let's enjoy the music

It’s 10 a.m. and my father lies in his hospital bed, talking to me. It’s sunny outside. Rays shine through the windows, dappling walls, dancing on the bedsheets that drape my dad’s skeletal frame.

It’s bright inside this room, but the dark of the doctor’s words from earlier still hangs about. The syllables themselves, still fresh spoken, spread in my mind like thunderheads: Mr. Reddy, you have weeks to live.

I sit in a chair beside my dad, adjusting the volume on the iPhone speaker – keeping the oldies just loud enough to hear but not so loud to drown his words.

It’s hardly more than a whisper. The tumors in and around his esophagus, as well as the damage done by multiple endoscopies over the past few months, have made his voice very weak.

Though a hospital room is hardly the most ideal of places for father-son conversations, we’re grateful to be indoors. It’s December. Condensation beads and trickles down window glass. Cool seeps through poorly sealed panes. Someone – an above and beyond nurse – has smoothed masking tape against the window cracks to keep winter out.

From my iPhone speaker, a song from the 70s playlist we’re listening to punctures the white noise of beeping, hissing, dripping medical contraptions that loom like metal skeletons all around the bed.

I know he’ll recognize the song, but I ask anyway, testing that still-lucid memory of his.

“Summer Breeze. Seals and Croft,” he says.

I nod, turning it up a little. But not too much. He has more to say this morning. But that comes later. Right now, let’s just enjoy the music.

If my dad and I are listening to oldies, we’re inevitably going to start talking about his old record collection and how as a child I listened non-stop to those scratched-up, dusty discs.

And we do. We talk about his records.

We talk about how he’s responsible for my love of music as well as the encyclopedic knowledge of anything produced prior to 1980-something. And we talk about one song we’d been trying to remember and how we finally figured out what it was.

The warm sound of crackling vinyl on my dad’s old stereo is one of my fondest memories: Playing the records repeatedly, standing on furniture, pretending it was my own stage, as I lip-synched the songs I loved.

We talk about how he purchased so many of those 45s – God, there must have been 200 of them – secondhand when he was in his 20s: Some restaurant owner with a whole jukebox full of the seven-inch-singles, selling them for a quarter a piece.

We talk about music until the conversation ceases naturally, expiring at the end of a funny anecdote. He has more to say, but we’re finished talking about music.

“We have to talk about my arrangements.”

I get out of my chair, get down on my knees, easing up against his hospital bed to hear him better. “OK,” I say. I steel myself, hearing the hitch in my voice. I clear my throat. “I’m ready.”

We talk about what kind of ceremony he wants. We talk about cremation vs. burial. We talk about financials and hand-me-downs and how things will be without him around. We talk about the eulogy and things he wants said. He wants a celebration, not a sad affair.

He wants jubilation.

Another song comes on. I quiz him about it, and he knows it of course. He knows the title, artist, and even most of the lyrics.

It’s after 10 a.m., as I sit in a chair beside my dad, adjusting the volume on the iPhone speaker – keeping the oldies just loud enough to hear but not so loud to drown his words. We listen, grateful to be together inside where it’s warm on this cold December day, both of us knowing the gravity of these conversations now. More grateful than ever for them.

The sun warms pale hospital sheets that drape his skeletal frame. It’s bright inside this room. Not even the doctor’s words – weeks to live – can eclipse the sun as it dances upon the walls.

Some call it haunted. I call it home.

Lake Lanier is many things to me. It is a source of nostalgia. It is a fixed point for all the mystique I can fathom: Sunlight catching the top of dark waters, dappling all deceptive and bright. It harbors the kinds of secrets you know to be true and others that might keep you awake at night.

I was recently asked to speak about Lake Lanier on a podcast. I said yes. It was an easy sell because Lake Lanier is in many ways inextricably linked to my own childhood.

On the street where I grew up, Lake Lanier was a 1/2 mile hike through the woods (toting fishing pole and tackle box of course) and a kind of wonderland: I could stand on the shore, toss line and bait beneath, and bring forth all manners of hidden monsters and gems from its depths. It was magical.

I think Lake Lanier got into my brain at a very young age, and there it remains, and likely always will.

I wrote my second book, Imminent Domain, loosely based on what I’d gathered about Lake Lanier after a failed attempt to capture the facts of its construction in a historical book I set out to finish a decade ago.

Lake Lanier remains many things to me. Those still waters run deep, and some believe they harbor all manner of biological horrors and fodder for campfire lore. The dividing line between fact and fiction – between the surface and what lies beneath – will never fail to fascinate this Georgia boy.

Blackberry Season

Summer marks something special for me – a childhood memory I can pluck and taste anytime I like. Intertwined in these recollections are the endless hikes through sweltering backwoods trails with my dad seeking out sunny patches in the forest.

Blackberries thrive in full sun, as does poison ivy. Locate blackberry bushes and you’ll often find that three-leafed menace: a yin and yang sharing the same dirt.

But this blog isn’t about North Georgia flora. It’s about my dad’s esophageal cancer and the nasty tumor in the lymph node squeezing his trachea and making it all but impossible to eat.

The cancer has also limited his ability to talk – one of several issues this most recent round of radiation is supposed to fix.

I’ve taken him to so many rounds of radiation and chemotherapy over the past several months that I’ve honestly lost track.

As I drive him to these appointments, our conversations are mostly one-sided because of the aforementioned difficulty speaking. I try to keep things light. He listens, nodding. He speaks in a whisper, mostly muffled by the sound of traffic.

Just last week however, he did utter something unmistakable: “I hope I get better in time for blackberry season.”

We talked about it a little. I said we should use that as motivation to keep going – to get better. He responded with something along the lines of (paraphrasing) if he still can’t swallow by then, perhaps he can chew and spit.

That’s bittersweet (no pun intended), because there’s something so vital to the enjoyment of food lost in the idea of chewing and not swallowing. I can’t pretend to know what it feels like not to be able to nourish oneself through the natural means, but I figure it must leave something to be desired.

In the meantime, as we hope and pray for the radiation to do its work, my dad gets most of his nourishment through a feeding tube. It’s a little awkward for him to do on his own, so my mom and I take turns helping him with it.

It’s been like this for quite a while now, so you can imagine how enticing the idea of food must be. Envision the tart, sweet satisfying burst of blackberry juice on your tongue on a sunny afternoon.

Now, imagine it when you’ve had little to nothing to eat for months except what’s piped directly into your body by unnatural means.

I bet that blackberry would taste like heaven.

June marks the start of blackberry season: I think back to our many saunters through the woods in search of the sunny spots where the plants thrive: Stepping over the poison ivy, stepping on the poison ivy, or just wearing long pants to keep it from touching our legs.

Sun burning our necks, the air so humid you could backstroke your way right through it. And somewhere hanging in the air is that subtle scent of ripening wild berries growing fatter in the North Georgia forests.

It’s the kind of childhood memory that makes me grateful for all the hikes through the woods and all the seasonal wild fruit harvested in stray grocery bags or zip-locks we stuffed into our pockets. It’s these kinds of memories that I hope and pray every day to continue to amass like so many bags stuffed to the brim with all the blackberries we could carry home.

I find myself wanting to hold on – to take more than my fair share. I want to keep making those memories.

After all, blackberry season is nearly here.

Fright without flight…why i love horror (thanks, Uncle Chuck)

Tonight, I’m reflecting on and remembering my Uncle Charles. It’s his birthday today. He died in 2021 and would have been 63. He was a great dude. Everybody loved him. He was a writer too, and he taught me plenty. Hell, I dedicated my second book to him. Chuck meant that much to all of us.

There’s so much I could say about him but, for the purposes of this post, and, given that it’s spooky season, I’m thinking specifically about how he’s singlehandedly responsible for my love of all things horror.

See, my folks kept a pretty tight handle on what I watched as a kid. They did it because they wanted to keep me from the bad stuff. Same reason any parents would do this. I appreciate them trying. 

Thing is, when I went to hang out at Uncle Chuck’s house … yeah, that rule didn’t apply.

On one fateful afternoon some 30 years ago, Uncle Chuck decided I’d benefit from a double feature (both starring Kiefer Sutherland in a villain role, incidentally, and both RATED R):

We watched Stand by Me first. Loved it. To this day, one of my favorite movies. I’ve seen it so many times it’s hard to even keep track.

Next up for our afternoon matinee, just as the skies were beginning to darken, appropriately: The Lost Boys.

Uncle Chuck popped the video in the VHS player and we watched. This was to be my first true horror film. I’d viewed plenty of intense movies before, but this … wow … this was about to blow my mind.

For an intermission, Chuck went to the kitchen to reheat some chicken wings in the oven. He came back with a couple plates full. We devoured the wings as I watched vampires devour humans, barely able to even focus on my food.

What stuck with me was the overhead POV shots of the vampires flying in the skies. God, if these demonic things could fly through the clouds, swoop down, and rip doors off hinges and roofs off cars, then nobody was safe.

And so with this in mind, I lay awake that night, post-Lost Boys viewing, wide-eyed, listening to Chuck snore two rooms over. There was the fear of what I’d seen on the screen, coupled with the young writer’s imagination I didn’t yet realize I had (that ability to see extremely detailed pictures of things materializing in your head and, sometimes, the blurring of reality and imagination, especially as a youth, that accompanied these mental images).

After wrestling with the idea of whether my seeing these things could physically make them materialize in the dark, something powerful came to me: What was so cool about watching a horror movie was the simultaneous combination of safety and fear. There was a sensation of fright without an actual fear of danger.

Maybe it wasn’t so crystal clear in my brain then, but that general idea came to me as I lie there in bed, thinking about those movie vampires.  I was hooked on horror right then and there. In the coming years, I’d sneak many a Stephen King book into my room at night without my folks knowing (sorry, mom!)

So, a shoutout to Uncle Chuck on his birthday today. He touched the lives of so many folks in my family – and beyond. I am grateful to him for many things: a love of writing and, whether he meant to instill it or not (I like to think he did), a love of scary movies and books.

You can't trap the moment in a jar

The other morning I did something super dumb: I accidentally deleted all the videos on my iPhone from the past six months.

Now, I could sit here and try to explain to you how it happened, but it would only make me sound like more of an idiot. The bottom line is this: everything I videoed from the past half year (with the exception of stuff I posted to facebook/Instagram) is gone without a trace.

Now, that might not sound like such a huge tragedy but when your kid is only three years old, six months is a huge chunk of her life to go missing. And, as my little girl grows older, there’s always this notion running through my head that if I digitally preserve the moment it will somehow make me appreciate her childhood more — well, one day anyhow.

But it’s wrong thinking like that. The truth is that a photograph isn’t even comparable to the practice of being present in the moment as it unfolds, preferably without clutching your iPhone or Android, scrambling to get that perfect shot/video clip/Boomerang.

But it still hurt. All that video footage — POOF — gone.

It got me to thinking about that old maxim though. You know the one. Whatever you may try to do in order to preserve the precious moments of your life, in the end you can’t take it with you. It’s the illusion that you can trap the moment in a jar, put it on a shelf, and one day bask in the fresh glow of it all happening again for the first time ... but really you can’t. These photos and videos we incessantly snap and record are a distraction from the truth: that the moment we’re in is all there really is.

You can’t. Take it. With you.

And, while it’s sometimes stressful being father to a three year old, these are beautiful times y’all. I will one day undoubtedly miss the trappings of having a toddler in my home: Mylar balloons with cartoon characters; Fruity Pebbles in the floor like rainbow confetti crunching beneath my feet; a cappella nursery rhymes; impromptu dance parties; stickers plastered all over the house; uneaten meals made with love; overdue diaper changes; and middle-of-the-night awakenings as she crawls into bed beside me.

But, you can’t take it with you.

In the meantime, as I move through this life among others grappling with their own ongoing personal narratives and their never-ending struggles to find meaning, love and acceptance in this world, I will do my best to appreciate these moments as they happen, instead of stockpiling memories for another day.

When you think about it like that, losing six months of videos seems a lot less tragic; in fact, it's absolutely liberating.

Pileated Woodpecker

Stella presses her nose flat against the cool window, fingers smearing glass as she watches the squirrels and cars and birds. The leaves fluttering to the ground. A diminutive creek burbling below. Despite cold conditions outside, we are cozy inside a home in Asheville, North Carolina, with endless heat piping through the vents and a comfortable spot at the window where we observe the world together.

She points out a group of pigeons as they land on a large oak. “That’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 birdies.”

Stella smacks her tiny hand against the window, and the pigeons hurry off as quickly as they arrived. The birds disappear against an overcast sky. It is a gray world out there this morning, and the cloudy haze seems to cast its pall on all things.

But we are happy in this house. We’re about to go out for breakfast on the final day of our little vacation. My wife is in the bedroom getting ready. I can hear her through the wall humming to herself. I sip my coffee. My daughter eats pretzel sticks one by one. She tells me they’ve got bugs — “buggies” — on them so I won’t steal her pretzels. She thinks that will stop me.

There is a sudden flash of color outside — a stripe of red and black and white.

It’s a bird crawling along the trunk of the big tree right outside the window. But not just any bird. I tell Stella to “wait right there. I’ll be right back,” and I rush to the living room, swiping my glasses off the coffee table. Practically jogging back to our perch at the window, I put my glasses on and gawk at the large pileated woodpecker.

It flies to a nearby branch, deftly dangling upside down as it systematically drills into the wood — intense eyes alert, head and neck shaped like a tomahawk, huge muscular body and claws of a predator.

I grab Stella by the arm, and I’m like “Hey, look! Pileated woodpecker, Stella!”

She turns to me, puzzled — more fascinated by the expression on my face I think than by any bird that could ever alight on a tired oak branch outside. She doesn’t understand why I’m amazed by it. And, returning her gaze it takes me a moment to consider it myself.

To Stella, this is just another bird.

But, thinking back on it, I remember when I was a little boy, not much older than Stella, my own father ignited in me a reverence for this beautiful bird. Distinctly, I recall walking through the woods with him behind my house one fall afternoon, leaves crunching beneath our sneakers, when he suddenly halted, grabbing my shoulder. “Look!”

That flash of red and white and black above was forever stamped in my memory. It was thrilling. For a North Georgia boy obsessed with mysteries and jealous of all the unexplainable phenomena dispensed elsewhere throughout the rest of the world, this was the closest thing I’d ever get to a Bigfoot sighting.

I recall the look of concentration, of unblinking wonder on my father’s face as we silently watched the bird peck away at some bark, eat some bugs and disappear again, just like that. The change in his demeanor was what made it all magical, I think. My father has never been a very openly spiritual man, but I knew in that moment this was his religion. This respect for nature and for the rare jewels it can bestow.

And so as Stella and I watch this brief visitation, I begin to wonder if it will make some subtle mark upon her mind as well. As I ponder this, the pileated woodpecker springs from the tree, wings flapping. It disappears from our view.

I hope she can remember it. I hope she can share an unplanned moment like this with her child or children one day as well. It doesn’t have to be a bird. It can be anything, so long as it means something. Because whether my father realized it or not, the appreciation for this bird was a gift, and nothing less.

As Stella and I sit together looking out the window in Asheville, North Carolina, she picks up a pretzel stick, nibbling off little pieces of salt. She smiles at me. “Birdy.”

Then, correcting herself: “Woodpecker.”