LEARNING TO FLY

Like many of the best things in my life, this story begins with a dog. Except that I never knew this dog and for that matter, he’s been gone 85 years. The dog was a beautifully bred St.Bernard from Nina Dodd’s White Star Kennels in Long Branch, New Jersey. He was sold as a puppy in 1917 for $75, which works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of $1400 in today’s figures. Apparently the puppy’s new owner went to the train station to pick up the puppy with his nephew– telling the boy they were going to the train station to meet “Mr. Bernard.”  It took me awhile to piece together this tale of a St. Bernard from the  faded photograph of Orville Wright walking his dog, Scipio.  As it turns out, there are dozens of photographs of Scipio, romping among the hawthorn trees, lounging on the front porch, riding in a canoe on Lake Huron, stretched out across a Persian carpet. When Orville Wright died, decades after his beloved dog, there were pictures of Scipio still tucked in his wallet.

Before Scipio, the Wright Brothers didn’t foster much interest for me. Yes, I knew they invented the airplane, just as I knew Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Important things, sure, but not the stuff that keeps me up at night.  But because we live just a few blocks from the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park (Honestly, the name! It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like “Yellowstone” does it?) we decided to take some visitors there one spring afternoon.  It was engaging, and I did learn how to tell one Wright Brother from another (Orville had a mustache all his adult life, Wilbur never had one) and I was impressed with their sticktoitiveness. We knew about their bicycles, but not the printing business, and we thought the sidebar about Orville’s friend Paul Laurence Dunbar was kind of interesting. Other than feeling a little piqued every time we saw a North Carolina license plate (First in Flight, indeed) we still didn’t give much thought to the Wright Brothers.

When another project brought me to Scipio and I discovered the collection of photos in the Library of Congress, I began to be more curious about these men that were the first to fly. As it turns out, Wilbur  had been dead for five years before Scipio came along, and though he helped his brother design their fine house in Oakwood, he died of typhoid fever before it was completed. Like many of us, the image I have of the Wright Brothers is that of young men in bowler hats and bow ties at the turn of the century, so I was surprised to learn that Orville had lived until 1948.

At the time of his death, we had airplanes “skywriting,” regularly scheduled airmail, planes had flown over the north and south poles and across every ocean and continent. There were crop dusters, paratroopers and aerial traffic reports. You could catch a regularly scheduled flight on PanAm from New York to San Francisco, or a Northwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Asia, and there were in-flight movies, with sound. Even Saudi Arabia had their own airline. The September before Orville died, the United States Air Force separated from the US Army, jet bombers were in regular use and a fighter jet had been clocked at 300 mph. That’s a lot of progress from those windy winter mornings on the dunes of the Outer Banks. If anyone ever asked  him  what his thoughts were about the use of the airplane to annihilate millions of people, I haven’t found the answer.

There have been scores of books written about the Wright Brothers and their quest for flight. Trying to find out something about the nature of the men themselves in those books is often like looking for a pearl in the sand. Mostly the books end with the success at Kitty Hawk (even though they truly did not hammer down the problems of powered flight until they were back in Dayton) or they end with Wilbur’s death in 1912. When the personalities of the brothers are described, it is in the broadest terms: Wilbur was “formal,” or “studious,” Orville was a “prankster” or (conversely) “pathologically shy.”  Wilbur had to be dressed by his sister to be appropriately attired, Orville was a dandy. Wilbur was the brains, Orville was the enthusiasm. Like many generalizations, there may be a kernel of truth there, or it may just be that a yarn repeated often enough takes on a ring of authenticity.

Take for instance, the notion that Orville Wright was “pathologically shy.”  (And yes, that’s the very phrase one sees over and over and over.) Think about this for a minute. Pathologically shy people do not stop to visit with school children on the street. They do not enlist the help of strangers in far off coastal towns to help them with gliders and later, powered aircraft. They do not entertain guests from all over the world. They do not play practical jokes.  Orville Wright eschewed public speaking, but there are documented instances where he did it anyway. He did not suffer journalists very well– and who can blame him? Journalists screw up the simplest things– imagine trying to get them to understand something as complicated as powered flight. These things do not confer on him even genuine shyness, let alone some kind of clinical state of dis-ease.

Continuing to sift through the sand, the dry, dry sand will turn up one little gem after another though, tiny landmarks in an amazing life. For instance, Orville Wright’s march to a different drummer started early– in kindergarten. Every morning, he’d start off — and never get there, preferring to spend the day playing with his friend, Ed Sines. At the appropriate time, he went home.  This continued for several weeks, until Susan Wright stopped in at the school to see how her youngest son was getting along. They’d never seen him.  Orville was then home-schooled by his mother (who turns out to be the source of real mechanical ability and curiosity in the family) until the second grade.

In the second grade, he was given opportunity to advance directly to the third grade, provided he could pass a reading test. The teacher chose a passage in the primer for Orville to read, and read it Orville did, holding the book upside down.  More in the realm of the prankster, he once dumped a packet of red pepper into the heating registers to see if that wouldn’t result in school closing for the day. This one kind of backfired, though. For three days, nothing happened. On the fourth day, the pepper was suddenly activated, making all the students sneeze.  But the teacher just apologized, opened the windows and went on teaching to her roomful of students, their eyes streaming from the red pepper in the atmosphere.

By the time he was at Central High School, at Fourth and Wilkinson Streets in Dayton, Orville had abandoned a regular course of study to take instead advanced academic classes in subjects that interested him, particularly Latin. (There is a photo here. Orville stands in the middle of the doorway in the top row. His friend Paul Laurence Dunbar is all the way to the left.) When he realized that his self-designed program made him ineligible for graduation he quit.

Interested in printing, Orville designed a press and his older brother, Wilbur helped him build it. By March of 1889, at the age of 17, he was printing a weekly newspaper, The West Side News. On the masthead, he is listed as publisher and Wilbur as editor. The paper is an amusing amalgam of “news.” For instance “Mrs. Harrison is sick and is obliged to refuse visitors. She will probably be out again in a few days” runs alongside an account of former president Grover Cleveland visiting St. Augustine, Florida en route to Cuba.  There are many “one-liner” stories, like “L.M. Brown wore the first straw hat of the season,” or “Miller’s slaughterhouse on South Williams Street was consumed by fire Friday morning.” (Yes, that’s the whole story.) However five column inches was devoted to “The Sand Blast,” a rhapsodic piece about, well, sand-blasting.

In April 1890, the West Side News became an evening daily, but the boys couldn’t sustain the pace, and in August, the paper closed. They did go on running the presses though, producing handbills, tickets, broadsheets, and booklets as a commercial press, including Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Tattler, beginning in 1892. In December 1892, they opened the bicycle shop, and in the fall of 1893 attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago where Octave Chanute’s aeronautical exhibit rekindled their childhood interest in machines that fly.

I’m not going to talk about the flying. The innumerable accounts of the Wrights’ efforts to make possible powered flight have ground that topic into dust. We know they did it. Let’s move on. Well, there’s one thing to consider though. In 1901, Wilbur Wright quit. He decided that man would never fly in his lifetime and he refused to waste anymore time on the endeavor. Orville, the clown, the tinkerer, the dreamer would not let go. He gave his brother reasonable arguments to continue. He wheedled. He cajoled. He stormed. Though it’s not recorded, he probably stamped his feet and slammed the door. Whatever he did, Wilbur reconsidered and the experiments in flying continued.

In 1900, Orville had taken up the mandolin. His sister Katharine wrote “Orv has begun lessons on his mandolin and we are getting even with the neighborhood for all the noise they have made on pianos. He sits around and picks that thing until I can hardly stay in the house.”  Orville’s  1900 Washburn mandolin is in the Smithsonian, along with report cards of both Wright brothers, the stopwatch they used at Kitty Hawk and scraps of fabric and wood from the 1903 Flyer than went with the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969.

It horrifies me to read of the September 1908 accident in which Orville Wright crashed during a demonstration for the U.S. Army. The right propeller broke, catching on a guy wire that braced the rear vertical rudder. The wire in turn tore out the rudder and the plane nose-dived.

“Our course for 50 feet,” Orville wrote to his brother, “was within a very few degrees from the perpendicular . Lt. Selfridge to this point had not uttered a word, though he took a hasty glance behind when the propeller broke and turned once or twice to look into my face, evidently to see what I thought of the situation. But when the machine turned for the ground, he exclaimed ‘Oh! Oh!’ in an almost inaudible voice.”

Orville and the Lieutenant were thrown against the ground, and Lieutenant Selfridge hit his head on a wooden upright that supported the framework of the wing, fracturing his skull. He underwent surgery, but died during the night without regaining consciousness. Orville suffered a broken femur, broken hip, and several broken ribs and was hospitalized for seven weeks in traction. He never quite recovered from the effects of the accident. It left him with ongoing back pain and sciatica for the rest of his life, as well as a lingering sense of guilt and sadness over the first passenger death in aviation history.

As soon as Orville was well enough to travel, he and his sister Katharine sailed to Europe to join Wilbur there in promoting the aircraft, training pilots in Italy and demonstrating flight in Germany. When they returned home in May 1909, they were greeted by a crowd of 10,000 people at the Dayton train station. Their father and their brother, Lorin and Lorin’s family were there to greet them, and a special livery of eleven carriages had been arranged to carry the Wright party home. The crowds followed them on foot and when they crossed the bridge to the West Side they found the streets festooned with paper lanterns and flags. Across the street from their home, a bandstand had been set up and the  band began playing “Home Sweet Home” as they arrived.

I love that when the brothers Wright were finally (and very belatedly) officially honored by the City of Dayton (okay, boys, we’ll claim you now) a month later  in June, 1909 that they rode in carriage with lifetime friends Ed Sines (remember him, from kindergarten) and Edward Ellis, and that the two Eds spent as much time leaning out of the carriage shaking hands as Orville and Wilbur did.

It wasn’t all wine and roses though. With success came issues with patents, and vigorously defending those patents in a court of law. In 1912, Wilbur died from Typhoid fever. Orville believed that the stress of the patent issues had weakened his brother and made his susceptible to the typhus, and he vowed to finish out the patent fights to honor Wilbur’s memory. The house that Orville and Wilbur and Katharine designed together on Hawthorn Hill, across the river in Oakwood, is completed, and they move their with their father.

When I read Milton Wright’s diary entry in 1913 that his son Orville had narrowly escaped arrest for “rapid driving”– I wrote it down mistakenly as “rabid driving” and I smile when I think of Orville careening down Harman Avenue and rounding the corner onto Far Hills in front of the high school, people scattering in all directions and the Oakwood Police turning a blind eye, because they don’t really want to arrest their most prominent citizen.

No doubt he could be insufferable too. His sister’s nickname for him was “His Criticalness.”  As Orville didn’t like the taste of refrigerated food, the Wrights went on with an ice box long after their neighbors had moved on to electric refrigerators. He did design a special door in the pantry so that the ice could be delivered without water being tracked across the kitchen floor. Workmen could not get the reddish color stain that Orville wanted  right on the woodwork of the Hawthorn Hill house, so he re-did it all himself. (Did he roll over in his grave when NCR  -who bought the house after his death- painted all the woodwork white? It’s all right, Bubbo, the white looks good.) He was working on developing an automatic record changer, with a mechanical arm that reached for records, ordered in specific slots, and placed them on the turntable. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as expected, instead breaking most of Orville’s records by flinging them on the floor. In need of more records, he went to visit all of his relatives asking for their records in order to fine tune the machine.

One of Orville’s nephews was inordinately fond of mashed potatoes, and in family memoirs,  “Uncle Orv” was remembered to have fastened a thread to the bottom of his nephew’s plate. He noted at the dinner table that the boy’s plate just seemed to gravitate towards the potatoes, while surreptitiously pulling the thread to make the plate move across the table. The same method was employed at Thanksgiving to simulate a tin “cockroach” racing across the dining room table which caused the housekeeper to drop the turkey.

Ivonette Wright Miller, the daughter of Orville’s older brother Lorin, recalled for reporters the Christmas dinner of 1919, when her new husband  Harold was the butt of one of her uncle’s jokes.  The place cards that year were a card from  Orville with a $20 bill tucked inside. ($20 in those days was the equivalent of about $250.) Except at Harold Miller’s spot, where instead of a card there was a small box of candy. Harold thanked Orville for the candy and set it aside. Others at the table encouraged  him to open the candy, saying that the $20 must be inside the box. Orville chuckled away at the head of the table. The box was opened, but there was no money inside. Harold set the box aside, quite embarrassed now. But the family urged him forward , and he removed all of the chocolates to see if the money was hidden underneath. No. Again, he tried to stop, and again he was encouraged to continue to search. Finally, when he unfolded the lid of the box, there was the $20 bill peeking out. Fiendish, in its own way.

As I sift through these dusty books and snippets of  information, trying to winnow fact from fiction, I realize what is happening here and I can no more stop it than I could hold out my hand and stop a train from coming down the tracks. A simple essay takes days because it’s like falling down a rabbit hole. I wander down this path, and then that one. I stop to drive out to Huffman Prairie and let the wind blow across my face. I check and cross-check, and check again. I drag my relatives to look at the 1905 Wright  Flyer III here in Dayton at Carillon Park. I suggest to the docents there that the pronunciation of the dog’s name is “Skipio” like the Roman general, rather than “Sipio” like the town in Ohio. I search for a Washburn bowlback Cremonatone Mandolin on eBay.

Falling in love changes everything. No, no, not that I’ve fallen in love with a man dead 14 years before I was even born. (And even if not dead then, he would have been, let’s see, 91 years my senior.) Well, maybe a little bit in love with Orville, but more so in love with Orville’s story, with discovering the real stuff of the men who gave us wings. (And in the parlor game of who would you invite to dinner, living or dead, if it could be anyone– he’s zoomed right to the top of my list, way ahead of George Washington or T.S. Eliot or Jesus Christ.)

Tom Crouch, the author of The Bishop’s Boys, to date one of the few books that stops to actually look at the Wright brothers, rather than just the race to powered flight, describes them as “warm, interesting, witty and articulate.”  Yes, well, all that and so much more.  The thing is, it’s difficult to write about a group of people– whether it’s Little Women, or the Barn Gang, or Poets in Their Youth, there’s so little focus on the individual that they are not much more than cardboard cut-outs to the reader; two-dimensional and flat. Combine that with the highly technical aspects of the invention of flight and you have something dry, dry as the sand blowing across the hills at Kitty Hawk.

Driving home alone one evening in the Saab, nimbly moving along the curves of Far Hills Boulevard, coming down out of Oakwood into Dayton, I have a kind of epiphany. It is momentous enough for me that the hair rises on the back of my neck. I realize  in that instant that I know what I have to do, and how I’m going to do it. There are many more stories to tell.

The next morning I am browsing online through something entirely unrelated, and I run across a little tiny article, written by Leonard K. Henry, someone I’ve never heard of.  As part of the Federal Writers Project, he had interviewed Orville Wright on the third floor of Wright’s laboratory.  They are leaving together and Orville asks Leonard Henry if would be so kind as to look down the elevator shaft and see where the elevator is. “It always makes me dizzy and nervous to look down from any place higher than the second floor,” the aviator explains. Orville Wright was afraid of heights.  He explains that while learning to fly he was too busy thinking to feel afraid. “It had all the exhilaration of a great adventure,”  he said.

There are literally thousands of documents online and in special collections having to do with Orville Wright, and his family. There are diaries and letters and photographs and interviews and ledgers and blueprints and patent applications. I could spend the rest of my natural life reading about Orville Wright and not only not know everything there is to know about him, but not know everything that’s documented about him. I know now what I have to do to really begin to understand, and I am going to learn to fly.

I can get on an airplane as a passenger and I can fly.  I don’t like it much. For nearly a decade, I couldn’t even do that, and would drive or take trains or simply stay home. Then I realized that I needed to overcome that fear to prevent my life from becoming circumscribed by distance. So I worked out a means to stop being afraid, and those first few flights, beating back that fear– I was giddy with euphoria afterwards. Now it’s dull and ordinary again, and a tablet of Valium makes the anxiety manageable. That’s commercial travel, and that’s not the kind of flying I mean.

I am going to go out to the airport and take lessons in a little tiny plane and learn how to race up the runway into the wild blue skies. I am going to learn how to soar and bank and climb. My family is absolutely speechless every time I mention this. That matters not. I know I will be afraid, but I’m going to do it anyway. Maybe I will be too busy thinking to be afraid. I hope to find there all the exhilaration of a great adventure, and in the exhilaration of learning to fly, I’ll be looking for Orville.

BREATHING ROOM

It isn’t writer’s block, quite. In fact, the word counts make me look entirely productive: more than 5000 over the span of two nights. And when I say “over the span of two nights,” that’s exactly what I mean. This morning I went to bed at 7 am. Yesterday it was 6:30 a.m. Both times I fell asleep in absolute defeat. I have wrestled the essay two nights running and I am losing.

I want to write about why I live where I live. In the 1970s, “Why I Live Where I Live” was a regular column in Esquire Magazine, each one featuring a different writer. I read them avidly. The two that stick with me are those written by Annie Dillard and Harry Crews, both of whom lived in places where I too had lived. I’m not sure you would have recognized either place if they hadn’t named them. In the course of trying to coax the piece into shape, I re-read Harry’s column. It rambles all over the place too. Esquire notwithstanding, maybe it’s the topic that doesn’t work. Still, just like a dog with her teeth into something, I don’t want to let go.

Where we live is sometimes dictated by necessity, sometimes by whim. (Occasionally you have to wonder if fate intervenes. Why did I pick up and move to Montana, a place I’d never even visited? And then I was stuck there. For years.)

Whether or not you are at home there is at the heart of the matter. I chose Montana and lived there 18 years, but I was never a Montanan. I spent a decade in Boston, but found no peace there. However that city influenced me, it’s since washed off like a watercolor. (Well, maybe some driving habits remain.)  I wasn’t even a citizen of the one place that did feel like home, and couldn’t claim it as anything but borrowed. My whole life was like something out of Goldilocks. Too hard, too soft, too small, too large, too hot, too cold.  Until now.

So why can’t I write about it? I love this town, but when I try to organize those thoughts on paper, they read like something creative from the Chamber of Commerce. When I try to talk about how we came to be here, the essay takes on that terrible pedestrian narrative – “and then, and then, and then.”

Harry Crews said one of the reasons he lives in Gainesville is because three hours away there’s really good fishing. I like horse racing, but I don’t live in Dayton because it’s three hours from the Kentucky Derby. If “really good fishing” was the criteria for living somewhere, you’d think Harry would have moved closer to the beach. Of course, he lived in Gainesville because he taught there, just as we live here because we chose the extraordinary public performing arts high school for our son.

Why I think I’ll stay for ever and always is a whole different question. And for that matter, Harry has long retired from the University of Florida, and yet he lingers quite near there, in Melrose. I lived Gainesville as well; three times. In utero, as a little girl from age 2 to 6 and again when I was 17, and I returned for college. I don’t go near Gainesville now, it’s clearly my geographical tar baby and I’m terrified I might get stuck.  And when I left there in 1980, I didn’t even glance back.

I did take a couple of classes from Harry Crews, though. They were upper-level creative writing courses and I never should have been allowed to sign up. Lucky me the computer didn’t kick me out and neither did Harry. We used to meet at night. We’d have an assignment to read and then we’d talk about it. We’d turn in our papers to Harry and he’d return those that were already graded. I don’t think we ever talked about each other’s writing, and so much the better. We really only cared what Harry thought. One night, after we’d read Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” he asked me to tell the class what I thought about it. So I told them. “A brilliant story,” I said, “but I didn’t really care for it.” (Which I still think is an entirely legitimate opinion.)

Well, Harry was on that like white on rice. “Didn’t care for it! Little Miss Coed here doesn’t care for the great Kafka!”  And so on. Really, I suppose I should have figured that it would have been one of Harry’s favorites. I’d read all his novels in high school, and a love for Kafka should have come as no surprise. I sat there and listened while he raved and tried not to cry.

At the break, I went up and asked for my story. If you didn’t pick up your work, he threw it out.

“Name?”

“Larkin Vonalt.”

“Oh yeah. The one with the people wandering around in the middle of the night.” He shuffled through a few more papers. “Here it is.”  I could see he’d marked it with a B. He paused, though, before handing it over. Leaning back in his chair he looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time.

“Are you kin to Larry Vonalt? He drew the word “kin” out three beats.

“Yes, I’m his daughter.” Harry slapped the desktop so hard people in the room jumped.

“Well, how the hell is he??!! We were the dearest of friends. You tell him, you tell him the next time you talk to him, you tell him Harry Crews sent his luvvvv.”

Well, I did tell him of course, and my father called Harry and they had a fine old time rekindling their graduate school friendship.  What I learned from Harry over the next two semesters was how to not flinch. It has served me well. I wish I could learn from him now how to say why I live where I live.

Why do I live where I live? There’s the history of course– the brothers Wright and their bicycles, their friend, Paul Laurence Dunbar and his poems. Jane Reese and her camera, John Patterson and his rowboats (yes, yes cash registers too) Esther Price and her chocolates. There’s the Federal Courthouse where Lincoln spoke, and damn near every president after  him. There are the 3000 creches at the University of Dayton and the 104,000 inhabitants of Woodland Cemetery, itself a National Historic Landmark. Every mover and shaker Dayton ever had is buried there– but the most visited grave is that of a boy and his dog.

There are the long straight boulevards of fine houses and the cobblestone streets, and the river, like a great grey ribbon curling through the town. Great old industrial sites dot the town, factories and warehouses and great hulking ruins. There are fountains in the river and a skating rink in a park downtown and a baseball stadium where the minor league team boasts the longest sell-out record of any professional sports team. Colored lights flicker underneath the bridges.

I lost my dog here for nine days. Everyone wanted to help: letter carriers, A.T. & T. repair crews, UPS, the Police Department, the Sheriff’s office, college students, homeless men and women. A local mover and shaker wrote about her in his blog. Days went by without a word. It was like she’d fallen off the edge of the earth. The hardest call each day was to street maintenance, to see if they’d found her body. When she was finally spotted, five miles across town in a wooded area behind the Hospice, nearly the entire staff became involved in our reunion. I’ll never forget the euphoria that swept over me as she raced into my arms, and I’ll never forget the UPS man dancing a little jig on my front porch that afternoon, upon hearing the good news. “The guys are gonna be so  happy to hear this, we’ve all been looking for her.” When I brought pastries to the hospice to thank them again on the anniversary of her return, the whole story was written up (badly, but it was a sweet gesture) in the Dayton Daily News as if the return of a lost dog is a story that ought to be newsworthy. Something like that can make you partial to a town.

Just a few weeks ago they named one of the bridges across the Great Miami River the Richard Holbrooke Memorial Bridge after the late American diplomat.  In 1995, Holbrooke brokered a peace treaty here in Dayton  that ended the Balkan conflict. He wrote about Dayton in his memoirs:

There was also a real Dayton out there, a charming Ohio city, famous as the birthplace of the Wright Brothers. Its citizens energized us from the outset. Unlike the population of, say New York, Geneva or Washington which would scarcely notice another conference, Daytonians were proud to be part of history. Large signs at the commercial airport hailed Dayton as the “temporary center of international peace”. The local newspapers and television stations covered the story from every angle, drawing the people deeper into the proceedings. When we ventured into a restaurant or a shopping center downtown, people crowded around, saying that they were praying for us. Warren Christopher was given at least one standing ovation in a restaurant. Families on the air base placed “candles of peace” in their front windows, and people gathered in peace vigils outside the base. One day they formed a “peace chain”, although it was not quite large enough to surround the sprawling eight-thousand-acre base.

When I read that out loud to my husband, I have to stop for a second to regain my composure. Why should that make me cry? It’s not sad. That’s Dayton for you. Not always the most sophisticated, perhaps, but hopeful and optimistic and caring. Even when the city keeps getting cut off at the knees– the departure of GM was dreadful, but NCR leaving by far the worst betrayal. (No doubt John Patterson rolled over in his grave several times.) Even when that happens, the city is like a scrappy little terrier– up on its feet and ready to go.

But when I try to write about it I get tangled up in keeping all the details straight and carefully drawing each line on the dot-to-dot. I try to keep my own story in there as well– after all, it’s supposed to be why I live here, not why those other 142,000 do. (Or a million if you want to count the outlying areas.)

I’d like to tell the story of the drunk guy that helped us unload the moving truck the hot August night we arrived here, or the woman who lived across the alley from us and her beautiful daughter and how the daughter died one night while they were making dinner. Or the man across the street who helped us carry a treadmill up the stairs and the stricken figure of a dog to the car, has cut the grass, strung the lights, and borrowed every tool we have, all the while keeping us apprised on neighborhood gossip. There are still so many things I don’t want to forget. But I just can’t seem to make the words cooperate.

It’s nights like that where my skill as a writer is less than useful. The sentences are pretty. They scan well. The metaphors are clever or apt. But it’s all so boring I can hardly stand to read it out loud to myself. Two nights of that is about enough to make me wild with despair.

Now comes the question of what to do? This experiment, this 30 Days Notice, was supposed to be neatly tied up and put away two days ago, on the 30th. I cannot seem to climb over this one piece and there are still two more lying in wait on the other side. Am I supposed to just give up and walk away after devoting two days of my life to it? Or should I go on wrangling the sentences until at last they move forward together? Maybe I just say forget it about the other two stories and move on to the next thing, closing down 30 Days Notice two days overdue instead of four?

I needed breathing room to sort it out. I used to sleep on this sort of thing, but I’m so exhausted by the time I fall into bed in the morning, that the sleep is hard and dreamless.

So today I let myself breathe a bit, hugging my sides like an exhausted runner, and I made some decisions.

I’m going to save “Why I Live Where I Live” for another project. It may take 10,000 words to tell that story. Or a hundred thousand. There will be one more piece here tomorrow and after that, a little wrap-up. And though the curtains are coming down on this show, I’ve left the stage door open– and I’ll leave a note with directions to the next theatre. One of these days I’ll figure it out, and then I’ll tell you how it is that I came home at last.

 

AMBIENT LIGHT

A Writer Talks About Photography

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 126. It was under the Christmas tree for me when I was six years old. The first photo I took with it was of a pen full of hound dogs, neatly foreshadowing the hundreds, nay, thousands of pictures I’ve taken of hound dogs since.  It made little square pictures, all of them fuzzy because while Kodak was making these dandy little cameras for middle America, they were outfitting them with the cheapest little plastic lenses ever. It was like making a photograph through the bottom of a plastic wine glass.  Did we even realize how awful they were?  Looking at these snapshots now really is like looking at your own hazy memories, everyone is no more than a suggestion.

Eight years later the Christmas tree once again bore photographic fruit. This time it was a much nicer camera, a Rollei B35, at the time the smallest 35 mm camera made. The “B” is for “Belichtungsmesser”– a lightmeter, which was built into the front of the camera. (You can see a B35 in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Melinda Dillon used one to take photos of the landing of the spaceship.) I didn’t have the opportunity to take a picture of any spaceships, but I did photograph chocolate shops in Brussels, friends eating herring outside the Hague, and a shot that showed early promise– I turned around and got a photograph of the hordes of tourists all taking snapshots of the Notre Dame.

I was already cast in bronze as a writer. Of course, I planned to be an actress and took to my high school stage as the Fiddler in Fiddler on the Roof, and Mrs. Smith in The Bald Soprano. I couldn’t sing well enough for the big roles in the musicals (the Fiddler, you might remember, is not Tevye, but a mute) and when I was cast as one of a dozen nuns in the Sound of Music I hotly told the theatre teacher, Don Oickle, that I couldn’t waste my time with such things. Which was probably the truest thing I ever said in that room. I was already editor of the school paper, after all, and for the first time ever I had an English teacher who both recognized my talent and raised the bar so high for me, that for the first time in my life I was having to work at writing.

I liked my camera, but I didn’t  think of it as anything other a means of recording memorable events, and always on slides. My stepfather had a very nice camera, a Leica IIIf from the 1950s and he shot (exclusively) Agfa slide film, so I shot Agfa too. We had a lovely Rollei projector and a good slide projected across the room can make a breath-taking image. They’re just a little inconvenient to casually leaf through. In time I started experimenting with different films, taking “artsy” photographs with an array of strange film from Ilford. I remember well a series of “eggs on a table top” that all came out cyan. My first year in college I stretched myself with the camera, shooting in the rain, at the beach, and all kinds of scandalous images that I’m surprised the local photo place deigned to print.

These were, however, good enough to get me into art school. On a trip to New York before I went off to MassArt, I “borrowed” the  Leica, and shot several rolls of the Chelsea Hotel, including a wonderful portrait of the famous hotel’s famous manager Stanley Bard. The Chelsea (in those days anyway) was very plain. Radiator pipes that banged all night long, narrow beds with thin blankets. But the wrought iron staircases were extraordinary, and the lobby was resplendent with boys in leather and raccoon-eyed girls, the celebrated and the notorious, cheek by cheek. I think that week is probably when I first started to use the camera as a different way to see. When I (ahem) “returned” the Leica, I left a roll of film in it, about half the exposures gone. I understand that when my stepfather went to pick up “his” roll of photos that he was quite bewildered by half of what he got back from Eckerd’s.

At Mass Art, I studied with Nick Nixon, who must be one of the most patient people alive.  My little Rollei had long since packed up (salt water and whatnot is hell on cameras) and with the first installment of my student loan, I bought an Olympus OM10 with a motor drive and two lenses.  Nick’s work is unflinching, capturing the beauty in the faces of people with AIDS,  people in nursing homes, the blind, the sick . . . and thank God, school children and city scapes. I wanted to take photographs like that, but I was shy about approaching people, so I shot almost exclusively with the telephoto lens. Yeah, it was a cop-out.

Even worse, I couldn’t get a grasp on exposure– I struggled with the light meter and most of the time just ignored it. I still can’t tell you exactly what “bracketing” or “matrix metering” is.  I understood why it was difficult to shoot a photograph of a black horse in the snow, and what to do about it, but I couldn’t explain it to you.  I suppose that’s like a writer who never bothered to learn to spell. It’s not that I meant to be disrespectful and careless. I was just in a rush to get the photograph. Somewhere I read a statistic that professional photographers believed that about five percent of the shots they took were successful. Five percent! That was one in twenty. I could produce a reasonable photograph one time out of twenty, well, most of the time.

I started in filmmaking at MassArt, drifted to photography and then upstairs to the Studio for Interrelated Media– “Performance Art.” There I built installations, made tape loops, shot film, and piled them all together to tell a story. Even though I was using various visual arts techniques to produce the finished piece, at the core all of my installations was the essence of it all: writing. I might have been running from words, but they were chasing me down.

The Olympus with telephoto lens and motor drive weighed in at nearly three pounds– which is a lot to carry on your shoulder day after day. Though I kind of hated to give it up, years later I finally packed it away in a box on the shelf for a much lighter Nikon SLR.  I was a long hold out for film. I’d see film stock from different companies disappear forever and each time would die a little  inside. Every time I had film developed, there was grousing about the expense. I understood the transient nature of a computer file though. Formats change, things disappear, they can’t be read down the line.

Daguerreotypes from the 1830s are still very much with us. Henry Fox Talbots “calotypes” of prints made with a silver solution fixed with salt still exist. You can make new prints from very old glass negatives. I love old photographs, particularly those of dogs, but also of family. My grandfather was an avid photographer and chronicled his family’s life with a medium format Speed Graphic, which belongs to me now. I have a photograph of Grampa, when he was just two years old, sitting on the lap of his grandmother, Elizabeth Tressler, who was born in 1837. So here’s a photograph taken in 1910 that is of someone I knew very well, well into my adult life,9 in the company of a woman who was born 125 years before me. I look at this image and I am connected to her. I can see that connection– he’s sitting on her lap!

I hated to change over to a format as tenuous as a computer file, and if the risks of losing the image weren’t bad enough, there was the trouble with capturing the image. I’d used friends’ digital cameras, snapping a picture for them at school functions and the like. There was no mistaking that lag between pushing the button and the shutter opening.  That  might be fine for taking pictures of a house or a tractor or an African violet, but what about shooting dogs, horses, children? You’d never be able to capture anything. They’d be long gone before the camera even cooperated.

Well, you know what comes next right? Nikon made a digital version of my beloved SLR, and it had no shutter lag. So I capitulated and agreed that the camera should be under the Christmas tree for me, 39 years after my first Instamatic. It’s been wonderful. Given that I never did master the technical aspects of photography, the digital format allows me shoot dozens of images to get the one I want.  This year, as part of a fundraiser, I used it to take pictures of pets with Santa Claus. I know, having had my owndog’s picture made with Santa Claus, that it’s usually one shot and you’re done. Not for me. I photographed each dog, as many times as necessary, until each owner had an image that made them smile. We would have gone broke trying to be that accommodating with Polaroid film.

None of my photographs has ever stopped anyone in their tracks.  Well, one maybe. In 1998, a friend and I spent 9 days crossing Wyoming on US 20. One evening, I took some photographs of an old fire truck parked under a sodium vapor lamp at the aptly named “Hell’s Half Acre.”  They were slides, and some of them were pretty fantastic. I chose the best one and entered, for fun really, in the Gallatin County, Montana Winter Fair. I should have had copies made, but I didn’t. Imagine how surprised and delighted I was to find that the photo had been named “Best Overall Photo” at the fair and “Grand Champion.”  When the fair was ending and I went to pick up the slide, and some other prints, my ribbons and prize money, none of it was there. Someone else had picked it up. At first I thought it must be a mistake, but as no one came back with them it was pretty clear they’d been stolen. You had to wonder about the man who usually won the photo contest at the fair, if he could be that small?  They reissued the prize money  and rosettes but the picture was lost forever and now Hell’s Half Acre itself is gone.

I take lots of pictures of the place I live, my family, some of the food that we conjure up in the kitchen, and of course, the dogs. One schmuck, an acquaintance, posted online a series of photographs he’d taken of Dayton. They could not have been less flattering. They weren’t even honest, just bad snapshots of parking lots and vacant houses and the quality was horrible– they might have been taken with my old Instamatic. When I shared my own photographs of Dayton with him he said they were the “typical yuppie bullshit” and called me a name. Another person looked at some photos I’d taken along the river  in Mississippi and saw in them a condemnation, when really that was not what I meant at all. So I think I’m not very successful in using photographs to communicate.

What I am good at is that I can make a great snap shot, an informal portrait. I can take a picture of a building or a harness horse or a carnival ride and make you go “Hm, that’s interesting.” No one’s ever going to want to buy them and put them on the wall and that’s fine with me. They work for me as illustrations, something to make the stories bigger. Photography for me was always about seeing, and writing is about feeling. Each photograph may indeed be worth a thousand words, but when I look at a compelling image, the journalist’s old maxim rises up in me: who, what, where, when and why. I see the photograph and I hunger for the details.

The noted photographer Shelby Lee Adams was a close friend of my late father’s. He is best known for his images of Appalachian family life, and those images are stories just begging to be told.  There has been an ongoing controversy about his work and whether or not it is exploitive of its subjects.  These people are poor, to some they might even seem grotesque– but surely no more (and perhaps less) than the homeless on the streets of L.A. or New York, or the babies with AIDS that Nick Nixon photographed. Or the children made famous  by Diane Arbus’ work. If we look at a photograph of another human being and it makes us uncomfortable, do we then deem it exploitive? Utter nonsense. When I see Adams’ photographs, I don’t feel pity or compassion or contempt– I feel curiosity. I want to know more about what’s going on in the picture, how these people are related to each other, what the circumstances are. It’s not up to me to judge their lot in life, but I greatly appreciate the glimpse into their world. When Dad was alive we used to look at these images together and he would explain to me what he knew about them. He and his wife were invited to go to Kentucky for a “Dinner on the Ground” with Shelby and came back with more great stories to go with these faces.

I like to take photographs, but I am not a photographer. I’m a writer, so I want to use words to tell these stories, but a single image catapults that person into our lives front and center, if only for as long as it takes to turn the page.  Over my desk hangs a large print of “Chester and His Hounds,” which Shelby Lee Adams made in 1992, and when I glance  up to really look it, it always makes me grin. But then I always had a thing for pictures of hound dogs.

A Cop at the Door

The doorbell is ringing. I am deeply asleep and it has rung several times before I surface enough to recognize the sound. It’s still dark outside and I squint at the clock.

“It’s the doorbell,” I say to my husband. “Who would be ringing the doorbell at six o’clock on a Sunday morning?’

“Larkin?” It’s my mother, visiting for the holidays, in the hallway. “It looks like it’s the police.”  The police? What. Why would the police I am confused. My husband starts to sit up and is immediately felled by a leg cramp. Isn’t this what we have husbands for, to handle a cop on the front step? The doorbell rings again.

In the 27 seconds that it takes me to sit upright, get out of bed, walk down the stairs, and turn off the alarm before I open the door, I think of four things. First, I am glad that this is a night I bothered to put on pajamas.  Second, third and fourth: did someone torch one of our cars? Are the neighbors okay? Is there a dead body on the front lawn? I mean, it is six o’clock on a Sunday morning.

It never occurs to me that it might be about my 17-year-old son. Or that something awful might have happened to one of his half-sisters halfway across the country.

When I open the door there is no one there. The Sunday paper’s been delivered though. Could they have rung the doorbell. Nope, a white sedan is backing up. It is . . . .  the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

The driver’s door opens and the trooper bounds out of the car and trots up the walk. He is wearing his Smokey-the-Bear hat, and his tie is flapping in the wind.

“Is this address 944?”

Is that code? I wonder.

“I’m sorry, what did you ask?”

“Is this 944 West . . . ”

“Oh, no.” The address. “No, this is 1010.”

“Oh, okay. Well, do you know where 944 is?” He gestures towards the Cochran’s house on the left.  “Is that 944?”

“No, 944 would be the other way, but on this side of the street. There’s just the red brick house.” I am trying to concentrate, but I am still groggy with sleep. I can’t think. “It could be on the other side of Salem Avenue, down that way.” Even as I say it, I don’t think that’s right, but I think the red brick house has a house number that is higher. I bend to pick up the newspaper and there’s a little black leather wallet under it.

The trooper, who seems young enough to be my son, turns a little pink.

“Well do you know that person?” he asks gesturing towards the wallet in my hand. “She dropped this when she was walking away and I, I was just trying to get it back to her.”  I look at the picture on the license.  It is a 30-something black woman. It’s impossible to tell if she’s attractive or not, the BMV never makes anyone look their best, and I don’t have my reading glasses on. The name isn’t familiar. I shake my head, and hand him the wallet.

“I don’t think so, I’m sorry. You could try that brick house on the corner. It could be 944.”

“Well, okay, thank you. You know, we just wanted to get it back to her, because, you know, she dropped it as she was leaving.”  I nod, though in truth I cannot figure out what he’s talking about. Why is he ringing doorbells in the middle of the night trying to return a wallet?  “Okay, well thank you. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” I say and he turns on his heel and disappears down the steps and out to the street. I close the door and turn the lock. My mother is standing in the hall. “That was so weird,” I tell her.

“I wonder what the real story is,” she says.  She heads back to bed and I wander into the kitchen, pour half a glass of milk and bite the head off a leftover gingerbread midget. 944. Was that the brick house? I remember instead something that happened when I lived in Montana. Very early one morning, before light, two sheriff’s deputies drove out to the dairy farm of this nice couple to tell them that their 15-year-old son had been killed in an automobile accident. The couple, bewildered, said no that wasn’t possible. Their son was asleep in his bed. It must be somebody else. Of course, it wasn’t somebody else. Their child’s bed was empty. The boy had snuck out and met up with friends. There’d been a crash and he had not survived.

Before going back to bed, I continue down the hall and peek into my son’s room, and there is the sleeping form of my wild child stretched out across his bed. His iPod is still playing, illuminating the crook of his elbow. Tears well up in my eyes for a second, and I say a little prayer of thanksgiving that it was just a cop on some kind of surreal errand and not there on my threshold to deliver some kind of unbearable news.

Later in the morning I check the paper and online for mention of car accidents or anything else that might have involved the name of the woman on the license, but find nothing. She’s not listed among the inmates at the county jail. Why would she drop her wallet walking away? That was what he said, wasn’t in?  I check the address. Oh, it is the red brick house on the corner. I wonder if it is the woman with the Chevy Suburban, which rests in its regular spot this morning.  Why would she have dropped her wallet, was she running? Why wouldn’t she notice, and why would the state patrol have it? Why would they leave it under my newspaper if they were trying to return it to her? We don’t know her, really. Her ex-boyfriend used to wave in passing, he was always pretty friendly, peddling marijuana from a bicycle. But she’s always been a bit, well, aloof, for want of a better word. The neighbor across the street said she works as a stripper. Sometimes the dots just don’t connect.  I hope she got her wallet back.

A Song for December 17

The camera is set up, and John has the bulb in his hand, ready to squeeze off the shot. The wind is cold today. Laying along the top of the machine, he doesn’t think of it.

One-two-three-four, the machine powers down the track. His brother runs next to him in the sand, holding the strut of the right-wing, steadying the machine.  With a shout his brother releases them and they are airborne.

Like an unruly horse, the machine bucks and pitches. It darts this way, then that way. He moves the rudder to steady it. The propellers are so loud he hears little else, but he feels the spruce snapping and creaking beneath him.

A sudden dart ends the flight, and they tumble onto the sand: 12 seconds, more than a hundred feet. The small group assembled on the beach is cheering. His brother, usually so taciturn, is jumping up and down.

Then there’s a second flight, 175 feet, and a third, 200 feet. Hail the new, ye lads and lasses.

“One chimpanzee, two chimpanzee, three chimpanzee,” he counts under his breath, as his brother takes the helm.  There’s a watch for official time, but he can’t take his eyes off the machine.

As before, the machine pitches and rolls, yet stays aloft. After a few hundred feet, the stability improves. 852 feet in 57 seconds.  The landing has a few problems– easily repaired, they note. But as it is moved back towards the camp, a gust of wind catches the wing, sending the machine somersaulting into the dunes, flinging off the crew that tries to hold it down. It is wrecked beyond repair. No matter, they’ve crossed the rubicon, there will be no turning back.

The brothers walk four miles into town, sand blowing in the windy hills. Sing we joyous, all together. He feels light. They have just mastered gravity, they have achieved powered flight. Heedless of the wind and weather, they are laughing.

Grinning at their hard-won triumph, they stop at the telegram office they send a wire home to their father. The message they send is artfully cool:

“Success four flights Thursday morning, all against twenty-one mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed 31 miles, longest 57 seconds, Inform press, home Christmas. ”

Fa la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. 

WALKING WITH HOLLY

Redemption in Real Life

 

It’s late, I’m tired. There’s a long list of things that need my attention before bed. Outside, it’s quite warm for December in Ohio, though its been raining all day. I hear the swish of car tires on wet pavement beyond the front door. It would be easiest to just let the dog, a Boston Terrier named Holly, out the backdoor into the fenced yard. She looks up, earnest and hopeful and I relent: we’ll go on a jaunt around the neighborhood, in the rain.

Holly isn’t our dog. She’s just staying here until someone sees her on Petfinder and decides on the basis of a charming photograph and 50-word paragraph that she’s just the right dog for them. I tell her regularly that we are just one long layover on the adventure of her life, that her “real” home is somewhere out there in the murky future. She just looks at me and tilts her head.

She is an entirely elegant little dog, with a confident strut and a “take-no-prisoners” attitude. She is affectionate, but she never fawns.  I’ve named her after Holly Golightly, Truman Capote’s offbeat heroine in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Just like the other Holly, we can’t be sure exactly what her past is, or her future. We watch her manipulate situations and people, sometimes to her own detriment. We wonder exactly how she has survived and although I do love her I know that she will never, ever be mine.

The email was like so many others that arrive each week. An urgent situation, a dog that was going to be euthanized if not sprung from the shelter. Becky, at Midwest Boston Terrier Rescue, described the dog as a two-year-old alpha female, needing a strong human presence. Somewhere along the way “snarky” became the primary descriptor for this dog, stuck in a kennel 85 miles away.

I’d had some success with another quirky customer, Roscoe the Wonder Dog, who had recently been adopted.  I just didn’t see how I could swing it for this one. That was a Tuesday. On Wednesday night I had to leave for Knoxville, Tennessee and though I would be home in Dayton overnight on Friday, I had to  leave Saturday morning for another two days.

More information trickled through. Apparently the “Little Snarky Girl” had a problem with brooms and mops. She’d had two failed adoptions and there was some thought that she might have bitten the elderly woman who most recently returned her. For a dog that’s a crime punishable by death.

What makes us say yes after saying no time after time? I told Becky I could take her, but not until Monday. “For God’s sake,” one of the directors wrote in a mass email “someone get this girl and put her in a crate, and keep all mops and brooms away from her. At least she’ll be alive.”

There’s a vet in Columbus I’ve worked with before on rescue cases, and I called them. Did they have room to board her until Monday? They did. I gave them my credit card number and cautioned them about mops and brooms and said I’d be in to get her.  A disagreement erupted at the shelter and there was some question about whether or not they’d let us have her, someone there felt so strongly that she needed to be destroyed.

Since I’m clipping the leash to the pink and white houndstooth collar and going out the door with Holly, clearly she did make it out of the shelter alive. When I first saw her in the hallway at Whitehall Animal Hospital, she took my breath away. Boston Terriers are not generally “beautiful” dogs. They are winsome and charming and handsome despite themselves. No one would ever describe Holly as beautiful in the way they might if they were talking about an Irish setter or an Italian greyhound or a Malamute. But she has incredible presence. In the email to say I had her I described her as “the Audrey Hepburn of Boston Terriers.”

Though, of course, we would find out that she didn’t quite have the good manners of Audrey Hepburn. It only took a day or two to realize that brooms are not her only hang-up. She also hates cats. Hates them. Maybe I should have seen the foreshadowing in the way she attacked a small stuffed dog toy– tossing it in the air, pouncing on it, shaking it hard. She was having such a great time with that toy we just laughed. What we were so slow to recognize is that she has incredible prey drive, and it was that same prey drive that sent her careening after one of the cats, with my husband shouting and climbing over the furniture after them. She caught the cat, but I was right there, and lifted her away with a yank. My husband was mad and a momentary tug of war ensued over the dog.

“I’ll deal with it,” I told him and he stomped off. He does love dogs, but really he is also a cat person and he has an almost child-like expectation of fairness in the animal world, where reality is usually brutal. I took the struggling, ki-yi-yi-ying dog and folded her into her crate.

“No. Bad girl.” I said firmly. “No cats. Bad girl. I. Am. So. Disappointed.”

So she must be constantly supervised, or in her crate, or in the yard. Which is not exactly ideal for Holly, but we are managing and there have been no further incidents with cats even though at times we have to pick her up to carry her through the kitchen because the cats come out to tease her.

She is not a well-bred dog– by the American Kennel Club standard , she is too long almost everywhere: muzzle, body, legs. Her head is dainty, yet her overall appearance is powerful. Unlike some of her better-bred distant relations, she never snores and rarely farts. Her intense focus, drive, speed and ability to breathe freely could make her seriously competitive in agility, and if she didn’t hate cats so much, I’d be tempted to keep her, start training. But no, she is not to be my dog– she is just here for a little while, until her real life begins again.

On this drizzly night, we are walking down the street to W.S. McIntosh park, a wide expanse of green where Wolf Creek feeds into the Great Miami River. There’s a playground there, and a picnic shelter, basketball and tennis courts. Often it is full of Canada geese. Tonight it is empty — no children or geese or boys shooting hoops. Just me and Holly strolling along. She stops occasionally to see if she can get away with eating goose droppings, but she cannot.

McIntosh Park was named for a Dayton Civil Rights leader, William Sumpter “Mac” McIntosh, who led the first major civil rights protests in Dayton in February 1961, challenging segregation long before the movement gained national attention. When negotiation failed, he encouraged nonviolent methods to fight for the employment rights for minorities at local department stores, supermarkets and other businesses, organizing picketing, occupation and boycotts when necessary.

In March of 1974,  “Mac” McIntosh was shot point blank trying to stop the robbery of a jewelry store, across the river from this park, half a mile away, downtown. He was simply walking down Main Street when two young black men ran out of the store with bags of jewelry. He raised his hands and told the boys to stop. One of them did, but the other shot Mr. McIntosh in the heart.

Later that night, Derek Farmer, 16 and his nephew, Calvin Farmer, 18 were apprehended by police at a Dayton housing project. The younger boy dropped the bag of stolen jewelry and money when he raised his hands to surrender. But Calvin Farmer opened fire, killing Dayton Police Sgt. William K. Mortimer.

Though only 16, Derek Farmer had an extensive juvenile record for car theft and armed robbery. He was convicted of two counts of  murders for the deaths of  Mr. McIntosh and Sgt. Mortimer and the jury recommended the death penalty, even though Derek Farmer never pulled a trigger. The judge disagreed and Derek Farmer was sentenced in 1975 to life in prison for murdering Mr. McIntosh, 15 years to life for murdering Sgt. Mortimer and 5 to 25 years for the armed robbery.

The jury was persuaded by Calvin Farmer’s defense attorneys that a similar-looking relative had killed W.S. McIntosh, even though the same jury did convict him of murdering Sgt. Mortimer. Convicted of just a single count of murder,  Calvin Farmer was sentenced to life in prison, but  served only an eight-year minimum sentence before being paroled in 1983.

While in prison, Derek Farmer earned his high school diploma and a college degree. He began a letter writing campaign that helped to bring about reform to a prison system plagued with racial tension, poor health care and substandard living conditions. Those conditions were acknowledged to be the worst at Lucasville, where Derek Farmer was incarcerated for 14 years.

After serving 18 years of his multiple sentences, he was paroled in 1993 and admitted to the Law School at Akron University.  He clerked for District Court Judge Walter Rice. He had to seek dispensation from the Ohio State Supreme Court, who allowed Farmer to take sit the bar exam because of his age (16) at the time of the murders and that he had fired no shots in the commission of the murders, in addition to the prison reforms he sought and his demonstration of true remorse. He passed the bar in 1999, and has had a checkered career as attorney, having been set down for probation at least once.

It’s hard to know what to think about W.S. McIntosh and the Farmer boys. Clearly, Mr. McIntosh must have thought that he could persuade them to do the right thing.  He must have believed that they would see the error of their ways. He pleaded with them to abandon the robbery, and died for his trouble. And what of Derek Farmer’s redemption? If life were scripted by Hollywood, the grown-up Farmer would be played by Laurence Fishburne and he’d be the kind of Noble Attorney, active in civil rights and the defense of the unjustly accused.

But this isn’t Hollywood. This is life, and Derek Farmer, like all of us, has feet of clay. I don’t know if he’s a good attorney or a terrible one, though having one’s license  to practice law stripped for a year because you are accused of having misappropriated clients’ fees might be a bellwether of some sort. On the other hand, there was all of that business with prison reform. We can only guess what W.S. McIntosh might have thought of Derek Farmer’s ability to turn his life around. We can say that Derek Farmer’s redemption has not been celebrated by many, and remains an issue for some officers on the Dayton Police Department.

The dog and I turn west along Wolf Creek. Holly is racing back and forth on the end of her flexi-lead, always slowing before she reaches its limit. She frolics in the drizzle, enthusiastic to be out on a walk. I don’t mean to be glib in comparing the second chance given to a dog to that of a second chance given to a man, but the parallels are striking. Derek Farmer didn’t actually pull the trigger that killed those two men. He was involved in the commission of the crime, and in our judicial system that makes him culpable. He was very young, and yet the jury recommended that he be sentenced to die.

Holly, too, faced a death sentence. I don’t believe for a minute that this dog ever bit a human being.  Never once has she so much as curled a lip at any of us, not even when I was wresting her from her prize, the terrified cat.  But I can see that someone might have been intimidated by her, someone might have thought that she was going to bite them eventually. Even though she was very young, someone at the shelter recommended that she die.

Up the street our house looks warm and inviting, each window lit up on this rainy night. My husband will be concerned that we were out so long. Holly turns to look back at me a moment as she bounds up the steps to the front door.  This is home, for now. This is her redemption.