Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [43]
More news of this day in August, halfway through the rerun, as yet another autumn draws near: My big brother Bernie, the born scientist who may know more about the electrification of thunderstorms than anyone, has an invariably fatal cancer, too far advanced to be daunted by the Three Horsemen of the Oncologic Apocalypse, Surgery, Chemotherapy, and Radiation.
Bernie still feels fine.
It is much too early to talk about, but when he dies, God forbid, I don’t think his ashes should be put in Crown Hill Cemetery with James Whitcomb Riley and John Dillinger, who belonged only to Indiana. Bernie belongs to the World.
Bernie’s ashes should be scattered over the dome of a towering thunderhead.
39
So there was Roger Downs of Indianapolis in Colorado. Here am I, of Indianapolis, on the South Fork of Long Island. The ashes of my Indianapolis wife Jane Marie Cox are mixed with the roots of a flowering cherry tree, unmarked, in Barnstable Village, Massachusetts. The branches of that tree can be seen from the ell that Ted Adler rebuilt from scratch, after which he asked, “How the hell did I do that?”
The Best Man at Jane’s and my wedding in Indianapolis, Benjamin Hitz of Indianapolis, is a widower now in Santa Barbara, California. Ben dated an Indianapolis cousin of mine several times this spring. She is a widow on the seacoast of Maryland, and my sister died in New Jersey, and my brother, although he doesn’t feel like it yet, is dying in Albany, New York.
My boyhood pal David Craig, who made a radio in a German tank stop playing popular music during World War Two, is a builder in New Orleans. My cousin Emmy, whose dad told me I was a man at last when I came home from war, and who was my lab partner in physics class at Shortridge High School, lives only about thirty miles east of Dave in Louisiana.
Diaspora!
Why did so many of us bug out of a city built by our ancestors, where our family names were respected, whose streets and speech were so familiar, and where, as I said at Butler University last June, there was indeed the best and worst of Western Civilization?
Adventure!
It may be, too, that we wanted to escape the powerful pull, not of gravity, which is everywhere, but of Crown Hill Cemetery.
Crown Hill got my sister Allie. It didn’t get Jane. It won’t get my big brother Bernie. It won’t get me.
I lectured in 1990 at a university in southern Ohio. They put me up in a motel nearby. When I returned to the motel after my speech, and was having my customary scotch and soda so I would sleep like a baby, which is the way I like to sleep, the bar was congenially populated by obviously local old people who seemed to really like each other. They had a lot to laugh about. They were all comedians.
I asked the bartender who they were. He said they were the fiftieth reunion of the Class of 1940 of Zanesville High School. It sure looked nice. It sure looked right. I was in the Class of 1940 at Shortridge High School, and was then skipping my own reunion.
Those people might have been characters out of Our Town by Thornton Wilder, as sweet a play as can ever be.
They and I were so old that we could remember when it didn’t matter all that much economically whether you did or didn’t go to college. You could still amount to something. And I told my father back then that maybe I didn’t want to become a chemist like my big brother Bernie. I could save him a ton of money if I went to work for a newspaper instead.
Understand: I could go to college only if I took the same sorts of courses my brother had. Father and Bernie were agreed on that. Any other sort of higher education was what they both called ornamental. They laughed at Uncle Alex the insurance salesman because his education at Harvard had been so ornamental.
Father said I had better talk to his close friend Fred Bates Johnson,