A Direct Route to Madness

"I haven't seen you in so long," my mother lamented. She and I talk on the phone every other day, but COVID-19 procedures of the Missouri Department of Corrections include a moratorium on visits that's been in place since February. "Have you heard anything about when they're going to lift the visiting ban?" she wants to know.

In a certain famous play, an anxious king, hoping to avoid contemplating the unthinkable, waved the thoughts away while remarking how such hypothetical thinking was crazy-making. That old playwright (whoever he was) knew a thing or two about human nature, cutting straight to the heart of dissatisfaction when he wrote the king's line.

The Buddha also spoke about accepting what is. He taught that setting aside intellectual abstractions and doing things for their own sake was a key part of realizing contentment. Don't overthink shit, he said, more or less. Some of us might've heard this before.

Consider this anecdote. My dad and I were film buffs. Our wallets bulged with membership cards for movie-rental stores large and small. We also went to the theater about twice a month. After a late showing, one dark summer night, as we crossed the parking lot outside a local multiplex, I brimmed with complaints, as I frequently did, about scientific inaccuracies in the sci-fi flick we'd just sat through. As I remember it now, some scenes egregiously violated the law of gravity – seeming more fantasy than science fiction – and thereby got my dander up. I was roughly twelve years old.

There are so many tidbits that I came to understand only after my father's death. I wonder at times if I'd have realized what he sought to teach, even if he never said anything. In this particular instance, he casually opened the driver-side door of his little Honda and pierced me with one of those offhanded shards of wisdom that penetrates to your core without you feeling a thing until years later, when you're right in the middle of household chores or some utterly mundane, mindless activity, and you suddenly realize that wisdom for what it is. "It's called 'suspension of disbelief,'" my father explained, that night in the parking lot. "If you can't even stop picking things apart long enough for a movie, you're never going to enjoy anything in life."

I seem to recall someone once saying that ignorance is bliss. The trick just lies in accepting that not-knowing, in embracing it when you encounter it. This takes effort. Experience in the dark (figuratively speaking) can be good training. For the record, Pops was no bodhisattva. I'm hardly some enlightened sage, either, but I do have nearly two decades' experience living with uncertainty, thanks to prison's rampant inconsistencies. Heedlessness to the physics of zero-gravity no longer ruins movies for me; now I can usually recognize what's not worth fretting over.

I want to see my mother again, but she wants to know when we'll see each other again. Maybe that's too fine a distinction, but I think it makes all the difference. There's a little set of rules that I made up and try to live by.

Rule Number One: accept what you can't do anything about.

Rule Number Two: do what you can with what you can.

Rule Number Three: recognize when to employ Rule Number One and when to employ Rule Number Two.

How can I possibly answer my mother's question? Engaging in wild speculation has never been my bag. Anyone predicting the future, or how the post-pandemic world will look, is either lying or delusional. And yet people persist. The craving for certainty runs deep. If I tried to give Mum's question a meaningful response, it'd be nothing more than guesswork, which could only inspire unwarranted hope or invite despair. I want to keep it real.

So I tell her the truth – an answer, just not the answer. I let her know that her suffering isn't unique, telling her how no other Missouri prisons are allowing visits right now either. I tell her that I love her, that I miss her, and how glad I am to be afforded the multiple phone calls per week that we get. Many families have suffered far more painful, more complete separations than ours. We should consider ourselves lucky and focus on the good. There's certainly enough of the alternative in the world.

And then Mum sighs and concedes that I'm right, and we move on from there with somewhat lighter hearts. It's a disagreement I'm happy to have won – for both our sakes.

Last Bites: A Different Variety of Prisoner's Dilemma

Away with the notion that prisoners bound for the death chamber request kingly feasts: one of the most common last meals in America is a humble cheeseburger with fries.

Few situations are more harrowing than anticipating one's own execution, so we can understand why the condemned man, whiling away his final hours, would want the comfortingly familiar. Who caves to exotic cravings at such a time, let alone thinks of eating at all?

Tricksters throughout the long history of capital punishment have tried gaming the system, making outré requests to delay the process or piss off whoever would see them hanged, beheaded, shot, what have you. Gradually imposed restrictions curbed such efforts, so that modern last meals often have to come from vendors in the vicinity of the prison doing the killing. Since US prisons aren't constructed, by and large, in bustling cosmopolitan areas, last-meal options are frequently limited to drive-through fare. There's typically a low budget cap, too. No clever forestallments by demanding bird's nest soup, Mr. Multiple Murderer; you'll be lucky to get some KFC and a smirk from the warden.

Although sentenced to life without parole, I'm not in the precarious position of awaiting formal execution by the State of Missouri. I can swear, however, that the chance I'd opt for a burger at death's door is exactly zero.

Granola. That was my parents, growing up. We had VW Microbuses in the driveway, a prodigious vegetable garden out back, and rice cakes and lentils in the kitchen. Mama swore by the health benefits of eating bee propolis; Papa built his own food dehydrator. This is relevant because I was eight years old on the weekend I tasted my first soda and nearly gagged on its sweetness. My cousin gave me a withering look, then slugged hers straight from the three-liter bottle. I poured myself a nice glass of milk. Later, between turns at Super Mario Bros., she offered a Swiss roll. I took one bite, nothing at all like the cakes Mama made, then I ceded to my cousin the uneaten portion.

Mama did a lot of baking, especially through the winter. Much of our heat came from a living-room wood stove with baking racks behind its firebox. When I was very small I sat close to it, enraptured by the flames. Their warmth was as much a comfort as the aroma of Mama's sweet whole-grain loaves. When the time came to pull the bread and let it cool, I was quick with the oven mitts. This makes for fine memories, but best of all was when Mama cut the first slice with her big round-tipped bread knife: that curl of steam escaping through the dark crust, that scent like no other, the slight bowing of the heel before it fell away and exposed the hearty inner substance, rich brown and supple, almost spongy. With a pat of salted butter melted across the surface and glistening, Mama presented that first slice to me. This remains my ultimate sensory memory, from a near-perfect childhood replete with them.

I was arrested when I was twenty-two years old. The circumstances leading to and arising from this comprise a story already widely told, immaterial to this essay except to say that, after being tried by a jury and convicted, then sentenced to two life sentences, my diet radically changed.

All the Sunday mornings Papa made from-scratch waffles or pancakes, all the bohemian get-togethers where friends gravitated to our vibrant kitchen, all the German dishes — Linsen und Spätzle, Zwiebelkuchen, Kalter Hund — on which Mama raised me, all the trips to the market, where farmers hawked their wares by the riverfront: flats of berries; boxes of leafy greens; brown eggs nested by the dozen in shredded newspaper; plump tomatoes in a hundred sizes and shades of red, yellow, and green; caged, round-eyed rabbits, adorably doomed to be stewed; squash in an earthy kaleidoscope of hues; nectarines, peaches, and melons so ripe that their scent carried thickly into the next row of stalls; eggplants like balls of night; plump, bright peppers; baked goods ranging from zucchini bread to strawberry rhubarb pie; myriad root vegetables like the toes of giants; and on and on, as far as I could see from atop Papa's shoulders. These experiences instilled in me a love for the beauty of food.

By the time I struck out on my own, my first apartment's kitchen lacked a microwave but featured a small arsenal of cutlery, mixing bowls, and saucepans. I might have been the only teenager in the city who owned an Italian marble cutting board, a pasta machine, and a mandoline. I still shopped the market. I considered culinary school.

Miniscule portions of the lowest-quality stuff legally classifiable as food made up meals in the county jail. The olfactory trauma I suffered from the bologna's kerosene stink there will never fade. An already slender young man, after my arrest I lost weight at a startling pace. My cheeks hollowed. My ribs showed. I'm not sure now if, in the days leading up to my trial, I ate anything at all.

I fell into the Department of Corrections' custody thirteen months later, and my body nearly went into shock. In prison they served occasional fresh vegetables and fruit, and the portions, while hardly large, were comparatively generous. While the institution's food wouldn't win any awards, it was edible more often than not. Every so often it verged on tasty.

As an incentive for good behavior, Missouri prisons grant inmates without conduct violations a couple of special opportunities each year. Food visits allow loved ones to bring four "food items," plus bread, butter, and individually packaged condiments, with them into facilities' visiting rooms. In eighteen years I've only missed two, due to minor infractions, and both instances felt like grievous losses.

Food visits are a gustatory lifeline, my one real chance to feel anything akin to that long-distant pleasure once found in a kitchen full of friends. Invitations go out weeks in advance, and the guest lists are, by necessity, short. RSVPs are booked on a first come, first served basis. The meals we gather around aren't of cheeseburgers or fried chicken, popcorn shrimp or pork chops, but more salubrious fare, oftentimes lovingly prepared by my mother, who makes the five-hour drive to see me every month.

Lamb rogan josh, chipotle meatloaf, vegetarian brick-oven pizza, fresh-from-the-butcher Knackwurst, big bowls of baba ghanouj, roast Guinea pig, lasagna and cannoli made by an old Italian woman who really knew what she was doing, grilled halibut, Black Forest gateau, Godiva chocolate cheesecake, soan papdi, croissants with Nutella and raspberry preserves — the years' standouts are too numerous to recount, and my mother laughs at how often I've declared, "This is the best food visit yet"; although, it so often is.

Other food-visit tables end up littered with crumpled Sonic bags, Styrofoam take-out clamshells, and cardboard boxes from Imo's Pizza. After institutional rules changed, disallowing my mother's big, bright Frieda Kahlo bag, she started bringing transparent totes still brimming with enough colors to constitute exotica in this drab place. Wandering eyes take note. Even the prison guards overseeing visits often stop by our table to gawk, then crack wise about the shittiness of their own lunches. What does it say when a prisoner's meal elicits jealousy from someone who can eat almost anything, anywhere they desire?

An argument can be made for the cruelty of capital punishment. Another can be made, likening life without parole to an execution of inhumane duration. If the latter holds a kernel of validity, either I'm exceptional for using adventure, variety, and spice to plan food visit menus, or existential terror takes longer than eighteen years to set in. Maybe my deadening is still in its early stages. What I'm certain about is that I'd choose an atypical last meal.

On the eve of my death, what better than one of humanity's most basic foodstuffs: bread, oven-warm, if possible, with a dish of salted butter? The type of bread wouldn't especially matter. Whether it's rye, sourdough, toasted-seed nine-grain, challah, focaccia, Irish, or French, bread is bread. Bread fostered society's growth. Bread is good. Bread is (to wax poetical for a moment) life itself. In this choice would lie an irresistible symbolism, a nod to the cyclical nature of things — ending with the beginning.

A soft center is revealed as the serrated blade splits the crust. A whiff of heaven floats free in a wisp. The slice falls, instantly cooling. This image compels and comforts me. It's no cheeseburger, but death and food are uniquely personal. It's a last meal. You should have it your way.

A Movable Feast

We call it a “food visit,” but that term is too unrefined, too underwhelming, too boring to describe an event so rare and exciting as a prisoner’s chance to have brought in, from the world beyond, a full meal of real food. Food visits here are an incentive for good behavior, a privilege bestowed only on those of us who remain free of conduct violations for six months. If we mind our Ps and Qs, we’re allowed to schedule two food visits a year. And while some like to expend both of theirs in a single weekend of gluttony, perhaps to accommodate out-of-towners who bring their jailbird acquaintance a grab-bag of barbecue or a bunch of Big Macs, I prefer to space mine out — one in the spring, the other around my birthday, in the fall. It’s the end of November now; guess what’s just around the corner.

Certain of my previous posts expose me as a foodie. I make no bones about my love of eating, and, for being such a slender thing, I can really pack away the grub. In my prior life I ate out at least every other day, cooked frequent meals with friends, delighted in market hopping and grocery shopping, and explored edibles the way BASE jumpers explore tall structures. I considered myself a budding epicure, a gourmand-in-training, a gastronomy wannabe whose idea of a good time involved putting good things in my mouth and chewing them up. Getting full was just a pleasant side-effect. Well, finding good things in prison, edible or otherwise, is hard, so the twice-annual food visits I earn are not only precious for being palate-pleasing, they also allow me a taste of that deep happiness I used to get all the time from communal meals with special people. What I’m saying is that food visits are a big deal.

Mum always brings too much, and I always show my gratitude for her efforts by eating until I can’t. In years past, when the number of allowed visitors was higher, my group of feasters made the event into a spectacle, crowding as many as six chairs around a coffee table stacked high with containers of sumptuous edibles, talking and laughing, our faces flushed with the delight we all felt. Photographs taken of us in the visiting room show us all with expansive smiles, not caring that the space around us is part of a maximum-security penitentiary. I’m not implying that we were the most joyful people in the room, but if pleasure was a contest we’d at least have won some kind of award.

As to the menus, I’ve been treated to all sorts, familiar and strange, over the years: styles from cheap Chinese take-out to Mediterranean delights, meats from skewered lamb to roasted Ecuadorian cui, treats from chocolate-coated marzipan to Indian soan papdi. Just because I’m imprisoned, eating year-round crap, doesn’t mean I must crave the old standbys; comfort food has its place, but sometimes I only want something that’s vibrant with taste, no matter how unusual.

This year, I was very lucky. The prison administration approved me for a food visit on my birthday, the day after Thanksgiving. Four hours with my mother and two dear friends, around a table covered in Mum’s home-cooked German favorites, plus what’s sure to be a mouthwatering Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (a rich Black Forest cake, my very favorite dessert) from a fine Kansas City bakery — what a special birthday it’s going to be. I’m actually excited about turning thirty-four. My stomach is, anyway. Can you hear it rumbling expectantly from there?

Possessions, Prison Policy, and Grief

For over a decade I’ve been living out of a box — the gray metal footlocker that’s followed me for twelve years. Its limited space must hold everything I own (TV set, radio, and fan excluded), according to the policy of the Department of Corrections. Living under such restriction has forced me to weigh the importance of every card, every photograph, every meager scrap of paper I keep, because it’s the little things that are most apt to accumulate, quietly, into big things. I’ve been diligent, so my property has never exceeded my storage capacity. Whoever writes Departmental policy would be pleased by my compliance.

Never one for hoarding, I have always preferred to keep material possessions in my life to a relative minimum. What I do own, I keep organized. My childhood playroom was a neat space lined with crates and spruce shelves. My father’s space, the garage, was the opposite. A practical pack rat of the venerable, age-old “This will come in handy someday!” school of thought, I can’t say it was from him that I learned what not to do, since it was, if anything, by the example of my German mother, whose memories of her formative years seem to involve an inordinate amount of polishing, that my inner neat-freak was encouraged. Any influence my father had on my aversion to accumulating stuff would have been posthumous, after his death, when I was eighteen and forced to make a salvage operation of his house — the home in which I grew up — and that damned garage.

In short, the things I have around must have real value, real importance to me on a practical or emotional level. I set the bar high. Here, in prison, I set the bar even higher. For me to keep something around, it must have passed the test. Some of what I keep is therefore precious.

Attachments beget sorrow, say the Buddhists. To divest oneself of material things is to take a step toward enlightenment. Unless they mean “enlightenment” in terms of a lightening of my life’s carefully selected cargo, then the last thing I felt when I lost everything and was locked away in a prison cell was enlightened. It must sound petty to you, but I still miss my pocket watch and my satiny brushed-stainless flatware. I don’t habitually complain about how much I miss the stuff of my former life, though, because I know that the absence of ticking in my pocket and the heft of those utensils in my hands are just symptoms of the larger problem, the perpetual state of loss that I’m finding prison life to be — perhaps no more so than life anywhere else, but certainly easier to dwell on than in other circumstances.

Obviously, though I live abstemiously, I’m no Buddhist. When we were teenagers, it was this sort of morbid stewing that led my friend Anna to title me Byron the Blackheart. Not that she had room to talk. Her favorite poem was that one by Stephen Crane, probably best known (though, I have no idea why) as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, “A man said to the universe.” You know the one:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”

After struggling with a vicious depression for far longer than even our decade of friendship, Anna killed herself in the summer of 2008. The batch of letters and cards I kept, written in her minuscule cursive handwriting that was almost illegible in its perfection, took on talismanic power, as if the sheaf of papers were imbued with some essence of her. I imagined I could smell her in the creases of the cards, on the surface of the pages, which were nearly as white as her skin had been.

Anna’s correspondence, hidden safe inside a folder inside a ribbon-tied portfolio inside a sturdy footlocker for four years and four months after she told the universe she’d had enough, was precious. But the Buddhists are right about attachments. Having held tight to those mementos of my friend, I invited the sorrow of additional loss, almost like losing her all over again. Whoever writes Departmental policy would be pleased by my compliance.

New property limits were posted a few days ago, for all prisoners to read. No more than twenty-five personal letters, it says. As if I had not already lost enough. I took a few deep breaths and tried to ignore the crumbling of more pieces away from what she jokingly called my black heart. I read her words one last time, then I tore them to bits. I poured this sad confetti into the thirty-gallon Rubbermaid trash can by the door of the wing, the pale sprinkles cascading over an empty bag of microwave popcorn and some candy wrappers. When I returned the empty portfolio to its place in my methodically organized footlocker, I barely noticed how much space I’d cleared up.

A Mother's Day Poem, in Lieu of Flowers

Dedicated

Born babbling, your preverbal baby
was showered with such love he couldn't shut up
about it. In youth, he strived to give enough
back, heaped the scale and failed: the day, at
four, recall, when ten times ten (and then
some) times telling you was insufficient
to convey the contents of his overbrimming
heart, because he thought you might
wander off into some nebulous boyhood notion
of life and be lost to him, or grow distracted
and forget. As if
you'd place hands over his wide,
anxious eyes in a test of object permanence
then neglect to remove them. Your boy was
laughably credulous in ways. Then came
the day he didn't depart for college
— bright boy burned out kind of
quickly, but guttered and sputtered and
re-ignited late in the strangest place —
and you did not wander nor forget one bit.
And you're still there, close.
Not grown apart but grown, he knows
the comedic nature of the Day of I-love-yous,
yet can't help thinking some of it
was anything but silly.

Hidden Pictures of an Elusive Past

After my abduction by the state, I granted indefinite use of my computer to my mother, whose creaky desktop system was generations out-of-date. It made sense that someone should be using my PC, rather than let all those potential clock cycles go to waste. I have always been bothered by devices left to rust, so to speak, while there remains some usefulness in them, and my workhorse of a computer was no exception.

Mum isn’t the tech-savviest person on the planet, so an old friend made a DVD-ROM backup of my documents, image files, and locally saved websites. (If you didn’t already know, I had been an aspiring professional web developer.) The last thing I wanted was to be released from captivity only to discover precious data wiped by some Trojan horse that had promised my credulous mother virus protection. I was relieved by my friend’s foresight when my computer actually self-destructed a few years later. The backup disc remained safely stored, and while I never forgot about it, I did put it and its priceless contents out of my mind for awhile.

You don’t need to do time to understand how reflecting on past glories can preoccupy the man whose present is far from glorious, how the remembered self holds power over one who is locked up. I wear gray today, with white underclothes, but, like the visual representation retained by freed minds, in The Matrix, of their virtual selves, I too have a darkly clad residual self-image that favors tall boots — worlds removed from the prisoner in Chinese tennis shoes who does all he can to blend in. Just as the movie’s character Neo is unsettled by the data port implanted in the back of his head, the feeling of my earlobes without the five rings I used to gently tug for comfort remains alien. Looking at my face in the scuffed metal mirror every morning, performing my pre-coffee ablutions, I know it isn’t the true me gazing back, only an avatar, a construct designed by a system of repression. The real me is all in my head.

In escapist moments, when this system has the least control over my mind, I summon mental snapshots with all the specificity I can muster — of evenings spent cavorting goofily, of meaningful conversations, of past inspirational flashes, of sights seen in travels — and these happy entries from what Oscar Wilde termed “the diary that we all carry around with us” lift me out of purgatory for awhile. But even having a better-than-average long-term memory, I lose the fidelity of long-ago events. Like ancient ink on parchment, many details are missing or illegible.

I came to suspect that indelible images, such as those preserved digitally, would serve me well as mnemonics for certain times I’ve let fall away.

“See if you can find that disc,” I requested of my mother during a visit. I had been leafing through photographs that morning and was suddenly fixated on all those pictures sitting unviewed on the DVD-ROM my friend burned.

The blog on the personal site I maintained until 2001’s interruption, was chockablock with pictures; I used to keep my digital camera at hand, because I never wanted to miss a photo op. I knew that my site had been preserved in its entirety, on disc, but couldn’t remember offhand what candid shots awaited there, other than a couple from a trip to Chicago with friends, one of a fried-foods stand across from my apartment, and one of my cats sunning themselves on a light-streaked floor rug. Mum and I scheduled a time and date for her to talk me through the disc’s contents, over the phone.

“I don’t see that,” she said, when I asked Mum to click on the Windows Explorer desktop icon.

“Okay, so do a search for it,” I suggested.

She found the program, but what was in the window she described was nothing like what I expected. Where I’d wanted a straightforward directory tree that listed every file in a neat and sensible hierarchical structure, what was presented on Mum’s screen was a menu of imprecise “user-friendly” options I didn’t understand. I asked, “What the hell version of Windows are you running, anyway — Vista?”

Her response was silence.

We pressed bravely forward. I was reminded of why I used to be somewhat sought-after by acquaintances for tech support: I’m tenaciously unwilling to accept defeat, especially by a machine. “Try the name of my site, Monochromatic. It was also the name of the folder I had it saved to.”

After a short delay, Mum spoke. “‘No results found,’ it says.”

“Okay, then try the filename index.html. That’s the splash page.”

She sounded almost as dispirited as I was becoming. “No, Honey, it’s not giving me anything.”

For nearly another ten minutes, Mum played the role of my eyes, describing everything she saw onscreen, which I upsampled into a mental screenshot and converted into instructions I tried to make comprehensible. I wanted to find those pictures so badly! Once we found out how to access them, getting her to print and snail-mail them to me would be no trouble at all. The disc they were on was right there. I would find them in seconds, on my own at the keyboard, even using an unfamiliar operating system, but our little game of high-tech blindman’s bluff made me feel like a total Luddite.

Abruptly, then, a breakthrough. Mum said with a giggle, “Oh, wow, it’s a slideshow!”

“What? What did you click?” I asked, desperate to know what she’d done. We wouldn’t be able to repeat the results later if we didn’t keep track of every action now.

“I don’t know. There was an arrow,” my mother answered. “Oh, here you are, playing the violin!”

“So you clicked a button with an arrow? Was there — “

“Now it’s a photo of Anastasia.”

“Okay, just wait a moment. Is there anyth — “

“Here’s you in the back of a limo. I’ve never seen these.”

She could have, of course. All of them used to be accessible to anyone who desired to keep up on the doings of one Mr. Byron Christopher Case. When I moved to Saint Louis, the year before my abduction, I redoubled my efforts at Internet visibility so friends back in Kansas City could at least be involved in my life vicariously. Some of them did, but Mum scarcely acknowledged e-mail’s existence back then. These eleven-year-old pictures were all new to her, as evidenced by the enthusiasm with which she proceeded to narrate the slideshow: my friend Brahm on a telephone pole; my ex-fiancée, Bianca, hiding behind a graphic novel; my former roommate making an obscene hand gesture; my friends Mike and Chris cavorting on a seesaw; me posing absurdly on a park sculpture. It was too much.

“Mum,” I said, “I’m going to let you go.”

“What? Why?”

“I can’t sit here and have you describe these pictures to me if I’m not going to be able to see them myself. It’s depressing. I don’t even remember some of the situations you’re telling me about. It’s like being taunted by the past.”

We had come too tantalizingly close to the goal, and had spent so much phone time pursuing it, yet she understood. Always willing to visibly express emotion when I cannot, my empathetic mother’s voice quavered on the· other end of the line. “I’m sorry, Sweetie. I wish we didn’t have to end like this today.”

“It’s all right,” I said, in what I hoped was a reassuring tone. “Just pack the disc away again. I love you, and I’ll see you Saturday.”

I could have predicted that I would spend the rest of that day abiding one of my tension headaches. The weight pressing me down, following our photo-search debacle, wasn’t too much to bear, though. I’m not generally one to dwell in states of ennui anymore; my depressive years are ancient history. It’s true I began the day with an ill-fated phone call, which unfurled a host of frayed narratives in my mind, but it’s also true that, in spite of that insidious headache, I donned my headphones, cued up a CD (one by a band recently enough formed to lack associations with pre-prison life), and threw myself into the preparation of some poems for submission to a literary journal. There is nothing quite like being in the flow of productivity, of being wholly in the now, to help me forget the then and the photographic evidence thereof.

The Pig

My father brought her home without warning one afternoon, to the shock of my mother. I remember being in the back seat of her brown Volkswagen Fox when we pulled into our suburban driveway, and hearing Mum mutter something under her breath. Then I saw her, standing beside my father, close to our back door, all naked and freckled and innocently smiling: the pig.

"She can live around the compost heap," my father explained. "I'll build a fence and we can just let her wallow around back there. She'll be happy."

We had a good-sized compost pile behind the garage — probably six feet by nine — into which we cast organic waste: watermelon rinds, coffee grounds, moldy bread. This stuff, any pig should be more than pleased to loll around in. No mention was made of city ordinances or what, in fact, had possessed my father to purchase for us a pink porcine pal. She was there, and that was all there was to it — at least to my naive seven-year-old mind.

True to his word, my father erected a long-overdue white picket fence on the site of our stinky waste pen, complete with a little gate. Behind the garage, the pig was shielded from our neighbors' view. Since she was such a silent swine, there was none of the oinking one would think (as my parents did) would alert passersby to the pig's almost certainly illegal presence.

Not that there were many passersby in our neighborhood. We didn't even have a sidewalk on our particular stretch of street. Pedestrians, on the rare occasions they appeared, were usually mail carriers or meter readers. Even though an elementary school lay right behind our backyard fence, school-age kids were virtually nonexistent. The only ones to be found lived around the corner — two rough-and-tumble boys who wore faded Aerosmith T-shirts and sported too-frequent black eyes. Not my cup of tea. I had a pig at home, thank you.

And it was always just "the pig." We never did give her a name. This should have been odd to me, given my predilection for naming every animal I came in contact with. Even my pet hermit crabs had names, taken from the Greek mythology, with which I was obsessed — Hercules and Sisyphus — and they were barely sentient. So why not also the pig? It couldn't have been that my parents had warned me against getting attached, because that would have immediately struck me as wrong. Perhaps I had a nascent, unconscious sense of what was going on, why we really kept a nameless pig.

It is a Kansas City tradition to organize a huge, festive parade downtown, on Saint Patrick's Day. That year, my parents, who owned and operated a chimney services company, entered us. The us in this instance included the pig. My parents donned the traditional top hats and tails they actually wore out on jobs, and I wore my pint-sized version of same, with a theatrical smear of soot on my cheek. The pig got a little green derby hat and green sequined collar, both adorned with shamrocks. As if the outfits weren't enough, my father rigged my Radio Flyer wagon with faux brick,  to look like a chimney on wheels. My parents took turns pulling this  ad hoc float in the parade while I crouched inside, popping up at intervals of every block or so, waving jauntily. The pig had it easier; all she had to do was smile and trot alongside the family on her thin green rope leash.

After meals, from time to time, I took a plate of leftovers behind the garage. The pig always seemed happy to see me, rushing over to the fence to wedge her moist snout between the fence pickets. For an animal reviled by many cultures for its uncleanliness, she stayed surprisingly spot-free. If we hadn't kept her in what amounted to a mud pit, even her trotters would've probably been pink. A meticulous, tidy child, I was impressed by this dignity. I found myself warming to her.

Then one morning, after my father had left for what I assumed was work, I went out to feed the pig the remnants of a cantaloupe I'd eaten for breakfast. I'd started spending time with her on these trips, talking quietly to her and scratching behind her floppy, fuzzy ears until she closed her eyes and made grunts like a series of relaxed sighs. But she was gone, her pen empty.

"We had to get rid of her," my mother told me when I ran into the house. My shock, I admit, had less to do with concern for the pig's well-being than with the astonished notion that she'd somehow managed to undo the gate latch, step out of her pen, and replace the bolt in her escape. I knew pigs were intelligent, but for a moment I worried we were dealing with Houdini on the Hoof.

Nothing much was said of the pig for the next couple of days. I was content staying silent on the whole thing, and my parents left no doubt they did not wish to discuss it. Eventually, though, the secret came out as all my family's revelations seemed to: over breakfast. I had the temerity to ask why the bacon that morning had come out of white paper wrapping, rather than the vacuum-sealed clear plastic I was used to.

"Well...," my mother began. Then my father took over.

"It's the pig," he said matter-of-factly. "This bacon came from the pig. We took her to the butcher the other day. This is just some of the good food the pig gave us."

While you, dear reader, probably saw this coming from a mile away, I was blind-sided. True, the pig and I never had the chance to get too attached. Ours were very different worlds, after all — hers, a squalid pen full of loam and old banana peels; mine, a spruce roomful of books and toys — yet the shock of eating the flesh of a creature who, days before, I'd been patting on the head and feeding old eggs was substantial. My eyes burned and my jaw tingled as I placed my strip of bacon back on the plate and stared at it. A minute earlier it had smelled and looked so good. But now....

The same thing happened when I learned, at four years old, what eggs really were. I knew they came from chickens, who laid them into fluffy straw nests and brooded over them with great care. I also knew that chickens hatched from eggs. Somehow, however, I never put Fact A and Fact B together until finding a smear of blood in one of my otherwise perfect, runny yolks as I dragged a buttery wedge of toast through them. For months thereafter I couldn't so much as look at an egg without gagging: unfertilized chicken ova! A sensitive boy, you might call me, but I got over that aversion with time. Sunny-side-up eggs are a hard habit to shake.

So too was it with the pig. A few weeks of childhood vegetarianism passed, resisting her greasy aromatics as they wafted daily around our table. Then my righteous indignation caved to my taste buds. The pig lived a good life, I reminded myself, and it was not without grateful joy that we would cut into her juicy chops, the flavorful roast, and savory sausages. One bite was all it took for me to rescind the prior remarks about my parents' savage ways. They were mine, too, in the end. Vegetarians, I decided, were missing out on a truly good thing.

A Life Amphibious

My father was born with gills and webbed feet, the son of a mermaid and a merchant marine. The earliest photograph of him I have seen was a grade school portrait, which suggests those features — the gills, at least — atrophied as he got older, for they were nowhere to be seen by then. For the entirety of his life, though, as with any creature born of the sea, my father would remain drawn to water and all things aquatic. At eighteen, he enlisted in the United States Navy, where whatever vestigial toe-webbing remained would have been perceived as an asset. He dove freely into untested waters, canoed down rolling river rapids, fished with nets. He collected seashells and coral. He kept tropical fish. I remember the way he'd whisper to them while sprinkling in their food, inviting them to dinner by invoking their secret names: to him they were not angelfish, gourami, or tetra but Streamer-Tail, Little Bubble-Maker, Prism-Darter. They were his piscine friends, exiles from the same kingdom, and they kept him company in his home on dry land.

Of course he owned vessels — a fifteen-foot aluminum canoe, an inflatable raft, a small sailboat. These were the only way my mother and I could accompany him on his watery communions. Creatures of terra firma is what she and I were — awed by the shadowy ubiquity of water in the world, shaky on deck, barely submersible. My father was our fearless captain, ready to brave the storms and show us landlubbers there was little to fear from the murky depths. When he would change tack to head into a squall, or paddle us towards the rocks, we had to wonder whether he hadn't momentarily forgotten our handicap. But always he brought us through, dampened by the spray, most likely, but quite alive. Being with him in the presence of water meant knowing fervency for life; his enthusiasm was contagious.

We towed the sailboat with us one year, on a family vacation to the Florida Keys, when I was a boy. Our first night at the coast, my mother and I slept in the van. Displaying uncharacteristic childlike eagerness, my father spent the night in a sleeping bag on deck, docked in the marina a few hundred feet away. Mosquitoes, of course, left him unmolested. It was blood they craved, not the clear salinity of what his veins pumped. As the sun rose from the center of the Atlantic, Mum and I stumbled salty-eyed into the morning. We found my father already unmoored, gliding aimlessly around the marina on a steady wind he'd been loath to let pass unavailed. He waved to us. There was no telling how long he'd been out. He had to have woken at least an hour before dawn, in order to have time to erect the mast and secure the rigging. Out on the blue, his sails were brimming, his smile gleamed.



The day was long and humid, and by late afternoon had given way to the slate horizon of an impending storm. Since that morning we'd been skirting the coastline. Because we had no radio, no compass, no map — indeed, no navigational equipment of any sort (what kind of an adventure would it have been, otherwise?) — we dropped anchor off a tiny, sandy island with a sliver of clear beach large enough to pitch our tent and light a cookfire. We ate thin vegetable soup with crackers and nibbled on roasted peanuts. The soup scalded my tongue as I sipped too eagerly from a battered tin cup. When the rain came, at first with uncertainty, we retreated but left the tent flaps open so we could watch the clouds tumble and the far-off waves clash. I fell asleep to the popping of fat drops on the canvas and the thick air of our gradually smoldering fire. I dreamt of wild seas.

In the small hours, the three of us awoke startled. The tide was coming in. It lapped inches from the front of the tent. Already the remains of the fire had been swallowed; now, ever hungry, the water was reaching for us. Pattering rain kept on as we hurriedly pulled stakes and carried our shelter several feet back, to the tree line. As the beach gradually disappeared, we looked on, unsure if the high ground we'd claimed would be high enough to avoid a late night escape back to our boat. I fell back asleep eventually, as did Mum, but Papa was vigilant. His silhouette at the front of the tent reassured me when I woke again, later, to the sound of his whispered supplications to the waves.



The scene at dawn was much different. By that time the tide had gone out so far that it had stranded the boat, dry and resting pitifully at an angle, on its keel. Seaweed draped the line to the shore, imparting a look of abandonment, like a ghost ship in spite of its cheerful blue hull. Not knowing when the waters would again rise, my father set to work righting her, the way people attend to a beached whale. Now pushing, now rocking, now patting her belly, he coaxed the boat back into her element.

Packed in and hungry, we set course for the mainland beyond our horizon. Arcane sailor knowledge or natant instinct guided my father at the tiller as he steered us toward the marina from which we'd put out. The wind that morning was robust and consistent. I stood aft of the small cabin, catching briny air in my nostrils. In my ears was nothing but that whooshing roar. Then Papa said something indistinct and my mother laughed. I turned, hoping to hear. They were smiling — such wide, open smiles! — and with the sun radiant on his face I watched my father draw a deep, contented breath, and surveyed his neck and jawline for the row of fishy slits I knew just had to be there.

My Mother, Dynamo

The last Mother's Day we had together before my abduction, Mum and I brunched by the fountain at Roselle Court, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Since I was a little boy, the museum has been a special place for both of us. On weekends we'd often come to see the exhibits and, during the week, there were wonderful art classes for children — pottery, figure drawing, and so on — that I was privileged enough to enjoy. Afterwards Mum would often take me for a croissant or some other kind of treat in the softly lit neoclassical courtyard that opened off the museum's main hall. The place holds fond memories for us, as a result. Upon leaving that final time, I presented her with a large potted gardenia. It was in a full bloom of tiny white blossoms and was redolent of wild honey. Because of its size, she could not take it with her just then, so it endured the better part of a day riding around in the cavernous back seat of my old car. Eventually, though, it ended up in Mum's bedroom, where it's delicate perfume could carry her into peaceful, pleasant dreams every night.

One month later, I was gone. During the nightmarish year to follow, she came to visit me twice a week in the county jail as I awaited trial. Often she would come with friends of mine who were there, I imagine, as much in support of her as of me. We all cleaved to one another — it was the only way to make it through. But mostly it was my mother whose face through that half-inch-thick safety glass both reassured and broke my sickened heart. For as long as I can remember, she has said that she's a survivor, and that time was my opportunity to witness firsthand the full reserves of her indomitable inner strength.

The gardenia I had given her, fragrant and soft with its hundreds of petals, soon shed and grew sparse with some unknown botanical illness. Strange white film had started forming on the leaves, like wax. Mum would deliver updates on its deteriorating condition: "I think it's dying." Not long after, it was moved to the glassed-in patio, where she would tend carefully to it, wiping each individual leaf clean. Even with that attention, the prognosis looked grim. It would have been nothing for her to abandon it to chance rather than dote on it the way she did.

Giving in is not generally part of her repertoire. The gardenia was finally able to be moved back indoors, able once again to cense her to sleep, in due course. She brought it back.

With me as well, her resolve has yet to flag, even these seven years later. Still she makes the hour-long drive every week to see me, still we talk often on the phone, still she finds within herself energy enough to actively crusade for justice in the face of such obstacles as would drive most to discouragement. She is like a force of nature. From her own resilience I get so much of my own — not in some sociobiological sense of inheritance, but that I am emboldened by knowledge of her strength. And, for whatever it's worth, I wear for her my bravest face so she may take heart in the reciprocity of endurance.

We abide balanced upon one another's resolute love, and on the tenacious hope that, someday soon, I too will be brought back from my sorry condition, able on days like this to honor her the way she so rightly deserves. And, of course, to give her flowers.

Danke für Alles, Mutti. Ich liebe Dich