Death and How To Deal With It.

I’m a huge fan of Groucho Marx. It’s not just that he makes me laugh like a crazy person (though he does)—I identify with him. His view of the world and its inhabitants—equal parts acid and anarchy—resonates with me. His inability to leave any pomposity unpunctured and his propensity to insult anyone and anything (and get away with it) remind me of myself. Groucho's example allows me to rationalize those parts of my personality that have led lots of people to describe me as an asshole. 

I can spout Groucho anecdotes and one-liners ‘til the cows come home. The time he said, “I didn’t know you guys were allowed to have mothers,” to a priest who'd mentioned his mother. The time he snarled at an annoying drunk, “I never forget a face, but in your case, I’ll be glad to make an exception.” The time he told a woman who explained her 21 children by saying, "I just love my husband," “Madam, I like my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.”

But none of those lines, funny as they are, touches me like the ones from his final days: how, when his old friend George Fenneman lifted him under his arms and carried him, face to face, from his armchair to his bed, he growled, “You were always a lousy dancer, Fenneman.” Or how, when a nurse came to his room to see if he hand a temperature, he said, “Don’t be silly. Everyone has a temperature.”

I envy that quality that allows a man who’s facing death to crack wise. I’m not entirely sure what it is. It’s not courage, quite. Call it irrepressibility. Whatever it was, Groucho had it. So did my grandfather.

Since I’ve already written about my grandmothers and aunt on this blog, I beg the (most likely nonexistent) reader’s forgiveness as I slip once again into the self-indulgent slough of memoir. But death seems to be on my mind, and nostalgia is a cheap and easy refuge from the thought of the last stop on the track.

Billy Palmer was what was called in his time and place a character. He was a good-looking man, with a head of thick, curly hair and broad, sly grin. He wasn’t tall, but by the time I knew him, he’d acquired enough bulk to give him physical presence to match his personal charisma, a quality of which he had enough to make him intimidating, scary even, to a small and somewhat insecure boy growing up in a family of larger-than-life personalities.

The ancestral Palmers. Bill Palmer, my grandfather, is second row,
directly behind the middle child in the front row. 

He was born dirt poor in the tiny north-central Indiana town of Macy, one of seven children, four of whom succumbed to alcoholism and one of whom took her own life. His father was a mild but none too ambitious day laborer. His mother probably had a good enough brain, but stunted circumstances had made her mean and shrewish. 

His quick wit manifested itself early. When he was five or so, his mother barked that those who didn’t work didn’t eat, and set her small son to hoeing the garden. A sister who’d somehow escaped their mother’s baleful attention sauntered by and asked snidely, “Whatcha doing, Billy?” “Oh, just hoein’ myself up a little dinner,” Billy replied.

Times were brutal for most rural folk in the 1920’s, and people reacted in one of two ways: they either became crusty, hardbitten, taciturn, narrow of eye and tight of mouth, like most of the old Indiana men of his generation whom I knew—or you let your ebullience become the source of your resilience. Billy Palmer chose the latter route. 

He had a congenital and aggressive kind of charm, a natural magnetism that drew all eyes to him when he walked into a room. He augmented it with snappy clothes, big diamond rings, and Lincoln Continentals as big as his personality. He liked attention—it was his medium, he worked in it like other artists work in clay or oils, and he knew how to get it, hold it, mold it, and use it like a master.  

He was a natural salesman. He didn’t inspire trust, exactly. He was a little too glib, a little too quick, a little too overpowering for that. What he inspired was the fierce desire to please him. You wanted to be Billy’s friend—you didn’t want to be left out in the cold. And you got into his good graces by buying what he was selling.

What he sold was cattle. If you ever drove between Indianapolis and South Bend on Indiana 31, you probably saw a big white billboard trumpeting, “W.V. Palmer, Stocker and Feeder Cattle, Indiana’s Largest Selection, since 1950”—a claim as grandiose as the man who made it. I have no idea if he really WAS Indiana’s biggest cattle broker, but he sure acted like it. He bought and sold cattle when lots of farmers kept a small herd of twenty, thirty, or forty head. He loved the business, and he did pretty well at it. In his later years, he sold cattle to bigger outfits like Armour, Iowa Beef (he claimed to have been a personal friend of Armand Hammer), and McDonalds.

My father says he was the best salesman he’d ever seen. “Wuh, hell, you’re right,” he’d say to some farmer who’d thought he’d try to negotiate. It was a mistake. Billy would come in close, loom over you, and start poking his finger in your chest. “You’re right. You saw right through me. I was trying to rob you blind, and you saw right through me. Shit, those animals aren’t worth a damn. Why, I tell you what, I tell you what I’ll do right now, I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you turn around right now and DON’T buy these animals. I’ll do it right now,” and he’d reach into his pocket, pull out a thick wad of cash, and start peeling off twenties.

Billy cut a hell of a dash, although my father, more restrained and better with figures, knew the real story. “He rode the ragged edge of financial disaster for most of my childhood,” my pop says, shaking his head and smiling a little ruefully. “But he knew how to make it look good.”

He could make it look good, all right. Eventually, it actually was good. He died a rich man. But as much as he loved trading cattle—and as good as he was at it—cattle were not, at the end of the day, the source of his prosperity. Land was.

My father knows the tax codes better, but Billy was no slouch at number-crunching himself. He figured it was cheaper to grow feed than to buy it in the 50’s and 60’s, when Indiana farmland was so cheap you couldn’t give it away. Bit by bit, farm by farm, bank loan by bank loan, he came to own a good chunk of Miami County.

Naturally, the Federal Government farm subsidy program paid him not to grow feed. But Billy pocketed Uncle Sam’s largesse with a wide grin, kept growing, and went to Vegas three or four times a year with his good pal, the Miami Country Farm Commissioner, who looked the other way. And when land prices shot up, the old boy began to buy and sell whole farms the way he sold cattle. 

Billy enjoyed the high life, and he felt right at home in Vegas--a hustler’s town, a shrewd and gaudy place that invented itself and created its own legend. He liked to drink (he was an alcoholic, but, like his finances, he hid it well) and he liked to gamble. He’d show us grandchildren the fat stack of bills he’d come back with—the big time high roller just back from cleaning out Vegas. “I’ll go back when they’ve got more money,” he’d say. "And I'll clean 'em out again."

As with so much else in his life, this was largely invention, too. After he died, a very nice letter of condolence from Caesar’s arrived, asking if the heirs wouldn’t mind honoring that $10,000 marker left outstanding by Mr. Palmer’s sad death.

A lifelong Democrat, he was a two-time delegate to the National Convention (’64 and ’68), about which he was very proud. My father occasionally snorts that it wasn’t much of an accomplishment (“Hell, there’re only six Democrats in the whole damn state”), but Billy liked being a big shot. He also liked meeting Lyndon Johnson, the one guy whose powers of persuasion matched his own.

Unless it was a good-looking lady, Billy never seemed too interested in anyone else. Why bother? He was  the most interesting person in the room. This disinterest extended to his progeny—he never seemed too enamored of his grandchildren, although he liked to call me “Perfesser,” and he dutifully attended my brother's and cousin's baseball and football games. It was part of his mystique to turn the dynamics of any relationship to his advantage: people fell over themselves to pay him attention. No one minded that he paid very little to anyone else.

A long slow decline would have been out of character. Mercifully, his final illness didn’t last more than a month or two. I drove up to Indiana from St. Louis to say goodbye the day of the Farm Sale, at which all his equipment—the tractors, harvesters, combines, manure spreaders, etc—were sold at auction. Moments after I arrived at my grandparents' house (they lived in a big rambling house nowhere near any of the farms themselves), my father drove up in the Lincoln, with a shrunken, emaciated withered, hunched-over, and rheumy-eyed shadow of Bill Palmer in the passenger seat.

“Sad day, huh, Grandpa?” was all I could think to stammer. He looked nothing like the big and vibrant man I remembered. 

“Well, Billy’s not in much shape to do a whole lot more farming, are ya, Billy?” said my father, lifting the old man into his wheelchair. My grandfather raised his quivering head from the folds of his bathrobe and flannel pajamas and rasped, “Ooohhh... maybe just light work.”

They’d set up a hospital bed where his big blue leather recliner had been. Hospice nurses tended to him, giggling apologetically as they did it. To the end, Billy kept his lightning wit. He refused his pain medication, telling one nurse, "I'm afraid it might be habit-forming.” When another complimented his full head of curly white hair and said he was still a good-looking man, he leered at her and croaked, “Isn’t Betty [his wife, my grandmother] lucky?”

Those might have been his last words, come to think of it.

I don’t know if you can call it courage. The quips, the one-liners, might have been a distraction from the inevitable. Maybe it's easier to face death when you don’t think about it, because you’ve still got an audience to entertain. Whatever it is, though, whatever let Groucho and Grandpa greet the Reaper with a wisecrack, I hope I’ve got it. Bill Palmer was no saint. He was a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, a sharp dealer—you better believe he had his dark side. In fact, he was more or less defined by it. But when we remember him now, it’s with laughter. His humor both softened the blow of his death and gilded his memory. There are worse ways to go. 

The March of Regress--A Cautionary Tale

Inasmuch as I am a person who grew up with a lot of religion and subsequently lost it, I think—and, on this blog, write—a lot about the process of ditching one’s faith and the benefits of doing so. A lot of secularists do this. We get smug about our lack of faith, and, from our post-God perspective, look down on those who still thrash in the coils of organized religion with a mixture of self-congratulation and pity. We tend to look upon believers as somehow less advanced, less evolved, than we are. But given enough time, they, or their descendants, will, we hope, wake the hell up, break out of the shackles, and join us in an optimistic, humanistic, and brighter future.

What we all too frequently ignore is that the process often goes the other way.

I realized this while I was shuffling about online, pretending to do some research on Joseph Pulitzer, and ran across a website for a nonprofit organization on whose board Michael Pulitzer, Jr., his great-grandson, serves. The biographical blurb under his picture said that he was active in his Mennonite church.

It shook me. Joseph, the progenitor of the American Pulitzers, was a deeply irreligious man. He abandoned his ancestral Judaism and, although nominally Episcopalian after his marriage, never paid much attention to it. He appears to have been thoroughly secular, an assertion supported by one of his employees’ statement that that he ascribed to what was then called the “Higher Agnosticism,” a philosophy about which I’m going to have to learn more one of these days.

But, some generations hence, his great-grandson is now an active churchgoer. I find that odd, and, if I’m honest, a bit dispiriting. But the process of moving from secularism to religion can be quicker than that, and I’ve got an example a good deal closer to home.

My maternal aunt is an interesting example. Actually, she’s an interesting person, period. She was a bright kid—she got her undergraduate degree in French, studied for a year at the University of Caen in France, got her master’s in math, and became a schoolteacher, and later on, a principal. But it was her politics that interests me most.

By all accounts, she was passionately committed to racial equality from a very early age. I’m not sure where a girl from an upper-middle-class, socially-striving family in (what was then) a wealthy neighborhood picked that up. It might have been an atavism, some genetic memory of her mother’s family’s tough times in Russian Poland, whence the Tsars chased them in 1889. It might have been from my grandmother herself, who, as a teenager, brought home a little Mexican kid she found begging for change on Cherokee Street. His name was Frankie Lopez. I don’t know what had happened to his parents, but she dragged him back to Idaho Street, gave him a bath (“which, I can tell you, he desperately needed. Poor little thing”), and sat him down at the dinner table, where he remained a regular fixture—in fact, a sort of unofficial adoptee—for years. He and my uncle, egged on by my great-grandfather, would wrestle like Lou Thesz and Strangler Lewis. Later on, he went to work in my great-grandfather’s auto parts supply business on South Broadway, and eventually became an auto mechanic and owned his own garage. Fifty years later, he wept like a baby at my great-grandfather’s funeral.

At any rate, she got deeply involved in the civil rights movement in the 60’s. She marched at both Birmingham and Selma, hustled my staunchly Republican grandfather into giving her all his old office equipment for use at the NAACP office in Denver (where her then-husband, an Englishman whom she met in France, was getting his PhD in French literature), and, when it turned out she and her husband couldn’t have children, adopted four African-American children who were “wards of the state”—the unadoptables. The kids no one else wanted.

I don’t think I’ll be telling any tales out of school, or saying anything she wouldn’t agree with, if I say that my aunt is neither the warmest, nor the most nurturing, nor the most maternal of people. Some people are cut out to be moms, some weren’t. Some of my cousins are doing okay, some less so. But even if she was no great shakes as a mother, I always thought that was a pretty noble thing to do.

My self-consciously haute bourgeois grandparents were appalled. My grandmother, who had assiduously shlepped her daughters to finishing school, dance lessons, piano and violin lessons, horseback riding lessons, and a host of other activities designed to distance her progeny from the cold-water tenement flat where she’d spent her earliest years, was, simultaneously, both affectionately condescending and bewildered.

“Can you imagine,” she said to me years later, “what it was like for me to get off of that plane in my mink and my jewelry—people dressed up to get on airplanes in those days, not shlubby like you do—and to be met in the airport by this girl in this peasant dress down to her feet, and sandals, for God’s sake, with these two huge hippie braids and all these black children climbing all over her? I thought I’d have a heart attack. I was mortified.”

My grandfather, who maintained an air of chilly reserve to his dying day, never went much farther than a shrug and a quirk of his right eyebrow, but it was pretty obvious how he felt.

She was, however, a big favorite of my Russian-born great-grandfather, the Communist. My mother was blonde, pretty, demure, popular at school, a cheerleader, and, in college, a sorority girl. She took to my grandmother’s relentless agenda like a fish to water. She was the perfect daughter for a family clawing its way to moneyed middle-class respectability. My great-grandfather hated her guts. He used to make her cry on purpose. My aunt—small, dark, sharp-featured, intense, edgy, scornfully dismissive of her mother’s ambitions and blazing with that peculiar righteous indignation of the far left—well, now, her he liked just fine.

I’m not sure if civil rights was a sort of gateway drug into broader counterculture activism or not, but she was, throughout most of my childhood, a raving leftie. My brother and I still laugh about some of the presents Aunt Lynne and Uncle John got us. One year, it was “Ban the Bomb” tote bags made out of real hemp. If we’d hung on to them until we were old enough to know what hemp was, we probably would have smoked them as teenagers. Another year, it was the “Save the Whales” board game. That one was actually kind of fun. I remember being the only kid in fourth grade who knew what “baleen” meant, even if I still giggled at “sperm whale.” And she was, unsurprisingly, vocally anti-religious and openly derisive of my mother’s Christianity, about which I’ve blogged elsewhere and which she came to after seven miscarriages and a child who died two days after his birth.

But somewhere along the way, she reversed course. Completely. She is now a right-wing Republican conservative Christian who believes, absolutely and unapologetically, in the literal death and resurrection, supply-side economics, and the six-day account of Creation.

I’m genuinely not sure what occasioned the change, which, while not overnight and not completely without process (she went through a short spell of liberal Quakerism) nonetheless happened remarkably quickly. But there are, I suppose, a few watershed events that may have moved the process along.

The first was, in all probability, political.

My cousins’ formal adoption was held up for years by the fierce resistance of a Philadelphia-based organization of African-American social workers, who were ferociously opposed to the idea of white families adopting black children. To take black children out of their culture and raise them as “white” children amounted to, they argued, was “cultural genocide.” Their words, not mine. “White adoption of black children erases their heritage and will lead to the final extinguishing of our people.” Again, their words, not mine. This group—the name of which escapes me and doesn’t matter anyhow, since it no longer exists—filed legal injunctions to block the adoptions from going through, excoriated my aunt and uncle, accused them of racism, harassed them with threatening phone calls, and eventually gave up.

They were fighting a dragon that was already dead. My aunt and uncle went to great lengths to ensure that their children’s cultural heritage was honored. Their house was full of books by authors like Don Freeman and Ezra Jack Keats—books by, and about, people who looked like them. A picture of Rosa Parks was prominently displayed in the entrance to their house. She did her homework, knew not to wash the kids’ hair too often, learned what to do about ash, and even learned how to do African braiding at an Afrocentric salon in Philadelphia.

But it was immensely wounding. She genuinely wanted to work tangible and lasting change. And her treatment by people whose side she thought she was on must have felt like a betrayal, and probably estranged her from the fringes of the American left, and from activism.  

The second event was when she broke her arm.

She took a pretty bad spill while roller-skating with her kids and fractured both her radius and her ulna. It took quite a few surgeries to put her back together again, and she’s still got a serious scar running up and down the length of her inner arm. Her reaction to the experience was interesting. Instead of bemoaning her bad luck, she became fascinated by healthcare and by the human body, and when she was recovered, she ditched teaching and school administration, went to nursing school, and became a neonatal nurse, devoting the rest of her career to taking care of preemies.

To hear her tell it, that’s what turned her around on God. The more she learned about how bodies work, the more convinced she became that it didn’t all happen by accident. And with every tiny life that she helped save, and then cared for, the more convinced she became that this God had a plan for each life.

She was also going through a divorce at the same time she was in nursing school. It was pretty amicable. I suppose she and my uncle both realized that she was a difficult person to be married to, and they remain friends. But as amicable as any divorce can be, the process is still a pretty big upheaval—particularly so when you’ve got four smallish kids at home. That may also have had something to do with it, and doubtless, my mother’s proselytizing—as indefatigable as her own mother’s attempts to civilize her daughters—in all likelihood eroded her resistance to Jesus’ embrace.

Regardless of the reasons, she’s pretty firmly ensconced where she is now. And it troubles me. I’d like to think that the march of secularism and the death of religion are inevitable—but my aunt’s example shows that they’re anything but. Adversity is part of the human condition, and most likely always will be. It’s tough to contest Jesus’s prediction that the poor will always be with us, or the Preacher of Ecclesiastes’s assertion that man is born to trouble as the sparks rise. And adversity has a tendency to send people running back to the arms of the Lord, to take refuge in what they once didn’t pay attention to, or didn’t believe in.  It troubles me because I wonder if, as concrete as my own nonbelief is now, I too might suffer a relapse one day. And it troubles me because...  well, Christ, who knows? She might actually be right.

In any case, examples of people like my aunt ought to humble us nonbelievers, and knock a little of the smugness out of us. Our way is not so absolute that people can’t find their way out of it, nor so invincible that it cannot be eroded.