Knowing Jack

I got to know my wife’s Uncle when I was turning 49 and he was 87.  One of my brothers in law, husband with skills and tools of another of Jack’s nieces, was trying to help him stay in his old farmhouse in Dimmick township.  I became the gopher on the job.


That house had significant problems, plumbing among others. It was Jack’s parents’ house.  He had never married, was long past retirement, and lived as a solitary man. Jack occupied only a few of the rooms that once housed his large family.  The unused rooms were like a museum of a past life.


Jack lived simply.  Realizing calendars could be reused, that there were only so many combinations between days of the week and January 1, and factoring in leap year, he had a complete set of wall calendars from a long closed local bank.  The ones with the big numbers they gave out free.  As the years rolled on, he reused the calendars when January 1 lined up with the right day.  When an old calendar was hung in a new year, he crossed off the previous year it was used and wrote the new year in magic marker.  In the margins were strings of the years of Jack’s life in his own hand.


Jack was a White Sox fan, a democrat, and a Catholic but he was also part of a close community. He talked of his neighbors kindly, as if they were family, and many of them were.  He was grounded in the people and the land around him.  Jack served in Europe in WWII and was a prisoner of war but returned to Dimmick where his heart and his church were.  


Jack’s farmhouse, save for the priest’s residence long since rented out, was the closest residence to Sacred Heart Church.  As the number of families and Catholic church goers in Dimmick dwindled, a reorganization made Sacred Heart part a larger parish in LaSalle.  The church was served primarily by visiting priests. Jack dreaded the possibility of seeing his church close, the place where so many of his family were baptized and married, waked and buried. 


Sacred Heart had no plumbing and was unheated during the week.  During Lent, entrusted with a key, Jack would go to the church alone, do the stations of the cross, and pray the rosary.  Some days, he told me in secret, it was so cold he could see his breath.  Risking blasphemy, Jack would wear his stocking hat on the coldest days while in the pew.  He would wear one glove, alternating hands so he could still feel the rosary beads with his fingers.    


I knocked on his door one day with some food my wife made him.  He was sitting in his chair, the door unlocked.  He yelled for me to come in and as I stepped through the door, he put a clothespin on a rosary bead so he could return to his prayer and not lose his place.  


Jack was he most devout man I ever met.  He spoke about God like he talked about the White Sox, openly and frankly. He taught me how to pray the rosary.  He also taught me that prayer was a conversation with God.


“If you don’t ask him direct questions, I mean really pointed questions, he’s not gonna tell you a thing.  You got to be persistent.  And even then, he might leave you hanging.  He’s had me hanging for quite a while now.”


“What are you trying to find out from him Jack?”


“I’m trying to find out why he’s keeping me around.  It is pretty hard to see the sense of it some days.  I mean, what am I accomplishing?”


“Well, you’re teaching me things Jack.  That might count.”


“Oh yeah but you got plenty of things to do.  You got kids to raise and a wife to support and a job to do.  I have none of that.  I have some fence to make and a few cows to take care of but what does that amount to?  I want to know what God has in store for me in the rest of my life.  I think there must be more, but I don’t know what it is.  And he’s not helping.”


“So, do you pray for God to tell you?”


“In a way.  I mean I don’t expect him to speak to me. But he could show me. Is that asking too much?  I mean, I would catch on if he would just give me a clue.  But he’s left me in the dark.”


Never had I known a man whose life appeared so simple yet was so engaged with the world.  He complained about nothing and felt equal to everyone.  The world both amused and fascinated him.  Sometimes when I visited, I felt as if he had a list of topics waiting to discuss with me.

 
He was interested in county government, farming innovations, changes in education, baseball, national politics, you name it.  He would talk about the past if you asked but he was much more interested in the future. 


The twentieth century was ending, and he was fascinated with how computers were changing the world.  He thought all the “dot.com stuff and emails” were crazy, but at the same time he wanted to know how it was all going to turn out.  He saw the digital world as a means to avoid real conversation.


“I don’t know about that Jack.  Think of an email as a letter in your mailbox on the road there.  You can get a letter from a guy in the morning, send a response back at noon, get another letter from him in the afternoon, and send back another response before you leave work.  I think we communicate more now than ever because of computers.”


“Is that how its working now?”  He paused.  “I have to say I never thought of that. Yeah that could add speed to working out a problem.”


“You want us to hook you up Jack?  I bet we could find you a used computer for not much and get you online pretty easily.”


He laughed and shook his head. “No thanks. I think I’ll pass on this one.” 


Jack worried about his health.  He thought he was declining, as I am told many past 85 years of age do.  In bad weather he would work out by climbing up and down the steep stairs to the cold unused upstairs bedrooms.  He said like old ballplayers, his legs were giving out. 


When days were fair, he would walk up and down the lightly trafficked blacktop road that ran past his house.  Down the road were the houses of his widowed sisters in law, living on patches of ground carved out of his father’s farm and handed down to their husbands.  Jack looked after them as best he could when they let him. 

 
One winter day while walking down the road he thought he saw smoke coming from the house of his sister in law Marguerite.  As he got closer and the smoke cloud grew his heart began pounding and he broke into a run.  As he turned into her lane, he saw flames.


Marguerite was bedridden, recovering from cancer surgery.  He believed she was trapped inside.  He yelled for her and her son and tried to open her door.  Jack was looking for something to break a window with when a fire truck barreled down the lane.  A volunteer fireman, a young man he knew well, told him to stand back.


“But Marguerite and David!” Jack yelled.


“They’re OK Jack.  David woke up to the smoke, put the call in to us, got his Mom in the pickup, and drove her to the hospital.”


The house could not be saved.  Marguerite never moved back.  It was her last day in Dimmick township.


Later when Jack recalled the morning, still emotional in the retelling, he told me this.


“I thought I was there for that purpose.  I thought God kept me alive to save Marguerite and David.  But I guess that wasn’t it.”


He looked pensive, as if he was about to tell me something else.  I waited.


“I’m a little worried, not much to tell the truth, but its a thought.  What if God  tried to get me into that smoke-filled house to bump me off?  But then, that wouldn’t be like him.”


“I wouldn’t worry about God doing that to you Jack.  That doesn’t sound like the God you talk to me about.”


“No, you’re right. It’s not.  But I’m glad the door was locked anyway.”   


Jack may have been frustrated with God, but he never stopped talking to him.


In March of that year Jack and I planted potatoes, Kennebecs and Pontiac Reds, on a patch of his land. Like good Irishmen we tended them well.  After a rain in July we dug for new potatoes.  I brought a spade fork and began turning up the dirt  under the plants exposing the potatoes.


Those Irishmen in Dimmick said the word potatoes fast with no “T” sound.  It was as if it were one syllable; “Budayduz.”  Jack liked his new "budayduz" red, so we dug some of the Pontiacs.  It was a good year. We got rain when we needed it but not too much.


As I turned over the potatoes, Jack gathered them into a bushel basket.


“Let me try that,” he said.  “It’s been a long time since I dug potatoes.”


Jack was a slight man.  He jammed the fork into the ground, put his boot on the top edge and pushed, but it barely moved.  He made another stab at it, then looked up at me.


“Nope. Too old for that anymore I guess.”


Not long after Jack had open heart surgery in Peoria.  He knew the risks given his age, but insisted the surgeon try to repair his failing heart. It was 2001 prior to September 11^th. The surgery had not gone well, and the doctor told the nieces he doubted Jack could recover. 


I visited him in ICU.  He was struggling.  His kidneys were beginning to fail, and he was very swollen.  When I first entered the room, Jack was asleep.  He had an oxygen mask and lots of IV lines.  I went to the gift shop, bought a rosary, returned to his bed and waited for him to wake up. 


“Jack, how about we do the rosary together?”


He nodded.  I put the beads in his hand and said the prayers out loud the way he taught me. Start with the Apostle’s Creed.  Always say a Glory Be before the Our Father, follow it with ten Hail Marys (a decade).  Then repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.  When he couldn’t advance the beads, I pulled them through his fingers.  Praying the rosary takes a while.  Jack stuck with it.  When we were finished, he nodded again and went back to sleep.

Jack died a few days later and we had a funeral service at his church.  Later that year they closed Sacred Heart.  There was a niche in the sanctuary wall where they kept the hosts.  Inside the niche was a flickering red light that was always on.  After the priest said the final mass, he put the container of hosts under his arm, shut the light off, walked up the aisle and out the door.  I’m glad Jack didn’t see that.  For him, the light never went out.

Classical Music and Corncobs

I intentionally skipped the news today.  It was driving me crazy.  Instead, bright and early in the shack, I poured a cup of espresso and put Beethoven in the CD changer.  Ludwig von was born 250 years ago, and because of that the discount CD catalog I get featured his stuff.  I bought a couple.  I hadn't gotten around to listening to them.  Somehow, I decided today was the day. 
  
While talking to a friend a couple years ago about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and saxophonist Art Pepper  I mentioned CD’s.

“You mean real and actual plastic discs you play on a mechanical device?  I’ve heard people still buy those, but I didn’t know who.  So, it’s you.  You never heard of Spotify?”

“I’ve heard of it sure.  But I have good speakers in the shack, mounted at ear level, with a subwoofer in the corner.  Its better than what comes from some little sound bar.”

“I suppose you have a turntable for vinyl too.”

“I do.”

“That’s nostalgic.”

“Not really.  A needle on a vinyl record makes a warm silky sound.  You should try albums again.  When you hear the sound, you’ll remember.”

“But that means you can only listen in the shack.  You’re tied to a fixed place with your collection.  Spotify travels with me.  I can hear almost anything ever recorded anywhere, anytime.”

”I know its old technology, but I don’t mind.  The shack is all wood.  Eleven and a half foot square, with a vaulted ceiling.  The acoustics are good.  When I turn up the volume I imagine I’m listening from inside a giant guitar.  Maybe a big cello.  I don’t mind being tied to it.  Someday when you’re in the neighborhood you should drop in.”

“I will.”

He probably won’t.  He lives in Los Angeles.  I’d love to have him for a visit, but I doubt a trip to Illinois is in his future.

As it got light out this morning, I put the Beethoven CD into my set up.  Turns out Ludwig wrote music especially for string quartets.  The Artemis String Quartet was two violins, a viola, and a cello.  I thought they could have used the nice low sound of a big doghouse bass in the mix, but they didn’t.   

This Artemis group recorded Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 1 in F major and String quarter No. 12 in E flat major.  Long liner notes came with the CD, printed on glossy paper in English, German, and French.  Unless I’m mistaken, you don’t get liner notes with Spotify.


Commentators on classical music write very differently from say, the stuff written in a Bob Dylan album.  You don’t need much to catch the highbrow flavor of it. 

After talking about the development of “the quartet genre”, throwing in words like Rococo, and dropping the names of not only Haydn and Mozart but also some rich Prince Lobkowitz, the classical expert finally got down to the music.
  
“The entire movement derives from a short, strongly rhythmic motif and coils around a single note.”

But does he tell us what the note is?  Where to find it?  No.  He goes on. 

He went on to create a sentence where he included not only the words “contrapuntal, augmentation, and diminution” but also “adagio, affettuoso, and appassionato.”


But my favorite line was this.


“…the scherzo has the effect of a satyr play-it scurries along and is notable for its syncopations and pungent grace notes.” 

Wait.  Did he say pungent?  Pungent is an adjective used for taste or smell. The writer is German.  Maybe he got crossed up with his translator.  But pungent?  Vinegar splashed on ham and beans is pungent.  Spicy peppers roasting in a hot cast iron skillet are pungent.  But pungent musical notes? 

Imagine sitting around listening to some great and unforgettable modern album like Wake of the Flood by the Grateful Dead.  You know the album.


The front cover pictures a hooded old person with a scythe and a shock of wheat.  Behind the person, framed in a circle, are bands of blue; dark blue water with light blue sky above it.  Laughing crow on the back.  Oh, sorry.  You only listen to Spotify.  You don’t know about the nice art found on old 12x12 carboard covers.



Anyway, you and a friend are listening to “Eyes of the World” on Side 2, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter.  It’s a breezy song that lifts you up and carries you along.  Jerry Garcia plays a repeated guitar lick that always makes you happy when you hear it.  You smile.


But it’s unlikely you would turn to your friend and say “Did you hear that guitar?  Pungent don’t you think?”


“I agree wholeheartedly.  Quite pungent in fact.  One finds oneself enthralled.”

I played Beethoven because I wanted beautiful instrumental music only.  No lyrics.  I took a day off completely from both the news and the virus: the politics, the death, the science, the heartbreak, our ruined economy.  Not only did I shut out the news, I shunned spoken words entirely.

The sound of four good musicians playing Beethoven’s soothing and mellow chops for strings helped get my mind off the world around me and onto the small world of my stove, my woodshed, and the fuel I burned this Illinois season.  I was out to write a story about my relationship to fuel.


I heat my shack with  a wood stove from late September to early May.  At the beginning of fall I had a fair bunch of oak stacked in the woodshed, which had previously hung dead on a nearby tree. Oak is my favorite fuel.  It’s the go to, hot burning, long lasting stuff.  I hired a guy with a boom truck to take big limbs down off a tree by the ravine because I feared they would fall on the shack.  After the limbs were cut to length and stacked, I was not entirely convinced it would get me through the winter, but I was hopeful. 

I have several kinds of fuel.  Woodworkers bring me boxes of scraps from their shops.  It is dry and good for getting the oak going.  Sometimes they include small chunks of walnut or other fancy hardwood, which seem wrong to burn.  But what do you do with wood, no matter how fine, when it is that small?  That’s why the woodworker parts with it after all. 

My friend Joe brought me buckets of cherry wood three or four inches in length.  Someone gave him cherry logs just a tad too long to fit into the wood stove in his living room.  He cut off the ends to fit, saved the chunks, and when he saw my little shack stove said, “I’ve got some wood at home for you.”


I take everything.  As word of that fact got out, I ended up with left over paneling, some finished laminate flooring, particle board, the fronts of old cupboards, you name it.  That is the kind of stuff you save for a while in your garage, sometimes for years, before finally saying to yourself “What am I ever going to do with this?”


In addition to wood, I was fortunate to also receive pinecones from friends and relatives.  Pinecones, especially the bristly ones that have spread out and dropped their seeds, are wonderful fire starters when laid on top of brown paper bags.  I had gobs of them, five big black plastic garbage bags full at least.  I thought I would never run out.  They lasted till the middle of February.


I also have a corn cob angel who stocks me up every other year or.  Seems the land she owns alternates between beans and corn and when its in corn she gathers cobs for me.  When she dropped them off it seemed like a mammoth amount of cobs, two garbage cans full.

I use the corn cobs to extend fires.  When you need more heat but don’t want to burn more wood, like at the end of the day, nothing is better putting a stove full of cobs on top of a bed of coals and waiting for that big whoosh when they catch.  Cobs burn hot and fast.  Its May.  Beside my stove is a five-gallon bucket half full of cobs.  That is the last of them.


Fuel consumption depends on more than the weather.  While it was not the coldest winter, I was here for almost all of it.  I missed a cold ten days while in El Salvador on an eye care mission, but due to the pandemic I had to cancel my road trip to Florida in the Buick and a leisurely return home.  That trip usually results in two weeks of a closed up and cold shack, which is the beauty of a shack with no plumbing.  Shut the door and forget about burst pipes.
  
It seems as if I have been in this shack every day since I made it back from Central America.  Not that that is a bad thing.  But because of that I burned more wood, pinecones, and corn cobs than normal.

Lucky for me my brother helped.  Denny brought six long 5x8 pine posts to me at the end of summer.  When he first acquired those posts, he pictured them as perfect for a woodworking project he was carrying around in his head.  He probably saw not the posts at all, but pieces made from it, all planed, cut with a band saw, spun on a lathe, sanded, stained, and lacquered.
  
Either something about the project or something about the wood made the image of that finished project incompatible with reality.  At the very moment Denny concluded that, the future of those pine posts was transformed from furniture to fuel.


He brought the timbers to me.  They didn’t look like much on the outside, gray and weathered, but they split up and burned like a dream.  Clear dense wood with no knots.  Pine does not have near the BTU’s of oak mind you, but this pine caught quickly and burned hot.  Those pine posts heated the shack for quite a while.  I burned them up at the beginning of the cold weather to conserve oak.

When I began to get low on scrap lumber looked again at the stuff in the pile I was reluctant to burn.  Leftover tongue and groove fir planks I floored the shack with, tongue and groove cedar siding, flooring from the old chapel in our church that came out in a remodel.  I found rafter tails and other 2x lumber left from framing the shack.  Some of them had my daughter’s handwriting on them, or mine, pencil notations of cuts and angles, from when we built the shack 9 years ago.  I got sentimental over them, saved a couple, and burned all the rest. 
  
I resorted to looking through my own garage.  For some reason I saved wood handles from tools I’d broken.  A handle from a hoe, the busted off handle of a long-handled shovel I pried on too hard, a pitchfork handle that couldn’t take the strain.  Why did I keep them?  I have no idea.  They were cut up and burned in the shack stove just this past week, their existence converted to heat and a little smoke up the stovepipe. 


The list goes on.  The old mailbox post I patched together repeatedly after it was hit by the snowplow.  Wooden handles painted red from the old wheelbarrow that rusted through.  Various short pieces of 4x4 or 2x4 I thought I might use someday but never did.  One block of wood I remember tucking away because I thought it would be perfect for putting under a car jack on a soft gravel shoulder.  Hadn’t touched it in twenty years.  That block of wood and everything else ended up in the stove, converted to new energy.  It was liberating.


However, some wood survived because of its own stubbornness.  My neighbor Bill finally cut down his dying blue spruce tree.  Must have been 30’ tall.  Trunk straight as a string.  I coveted the logs.  His son cut them up into three-foot lengths for me.  I’ve had them stacked by the woodshed for two years.  I kept thinking I would hit them with the splitting maul and theywould fall apart like butter.

No such luck.  All those branches radiating out from the blue spruce trunk locked the grain of the wood together tighter than wallpaper.  That logs just sit there, waiting for a bonfire.  I don’t think the spruce locked in them will ever see the inside of my stove.
  
Thankfully, the temperature continues to rise.  Soon, I will forget about fires in my stove and get out the fan.  Just as the shack lacks plumbing, it also lacks air conditioning.  Fuel and heating will be the farthest thing from my mind in July.
    
But sometime before fall I will need a plan for acquiring more fuel.  That means dedicated and thoughtful deliberation or, failing that, a mad scramble of some kind before it snows.  Either way, getting away from the news is a good way to start.

And beautiful music helps.

A Report from the Shack

That is the view out the patio doors to the right of my writing desk.  It is a small patch of woods that  comprises most of my world view during these slow days. I feel fortunate to have it.  More happens out there than you might think. 

I saw the fox last week.  He was moving through the bottom of the ravine twenty feet below me.  Even though I don’t see him often, I think of him and smile.  I imagine him living near me, in a den somewhere in the ravine.  If I could, I’d fix him a little home under the shack.  Not that he needs my help. 

Last time we met he was sunning himself by my bird feeder not far from the patio.  It was a summer afternoon. I walked around the garage and he was looking at me, stretched out on our lawn, legs straight behind him.  I stopped dead in my tracks and stared.  He looked back at me calmly.  Neither of us moved.  We had a moment.

After a while he stood, did a downward facing fox, and trotted off nonchalantly through the neighbor’s yard.  His tail disappeared into the trees that line the ravine.

From my chair in the shack I notice wild animals in the ravine first by their movement.  It distinguishes them from the stillness of fixed things around them, the trunks and branches of the trees, the leaves and sticks covering the ground, the sky.  While sitting at my desk something moves to catch my eye.  When I look closer, I see a squirrel hurrying along a fallen log or maybe a bird pecking the ground.  Sometimes a rabbit picks up its head and sniffs the air.  Occasionally it is the ground hog waddling here and there.  Often the deer move slowly up from the ravine, enter my yard, and eat my hostas.  Most of those animals move warily, constantly looking around, afraid of predators.

The fox is different.  He moves as if he has somewhere to go.  I saw him on the far side of the creek that runs along the bottom of the ravine.  He looked good, his coat thick and full, his tail bushy.  He trotted along until he came to the bend in the creek. There are rocks in the water there.  His back arched slightly while his front feet left the ground together, touched a rock in the middle of the creek lightly, then lifted off reaching for the other bank.  His back legs followed, landed on the same rock for a split second, and pushed him over the creek.  He resumed his trot, disappeared under a fallen log, appeared on the other side, and then was gone.

While my eyes were glued to the fox, caught up in the presence of a wild animal, I completely forgot how difficult life has become for humans in the last month.  I was watching a fox in his environment, living his life with no regard for me.  A fox being a fox, nothing more and nothing less.  They would do fine without us.  Probably better.

I keep an ash bucket on a nail outside the door under the eaves.  Every week or so during the winter I scoop the ashes out of my stove, dump them in that bucket, and when the bucket gets full I empty it into my compost pile.  If I don’t remember to take it down in the spring, birds build nests in there and lay eggs.  I’m not mean enough to tear out their nests, so I’m stuck without the use of that bucket till they leave.

Usually the nest builders are sparrows, but this year a pair of wrens built an elaborate round nest of soft grass with a small hole on top.  The nest rested on a half bucket of gray ashes.  I pulled down the bucket like always one morning and both wrens zoomed out, landed on top of the woodshed roof, and began scolding me like a bad boy.  There they were, six feet from me, jumping around trying to appear mean.  Tiny birds with their tails in the air hopping mad.  Squawking.  Putting up a big racket.  I put the bucket back.

They scold me every time I open the shack door and every time I leave.  Now I hear the sound of baby birds in there.  I found another bucket for my ashes.  I suppose by the time the wrens are done getting their babies out of the nest it’ll be warm enough I won’t  build fires anymore.  But we manage to co-exist.

Visiting birds are travelling through.  Today, Cinco de Mayo, I spotted the first oriole eating the cheap grape jelly and oranges I put out for them.  The brightness of those orange feathers and the way they shine up next to the black on their body pleases me no end. It’s a welcome sight.  They don’t stay long.  Are they on their way to Baltimore?  I have no idea.  I just enjoy them while they are here.

The orioles arrived only days after the rose breasted grosbeaks showed up.  They grosbeaks must be cousins to cardinals. They have the same beak, eat the same seed, and are about the same size yet the cardinals stay year-round and the grosbeaks stop by each year on their way somewhere else. The lives of birds intrigue me, but not enough to learn all that much about them.  I prefer to let their lives remain a mystery, as my life must be to them.

I don’t know if building the shack where I did blocked the sunlight  or otherwise affected the small patch of level ground outside the big east window, but nothing grows there now but moss.  It’s a bare spot.  I think of it as a small stage where animals perform for my benefit.  As if they exist for my entertainment, which they do not.  Be that as it may they are very entertaining.

Two robins landed there a week ago in the middle of a furious fight.  Wings flapping, beaks open, they cawed at each other, flew up off the ground, twirled around, landed, charged after each other.  I was totally taken in.  I pushed my chair from the desk and got closer to the window for a better look.

They must have seen me. Both robins stopped their battle and cocked their heads towards me as if to say “What the hell YOU looking at?”  Distracted they flew away.  I felt like a voyeur.

In late fall last year my friend, in the middle of a heated backgammon game, looked over my shoulder through that big window and spotted a barred owl in the tree by the woodshed.  You don’t realize how big owls are till you see them up close.  As we watched him, hoping he didn’t fly away, he swooped down onto that bald patch of ground and snatched up a ground squirrel, the little chipmunk looking guys who hang around the shack compound.  The owl dispatched him with his beak, slowly flapped his wings, gained a little altitude and went elsewhere to finish his snack.

  

Come to think of it I haven’t seen any ground squirrels lately.  Maybe between the owl and the fox they’ve been driven from the neighborhood.
  

It’s a bad time for humans, and Americans especially.  We lead the world in deaths to the pandemic.  We cannot seem to figure out what to do or how to get it done.  I mourn for us.  I mourn for those that have died, for their families, for those who are charged with caring for the rest of us and keeping us alive, for those who have turned this natural disaster into a partisan political fight rather than seeing it as an opportunity to come together.  Mourn for us as human beings.  We’re in trouble.

But feel good for the animals.  Perhaps our loss is their gain.  They seem to be doing quite well.

That completes my report from the shack on this fifth day of May.