The Duckling Heart

During marriage counseling, I was told by no fewer than three mental health professionals that we marry one of our parents.

After the first one said it, my ex and I stood in the parking lot outside his office building and mutually agreed, “That’s a lotta Dr. Phil bullshit!” But the third therapist took us through a process that identified which of my parents I had married, then led us through an exercise that put a big, expressive, tear-gushing exclamation point on the truth of it. It was one of the most emotional, revelatory experiences of my life.

How appropriate the sessions were held in the dimly lit, low-ceilinged basement of an unassuming, small office building in my own neighborhood. Into the rabbit hole of our childhoods my wife of twenty-five years and I tumbled. What I saw down there rang true, like the details of a hazy, half-remembered, fever dream from childhood, suddenly recalled and focused. And so I tried to grip the feathery, blow-away edges of those truths and understand the formative events that led to my impulses.

The theory that we marry one of our parents begins with the idea that we grew up in conflict with a particular parent. It can be as devastating as sexual, physical, or emotional abuse, or as simple as a longing for the nurturing and love a parent withheld. When we encounter people later in life who have personality traits similar to that parent, we often connect with them. Subconsciously they speak to our hardwiring because we know how to play a role in that familiar relationship. We may even see promise of the emotional resolution we’ve always yearned for but never got with the parent – The nagging itch that never got scratched.

We yearn to be loved by THAT kind of person.

In the same way that good dramas require conflict, seems life is more compelling when we have something to push against, which might explain why we pursue things that actually make us unhappy.

Late last winter I had a couple interesting, intense dates with a lovely woman named Jan. I’m a talk show host on a date – part Johnny Carson, part Dr. Drew, so better be ready to talk about your life in detail or hear about mine. Over the course of two evenings I coaxed out of her stories of an emotionally abusive father, an emotionally abusive ex-husband, and an emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend. This cute, fit, brunette mother of 3 told the stories with no air of victimhood, like it was just bad luck. Clearly a strong woman, she talked like she, “ain’t takin’ that shit no more.” But the first thing I thought once the common threads of those three men dangled in front of my face: I don’t stand a chance with this beautiful, dynamic, intelligent, hardworking gal. Why? Because I’m not silent, emotionally distant, or abusive. I’ve got my own issues, but not those.

Jan didn’t choose her abusive dad, but she chose the husband and boyfriend. They may have been assholes, but she’s the common denominator. She knows their traits, understands them, and knows what to do with them. Whatever the abuser’s best behavior at the start of a relationship, those qualities speak to her, to her imprinting, perhaps echoing the joy and relief she felt at the moments her father actually treated her well. She can say all day long she’s looking for a kind, loving man, but I’ve met way too many woman – friends and lovers who expressed that delusion, only to watch them fall for the next charismatic abuser who showed up.

First time I faced this I was a teenager. The girl even sent me a tender birthday card gushing about what a “Nice guy” I was. It had a picture of Charlie Brown on the front. She soon dumped me and went back to the older, ex-boyfriend who had cruelly, sexually abused her.

It’s not just women choosing unconsciously and poorly. On another date with another bright woman, I shared my belief that while many women say they want kindness, they often don’t choose it. She rolled her eyes and shot back, “And men say they want an intelligent woman, but how often do they actually choose one?”

Touché!

Now, don’t mistake my harsh honesty for disrespect. I’m feeling utter sympathy in these moments . . . and maybe my own dysfunctional urge to fix things for them. That illusion is called the “savior complex.” It’s about being attracted to “birds with broken wings,” thinking you’ll save them, lighten their burden and get their love in return. I had a lucky childhood. My male and female role models were fixers. They fixed people’s problems. I know how to do that. I know how to play that role. And in my love life I’ve chased that fantasy even when it didn’t serve me well. That’s why women who are attracted to abusers have broken my heart regularly. I fall for them thinking I’ll fix them, but that doesn’t speak to their hardwiring. Don’t get me wrong, they want to be happy – but unfortunately they’re just not attracted to people who can make them happy.

Which is kinda a problem.

Somehow as adults, we seek roles familiar to the skill sets we learned as children. And it seems to form what we think we’re worth, what we deserve, what we’re worthy of, where we “belong.” And it can go way dark and way ugly.

Long ago in my teaching days I worked with another teacher, Mike. He was lovably nerdy, a good guy, and a good teacher.

The week before classes started one August in the 1990s I stopped in the empty central office of our school to check my mailbox and heard fingers typing furiously on a keyboard in the back room. I poked my head around the corner and found Mike at a keyboard, sweating bullets.

“Dude, you okay?” I asked. He motioned desperately for me to step in and close the door.

In a confession that clanged like fire crackers set off in a dumpster, this seemingly kind, gentle man explained that he’d been arrested during the summer for child molesting. “I want you to know that I never touched a child,” he said urgently. At this point, I didn’t care, I just wanted out of that room. “I was molested as a child,” he said. “I know I’m screwed up and I need help and I’m gonna get it. But I plea-bargained that I would never again work around minors. So I’m typing up my resignation.”

This guy was a great teacher. Visiting grads stopped in before holidays for years after asking me where he was, saying they wanted to thank him for preparing them for their intensive college courses.

I guess beauty and damage are tangled together in all of us.

I totally believed Mike when he said. “I got screwed up as a kid.” And as an adult he got caught doing weird, upsetting things near children, things that echoed what was done to him in the real life nightmares of his childhood. It excuses nothing, but explains a lot. Though I wish he hadn’t, he told me the whole story. Things I can’t unhear, though I wish I could.

How do we get imprinted so deeply in the half-forgotten dream of our childhood? Following and re-acting out the hurt of our early years like little ducklings who got one good look at their mother, whether matron or monster at just the right developmental moment, and so would follow her or anybody who looks like her off the edge of a waterfall, again, and again, and again, thinking this time it will be different, or more likely, we’re not thinking at all, just following a feeling.

The psychiatry world tells us that children who were abused often grow up to be abusers? That’s their norm. That’s what their roll models did. You think it would be the other way around – that they’d resolve to be different. But the human mind is a rabbit hole with immeasurable variations. 

Even folks like me with minor childhood issues can find it hard to shake their imprinting.

Just like I read between the lines on those two dates with that lovely women named Jan – the one with a habit of choosing abusive men? Any psychologist reading this story is reading between the lines, doing what any smart person does when they hear someone judging others; they’re pulling my common threads together, for often judgments say more about the person pronouncing them than about those he’s judging.

There was another rabbit hole in my life, one that at first looked like clear-eyed, adult clarity.

In a spare, darkened bedroom, on a mattress that lay flat upon freshly refinished, blonde oak floors, in a late night argument with a woman I dated after my marriage ended – a woman I thought I loved more than anyone else I’d ever met in my life – she silenced our angry debate with a simple, searching observation about herself, and me. Lying on her stomach, leaning up on elbows, her long, dark hair falling over her shoulders, she softly but urgently whispered at me, “Well maybe I’m attracted to birds with broken wings – thinking I’ll fix them.”

Occasionally, in that bed I awoke in a sleepy fog in the middle of the night to the glow of an iPhone screen cast against the wall. I’d turn to find her using it as a flashlight, her face illuminated in the blue-white glow, writing furiously on a small notepad. First time it happened I mumbled, “What are you doing?” She replied without looking up, “Writing down my dreams before I forget them.” She told me often she wanted to understand her dreams, tease out their hidden meaning.

The night of that earlier argument, we fell asleep back-to-back, then woke in the morning with our arms apologetically wrapped around one other.

But that didn’t fix anything. How I wish it could.

You see, I was still me and she was still her. We talked a lot about changing for each other, but never got there. The tea leaves of her dreams and my rabbit hole journeys with a therapist couldn’t outrun our old impulses or keep us from stomping out the last remaining embers of each other’s innocence.

Though the relationship ended painfully with us at odds with each other, perhaps we were more alike than we ever realized – both of us fixers, trying in vain to repair the other person’s broken wings. And how that urge got imprinted on our little duckling hearts in our long distant childhoods is anyone’s guess.

could you be loved?

Life In The Fast Lane

On a two thousand mile drive to Alabama, Florida and back home last month it occurred to me that driving behavior has changed since the days I got my license back in the ‘70s.

My chariot, captured mid-journey in my sister's driveway
in Chuluota, Florida. It's a great vehicle for turning the
slow lane into a make-shift fast lane.

Out of shear boredom, and admittedly, more than a little impatient frustration, I conducted a highly biased traffic study of Interstate driving habits. These are my findings.
 

Lesson #1: “75 is the new 55.”

At some point passing through northern Alabama I recognize that nobody, and I do mean nobody, is going the speed limit. The old oil-crisis-Nixon mandate of 55 mph that was in place when I started driving seems quaint in retrospect. In those days I used to fudge the 55 mph law by setting the cruise control at 62.

We’re in an era of accelerating instant gratification. “I wanna be there, and I wanna be there right now!” The journey is to be tolerated. The destination is our birthright. We’re in our little living room on wheels; comfy chairs, stereo, smart phones feeding us email, music and social media updates, video screens mounted on the ceiling – the entitled Ugly American at our ugliest.

Now, if the posted limit is 70, my fellow drivers and I have cruise control set at 85. Just like original Oreos, old school IPAs, and 1950s ranch homes weren’t enough for Americans and needed to be “doubled,” mph over the speed limit have doubled, too.

Lesson #2: The “fast lane” is a dead concept.

When I was a kid the fast lane was a place where faster traffic actually went past slower traffic. When a faster driver approached a slower moving car, the slow guy noted this approaching reality in his rear-view mirror and courteously moved to the right. In the Midwest, this disappeared along with bell bottoms and disco. I wouldn’t even be surprised if a state-by-state study showed Hoosiers are the worst at moving over for faster traffic.

As I drive south, I'm always reminded that the mid-south is more courteous than the mid-west at getting over. It improves in Kentucky. Courtesy appears around Louisville and stays strong well through Georgia. But once you get into Florida, that social contract falls apart again and as in Indiana, the fast lane is once more clogged with slow fuckers just don’t care if it bugs you.

Today the fast lane has become a promise of swiftness that rarely pays off. It’s a bit of a status claim, too: everybody thinks they belong there. Only losers poke along in the slow lane.

And the fast lane is a place of hope. Think of the intermittent reward of gambling. People throw away their money gambling because, well, they won once, and so keep playing and losing, certain the next big payoff is right around the corner. Likewise, people line up in that far left lane, beating the steering wheel with their palm, wondering what the hold up is. Long ago they got in the fast lane a time or two and actually went fast, and so they hope against hope that once that blockage opens up, they’ll be zipping along smoothly.

Hurdling through central Florida on I-4 with my sister, the fast lane was bumper-to-bumper as far as the eye could see, yet the “slowest” lane to the right was totally – I'm not kidding, totally empty. We gave up hope and slipped into the far right lane and blew by the front of that line over and over again (yes, I’ve become one of those drivers). As a result, I can tell you first hand what the various blockages are at the front of that so-called fast lane.

Blockage A: Drivers texting, or so absorbed in a cell phone conversation they momentarily lost connection with where they are and why. You can see them alone in the front seat, talking urgently into their phone or a Bluetooth headset, sometimes gesturing wildly to the disembodied caller on the other end. 

Blockage B: Elderly drivers who have forgotten the point of the fast lane and, and like most Hoosiers have come to see it as just another lane. They’re driving along, slow and happy, hugging that left-hand guardrail. When you finally pass and give them the stink-eye, they look back and gesture to the other lanes like, “Hey, there are three lanes. They’re all the same. I chose this one. You choose yours and get off my back.”

Blockage C: Long-haul Zombies – not truckers, but forlorn, straight-thru drivers in Civics and aging mini-vans who decided to drive non-stop all the way. They’re just staring ahead, eyes swollen, mouths agape, half mesmerized/half lost, steeped in second-hand diesel fumes and way, way past caring that there’re a line of 20 or 30 defeated drivers stacked up behind them.

Blockage D: Self-righteous Drivers. They’re indignant as hell and don’t care if you’re irritated. They’re already going 5 mph over the speed limit, dammit! And, “For the love of God, that ought to be fast enough for anybody! If you don’t like it, next wide open break in the center lane, I might get over for you, but it will have to be wide open – it can’t cost me a moment (or an ounce of pride).”

Lesson #3: SOBs + Enablers = Injustice

There is a class of driver so dispicable they don’t deserve the smallest courtesy. They are the “SOB Driver.”

How to spot the SOB: There’s road construction ahead and you’ve had ample warning that a lane is ending and you must merge. As you near the final merge, drivers have all lined up. But here comes the SOBs barreling past the line on what’s left of the dying lane. He (and it’s always a he) pulls to the front of the line, puts on his turn signal and waits to be let in.

Which brings us to The Enabler. This is typically a Blockage hybrid whose enabling tendency combines with their #1 or #2 Blockage tendencies. It’s The Enabler who lets the SOB in ahead of everyone who followed the merge instructions.

I merged dutifully in line south of Louisville, watching an Enabler allow an SOB in an urban assault vehicle force his way in ahead of us all. Steaming a little, I started mentally listing Enablers: those who spoil petulant children, those who pick up cigarettes at the store for their smoking friends (who really ought to quit), those who quietly clean up after slobs without complaint, those who subscribe to Comcast despite its obvious status as pure evil, and those who allowed Hitler to consolidate power in 1930s Germany,

Why didn’t I just fly? I’d be drinking a gin and tonic and reading Rolling Stone magazine.

Waterhole Branch

Live oak and dead boat at the Waterhole Branch

Sunlight falling through massive live oaks hung with Spanish moss casts a backlit, dreamy luster to the landscape. That, plus a rusting cabin cruiser on a trailer and the neighbor’s junk pile give the rural compound that is Waterhole Branch a tattered, cinematic beauty.

Shari had urged me to southern Alabama on a sorta blind date with a book editor, Joe Formichella. “I think you two would understand each other. I think he’s the guy to edit your book.” After I arrived we sat in Joe and Suzanne Hudson's living room. Suzanne is perched delicately, legs crossed on a couch cushion, wearing a black beret, smiling, silent. I’d read her novel, “In a Temple of Trees,” and had to remind myself that this seemingly prim woman, and former middle school councilor, had written the most violent rape scene I’d ever read in a book.

Her husband Joe is the writer/editor Shari wants to match me with. I’d read one of Joe’s books, too:  Murder Creek. Next day, when I’m on the deck looking out at Waterhole Branch, she texts me, “Come to the cottage,” to hang out and talk with Joe. I walk over to Shari’s cottage and we all chat. Joe leaves, Shari eventually smiles and nods toward the main house, “Not trying to tell you what to do Kurtie, but you need to go in a talk to Joe.”

On the deck at Waterhole Branch

She’s called me “Kurtie” since we were teenagers.

So I do. Joe, lean, with a youthful face and longish hair is wearing Tabasco logo print pajama bottoms

and watching English football on the television. I see my manuscript stacked beside him on the couch, dog-eared pages, post-it notes, and hand-written comments are evident. I drink gin, Joe drinks vodka, and we talk. Joe raises questions and gently pokes holes in the opening of the novel. Nothing he says is a surprise. I’ve had many stories that needed professional tweaking, but never had an editor who really knew how to do the surgery. I quickly see that Joe knows. And Shari had seen that he would.

Both Shari and I have a 5 in front of out ages, but when we became friends, there was only a 1. In perhaps 1977, she sat in front of me in a classroom filled with what are now ancient machines called typewriters. That was in Tipton, Indiana.

I played guitar and sang a Dan Fogelberg song at Shari’s first wedding in a little country church in western Tipton County. Her Mamaw was upset I wore flip-flops on the altar - called me a hippie. I built a rocking horse for Shari’s first child, Abbie. We lost track of each other. Years later, at the Pork Festival parade in my hometown, a dark-haired, freckled little girl appeared before me in a crowd. Turned out it was the little girl I’d built that rocking horse for years before. Little Abbie said flatly, “Call my Mamma. She misses you!” and then disappeared back into the crowd.

While I raised a family and stole writing time during lunch hours and late nights, Shari was living in New York and then North Carolina. While trying to get best-selling author, Rick Bragg to write a story about the people of her adopted small town, Bragg turned the tables and challenged her to write about them instead. Afraid of failure, uncertain she could do it, she stepped off the ledge and did it. Shari began writing.

The art outside my bedroom wall at Joe & Suzanne's

So in distant places, disconnected from each other, my friend and I were writing. We will both publish books this year with the same publisher. All because of her, this girl I sat behind in typing class.

In the cottage, Shari Smith has a MacBook Air in her lap. Her boyfriend, Chris sits between us with an unplugged electric guitar in his lap, plucking scales and blues riffs. Over Chris’s shoulder is a picture of Shari’s daughter Abbie, all grown up and a mother herself, holding her baby in a photo with Hillary Clinton, taken at a campaign event.

I know Chris hurt the middle finger on his chord hand in a recent accident. “Why don’t you take a few days off?” I ask. Beneath a tussle of salt-n-pepper hair, he considers me with the one-eyed, long, steady wink of a man looking up from serious work, “Chet Atkins said, ‘If I don’t practice one day; I know. If I don’t practice two days; you know.’”

Shari and I agree on a release date party for both her book and mine to be held back in Indiana. Immediately we’re texting people who must agree. Chris puts his guitar down to check his calendar.

I quiz Chris as he practices. He’s toured in James Taylor’s band and been a hired-gun guitarist for more famous folks than I could name. I realize I’ve probably seen him in concert repeatedly during my life and heard him regularly on albums and TV commercials. He’s looking forward to a weekend show, playing a gig with James Brown’s drummer.

I linked up with Shari again two years ago. She noted an emotional edge to my Facebook posts as I was going through divorce. She suggested I come down to North Carolina, where she was living at the time, get away from the turmoil, and write. After twenty years apart I drove down to her little farm and spent an autumn week writing on her back deck. From time to time she would drop a couple magazines beside me so I could read her work. In those magazines, I found that Shari was writing about her neighbors with gentle compassion and an ironic sense of humor.

Within a year we spent a couple days in a rural Tipton Co. farmhouse with writer, Joe Galloway, whose book, “We Were Soldiers Once and Young,” became the Mel Gibson movie. We sat up late drinking and eating pie with Joe, and did a speaking gig at our old high school in Tipton, together on the same stage where we both acted in The Sound Of Music 30+ years earlier, me playing Captain Von Trapp, and Shari playing a nun.

Writers Live Here: at the entrance to Waterhole Branch

And a year later her publisher is asking to republish my first book, Stardust, and soon thereafter asked to take control of the publishing of my 2^nd book, The Salvage Man.

But sooner than all that, Joe Formichella’s new book, The Waffle House Rules, will be published and I’ll be back in Waterhole Branch for the party.

I love you, Shari. Thanks for all the years of friendship and for carrying such a creative cloud of energy around with you. So happy I got drawn back into it.

The Walnut Tree

         When I was a small child my family lived in Sharpsville in northern Tipton County. There was a big walnut tree in the backyard. To this day the smell of green walnuts is evocative to me. It’s not really a nice smell at all, rather pungent, but it triggers memories of my childhood. 

         I like to pick up a green one, rub the skin gently, then take a big whiff. It’s one of those smells – like freshly ground coffee or the entrance to a tobacco shop, that only provides maximum, intoxicating impact on the first whiff. All repeated attempts to enjoy that smell fade to the point of futility. Time must pass between such intense aromas before recapturing the initial burst, as if our olfactories need to air out and take a rest between such jolts.

         On a summer day more than forty-five years ago the old train station downtown was being demolished. My brother and sisters had been pestering my Dad for a tree house. He suggested we go down with the wagon and ask the workmen for some scrap boards.

         We came home with the wagon stacked high with old woodwork and rough sawn two-by-fours. With them, my father built a tree house in the walnut tree. Looking back now I can see that it was a terribly dangerous arrangement. Wouldn’t be allowed today. Still, nobody ever got hurt.

         We could see our entire world from up there. There was a basketball court against the garage, not paved, just dirt. Beside that was a gnarled, aging apple tree. There were old names carved in the bark and we, too, carved our initials there with a roofing knife. There was a large sandbox along a fence that separated the backyard from the gravel driveway and a big garden that lay just beyond the reach of the shadow of the tree branches. There was also a long row of forsythias along the fence - great for making instant green roses – and whips. We were at the very edge of town. Beyond the road to the west (where I learned to ride a bike) was a barn and a field where cattle grazed, across the road to the north was a soybean field.

         My brother and sisters and I did such terrible things when we were kids. If my own children ever did the same things we’d have rushed them off to therapy. We shot each other with BB guns, got in vicious fights and experimented with cigarettes behind the garage. Our family had taken a trip to California in the summer of ’67 – in a day when the airlines put mini-packs of cigarettes on your food tray (yes, they served everyone a meal). My sister and I gathered all those little packs and brought them home and gave them a try behind the garage. You could have seen what we were up to from the tree house in the old walnut. Of course we got caught. There were spankings and groundings - it was a dark day.

        Whenever I smell green walnuts, I think of that.

         I found a little puppy and brought it home and begged my mother to let me keep it. It only lasted a few weeks. I remember standing beneath the tree one day, filling a bucket with walnuts as my mother often forced us to do. My brother, Tom, came around the house and sneered, “Your dog just got hit by a car. It’s your fault because you never take care of it.” I dropped my bucket and ran around the house. Sure enough, there was Poochy laying along the curb - dead and bloody. I laid him on a brown paper sack and carried him to the doghouse under the walnut tree. When my dad came home from work he dug a hole and buried the dog in the garden. I built a little grave marker out of sticks. You could have watched all this unfold from the planks of the tree house.

         Oh, the trials of childhood.

         After a winter season, the walnut husks turn from Kermit-The-Frog-green to rotten-banana brown, and the layer beneath congeals into a black goo, as thick and staining as used motor oil. At this point they were gathered with gardening gloves. When that dries and falls off, you’re left with the nut we all recognize as a walnut. One warm, late spring day, my sister, Jama gathered those walnuts fallen the previous autumn from the garden and along the neighbor’s chain link fence. Each had a 2” or 3” sprout of a walnut tree popping out of the nut. She filled the wagon and went door-to-door selling walnut trees to the neighbors for a dollar.

         We moved from that house when I was eight. I remember being quite happy there. It seems that money was tight and we lived with few frills. We moved to a bigger, nicer house in a bigger, nicer town and our lives seemed suddenly very different – less wild. When I think of that house in Sharpsville I see the layout in my mind from the lofty perspective of the tree house in the walnut tree. It was a hideout when we played war, a base for hide and seek and shade when we shucked sweet corn.
         Many years later, when my own kids were small, I bought a rental property on Logan Street here in Noblesville. At the back near the alley was a huge walnut tree. I took my boys with me when I did yard work. In the autumn when I mowed, I gave them each a bucket and made them pick up walnuts. As children often do, my boys mimicked me. Sometimes when I picked up a green walnut, they would do the same. They gouged the felt-like skin with a fingernail or rubbed it on the concrete and then held it against their noses for a big whiff.
         But the smell did not mean the same thing to them that it meant to me.

My new book, The Salvage Man began going online for e-readers before Christmas. It's currently available at iTunes, Amazon.com, Fastpencil, and BarnesandNoble.com. I'll be doing a public launch to tell the world in the weeks ahead - probably throw a party at my house with hardcover versions available.

The Salvage Man

cover design by Sarah Kate Chamness

I've just published my 2nd book. It's called The Salvage Man.

The Salvage Man is the story of Dan Reynolds, a man who’s become invisible in a place where he thought he’d live a life of purpose, where he thought he’d matter. In a startling moment of terror and wonder, he meets another soul as invisible as he is.  Together, they seek redemption.

Dan’s story was born in my imagination in 1994.

In the early morning dark, driving down Cherry Street to my out-of-town teaching job, I found myself behind a slow moving city truck, pulling a magnet that hung an inch above the street, gathering nails dumped by union workers to harass scabs. Noblesville’s biggest employer, Firestone, was trying to bust the union, which in return was striking. The union-busting, picket-line crossing, slow-motion destruction of those jobs happened just blocks from my home. The plight of those workers weighed on my mind.

When I moved to Noblesville in the late ‘80s, the population was 18,000. Growth had already changed the town. Many of those Firestone workers had grown up in a different Noblesville. As the years passed I met blue-collar workers my age who grew up in a town they thought would be 10-15,000 people, where they’d have jobs of a certain kind and would fit in socially in the life of the town. But even in the late ‘80s it was changing rapidly, and by the mid ‘90s, that world was evaporating.

That growth and those new suburban residents created an economic vitality that obscured the fading of blue-collar Noblesville. But I saw it on my way to work every morning. For the writer in me, that became Dan Reynolds background.

During the same period my little family was living in an old house I was restoring just down the street from that strike. We were surviving on my teacher’s salary. I took to dumpster diving for old house parts at demolition sites and salvaging old houses prior to demolition. It helped restore my home and provided extra cash as I sold truckloads to antique salvage yards.

Once I went with a neighbor, Russ Wagoner, to salvage century-old cut stone steps from a neglected farmstead west of town. It was being demolished to make way for the new Mill Grove subdivision. The 1870s Italianate farmhouse had already partially collapsed, leaning to one side like a Dr. Seuss cartoon house, but one could have still slipped in a window to grab a door or fireplace mantel. Russ had been in there already. Digging around the five-foot long stones that hot sunny day, I asked if there was anything inside worth taking. Russ is not a foolish man, not prone to mysticism, but he gravely said, “Something bad happened in there. You can feel it. Don’t go in.” The cold insistence in his eyes convinced me. I peered into a back window at the fractured kitchen, but otherwise took his advice. We muscled the stone steps into my pickup and left.

The old Cottingham farmhouse, where The Salvage Man is set.

I salvaged again at a picturesque farmstead at the north end of 10^th Street, across from Potter’s Bridge. In my new position as a Realtor and the president of the local preservation group, I’d convinced the developer to save the pre-Civil War home, but the barn, the grain bin, the milk house and carriage house, shaded by towering trees in an overgrown courtyard-like setting, were all being demolished to make way for the Potter’s Woods subdivision. I felt a deep sadness as I gathered doors, porch posts and shutters that had been discarded in the barn loft. The next week when I went back to dig through old books and personal belongings stacked in the grain bin, I arrived to find a staggering mountain of dirt had been moved, making a twenty foot deep dry mote around the barn, which now seemed to float on an island. It was a bizarre scene. Eventually the barn would be demolished and the ground beneath it also moved to make the subdivision’s retention pond.

It was there on that farmstead that I set the story of the Salvage Man, there that I imagined Dan Reynolds doing the same work I was doing, but he did it to financially survive after the strike. And like the old farmhouse Russ had entered only to feel a rising sense of unease, this farmhouse had an ominous feeling inside; dense, stale air, and dark rooms and recesses that put a tingle at the back of your neck and filled your chest with an adrenaline-spiked urge to get out fast.

It is there inside that house, in that barn, and on that land that Dan Reynolds life changes.

I imagined Dan not only challenged by the end of his factory job, but divorced at age 50, his kids gone or in college. All the things that once defined this silent, emotionless man – job, marriage, parenthood – are all gone. And his hometown is increasingly unrecognizable from the place where he was raised. To make him feel even shittier, the lone way he finds to survive is to “undress,” as Dan puts it, the town’s historic identity, to be sold off at antique stores before it’s demolished.

But there in that house, in that barn, and on that land, Dan finds redemption.

I hope you’ll buy a copy of the book and discover the story for yourself. Copies can be bought for e-readers at iTunes, Barnes&noble.com, or Amazon.com. Barnes & Noble and the Amazon site can also sell print version for mail delivery. I’ll have hardcopy versions available in a few stores in Noblesville. Please encourage your friends to check it out.

For My Father

My father died 10 days before Christmas. I wrote the comments I wanted to share, read them at the service, then kinda put them out of my thoughts. I'd shared them with my friend Rhonda and promptly forgot about that, too. Yesterday she and I got to texting about silly epitaphs to have on your gravestone (I'd suggested "She was sweet and stupid" for her – which is only half true, after she texted me the comment "Hakuna Matata!"). She eventually sent this text:

"I told Georgie (Rhonda's daughter) last night that when I die, if you were still alive to look you up and have you help her with my eulogy. I read her yours for your dad and she was so impressed. She loved it! Should make you feel good. She hates everything:)"

So here's the eulogy I wrote for my dad. If it's good enough for Georgie, I suppose it's good enough for a Contrarian post.

Last Sunday I lost the best drywall man I've ever known. That he could level the horrifically out of level ceiling of a 120-year-old house before applying new drywall amazed me. I always wanted the job to go faster, but he’d slow me down and show me how to do it right.

I also lost the best electrician I ever hired. And even though I only paid him with a ham sandwich and a can of Old Milwaukee, he'd draw careful wire diagrams of the 3-way switches so I'd understand how they worked, and show me which spots in the electrical box would make the lights come on, and which spots would electrocute me.

I also lost an amazing plumber, who tolerated that I didn't want new fixtures, I wanted to make the 1920s fixtures work like new. Though exasperated, he rolled his eyes and helped me anyway.

My first-class carpenter also passed away last Sunday, along with the roofer who taught me how to lay shingles and the handyman who showed me how to hang gutters.

My go-to mortgage lender died on Sunday as well. He could always be counted on to make the loan. He'd have a payment book and keep careful records with each payment I made.

And my auto repairman died as well. He could take a lawn mower engine apart, put it back together, and rebuild a car’s brakes or transmission.

All these guys I lost were in fact one man: My father.

And those talents only scratch the surface of the things he taught me. I grew up in a house where men cleaned and cooked. It wasn’t just a job for women. It wasn’t common for his generation, but it was the way he was raised, and so became the way I was raised.

He had a deep love of music, That rubbed off on me. I recall as a teenager watching a TV show with him of old video clips of County Basie, Lena Horn and Nat King Cole. I told him I didn’t like that music. He shook his head in disgust. I eventually leaned to love that music.

When I had kids of my own, he regularly pitched in and tended to them like the Eagle Scout he once was, taking them to the woods and the creeks and the ponds.

That engineer, that handyman, that jack of all trades – he was good at a lot of things, but he wasn't very good at saying, "I love you." Those just weren’t easy words for him. But he was saying it all the time in acts of service to me. He said I love you with a hammer and with wire splitters. He said it with a pipe wrench and a drywall knife. He said it with a loan and said it again by making sure I paid it back. He said it by nurturing my children.

My father, Jim Meyer, with my sister Jama.

All those projects he used to help me with, I’ve done them on my own now for years, ever since he slowed down and the helping got harder.

A few years back I was telling him about a project I was working on. I could see in his eyes how he wished he could help. He said in frustration, “I’m not much good for anything anymore.”

But that handyman was good for an awful lot. I wouldn’t have known how to do most of what I’ve done, if he hadn’t repeatedly told me that he love me in the only way he knew how to say it.


My new book, The Salvage Man began going online for e-readers before Christmas. It's currently available at iTunes, Amazon.com, Fastpencil, and BarnesandNoble.com. I'll be doing a public launch to tell the world in the weeks ahead - probably throw a party at my house with hardcover versions available.

“If you haven’t got anything good to say . . .”

On the way home from a dinner gathering at a friend’s house that got a little loud and bawdy, I recalled my favorite dinner party story.

Winston Churchill

It was the famous incident between Winston Churchill and Lady Astor. The two sat side by side at a dinner party and throughout the evening Churchill was his usual self, telling off-color jokes and using foul language. Finally, an indignant Lady Astor spouted, “Sir, if you were my husband, I’d poison you.”  To which Churchill replied, “And Lady, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

I love Churchill.

Sometimes in life, we’re stuck beside both kinds of people at public affairs – sometimes the Lady Astors of the world, and sometimes the Churchills.

Years back, while channel surfing late at night, I stopped for a moment at the Howard Stern show. It amounted to a video feed of his radio show, which is absolute trash. I’d watch a minute or two before, much the way a rubber-necker ogles a car accident – you don’t really want to be a part of it, but a voyeuristic peek won’t hurt, right?

The premise is this: Stern invites a well-endowed young woman – model, actress, minor celebrity, whatever – to come on the show. He quizzes her about her love life – but not in an intelligent way, instead, the way a drunken frat boy on spring break might chat up a call girl on a street corner. The whole point is to get the guest to take her clothes off. In other words, the Howard Stern show is the intellectual equivalent of a teenage boy’s sex fantasy, with a good sound stage. I don’t know which is more pathetic, the aging host who still thinks this is the height of comedy, or the guest who thinks if she undresses it might further her acting/modeling career.

And just so you know, I wasn’t waiting for the payoff, because this was basic cable. All you see is a woman with scrambled pixels over her chest.

I recall once channel surfing from Stern and immediately finding myself in an alternate world of idiots: Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. I’d gone from a pompous egomaniac to a delusional egomaniac. Pat was blathering on, comparing liberals to Nazis and insisting that if Disney didn’t turn away from its gay-friendly policies, God would send a hurricane to destroy Orlando (I’m not making this shit up).

On the 700 Club Pat Robertson pretends to read the news while spinning each story in a way to canonize the Christian-conservative point of view while vilifying any point of view that might have been considered progressive at any point during the past century and a half.

Pat Robertson: I love this picture!

In short hand – guns are always good, homosexuals are always bad, reinstating mandatory prayer in school would solve most of America’s problems, poor women will keep having babies if you keep giving them welfare, and September 11^th was proof that America is so sinful, God couldn’t be bothered to protect us.

For me, the involuntary vomiting reflex is triggered as quickly by Robertson as it is by Stern.

But, there was talk of dinner parties at the beginning of this ramble.

Let’s say you’re in purgatory - stuck at a dinner party - they’re seating people - Pat Robertson is on one end of the long banquet table and Howard Stern at the other. The seats in the middle are taken by the intelligent and reasonable people you would prefer to sit with. But, you must sit at one end or the other. Which end would you choose?

In truth, there’s a little of both men in me. I’ve offended my fair share of people with bawdy conversation and rude jokes and throwing conversational hand grenades. And there’s a childish side of me that likes to shock people (especially the Pat Robertson kind of people).

There’s also a part of me - the parent and former-teacher side that discouraged teenagers from pre-marital sex, alcohol and drugs. As a high school teacher I frowned at 16 years of potty and sex humor, not because it was my job, but because often it’s simply not funny, just childish. Howard Stern is proof that the dimmer the brain, the older you get before you stop laughing at that stuff.

But I have to admit, at the dinner party, I wanna sit next to Stern. That’s where the most interesting conversation is gonna take place. And there are plenty of other historical figures I’d choose. And if I could combine the wit with the crude, that’s my preference. If I could go back in time, I’d sit my ass right next to Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt.

Longworth cared little for social convention and once said, “If you haven’t got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth

In her late teens at the turn of the 20^th Century, while her father was the U.S. president, she smoked cigarettes, went out unchaperoned with men, stayed out late partying, and kept a pet snake. She looked like a Gibson Girl, but didn’t act like one.

She had a rude wit, once saying of her attention-whore presidential father, "He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening."

Of a senator having an affair with a woman less than half his age, she snorted, "You can't make a soufflé rise twice."

When I’m led through the gates of hell, sit me next to Winston Churchill, Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth, and if there’s no other seat, yes, I'll sit with Howard Stern. But if it’s truly hell, my little personal hell will probably be a private room with the disapproving Lady Astor and Pat Robertson.

My propensity to choose the rude over the prude rubbed off on my children. Once when telling the story of Winston Churchill and Lady Astor to my kids, my14 year old daughter, Sally, replied, “Did you say, ‘Lady Ass-turd?’”

I hung my head in despair a moment, and then laughed really, really hard.

And, oh yeah, at any dinner party, set me next to Sally.

My new book, The Salvage Man began going online for e-readers before Christmas. It's currently available at iTunes, Amazon.com, Fastpencil, and BarnesandNoble.com. I'll be doing a public launch to tell the world in the weeks ahead - probably throw a party at my house with hardcover versions available. Here's an early look:

http://www.fastpencil.com/publications/6244-The-Salvage-Man