The Determined Empty Chair

The brilliant firstborn Irish son who took up the mantle of fame from my father and swung it over bigger markets, Pogo remains a determined empty chair at the table.

When I meet him in dreams, it’s always a happy reunion, a reminder we’re more than mortal, that chronology’s not everything.

I want to leave him back in the “Pogo-Bogo, Reen-Bean” days, in his crack-skull Family Journal adolescence, his goofy “be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be somebody’s brother” jokiness, or even in the heyday of his fame, hobnobbing with cultural bigshots, scoring an honorary degree from a most prestigious university. He got further on the upward outward ladder of public success than any of us.

But I can’t leave him there. He left us first.

Was it true Dad pushed him to succeed, and money was the only measure? Did he swallow that hook, line, and sinker, a hardened vein of money hunger constricting his poet’s compassionate heart?

Mom told us he suggested at Dad’s death that she would save a lot of money by burying him in a pine box.

A horrifying slap to her grief. “He was an important man in Minneapolis,” she counters. “I won’t compromise his dignity.”

It isn’t only money, though.

Shockingly, not long after Dad’s death, his wife writes Mom a scathing letter, ostensibly as part of her own psychotherapy. She insists Mom is relying too heavily on Pogo since Dad died.

“He’s my husband, not yours,” she writes.

We all have our issues with Mom, but there’s such a thing as human decency.

Is it Pogo’s wife who urges and wedges him away from us? Shortly thereafter, he comes to Mom’s apartment and tears all his pictures out of the family scrapbook, destroying the gift Kako made for Mom and Dad’s twenty-fifth anniversary, further rending Mom’s raw heart.

He takes a job in a larger Midwestern city, where they move with their two young sons.

Over the years they run hot and cold with us, returning to the fold occasionally, when they want something (the grandmother clock, or career help for a son), then abruptly cutting off contact.

We talk among ourselves, trying to understand what happened this time, or why he chafingly persists in calling siblings by their baby names, why he exploded his close bond with Tom, how he could believe the help I gave his son was intended to smash their relationship.

•••

Acts of love, Pogo, were ground under your heel. You were a punch to the solar plexus, an onslaught of nausea. I understand “cold shoulder,” for you turned from my open arms at a family funeral, launching a rocket of ice.

But must I list disappointments? Bad behavior? Misplaced values? Delusions?

Must I use you to shock and entertain, to get people on my side?

•••

One morning I get a phone call from Tom’s wife Linda.

“We thought you should know that Pogo has been lost in the woods for two days.”

“What?”

“Went on a hike and didn’t return. They’re sending out helicopters.”

I leave a message on their answering machine: “Just heard—hope everything’s okay—thinking of you and sending love.”

Big search. They find him on the third day, walking, weak and dehydrated. He’d wandered off the trail, lost his way. Had to filter puddle water through his baseball cap, make a shivery bed of moss and dead tree, confront mortality.

I leave a message when he’s found, assuming near-death yields perspective. It does: he reconnects with other siblings. But not with me.

Years go on, stings subside.

The rest of us get closer, visit more often. We feel sorry Pogo and his wife miss out.

•••

Even if life has somehow charred your poet’s heart, I see you happily in dreams. If you called tomorrow, I would answer. There’s no reason not to love, no time for anything else.

Love may mean distance. Children pout in bedrooms. Doesn’t mean we leave the house. Doesn’t mean we leave the landscape. Nothing is permanent, eventually.