And We All Fall Back

One of my first thoughts about literature was the lack of the happy ending. Happy endings were for fairy tales and sappy books and comedy. Drama started it all. There were comedies and tragedies. Then Shakespeare came along with tragicomedies, and he thought he was onto something. Genius that he was, he knew there had to be deaths because dying is just a part of life etc etc. But as everyone knows, a vast majority of great writers have had shitty lives, and if not shitty lives, they were born into wealth and the boredoms of wealth lead to excessive drinking and education. And writers in general tend to be alcoholics and addicts of some kind or another because writing to writers is an addiction, and when it is not going well, when the writing really sucks, it's time for a drink to relieve the frustration, and when the writing is good, it's time for a drink to celebrate the success. Despite not growing up rich, the working class introduced me to drinking, and God handed me some brains all over, and I got to go to school for free (believe it or not). It's the only good thing I can say about the state government of Indiana off the top of my head.

But I still struggle through tragedies (both in print and my own, though I think I've been pretty damn lucky so far; thus, I have to write excessively long, rambling parenthetical statements, which I guess are entertaining to certain readers who enjoy "cleverness, to make up for the lack of excitement that I have experienced so far in my life). I feel so helpless. I cannot do anything for the characters in print. Dramatic irony is a pain sometimes (I personally hate it). And sometimes I just have to stop reading whatever it is that I'm reading and walk away because I get so annoyed, and maybe it's a great work of literature and maybe I love it, but death death death seethes from the book, evaporates from the page and I breathe it in and it collects in the center of my chest. I start feeling more and more uncomfortable, and it's not even my asthma.

How can I combat this evaporation? I'm no dictator. I'm not going to burn the books in my great revolution, whatever this revolution is. I'm not going to stop people from reading great literature. But what can I, the average Joe College-Grad do for literature? What is there left to write? No no that's been said far too often. Stop that.

When it's springtime it's Clap Clap April showers bring May flowers and everyone is in love and kissing and hugging each other with new found optimism that had hibernated over the winter. The summer is hot; we wear less clothing; we feel more free. The more sunlight, the more smiles. Optimism and happy thoughts in full bloom. The green green velvet of the land rolls, and here in Indiana knee high by the Fourth of July sings through the southerly winds. Sometimes life is a furnace, but a movie theater can quench your thirst for buttered popcorn. And who doesn't have air conditioning around these parts anymore? And maybe we do stay inside too much, but at least we can open the blinds and let in all that fresh sunlight that warms the carpet under our bare feet.

But the end of summer brings the dying and death. It prepares us. When I was in seventh grade, my only living grandfather, the only grandfather I knew died of a massive heart attack while sitting on a park bench next to a nurse. It was September 3, 1997, and it was my first encounter with death. In retrospect I took it amazingly well, but it was the coming fall just around corner that I thought of (I don't even remember crying at the funeral, maybe getting a little teary-eyed, but everyone else was, and when the tide of emotions comes in, they are greatly contagious and the ocean of emotions is impossible, especially for a 13 year old, to avoid). We'd be mourning and singing the songs of death for the whole winter, I thought. What about Thanksgiving? What about Christmas? Nothing will be the same again, ever again was the refrain in my mind.

Clarence Earl "Jiggs" Scheive was born in 1931 in Hammond, Indiana. (No one ever called him by Clarence or Earl, he was Jiggs to everyone and anyone. It was even sewn into his GE repairman work shirts. No one seems to remember how he got the name Jiggs, though he was probably an ADD, troublemaker child.) He had nine other living brothers and sisters. He worked at General Electric for all of his adult life. I still remember riding in the repair truck he drove everywhere in. It smelled like a new car all the time. I always wondered how he kept it smelling like that. It was always so fun to look at all the random parts he had in the truck and in his garage. I'd play with what I was told was a part of a dishwasher for fifteen minutes or so before moving on to a part of a washing machine, then a part for a drier, and then a hose for a stove.

I'm sure he was a man that enjoyed to party. He always mentioned the jitter-bug. Let's do the jitter-bug, and I always thought it looked like he was doing the Charleston, but I still am not quite sure what either of those dances are. He had the jolliness of Santa Claus, and the fun times of a grandparent who spoils their favorites with random trips through the back roads of Lake County. A Santa Claus, without much hair and no beard, and who came down every weekend morning for coffee. There was a lot more love than I realized at the time.

But when he all of a sudden died, it signaled the end of summer, which was still three weeks away. I remember driving over the new road, the new part of 77th Ave (connecting regular 77th Ave with W. 77th Ave, the street I grew up on) that had been in the works for 25 years, after they were finally allowed to float the road over the marsh. I remember the first time I rode over it was on my way to the wake. It cut right across the marsh, split it in two. I didn't recognize the inconvenience for the cranes and Canada Geese. I remember it wasn't long, during the winter, before the road started to buckle and break up because they built the road over bio-friendly industrial strength Styrofoam. The town of Schererville even took down the little dedication monument for the 77th extension, obviously embarrassed that their great new bio-friendly material didn't work. Eventually the ineffective Styrofoam was replaced with a legitimate bridge, further distressing the wildlife.

In an amazing coincidence (or act of God if you're one for the Goddy's) and act of unparalleled symbolism, one of two huge evergreens in my grandparents' front lawn was blown over on an excessively windy night, the day of October 30, about seven weeks after my Grandpa Jiggs died. The two evergreens were planted soon after my grandparents were married and moved out to the boonies of Dyer, Indiana, to raise a family in the early 1950s like so many other baby boomer creating parents did. In some old, silent home movies that my own mother had converted to VHS at Wal-Mart, the two trees are shown in their young, rebellious, teenage years, while my mother ran around topless.

It's tens years later now, and fall is gripping the land (though more slowly than normal due to global warming). So many people notice the pretty leaves, but whether it was the science classes I took in high school or all the sad endings I've read, I look at everything that's dying or everything that is getting ready to sleep for the winter, and I already begin to miss it. Humans don't hibernate, though. The closest we get is a winter home in Florida or Arizona once we're too old to enjoy it as much as we would now (at my age). It's like the optimism evaporates in the drier, cooler air. The sun drifts farther and farther away from me everyday. It's almost 4:30pm and the sun has set (fuck you, turning the clocks back, fuck you), and there will be "nights" when I sleep through all of the daylight.

Winter itself is unspeakable. The cold feet. The blue and ivory feet.