It was grocery day, a
Saturday, and Mike and I (at least – was John there? Did he get his own
digest?) were with Pop shopping at Baenziger’s. We were at the magazine rack
next to the little checkout where they bought cigarettes, and for some reason
Pop agreed to buy us each a Mystery Comics Digest. Once again, I put my money
on the wrong horse, and chose the Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #2 (well,
it had exciting looking reptilian monsters on it), while Mike chose the Ripley
title.
I recall Uncle Remus Stories had
one [a storied map], though we only saw the book one night when (I think) one
of Mike’s friends loaned it to him and he barely let us touch it.
Looking back, I would have
to say there were two features [in Walt Disney Comics Digest #6, bought when he
was in 1st Grade] that may have particularly influenced Mike. One
was a “Walt Disney Animal Autobiography”, with a realistically drawn
exploration of whales and their lives. Another was “Lotor Takes a Trip” (not a
comic strip but a simple short story with a few illustrations), about a raccoon
that escapes from the zoo and with the help of a young boy is returned to the
wild, where he learns to live in freedom.
For another thing, I was
used to having a family support group, to running in a pack with my brothers,
to being a follower rather than an independent unit of my own. True, Mike was
in the Second Grade right next to me, but once class started, he might as well
have been on the moon. I was on my own. And my teacher was an unknown quantity.
I was used to hearing about Mike’s First Grade teacher, Mrs. Bilnitzer, but she
had been moved to another class.
I think this is the earliest
photo we have of Mike on file; it is labelled Mike, 1 year old. He would have
been 63 years old today. As a tribute I post this story [By the Lake] that he
published in the 1982 Persona when he was in college.
The reason I cleaned out the old shed was to have a personal space to hang
out, away from my brothers. But one, at least, wasn't having it. "Shoddy
construction" my eye. Mike broke that lock [on my diary] trying to pick
it, apparently wanting to see what "mighty secrets" I might be
keeping. I couldn't lock the diary anymore, but I saw that any attempt at
privacy was futile anyway. It took me a while to forgive him.
Dear Mike,
It has now been ten hours since you have gone and already I miss you.
All of my life you have been there, almost never more than half an hour away,
and now every minute carries you farther and farther away. I look at my
books placed in your shelves & am reminded of you, I type this letter on
your typewriter and am reminded of you; every now and then something will
occupy my attention, but then I think of you with a start and feel guilty for
having forgotten for a moment.
I have noticed something strange. Things do not have a past until they are
gone. I mean they have a past, but they are not in it. It is awful
feeling so torn, but I don't feel any despair. I know from the past that
things I think are gone forever turn up where least expected. I hope you
will turn up soon. [written when he left for Oregon; found in his papers
ten years and more after his passing.]
Memory tells me that I was
often annoyed by Mom and Pop and Mike, though it fills me now with rue. I would
give almost anything to be annoyed by them again, if only for a little
while.
Little Rascal, by
Sterling North, a cut down version of his larger book Rascal: A Memoir
of a Better Era (1963). That better era was during WWI and the Spanish
flu. As I said, it was a family book, shared among us kids, but I think Mike
had the largest interest in it. I don’t remember ever reading it myself.
Needless to say, at the end Rascal, a raccoon, has to be released into the
wild. Mike also had a copy of The Yearling (by Marjorie
Kinning Rawlings) years later. I think Nomads of the North (James
Oliver Curwood/Disney) was his too.
I remember the first time I
saw [Cyrano de Bergerac], back when I was in high school. Our creative writing
teacher knew that it was coming on that weekend and suggested that Mike and I
take the opportunity to see it. We did, not knowing exactly what to expect, but
determined to give it a try.
Saturday afternoon came and
we settled down to watch. Unfortunately, Pop (whose idea of a proper movie was
a good Western) had settled down in his recliner and was determined to be a
film critic for his idealistic sons, perhaps all the more so because we had
hinted that he might want to do something else as it was probably not his cup
of tea.
When in the first scene of
the movie the slimy, posing actor Montfleury came on stage and began to
declaim, Pop's scorn was loud and palpable. I think he thought it was all going
to be like that. Mike and I tried to get him to settle down so we could hear
the movie and give it a fair chance. He was having none of it.
Then Jose Ferrer came on as
Cyrano and voiced Pop's exact opinions about Montfleury. That took him by
surprise, I think. And then? "Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants,
monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles!" By the time the film was
over, even Pop had to admit it was not the exercise in sissiness he thought it
was going to be; in fact I think he even begrudgingly liked it.
As a joke, Mike persuaded
Mom to send off for a copy of [Baked Beans for Breakfast] a Scholastic
book from Weekly Reader (I think it was a bonus free book) as a burn on my
bean-hate. I mean I’m sure Mom didn’t see it as a joke, but Mike knew how it
would affect me. It came, and I was duly disgusted.
When I got my first
computer, the on-again-off-again transcribing of 'Elf and Bear' was one of the
many scattered projects I attempted. When I lost that file when my computer
crashed, I was too despondent to try again right away, but by 2005, with Mike's
help, I finally had a complete edited version of the book. And then Mike passed
away, and the world was again turned on its head.
The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs was
Mike's book, although I did read it with interest. For a while it was more or
less 'in the family'. Dinosaurs were always a hot topic for us boys, and this
intriguing new theory (which has now come to be more or less accepted) was the
newest wrinkle in an old topic.
What Mike’s lunch box was I
have no clear memory. I thought it might be Peter Pan, and when I looked it up,
I did feel a definite ‘vibe’. It seemed familiar to John as well. As Mike had
no sentimental attachment to it, it did not particularly live in memory or
reminiscences.
4/15/2018: Got up, wrote a
little more 'Unbelievable', up to the part where Mike and I drive away from the
Writer's Roundtable. It is odd; I think in a part of my mind, it is always
There and Then, whenever I think about the past, as if it were a place that can
always be revisited and might be redeemed.
In seeking for a new
project, I revived the idea of the first strand, which I had dubbed 'The
American Fantasy.' I wrote a first chapter, and my older brother Mike joined me
as coach and advisor. Before we could get very far, however, he passed away and
I again became bogged down in gloom and inertia. And there it stood for some
time.
[In I, Claudius] I
saw my brother Mike’s gloomy nature in Tiberias (George Baker), the second
Emperor.
[For Halloween] that year I
was a pirate, the brittle plastic mask, held on by a rubber elastic string,
gripped a knife in its teeth. John (who must have been four or five) was a
black cat, and Mike was a devil, if not THE Devil. His mask haunted the spare
room closet for quite a while afterwards, probably contributing to the Legend
of the Little Hoofer in years to come.
True, family photos from
those days are rather scarce on the ground, but there are quite a few of Mike
(as firstborn child).
A little planter/pencil
holder like this was presented to Mom and Pop around the time of Mike's birth.
For years it was a constant presence, either in the kitchen window or on the
mirror shelves over the TV. It reads "Congratulations on Your New Little
Tax Exemption.”
John called me; he reminded
me that yesterday was the 13th anniversary of Mike's passing, and today was the
20th of Mom's. Now I understand all the butterflies. The anniversary of Mike's
and Mom's passing is often marked by vast clouds of butterflies (and sometimes
dragonflies). Perhaps it's just that time of year, but natural coincidences are
often signs, too.
I have now finished Fathers
& Sons, a very interesting book; Basarov and his fate remind me a bit
of Mike. Poor Basarov!
I decided to finally order
the Solzhenitsyn book for a variety of reasons. For one, Mike had always been
interested in him since high school, realizing that he was a force in Russian
literature, which was one of his areas of special attraction. I remember seeing
his copy of The Gulag Archipelago and wondering what it was
like.
Mike supplied me with The
Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King but
could not get The Two Towers until a week later.
And, of course, this was
mainly the time that I read The Hobbit, and The Tolkien
Reader, and Mike brought me The Lord of the Rings trilogy
from high school.
The Seventies was truly the
age of cryptozoology, of UFO encounters, of demons and cults. With old
certainties being questioned, old uncertainties began to gain more credence -
or credulity. Mike, who always had an interest in the sea and ichthyology anyway
(Jaws was already big at the time and the mystery and fear of the
sea particularly potent) bought this very intriguing mag [about sea monsters] that
was of deep interest to us all.
I may have written (at least
parenthetically) about my brother Mike’s obsession with marine biology, no
doubt sparked by the impact of the movie Jaws. He came to have an
interesting knowledge of the varieties of sharks, their habits and habitats.
This extended peripherally to other denizens of the sea, and it seemed for a
while that he might pursue the career of a marine biologist. But his growing vocation
as a writer kind of pushed that out of the way.
But there was, briefly, in
high school, a strange overlap, an idea that he toyed with for a while. This
was to be a combination of whales and Watership Down, with a dash
of Rudyard Kipling’s The White Seal: a story about a pod of
cetaceans (mostly right whales, I think) fleeing the depredations of mankind
and seeking a safer sea to swim in. They would encounter dangers and other sea
life, from giant squid to orcas. I seem to remember they were joined by a
grampus, or something, who envied their ability to dive deep and dreamed of
being able to do that himself. A bit of a sub-plot of tragedy and
self-sacrifice brewing there.
Anyway, I don’t think he
ever wrote anything on it, though he thought and planned and discussed it with
us, to the extent of maybe making up sort of whale words to sprinkle in their
conversations, like Lapine in Watership Down. He soon abandoned the
idea as too fanciful, however, and buckled down to more realistic writing. It
would possibly embarrass him now to have it revealed as a step of his writing
development, but I rather treasure the anecdote as part of his more juvenile
stage, when the fantasy
of Beast Fable still held a toehold in his mind.
We might hold a meeting of the Black Cat Club
behind the closed door of the bathroom, with Mike as President enthroned on the
toilet while the rest of us lined up on the edge of the tub.
It was also here [our Half
Price Books] that we brothers could indulge our growing interests, Mike his
Hemingway and Faulkner, John his Bradbury and horror fiction.
[The ornament’s] 'silk' is
unraveling a bit and it lost its original little loop to attach the hook. That
has been replaced with a yarn bookmark that belonged to Mike, one of his own
sentimental Christmas presents, attached with a pushpin.
When I tell any scurrilous
tales about my family (I might point to several stories about Mike) it is
because I love them for being so them, even when annoying.
It was the early Eighties,
and my first year in college. I had entered a Creative Writing class with Mike,
my older brother, and he was far more dedicated than I was.
I remember that at first, I
was a pretty enthusiastic vocalist until my tuneless braying moved my brother
Mike (who sat next to me) to rebuke me into virtual muteness. I do not blame
him (although I totally do) for my continued stunted musical development.
The volume we had when we
were kids was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and that
contributed to my older brother Mike's burgeoning ichthyology craze.
The other day, when Susan and I were discussing threatened suicide, and I
said it's just something we all did to a greater or lesser degree, Susan said
"He's a Babel, and we Babels just hate ourselves." It suddenly struck
me, not as a surprising truth of course, but because it must be more than 20
years since I've heard her refer to herself as a Babel. It got me thinking
about us and our perception of ourselves as People with a Special Destiny. It
reminded me, or made clear to me, that we always have considered ourselves as
not like other people. Even our ambitions were unusual: if Mike was to be a
writer, he had to be a writer unlike all others; Kenny an actor not on the
beaten path; even Susan wants the bourgeois lifestyle with a depth and a
difference.
I've started transcribing
Mike's work on his early novel, A Stranger and Alone.
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