The World According to Chuck

(Sometimes I look back on my old blog, wondering what I was thinking at any given point. I can look at old columns, too, but the blog has always been a little closer to me, both bad and good; some interesting stuff came out to play.

For those of you who’ve been following my various family adventures for the past few years, here’s a daughter update: She’s finishing her last class requirement for her degree this summer, and then she moves to Boston. She already has a teaching job lined up, and Cameron has, like, eight, so they’re good to go.

Three years ago it was a different story. That was her last summer here at home, following her first year of college, and it was a little dismal. So there we were, and here we are, encore style. From July 2, 2004.)

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July is my favorite month. If months were trading cards, I would prize my Julys and get rid of all my Februarys, foist them off on some unsuspecting fool who thought he was getting a deal and snicker.

July has Independence Day, my birthday, and my wedding anniversary, along with some spectacular weather toward the end. If July didn’t exist, I would invent it. Even the name “July” sounds happy. It’s a happy month.

June, on the other hand, can be problematic.

We ended June in sort of an Edgar Allen Poe fashion in this house, which didn’t surprise me at all. At 4 a.m. Wednesday morning, which is actually about 10 p.m. in Daughter Time, Beth was watching TV in her room when she heard a noise outside her window. Something was walking on the roof, and it sounded big. More moose than squirrel.

So, for the first time in her life, she sought comfort and reassurance from her brother, who was also up, having switched to Son Time for the summer. My kids are just bizarre right now.

John’s door is approximately 12 feet from my pillow, where my head usually is at 4 a.m., so naturally I got to join the party. As I headed for the front door to go outside and solve the mystery, Beth got brave and opened her blinds, and saw the eyes.

Red, glowing eyes.

This was a raccoon the size of a Labrador, although that’s her opinion; it was gone by the time her mother, brother and I raced back in her room. I suspect it was a little smaller than that.

I offered the opinion that it was a vampire raccoon, a member of the undead, doomed to walk the earth without a soul and prey on unsuspecting trash cans, but I was just guessing.

So the last day of June started in an odd way, you could say. And since I was up, I stayed up. It was getting light, anyway, and I was pretty sure the ‘coon had slunk back to its coffin. And the combination of a week of less than usual sleep and godawful stress from dealing with the mortgage company turned me into Sleep-Deprived Crazy Man.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until six hours later, by which time I’d consumed half a gallon of iced tea, so I ended up sitting on the couch, needing to sleep but being prodded by the caffeine to stay awake. Sort of self-imposed torture, and I don’t mean in the good way.

So I went to the grocery store.

It had occurred to my addled brain that my kids would eventually crawl out of bed in mid-afternoon, yawning and talking about the raccoon and wanting food. My wife would be gone by then, off to the big city to meet Bubba, and I thought it was possible that I would hear, “There’s nothing to eat” about, say, a million times and in my state I would snap. Just fall apart, scream or break something breakable, although probably nothing human.

I bought barbecue food, food for the grill; I think I was slightly delirious, since cooking out back, facing west on a hot day only a week past the solstice, tired and irritable and wondering if raccoons actually have souls, is never my idea of a good time. But I could see July coming, sense it, smell all its happy July things, so I bought brats and buns and steak and chicken and barbecue sauce and Dr. Pepper.

I never went back to sleep. I watched a movie, “Spartan,” which is a David Mamet film that got good reviews, but even though I like Mamet a lot, with his quirkiness and wonderful dialogue, it left me cold. More of a December movie, I think.

And then the children got up, straggled out, blinking in the honest-to-God sunlight, and I lit the coals and Beth sang.

She’s having an uneasy summer, my girl, with not much in the way of employment and currently no car to drive, wondering about the future and why her memories are getting fuzzy. “High school is blurry,” she wrote the other day. She saw a picture of herself in the eighth grade and didn’t recognize the girl. When did I change? she wonders. When did I turn into what I am, and what am I going to be?

I read her journal online, so I know this stuff. Plus, she talks.

I remember this well enough, being almost 20 and doing a lot of forward gazing and retrospective thinking. Things are happening, life is moving along at a slightly quicker pace, it’s a sleepy summer so far and her Scooby gang that got her through high school is slowly, ever so slowly slipping away.

So she sings. She sits at the piano, as she did when she was 14, and plays and sings, rummaging through the music her mother’s collected over the years, arias and show tunes.

And I stood on the back deck and turned the meat over, and I realized what I was doing. I wanted to tell her that it would be okay, that July was coming, that it always comes, but she doesn’t need to listen to me, so I was doing the only thing I could. I was feeding her. And I did. I always have, from the days when I’d make her sloppy joes and scrambled eggs to burgers, to teriyaki chicken tacos and fajitas.

And really, that’s all I can do. That, and give her money for shoes and chase away demon raccoons before dawn. And that has to be enough, I guess.

I fell asleep at 8 on John’s bed, watching him play a video game, and then I woke when my wife came home with tales of Bill. I caught a little Leno and Letterman and then went back to bed, and that’s how I saw out June, sleepy and worrying and feeding, standing on the deck in the sun, blinking back tears from the smoke, listening to my daughter sing Sondheim songs, and knowing July was coming, and not a moment too soon.

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Excerpted from The World According to Chuck: Stories from Mukilteo of Family, Faith, Friends, Baseball and Sponge Puppets (Xlibris, October 2004).

This will be the last post from my sentimental spring, 2003. Beth and Cameron will be here next week for a visit, and then sometime in June she’ll complete her bachelor’s degree and it will be an occasion for celebration, but not the same. Not like it was four years ago, at least for me. I’m not nearly so sentimental now, and for understandable reasons: My father, who was diagnosed with cancer at the time, has been gone for over three years; I’m older, and one would hope better adjusted; and my daughter is 22, away for four years at college, and all grown up.

And I assume that one of these days, I will be, too.

From June 18, 2003.
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“How many more columns are there going to be?” Mary Knoll asked me last week.

I understood. Her son and my daughter have been friends since middle school, and both graduated from Kamiak this past Monday. It was difficult enough for her without having to read my angst in these pages.

“One more,” I said, holding up a (polite) finger. “I’m just working some stuff out.”

I promise. Next week, I start writing about my lawn again, or my dog, or Hillary or something. Enough is enough.

It’s been a hectic week or so. There were parties and farewells, lots of pictures and lots of anxiety. I gather there were some hair and wardrobe issues. No one paid any attention to me at all, which was probably a good thing.

I tried to stay out of the way. I also tried to convince my son to run away from home for a few days, but he just stayed in his room. So I’ve had time to think.

I was there at the beginning, a literal alpha male. Her first preschool was a converted house on Capitol Hill in Seattle, and sometimes after work I’d walk the few blocks from my office and pick her up.

I seem to recall that it was a glorious spring in 1988, warm and sunny. We’d walk hand in hand through tree-lined streets, talking about her day and about the house we were buying in far-off Snohomish County.

She was all enthusiasm and energy, amazed with the world. “The air is so FRESH,” she’d say. “The sky is so BLUE.”

I worked a little digital magic last week, combining pictures of Robert Knoll and Beth from freshman year and this year. It was interesting. The physical changes were subtle, but the poise, the inner grace, was there. They’ve grown up a lot in four years.

And suddenly it struck me. This is what I’ve been trying to do in the past few weeks, construct a Photoshop montage of her life from preschool to senior prom, and all along I’ve been focusing on the wrong journey.

Graduation speakers seem compelled to remind us every year that commencement is just another word for beginning. It never feels like that.

I know that parenting doesn’t end with high school graduation, but something does, something substantial, and with all the activity recently, it took me a while to realize that all the sentiment and nostalgia was about me.

I used to have this recurring dream about finding a pool in our backyard. Not a wading pool or a plastic pool, but a real-live, honest-to-God built-in pool. It was covered with algae and floating trash and tree branches, and I’d kick myself for forgetting we had it and not taking care of it.

This is what’s been really bothering me, then. Because it seems to me that after the first formative years, after we send them off to school and teachers and friends, it matters less what we’ve taught our children than what they’ve taught us.

What have I learned? What did I forget to pay attention to? Could I have spent 18 years as a father and learned nothing else than how much car insurance costs and how to go to sleep at night when my daughter is watching TV with a boy in her room?

Oh, I learned how to put dresses on dolls and watch “Sleeping Beauty” 20 times in a row. I learned how to ignore the rolling eyes and the slammed doors. I learned the importance of multiple phone lines.

As I say, I was on my own. My wife and daughter were having a lot of obviously private conversations, or else not speaking to each other. I was not on anyone’s agenda.

I walked around the house on Father’s Day, eventually ending up on the back deck, and then I found myself thinking about the candy store.

It was just a little mom ‘n’ pop on the corner, but when she was 3 Beth called it the candy store, for reasons you can probably figure out. It was our place, the Starbucks of the preschool set, and then I remembered.

They see things that we’ve begun to miss. They look at life and see pure Creation, alive and waiting for them. Everything is new and radiant, and in watching them grow we learn something we’d forgotten.

I’ve passed these years working and worrying, sweating the small stuff and having strange dreams, and all the time I was learning from a little girl how to look at the world once again through the eyes of a child. And I thought I was going to teach her. Time to graduate now.

I stand on the back deck, oblivious to the commotion inside, bathed in the glow of a parent’s pride and the warmth of another glorious spring. I can see all the corners of my yard. There is no pool, I know, and there never was. There are just beginnings, and endings, and beginnings again.

“The sky is so blue,” I say to myself, and of course no one pays any attention to me at all.

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Excerpted from The World According to Chuck: Stories from Mukilteo of Family, Faith, Friends, Baseball and Sponge Puppets (Xlibris, October 2004).

(This weekend, in Flagstaff, Arizona, men and women who were involved in the theater department of Northern Arizona University in the 1970s are gathering for a reunion that, unfortunately, won’t include me. Recently, through an exchange of e-mails attempting to nail down some dates of various productions, I was reminded of the summer of 1980, when some of us were fortunate enough to work with Oscar-winning actress Mercedes McCambridge in two productions, Sam Shepard’s Buried Child and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. “Fortunate” is a tricky word here; Ms. McCambridge did not want to be there, apparently, and made things miserable for a lot of us. Still, I dug out some rose-colored glasses three years ago, when she died. Here’s to old friends, good times, and selective memory. From March 2004.)

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My grandmother cried when Elvis died, I remember. Just wept. My grandmother. Elvis.

It’s funny how we react, hearing the news that a famous person has passed on. Their lives get tangled up with our own, mixed in with memories. Our first date, our first vote, the first time we fell in love at the movies. We mark moments, we speculate on whether they really do die in threes as our mothers claim, we watch a retrospective and read an obituary, and we have stories.

I have a story.

It was announced last week that Mercedes McCambridge had died, at age 87. A celebrity to be sure, an Oscar-winning actress for “All The King’s Men,” and after a fading career she had perhaps her biggest fame as the voice of the Devil in “The Exorcist.” She had the voice for it, for sure.

A Life, then, as the Irish say. And oh, she was Irish.

She was also my friend, for a very short time, what seems like a very long time ago.

“I didn’t believe a word of it!” was the first thing she said to me. We were in rehearsal for Sam Shephard’s “Buried Child,” a play she despised. She wasn’t all that happy with my monologue at the moment, either.

I was playing her husband, hard enough when you’re 23 and your co-star is 40 years older, but then I imagine it was never easy being her husband.

She was loud and bossy, and I don’t think she particularly cared to be in the boonies of Northern Arizona, working with students, doing plays she didn’t like. But it was a job, and it was acting, and acting was what she knew. And she knew it, trust me.

Early on, she twisted her ankle on a cable backstage while we were doing “Blithe Spirit.” It didn’t seem to improve her mood, and she spent the rest of the summer in a wheelchair mostly, griping and snapping at anyone who got in her way. I hid a lot.

We hated her.

And then, one day in rehearsal, she needed a prop, a liquor bottle. One of the crew dashed off to the office of our technical director, a gin drinker, and found an empty in a trash can. It was filled with water and rushed to the stage, and Mercedes McCambridge poured and drank. And stopped.

She smiled then, a small smile and a strange sight for us, after all these weeks. She looked at the glass, and looked at us.

“My God,” she said. “I haven’t tasted gin in years.”

And she began to talk.

We knew, I suppose, something of her battles with alcoholism. It was part of her resume, her story, and there were long bouts and many hospitalizations, and finally AA and recovery. She talked of this, and also of Joan Crawford and Jack Kennedy, Marlon Brando and Orson Welles. Movies she’d made and places she’d been, and for an hour or so we sat at the feet of our enemy and listened.

She broke character that day, and we saw a life, and we learned something.

Her friends called her Mercy. I called her Ms. McCambridge, of course.

On opening night of “Buried Child,” we had a dialogue, she and I. Ms. McCambridge was offstage, reading from her script, while I sat alone on a couch. It was a difficult trick, lines and lines of one-word sentences and interjections, and at some point I flubbed. She covered, I covered, and we went on.

Afterward, she pulled me aside. “Young man, you were a pro out there,” she said, a pro being what she was and what she respected most of all.

She talked to me, then, from time to time, gave me suggestions and praised me occasionally. She encouraged a career, which never happened but then I was young and she was a famous person. I listened.

I never saw her after that summer, never crossed her path again, but I was glad for the experience and grateful that I’d survived. I’d never met a tougher woman, or a better actress, and I say that knowing it’s true and knowing it would be a compliment to her.

I followed what remained of her career, noted her biographies and caught her old movies when I could. I saw her on “Magnum, P.I.” one night, playing a washed-up actress, the villain, wheelchair bound until the end, when she leapt from the chair and tried to escape.

At the end of the show, Magnum explained. It seems she’d twisted an ankle during a production of “Blithe Spirit,” he said, and was in a wheelchair and just loved the attention it gave her.

I knew this already, of course, knew that she loved the spotlight and being theatrical and living up to her reputation. It was quite a reputation, all earned, and when I heard the news, heard that she’d died on March 2 but the announcement was made on St. Patrick’s Day, I knew who was responsible, and why.

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Excerpted from The World According to Chuck: Stories from Mukilteo of Family, Faith, Friends, Baseball and Sponge Puppets (Xlibris, October 2004).

(My daughter graduates from college this June. She asked me the other day if I planned to write about it, and while I was mulling that over my son, listening in, said, “He’ll probably write about THIS CONVERSATION” and Beth laughed. Yeah, I pretty much write about everything. And I wrote extensively about her four years ago, as I wrestled with the concept that she was growing up and moving away. This is from May 2003.)

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It is his favorite picture of her, he realizes suddenly one day, and then wonders why it took so long to figure that out. Maybe it’s a sign of maturity, or middle-age; after years of trying to keep an open mind with shifting tastes and likes, the races are over and there are winners. This is the book, the song, the movie, the moment. This is the picture.

She is a Texan. He knows this, of course, but then anyone would, he thinks. Who else would rehearse an opera, be captured on film interpreting the music of Mozart, wearing cowboy boots?

He gives her the boots on her 28th birthday, years before the picture, his way of acknowledging who she is and also surrendering to a more powerful culture. I give up. Y’all win.

She goes home a month before their wedding, to have it out on home turf. “What does this boy do?” her father asks, and she sticks up for love. “He’s an actor and a writer,” she says defiantly, and the screen door slams and there are words. Not a good sign.

He meets the in-laws the day before they marry, and his bride-to-be holds onto his arm as if he’s about to bolt, which he is thinking seriously about. Her mother hugs him, trusting her daughter, but daddy just says, “So this is what you brung us,” and sticks out a meaty hand. To his credit, he has a slight smile. This will only hurt a little.

He finds his first trip to Texas disorienting, disturbing. It’s flat, seemingly spread out over a quarter of the country, and though his mother-in-law claims they have mountains he thinks she’s probably making this up. It’s humid and hot, and he meets aunts and uncles and roughly a thousand cousins, only 6 or 7 of whom are apparently not named Bubba, Billy Mac, or Pam. They all come over, to see what she’s brung them.

He learns that ponds are “tanks,” that potatoes are taters, and that what’s really important is God, country, and the Dallas Cowboys, and not always in that order, depending on the time of year.

She takes him on a tour of her life: Her house, her high school, and finally her college, the University of North Texas in Denton. A state university but with a prestigious, internationally acclaimed college of music. This is for serious students. You come to North Texas as a musician, y’all better have the chops for it.

She did, and does. He smiles when he thinks about the conflicts over the years, the choirs she directs and budgets she projects, and the self-appointed powers-that-be who want to dismiss her as just a pretty voice. She was music student of the year at North Texas, he thinks, at a time when North Texas was the largest school of music in the world. Shut up and learn something.

“Texas?” he says when someone asks. “Yeah, I spent a year there one week,” but he’s just joking. Texas is fine, there’s just no connection for him. Nor is there one with his former states, California and Arizona. He came home 20 years ago, and this is it: The mountains, the Sound, the trees and the rain. This is where he always belonged, he believes, and his children are now natives.

He looks at his favorite picture again. It was taken during a rehearsal for Tacoma Opera’s production of “The Magic Flute.” She is playing Pamina. She is 31, looking younger than that, with lots of hair, a plaid shirt, blue jeans and the boots. Other cast members are in the background, watching her.

And on her shoulders, in a baby backpack, is her one-year-old daughter, red hair blazing, thumb securely in mouth, apparently unperturbed by the setting or the sound of her mother singing, as if she had been doing it all her life. Which she had.

“Someday,” someone could have remarked back then, “that baby will grow up and follow in her mother’s footsteps.” Her mom would have howled. “Oh, Lord, she’ll probably be a chemist.” These things happen. Children make their own lives. Prophecies about their futures are bad bets.

Genetics and geography are funny things, though, he thinks as he puts the picture away. And destinies are only clearly seen from the perspective of the future. He will probably think about this often, and especially in August, when he puts his daughter on a plane. The University of North Texas will get another freshman voice major in the fall, this one a red-haired Northwest native with a will of iron and an impressive pedigree. She will, in a way, be going home.

This is his favorite picture. Just a shutter click in time, it still has power and magic. It holds the middle of one story and the beginning of another. It is a picture of symmetry and cycles. It is a picture of the future hiding in the past, where it always is.

And it’s a reminder that his little girl is leaving. He always knew she had to, of course, always knew that she would, and if only he’d paid more attention he would have always known where she was going.

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Excerpted from The World According to Chuck: Stories from Mukilteo of Family, Faith, Friends, Baseball and Sponge Puppets (Xlibris, October 2004).