Birth Day

Everything else on the 27th day of January in 1945 paled (as it should) next to the Russian troops throwing open the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau while radio stations in this country were playing “Don’t Fence Me In” by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. While the troops were finding 468 dead inmates, folks in New York were catching Martha Graham and Dance Company at Jordon Hall performing “Appalachian Spring” at the Saturday matinee. While the troops were liberating 2800 people abandoned by the SS without any provisions to survive, William “Willie” J. Glunk was being born in Astoria, New York, about the time Noah Berry, Jr. was preparing for an opening and run of 504 performances in Up In Central Park at the Century Theatre with book and lyrics by Dorothy Fields. While Lois Ada Comfort was being born in Doniphan, Maryland, Raymond Cothern in Baton Rouge, David Hermes in Baraboo, Wisconsin, while these and countless others were being born, hopefully with joyous cries at new life, the Soviets were inventorying the storage buildings and finding 836,255 women’s coats and dresses, over 368,000 men’s suits, and human hair totaling seven tons. While Oscar Schindler was saving 85 Jews from a train in Brunnlitz that had been locked for a week, in Bound Brook, New Jersey, William Hennessy was being born and would live 67 years to the day, the 27th of January, both his birth and death date.

In Baton Rouge and other places in Louisiana that day, there were no ironic newspaper headlines, only straight-forward reporting during war-weary times and the seemingly necessary one-sided reporting of race. Harold Joseph, Negro, died that Friday in New Orleans Charity Hospital of an abdominal gunshot wound received while resisting arrest during a jewelry store robbery Thursday night. His partner, Robert Guidry, Negro, was also shot while escaping with the goods and was in serious condition. No doubt Patrolmen Jay Sedgebeer and Paul Oestricker were busy filling out reports about Joseph and Guidry refusing to halt while fleeing and how many shots were fired and by whom. Also in New Orleans, Rock P. Scallan was sentenced to 60 days in jail by Judge George Platt for driving a truck while drunk earlier on December 23rd. In Baton Rouge, despite objections from the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the sale would go forward of 22 horses and mules no longer fit for duty at Angola, the state penitentiary. The Society cited a law prohibiting the sale of “debilitated, diseased and lame horses and mules in cities of 10,000 or more.”

On that winter day in January, while Robert Guidry, Negro, struggled to survive his gunshot wound and the family of his partner prepared for a funeral, while Patton’s Third Army was crossing the Our River and capturing Oberhausen and while the 6th Ranger Battalion and the 6th Army Special Reconnaissance Unit began a rescue behind enemy lines of 500 American, British, and Dutch prisoners-of-war in the Philippines, Onetia Mae Wilson Cothern was 31 years old and giving birth shortly before noon at the Baton Rouge General Hospital, right across Florida Boulevard and two short blocks west of Bernardo Street. Willie Talmadge Cothern was 33 years old and waiting with other expectant fathers for the birth of his child. Willie Von and Wayne Harolyn at ages 12 and 6 were in school, perhaps with vague inklings that the attention they had been receiving was being splintered into unequal time, that the balance of power was shifting under them much like the uneasy alliance among all armies, all families.

Tumbling

It only seems like slow motion when tumbling to the ground because I’m aware of every step. The first step on Colorado River rocks behind the koi pond’s waterfall, another step on uneven rocks for balance, and the feet are leaden, refusing to lift high enough or quickly for more balancing steps as the momentum of my body pushes forward, aware the tipping point has slipped behind me, the right shoulder crashing into a spiny asparagus fern spreading over more large rocks on the mounded perimeter of the pond. No banging of the head like two friends who died from falling, sudden leaks in the brain. There is slight pain from the thorns of the fern and the middle finger on the right hand throbs from cushioning the impact. Add blood-thinning meds since a heart attack more than a year ago and skinny white legs sticking out of cargo shorts look like someone has been playing mumbly-peg with a sharp knife. Small cuts bleed as if they are more dangerous ones and they do so on through the night.

What’s disconcerting is the tumble happened to a formerly agile guy, one who climbed ladders daily hanging lights in a theatre. It was the inevitability of hitting the ground once the fall started, knowing no instinctive maneuver would be quick enough to avoid the accident. It is like the sudden looseness in the steering or the brake pedal going all the way to the floorboard, the sudden acceptance of a crash into rocks covered by a pondside fern.

Heart Attack Friday

One year ago today . . .

After my father died of a heart attack at the age of 58, I had experienced sympathetic chest pains for months after the funeral. Despite being profoundly scared standing next to my father’s bed, knowing from that experience the symptoms of a failing heart, when my turn came over forty years later, I was not surprised I waited almost a full day before driving myself to the hospital, something the experts say you should never do. Famous last words in many cases, I guess, but the pain was hardly severe, not at all like the pain radiating across my father’s back that had made him sick to his stomach. What I thought while driving to the hospital—stopping at every red light—was getting a cure for the annoying discomfort before the weekend. I had books to read and writing to be done.

It began Thursday evening with discomfort behind the sternum, from stress I thought from financial concerns in retirement and because my wife was ill. Took aspirin and meds for my arthritis and went to bed. Awoke at 4:30 Friday morning—long before daylight—with the same discomfort and knew that was unusual but went back to sleep for a while, always the best way to escape concerns, or the best way to die for that matter, as several people I knew had done, to sleep, perchance to dream before sudden painless nothingness. Inclined as most men are when it comes to doctors and hospital, I put off doing anything, always aware of the discomfort and now some pain on the back of my left bicep—something felt plenty of times from arthritic pain in that shoulder. For short periods of time, the discomfort and bicep pain were joined by slight pain along the jawline and all were with me until early afternoon Friday.

Getting admitted to the emergency room was rapid, dizzying. It became the beginning of the story of how to avoid paperwork and waiting in a room full of sick people. I told the ladies through the round hole in the glass, I know this may sound dramatic, but I need to see if I’m having a heart attack. From the moment of uttering those words until I was on the gurney in an operating room, naked except for a gown, shivering because it was so cold in the room until one of the men put a warmed blanket on me, in that span of an early quick EKG and an emergency room doctor asking if I knew I was in atrial fibrillation and had high blood pressure (no to the first, never ever had the second), from the moment of being on a gurney and racing down a hall while talking on a cell phone to Dee who was too sick to come to the hospital and telling her I was headed to the cath lab, from being amid a gathering heart team and after the cardiologist introducing himself and me sort of echoing my father by asking if the doctor was any good, from that first utterance about checking to see if I was having a heart attack to having a line installed from groin to heart along mysterious pathways and three stents installed in an artery with 99% blockage, in that time, thank you, thank you, thank you, far less than one hour had raced by.

I was never in a great deal of pain, feeling only flushed warmth during the procedure. There was some pain from two IVs, some slight pain from the shaved pubic start of the pathway to the heart. The endless blood gathering always hurt and bruised, but the most pain came from countless sticky contact pads for always awkward and tangled lifelines connected to them. Despite shaving various hairy areas, the worst pain was the removal of two hand-sized sticky pads stuck to chest and all the hairs upon it in case my heart needed some shock therapy. After just one firmly fixed pad was yanked off I was ready to confess all the bad things I had ever done.

There is always a value to serious illness. After my daughter’s battle with encephalitis, it was learning not to sweat the countless and ultimately meaningless small stuff that makes up so much of life. Her illness also brought an appreciation of living in the moment. True of all serious illness, I guess. But I learned something entirely different from having a heart attack.

Dreading it despite knowing it is mostly an infinitesimal part of living, I have always been afraid of the actual act of dying since I was old enough to understand the process. Somehow, lying there on the table before snaking a line up to my heart and installing three stents to save my life, despite knowing I could go into a full-blown attack and die, I felt no great fear, and part of that may have been the speed of the process from when I first spoke to the lady at the ER window. It was a feeling that one of the shoes had dropped, that finally the end process had become visible. Not that I wanted it or welcomed it, but it was a dance with the actual end game that binds all humans most strongly to each other.

I am not sure what the lack of fear during that dance with mortality meant ultimately. Maybe I became a slightly better person. Wife and children would have welcomed that early on. Maybe I appreciated even more the time I had left, a grand gift, enjoying family and watching granddaughters grow into beautifully brilliant young women. But other nagging fears crept in, no doubt to balance my earlier lack of fear when I was having the heart attack, small daily concerns: the blood thinner that immediately created problems; being told not to miss taking another drug because I now had foreign bodies in my artery and the body loves to clot around anything not its own.

Lovely.

A half-century after my father died from his heart attack, two decades after Jennifer’s illness, I was just glad there was another lesson learned from my illness: sometimes you do have to sweat some of the small stuff because some of it can kill you.

 

Holiday Labors

In the old days, fathers were not allowed in the delivery rooms. Admittance for them beyond a series of swinging doors even in the early stages of a wife’s labor was strictly forbidden.

Go, sit in the waiting room, watch the television high up on the wall, we’ll keep you informed of the ritual secret birth and call you when your life has changed in unimaginable ways, when you and your wife are forever marked as blessed by a tiny life you’ll come to love above all else. So go on, pace the halls and lobby of The Woman’s Hospital if you must but never ever go through those swinging doors because you are germ-filled and are only the father.

Dee woke me early Thanksgiving in the still-dark morning and told me she was in labor. No old Dick Van Dyke routine with a cap on the top of the headboard, ready to sit up in bed and put it on in one quick motion, no fumbling for a suitcase that springs open and dumps all the womanly clothing and items needed after becoming a mother. It was simply excitement and a call to the doctor who said he would meet us at the hospital. So eyes puffy from lack of sleep, excited heartbeats felt in our throats, we met the doctor and he said Dee was barely dilated, to go on home and enjoy Thanksgiving. So we mentally put my baseball cap back on the headboard and had breakfast and waited for the Thanksgiving meal at Dee’s mother’s apartment. Miriam had baked the requisite turkey and her usual delicious fare of dressing and squash and butterbeans and cranberries cooked fresh that morning, a late afternoon feast with Dee’s brothers, David and Ricky, rounding out the family.

Once seated and no prayer, my first forkful of food heading toward my mouth, I swear, the first forkful heading up on an arc toward waiting teeth and tongue, and Dee said quietly, My water just broke. My fork clattered down on the plate and catapulted a piece of turkey to the other side of the white linen tablecloth like some invading eat-or-die mongrel hoard launching the only ammunition they had left.

A quick trip home to retrieve the suitcase and we were back at the hospital, me handling the check-in paperwork, Dee in a wheelchair facing the corridor of swinging doors leading to the Labor Room and, ultimately, the Secret Birth Room and special reclining chairs with here’s-one-for-the-boys-in-the-balcony leg stirrups in a wishbone Y. Hurried kisses and reassuring hugs, finally losing sight of Dee through a small window before being exiled in the waiting room.

Dee attempted Natural Child Birth but it was a long hard labor, stretching on into the night and all the next day, so long, in fact, that when they did finally wheel an exhausted Dee into the hallway and finally allowing me back by her side, she put her hand on my face and told me we had a daughter and wondered if worry made a man’s beard grow.

When she went into labor with Jennifer two years later, two weeks after Christmas in January of 1972, Dee remembered the two long days trying to deliver Laurie. She started holding out her arm for a shot as soon as we hit the hospital parking lot—or at least as soon as we cleared the first doors of the hospital. But Jen’s birth came much easier, not nearly the physical ordeal of Laurie’s first appearance on the Cothern stage.

I posted a sign on the door of The Rainy Day Bookstore that we owned, saying the store would be closed for a day or so and giving proud father details on Jennifer’s birth and weight. A reporter for a newspaper from one of the smaller towns around Baton Rouge took a photograph of the birth notice and we were told it had been published, one of those feel good items smaller newspapers seemed particularly fond of trumpeting.

During the time both daughters were born, their historical holiday birthstones included the still raging Vietnam War and the sometimes violent push for racial equality. While the Beatles’ “Come Together” / “Something” was climbing Billboard’s Hot 100 as a two-sided single (and would peak at Number One on Laurie’s birthday of November 29, 1969), The Plain Dealer published shocking photographs of the massacre of Vietnam villagers at My Lai, and in a more subtle approach John Lennon returned his MBE medal to protest his government’s support of the war in Vietnam. Two days after Laurie was born (and something that concerned her father), the first Draft lottery was held in this country since World War II. Three days before Jennifer’s birth on the 13^th of January, 1972, a local reporter and anchorman, Bob Johnson, and his cameraman, Henry Baptiste, were covering a rally for a group claiming to be Muslims from outside the state who parked cars in the middle of North Boulevard to protest racial discrimination. The crowd grew, 200 or more strong, deputies arrived, and bottles and bricks flew. Two by three they died, two deputies, three Muslims, and the enraged crowd attacked Johnson and Baptiste as they fled, and it was Baptiste, a black man, who dragged from the scene his co-worker and friend, Johnson, a now comatose white man, who would remain in a coma for almost four decades.

So in all the years down the road, there were celebrations of birthdays while historical events swirled amid the holidays, always making reflections of the season a little deeper, more poignant. The girls grew up so quickly, and in the rush and hassle of living day to day we sometimes blinded ourselves to the simple sentimental facts that no matter the season of discord in the world, loving and sharing and protecting and giving to one another were the best gifts we had to offer.

Foreshadowing

It occurred to me only later that there was a hospital episode when Jennifer was a senior in high school that was a sampling of what was to come for her and us. When she contracted encephalitis and battled for months to stay alive while in a coma and battled for years rebuilding her life from the ground up, the earlier botched tonsillectomy was a foreshadowing of the dark days to come as parents, helpless, worrying about a sick child, worrying that earlier time about the outcome of a second surgery needed to correct the weakness of catgut or silk in the back of the throat, the placement or tightness of the sutures, all done in the operating theatre by a masked man performing badly.

The initial surgery went well, we thought, all according to form, we thought: a sedative to relax Jen, an intravenous line in the arm for fluids and antibiotics and whatever, general anesthesia before the procedure started, a breathing tube through the nose and down the throat, the mouth propped open, and the tongue no doubt pulled to the side like a thirsty hound on a summer day, snip, clip, suture ligation, the recovery room until the anesthesia wore off, and finally the white-sheeted bed.

But all during the day, after Jen was awake and aware, she said she could taste blood and assurances constantly came from us and the nurses about that being normal. She threw up once, twice, three or more times, each episode filling one of those kidney-shaped yellow plastic bedside pans. Aahhh, that will make you feel better, to get all that blood out of your stomach. And it went on and on until early evening. Finally, finally, the man was called back, unmasked now, Dr. Breaux, so obviously put-out by being called and having to come back, doubting until he probed the back of Jen’s throat with long crooked surgical tweezers and mumbled something about the sutures, straightening and telling the nurse to call a surgical team back to the hospital.

Now more assurances to Jen from us that everything would be fine, a stitch needed repair, that was all, and the pan again filling up with blood, her teeth and lips smeared with bright blood. You’ll be okay, here’s the gurney, slide over, that’s it, we’re going with you as far as we can, everything will be fine.

A nurse maneuvered the gurney out of the room, bumping the door facing a couple of times, pushing Jen by the nurses’ station, some of them registering slight surprise, and Jen sat up suddenly, hemorrhaging, gagging, leaning over, and the blood coming out, a projected wide stream like dark rusty water thrown across a yard out of a full bucket, covering half the gurney, Jennifer’s lap and legs, and splashing down to the floor, some of it rolling down the framework of the gurney as if the chrome tubes were being magically transformed to a bright Christmas red.

The speed of the gurney picked up and Dee and I were racing down the hall to keep up, drops and plops of blood marking our trail.

Dee and I waited in an empty pre-op room, the stillness and evening quiet unsettling, the worry now manifest in furrowed brows and tight lips and eyes moist with concern, pacing, arms across our chests, hands squeezing biceps in rhythm with our thoughts, Dee suddenly giving out a quick sob, telling me to please come hug her, asking me why I didn’t know she needed that, me wondering for a moment what was pushing me to stand at a distance in the empty room, apart from her, some solitary grieving ritual denying us both comfort.

Reposting Gustav

Hurricane season in south Louisiana is always a time of nagging worry that weather patterns will align and a path will open up through the Gulf of Mexico, sending a storm of destruction that changes people’s lives. Hurricane Gustav in 2008 was one such storm, six years ago today.

All day the Sunday of that last storm, in that longtime home in Baton Rouge, the wind and rain bands moved inland and in the dark of early Monday the wind began to gust at alarming speeds. He lost electricity mid-morning and still the winds were building to velocities that were downright scary. Thinking the brick fireplace down into the house was a strong point and because it was close the to walk-in kitchen pantry with walls all around, he sat on the raised edge of the hearth for long moments, hearing and feeling the distinctive crack and ground-shaking thuds of falling trees, each time backing into the pantry doorway, waiting for a time before venturing back out into the house proper.

Peering out of rain-streaked window panes in the bedroom, the huge oak at the end of the driveway came crashing down along Seven Oaks, taking all the poles and previously-dead power lines with it. Amazing how fast it came down, earth-quaking up his 8" thick driveway into slabs as big as kitchen tables. Venturing to the large picture window in the kitchen, not standing too close because of the possibility of the glass exploding inward, he watched the large oak across the driveway, on the other side of his fence, crashing toward the house, the treetop splitting the tall Bradford pear tree next to the koi pond, crushing plants and tied down patio furniture and smaller trees and shattering lantern-like patio lights on supposedly immovable iron posts, the top branches finally crashing into the roof. Still, all around, the crack and ground-compressing whoomp of falling trees felt in the chest. Like standing next to a speaker at a rock concert when he was young, the vibrations like a cello bow being drawn across his ribs. It went on for hours and hours, the feeling of helplessness building endlessly with each minute, what it felt like when he was in the middle of a battle. Two more trees from across the driveway came crashing down, one of them hitting the corner of the house, enough so it was being helpless in battle again because his first thought was, I got hit that time.

And it went on and on.

When the worse of it passed, but still the gusts scary enough to walk with his back flattened against the outside walls of the house, it was emerging into a battlefield. Nothing was left untouched. It was like wartime views in Vietnam he saw from bombers dropping so many close-patterned bombs, carpet bombing, and then the view up close, at ground level. Even after going through actual war and now seeing a small portion of the storm through rain-streaked windows, it was still difficult to wrap his mind around what had happened.

Later, reports stated it was the worse storm ever for Baton Rouge—with gusts of 90 mph with sustained hurricane force winds for nearly 5 hours, the result of Gustav's eye coming close to the city, putting it on the northeast quadrant, the strongest area of destruction. In every neighborhood it was the same: 20% of the trees in Baton Rouge down, every third or fourth house with a tree on it or in it, streets blocked by huge oaks, trunks as big around as cars, street signs found miles away from the actual streets.

There was a long week of no power. He moved everything from refrigerator into the freezer, eating sandwiches, Shredded Wheat before the milk went bad. Trees across the driveway blocked his automobile, but there were no stores open even if he could have gotten to them. No streetlights or traffic signals were working in the entire city. At night it was like being at the cabin in the country: no ambient light from any source. There was the sound of a few generators running, powering someone's refrigerator, a fan, radio, a lamp. It was eerily similar to the end-of-the-world movies. For the first two days the wind continued to blow, bands of rain falling, the weather cool enough to get some exhausted sleep. It was Wednesday before an out of town crew was hired to cut a path through the trees across the driveway, those crews like Carpetbaggers after the Civil War, from North Carolina, Alabama, Ocean Springs, all seeking work in the devastation. Thursday the sun came out, the humidity rising and the nights miserable; he would sit in the dark with as few clothes on as possible, candles in every room, hurricane lamps aglow, reading (because there was nothing else to do) by booklight and flashlight, finishing three books in as many days. Every day, he started by burying two or three koi he and his wife had raised, ten-pounders and bigger, each floating in the water pitch black from the undissolved oxygen, beautiful fish, raised from thumb-sized specimens. It was like burying pets each day.

When the lightless nights were becoming the norm, when it was second nature to light candles and lamps at dusk to keep from entering totally dark rooms, the lights came on a week later at Sunday dusk, the light over the kitchen sink suddenly lighting a small area on the patio, the sound of the pond pump with its first surge of water through the hose into the waterfall basin. Finally back to teaching classes after that week off, he would come home into air conditioning, watching off-air TV because the cable was still out, and feeling for weeks to come somehow still disconnected, disgruntled, discovering it was the aftermath shock of driving home along a street no longer the same, a stranger street, not the same neighborhood of so many years before.

Warren Eyster / Writer & Teacher

   My writing resume usually starts with the fact that I studied writing at LSU with Walker Percy and Vance Bourjaily, both known to interested folks as two great writers. I list them for just that reason, to have someone think, Wow, two fine writers and this unknown studied with them so let’s pay attention to his work because he must have some talent. If that has ever been the case it is surely talent by association. But as well-known as those two writers are, there was another writer and teacher at LSU who influenced me more than Percy and Bourjaily.

   Merely scratching the surface, here are a few facts about Warren Eyster, my old undergraduate creative writing teacher.

   He was born in Steelton, Pennsylvania, in 1925, and after high school, Eyster became a hydraulic repairman in the Army Air Corps and, in 1942, joined the Navy. His experience in the navy was to be the basis for his novel Far from the Customary Skies, set on a navy destroyer operating in the Far East during World War II.  While in graduate school at the University of Virginia, he wrote half of that first novel as short stories, and after leaving Charlottesville he devoted himself entirely to writing. Audrey Wood, primarily a theatrical agent, with clients like Tennessee Williams and William Inge, nearly succeeded in persuading Little Brown to publish his first novel. Instead, David McDowell at Random House became his editor and with support from Bob Haas and Bennett Cerf, Eyster became acquainted with a number of writers, including James Agee, Robert Penn Warren, Mario Puzo, William Carlos Williams, Budd Schulberg, and William F. Buckley. In 1954 he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to work with aspiring Mexican writers at El Centro Mexicano de Escritores in Mexico City. Finishing a second novel, No Country For Old Men, Eyster started to write a novel about a Mexican revolution. He also translated the first three chapters of a Carlos Fuentes novel, Where the Air Is Clear, and  was instrumental in getting it published. The movie, The Old Gringo, was based on conversations Eyster had with Carlos about Ambrose Bierce and his determination to bring about his own death by becoming a spy for Pancho Villa.

   In 1970 Warren Eyster came to Louisiana State University and became coordinator of the undergraduate writing program, teaching courses in writing short stories, novels and plays. Since it bolstered decreasing enrollment in English—even future journalists and law students particularly interested in creative writing courses—the writing program became more acceptable to the English department, allowing students like John Ed Bradley, James Colburn, and Valerie Martin to take more than 20 hours of undergraduate writing classes.

   In the early ‘70’s, he reminded me of Columbo, the television detective played brilliantly by Peter Falk. Short, a little stocky, clothes always giving the wrinkled-at-the-end-of-the-day appearance, even first thing in the morning, like Columbo he seemed forgetful, his desk always piled high with stacks of short stories and plays and novel excerpts, all in danger of sliding off of his desk at any moment and some doing so occasionally. Always open to talking to any student who came to his office—official office hours or not—he often discussed books and films and then suddenly realized he was late for class, grabbing one stack from his desk and hurrying off and muttering a line from literature, I’m late, I’m late. The thing was, often hurrying behind him to the same class, I was always amazed he had read every story and had jotted down succinct notes that always pointed to improvement in the narrative. Like Columbo, his appearance was deceiving, like the character’s seemingly faltering style, the sudden remembered question to ask, Eyster’s comments on each student’s work were never less than concrete clues that led to the solution of a story. Like Columbo as played by Peter Falk, at the end of each episode, there is a realization of being fooled by appearance. Warren Eyster was never less than a brilliant teacher in disguise, kind and caring of his student’s success, and always willing to impart everything he knew about the craft of writing.

   Thank you, Mr. Eyster.

   Any writing achievement is from the association with you.

   In recognition of your accomplishments, your name will always be mentioned.