guardrails, steep steps.

“Children here are very lucky,” Choeun tells us. “Siem Reap is lucky to have a free children’s hospital. Free treatment for diseases.”

“You have a problem with malaria here, right?”

He turns his round face and looks at me with his dark eyes. His large eyes are so dark that the white part of them are almost light tan in color. As he talks, he often uses his hands to communicate. His English is excellent, but he makes good use of his gestures to help us to understand.

“Oh, yes,” he says, waving his hand all around him, “malaria is very bad. Also the diarrhea sickness kills many. I think that one in eight or ten children die.”

Standing on the side of the terrace are two small children. As we pass them, they stare up at us. Unlike all the other children we have seen, they aren’t holding anything for us to purchase. For a moment, I think that they will beg from us instead, but they do not. They are just looking. Their eyes are dark and almost vacant, as if they have no thoughts at all or do not know what to think. The truth is probably that they do not know how or what to think about us – two stark, white people with new-looking clothes and sneakers, snapping digital pictures and talking in a foreign language.

When we have gotten a few feet beyond the children, one of them says a faltering, “Hello.” The word is spoken hesitantly, as if it is being tried out for the first time. It is also vaguely hopeful.

It makes me stop to wonder whether or not I am still hopeful. As a person, I feel as though every word I speak sounds like the child’s greeting. I am uncertain, vague, almost terrified. And there is hunger inside of me. Even still, it is an indistinct craving for something I cannot possibly name.

We stop at the edge of the elephant terrace and look around. It is a grand, commanding view. Behind us lies the old king’s quarters. The only thing left of them is a high stone wall adjacent to the terrace.

“The king would come out here every morning,” Choeun explains. “To watch military processions or to meet diplomats from other countries.”

“Must have been quite a sight,” my husband says, his hands resting on his hips.

Choeun points to a large stone structure just to the side of the king’s platform. Square-shaped, it rises higher than the terrace and has intricate carvings on all its sides. But none of elephants.

“That is the leper king’s terrace,” Choeun says. “That is where they would cremate the kings. They would burn the body on top and then keep the ashes within the walls.”

“Appropriate name,” my husband replies. Then he begins asking Choeun something about the current political situation of Cambodia, about its current king, the recent Khmer Rouge years, and how Choeun thinks things are progressing. As they talk under the hot, early afternoon sun, I drift off.

I look at the Terrace of the Leper King and ponder how the king could walk out of his home everyday to attend to state business and look upon the place where he would ultimately be burned. Each morning, he was the king. And yet on his left were presumably the remains of other, just as powerful, kings. A constant reminder of his own ultimate insignificance directly adjacent to the symbols of his ultimate rule.

How did it measure up? Did he ever look out of the corner of his eye and catch a glimpse of the fire that would consume him? Did it humble him or embolden him to think of his own death? Did it make for bold action? Perhaps Ankor Wat was merely a testament to the power of having death as a constant shadow over life. It pushed the king to create an empire, to leave something in his wake, to construct some of the most ornate and beautiful structures in the world.

Alternatively, maybe it was a spiritual gamble. Maybe constructing grand temples was a way to ease his own mind. As king, he wanted to be remembered, but surely he was also bribing his gods to let him into whatever heaven there was for him. Perhaps an early tribute to insure a good reincarnation.

What was it about ancient cultures that made them so good at living with the dead? Were they simply much stronger than us, capable of long, contemplative gazes at something we, as their descendents, no longer care to see at all? Their death was on their left, a living presence in their daily life. Our death is a murky shadow, a ghost that we attempt to keep directly behind us at all times in order not to see it clearly. But what is more terrifying? Looking at it, carving out its beauty – or hiding it away in hospitals, in cleverly disguised funeral parlors, or in nursing homes?

I stop myself from jumping down from the terrace to get closer to the Leper King and watch my husband chatting with our guide. He is different than me; death is not something he thinks about at all. He is more concerned with life as it is being lived. In the car of life, he is looking ahead with an occasional glance in the rear-view mirror. I am in the backseat with my face pressed up against the window, forever looking back.

***

Hong Kong Observatory has just issued a Tropical Storm Warning – Level 8. In layman’s terms, we are about to come between a typhoon and the mainland. I have been through loads of storms. From the Midwest, I am used to tornado warnings and violent thunderstorms. When I was in New York, I even suffered through a low-level hurricane. But I have never seen a typhoon and I have to admit I am nervous.

People have been instructed to go home, to stay indoors. In our apartment building, the management staff slipped some “typhoon instructions” under our doors. Apparently, it is a good idea to seal off any gaps in the windows, move any furniture away from the side of the apartment facing the harbor, and place strong adhesive tape across the big bay windows. I have done none of this, partially because I do not have any special tape. And I am not about to go out looking for some now.

I am unprepared.

Outside the window, it is the calm before the storm. The clouds are rushing past at quick speeds, as if I were watching a speeded up film of the sky. The cloud cover changes from ominously dark to so light that it almost seems that the sun might break through. The wind is constant. Looking down from the 37^th floor to the poolside below, I can see the palm trees blowing violently. The entire city is hushed and hesitant. We are all waiting silently and patiently for it to begin.

I almost don’t breathe at all. My nerves are a little jittery and I am acting like a seven-year-old child before her birthday. I am anxious to see the storm, to see what kind of power can be unleashed by nature, but I am also scared to witness it. Not for the first time, I feel closer to another godlike realm here. Perched at the top of the city, I feel the electricity in the air. It is exhilarating.

My husband called me from the office to say that he is headed home. The shuttle bus back to our building has discontinued service. As I watch the winding road that snakes behind the trees below, I can’t even see any red cabs. He has told me he will probably just walk home. It is only twenty minutes and the serious winds haven’t started yet. Still, it makes me a bit worried. I don’t like the idea of him getting caught out in a sudden storm burst. But there is nothing that I can do about it. There are very few other options.

As I wait for him, I busy myself with small household chores.

There is something strange about waiting for a storm to pass over you. It feels like waiting for death to brush past your skin and blow you a kiss. In a storm, there is no telling.

Elegy for my Grandmother – Ruby McKinney

RUBY BEATRICE (SPENCER) COLEY-McKINNEY

(1913 – 2006)

My grandmother, aged 93, died this morning. While at this age, death cannot be said to be unexpected, it is still always a shock to the system of the living. It reminds us of our own mortality and the heaviness of our lineage. My path through life was certainly paved with the sweat, blood and tears of many women, my grandmother being the first among them.

These are things I can tell you:

She always carried cookies or mini candy bars in the front pockets of her apron. When no one was looking, she doled them out to her grandchildren.

Good behavior was never a prerequisite for garnering her love.

Whenever she cooked, it was for twenty people. Even when only four people were present.

She insisted upon making her own, southern-styled, gravy and noodles. Despite having the recipe, no one has ever been able to duplicate the yummy results.

I once told her I like tapioca and for the next twenty years, every time I came home for a visit, there would be four tiny bowls of it in the refrigerator for me. Handmade.

She wore a sweater even in the summertime because she would often ‘catch a chill.’

She believed in God, but never went to church. One day, she asked me whether or not I believed in anything and when I said I didn’t she shrugged her shoulders and said she expected that God wouldn’t bother himself too much about it.

While frequently writing it in a card, she never once said the words “I love you” until she turned 90 and then only said it once, when she thought that she wouldn’t survive until my next visit. Just in case, she wanted me to know it for sure, she said.

When we were children, if we made to her before our parents caught us, we would never be disciplined. In any game of tag, she was always a “safe” base.

When I was thirteen and my mother and I had gotten into a huge argument over my wanton unruliness, she happily told me about the time my mother ran away to Chicago at the age of sixteen to become a singer.

She worked hard her entire life, having been pulled out of school during the 8th grade.

She always took an extra roll in Yahtzee, claiming she couldn’t remember if it had been three yet. However, she could count up all the dice in five seconds flat. In her 80s and 90s, no one ever called her out on it.

When she played cards, which she avidly loved to do, she never hesitated to use guilt to help her win a point. She hated to lose.

Until she was in her late 80s, she still mowed her own lawn.

Her front yard was filled with rose and peony bushes and she was in a never-ending battle with aphids.

She outlived two husbands and on my last visit she revealed to me that she didn’t think marriage was so hot. And if she had it to do all over again, she might not have had any children, though she didn’t regret having those that she did. She hinted that she we were a lot alike and that was just fine by her.

Every Halloween, she gave out the best candy on the block.

Every Christmas, she gave me extra presents in secret.

She only came up to my shoulder, but claimed she had always been 5′7″. (I’m 5′ 7″.)

She would rather eat cookies or ice cream than dinner.

For years, she was deaf in one ear and near-deaf in the other. She had a hard time hearing, so everyone became louder around her. When someone wanted to keep something from her, they would whisper. She would surprise them sometimes by repeating everything of interest.

Even though she never had much money herself, she could always find $10 to lend out.

She never yelled at anyone in my presence except my step-grandfather, and he deserved it.

She loved horses from her days on the farm. She knew how to bridle, saddle and hitch them to a wagon, but she never learned how to ride one.

She often said that it had been a long life and that she had lived through so much that somebody ought to have written a book.

Maybe someday I will.

Sending her off on the next part of the journey with all my love.