Author: Brad Zellar

Stanley Kunitz, 1905-2006

Kunitz did not go mad, die young or yield to other forms of dissipation, despite tragedies in his early life. For years he made his living editing reference books and teaching at universities. At night he holed up in a spartan writing room where he read, wrote and rewrote until dawn.

“Stanley has managed to do what many of us fear is impossible,” [Marie] Howe once wrote. “He is a poet and he is sane.”

The Testing-Tree

Night Letter

The Layers

The Long Boat

Touch Me

–Illustration by James Dankert

People have been wondering what happened to Uncle Jumbo. That is, of course, the million dollar question, and a question whose answer apparently lies somewhere far in the man’s distant past.

All I can tell you is that something did indeed happen. There’s no doubt about that. And something always seems to be happening to Jumbo. One consistent thing that happens is that he disappears for long periods of time. It would be hard, you might think, for such a large object to disappear so completely from the radar, but he nonetheless has a knack for doing just that.

I’ve always liked to think of these disappearances as sulking retreats. I can also generally assume, I’ve learned, that he’s pissed about some imagined slight. Other friends have diagnosed him as suffering from depression, social anxiety, or kidney failure. I believe it’s nothing more complicated than pure misanthropy.

Jumbo’s always been a pain in the ass, but in his younger, presumably happier days this quality could often be both endearing and entertaining. Not so in recent years, I’m afraid. Back when we were both younger he used to routinely fret about the day when there would no longer be a single Major League player who was older than he was. That, Jumbo always claimed, would be a form of death, and the end of his days as a fan.

Despite the existence of Julio Franco on a Major League roster, I’m almost certain that long-feared nightmare is now staring Jumbo in the face, and I stopped hearing from him about two-thirds of the way through last season. For various reasons (mainly because he’s such a pain in the ass) I also stopped trying to initiate contact with him.

Before his disappearing act last year I was engaged in almost constant wrangling with Jumbo over the terms of what he insisted on calling our “contract,” which was never really anything but the vaguest of arrangements. He insisted that we needed to renegotiate, and made what were increasingly ridiculous and wholly unreasonable demands.

Jumbo wanted a company car, for instance. It’s true that I do have access to what is technically a company car –a 1986 Chevette with 149,000 miles on an odometer that hasn’t worked in two years– but I share the piece of shit with Brian Sandberg, another member of the Rake’s brain trust, and I seldom get to actually drive the thing.

Jumbo also spent months bitching about the computer that was provided him –free of charge, I should mention– by Rake management. He claimed that the computer was a prehistoric Radio Shack PC, the Tandy 2000, and that it was full of bugs and cluttered with advertising spread sheets from the late-eighties. That was nonsense, of course. The machine was actually an IBM 5150, an older but perfectly serviceable computer.

In apparent protest Jumbo began typing his columns on a manual typewriter and faxing them to the Rake’s offices from a Mail Boxes Etc. outlet in St. Louis Park (“Real Men Work Manual,” was always scrawled on the cover sheet). These documents –consisting as they did of pages of single-spaced text with scads of hand-written corrections and digressions– were virtually, if not entirely, illegible, and a decision was made (not, I must admit, by me) that we wouldn’t post them.

I still have some of these columns on my desk, and many of them have absolutely nothing to do with baseball. In one of them –“The Kiosk King”– Jumbo writes of his attempt to work at every kiosk at the Mall of America. He recalls being fired from a calendar kiosk for barfing into a plastic bag and getting hired less than an hour later at a kiosk that sold (or so he claimed) nothing but rocks.

He also submitted a column in which he recounted in horrible detail his colonoscopy, and claimed that his older brother, Rich, had been “Born Again, no less than eight times.”

I tried for a time to reason with Jumbo, and to steer him back to the topic of baseball. The final straw, I suppose, was when he submitted a fantasy in which he was driving a lawn tractor and dragging a naked John Gordon around the infield of his old high school stadium in Blooming Void. This spectacle, if I’m not mistaken, was supposed to be some sort of fundraiser for kids with disabilities.

When I refused to post that column Jumbo disappeared on me, and the entire baseball season proceeded to go straight in the toilet.

As much as he has tried my patience, and as difficult as he can be, I have to admit that I miss Jumbo. I started trying to get back in contact with him in March, and managed to eventually track him down through his mother. When I finally talked to him he sounded under the weather, said he had severed all ties with the Rake, was working happily at Cracker Barrel, and directed any further inquiries to “his lawyer.”

I told him to call me if he changed his mind, and I came into the office on Monday and discovered that he had left a message on my machine at three o’clock Sunday morning. He was, he said, ready to “talk turkey,” and requested a meeting with the publisher and the Rake’s team of attorneys.

Such a meeting proving impossible, Jumbo settled for a brief phone conversation with Domenic Cossi, the Rake’s manager of New Business Development. As a result of this abbreviated negotiation, I am told, Jumbo has agreed to make “the occasional contribution” to this space in exchange for “an undisclosed amount of credit at Chipotle, a Da Vinci Code coffee mug, and a copy of Rudy Perpich: The People’s Governor, warmly and personally inscribed by Deputy Editor Julie Caniglia.”

I’m told that I might expect Jumbo’s first contribution by as early as Friday, but I’m not holding my breath.

This persistent image you mention, the masked man in the mirror that you have been routinely encountering in your dreams –I don’t mean to make light of your problems, but certainly you don’t need to pay me to explain something that is so painfully obvious that it is almost an insult to my profession.

Please don’t misinterpret my words; I recognize that you are in real distress, and I’m not trying to be difficult. It does seem to me, however, that the obvious symbolism of this dream –what it means, if you will– would be apparent to a man of your intelligence.

What I would like to ask you to do is this: I want you to go home today and give this matter a little more thought. I think it will be much more satisfying if you arrive at a personal and convincing interpretation of this dream on your own. I’ve typed up a few other common and in some ways similar dream scenarios, and I’d encourage you to spend some time this evening looking over the list. Consider this a little homework assignment.

If you take a quick look at that sheet of paper I think you’ll have some idea of what I’m getting at here. Number one, for instance: Suppose you were to have a dream in which your mother appeared at your bedside naked or in the archetypal guise of a vampire; what might you make of that? Or consider number five: You have a nightmare where your wife is trying to prevent you from re-entering a boat you have fallen from, and is furiously striking at you with an oar.

I feel confident that with a bit of thought this brief exercise will assist you in arriving at a satisfactory and therapeutic interpretation of your own dream.

A dog is walking on the rocks.

If that dog weren’t there

coming between me and the rocks

I wouldn’t understand this world

I wouldn’t.

Fish are swimming in the water

the water flows around the fish

birds are flying in the air

the air moves around them

if there were no fish

if there were no birds

between the water and me

I couldn’t live here

I couldn’t.

If there were no creatures

in the midst of this desert

I wouldn’t stay here

I wouldn’t.

–Ernesto Calzavara, Analfabeto

Our job is to understand, and we have failed, miserably.

The everything we cannot understand we are asked to accept. At this also we have failed, miserably.

Most of us, though, have gotten pretty good at going on, and for this most modest of accomplishments we are rewarded with…what?

Wings, I suppose. The occasional flight outside and above ourselves, allowing us a glimpse –even if only for a moment– of where we are and what we have been given, which is the one thing we can ever truly call our own: our lives in this world, exactly as it is, which is heartbreaking, but which is nonetheless beautiful.

You, then: Big Thing. Great Eraser. Compulsive Builder. Demolition Expert. Flesh Shredder. Conjurer. Custodian of these bursting hearts and Choreographer of confrontations with mirrors. Master of disappearance and deterioration. You with your largess with lilacs and your wondrous palette of greens. Soul Pincher. Star Sower. Shatterer. Lamp Lighter. Candle Snuffer. Trickster. Sour Puss. Slumberer. Mad Man. Soft-Hearted Old Fool. Misery Maker. Terrifying Immensity. Merciful One.

You: Forgive us.

Forgive us.

Forgive us, astonishing, bumbling, miraculous failures that we are.

Forgive us all the great and usual sins.

I spent much of my early life looking for fables, and can remember the days when the spring woods would be full of them. If you climbed back up into the bluffs above the Bitterroot creek and nosed around under rocks and in the shady areas beneath the stands of big oaks, you’d find fables growing wild by the dozen and burrowed in the roots beneath the trees.

Some afternoons, after the sun had faded beyond the rolling hills to the west, I’d hike back home with a burlap bag full of fables. My boots would be caked with mud, my back would be aching, and I’d be exhausted from all the sun and fresh air, but I couldn’t wait to empty that bag on my kitchen floor so I could look over my recent acquisitions.

I once lugged home a bag full of squirming trolls. On other occasions I pulled from my sack a turtle with wings like a dragonfly, and a tiny pirate ship full of mice. Yet another time I found a stooped and tiny man with flowing white hair and a long beard. Fairies were nesting in his beard. The old man was both a fable and a repository of fables. He sat at my kitchen table and told me the story of a giant who once upon a time went about with the moon in a pack on his back. On windy days he would fly the moon like a kite in a meadow full of wild flowers.

One late afternoon, the old man related to me in his squeaky little voice, as the sun set and darkness descended, a hawk was perched at the edge of a long valley, admiring the spectacle of the giant’s luminous kite hovering above the meadow. The bright object, the hawk thought, made such a nice addition to the night sky.

As it sat there taking in this quiet scene, the hawk saw an arrow suddenly strike the giant squarely in his chest. He toppled straight backwards, and then the hawk witnessed the giant’s huge feet rising momentarily like a seesaw before disappearing again into the tall grass and flowers. And as the giant fell, he lost his grip on his kite’s tether and the moon drifted skyward, growing ever smaller as it rose, until it had assumed its now familiar place in the heavens.

With its keen and beady eyes, the old man told me, the hawk also saw a cat (wearing a little red felt hat and in possession of a bow and a quiver of arrows) dash off into the dark woods at the edge of the meadow.

I always inspected and interrogated the fables I brought back with me from the woods, and I also unfailingly released them before I retired for the evening. Some of the fables I found in those days would leave me dazzled and mulling for days and even weeks. They changed me, and changed the way I looked at the world and my place in it. They made me want to live to an old age.

As I grew older, though, it became harder and harder for me to get back there to my old fable hunting grounds. My life was crowded with work and other responsibilities and obligations. When I did manage to get away to the bluff country I found that the fables were increasingly difficult to find, and eventually they seemed to disappear entirely. Again and again I returned home empty-handed and numb with disappointment.

I have since read that fables have become almost completely extinct in America, or have been reduced to little more than grim little lessons, morals without the magic. It is my understanding, however, that patches of fables still survive in parts of Latin and South America, in obscure corners of Eastern Europe, and in small pockets of Africa and the Middle East, and I hope to one day venture to some of these places in search of that old lost magic of my youth.

Death had become bored with humans and their ridiculous rituals, their lip service to life and its preciousness. How could he take them seriously after all the centuries they’d been mucking up his once mostly orderly routine?

Once upon a time he’d had a pretty cut-and-dried job description. It wasn’t pleasant work –it wasn’t meant to be; he’d never taken any joy in it– and it wasn’t in his nature to be creative. Occasionally he’d get messed up in some large-scale collaborations, but he found these bigger, clumsier projects lamentable. Yet when all was said and done (and that, really, was his bailiwick), he was the closer, plain and simple. He didn’t, though, like slamming doors; he preferred shutting them as quietly as possible and going on his way.

There was a time when he hadn’t been ashamed of his job. It had been honest, necessary work. But, all the same, he’d always preferred operating under the cover of darkness, and favored black garments, not to strike terror, but rather so as to move as inconspicuously as possible. From the beginning his job had been simply to take people when their time had come. Even he had never understood exactly how this business was determined, but he didn’t ask questions. Which isn’t to say that he had never participated in some operations that struck him as tragic and even unjust.

God, how he despised the name “Grim Reaper.” He knew exactly who’d first coined the term, and it took every ounce of his mandated stoic restraint not to experience a spasm of pleasure when he’d finally received the order to take the man’s life. It didn’t mean diddly at that point, of course; the title already had wide currency, and would dog him forever. He understood all the same that a bad reputation came with the territory. There was nothing he could do about that, but he hated the melodramatic terror with which he was regarded; it was as if people didn’t understand that he had a claim on them from the moment they drew their first breath.

For heaven’s sake, the world had been burying his handiwork since the beginning of time. You’d think humans could make their peace with the idea. Some of them, of course, could, and he had the utmost respect for these people, and exercised the most careful restraint in stopping their hearts. At the same time, he had little patience for those who flirted with and courted him, the reckless and heedless and hysterical. Still, left to his own devices he was never rash or vengeful; he had his orders, and was nothing if not a fellow who followed orders.

There were, though, throughout history and increasingly, eruptions of violent madness, and he resented his role as glum sub-contractor in these mass incursions into his province.

Free will was a terrible mistake, and was constantly making an impossible mess of his business. Whenever humans took his job in their own hands they inevitably made horrific work of it, and often on a large and disgracefully untidy scale.

His presence continued to be required to seal the deal, such as it was, to make things official, but he seriously resented being dispatched at all hours to far-flung places where he was little but a helpless and disgruntled officiant.

He needed help –it had become entirely too much work for one man– but things were what they were; it was too late, and he knew no help would be forthcoming. On some base level humans had become his collaborators, which rankled him; they were apparently more and more willing to do his dirty work, and even to take on dirty work that he himself would have been reluctant to undertake.

He had long prided himself on not being a mess-maker, but it was too late for that as well. Every day anymore he found himself up to his elbows in messes and gore, whether he liked it or not.

The hardest pill to swallow was that he had been almost completely usurped; the work still had his name on it, it was ultimately his signature on the bottom line, but it was no longer truly his work.

It had become just another shit job. That was all there was to it. He had become an indifferent and exhausted practitioner of a profession he had once pursued with genuine dignity and skill and a certain stoic pride.

Whenever he had time –and he seldom had time anymore– he would retire to his sprawling penthouse on a top floor of a moldering skyscraper in a forlorn industrial neighborhood of Frankfurt, where he would sit in the dark, listening to Mahler or perhaps Thelonious Monk, and petitioning ceaselessly, and with growing desperation, for retirement.