(for Donnacha)

A while back, after a punishing rain, I helped clear out my mother’s basement of damaged boxes and old and useless things tucked down there for convenience’s sake, which had grown to an inconvenient tangle of things. Artifacts of our life, of my dad’s life. Important things.

I was uniquely qualified to do this because buried among the junk and boxes of papers were treasures that only I could know were important. Letterhead from his TV days; an ancient jacket patch from his stint in Korea as a rabies control soldier in a combat zone. There was lots of chaff, but there was some very, very important wheat to be found. And, thanks to my folks’ habit of clearing away clutter into boxes and tendency to “sort them later,” (read: never) many pieces of treasure were scattered here and there, hiding between old bills or restaurant fliers across multiple boxes.

The word “journey” is overused in pop psychology to lend an instant air of gravitas to any set of events. But this task really was  something of a mythic journey: part descent into the underworld, part cleaning of the Aegean Stables, part father-quest. In sifting through both the detritus and the documents that spanned back through my whole history as a person, in scattered order, I found that I was also unpacking and sifting through my own internal landscape of memory and seeing how it fit in with these artifacts. Or seeing how they unfolded memories and informed them.

Then magic started happening. For real and true. Real magic isn’t the kind you’ve been led to believe, with arcane vapors and mystic lights appearing and things floating. Real magic is, I think, the intersection of will and action meeting with chance encounters made possible by that will and action, wherein those “chances” show you things that you’re willing to see. Real magic is a dialog between you and what you are doing and perceiving. I chose to make the the task more than a task: I was open for it to show me and teach me. And also hurt me, if it was going to. It did all those things.

I learned (among other things) through a history of lawyer letters and correspondence- once again, pieced together across many containers and boxes– that I was never privy to, just how hard my father fought to keep contact with his children from his first marriage. What he sacrificed, how he struggled. I never really knew the extent. I mean, I was a kid, I was aware in a peripheral way, how kids soak up things and overhear conversation snippets. But now, I was aware.

I learned, too, how spiteful and how deeply cruel his former wife had been, both to him and to my brother and sister. It informed me, now, as a father myself, of the nature of the pain that he held, all throughout my happy childhood adventures with him and showed me a hidden aspect of the man who taught me what it is to be a man.

Then I found this. It is a letter my dad wrote to himself, to organize and figure out where his head was as he turned 50. I had no idea my dad did this sort of thing. I do this sort of thing; I did not know we shared that trait. It is a “letter” he wrote and filed away, being read by no one.

But there is magic in intention and magic in doing, and this letter traveled through almost 22 years in time to be delivered to my hands, just when I needed to read it. The will and intention of the writing in one point in space and time meeting the will and intention in another, to take on this daunting, cluttered space with a paleontologist’s sense of delicacy and together, creating a “new” conversation, a “new” communication with my father, almost two years dead. In reading it, in being the only person in the world to ever read it besides him, I realized it was meant for me. Not by him in that moment, but certainly in this moment, here, in this basement, underground and digging through time to find it.

If that isn’t magic that puts vanishing handkerchiefs and mysteriously floating orbs to shame, I don’t know what is. Here is my father’s letter to himself, written to himself when he was 50 and I was 15, turning 16. It is also, as it turns out a letter to me, delivered to my hands when I was 38 and ready to hear it. It is about life and living and death and grieving and I choose to take it as an act of a master magician that I received it as I did, when I did, and how I did. Maybe a joint act of two magicians.

Letters To Myself
By Joel Dobbin

I was thining about John Lennon the other day; about his life, and about his death. Mostly though, I was thining about his life. It started me thinking about a lot of other things. Thinking about artists and how they’re viewed by the rest of the world. In that respect, Lennon’s life wasn’t all that different from the lives of other artists throughout history.
Conventional society, whatever that may be at any given point in time in the history of man, has some strong dichotomous feelings about art and artists. It’s sort of a case of “Love Art, Hate Artists.” Well, maybe not really hate artists; more like being scared shitless of them.

I think I understand it. Artists aren’t safe. They make regular people uncomfortable. Artists just don’t play by the rules. Shit, they don’t even play by their own rules. They just play the game as it comes, making up the rules as they go and them breaking them just as easily as they fabricated them in the first place. That could be very scary for the majority of humanity, who live out their lives utterly bound to rules that were created for them by people they’ve never met.

Most people are so fucking preoccupied with dying that they wind up scatred to death of life and living. Religion has ‘em by the balls.

It really doesn’t even matter what religion, basically they’re all similar. Most religions, at least those of the Western Civilization genre, are nothing more than thinly disguised death-cults, which doesn’t make a lick of sense when you look at it dispassionately.

I mean, here’s life. That’s a tangible.

Except for a lot of philosophical, semantic horseshit about questioning the reality of one’s own existence, an individual’s life is the only tangible that he or she really has. Life is REAL! If you don’t believe it, stop breathing, stop eating! Or try jabbing yourself in the genitals with a rusty serving fork. That should answer any questions you may have about the reality of your own existence.

And then there’s death. Now that’s a tangible as well. Basically, an unpleasant prospect, but nevertheless, an absolute. It’s the period following death that’s in question.

Come to think of it,the big question is whether or not there’s any period of existence following death. Yet the vast majority of humanity finds themselves led around by the nose over the issue of what the period following death is all about, whose version is correct, then preparing for it.

Throughout history,the shamans have had so thoroughly bullshitted over an alleged life following death, very few of the masses have ever learned how to live completely in the only real existence that they can ever really be sure of. To further compound the stupidity, any one group of believers has always been only too eager to slaughter any other group of believers to prove their point.

So, here come the rules. Most of which are dedicated to a promised payoff in the great bye and bye.

Shit, like George Bernard Shaw said, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard!” Any schmuck can die; it takes a certain amount of courage and even pain to learn to laugh with guiltless joy.

That’s why artists are the true enemy of the people. They make everyone around nervous. They do things, they say things, they sing things, they write things, they create things that all the rest can hardly even dream about. Artists find within themselves the secret joys, fears, hopes, and dreams that exist in everyone and they go public with them.

Artists laugh with guiltless joy and then go play fuck all with the rules. And to make matters even worse, these creative sons of bitches live forever while the rules-players memories are nearly always interred with their bones. No wonder everyone hates their guts. By their lives works, they wipe humanity’s nose in the excrement of humanity’s own foolishness.

You disagree?

Most everyone with over an eighth grade education knows that Michelangelo painted the “Creation of Man” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was a drunkard, homosexual, and by all accounts, a most unconventional and unpleasant fellow. He probably lived down the street from a good, solid businessman who devoted his life to following the rules and preparing himself for an eternal existence in the “great beyond.” If you can tell me his name, I’ll admit my error.

Shit, I’ll bet that nine out of ten rules-followers couldn’t even name the Pope who commissioned the Sistine Ceiling, let alone our pious hypothetical businessman.

When I was fourteen, my grandfather died. Now, to a fourteen year old, life has a certain sense of immutability. At least, it did to me, back in 1953. So, wen my grandfather died, the fabric of that immutability was suddenly shredded.

I mean, I always had a grandfather, ever since I could remember. Just like my father and mother were always about forty five or so, at least, ever since I could remember. And now, here comes this shit. Death.

It made absolute mincemeat out of my little adolescent sense of permanence. It was in the summer, I was working on a chicken farm in a little town in New York State by the name of Cuddebackville.

 

 

I had lied about my age and told the farmer I was sixteen. All this, of course, with my parents’ approval. The farm was situated right down the road from a summer resort owned by my mother’s great uncle, so I was able to spend the summer gainfully employed and still remain under the watchful and protective eye of the family. Besides, the experience would, as far as my mother felt, get me away from my “hoodlum” friends for a while. (One of the things that used to piss me off the most when I was a kid was that my parents would always blame my friends for all my wildness; they never gave me the credit due me for initiating most of the trouble I got into all on my own. I always took it as a lack of respect on their part.)

Anyway, Hy Fromowitz, the chicken farmer, woke me up about six o’clock on a Friday morning to tell me my mother was on the phone. I hadn’t lived long enough at the time to realize that any phone call you get between the hours of two and six in the morning is always trouble.

Mother had called to tell me that Grandpa Dobbin had shuffled off the mortal coil late the night before and that I was expected in Brooklyn by eleven that same morning to attend the funeral. Now, thirty six years later, I can remember vividly getting dressed hurriedly to make the eight o’clock bus to New York.

I remember being kind of excited about the adventure of traveling to New York by bus, all alone, and then finding myself the right subway train to take me to the Avenue U stop on the Brighton Beach line. I remember feeling just a tad guilty about not feeling an awful lot of grief. I know I was more excited about buying a book and reading it on the long bus ride home. Also, I had lost a lot of baby fat during the month that had passed since I left Brooklyn and I was kind of eager to show off my new, lean body.

It was almost as if my grandfather was merely a prop for a new scenario for me to play out. I made it safely to Brooklyn, and, to make my new sense of adulthood and self-importance complete, I met my family at the Funeral Home.

God, how it appealed to my sense of drama to make my theatrical appearance in the door of the undertaker’s establishment. It was like the hero home from the war.

It wasn’t until we were at the cemetary that my moment of truth came. The cemetery was located almost on the border line between Queens and Long Island and was adjacent to one of the busy expressways that served as a vehicular aorta to the heart of New York City. The roar and whine of countless scurrying cars and trucks almost drowned out the sound of the Rabbi’s low pitched chanting as the family gathered around the gravesite and suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, the realization struck me:

NOT ONE OF THE FUCKING CARS WAS STOPPING!!

Shit, they weren’t even slowing down. I mean, this was my grandfather. MY GRANDFATHER, DAMNIT! One of the pillars of my immutable fourteen year old existence was being planted in the earth. Buried in a shiny, massive, dark-wood coffin, with a Jewish Star engraved on the lid and he was being buried all encased in that fucking darkwood coffin and my grandmother was wailing and my father was looking stoic and sad and people, grown up fucking people, most of whom I had never even met before, were crying, fucking crying, I mean with real tears and all, and not one of those fucking cars had even slowed down.

Now where the hell is the justice in that shit?

That’s when it all dawned on me. About what life is really about. You know, stripped of all the bullshit and the good words and the pious hand-wringing. With all the rules and values that other people surround you with torn away. There I was, fourteen years old, standing in some cemetery in Queens, and I FIGURED IT OUT.

THE ONLY THING THAT REALLY MATTERS, I MEAN, REALLY MATTERS, IS THAT THE CARS STOP.

Not forever. Nobody stops the cars forever. It’s enough to just make ‘em slow down for a moment.

They wanted me to staty home for the rest of the summer. Or at least spend a week at home, joining in the ritual mourning ceremony that somehow is supposed to substitute for failing to stop the cars.

But I couldn’t do things like that anymore.

I took the subway back to Manhattan that evening and caught a light night bus back to Cuddebackville. Down deep, I really wanted to stay, to sleep in my own bed, to get up late and hang out with my friends. But even at fourteen, I knew the value of a dramatic exit and who the hell could pass up a chance like that.

Now, I’m fifty. And frankly, I’m not sure I’m a hell of a lot smarter than I was that summer’s day in 1953. I’ve produced three children, one of whom has a real shot at being a car-stopper.

I’ve got a terrific lady who loves me completely, mostly for what I am, not what she’d like me to be. I’ve sort of meandered through the pasture of this life, with no particular destination in mind, but with few exceptions, I’ve enjoyed the view.

And I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
All in all, I guess I’m doing pretty good.