Calling the Chickens Home

by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Apr 26, 2022 | Featured, Personal

My mother was a quiet country girl. Even in the suburbs, she used the exact same whistle that her mother used to call the chickens when she wanted us home for dinner.

She married a strict but loving patriarch and had two sons. The three males all believed they were the center of the universe. When she died almost 15 years ago, she left an unexpected void in her place.

The three men she left behind slowly came to recognize she had been our gravity. I don’t think I could have understood her while she was still alive. I think she knew that.

The year she died, she gave me a large steamer trunk, which she told me she had filled with the flotsam and jetsam of my very “learning disabled” childhood. She told me she had saved everything, beginning with kindergarten through when I passed the bar exam and she pronounced I was on my own, “because finally you will never have to take another test again.”

It had been our war, which we fought side by side, against a world eager to write me off, forget me, marginalize me and perhaps us. Because I did not wish to return to that nightmare, I was never ready to open that box.

My mother had no fear of time. She had endless patience.

Because we lived in a patriarchy, we knew all about our family name, with its politicians, governors, distinguished lawyers, and Maryland history. But my mother‘s family of farmers and merchants on the eastern shore of Maryland with its southern roots was rarely discussed.

The year before she died in her mid-90s, she asked me to drive her down to Church Hill, Maryland, where her family of Chapmans, Valiants, and Faithfuls were buried around a small church in an agrarian tidewater town. She said she wanted me to see where she had come from. She had already given me the box by then.

As I recuperated from surgery over the last few weeks, I kept looking at that box. Last Sunday, I opened it.

As I gently pulled back the wrapping paper, I was surprised to find more than I expected. There were pictures of her relatives and ancestors who I had never really known. On the back were the names and dates and a few sentences about who they were and how they connected to my mother and our family. As I put the pictures up on the table and found them staring back at me, her life slowly formed around her in a way that included me.

I noticed that I looked like them more than I looked like my father’s family.

Her father loved poetry and the arts. He had been a choral master and led singing groups and church choirs up and down the eastern shore. There was a beautiful hand-crocheted bed cover, and a white embroidered tablecloth made by her mother, and more pictures of her two older brothers whom I barely knew.

At the very bottom, piled in chronological order and bound by a rubber band that had long since broken, were all of my teachers’ reports. They started with kindergarten reports of a joyous, adventurous, somewhat shy little boy who the teachers found “amazing in his creativity and interest in the world,” until the alphabet and reading and spelling were introduced in first grade and then the failures compounded year after year, as that little boy fell further behind, repeating grades or advancing to the next grade only if he would go to summer school, then encouraged to leave and go to another school, and ultimately to be told he could not go to college.

My mother was patient. My mother had no fear of time. She got me to dictate stories to her as I thrashed on the bed in the vacant third-floor room. She got me to write poems.

Each day after school, she made it her business to read all of my homework assignments to me as we curled up in a window seat, the afternoon sun pouring in through the windows. It didn’t really help, but it was all she could do and she refused to give up on her disappointing son who was always falling behind.

My mother had no fear of time. She had endless patience.

We were all too self-centered to ever recognize who she really was. We all loved her, that was never an issue. But I am now convinced that when she went off to church alone on Sundays, that was something more than her quiet time.

After I spent better than a day with everything spread out on the dining room table, I finally closed the empty trunk. It had been a time bomb to be opened when I could finally understand it. It was an explosion.

Over the years, my father and my brother grew to realize that she had a unique relationship with each of us that was powerful and the source of the gravity that brought us all together. The trunk did not hold the history of my failure as I had thought it did. It held the history of our love as it had matured with faith and quiet determination, year after year, growing strong dispute life’s pressure.

My mother was patient. She had no fear of time.

She waited until I found a voice outside of failure, my family history. She trusted I would find that voice and make it my own. She waited until I found the arts in her family and in me. She waited until last Sunday to be more fully recognized.

There is a poet I love named Philip Larkin (1922-1985). He wrote a quiet poem that stopped me in my tracks when I first read him in college:

The Explosion

by Philip Larkin

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead.
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins
Fathers brothers nicknames laughter
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun
Scarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face–

plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed–
Gold as on a coin or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them

One showing the eggs unbroken.

There are times when it takes so long to understand the depth of one’s love you almost lose the chance to say thank you. If I shut my eyes, I can hear my grandmother and my mother calling the chickens home.

The Question I Was Afraid to Answer

by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Apr 12, 2022 | Featured, Personal

This can’t be real but it’s happening anyway…?

Last week I missed my Tuesday @ 3 posting.

A friend told me, “As you go into the operating room, don’t look at the ceiling because it’s like you’re underneath a giant spider. The legs come down when they do robotic surgery. The doctor isn’t even in the same room.”

This can’t be real but it’s happening anyway?

Then he said “You’ve got to be ready to block it out. Before you go in, give yourself a question to think about and then think about working on solving it all the way through your time in the hospital even through the anesthesia. You will be an unreliable narrator and your answer might make no sense, but you’ve got to be ready to block it all out.”

The operating room doors opened and they pushed my bed to the center of the room. Several nurses were setting up under very bright lights but they had their backs to me. The second hand took baby steps on a wall clock until the minute hand hit exactly 6:45 am.

I didn’t look at the ceiling.

My thoughts turned to my eighth-grade hockey team’s first victory. We were joyously riding back in a school bus in full celebration. The coach was in a separate car and the bus driver had lost all authority on the bus.

There was a ruckus in the back. I turned to see one of the boys secretively drop his pants and moon the late afternoon traffic. I realized that his audience was not the following traffic. It was the boys on the bus.

I was unprepared. I had no question to work on as the anesthesia dripped through tubes into my arm.

Moments later, I blinked into consciousness and I saw my doctor, not the surgeon, saying to me, “you probably won’t remember this, but I came by to let you know they got all of it and it hadn’t spread.”

As I fell back to sleep, l focused on the jukebox in the basement bar I worked in during college. One night, I discovered that from behind the bar I could control the volume of the music and the dimmer for the lights. And that if I made strong drinks, turned down the lights and turned up the music, all that was missing was a high wire act.

Around 2 o’clock the following morning, I woke up and tried to roll over but I was unable to move. I was lost in a tangle of catheters and drainage systems with little bags hanging from a carriage on wheels. I could not move. I had become claustrophobic.

The night nurse reassured me that she also suffers from claustrophobia. She told me it would be good if she helped me out of bed, and I walked up and down the well-lit hall, slowly pushing the carriage holding the dripping bags that flowed into me.

I did laps and more laps, past night nurses who drifted in and out of rooms as they gathered blood pressure statistics and temperatures and returned to their computers like bees to their hive.

I read the patient thank you notes posted on the walls and looked at the list of this month’s birthdays, all in the gentle murmur of motion past midnight.

Everyone left me alone to work out my demons by myself, and I recognized we live in an ever-changing atmosphere our whole life.

Finally, I returned to bed to realize that over the last half an hour while I was walking, my gown had been lifted and snagged to expose my bare bottom to the world and I wondered… is this connected? And then I broke out laughing — fresh beautiful laugher — just because I knew I was alive.

Once upon a Time I Had the Darwin Award Snatched from My Grasp

by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Mar 1, 2022 | Featured, Personal

Last week, I posted about my first parachute jump with my wonderful and crazy lost friend Haven.

But here is the rest of the story…

About ten years after my jumps with Haven, I told the story during lunch at the law firm where I worked.
As I finished, a few members of the staff and two associates unexpectedly got up and left. They came back about 10 minutes later with an announcement.

There was a parachute place on the Eastern shore of Maryland just across the Bay Bridge, about two hours away and, if I wasn’t a coward or just a B.S. storyteller, they would go next Saturday with me. But only if I would do the first jump.

That night, my wife just shook her head, looked at me in disbelief and said, “At least you don’t have any children.”

Because of my luncheon bravado, I was now a fool following myself down a path I did not want to follow… but it got worse.

The following Saturday, eight of us piled into two cars and drove down to “Parachutes Are Fun,” which looked a lot different than the professional business in Massachusetts where I first jumped.

Parachutes Are Fun featured one single engine plane with all the seats removed except for the pilot’s, a barn, and a school bus that had no tires and was up on cinder blocks.

As if launched from the bus, an overly excited prematurely-aged young man with wild blond hair and dilated pupils approached us. He looked like a stunt double for the old guy in “Back to the Future.” He held a helmet in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other and couldn’t stop welcoming us even before we got out of the car.

At the same time, the owner came out of the barn, dressed in a bombardier’s jacket with Parachutes Are Fun stenciled on the back, carrying a walkie-talkie. Behind him was as an assistant leading four people with parachutes on their backs to the little plane as a pilot in blue jeans, a baseball hat and sneakers was entering the cockpit of the plane.

This was way too informal! This was not good.

It was too late to change directions and forever be the coward who turned around and for once in his life had been responsible.

We were divided into two groups of four based solely on the car in which we came, and I was volunteered to be in the group that would jump first.

The character from the bus enthusiastically showed us how he packed the parachutes and couldn’t stop promoting as he did. He was excited to tell us he lived in the bus and loved his job so much that he took his raises and bonuses in free jumps.

Our new friend who lived in the bus took off with every plane and was responsible for everything from our chutes being packed properly to cursory instructions about the emergency chute if the primary shoot “perhaps” didn’t open, as well as coordinating the open door jumps from the plane that had taken off as we had entered.

As the plane circled overhead, the owner turned on his walkie-talkie and watched as the first diver spreadeagled at about 2,500 feet above us . The chute opened and the owner barked into the walkie -talkie, “Pull your left toggle”… “Reach up and PULL YOUR LEFT TOGGLE,” and then turned to the assistant and yelled, “That son of a bitch loaded them in in the wrong order again, dammit! I’m talking to somebody who hasn’t jumped yet!”

The clueless diver was drifting, arms at his side, downwind at a high rate of speed toward northern Virginia.

The owner shoved his hand into his pocket, threw a set of car keys to the assistant and told him, “follow the bastard and pick him up where he lands!” Three jumps later, the plane taxied down the dirt road runway to the barn to reload as the jumpers landed helter-skelter in the surrounding soybean fields.

I concluded this chaos was all a very good sign.

I had strategically decided to show no fear and thus as the others saw the disorder around them, the fear would gather in them and they would decide to go home. But when I finally decided to make eye contact in preparation for supporting their decision, I was shocked to find that they didn’t have a clue because they thought all this was normal.

Before I knew it, I was on the plane sitting on the floor next to the open door as we took off. It didn’t help me to feel any better that I could hear the guy with the walkie-talkie in communication with the assistant as he tried to follow a parachute in his car, zigzagging through highways and byways while trying to keep his eye on a disappearing spot in the sky. I considered the children and family I would never have.

I am vain enough to not ride roller coasters because I don’t want that as the cause of death in my obituary. As we rose higher and higher in the sky and waited to jump, I decided I wanted to be remembered, if at all, as the fearless, selfless, courageous parachutist who had advised the other three jumpers who would jump after him that if by some chance the walkie-talkie failed they could pull the toggles to face the wind in order to drop slowly straight down rather than have their backs to the wind and end up dead in some unfamiliar state.

The following week, late one afternoon, two of the people who had jumped with me came into my office laughing and holding The Evening Sun.

They had five copies open to a series of pictures and a headline that read, “Eastern Shore’s ‘Parachutes Are Fun’ Shut Down as America’s Most Dangerous!” There were several pictures of skydivers stranded on rooftops or hanging from high tension wires, as well as a beaming portrait of our friend who had just been evicted from the bus.

Slowly, as I reach maturity and a belief in evolution, I thank God for my children and grandchildren and that their mother’s DNA has prevailed.