An Eye on the World

“I don’t know what else to do, so I write. It’s my way of seeing the world.” -- Jim Harrison

Joyce Bahle, Harrison’s assistant for almost 40 years: “He set his life up that way. He didn’t have to think about a computer, a typewriter, anything. He just carries his pen — he’s constantly noodling with words and ideas. He has had that freedom.”

Harrison died five years ago -- on March 26, 2016 -- at his writing desk in Patagonia, Arizona. His stories, essays and poems will never die and we are free to roam his world forever.

Drew Parsons (1954-2021)

It was once said that the death of a dear friend is a strongest indication of the clarity of all of our futures. In a world that allowed Anne Frank to die, it is easier for us to lose interest and accept our own eventual demise.  Drew Parsons, who was among his many interests and accomplishments a student of the Holocaust, would understand that statement.  That said, Drew never lost interest and lived his life to the fullest in the time he was given. 

My friendship with Drew extends over nearly five decades; since that evening in September 1972 when I first met him in Florida Southern College’s Branscomb Auditorium.  He was an incoming freshman and I had just returned from a year studying abroad in Germany to begin my senior year.  It was at that same time that I met SallyAnn who two years later would become my wife.  We were both good friends with Drew’s brother Don - in fact, it was Don who first introduced SallyAnn to me - and we were both excited to have another Parsons among us.  It was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship.  Drew, Don and I are fraternity brothers in Tau Kappa Epsilon and will always remain in that bond.  Drew, SallyAnn and I were members of The Vagabonds, the FSC theatrical troupe and we spent many hours together both on and off stage.  Drew and I shared the boards in The Crucible and The Merchant of Venice, and SallyAnn joined us in the cast of A Short Story Quartet.  It was in the Green Room where Drew and I engaged in what some will call “legendary” slow motion fist fights.  At least he and I thought so. 

Sadly, after leaving Florida Southern I tried to stay in touch as best I could but I did not get the opportunity to see Drew as often as I would have liked to.  I returned to Florida in December 1974 after my first year in graduate school in Tucson when SallyAnn and I married in Pensacola.  Several of our friends interrupted their holidays at home to share that special day with us.  Drew and Don came all the way from Pompano Beach to be there.

When our son Ian was born in November 1981 I contacted Drew, who at the time was pastor at the McCrea United Methodist Church in Fort Murray, New Jersey,  and I asked him if he would baptize him.  He agreed immediately and he and Sandy hosted our family and friends as we made the trip to rural northwestern New Jersey on March 20, 1982 . . . 39 years ago today . . . and on that day Drew became an important part of Ian’s life, too.

In the intervening years SallyAnn and I would return to Florida in the hopes of linking up with Drew and some of our other college friends.  Regardless of how long it had been, we always seemed to pick up right where we left off.  On one such trip, we attended the FSC 2010 homecoming festivities during which the Vagabonds paid tribute to the late Mel Wooten who had been our director and mentor during the budding of those early thespian careers.  It was a time of sadness but also a celebration as we fondly recalled those days together.  Drew and I were joined by one of our former “co-stars” for some slow motion fisticuffs.    

It was also during one of those returns to Florida when we were excited to meet Becky . . . another Parsons had come to Florida Southern College . . . and from that day on she became an important part of our lives.   I liked to kid with Drew that Becky is the daughter we never had, and as time went on we discovered how true this is.  We always love it when she flies up to Maine in the summer to share time with us at the lake cottage.

The last time I saw Drew was in February 2019 when we joined him and Sandy for a seafood dinner on the banks of the St. Johns River.  It was the first time since he began his struggle with cancer.  We jokingly remarked how we had not seemed to age, but certainly the past decade had taken its toll.  Still, Drew was just as I remember him.  That wry smile and that keen sense of humor.   Always quick with the puns.  We promised not to wait so long to get together again, but the ways of the world always seemed to get in the way. 

In early January we were saddened to learn that Drew had elected to enter hospice care.  He had come to terms with the realization that his long and brave battle was tightening its grip.  He had spoken with his God and his family and had made peace with the world and his time and place in it.  He wrote how much he hoped he would survive long enough to participate in the November 3rd election; the health of the American democracy was very important to him.  What incredible courage to face his personal struggle yet so concerned for the country he would leave behind for the rest of us.  And what humility as he asked his family and friends to forgive any pain or unkindness he knew he had inflicted.  He reminded us all that regardless of it all he was a happy man thankful for the fullness of the life he had enjoyed and shared with others.

I wrote my last letter to Drew on January 7 telling him how much he had meant to me since we first met.  As we grow older, and certainly in the autumn of our years, we cannot help but reflect on our own mortality and what we hope to accomplish in the time remaining to us.  I told him I could not even try to comprehend what he was going through but could only assure him that he was not going through it alone.  He had the love and understanding of his family and his friends.   I recall many of the times we had shared over these many years and what they meant to me and to SallyAnn; that he shared in our wedding and the baptizing of our son who has grown into a remarkable young man. And then there is Becky who is quite wonderful in her own special way. 

My last letter from Drew arrived on January 11.  His mind was still sharp, his wit dry as ever, and he assured me that he felt the best he had since he entered hospice in September.  He shared his own impressions of many of our shared memories and especially that connection through our children.  He also mentioned our shared interest in Holocaust studies and we both regretted that we never had an opportunity to work together after realizing how much we owed to each other without ever fully realizing it.  He sent me a copy of his doctoral dissertation which I read with amazement.  What a wonderfully analytical mind he had.  Drew and I were brothers in the bond, but I consider him much more than that. 

When word came that Drew had passed away I was not sure how to respond.  What does one say at a time like that?  Then I recalled a passage of Scripture – Romans 8:38-39:  
“Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.  For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.  When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’”

I am sad that Drew has left us, yet out of grief comes the joy of the many memories we share and which will never be lost to time.  Drew is unforgettable and I will miss him always.  Mögest du in ewigem Frieden ruhen, mein lieber Freund und Bruder.
 

A Brief Berkshires Memoir

In memory of my dear friend, the Alaskan poet and essayist John Haines, who passed away ten years ago this month.

Every time I find myself driving Interstate 70 (the Mass Pike) through western Massachusetts I recall “a song they sing when they take to the highways.”   It is James Taylor’s 1970 “Sweet Baby James.”
    Now the first of December was covered with snow
    And so was the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
    Lord the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting
    With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go.
There was no snow on the mountains when my wife and I drove through the Berkshires, a southern extension of Vermont’s Green Mountains, in a late October after spending a couple of weeks at the lake cottage in Maine.  We decided to take a different route home to do a little leaf-peeping and enjoy the tint of autumn in western Massachusetts and through the Taconic Range across the border in Upstate New York.

But it was not just the rolling hills and autumnal colors that brought us to the Berkshires.  Our detour afforded us the opportunity to visit with a very dear friend – the former Alaskan poet laureate and essayist John Haines (1924-2011) who was in the midst of a writer residency in Lenox.  I brought along two bottles of good single malt Scotch I picked up at the state liquor store in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and I was looking forward to a long chat, that lovely usquebaugh properly loosening our tongues and inhibitions.

It was mid-afternoon when we arrived at 22 Nielsen Lane, just off the Old Stockbridge Road on the southern edge of Lenox and not far from Edith Wharton’s estate The Mount and the Tanglewood Music Center.  At first blush there was nothing exceptional about the house, a small Cape Cod bungalow built in 1941 and sheathed in clapboard painted a dull leaden blue.  What made this house special is that it was the last home of the American poet Amy Clampitt (1920-1994).  A native of Iowa, she had lived and worked most of her life in New York City, and in 1993 purchased this first house with funds awarded to her as a MacArthur Genius Grant the previous year.  Clampitt was first introduced to the Berkshires by Karen Chase, a local poet whom Clampitt met in Italy where both of them were residents at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, on Lake Como.  John had also been a resident there at another time.  Clampitt planned to use it as a summer get-away cottage. She and the NYU and Columbia University legal scholar Harold Corn, her partner of 25 years, lived in this house until her death from ovarian cancer.  They married here just three months before she died and he continued to live here alone until his own death, in 2001.  Before he died, Korn willed the cottage to the newly-established Amy Clampitt Fund to be administered as a writers residence by the Berkshire-Taconic Community Foundation.  It would be made available rent-free to selected poets who would have the time and solitude to work on a manuscript-in-progress while enjoying the tranquility of the Berkshires.  

William Spiegelman, Clampitt’s biographer and the cottage’s first writer-in residence, has called Clampitt “the patron saint of late bloomers.”  She attended Grinnell College, in her native Iowa, and later Columbia University, and worked as a secretary at Oxford University Press, an editor at E.P. Dutton, and as a freelance writer and researcher.  She was an avid birder and was also employed for a time as a reference librarian at the National Audubon Society.  She began writing unpublished fiction in the 1950s, and she released two poetry chapbooks in 1973 and 1981, but The Kingfisher, her first volume of poems published by Knopf did not appear until 1983 when she was 63.  Spiegelman wrote that her poems combine her Quaker austerity and the “luiciousness” of Keats, perhaps her favorite poet.  Clampitt’s career as a poet would only last eleven years during which she would publish five volumes of poems, the last being A Silence Opens published around the time of her death in 1994.  She had also served as a writer-in-residence at William and Mary, Amherst, and Smith College where she taught and instructed younger poets

John ambled out of the cottage into the front yard as we pulled into the driveway.  I admired the exterior admitting it was not quite what I had pictured in my mind although I cannot say for sure what I was expecting.  One conjures up all sorts of visions when one thinks of a writer’s cottage, especially one sequestered deep within the Berkshires.  Perhaps a small cottage set back in a copse of trees with ivy growing on its stone walls.  Instead it was one of eight modest homes with large yards situated on a quiet cul-de-sac and surrounded by autumn-colored woods.

John gave us a short tour of the property and I remarked on the size of the large backyard.  One side was lined with trees and shrubbery and I commented on the orange and yellow foliage of a stately beech tree.  I would learn later that evening that Ms. Clampitt’s small memorial service was held in the backyard and her ashes had been scattered under that very tree.

The neighborhood, and the cottage itself, both seemed very conducive to writing, offering solitude without being reclusive.  John was the fifth poet to enjoy the benefits of the Amy Clampitt Fund and to date 28 poets have spent months there working on their projects.  The cottage was simply furnished with many artifacts from Ms. Clampitt’s life and travels scattered throughout . . . her many hats and small collections of sea glass found during her summers spent in Corea, a tiny fishing village in Down East, Maine.  The walls were lined with books, many of them filled with Clampitt’s marginalia and with various ephemera employed as bookmarks.  Prominent among them were the collected works of her beloved Keats.

John had set up shop in Clampitt’s study to which her bed was moved during her final months so that she could watch her beloved birds flying to and from that stately beech tree in the backyard.  “What I like about the view is that there is so much going on.”  It was here she passed away on September 10, 1994 having lived in the cottage for only a year.  She would be pleased to know the tree and its birds were still there.  Her Olivetti typewriter sat nearby, a silent reminder of a stolen life.  Next to it were John’s notes and drafts for what he always referred to in his letters as his “big omnibus project,” a collection of essays that would eventually be published by CavanKerry Press as Descent in 2010 just months before his own death at age 86.  I was please to see that close by he had a copy of A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines, which I had edited and published with CavanKerry Press in 2003.

SallyAnn retired to the guest room upstairs and John opened one of the bottles of Scotch and we returned to the living room to chat.  Clampitt and Korn were married here and there was a photograph of them taken that day sitting next to one of her caches of sea glass.  It seemed that Ms. Clampitt’s spirit was everywhere watching over those who came to live and create in her cottage.  John and I discussed our respective projects and I caught him up on news of our mutual friends back home in Washington.  And there was also the upcoming off-year election and what it meant for our troubled country.  He and I never had a problem coming up with something to talk about.

SallyAnn rejoined us later and we invited John to join us for dinner at Bistro Zinc, on Church Street in the center of Lenox; it had been recommended to me by a friend back home who spends his summers in the Berkshires.  SallyAnn ordered the French onion soup and a small salad while John and I both selected the grilled flank of salmon served with couscous over a bed of crisp baby spinach.  John never considered himself a gourmand as such, yet having lived for so long in Alaska he found it hard not to appreciate a nice piece of salmon well prepared and beautifully plated.

Returning to the cottage, SallyAnn took her leave to read upstairs before turning in.  It was a very cozy space with bookcases lining the walls and a writing desk below a small window looking out toward the quiet street.  John and I retreated to the kitchen where we polished off the first bottle of Scotch before moving on to the second.  John may be considered taciturn by many; people he does not know.  But he and I had been good friends for almost two decades, having corresponded regularly and worked closely while I was editing A Gradual Twilight.  That night, with the skids properly greased, he was quite chatty and we talked long into the night on anything and everything.

When I finally went upstairs I found myself restless and unable to fall asleep.  I perused the book shelves and chanced upon a copy of Clampitt’s collected poems published in 1999.  I was particularly struck by the poems occasioned by her time in Down East Maine and also by the fact that none of the later poems, some of which may have been written in this cottage, made any allusion to the Berkshires or her time there. I also leafed through Clampitt’s guide to the English Lake District which she filled with notes on Wordsworth, his homes at Rydal Mount and Dove Cottage, and about her beloved Keats who traveled the region on foot in June 1818 hoping to visit Wordsworth there.

SallyAnn slept in the following morning but I arose early not surprised that Clampitt and her cottage had filled my Scotch-fuel dreams.  Before dressing I sat at the writing desk and sketched out some notes thinking they might some day give rise to a poem.  When I finally ventured downstairs I found John sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and writing down some of his own notes.  I poured some coffee and joined him, the two dead soldier Scotch bottles observing us from the far end of the table.  We talked about his plans to return home to Montana once his residency was over and we dredged up memories of our time together there in Big Sky a couple years earlier which was the last time we had spent any real time together.  

SallyAnn eventually joined us and John suggested that we drive down the Old Stockbridge Road to the nearby town of Lee for breakfast at Joe’s Diner.  It had been a local meeting place for locals and rusticators from away since 1955.  It served breakfast all day which was good because it was already approaching the noon hour.  Pancakes, eggs, bacon and sausage, and plenty of coffee was just the ticket.  While we were eating I noticed a framed copy of Norman Rockwell’s famous painting “The Runaway” hanging behind the counter.   Our server told us that Rockwell, who moved his home and studio to nearby Stockbridge in 1953, had used the diner as the setting for the painting although I would later learn that he had actually used the counter at the former Howard Johnson’s in Stockbridge.  Frankly, I think the painting more closely resembles Joe’s than any HoJO I had ever visited.  Doing some research later on I also learned that in the mid-1960s the downstairs portion of the building housing Rockwell’s Stockbridge studio was a small eatery known as the Back Room (aka Alice’s Restaurant) where you could get anything you want.  The same thing held true for Joe’s.   
After breakfast we dropped John back at the cottage and we loaded up the car and set out for home.   We had a long drive ahead of us.  The morning fog had lifted and it looked to be a beautiful day for some more leaf-peeping along the Taconic Parkway on our way toward New York City.  Before leaving Lenox, however, we stopped at a small bookstore we had spotted the previous evening.  It had a wonderful selection of poetry and I purchased a copy of Clampitt’s collected poems for my own library.  We also drove past the former site of Alice’s Restaurant in Stockbridge before we continued on our way . . . With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go.

In case you are wondering if those journal notes ever evolved into a poem . . . .Yes they did.

                     A Storm in the Berkshires

                                                      For Amy Clampitt (1920 - 1994)

            Perhaps it was only a dream, a violent autumn storm
            wrawling through darkness and raking the Berkshire hills;
            maple and oak riven from deep ancestral earth,
            and with them your beloved beech tree beneath
            which your ashes have reposed for many years.

            Branches stripped of leaves now broken and lying
            sprawled across the lawn, bird feeders tossed and shattered,
            their seed scattered far and wide in a tempest rush.
            Gone, too, the many birds, their homes and fodder
            carried by the winds to every near compass point.

            The storm has dissipated as I sit silent in your study
            where your breath quieted watching your birds on the wing.
            Drinking coffee I stare out at what nature has wrought,
            a gentle breeze blowing through an open window,
            a cadence your body followed to its early extinction.