My Father’s Room

The Four Seasons of the Master Myth

Roland Salazar Rose



Figure 1 “Perfect He Thought!” #770 of 1,000; From the Series The Four Seasons of the Master Myth

Preface

I am a visual artist by choice and dedication. With that in mind, I must say that writing My Father’s Room wasn’t painful nor was it joyous. It was an outpouring, exactly the way I paint: get it out and put it down before it escapes you. When I paint I face the blank white paper, board or canvas and let it happen. This memoir was accomplished the same way. It is pure emotion, an urge to “just do it,” not dominated by my intellectual side, yet not divorced from the creative urge within.

Painting what I felt about my father, my divorce, my past, all stimulated by being in my father’s room would not work for me. I could not see any visual representation of this. I had to turn to writing, my poetic ability sorely lacking. Pen and paper were the only way to launch the feelings, to express them to others and to commit them to memory. There emerged an outline but I didn’t write it down. It remained in my mind and it guided me as I set down my past. I wrote for myself, but also for readers who may struggle with their parents, their lives, and the complications of the times we live in. I describe what it meant to be forced from my home. I tried to relate this situation to the need expressed by Joseph Campbell for us to seek that “sacred space.”

My Father’s Room is presented in two parts. Part I focuses on my father and my being in my father’s room in Mexico. Thoughts of him, my life in art and my pending divorce form the essence of this section of the book. It expresses how the “aging process” affected him, and how it was to affect me. The value in having a “sacred space” in which to become more human is expressed. Part II regresses: it is about my earlier years and my first marriage. I go back to the springtime in my artistic days in Europe and my life in art. It offers a written text of the monolog and dialog sequences in The Four Seasons of the Master Myth and also provides an electronic source to the reader via the DVD that accompanies the book. The dialog, which is printed and follows the monolog in Part II, is not on the book DVD that accompanies this book. This DVD has 100 images, accompanied by the monolog and excerpts from Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. A revised DVD is planned for production in 2008-09 and shall be distributed by Chip Taylor Communications.

Living in two distinct cultures, the United States and Mexico, wondering how the experience might have shaped my father, brought in mind how we had failed to communicate during our lifetime. And, that this failure had separated us from understanding our values. His silence of what he knew of our family history left a great empty space that I had no way to fill with factual data especially our Jewish history that he kept hidden from me until I was over thirty years of age. I was not to know if a relative of Solomon Rosenberg, my grandfather, was one of the Jews carted off by the Nazis during World War II to die in the many concentration camps that were uncovered during the Allied occupation. Furthermore, my father’s silence continued when he lived with my spouse and me in Maine, later in Mexico. What did he think when he was brought to Mexico as an old man, soon to need much more custodial care? And as his caregiver, how did I face the core problem? Soon I myself was in my father’s room, aging as he did, concerned about how to live in that “place” and how to manage my life. I faced a second divorce; I would be an octogenarian in Mexico just as he was. With divorce pending resolution I was unable to go back to my home in Maine where I had lived with my wife for twenty-eight years.

My hope in this memoir is to help the reader to search within for meaning and to energize toward new awareness and purpose as one contemplates or experiences aging. This book was written for anyone who cares about the past: its relationship in the present and its importance in seeking harmony and meaning. It is story about me and my father. The others in the story are there to help my father and me to understand each other. The story searches for conversations I never had with him in real life, but which I now have in my father’s room. Unlike real life, they emerge not as verbal battles, but as a means for meaning. There are dark passages here. But there is also light in the “sacred place.”

At times my mind raced faster than it was possible to write. My penmanship has always been a disgrace but this process produced far worse handwriting and I had to clutch a magnifying glass to unravel the chaos on the paper. It looked as if I wished to beat a record that established the most incomprehensible writing in history. Some words or lines appeared as the writing of a dying man, scribbling on the wall of his cell, his last hurrah. It is fortunate that I did not do a great deal of rewriting, for when I did I found that the solution for the scrawl was to use it as a sort of guide, getting an idea from one or more words I could decipher: a clue as to where to go next. I moved along quickly, my sole interest to keep the rhythm alive. Words gushed out as a cascading waterfall, breaking on the rocks below to move down stream. It was uncontrollable, and what was to happen next, the sequences of events, the mood, the characterizations and the structure fell free form. I had no idea how long it was to be and I didn’t care. I knew when it was done, as I know when I have completed a certain painting. I hope that my book helps you on your journey as you advance in age, and that you will welcome a review of your past relationships to challenge this stage in your life, whether it be in your father’s room or elsewhere.

Chapter 1

It isn’t large. If you pace it off, toward the southwest where the doorway lead to the inside patio, you find it to be about six paces. On the width end, it’s only five paces, allowing for the glass doorway leading to the balcony, which is large enough only for a solitary chair of modest size. Here you face west, more or less—tilted to the north. The condo has a lovely garden some ten feet below the balcony. A reproduction of an Olmec head is sited immediately in the garden’s center, and several feet from it is the gate to the street. Turn left and walk to the corner and you stand on Cuesta de San Jose, noted for the metal cross, elevated from the sidewalk; it was placed on the outside terrace of the corner building when these condos where built; it is lighted at night, with a dangling wire connected illegally to the main wire, across the roadway. Turn right and head down the sloping street, watching out all along for booby traps, a Mexican thing, and in about ten minutes you are standing in the central marketplace of San Miguel de Allende.

Sunlight almost always streams in from the southwest window and glass doorway in my father’s room. The sun warms the dark chocolate tones of the tile floor coated with chapapote, unique to this San Miguel area. This is Mexico. The sun is a near constant; it is one of the compelling reasons for expatriates like me to call it home. No screen hangs from the doors or windows as seldom do mosquitoes or flies present concerns. A double bed flanks the wall; a bookcase and a desk with several chairs make up the furnishings. Built into the wall is a bureau and clothes closet. The bathroom is next-door, not connected to the room. A few plants in Talavara (the tile designs originating from the Mediterranean, so prolific here) pots are arranged in a linear fashion, surrounding the walls of the interior patio. The patio makes the room seem larger. As far as I knew, Reggie, my father, never made use of the patio. He had no guests, no friends here; he was alone in his room.

Jiminy Cricket just alighted onto the bedspread. He is looking at me; so I am looking at him. This is my room, now. Reggie is dead. A thimble full of his ashes remains in a ceramic vessel on the mantel of the fireplace, which has never been used. Now, because I wanted one, it has a screen, now it would be safe to fire it up. But when Reggie slept here, that was not possible: I doubt if he could have started a log fire, or even to strike a match! Jiminy Cricket didn’t stay around; he jumped, or did what crickets do; he was gone. Jesus, I thought, Reggie incarnated as a cricket? He wouldn’t like that: my father God-like, demanding, a fearful force in my youth. And here I am, in my father’s room. Here to put to rest, at last, my own restlessness—here I declare once and for all to hear—why he was he, and now, at last, I must be I.

When Reggie called soon after my mother’s death in Hollywood, Florida from heart failure— she had multiple pacemakers—I was shocked! Distance had been very good for our relationship. My brother, the doctor, was the light in Reggie’s eyes; he succeeded in all that he undertook: a brilliant surgeon, wealthy, respected in his professional life, yet he ended his life as an alcoholic and lost all his money along with the respect of his peers. Reggie must have seen me with my inability to find myself as just a “bad seed.” Not worth the effort. It was the way things were. Yet, Reggie called from his apartment in Florida: “Roland, I need your help,” and in so many words or less, he ordered me to come to Florida, make arrangements with my spouse, and move him and his household effects to our home in Kennebunk, Maine. Piss off, I thought! But the same inner force that caused me to marry my first wife in Copenhagen, Denmark, due to an unplanned pregnancy, and which later sought his help in moving us to his home in Queens, promoted me to say, “I will be down to see what I can do!”

He had done it again. And I had done it again—caved in—given up my freedom to meet someone else’s need. In his case, I admit that he was willing to come to our home, to give up his eighty-seven years of hard-won independence. In our home of course he would be safe, cared for—so he thought— and the devil with what the intrusion might mean to us. His indifference, his need to satisfy his needs, was paramount. You can just take it and lump it, Buster. To hell with anyone else! We had room, or I should say we had a bedroom for him Helen’s other’s oldest boy was away at McGill University in Montreal, and the younger boy was in high school but was easy going by nature and would manage.

Our situation was similar to the time when Reggie came from work, when we lived in Queens Village and after washing up, lounging on the sofa, he would call out; “Nellie, more ice tea!” I didn’t hear him say: No, please, no I will get it myself. Mother could be doing something that required her full attention but he, King of the Serengeti Plains, wanted something now. You can wait! He didn’t have a middle name. It should have been Disregard: Reginald Disregard Rose. He did adopt a middle name, some name after a movie star he liked: of course it would be a star, understandably so. Reggie had actually been asked to consider a movie career. In the Heights, a movie mogul asked him to go to LA, as New York movie companies were moving to California, to seek a career in acting. Reggie felt more compelled to stay in New York and he did so for all his working life. In the Depression most people and Reggie was no exception felt threatened and if you had a job you stayed with what you had and never gambled on the unknown.

Damon Runyon, as a reporter for The World covered the “Ruth Snyder/Judd Gray” murder trial, a sensation in New York, in 1927, describes Reggie, a “key” witness, as handsome, having star-like qualities, a quick mind with a retentive memory that pinpointed Judd Gray as the one who had bought a railroad ticket, a piece of evidence which documented Gray having lied about his alibi. Runyon memorialized the trial in his book Famous Murder Trials.

Working as a cashier at the $100 window at the Belmont Race Track wasn’t just about having a second job while supporting the family at his job at the New York Central Railroad. Hardly! It was about his gambling addiction. Gamble he did! And lose he did. He finally got in so deep that he talked his closest friend into loaning him money. His friend illegally borrowed funds from the Railroad safe in Albany, where he was the Station Master. His friend was caught in an audit with the personal loan document in the safe.

With a foreclosure of our Queens property ongoing, my brother, wife and daughter were in Hawaii and brother asked mother to come to Hawaii, to live there and care for his daughter. Mother decided to go and who could blame her? Reggie arranged to move to an apartment in New York City. I packed household items and readied them for shipping to Maine or we sold things at yard sales. Mother would return to live with my father in Queens some years later, after the death of my brother’s wife.

The Queens’ house was sold. I moved my first wife Britt and baby daughter Jane to my employer's hotel complex of several buildings located at the mouth of the Kennebunk River. We lived in one of the cottages facing the River, in a truly beautiful location, the quintessential Maine setting. I had sought this employment as a resident manager while in graduate school and had worked for the owners during the summer months when single. In 1955 in Maine, I applied for a residency at the United States House and University of Paris, L’École Supérieur des Beaux Arts, was accepted and went to paint in France, from where I ventured on to Spain and met Britt. The reason that I sought employment in Maine was disgust with my life in New York. I wanted a place where I could paint and New York was not working for me. I was fed up with graduate school and dull employment at the New York Central Railroad. The residency management job in Maine allowed me to earn money and work at my art simultaneously. I had many free hours to paint: all my living expenses were covered. The owners, Wally and Ginny Reid, were more like family than employers. And when I had returned from my paintings days in Spain, I asked them for reemployment as resident manger, they graciously agreed, providing the cottage for my family.

With my wife and daughter, Rex our family dog, TV and boxes of household stuff, in my age-worn station wagon we lumbered away from New York, never to return. Off we went to a “new” life in Maine. While we lived there, three more children followed, Joan, Catherine, Alexander, all Maniacs: born in Maine.

From there came jobs, buying a home and restoring it, new employment in urban planning. Then an offer for a major planning job in Indiana presented itself. We temporarily shuttered the Maine home and relocated to the Midwest. A merger between my firm and a computer software firm in Virginia eventually resulted in my transfer to the D.C. area. I began consulting work for a firm in New York City. I was assigned to a project in Baltimore, and from this job I found other consulting assignments in another firm in and around Washington. At first we rented an apartment in Virginia, but later we purchased one. The late sixties and Vietnam raged around us. The “Great Society” programs enabled me easily to land employment as a consultant, as one project led to another

Reggie and Mother moved to Virginia after he retired from the New York Central Railroad; he thought it would be best to be nearer to me. Shortly after he settled in Virginia a job change required that we move the family back to Maine. He then settled in Hollywood, Florida. There was a racetrack there and he could get employment and follow his bliss—gambling

Meanwhile, foolish me, I had given up my art— my true calling—to satisfy some middle class sense of values. Do what is right! I doodled faces on Styrofoam cups at meetings, hating what I was doing, on the one hand, and still enjoying the challenge of doing it right, on the other I was damned good at what I did. From a race relations project for the US Navy under Admiral Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations, to a project for the Department of Labor, The Job Bank, I succeeded and left a mark. But this life wasn’t me. I still wanted to do art but I was responsible for a family, wife and four children, a handful for anyone to maintain.

Now I am in my father’s room—aging—as he did here. I will have to make it alone—as he did here. My spouse of twenty-eight years has left me. The room is not sustaining, the environment not life enhancing. Yet, I must go on living, in my father’s room, with memories.

Figure 1, Chapter 1; My Father's Room

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San Miguel de Allende, GTO Mexico, © Roland Salazar Rose 2007