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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826271822 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Missouri Press |
| Publication date: | 08/08/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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The Plain Language of Love and Loss
A Quaker Memoir
By Beth Taylor
University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2009 The Curators of the University of MissouriAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-7182-2
CHAPTER 1
The Note
When I turned fifty, I stood at the kitchen counter looking out the window at our small backyard in Providence, Rhode Island, studying our one towering tree and old carriage house, and suddenly I saw my mother, alone at her kitchen table in Pennsylvania, looking out at her flower garden, the sloping lawn, the pear tree and woods beyond. It dawned on me that I was now as old as she had been when she lost her fourteen-year-old son to suicide. My mind didn't flash to my brother, Geoff. It saw only the three different faces of my own boys, each so full of life and purpose, and my breath caught. I could not fathom losing one of them. I saw my mother's face, the kindness of her smile, her attentive eyes, and I felt her spirit swirl through me even though she was now eight years gone. Sadness for her swept over me, into my bones, and I steadied myself against the hard countertop.
Soon after my mother died, I found a torn piece of white scrap paper, tucked into her college alumni magazine, lost among phone lists, newsletters, YWCA brochures, and letters from friends, in a box near her bed. I unfolded the paper. In her neat, clear handwriting, she had written "My son, Geoffrey Rowell Taylor, died." There was a space. Then, farther down the scrap of paper, in tighter script—as if her hand clenched—she wrote, "He was a good boy—" And the handwriting stopped again, for good.
She must have been in her early fifties when she wrote those words—notes for her college alumni news. When I found them, I sat on the bed where she had died, and I tried to feel that moment as she stopped writing, thirty years earlier. What could she possibly say? In public. What words could sum up what that boy had been? List his accomplishments, his talents, his kindnesses, his triumphs, his wisdom, each time he was Geoff? What was the most essential word for him? He was a good boy. How true. How feeble a summary. How impossible to say what it felt to have known this boy, to have loved him, and now to have lost him. She knew all those college friends would want to know, would rally to her as soon as they knew, would write, even visit. But she couldn't find the words. Any attempt immediately felt too loud, too empty, too harsh, too useless, so necessary, all at once. There was nothing she could say to explain what happened, because she didn't know, she didn't understand, it didn't make sense; the fact of his suicide was only a huge, yawning emptiness around her, inside her, sucking from her all the smart, capable, articulate words and energy that once filled her life with work and friends and love in ways that did make sense. She wanted to say something, to publicly say Geoff lived. But once she put pen to paper, stared at the first essential words, "he died," there was nothing more that mattered, nothing more to say. She was alone, deeply, profoundly isolated. Nothing, no words, no hug, no sympathy, would ever absolve her grief.
Before my mother died, she directed me through other boxes in her room—family heirlooms for my sister and me, useful goods for friends or donation, a few things for the trash. And then one day I opened boxes filled with newspaper articles and editorials—each one about the Vietnam War. The New York Times, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Saturday Review, Friends Journal, I.F. Stone's Weekly—dating back to 1965, the year my brother died. "This is an archive, Mom," I said in wonder. She sat, exhausted, on her bed. "I thought I might write something," she mused. I had never known her to write anything for publication. But, I understood. I had begun to write about those years, and about Geoff, whose suicide had always seemed indirectly but inextricably tied to that war. Recently I had been interviewing old friends and discovering there were many ways to see what had happened in our family. My mother did not seem to mind. I had shown her an early draft of an essay. All she said was, "This writing that you're doing—is a good thing."
CHAPTER 2Hill of Vision
This is how they met. My mother was cleaning house, her hair tied up in a bandanna, when she greeted my father at the door as he came to pick up her roommate for a date. The next visit he took all three roommates to an alumni picnic at Haverford College, and decided right there he liked my mother's "milkmaid beauty" and her down-to-earth intelligence. They swapped tales of climbs up Mt. Washington, discovered they had probably been at the same USO dance in Petersham, Massachusetts, during the war, and then in Paris the same week, maybe at the Folies Bergère the same night. My father saw she listened well and seemed to enjoy his love for recalling stories, reciting poetry, and narrating family history. When he took my mother out on their first date, he stopped first to feed the chickens for his widowed mother at "Brooklawn" in Cheltenham, the old stone farmhouse that had been his boyhood home. He knocked on the henhouse door, asked his "ladies" if he might come in, and then he spoke French to them. Knowing she had grown up on a farm in Maine, he told my mother he was the closest to a farmer she would find in Philadelphia. But she was charmed by his urbane erudition, his energy, and his humor. That was the most important thing, she would often say—"He made me laugh."
Geoff was born ten months after they married. On a tiny cobblestoned alley in Philadelphia, not far from my father's law office, they squeezed up and down the spiral staircase of their three-story townhouse, one room on each floor, and dubbed it "The Casbah." When I came along, they decided it was time to find a place in the country. Through a former classmate of my father's they heard about a cooperative "intentional" community about twenty miles north of the city. Called Bryn Gweled—Welsh for "Hill of Vision"—it was founded in 1940 and carved out of two farms in Lower Bucks County. The founders wanted families to own the land together, share responsibility for common land, but build their own homes on a two- to three-acre "homestead." Beginning with twelve couples, they laid out their own plot boundaries on the 240 acres, dug the trenches so their electrical and phone lines could be underground, dug a communal pond and swimming pool, and debated their own by-laws to consensus. When a new couple wanted to join, they met each family on the Homesteads before they committed to become, and were accepted as, members.
As a charter member explained, it was supposed to be an "ideal community," free of prejudice and discrimination. They were artists, teachers, journalists, engineers, lawyers, and ministers. They were Quaker, Unitarian, Jewish, agnostic, and atheist. They were mostly white, but soon embraced the first black and Asian families to move to that suburban area. They described themselves with amusement as folks with "high ideals and low incomes"—although some of the founding couples had independent wealth that cushioned their abilities to risk living more by conscience than paycheck to paycheck. All chose to live by ideals less valued by mainstream America. Ed Ramburg left Europe before the Holocaust and helped found Bryn Gweled. In a community history he recalled, "We questioned the validity of authority—whether it was the authority of the government asking us to take part in war, or the authority of custom describing styles of living and spending of leisure time. Authority had not produced results which satisfied us. We hoped to develop a more brotherly and fulfilling way of life by applying our own judgment and experience, and such technical knowledge as we could gather."
By the time my parents joined in 1953, there were forty-three families. On one Saturday each month, men and women gathered for "work parties" to tend to the common areas—clearing underbrush near the skating pond, repairing road signs at the traffic circle, replacing lights in the community center, fixing the pump for the pool. For a while, the men collected the trash from each household on Saturday mornings, tossing bags into an old yellow pickup truck. Appropriately, when asked in second grade, "What does your father do?" my seven-year-old brother reported that his father was a trash collector. In the summer each family signed up for a week of cleaning-the-pool duty. While it was warm, everyone gathered on a Saturday for a picnic before the monthly meeting, where community business got debated and resolved with spirited discussion. We knew everyone by first name, and with some we shared a phone line. If a meeting was called or someone needed help with a crisis, we got a phone call through the "grapevine." We knew particular things that made us care about each neighbor, and we felt part of something larger than our own family.
For children, Bryn Gweled was a wonderful place to grow up. In the winter my brother, younger sister, and I met "the gang" at Morris's hill for a fast sled down toward the creek, or at the pond to skate. We gathered every summer evening with the kids on Woods Road or Hillside Road, and we built troll houses in the woods, or slid down the mud bank known as "The Big Moheaves," built dams on the creek, or played "Beckon" or baseball in the meadow till dark. When we wanted to know where a buddy was somewhere in BG, we'd give out a shrill, intense call—"Yey-ee-yeeet!" and if they were out there in the woods or on another road, they'd respond, the curt yodel leaping out of the trees like an echo. On summer mornings, mothers offered courses in jazz dance, pottery, or weaving straw into baskets. In the steamy afternoons we oozed down to the Community Center to plunge gratefully into the cool, lifeguarded swimming pool. Swim down and back the first day, and you could go into the deep end. Swim ten laps without stopping, and you could come each afternoon without a parent—the cherished first step of independence. On hot summer evenings we joined buddies for a night swim or slept out under the stars on our lower lawn, lulled by the rhythmic whirr of the cicadas. Or, if it started to rain, we all crawled into the tent sheltered by the trees in our backyard, and listened to the tap-tapping of the drops as we told ghost stories and drew curly op art with flashlight beams on the dark green canvas.
My parents designed our house and loved its perch on a central hill that looked over the rolling former farmland. They positioned the picture window so the sun rose directly up its middle on December 21, and they created the fieldstone fireplace as the focus of the living room. Unlike their neighbors who chose the rectangle of the 1950s Frank Lloyd Wright houses, they remembered the snows of their youths and gave their roof a good pitch. Each Christmas they chose a live Christmas tree, and later, when the winter earth thawed, they planted it somewhere on the property, creating windbreaks that now tower over the house. To honor his Quaker heritage, my father planted ivy from William Penn's boyhood home in England, which my grandfather had first brought across the ocean to Brooklawn. From Maine, my mother brought blueberry bushes and a pine tree.
When the house was finished, my father took Geoff and me out to pick up stones from the raw earth before he planted soy to give protein to the dry, dusty dirt, then clover to feed the honeybees he kept in hives. As we grew older, he taught us how to smoke the bees before extracting the honeycomb, which we spun in a huge steel cylinder in our basement so the honey would fly out, coating the metal before it oozed through a trough into a jar. He showed our 4-H Club how to tap maple trees for sap, then heat it into syrup. One night he brought home fresh road kill and showed us how to skin and dry a small animal. On a Saturday each month, he took me into the musty smells of the Davis Feed Mill to buy grain and oyster shells for my twenty-five chickens. My mother taught us how to make jelly from our dark blue grapes and applesauce from our red crabapples. We composted organic waste to go back into our garden, and hung a pail of fatty wastes after dinner in a tree so the raccoons didn't get it before the trash man came.
My father dubbed our family's three acres "Tobacco Road," which at first I thought referred to his pipe, nestled in one side of his mouth, emitting the sweet smell of walnut tobacco.
"Actually," he said, "there was a novel by that name, about folks in the South who had chickens running around, just like we do, and overgrown woods and gardens, just like we do."
On the hallway wall my mother posted a chore chart. Geoff did all the "boy" chores. He carried the trash bins out the fifty yards of our gravel driveway, mowed the half-acre of lumpy grass in the warmer months. In the autumn he helped my father insert the big storm windows and split wood for fires on the hearth. My sister and I were assigned indoor chores—dishes, washing and waxing the kitchen and bathroom floors, ironing, vacuuming, cooking, and setting the table. My tomboy spirit chafed at these girl duties, and I longed to mow the lawn or split some wood. In the meantime, we did often pull together as a family. When it rained too much and our furnace room flooded, we all set up the bucket brigade out the basement door—a process which, despite the wet clothes and dirt, always felt like fun for its humid sense of crisis averted and teamwork triumphant.
Our favorite visit in the warmer months was from the fish man. Geoff, Daphne, and I watched from the living-room window as he rumbled up the long, gravel driveway in his skinny refrigerator truck, turned a semi-circle in front of our flagstone porch, then eased himself out of the high front seat, dressed in rubber boots, fish-filthy pants, blue canvas jacket, and a black worker's cap jammed on his scruffy hair.
Right out of Treasure Island, I thought, imagining him on schooners in full sail, kicking over a bucket of slop in a rage, and hauling in the net full of fish for the day.
"Got shad today, Mrs. Taylor, or bluefish, or haddock," he said, his howdy-do smile revealing brown teeth.
We peered over the wooden slats holding in a huge pile of ice and saw google eyes staring out at us in frozen stoicism.
"Fresh from the dock," he would say, grinning at the three of us as we squinted up at him. "All the way from the docks of Philadelphia!"
My mother scrutinized the google-eyes a bit. "How long do you think the shad run might last?" she asked.
He shrugged. "A week? More?"
"We'd better get them while we can," she said. "Do you have any roe?"
I imagined the brown-black packets of fish eggs she would fry up with our eggs the next morning. I watched her appraise the fish and felt she was somehow back in her Maine element; she knew fish, and this guy's visit was always a treat for her in more ways than just dinner.
He flipped down the wood plank, pulled out three fish, flopped them down one at a time, took out a long, broad cleaver, and wumped the heads off. Each head he wrapped in newspaper and presented to one of us. He knew the routine: we promptly took our damp packages around the house to the front lawn, opened them like Christmas presents, and studied the silvery, shiny scales and eyes until my mother brought out the paring knives. Then we plunged delicately in, pulling back the skin, peering into the eye, probing to where the truncated backbone began.
"Yuk!" I'd spit in mock horror.
"Uuuum, good!" my brother would retort with relish.
Daphne stared at the colors as they changed from fresh glint to dull, dry gray.
One morning Geoff ran in from feeding our big collie dog to say a baby crow was flapping around out by the driveway.
"Can we help it?" he asked. "It probably fell out of its nest. Doesn't even know how to fly yet. Maybe its wing is broken."
My mother went to the window and studied the small, flapping black bird.
We had saved baby kittens and rabbits before when their mothers were hurt or killed, and once we nursed a sparrow that had crashed into our huge picture window. But a crow seemed a different challenge—among the bully species. In our Thorton Burgess books the crow was always the loud, obnoxious character; in Bryn Gweled they were overpopulating to the detriment of the bird neighborhood. But tolerance was the higher value.
"He probably doesn't have diseases yet," my mom said. "Get a box downstairs. Bring him on in."
Carefully, Geoff wrapped the bird in an old towel and placed it in the cardboard box. He fed it mush and milk with a dropper and slowly it calmed down. We found an old hamster cage in our basement to use as a home.
"I'll call him 'Poe the Crow,'" Geoff said, and he set the cage on the bureau next to our big, round kitchen table. Geoff's research on crows showed they were sociable and could even be taught to talk; by placing Poe next to us at our family meals, Geoff thought maybe he'd get the point and say a word. We all chatted with Poe, applauded when he felt good enough to eat on his own, and waited for him to finally move the hurt wing in a normal flap.
Geoff's friends were all waiting for the inaugural performance of the talking bird. But one afternoon, I came home late from school and Poe was gone.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Plain Language of Love and Loss by Beth Taylor. Copyright © 2009 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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