Monthly Archives: July 2012

Blissful Upstate Summer

I spent last week in Rome, New York, as I recovered from Gamma Knife radiation treatment intended to eradicate leftover pituitary tumor cells. And I was once again overcome by the spectacular beauty of summer in my hometown.

Now that we have skipped past the Fourth of July, summer is ripe, bursting open in color, sounds and scents, but soon it will wane. Soon autumn will overtake it.

But now near perfection reigns in central New York with warm days, flowers in full bloom, vegetable gardens producing their bounty and children riding bikes and playing outside. We need rain here so it’s not quite perfect.

As I went for an evening walk heading toward Vogel Park in Rome, sunlight filtered through the lush maple trees lining North George Street, casting a greenish-yellow glow. Along the way I dodged hissing sprinkler streams dancing over burnt lawns and spilling over on the sidewalk. I saw teenage boys playing Frisbee in a front yard. A basketball bounced on a driveway and screen doors smacked against doorjambs. The smells of freshly-cut lawns and grilling meat entered my nose.

I also heard the voices of summer as I walked past the houses.

“Let’s go Randall.”

“All right, I’m coming.”

“Come on Meg, time to eat.”

Summer is such an intense sensual experience words and images alone cannot do it justice. Ray Bradbury came as close as possible with his fictional Green Town.

I think these days of splendor in central New York are God’s way of making amends for all the lake-effect snow days of December, January, February and March when darkness comes at 4 p.m. and the cold air bites your face. But you can’t contain summer. You can’t bottle it up and preserve it like dandelion wine, store it in Mason jars and open it up on a February night when your bones ache and the snow melts inside your boots while you shovel the driveway.

Summer is also a nostalgic time, as we remember our youth spent at the playgrounds and baseball diamonds, doing cartwheels to show off for grandparents, running around the neighborhood with sparklers and chasing the ice cream truck down the street.

I also consider the math when looking at my life. How many more summers do I have left? And then I think only one, right now. That’s it.

While driving with my brother one afternoon last week I spotted a white banner stretching across Black River Boulevard. It announced the Drums Along the Mohawk drum and bugle corps competition would be coming on Aug. 2. “Oh no,” I said to my brother, “that means summer’s ending soon.”

The competition has always been one of the last big events of the summer in Rome, signaling cooler weather, moms checking off their school supply purchase lists and the Rome Free Academy football team practicing in two-a-day sessions. My stepfather also says Drums Along the Mohawk sometimes coincides with bats sneaking into the house and circling the kitchen or family room.

An ice cream truck is parked along Stanwix Street in Rome.

So before summer is gone again, make a point to leave the house, walk around the block and look at the stars, eat your share of ice cream cones, race to finish nine holes of golf in the gloaming, attend a minor league baseball game and go for a night drive in the country to hear the whoosh of the tires against the asphalt.

Summer is indeed fleeting, but we still have half a cup left to enjoy.

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Beyond

This piece is a short story that was published in Issue 3 of Kerouac’s Dog Magazine.

My name’s John O’Brien, or at least that’s who I used to be before I froze to death in the alley behind Mother’s diner in East Rome, New York. An arctic air mass swept into the Mohawk Valley from Canada one February night last year. I had propped myself against the brick wall, trying my best to shield my face from the wind; but it was futile, and I never woke up in the morning.

Mildred found me while out having a smoke after the breakfast rush. She called the cops, but not before rifling through my knapsack and pocketing the gold crucifix my mother gave me in 1969. Mom had it blessed by the Pope, and it was the only possession that meant anything to me. I’m kinda glad someone ended up with it, even if Mildred swiped it from me post-mortem.

The Oneida County coroner ruled hypothermia as the cause of death and the police labeled me a John Doe, since I had no ID on me or next of kin. They buried me in an unmarked grave in a back corner of Rome Cemetery, and that’s where I currently reside.

I don’t mind so much, though. The leaves on the maple trees overlooking my plot are bursting into flaming orange, brown and burgundy colors now, and I get to watch the squirrels scurrying about in the fading afternoon light. The cross-country team runs up here sometimes, and I can even hear the public address speaker at the Rome Free Academy football stadium on Friday nights, when the Black Knights play at home. Last Saturday, I even saw a group of teenagers hurling acorns at one another and ducking behind the headstones for protection. Their shouts and yelps echoed throughout the cemetery, and my only regret was that I couldn’t join in the fun. I can’t wait for winter when they have snowball fights and go sledding on a steep hill behind the cemetery.

The funny part is I don’t feel much different from when I was alive. Had I known this earlier, I might have given up a long time ago. You see I heard the temperature on the eve of my death was dropping; old Petey “Bones” Ragonese warned me to find someplace to flop when I ran into him during the lunch rush at the Rome Rescue Mission. So, yeah, I realized what would happen to me if I stayed outside, and I could have easily made it to the county shelter, where I would have gotten a hot meal and a cot with a blanket. But damn, my legs were heavy and numb, and I didn’t feel like moving an inch, let alone walking six blocks to the shelter. And I figured with my luck, it would only be colder the next day. So I just cradled the bottle of whiskey, closed my eyes and awaited the inevitable.

Now I spend my days trying to occupy my mind and fill the empty hours. I haven’t been given any sort of notice on what my final destination might be, so I’m just trying to live in the moment; or should I say go on being dead in the moment? I can’t complain, though. It’s really not that bad on this side, and at least I’m no longer cold.

Still, I really do wish someone, anyone—maybe even God Almighty or one of his messengers—would tell me what to do or where I’m supposed to go. I no longer have a body, but my brain still works. I am able to formulate thoughts and I spend most of my days contemplating my situation.

And all this thinking makes me wonder: Is this all there is? Isn’t there anything else? Is this heaven or hell, something in between, or just a continuation of what was considered the present?

“Enough already,” a voice yells from some distance away. “You’re not the only one here dipshit. You’re disturbing our sleep.”

“Excuse me,” I say, or rather I think and the words are somehow communicated to the stranger. “Who are you? Where are you?”

“It matters little. We are all dirt now. Don’t expect answers. Don’t expect anything. Just rest.”

“I don’t get it. If nothing matters, then why can I still think? My mind is active. I may not be alive, but I am not fully gone.”

“That’s it. I’m done trying to talk sense to this fucking wino. Annette, get this guy to shut up already.”

“Just because I’m your wife Fred doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do. You’re not the boss anymore. And what am I supposed to say anyway? He doesn’t understand yet.”

“Look I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to upset anyone. I just want some answers. Aren’t I entitled to some answers?”

“What’s you’re name friend?” another voice asks.

“John.”

“Well I am James and I will do my best to give you some explanation. But it may not help you. I have been here since 1856, and I am still waiting for my fate to be decided. No one has told me anything. But I pray each day the Lord will come again so I may rise with him. Do you believe in Jesus John?”

“I guess so, sort of.”

“He is the only way.”

“Jesus Christ,” the voice known as Fred says. “It’s too fucking late for conversion.”

“It is never too late,” James says. “I repeat John, it is never too late.”

“I am sorry for bothering all of you. I don’t know if it’s physically possible, but I am getting a headache now. I want to try to go back to sleep.”

“Now you’re talking some sense dipshit. Go to sleep John. It’s too late for anything else.”

“I suppose it is. I guess we just die and enter the void. I never wanted to believe that but it seems it is true.”

“You got it brother,” Fred says.

“Now I wish I would have done something more with my life, while I still had the chance.”

“That is something we all wish for John,” James says.

Blackness takes over the cemetery once again and I drift off. I am not fighting sleep now; I am not fighting anything. I submit to the slumber of death with the recognition that nothing else exists.

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Schubert Music Meditation

This essay was published in the 2012 Spring/Summer Edition of The Shangri-La Shack Literary Arts Journal.

The piano notes of Franz Schubert, playing on Syracuse’s Classic FM station, seep through the car radio and wash over me, invading the space of my inner mind. I sit alone in a metal-aluminum box built in Detroit a decade ago and equipped with a rattling engine that announces it age.

It is mid-December in Syracuse, New York, and this afternoon, unlike most days in the last month of the year, it is sunny and bright, above 35 degrees and not a speck of snow covers the grass or this semi-empty mall parking lot. I delight in the sunlight creating sharp delineations between the sky, the ground, the large office building in the distance and the surrounding countryside dotted with fir trees and spindly, auburn-brown trees with branches devoid of leaves.

As I sit in my car, I listen to the music, watch a seagull circling some lampposts and let my mind go in meditation of my place in this city, this zip code, this world, this time in history.

And without being invited, a dark thought comes to me. I think how easy it would be to let myself slip away, to strap a wide-mouthed plastic hose to the tailpipe and tuck it inside the driver’s side window. I could let the small car fill with carbon monoxide and drift off without being noticed by the shoppers heading to the stores or to lunch.

No one would find me for several hours. And later tonight, my car would be the last one left in the parking lot. I would be discovered by a lone security guard doing a sweep of the mall before punching out. Or maybe I wouldn’t be spotted until the next morning, when an old lady goes out to walk her white poodle.

Listening to Schubert always awakens in me a sense of spiritual discovery, as if the composer’s chords penetrate my ear canals and tickle receptors in the brain open to pondering the mystery of human existence.

Today I discover just how easy it would be to discard the life I have been given, to sever my earthly ties, to choke my breath intentionally.

And I realize, those prone to questioning our place in the world, those people whom sadness often infects, and I count myself among this group, need ironclad discipline to provoke a desire to fight to stay alive, to not give up, to not submit to the easy way out.  They require a survival instinct, a force to help them accept each day regardless of circumstances. This may not be easy but the alternative is far worse.

We need this will to live even when our lives find us no richer, no happier and no less lonely. We have to let the fragile bubble moments—when this world and the next seem closer in proximity—to glide over and wash away without us being sucked into the maze of self–absorption that can lead to self-destruction.

So today when the announcer’s voice comes on the radio at the end of Schubert’s piano piece, I turn off the car engine, saunter across the parking lot, enter the mall and buy a movie ticket to see Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. And the Monday afternoon passes without my resistance, and the matinee kills two hours of my life, instead of me killing the man in the driver’s seat.

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