Gerald Hausman arranges stories of his life under four headings–“Starting Out,” “Writing,” “People & Places,” “Traveling.” What follows are chapters from each of those sequences in Little Miracles…
Ilfeld Auditorium, New Mexcio Highlands University
Las Vegas, New Mexico, 1966
I read The Gypsy Ballads of Federico Garcia Lorca 52 years ago and I’ve been carrying them in my head ever since. Sometimes I wake and they are there. Myrtle and lime. Three hundred crimson roses. Trails of tears and tin lights and the moon swimming in sounding water. And then I come to these unforgettable lines resonating lines ringing in my head:
Green as I would have you be.
Green wind. Green boughs.
The boat on the sea
And the horse on the mountain
I remember reciting these lines to my professor, Dr. Richard O’Connell, translator with James-Graham Lujan of Five Plays by Lorca, and he smiled. “Whose translation is that?” he asked.
I told him, “Rolfe Humphries.”
Doc, as we called him, looked a little uneasy. “Rolfe will forgive me if I say he got it wrong. It needs to be more like, ‘Green, green, I want you green.’ ”
He emphasized it with his hands, clasping the air, grabbing at the invisible but palpable green. “Maybe desire is a better word than want,” he said. “Have you heard it better?” he asked.
“Maybe” I said, and I recited:
Green green rocky road
promenade in green
Tell me who you love
Tell me who you love
“That isn’t Lorca!” Doc said.
“It’s Len Chandler, folksinger-poet. I heard him sing his green song at The Gaslight in Greenwich Village in 1962. Len played the 12 string and he could really get you going with that song. Bob Dylan was usually in the audience.”
“Who’s that?” Doc asked.
The Fat Black Pussycat
Greenwich Village, NYC, 1964 The good Reverend Gary Davis, a blind man who could see, told the people how it was, how it was going to be and he laid the notes down on his six-string guitar, an instrument that he played in his sleep — not figuratively but really.
Few people, if any, were listening to the wizard of the six, who was doing a two-finger punch and strum and pick, and talking about the Twelve Gates to the City and other things that no one could hear because they were all talking, smoking and sipping and not listening.
Reverend Gary Davis faced the crowd, and listening or not, he addressed them with scorn:
“Some of you people don’t realize it, taking the world by storm, don’t even know how to treat your family…doing all kinds of ways…living all kinds of lives…saying everything in front of your children…ashes to ashes and dust to dust…the life you’re living won’t do to trust.”
We left Reverend Gary while he was hammering his sermon, and we stopped by the Gaslight Cafe where a scruffy little guy with a big Martin guitar was pounding out a song called “Masters of War.”
“Looks like Bob Dylan,” someone said.
“It is Bob Dylan,” someone answered.
When I think about those days and nights haunting the Village or rather, the Village haunting us, I often see the old black gospel singer from the Delta, a huge legend to many of us and then again I see the fog-voiced, hard-bitten midwestern kid with the dark blue sailor’s cap and the wind blowing behind him as he shuffled those same folk-begotten streets we did.
They were two American prophets — one going out, the other coming in.
But that one night they were one.
They were saying the same things — their lives might be separated by age, color, geography, generation – but no more than that, and that, in itself, was nothing. To us anyway. They were two great heroes of the Greenwich Village folk singing night.
It was 1964 and the summer was heating up and everyone was talking about civil rights and the John Birch Society and the Vietnam War was about to happen and no one that I knew was reading a novel called Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara and I kept hearing Reverend Gary’s corn husk, old man’s rasp voice:
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the life you’re living won’t do to trust.”
12699 Cristi Way
Pine Island, Florida, August 9, 2004
Hurricane Charley supplied me with a lot of ink and even a Best Column Award for “Rose” — but more than anything else, Charley gave me a sense of courage. We stayed home for a category five with all of our animals — Great Danes, Siamese cat, European Shorthair, Blue-Fronted Amazon Parrot, Dachshund and a host of unseen geckoes and Cuban tree frogs. Seems like Charley and the animals taught us more than we can ever repay: thanks to each and all.
The day Charley churned across Pine Island Sound and did a mad, destructive dance in Bokeelia, we were in our kitchen expecting the worst. From between the storm shutters, we peeked at the wind-whipped froth that sent bass from our pond hurtling through the air. Wingless bass flying through wind-bent, earth-pressed paperwood trees. No dream of life ever seemed more surreal. However, when Charley tired of sawing up slash pines, there came a dripping, dew-bright moment that was the eye of calm, the eye of false peace. Then after the ripping and the raging continued for a while, Charley seemed to get bored with woods wrecking and roof-pulling, and he spiraled out across Indian Field and then into Charlotte Harbor, whence he made his way, as everybody knows, to Punta Gorda.
We came out of our bolthole, blinking at the new world that lay before us.
It was indeed a brave new world, for which the phrase “wrath of Charley” has no significance. Mainly because it doesn’t describe the haunted, unleaved, and in many cases, bare-barked trees. Or the canopies of vines woven into a tornadic tapestry that swung dreamily from the broken stalks of pines and palms.
A new world, yes. A wet and gleaming world that bore no resemblance to the Garden of Eden we’d shuttered off just two hours before when we locked and bolted ourselves into our house.
Miraculously the house still stood.
But it had taken a battering. Lorry and I, after counting our blessings, fell to that other preoccupation–counting our losses. This began with tropical trees, hand-planted so many years ago, to such things as shingles, soffit and fascia. The pool enclosure, so much a part of the house itself, was gone, much of it blown into our pond at the same time the bass were blowing out, most likely.
Anyway, it looked incongruous out there, like the spars of a black ship rising from the gloom of the green swamp.
I looked all around; nothing seemed familiar. Everywhere, rising from the plangent earth in ghosts of steam was the burnt, bruised fragrance of ripped roots and crushed leaves.
At last my eye fell on something known, something dear. A scraggly little rose bush that lived by our lanai. Its bony back was neither bent nor broken, and, unaccountably, there was one bright red-orange rose popping out among the purplish leaves.
“Hey,” I cried out to Lorry, “here’s a little guy unbeaten by Uncle Charley.”
We stooped to admire the hardy little bush. Its brittle bark had been stripped clean of the lichen crusts that we’d been too busy to scrape off all summer.
In reverence, I touched the blossom, and it toppled lazily onto the ground. There was a sad second where I stared in disbelief. Then, turning away from sadness, I fetched the flower, and with a smile of hope, gave it to my wife.
She christened the flower, Hope, and put it in a crystal shot glass filled with water. And so we went about our lives that day, readying ourselves for the great indoor camping trip that would begin and end in our own house two weeks later.
During the day, however, I often spoke of the rose. How Charley had brought it forth. So, from destruction, creation. From bombs bursting to buds breaking. In The Bhagavad-Gita, the classic mystical work of ancient India there are these words of rapture that express what I was feeling.
You are the gods of wind,
death, fire, and water;
the moon; the lord of life;
and the great ancestor,
homage to you,
a thousand times homage!
I bow in homage to you
again and yet again.
That evening another miracle occurred: the phone rang.
The power had been out since Charley’s blue eye had gazed on Bokeelia. We were without power and water. In addition, the phone line—pinned down by fallen pines—was lying on the ground.
Therefore, we jumped when the phone rang.
I approached the receiver as I had the rose—gently. The sound as I pressed it to my ear was that of a hollow shell at the beach. A kind of OM. Then I heard the bright yet distant voice of Kelvin, our horticulturist friend from Trinidad.
No one knew the dark demon Hurucan better than Kelvin.
The first thing I said to him was, “How did you do that?”
“How did I do what?” he asked.
“Call us.”
He laughed, then said, “I heard you were having a hurricane.”
That seemed to say it all. Still, I was astounded.
“You got through,” I murmured.
“Yes, mon,” he assured me.
“How? Our phone’s been dead.”
“Love always gets through,” he replied, as unsurprised by the munificence of his answer as I was overwhelmed by its beauty.
We went on, then, to talk about what had happened. How Charley had been a very bad boy. How our house had held up. How so many others had not. Kelvin was the perfect person to talk to after living through a category four. He’d been through a hundred tropical storms and who-knows-how many hurricanes. He was so reassuring, so respectful and yet amused, so endearing, so wonderful that I forgot the seriousness of what we were up against—the grim aftermath, the insurance woes, the broken parts of our home.
I didn’t say a word about those things, though. Instead, I told Kelvin about the rose that bloomed in the midst of Charley’s winds.
“Are there no more blossoms on it now?” he wondered.
“She gave us all she had, I think.”
“No,” Kelvin said, laughing. “You must go out there and tell that brave rose bush how much you love her, and how many more flowers you want to see her make.”
“You mean that?” Kelvin’s laugh, because it’s so deep and genuine, is infectious. I was laughing, too—for the first time since Charley. “Listen, my friend,” Kelvin said, finally growing serious, “tell that rose how much you love her. Tell her, and she’ll give you more blossoms.”
“Is that how you do it in Trinidad?” I asked.
“We’re in short supply of Miracle Grow, my brother. But there’s no shortage of love here. There’s lots of love in the things of this world.”
“So you want me to speak to a rose bush.”
“Yes, mon. “Tell her,” he continued, “how brave she was facing that wind all by herself. Tell her—well, tell her whatever you want but let it come from the heart.”
And with that, the phone went zzzttt, and then went dead.
In honor of our long-term friendship and Kelvin’s infallible wisdom when it comes to the things of this world, I went directly outside into our ruined garden, and did what he’d told me to do.
As I stood in the ruined garden uttering praises, a heron flew over the pond. A warm glow flowed through me. I felt so grateful for being alive. And somehow, even after Charley, I was still in love with Pine Island. It seemed at that moment, the most enduring place on earth.
The following day, we started to clean up.
However, by day’s grueling end, my wife and I were fumbling, tired, and hot. It was 92 degrees in the shade. We were both staggering and the dog fence—so necessary in our yard with the Great Danes—was far from finished. I told Lorry, “I’m going inside to call the fence guy.”
She said, “With what phone? You know the line’s dead.”
I sighed, and looked to the sky. It seemed like it was going rain.
“Hey,” she said, “We can do this.”
Then two red-shouldered hawks settled in a broken-off pine tree a few feet from us. They bobbed their heads, as if sighting something. Then they froze and gave us a red-eyed, sharp-beaked stare that went into our hearts. After which, in two divergent yet equally strident shrieks, the hawks screamed at us. Maybe they were sounding off about the dismal, dark state of the world, but at that moment, I didn’t think so.
To me, it seemed, the hawks were talking to us.
And, out of respect, we listened.
They were such beautiful birds, a matched pair. Their shoulders were rusty-patched, each with a dark tail that had white bands on it. I’d never been this close to a red-shouldered hawk. After eyeing us and scolding us, both birds flew off, leaving the pine branch twanging behind them. Up into the Charley-polished air, the two hawks soared, and then, seemingly to underscore their message, they made a sharp and sudden descent, aimed in our direction. Each hawk fell in a series of perfectly turned, upside-down pirouettes. One roll after another, until, heading right for us, they broke off, singing that high song of angry triumph and crying despair.
I wiped the sweat from my eyes. Saying nothing, my wife and I finished fixing the fence. After seeing the hawks, we found silence more comforting than words. We just worked quietly and uncomplainingly until we were done. The fence, after we were finished with it, looked pretty good. Would it stand up to a galumphing Great Dane? We didn’t care. But as we were walking back to the house with our tools, I said, “I think they were telling us to get back up and fight.”
Lorry offered me a wry smile. “I think the lady hawk was saying we’d strung it up all wrong.”
“That would be the male hawk, saying that,” I told her.
“Not if they’re like us,” she replied.
This was an unfinished—and unfinishable—argument. No one wore the pants in our family, because neither one of us want to wear them.
That evening, like all others for the next two weeks, we bathed in our freshwater pond, and while we were paddling idly among the lily pads and amethyst lilies that encircle it, I saw a female anhinga drying its wings on the white trunk of a fallen paperwood tree. I knew this because of the bird’s characteristic tan head and neck. Both males and females, however, have black bodies with white plumes and silver edgings on the wings. The anhinga, or snakebird as they’re often called, sat in that emblematic pose–wings extended, head erect. Her pointed bill was yellow and straight, unlike the cormorant that has a descending, hooked beak.
She was so still she appeared sculptural. I swam close enough to gaze into her red-orange eye. Her sun-gilt feathers were the gleaming black gown of an Egyptian queen. Like the heron of the night before, here was another Pine Island blessing. I admired the anhinga as I treaded water among the lilies. I don’t know if she admired me, but I know she regarded me with tolerance. I could feel that she wasn’t afraid of me. Like the hawks, with whom we were somehow bonded, this ancestral relative gave us a sense of both timely and timeless confidence in the renewal of life.
“It seems like a time of beginnings,” I said to Lorry. “Everything is destroyed, and yet reborn. Everything is known, and unknown. Nothing is timid or afraid. All things are what they are. Only one day ago, the creatures were as strangers. Now they are relations.”
That evening as we lay in bed trying to fall asleep in the oppressive night heat, the only sound was the far off barking of a dog, the nearby roar of a generator, and the crazy riff of a displaced mockingbird that kept waking up and singing for no reason other than joyousness.
We couldn’t sleep. A poem by Richard Wilbur kept filtering through my mind. Its title was “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” It was a poem about angels—things all around us that speak to us in the language of poetry and praise.
I told Lorry, “Angels are animals and birds, too.”
“Sometimes they are little rose bushes,” she added.
I thanked each of the flowered, feathered, furred and finned. For it was their love of life that had called us to the things of this world, and awakened us to our own inner strength.
St Thomas, Kingston, Basseterre, Charlotte Amalie, Nassau
to Christmas in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2010
What is the muse? Is she, as some say, an angel? Is she a figment of the imagination? Is she a corporeal human being who visits once in a lifetime? Is she your wife, daughter, sister, best friend? I met her once in Old San Juan. It was a short but life-changing meeting of fire and frenzy. The city was lit up with purple and blue lights. There were folk ensembles and bands on every street. Drummers on every corner, folk trios with twelve string guitars, congas, bongos, steel drums, and passing over the cobbles on light, dancing feet–the prettiest women. Age did not stop any of them from hip-swaying, laughing, singing, dancing, drinking, and having a good time. We saw the tallest woman in the world and the shortest on the same street and they were both flirting with the stars and that old, mischievous San Juan moon peeking over the wrought-iron, ancient balustrades of the heavy-eyed, sleepless city. We watched the tiny woman throw her head back and laugh at the moon–she was no bigger than a cotton mouse. And then the tall, African queen danced close to the mouse, as if they were sisters and the queen’s gown was green sequins and her skin changed like an anole’s from blue-gray in shadow to honey gold in the moon and her hips and shoulders flicked to the rhythms, and far beyond the coquina-mortared walls of the city, the banana leaves lapped the cool sea air and drank darkness. Then a fire dancer, a blue-haired mime who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, played with fiery batons throwing them over her head, around her back and through her legs. She had wild blue hair and we feared she’d set it afire but she didn’t. She danced and burned and disappeared. And after she was gone the fast replay of her fire-hustling moves kept coming back. Where was that angel of the blue-haired Puerto Rican night? We looked for her but she was nowhere and yet she was everywhere–in everything we touched, heard, smelled and dreamed, not just that night but after days at sea still there on the edge of all that is.