What We Bring To The Table

Companions at the table are usually people we already have some relationship with and so have a hint of what to expect. Not so on the train.

The spry old-timer extended his well worn hand, his knuckles swollen likely from arthritis. He looked me in the eye and said, “take my hand in yours.” This was about five minutes into meeting Peter Dukich in the Amtrak dining car. We were beside each other in close quarters. I hesitated but it seemed harmless enough so I took his hand in mine. Then he said, “now, squeeze my hand as hard as you can.”

I met his intense gaze, smiled to make myself a little more comfortable and said, “No, I don’t think I should do that.”

“Go ahead! I’ll match you!” He exclaimed with bravado, almost a dare.

We were there for dinner, rolling along somewhere in the southeast corner of Colorado, headed for Chicago. In the few minutes before the handshake, Peter informed me he had just turned ninety, and with a sly twinkle introduced me to his wife Charlotte telling me she was (I do not recall the exact number), on the order of forty years younger than he. Charlotte smiled demurely. Peter then quickly moved on to expounding the virtues of physical work, especially outdoors, and especially in the garden.

I gave his hand a squeeze. And he met it. And he said, “Go on.”

There was no doubt Peter had life force. I thought, “ok, I’ll ease into this,” and said, “Peter, I refuse to hurt you.”

“I’m not worried about that,” he said with steady resolve. “Go ahead.” He was serious about this.

And I squeezed his bony old hand a little more and he squeezed back and I squeezed more and he squeezed back… until the two of us were in all-we-got vise grips, with faces turning red, staring at each other, our arms shaking from the strain and I thought to myself, “… white linen table cloth, flowers in vase, dining car, 90 year old man… and I’m sitting here in a lock grip about to crush his hand… if I made this up no one would believe it!” After a life of mostly physical work I am capable of a substantial grip and this was getting crazy and finally, thank goodness, one of us backed off. We were both breathing hard. Peter had made his point. Yes, physical work, outdoors…

Dinner arrived, my lamb chops a little overdone, but as the high plains landscape swept by, as the light failed, Peter and I continued our conversation about food and energy and life. He was sure to tell me about “Peter’s Powder,” a super concentrated compost he makes and speaks of with great enthusiasm. I’m sure it has some kick. Peter Dukich is a fascinating man in amazing physical shape for any age, not to mention 90. No doubt he has touched many, if not with his iron grip certainly his spirit. Dinner was among the most memorable I’ve had.

After a night of pounding and rocking over poorly kept track, a night of the train stopping and starting and the horn blasting I hadn’t slept well if at all. Brushing my teeth and washing my face while bouncing and lurching along in the teeny bathroom with the teeny-tiny sink didn’t help my demeanor much. But coffee would, so I looked forward to breakfast. Running into Peter and Charlotte again would be a plus but did not come to pass. The steward directed me to a table where a lone woman sat, bleary as me but wearing a suit. I was dressed in my usual attire, permawrinkle cotton. We said good morning to each other, silently acknowledging the insincerity of it. Just give us the coffee. Then two other women came to the table, each also in crisp business suits. Polyester has its advantages. Neither of them looked particularly happy – fatigue as I found out, is not conducive to congeniality.

A bit of small talk went around the table, pleasant enough and then one of them fired the first shot, some comment on politics with an inflammatory barb in it and without warning these three were growling, snapping their teeth, straining against the leashes of civility and generally going for blood. The tension in the air was thick enough to cut with a sharp knife. I’m glad we didn’t have a sharp knife, because it would have been used it to settle the dispute in a decisive manner and then we would have made the news. I have never before or since found so much to focus on in a plate of eggs and bacon and toast. So I managed to stay out of the fracas, and got the hell out of there and back to the safety of my economy sleeper asap. Oh sleeper, sweet sleeper.

Farms and prairie and the back yards of America slipped by. St. Louis was a stream of vacant factories and warehouses with broken out windows, empty parking lots, derelict cars and a few lost souls wandering around in it all. I looked forward to lunch and knew I would give the steward an argument if I saw any one of the breakfast Valkyries within spitting distance of my table.

Fortunately they were nowhere in sight and I was seated with an elderly and very stately woman of African American descent. She smiled primly and as other diners were seated at tables around us, informed me her daughter and granddaughter would be arriving soon. And in walked a woman who could give Koko Taylor a run for her money and a girl of about sixteen who was, in a word, HOT! The daughter eyed yours truly over suspiciously, then sat down beside me thus cornering me in. The granddaughter smiled and twinkled and wiggled and I wondered, “who would have guessed this combination?” Being the one lone skinny white guy, if I knew what was at all good for me I better mind my manners. To a T. So I mostly paid attention to the grandmother and kept my hands on the table.

Slowly the uneasiness, the what the heck do we do now feeling we were all feeling - except the granddaughter who knew what she wanted to do - melted away and I found out these three were from Bronx, New York, and Grandmother, whose deceased husband had been a train conductor all his working life was treating to a train trip around the country. As we bore down on Chicago we talked about life in New York and New Mexico, and train travel and I loved their New Yourk accents. We told jokes and laughed and had a wonderful time. Where else would I have lunch with the matriarch and two succeeding daughters of an African American family from the Bronx?

The Amtrak dining car is a place and experience not to be missed. Dining with strangers was by far the coolest part of getting to Chicago. The next coolest part was at the station where the bag I checked was the first to come off the conveyor belt.

Gordon Bunker

Photo courtesy of Amtrak.

An Interesting life

I have picked apples, built boats, managed the collection of a museum, swung a hammer, been responsible for multimillion dollar construction projects, and done a dozen other jobs. I’ve rolled in the dough and lived on the edge of poverty. Now I write and so far it is the toughest job.

Like any art and craft writing requires an open heart, it requires one to look and see and listen and hear very, very carefully. This all comes naturally enough; the tough part is living with the accumulated experience and knowledge which makes one acutely aware of the good and bad of life, every minute of every day in the thick of it. That many writers become raging alcoholics or commit suicide is no surprise. Writing requires unending honesty and empathy, it requires not slipping into the comfortable cloaks of judgment, of cowardice. It requires love and acceptance.

My sister Vic sent me a birthday card quoting Helen Keller: “Life is a daring adventure, or nothing.” Yes. Thank you Vic for getting it, you’re a gem.

The fellow who lives down the road drives in and out of his place three, four, five times a day. What the heck is he up to? (A friend suggested he’s dealing drugs.) He must be the itchiest guy on the planet. While his one man parade is annoying, I feel for him.

I watch a bird fly and marvel at the shapes of the wings and body, nature’s work, constant honing. The bird slips through the air, free, slips through the bounds of gravity and earth. It goes about its way, shrinking to a point in the sky and then disappears from sight. But it is still there. The sky and the light change. I feel joy and thanks for the mystery of things unseen.

I puzzle at how we’re smart enough to get ourselves into all sorts of trouble but not smart enough to get out. Conversely our intelligence may be our undoing. The sadness, the horror and pain we cause one another in war and myriad other atrocities tears me apart.

The balance tips back and forth between beauty and ugliness and life goes on.

And so there are times I cannot write, my mind and heart lock and I spend a day or a week or a month agonizing over it all. Nothing comes out, the screen stays blank. This is the worst. I pace or sit. I look out the window. I do something else, anything else, just to get away from the not writing.

Things happen which may not gel until later. I stand at the sink washing dishes and remember – the image in my mind overwhelms me – the simple joy, the brilliant smile of a little girl I saw yesterday at a taco joint. She sat with her dad and would sip her drink through the straw and they talked, and she would tip her head back and look around with her twinkling dark eyes and giggle and smile. And for those moments the world laughed, the world sang with unmitigated joy. Her dad would smile and tenderly stroke his hand over her head and down her back. They were so happy, it was wonderful to see this. Their tacos arrived, each a present in crinkly paper they eagerly unwrapped. Daughters can bring out a tenderness in men rarely seen. It is so very sweet.

I hear the swish and whoop of a raven’s wings beating the air as it lands on the roof of the house, it clucks and chortles and in a moment flies away, swhoop, whoop, whoop. The sun is going down and I finish doing the dishes.

Then there’s a year’s work tossed off by publishers with notes to this effect coming back, copied on strips of paper and this only because I supplied an SASE. And money, if there is any money is only slightly greater than zero, unless some day I win what is essentially the lottery. So why write? Because when the words come it is magic. And every once in a while I hear from a reader that something I wrote touched them, and it just don’t get better than that.

Gordon Bunker

The Clock

The clock is one of the few things I have from my dad. He kept it on the workbench in the garage, and one day while we were out poking at one of the cars and both knew he wasn’t long for this world, feeling awkward I said, “Some day I’d like to have the clock.”

He picked it up, handed it to me and smiled. “Now it’s yours,” he said. My dad was a man of few words, unless he got telling one of his stories. He died a couple of months later, confused and frightened with not much left of him and tubes going in and out; somehow not a fitting end for a man who survived three wars and had flown aircraft to and landed on every continent of the globe (including Antarctica), and the Arctic ice cap.

The clock is a Wittnauer 8 day for aircraft use, made in Switzerland. My dad’s work was more or less equally divided between flying for the military and aircraft safety administration for the state of New Hampshire. In that capacity he investigated accidents and the clock came “from a wreck.” The circumstances of this wreck or how he got it I do not know, but he treasured it for years.

As a kid I often flew in small aircraft with my dad and would watch what he was doing from the co-pilot’s seat. (I also learned to fly instruments before visual, but that’s another story.) Before takeoff he would go through a preflight checklist; he would wind the airplane’s clock and check it against his watch, he might then adjust it and then set the red hands against the white to keep record of the time we started. He would also set the barometric altimeter according to what the tower told him, and go on checking all sorts of other things with the plane yearning to fly as the engine idled, fighting the pull of the propeller against the parking brake. Often he would tap the faces of instruments as the mechanisms might be sticking, and if he was happy with how they responded and everything else, off we’d go.

The clock is a quality piece of equipment. For its small size it has heft. The winder clicks precisely in and out of the setting position and the second hand sweeps around splitting each second into four tiny mechanical increments. Unlike a digital timepiece it is comforting to watch this clock work. Powered by the energy stored in a spring, the hands going around imply a continuity to things rather than the linear marching forward of numbers, in abstract and merciless lock step with the pulsations of a tiny crystal stimulated by an electrical current. There is hope in continuity and hope is something otherwise in short supply. I wind the clock once a week.

Gordon Bunker

West Bend

There are times we have instinctual responses to circumstances, we take action and afterward wonder where it all comes from. What forms our subconscious I find fascinating and mysterious, influences may go way, as in millennia way, back.

The road atlas shows a campground on the West Bend of the Missouri River near Pierre, South Dakota. I take the turn off the main road and head south into vast open prairie, the road is dirt and heavily washboarded and there’s six miles of it. I gas the truck. At this speed I’m essentially airborne, skipping along the tops of the ridges. Control of the truck is greatly compromised and the suspension takes a beating, but the ride is smoother and I want to get it over with. Stones fly up and ping and snap as they ricochet off the underbody and exhaust. A big rolling plume of dust billows up behind me.

The road dips and I come to the river. There are trees and the air is softer. Sites near the water are all taken. RV’s sit in rows, their generators thrum, fans in AC units blow and the blank eyes of satellite dishes stare and search for tiny emitters so far away. Men and women with bellies sit in folding chairs under awnings and drink beer. Most setups have little signs posted informing stoppers by with a starting point, such as, “The Gustav’s, Estelle and Dick, Toledo, Ohio.” I drive around the area to find a site with some privacy. On a back loop I find a hollow in among low hills forested with scrub oak. I back the truck into a site and settle in. It is quiet and I have the place to myself.

After the ritual of setting up the camp stove, cooking and eating dinner and cleaning up I sit at the sturdy picnic table and write in my journal. The light is failing so I set a flame to the old hurricane lamp. Time goes by and my focus is such I don’t even notice it’s dark. The oil lamp casts a small warm ring of light. It is all I need.

The thought “it is time to get in the truck,” floods my mind, the odd part being I am not particularly tired, the wind isn’t blowing a gale, bugs are not eating me alive. The night is warm and still. Nonetheless the message is clear. I heed it, gather my things and get in the truck. The screened windows are open and I close the tailgate. It was then at least a half dozen coyote voices from all around broke into song, “Yi-yi-yi… Yip, yip!” The chorus went on for minutes and suddenly stopped. It was as still as before.

They must have been all around me for some time, just far enough into the dark, watching me. Quiet, quiet. And something in their presence unseen and unheard spoke to me.

Gordon Bunker

Photo: Rebecca Richardson