Year-Ender 2018

Exit, stage left.

Between any January 1 and December 31, stuff comes and goes. People places events. Some for the better; others less so.

Sayonara, 2018.

Happy New Year!

Below is a list of personal favorite Lung posts from the last twelve months.

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Women’s March, Denver. A gathering of the loyal opposition.

No One Stopped Him. That vulgar fraud, that morally bankrupt pig, that transparently corrupt, manifestly unqualified, grotesque excuse of a – well, to whom could I possibly refer? Three guesses!

Sour Grape. A romp through a local, legal pot store.

Podcasts. Stuff to listen to.

Notes on Arthroscopic Surgery. My (formerly) aching shoulder. It’s all better now, at year’s end.

English Teacher. An homage (sort of) to my old high school English teacher – and for us, the living (apologies to Myrlie Evers).

Anne Frank and Amy Bellette. Ruminations on a forty-year-old novel, and a seventy-plus-year-old diary.

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Here is an extra one from the pile (several years old!).

Resolutions. I have recycled this one a couple of times. Third time’s the charm.

Anne Frank and Amy Bellette

If not for Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, I might never have gotten around to reading Diary of a Young Girl, aka The Diary of Anne Frank.

Roth’s novel is set in 1955, and Anne Frank figures in as a character – miraculously, but not implausibly, having survived the horror of Nazi concentration camps, and deliberately living in anonymity in the United States.

Or is it Anne Frank?

The Ghost Writer is the first of Roth’s Zuckerman novels, and it totally knocks me out – as much now as the first time I read it six or seven years ago. It centers on the young Nathan Zuckerman and a quarrel within the Zuckerman household: Nathan has used an old family dispute as the source for one of his short stories. The dispute involved a fight over money, and Nathan’s mortified parents conclude, or at least strongly suspect, that their son is a self-hating Jew.

Actually, that’s mostly backstory. The novel proper begins with Nathan as the invited guest at the home of his literary idol, one E.I. Lonoff. Nathan, in the wake of his family feud, sent Lonoff his story and “had come, you see, to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E.I. Lonoff’s spiritual son.”

At the Lonoff home he meets a young woman named Amy Bellette, and in a flight of fancy begins to think she is, in fact, Anne Frank. The reader, too, is permitted to think this. The circumstances of Anne’s miraculous survival, and her discovery years later that her diary (Het Achterhuis in the original Dutch) has not only been published but become an international sensation, are described in excruciating detail, as are her reasons for choosing anonymity.

Nathan observes:

How could even the most obtuse of the ordinary ignore what had been done to the Jews just for being Jews, how could even the most benighted of the Gentiles fail to get the idea when they read in Het Achterhuis that once a year the Franks sang a harmless Chanukah song, said some Hebrew words, lighted some candles, exchanged some presents – a ceremony lasting about ten minutes – and that was all it took to make them the enemy. It did not even take that much. It took nothing – that was the horror. And that was the truth. And that was the power of her book.

Soon enough, Nathan falls in love with Amy/Anne and imagines marrying her. What better way to prove you’re not a self-hating Jew? Here’s my new bride, Anne Frank!

The Ghost Writer is, by turns, hilarious and harrowing. (About the only thing I don’t like is a casual, almost throwaway line, “when Oswald shot Kennedy” – regrettable, and beneath a writer as smart as Philip Roth.)

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So after first reading The Ghost Writer, I at long last turned to the famous diary. Hard to believe I went so long without reading it.

Maybe I’d never read it, but I knew the story: who doesn’t? I knew the grim outcome. That outcome is in sharp contrast to certain other elements of the diary, in particular the elfin-like names of its principals: Pim and Miep and Bep, and of course Kitty.

And yet I did not get hooked right away. For one thing, I discovered a “definitive edition” of the diary and began comparing passages between it and the version I had started with, which was a well-worn mass market paperback – the version everyone probably starts with. Eventually I set them both down. Soon they were due at the library. Then overdue. I returned them and paid the fines.

Eventually I got back to it, but got sidetracked again – this time by The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, a thick volume containing three versions of the famous diary and a lot of related material. Began plowing through them simultaneously.

A section of The Critical Edition called “The Betrayal” really intrigued me. A lingering question is how the Franks were discovered by the Nazis. There is nothing definitive, but suspicion centers on a man named W.G. van Maaren, who apparently worked for the Frank business starting in 1943, when the family was already in hiding.

According to the critical edition, van Maaren grew suspicious about what might be going on at night, in the building where the Franks hid. He set little traps he thought might reveal people were hiding, like dusting the floor with flour, which he hoped would reveal footprints should those hiding emerge after hours.

Did he betray his employer and his family in exchange for a bounty? Van Maaren was grilled about this more than once after the war but never admitted to anything. Nothing was ever proven. He died in Amsterdam in 1971.

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I think it is fairly well known that Nathan Zuckerman was Philip Roth’s alter-ego. Roth was himself attacked as a self-hating Jew, after publication of Goodbye Columbus in 1959. I won’t weigh in on that, but I will say that Roth wrote with great power – not just fictionalized accounts of Nazi outrages, but anti-Semitism in particular.

Philip Roth died in May 2018. The Ghost Writer was published in 1979. Did Nathan become Lonoff’s spiritual son? I will not say. But I’ll add that Roth revisited parts of The Ghost Writer a few years ago, in his novel Exit Ghost; I consider it a companion piece.

Anniversary, 2018

A very brief excerpt from Chapter Thirteen, “The Circus.”
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Being in Dealey Plaza at half past noon on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination is an incomparable experience. Whether you care deeply about who killed Kennedy or think the whole conspiracy thing is a crock, you cannot help being impressed, for better or worse, by the reality of Dealey Plaza on a sunny midday in late November, and by the people who show up there to remember JFK.

Like September 11th and December 7th, November 22nd is a date synonymous with national calamity. The implications of the assassination loomed over the United States for decades, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. Maybe it’s because so few people still care. Or maybe it’s because of that whole new form of government Jack Ruby warned of. Or maybe it’s that, between the stigma associated with “conspiracy theory” and the passage of so much time, the issue has been effectively neutered.

As I grew up, though, the assassination seemed ominous and real, especially on each anniversary. The next day’s paper always had a picture of surviving Kennedys gathered at JFK’s grave at Arlington. One of them, usually Teddy, leaned forward to place flowers by that eternal flame, while the rest knelt beside him, their heads bent in prayer. That picture didn’t change much from year to year – except gradually, as strange fates and the inevitable claims of time left fewer family members to mark the occasion.

...above text excerpted from Conspiracy Nut, © 2018 by John Kelin

English Teacher

Early this year my high school English teacher, from more years ago than I like to calculate, called me to say: look me up next time you’re in town.

The town is Detroit, where I grew up. I get back there most Septembers to see my mom, and to check in with a handful of others. My old teacher and I have stayed in touch over the years, on and off, and her call was neither unusual nor out of the blue.

This teacher, back in what some people like to call “the day,” had apparently seen something worthwhile in the anguished teen prose I used to turn in. She began thwarting my tendency to skip class by urging me to go to the school library instead, and write whatever I felt like. I had never written much, before that.

When my father died two Septembers ago, I restricted that year’s fall visit to his funeral. But I had been to Detroit in July, too; my dad was increasingly frail and the end was plainly getting close, so I wanted to say my goodbyes. I saw my English teacher then. I’d already begun writing the eulogy I assumed I’d be asked to deliver at my dad’s funeral, and read her a draft. A bit like old times.

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This year I flew into Detroit on a Thursday evening with a rough idea of how I’d be spending the next few days. I expected it to include a visit with my old teacher, but thus far had been unable to reach her. I’d left her a voice mail the preceding Monday but she hadn’t called back yet. I tried again on Wednesday and still couldn’t reach her.

On Friday morning, by then in Motown, I called her a third time. Still no answer. In my bones, I sensed something wrong. Her house is only a few miles from my mom’s, so I decided on the direct approach and drove over that afternoon.

I parked along the tree-lined street in front of her house in a quiet Detroit suburb – the same house she lived in since way back. Signs of life: a car in the driveway, and trash cans hauled to the curb. A porch light burned, which seemed odd at that hour. Otherwise, a picture of normality.

She preferred people coming to the side door but no one answered my knock. I knocked again – again no answer. I walked around to the front and knocked, then rang the bell. Still nothing. My apprehension increased.

Across the street, an older man pulled a cord to start a lawn mower, then began pushing it across the lawn. Aside from that the neighborhood was still.

I walked to the house next door and rang the bell. The guy who answered didn’t know anything. This is my sister’s house, he said, and she isn’t home. I’m visiting from Chicago.

So I crossed the street and got the attention of the lawn mower guy. And who are you? he asked. I explained as succinctly as possible and it satisfied him. Yes, he knew my teacher. He mowed her lawn, too. I’m sorry to tell you this, he said, but she had a stroke last weekend and is in hospice care at William Beaumont Hospital.

Saddened, but not all that surprised, I drove back to my mom’s and pondered my next move. The direct approach had worked so far, so I called the hospital, got transferred two or three times, and finally reached my teacher’s room. Her daughter answered and confirmed what the lawn mower guy said. Would visiting be a bad idea? I asked. No, she said. A good idea, in fact. And within half an hour I pulled into the hospital parking structure, walked inside, and took the elevator up to the sixth floor.

I found my teacher confined to bed, very weak and tired, and only semi-responsive. Half her face sagged. Our conversation was anything but ordinary and I won’t recount it all. I wondered if she’d even know it was me. It became clear that she did. We held hands. She told me she loved me. I told her I loved her.

“I’m not exactly Shakespeare,” I said. “But I’ve been paid to write one thing or another for most of my working life. And your encouragement, way back when, made all the difference.”

A nurse came into the room and took my teacher’s vitals. The objective now, the nurse said, is to keep her comfortable. Comfortable has never sounded more ominous.

I stayed for about an hour. That night I attended a baseball-themed party in a downtown Detroit bar. I don’t drink much and am not an overly social animal, but had a much better time than I anticipated. A great time, in fact. I think I needed the contrast.

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On Sunday afternoon I visited my father’s grave. I didn’t bring flowers. I didn’t pull weeds, I didn’t talk to him, I didn’t mourn. I just sat there. It was my first time there since the funeral, but it felt almost routine.

His grave is at the bottom of a gentle slope in a quiet, bucolic boneyard. There’s a large stone ten feet or so from the grave, ideal for sitting, and it occurred to me, as I sat down, that mine must be the umpteen-zillionth ass to warm that rock over who knows how many years.

A great calm settled over me and, it seemed, my very surroundings. My thoughts wandered far and wide, as they only seem to do at such times. I admired the trees. I listened to the birds. I noticed the logic to what at first had seemed a haphazard arrangement of all those neighboring headstones, and began to read some of the names: Wood, Springer, Rogers, Meade, Warren, Kennedy, Van Deun, Goodyear, Drutchas, and Jones.

Of course there was a Jones.

Then I looked a little closer at one of those headstones. May 1971 - November 2002. Beloved daughter. Devoted mother.

Thirty-one years.

Directly across from this headstone was a granite bench, engraved to the same young woman. My Angel, I Love You, Dad. I Love You Mom, Justin.

My dad was eighty-eight when he died. My mom is ninety-one and still going. I don’t know my former teacher’s age, but she’s probably coming up on eighty.

That headstone and bench offered no clue, of course, to the cause of that young woman’s death. Only the stark reminder that for any of us, the end may arrive at any time – at any age, and for any reason, or for no reason. I left the cemetery with a powerful need to contact the living, those people who mean the most to me, to remind them I love them.

Postscript: My teacher died on September 16, 2018, two days after I saw her.

Ball to the Wall (Or, Okay Stop!)

Three weeks after shoulder surgery, I still have gray gummy stripes on my upper arm – glue residue from the incision bandage. I can shower normally now (only sponge baths at first), but am not supposed to scrub my upper arm. Incisions are healing.

Those gummy glue stripes do not concern me in the least. By now I’m well into the physical therapy that, the PT predicts, will restore me to 100% of my former self in a matter of months. Or something close to it.

The photo at right is Yours Truly executing what must look like a simple PT maneuver. It isn’t; it hurts to do it. And I can’t raise my right arm that high without the aid of that ball on the wall.

The surgery repaired a ripped rotator cuff and torn biceps tendon. By the next day the nerve block that deadened my arm had worn off, so (very much against doctor’s orders) I picked up my guitar. Photo below. I wanted to see how much it would hurt to play.

The answer? It hurt a lot. Probably not my smartest move of the day. I was still flying on pain meds. I don’t exactly regret what was, in truth, a petty and stubborn bit of defiance. But I probably should not have done it.

As the guitar photo shows, my right arm was still wrapped in an elastic bandage, which would remain on for another three days. And you can see the tops of the compression socks I had to wear. Those stayed on one more day. I couldn’t stand ’em any longer.

Physical therapy started about ten days later. As the first session began, the PT said, “This may hurt a little” – code, I soon realized, for “This is going to hurt a lot!” As he bent my shoulder and elbow well beyond my pain threshold, I kept thinking about the Crooked Media podcast Lovett or Leave It, on which they play a game called “Okay, Stop!” That is what I wanted to scream to the PT, in more emphatic terms.

But now: whining mode off. Over the course of the last few years, a friend of mine has undergone several joint replacement operations, and I think still has at least one more to go. Her spirit throughout has been impressively upbeat. By comparison, what I’m enduring is nothing.

Yes, I can count my blessings. Yes, everyone is welcome (if not invited) to tell me to shut the fuck up! (Or at least, Okay, stop!)

Below is something totally unrelated to the preceding, and thus more interesting. It has been much on my mind of late and is worth a listen.