Hands On Wooly Bear

Hands—“they are the way we connect with the world,” said a student in a class discussion when we were talking about how the hands of immigrants are almost never like the perfectly manicured and softened hands of American women.  Hands speak for the deaf, but I wonder, too, if they do not speak a language that underwrites our very existence.  If so, then a gesture—a recoil or a reach—could potentially alter our somatic life for years and maybe even forever. 

I remember the morning so clearly.  Thirty seven years ago in the bathroom of Camp Mary.  I was staring into the mirror, smearing Noxema over my face to keep the pimples away.  Katie came to the bathroom door and said, “Something’s wrong with Pop.”  I splashed water on my face, wiped it dry with a towel, went quickly to the pullout sofa bed, and reached toward him, recoiling before I let my hand rest on .... death.  Dead.  Was he stiff?  Was he cold?  I cannot remember.  All I remember was the instant recoil.  All my senses shut down.  I think I looked at his face and think I remember that his eyes were open, but I still do not want to look too close.  Then all the sisters and girl cousins were on the cabin porch screaming.  It was raining outside, and my brother was down on the dock shrouded by mist.  It was always that way in the mornings, and the fog would burn off in a few hours.  Neighbors came and took us away to their kitchen.  I remember blankly staring at a muffin on a plate.  I feel a lump in my throat.  Then, I was in the back kitchen of Camp Mary, being interviewed by a coroner.  He was young and handsome.  I knew the answers to all the questions.  I didn’t cry.  I don’t recall feeling.  Was Pop still there on the sofa?  I didn’t ask.  I never saw his body again.  I pulled my hand back, and the next thing I knew, he was gone.  No more.  Cold as any stone.  The mists of that morning never burned off. 

I am 54—one year older than Joseph Kietzman was when he died.  I saw him buried.  But I don't really know where the grave is exactly.  I stumbled upon it once, saw the letters of his name carved in the stone; again, I recoiled.  In tears, I ran from that place never to return.  Michigan is a safe distance.  But sometimes the past comes looking for me as it did today when I squatted under some spruce trees to pee, and something the trees said spoke of that cabin in the mountains.  I felt the lump in my throat and began to cry.  I quickly pulled up my jeans and strode out into the sun.  “You are just like Red Crosse [the knight trying too hard to be holy].  Remember when Fraudubio, “Brother Doubt”—the man locked inside the tree—told the story of how he was seduced by a witch, and Red Crosse, who’d been seduced by the same witch, didn’t pick up on the connection.”  Because he wasn’t self-reflective, says a student.  Yes, but why?  What stops him or any of us from being able to look inside ourselves and work on our own experiences?  Trauma.  The past gets covered with fog to save us from the devastating Medusa face.  Shame.  I was so embarrassed when I went back to school after my father died because I figured that everyone would know and they wouldn’t know what to say.  I was right: that was exactly what happened.  I am ashamed to be writing this now because I should be over it after thirty years … it shouldn’t be that big a deal (it's cliches like this that keep me from my self, and when I hear myself think them, my unspoken voice always sounds like my mother's).  But when students trust me enough to talk about horrors:  a murdered mother, sleeping in the funeral home, the "bonding experience" of helping to do her nails and hair for the funeral, I am honored because I know that these things are very big deals.  I was given this story just a few days ago, and it helped me realize that continuing to recoil from my own memory may mean that I continue to deny myself my own deep experiences.  I am writing about my father's death here because I don’t want to hide out in literature any more.  I want to have my own life, and I want to reach out and toward people and things rather than pull back and dive inside, hiding my tender flesh within my shell

Across the field is an old road lined with large maple trees.  It’s the kind of road that should lead to a clapboard farmhouse, but there is only a shed that contains the mowers and tractors used to tend the arboretum.  I look down and see a wooly bear.  These are caterpillars—black on both ends with a reddish band in the middle—covered with stiff bristles that don’t feel wooly.  Always on the move in autumn, they look for crevices and holes to winter in before they emerge in the spring to spin cocoons in which they will metamorphose into the Isabella tiger moth.   

I’m always delighted to see them because they bring a happy memory.  My father was an avid golfer, and even on the coldest October Saturdays, he’d be on the golf course.  But he didn’t forget us.  The proof was in his pockets.  As soon as he was in the door, we’d hug him and hope that he remembered.  He’d fish around in his pockets and pull out four or five wooly bears that he had picked up along the edges of the fairways.  He dropped them into the cupped hands of my sister, Katie and I, and we laughed because they tickled.  Then we were off to find our bug houses, rip some grass from the yard, and make a little home for them.  “Thank you, Papa.”  Every time I see them, I remember. 

Instinctively, I bend down and reach out my hand to stroke him with one finger, lightly enough so that he won’t curl up in a ball and play dead.  Petted, he crawls on.  My touch must have been just right.  I walk further down the road and pass a heavy truck, rumbling along.  Oh, no!  I didn’t move the wooly bear.  I turn around and watch as the truck, churning dust, drives right down the road.  Oh, no!  I hesitate in fear before I walk back to see if my wooly bear survived.  I look and look, but I don't see him.  I should have moved him to the side of the road.  Why didn’t I do that?  I don’t see him crawling, but I don’t see him squashed either.  All I see is the criss-cross of branch shadows that lattice the road.  In a passing thought, I wonder if he was ever there at all.  Here and gone.  What I do know is that I reached out, I touched him; and I wasn't so scared of death that I couldn't go back and see.