The Umbrella

The tornado went through in '74. The neighbors say it sounded like a freight train. My aunt El was always jumping and starting in the spring and summer, cautiously eyeing the door to the root cellar; she'd mutter about hearing the sound of a freight train, but since the railroad  tracks were just down the drive - skip over the gravel roadway and there they were - it was put down to failing hearing and a general jumpishness of Aunt El's, rather than dementia praecox.

After the real tornado in '74, down river from El's, down at Gram Parson's - where the river bucked up against the delta head, then staggered and slowed down to spread out widely into the lake; there where my parents lived,  it was time to rebuild. This was the time to take the summer house, bought by my grandparents around World War I, and bring it up to date. It was old. It was based on a cottage that formed part of a Grand hotel back in the late 19th and early 20th century: a separate domicile where people who did not wish to live in the main building could stay; free spirits, no doubt, who flew from the social strictures that ruled the main enclave, fancying themselves Henry Ford, Tom Edison, and Harve Firestone on a camping hike in western Pennsylvania - free from the gaze of Clara, Mina, and Lizzie.

I have seen photographs of the hotel at this time, even a picture of the cottages, though not the exact same as ours, and the people were dressed alike everywhere:  an unintentional candid series of women in walking dresses - now and then riding dress broke into view - and summer travelling dresses, culminating in afternoon dresses when the sun was lower in the sky,  and prints became blurry by a compensation in exposure time - grasping at photons and catching Muybridge-movement in sepia tones.
Men wore boaters and cravattes, unless they played at something more taxing than croquet, when the open collar was emblematic of their club. All were pale faces, the women who carried parasols especially so. The men who had darkened complexion seemed like servants captured in their rounds by the camera, or like roguish explorers - like Burton of the Nile - who came, created a stir, caused ladies to swoon and old crones to enforce purdah upon the girls in their charge.. and you knew they were destined for a bad end in some bawdy house East of Suez. It was life, ablaze, standing at attention with all its idiosyncratic emblems and medals by which it defined itself, and daring posterity to do better.

So we, the families of my brother and I,  bought an umbrella for the dock. Of course, the original dock and boat house, where I had carved my initials in 1960 into a door jamb and which had been white-washed and embalmed for posterity, was long gone: swept away by the tornado, the supporting spiles nipped off like spring shoots are nibbled by hungry deer. But when the dock was repaired a few years after the work on the house, we bought an umbrella to place on the end, so we could go out and sit in the sun without being fried; sit in the cool of the breeze blowing over the river.

Now my parents still had an umbrella in the garage: it was the one they had originally bought for the patio behind the house we lived in when I was in elementary and middle and high school. It was by now 30 years old, if it was a day. When the tornado had gone by, it had shook the garage, then jumped overhead and came down, taking the superstructure of the root cellar and the entire outhouse. In this process, it had shaken the garage so strongly that the dust from between the boards and the mica from the shingles had been showered down, and the umbrella was covered by a thick layer of this soot.

They greeted the new, clean, umbrella with a bit of disdain, favoring their old faithful one, which - if memory serves - hadn't actually been used since they moved it from city house to summer house years ago. I remember being surprised at this. Looking back, it was the first in a series of paradoxes they began to present to us, their children: they had grown up with the view that summer houses were supernumerary houses, and as time went on, this tendency began to cement into a faith, the outcome being a kaleidoscope of eclecticism of furniture and pictures and knick-knacks. Within a short time, it resembled a museum of tchotchkes dredged from the unconscious and the id of mid-20th century America.

My father got a ladder and pulled the old umbrella from the rafters of the garage. He took it outside, stood it up, banged it a few times - about 30 - on the ground to knock the dirt off. He hosed it down, and it began to take on color, faded and pale, but color, much like a hand-watercoloured umbrella from an old photo entitled "At the Beach" or "On the Sand at Coney Island".

He reached under and released the latch, and it extended itself outwards, opening up and over his head... and releasing a shower of dirt on him. We discreetly left the backyard, thinking it best to let him rally the troops as best he could. We grasped the new umbrella, with its polished cherry wood gleam and its smooth, supple blue fabric, and began trekking to the dock. I felt jaunty and hummed "Kyrie Eleison" from The Lord of the Flies.

The choir singing "Kyrie" on the beach

We had already lugged the base out at the end of the dock, so we stuck the umbrella in, and opened it to its full extent. Now we could sit out on the dock, without worrying about getting too much sun. Our lives had spanned the range of learned opinion on sunshine: brown-as-a-berry health & spend all day in the sun to mega-sunscreens with suncreen protection factors of 110% and holes in the ozone layer; I myself found a mens' gardening hat with an extra wide brim, and was then, as I am now, in the habit of pottering around like Brian Blessed portraying old Augustus Caesar when out and about al fresco.

The dock was now complete. Before now, it had been only half-done: offering too much summer and sun. Now it was perfect: we could escape the sun when we wanted, dive out of the shadows when we wanted; throw a pole in the water, dive in the river, dry out, or stay cool. It was complete.

The only downside left was the fact that our parents never seemed to come out to the dock now.

They had spent an afternoon trying to resuscitate the old rugged umbrella, to set its broken ribs and to stitch up its fabric, all to no avail. Since it had been brought down from the rafters, and since it was no longer useable, there did not seem much point in putting it back up in the rafters, so it made its way over to the refuse pile next to the garage, on the north side, out of our sight, but visible to the next door neighbors.
There started an long discussion about whether the garbage haulers would pick it up with the rest of the garbage on garbage day, a week away.

The discussion continued for most of the week, on and off, stoked by my mother's insatiable sense of analysis, an urge which drives her to attempt to see an item of interest from every possible viewpoint, to create scenarios for every eventuality, and to engage you in conversation about it. I can't tell you how many times I have fallen for this: to hear her speak of something of some importance, to warm to the conversation, to express my own considered opinion... and totally forgetting that all I have done is extend her monologue. She has no intention of paying attention to what anyone says, especially if it does not agree with the opinions she has so far gathered on her side.

If she does actually agree with you, she will not admit to it, rather she will bring it forth some time in the future by expressing your opinion as her own, and daring you to say otherwise.
Eventually, we called the haulers the day before garbage day, and were told they would gladly take the umbrella;  just have it out at the curb.

In all fairness, my father spends a good deal of time outdoors in the garden area, the area which would be called "garden" if there actually were a working horticultural entity there, but the "garden" is more like a work eternally in progress. My mother is fairly complected, and she has never been much for sunbathing. Their absence on the dock may not have been a smoldering resentment at all. We were probably misled by our memory of all those old pictures of them in their youths, frolicking on beaches and smiling from the gunwhales of open-decked boats. They had both had parents with houses on the river, and had spent a good deal of time outdoors, at least according to the archives. The Great War put an end to all that, I guess.

They did, however, feel compelled to develop a canon of umbrella laws and directives. At eventide, the umbrella must be lowered and its fabric lashed;  it must be removed from the heavy base and laid down, preferably with the apex pointing west, the direction of the prevailing winds. Each year, a series of interrogatories started as to when we shall be moving the umbrella from summer to winter quarters, as winter inexorably approached through the onset of autumn... about August 1, if I recall.

Storms do arise and the umbrella withstood a couple of gales, bending ominously. Several times the wind had filled it as it lay on the dock, and caused it to sail to the very edge, where it teetered on the brink of the 4 foot free-fall into the drink. The laws were designed to protect the guys ninety years old from having to constantly worry about taking care of exotic objects... new to them and unfamiliar: objects looking like a parachute popsicle, alien and ready to vault into the wind and vanish.

In 2008 and 2009, my parents actually did join us once or twice on the dock in the shade of the wooden umbrella. Old hurts were forgotten, and we did have Obama to argue about, and this far outweighed fidelity to some old - and admittedly junky - patio umbrella. Now in 2010 we don't discuss politics anymore, at least I don't. Two weeks ago my father said the terrorists' plan was to bankrupt the country by exploits like Times Square, forcing the police to work overtime... and Obama was behind it. Yesterday my mother discussed politics while constantly referring to some work of fiction she was reading about stratagems in financial markets. So even though this level of discussion is a good deal like that throughout the rest of the country, as well as on cable, we now tend to shy away from it.

The old tree in front came down last year. I counted the rings: there were 140 rings, at least; years of good growth and years of drought and struggle. It stood there all that time. We asked Mom whether Dad would like a new tree in the same spot, but she said no, it would block his view. It's a big river and there's a lot of room; a new tree would be pretty small: a sapling, a new maple, heck, would take 10 years to grow enough to block the view even a little bit, or so it seems.

Maybe the umbrella, even standing way out at the end of the dock, blocks his view, too. He doesn't see too well anyway, and maybe it blocks the view. But what are we looking at? It's a big old river, and it would take a couple dense forests to block the view entirely.

Yesterday, Mothers' Day, we took out the umbrella along with the base loaded onto a green garden wagon. As we put it up, cleaned it off, then took it down again, lashed it and stored it, apex facing westerly, we wondered how long we'd be doing these rituals, but we remained silent.

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