Ohio 2

July 13, 2013

Yesterday’s emotions may have been in part exhaustion, for waking today I feel more like one should on a carefree vacation to a familiar place. Woke from dreams that were sometimes about things to eat, sometimes about a line of books I had published that were merrily and sweetly sexual, to prove the point, I think, that sexual arousal could be plain good fun. They were named after different colors, the Blue Sex Book, the Green Sex Book, the Peach Sex Book.

Wandered through campus yesterday. Frohring Art is now the theater complex. Did not discover where art went. It was a New Student Visitation Day, and campus was alive with new students and their parents, a surprising proportion of which were notably overweight black people, Perhaps that’s the new demographic. Wandered to Bonney Castle and the quiet Bonney Castle garden, and some sort Romantic revery fell upon me, and I sank down on the Brainerd P Stranahan bench and brooded, entertaining the possibility that I had failed everyone who had helped me or believed in me. It was a hard conviction to shake. All the exhibits I could produce for my case seemed feeble and shaky. My seatmate Ocean helped me to get up off the bench and move again. I gave myself the advice I would have given her, “It’s best to think of something else now.”  A brindled cat wanted to cross the garden, but she was afraid of me. I said, “It’s all right,” and she crossed, finally, tail high, hardly looking at me. There was a preliminary class get-together at the usual restaurant in Tallmadge that night, which I missed because I comforted myself with rum and did not wake up until 9:30.

But I rose early this morning and drove to Akron, which turned out to be the right thing ti do.  It’s curious that I have photos of none of my sacred places. Why is that? I’ve had some kind of camera nearly all my life. Was it an impulse to keep the sacred sacred? Did I never fear losing them? Did I want to keep them changeless in my mind? Did I want to be cagey about what was sacred to me, so no one would know and violate? Whatever went on with that, I started at the Foxboro house and took photos from the road. It looks far better than it did when we were there, a classy gray now, landscaped and flowery. The pond is covered up with plastic, being restored or replaced. My basswood is gigantic, and leaning, as all the trees in the area do for some reason, slightly to the east. The house on Honodle is spruce and bright, like a cottage in a fairy tale. The house on Goodview, the First House where I was the First Child, is a neat yellow box, the owner a trim young man with a big truck. I almost cried out to him who I was and how badly I wanted to see inside and behind, but finally I couldn’t find the will. The basketball hoop dad affixed for me is still where it was, and the middling oaks of my childhood are now immense. The neighborhood is both like and unlike. The Fisher house is exactly as it was, the little sassafras trees become great sassafras trees. The Crines’ great wood is covered with tiny ugly houses. At that I could barely look.

Drove to East Park to see the Creek. I could have walked the way, but our path through the woods is almost certainly lost in the yards of squat little houses. I didn’t even know the Creek’s name. It was “The Creek” when we were kids, for there was only one. It flows out of Alder Pond through the Sullivan Street culvert and into the Little Cuyahoga– perhaps it IS the Little Cuyahoga. I started at the Deep End, at the culvert. It’s still deep, but not wide anymore, having been hemmed in by stone walls. I climbed the far bank onto the wide industrial waste that used to house the Tadpole Pond. The pond, which had vanished for many years, has reasserted itself. The ground told me there have been torrents of rain, and perhaps I came at its best moment. But there are frogs and waterweeds, and it is again more than a rut left by ATVs. I followed the creek to the great Boulder, which used to be partially imbedded in the bank, but now stands free. The first time I ever went to the Creek by myself I “discovered” it and the huge frog which ruled the pool at its base.  Never since have I had a greater sense of discovery. I continued downstream, as I almost never did before. One time only we went as far as to get a glimpse of the railroad tracks and the cars on them. This we were forbidden not only by our parents, but by our own folklore, which suggested that the railroad bulls were lying in wait to capture over adventurous little boys. This time, though, neither fear nor admonition had power over me, and I continued down the twisty, muddy trails beside the tracks as far as I wanted to, which was pretty far. The trails must have been there when we were kids. Maybe Jesse followed them, but I never did. I did today. In all my roaming along the Little Cuyahoga, I went the farthest on a day fifty-six years after I went there first.

As I walked, the experience stopped being nostalgic, and started being an actual exploration. I was in new territory. There was a groundhog. There were campfire sites left by God knows whom. There were wide pools left by rain. I didn’t quite realize it, but as I roamed I became a boy again, there in a crucible of my soul.

Went finally to Maytree, to the GHMP, and sat in the great field under a very particular tree. When I was living at home in the summer of 1974, after the Baltimore catastrophe, after the death of my mother, I jogged to that tree by night. I sat while the moon rose. Before I knew what I was doing, I was praying a mighty prayer. I was launching my first attack on God, all guns blazing, furious at Him for leading me astray (as He had done; I would say that now), demanding to know what He wanted of me. I lay down in the dampening grass, exhausted. I rose up and went home. The next day the call came from Syracuse, and what I recognize as my life began. It was that tree I went to. God and I have been at war many times, but that was the first, and my victory was a shock to my soul. It was not war this sunny morning. It was not exactly a chat, either: I am very far from what I had imagined would be– while, at the same time, oddly, being quite near– and I have no idea how to proceed. The great south field was all ablaze around me.

Stopped in Brimfield for lunch at the Brimfield Family Steakhouse. I detest family restaurants, and detested that one, but I was led there, I think, because it was the site of our last family meal in Ohio, with dad and Linda’s kids, Bekka deliberately issuing taunts that made Jonathan call her a racist. It was not a good time, but it was a final time, and I was glad to be there again, where people call you “honey” the first time you meet.

On the drive to Hiram, stuck in a convoy of military Humvees headed, I suppose, for the Ravenna Arsenal, an odd and cleansing realization came to me. I am still the boy who went to the Creek with the capture pail in his hands. He is battered, covered with scar-tissue, defensive, roughened, sad with the recollection of having strayed, concealed, self-mocking-- but intact. I saw him that way for the first time, self looking at self. Why is it so good still to be him? Because he was endowed with the most radiant and accepting curiosity, going into all strange places with mind and heart open. Because his soul was absolutely stainless, and remains so under scars and armor. Because he was a kind of priest, and this priesthood was not ended, but rather strangely enriched, by the profane struggles which came later. He was the one not father or mother or friend knew, but I did, and so did the Lord, and we shared every minute I strode through the dazzling mud of my first world. As with the night in the great field under the tree forty years ago, the gift given is greater than the one asked. I had to pull over to the side of the road. I am not quite finished murmuring, “blessed.”