Sometimes you can go home. Sometimes you can go home if you are willing to recognize that what's past is past and what's now is now and that both are happening, have happened, will happen and that nothing exists in a finite moment. I think that sometimes we have moments when we can put one foot in two places; kind of like having one foot on each of two train platforms. I stood in two places on Saturday and I am just now able to write about it (actually, I've been trying since Monday morning and it's just now coming).
Here in this photograph is a perfect moment. It is perfect because it is representative of a romantic and therefore perfect past and indicative of the here and now. It is perfect because it signifies a beginning but also tells the tale of an infinite series of endings that come flooding into the forefront of my mind like the banks of the Mississippi on a voluptuous day. Also, I think this photograph could conceivably sum up my entire childhood. Conceivably. Depending on how you wanted to look at it. Maybe Mom ought to stop reading now because I am going to romanticize it. It's real for me, go figure.
Here sits a glass of beer. Regulation maybe yes, maybe no. Budweiser definitely. A glass of sacred beer. A sacred glass of beer. Regardless of how you slice it, sacred to someone, primarily me at this moment, but most assuredly to the four people sitting behind the table in front of those regulation or not glasses of beer. I'll get around to explaining eventually but for now I'll leave you with the money shot.
On Saturday I packed up my family and headed to the drop zone. The drop zone is the airport where skydivers congregate to jump out of planes (note: I did not write the words 'perfectly good'). This is the drop zone in Ellington, CT where I grew up where much has changed and everything is as it has always been.
There were three events scheduled to occur on Saturday. The first was the Dads and Lads jump (skydivers are SERIOUSLY hokey) with four fathers and five sons. I am thinking that most of these sons are pushing if not at 40 which makes the dads pushing if not at 65. Not that there's anything wrong with 65 (or 69 DAD!!!), mind you, just that maybe some of these older gentlemen might not have been current and maybe things ought to have been kept a bit on the simple side, but I digress. No one died. Here they are dirt diving prior to the load (and I notice I only see one old man in this shot. I wonder where they could have been hiding the other three.) Also, my dad is the guy with duct tape on his butt. I'm just sayin'.:
And here they are getting on the big airplane that came down special from The Blue Sky Ranch which has a name but I've forgotten already (now who has missing brain cells?). Also, you can see more old men and have a little more faith that I'm not just making this part up.:
Like I said, nobody died but I'm not sure it turned out exactly as they might have envisioned. In any event, I think it was a last kind of thing. I don't think these Dads and Lads will be doing this again, not this set anyway. But there was a moment when all nine of them climbed up in that plane with a few other passengers where time folded up upon itself and nineteen sixty-nine kissed nineteen seventy-five kissed nineteen eighty-two kissed nineteen ninety-six kissing today finally folded over upon itself and guess what? The universe did not implode even though I thought it might.
Having written all that, Dads and Lads was a bonus. That's not why we're all here. We're all here to say good-bye to the Lion as well as Dick Barber and we've got two separate jumps scheduled because the families don't seem all that inclined to mix their metaphores, as it were. Despite the fact that these two dead men might as well have grown up together they spent so much of their lives in the very same space.
The culmination of these events brought all manner of people and animals out of the woodwork, myself and family included. I don't honestly think I've been on this drop zone in twenty-five years short of a quick midweek stop to lurk about when no one was around. I have been on other drop zones, just not this one. I have seen some of these people, just not in this place. This one place with these people which is and who are more home than I can call any other place and which I left so many years ago, forever refusing to look back as if I might turn to salt. And perhaps I might have.
The world does move on. Most of the time we aren't aware that it's moving, we're just along for the ride until one day the world up and smacks us in the face like a ten foot breaker and we're forced to take stock. It is one thing to attend a funeral or two off premises and quite another to visit those very same places with the remaining old guard along for the ride. It was a freak show of juxtapositions and I'm glad as hell I gave myself permission to be there.
Connecticut Parachutists Incorporated in Ellington, CT was recognized by the State of Connecticut as a non-profit group in March of 1962, twenty-five months before I was born. According to one of the bios on Marge Bates, there were 32 Charter Members of which fewer than a dozen had ever made a parachute jump. Marge Bates was one of those members, by the way, and she had two static line jumps to her name. Vic Deveau and Dick Barber may very well have been, I just don't have the documentation to back it up. In any event, Marge's husband, Jim, certainly was and in the last year three of these old guard have died. I'm sure there were more than three, but three of mine, three of mine have died.
The world moves on.
So I took my girls and my husband (mostly my girls) to this drop zone where my brother and I ran through the tall grass shagging down chutes or tumbling mindlessly into the unknown or otherwise universe. They cut the grass these days I notice. We went to pay tribute, to be with, to steep at least myself in the memory of what was and perhaps to let go. I wasn't counting on time travel. I wasn't counting on being hit right in the face with the notion of 'is always'.
The first thing I did was look for my tree. Trees change. I couldn't find my tree but I was pretty sure, given the lack of gianormous stumps in the locale of the creek bank that my tree lives. I identified one or two with a crotch in just about the right shape that given the years might have been low enough for one scrappy little girl's reach. That done I moved onto the corn fields. The corn is still there despite the housing developments encroaching at an alarming rate. It's hard corn, not sweet. This much I remember. I also remember we stole a bit and cooked it up over grills made from cut up old oil barrels. Al Bailey did our grilling and I saw the man on Saturday for the first time since maybe 1972. I thought of nothing but cow corn and husk braiding. He taught me that.
After that the girls and I did just about nothing but sit and wait in the hot, hot sun. And we rolled in the dirt a bit until we were good and sweaty and covered in the stuff and suddenly I could smell the smell that was me at six or eight or twelve or sixteen with my face down in a packing mat and the smell of crab grass in the hot sun and the voices buzzing in and out of consciousness as I moved in and out of the dream space as if waking and the dream were one and the same.
The jump meant to dump Vic's ashes and then the one to dump Dick's never happened. At least not on Saturday. The weather came in just as the photo ops were being had and the whole thing got put on hold until somebody gave in and opened the first beer. The beer does not open until the last plane of the day takes off. That's the way it always was and perhaps the way it always will be. So the beer was opened and the festivities were ready to go but we had some things to do first.
My dad went to the pea gravel pit which no one ever uses anymore. He went there with someone. I want to say Billy but now I can't remember, it could have been Al Bailey, it could have been just about anyone over the age of fifty. He went there and dug a hole where no one lands anymore because now there is something called a tuffet and he buried a bit of The Lion at dead center where we used to anchor a margarine lid. I ran into the pea gravel and squatted down and must have created some kind of agreement because I took a double handful of The Lion and I ran into the corn and spun about with my face in the sky letting The Lion go into the corn. In these moments I was stunned at the viscosity of those ashes. They are not light and fluffy. They have weight, and grit and carry chunks and bits of this human being reduced to the sum of something that can be contained. At last. And I wondered, who from his own generation will carry my father's ashes to the sky and the pea gravel and to the corn?
So the jump did not go. Instead we had to do something with the Marines that came and the VA as well and so we had a small service in the rain which I missed because I was so entranced with photographing the old men from the VA and the Marine who played taps but it's OK because that was for the family and I can say my own words for The Lion anyway.
And still, I digress from my point. When the ceremony was done, and here, by the way is the photo op (all of those people, with the exception of the boys who are or are nearly forty, are adults from my childhood. My heart breaks and releases):
When the ceremony was done and the food was eaten and the sun was back out there was nothing left to do but drink and play games.
The game of Cardinal is an old game. Perhaps you have heard of a college version but unless you were in the military and played it there, you do not know Cardinal Puff.
I grew up with this.
Sir. How would you like to be addressed?
Sir, Supreme Cardinal X, may I have your permission to begin?
Here is to Cardinal Puff for the first time.
And the series of events begins and continues until the neophyte (defined as lower than whale shit) misses a beat and has to finish the glass of beer with the glass to his or her lip until it is empty.
It's a shell game of a sort. You see the Cardinal masters do the demos and they do it so well and so effortlessly that I think of Stephen King's Gunslingers, which in a way, they were. They say, 'it is just one glass of beer. If you fuck up you can quit once you've finished. If we fuck up we have to drink up and continue until we get it right.'
You know, none of us ever made Cardinal. None of us who grew up with it despite the fact that the lines and gestures were indelibly etched into the lizard brain ever even tried. None of us were willing to play the shell game. None of us. Not a one. Therefore, these lovely young people who were born THE YEAR I QUIT JUMPING (OK, I was only 18, but still) have no legacy before them. Meet Penelope and Doug. Doug is up first (hey, Mom, that's Lisa Hays (and Jean was there with Everet and Baby Gary and Baby Gary's Baby Gary but no Tony) in the background and Drew Lamb with Dennis Testoni and Mary Lou and Josh Wolf is just off to the left but you can't see him here):
Doug crashed and burned a number of times (exactly the way I would have) but Penelope got close, close, close in her intensity and intention. Here is Penelope with a man we call Jello who has been in that wheel chair from a sky diving incident since about 1972. Do you see the look of indulgence and love?
The first generation is watching the third generation, who have already invented themselves from nearly whole cloth, trying on the shoes of their fathers. Because they can.
Sometimes you can go home. If you are willing to accept...
The following are gratuitous shots of people I have not seen in more years than I want to count. There's more on Flickr if you can find me. Gary Hays and Al Bailey:
Butch Auden:
Marge Bates (who had a chihuahua in her lap the whole time she demo'd Cardinal):
Al Bailey (who no longer drinks) looking on while Gary Hays, John Jefferies (my Dad), Butch Auden and Marge Bates give one of the final demos to Cardinal Puff:
Here is to Cardinal Puff, for the first time.
Amen.
Recent Comments