Compensation Saved My Life

“I’m thinking of divorcing you,” or words to that effect were spoken by my then-wife on a January evening in 1994. I had driven the 500 or more miles earlier that day or the day before and we were staying in her cousin’s trailer not far from the shores of Lake Erie. I had come up to go back down I-76 to Pittsburgh for my interviews with Dr. Conerman, the graduate student advisor of the German Department. I wouldn’t make it. I got lost and went over the Point where the Monongahela and Allegheny merge to form the Ohio before turning back for Erie. I got in anyway. I lied and said I had the flu when I phoned in my apologies for not making it. It was really because I was having huge emotional upheavals. Sometime during my few days there, I found myself in a mall outside of Erie where I bought Heather a blank book. I suggested that she journal in it and that I’d be fine with whatever she decided to do.

Fine. What a word. Fearful, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional is the acronym my tribe applies to this. I waited. The call would come around the time of my mother’s 55th birthday, March 25. I wouldn’t be there to get it. I was watching Star Trek on a friend’s TV over in James-York Terrace and drinking Wild Turkey Rare Breed. My truck had driven me to the ABC store on Monticello Avenue against my will earlier that evening and that bottle of cask-strength whisky had come with two free glasses, so I had to buy it. I’d end up vomiting blood in his toilet and then driving over to my parents house where I’d lie in bed with alcohol poisoning for the next day. Sunday, I returned to my house when I got the call. A few weeks later, I think it was April 16, she came down in a U-Haul with her adopted sister, Kobi, who’d been a foundling in Seoul, South Korea, and they’d clean out half of the furniture. I came by with a friend, the Conservator of Musical Instruments and Mechanical Arts at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and help with loading the bigger pieces. I’d plead with Heather to do an 11th hour about face and not leave, but that’s wasn’t in the cards.

Earlier in January, as I’d shoveled a four-foot drift of snow out of the car park area of the trailer park for her car, I’d realize that it was a whole lot easier to let things go than to have them torn from me. The weather confirmed this as a 50 mile-per-hour gale blew off of Lake Erie in an intense snowstorm. I shoveled that space and realized that having any expectation of being able to hang onto anything was an invitation to intense suffering. I was going to try to let go as gracefully as I could. I had no control over her choices. The fact that “ex-boyfriend from high school” was willing to come back into her life and she had to choose…it wasn’t easy for her either and I had sympathy, even though I knew that it was me who was going to end up without the support that I had expected when I went back to school.

We’d put her through her schooling to get her certification to teach art in kindergarten through high-school between 1991 and 1993. She’d just needed a year and a half of course work since she’d already done a bit at Edinboro where she had met her first husband. He’d taken her to Fairbanks, Alaska where she’d been “head of shop” for the costuming for the University of Alaska - Fairbanks theater. Up there in the shadow of Denali, theater was really important. One of the plays she had costumed was “Curse of the Starving Class” by Sam Shepherd. She’d done costume work for the Williamsburg Players also and even acted in “Dial M for Murder.” She’d joined the Williamsburg Choral Guild too and I remember being in the audience for Handel’s Messiah which that group did as a sing-along. They may still.

We had been married for a little over three years. The first two and a half had been idyllic, but she grew progressively more critical of me as time went on. It may have been the correspondence with Michael on the left coast, the ex from high school, about which I knew and had even encouraged that brought about her dissatisfaction with our lives together. I did my best to please her, but I was scared and hurt by the change in her affections. It’s only now that it comes to me that this might have been the very thing that led to the dissolution of our marriage - and my own return to the bottle and active alcoholism which had been arrested when I first woke up next to her. I remember saying (on August 2, 1989) - “I don’t feel like killing myself anymore!” - and making a commitment, followed through upon later that same day, to throw out my Scotch and cigarettes, cold turkey. No “Don’t Drink” meetings for me! I’d seen those people in the summer of 1985 when my doctors told me that they thought I might enjoy the fellowship. I thought their program looked like a good design for living, but the people? Whack jobs…not attractive. Pathetic, in fact, in the way that they were seemingly unable to lace up their shoes without consulting someone called “a sponsor.” Three months of observation of that crowd cemented my opinion. I wouldn’t return for over 12 years and only when I was desperate enough to consider giving them onr more hour and then I told myself I could kill myself with a clean conscience. Obviously that one hour on the morning of November 14, 1997 had a transformative effect. I talk about it in an earlier post.

So, 1989 through 1992, I stayed sober. I guess it was around the time that Heather’s grandfather, John Russell of Waterford, PA, died of prostate cancer which had gone to the bone, that Michael had gotten back in touch. I’d put Heather on a plane back to Erie at the Patrick Henry International Airport in Newport News. I’d then gone home and gotten a bottle of Glenfiddich to do “the experiment” - I remember sitting at our Ethan Allen bedroom unit in our little house at 3872 Fox Run and pouring myself shots and then doing hand-writing samples to see the effects. Some time in that experiment, I got a call from the then-director of the Early American Industries Association, Emil Pollock, who had an interest in publishing my translations of Peter Nathanael Sprengel and Otto Ludwig Hartwig’s vocational textbook for the Berlin Realschul which had been originally published between 1767 and 1777. I thought, “I really ought not drink! I get important phone calls when I drink!”

Anyway, we didn’t end up closing the deal on that. I would “self-publish” the translations after running into some friction with the chap who had used some funding from a donor to pay me for doing the work. There was no “Work-for-hire” contract, so I contended that I owned the copyright. I was right about that. It was an unfortunate chapter and put me under some degree of stress. While I owe my entire existence to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, they weren’t always good to their employees. Even their Chief Counsel got involved to threaten me. It would be lovely if they learned the value of the individuals who work there, but adminstrations have come and gone and the core of the foundation, the heart and soul of it, has been mostly cut out now. Fortunately, my hometown has “good bones” - about 88 (or 89?) orignal buildings from the 18th century remain. Its history cannot be erased including the history of the Foundation itself which is coming up on a century. There is nothing constant but change, but the dead have been kept alive there in many ways.

I have digressed significantly and not spoken of “Compensation” and how it saved my life in the summer of 1994. As mentioned above, Heather and Kobi, helped by me and John, loaded up the U-Haul. I returned in the evening and took them out to Chez Tran, a Vietnamese Restaurant just off of Monticello Avenue. While there, they told me that they had both been awakened the night before by a figure standing at the foot of their respective beds. I thought, “Well that’s great. They are leaving me with a ghost!” I remember sitting at the foot of our bed, holding Heather one last time. I walked away. I haven’t had that dream where I replay that emotion in a long time. I don’t even relate to the person I was then.

I never saw her again although we shared a few emails a couple of decades ago. After Heather left, taking our healthy cat and leaving me with a dying one which I soon had to put down (could it have ever been more pathetic?), I got the call from UVA that I had been accepted. Shortly afterward, I got the word that Pitt had accepted me as well. UVA did not offer me any support to come study there. The chair of the department told me, “People with your kind of quirky background either do extremely well or extremely poorly. If you do well, we’ll offer support for your second year.” Pitt though offered me a full ride and Dr. Beverly Harris-Schenz, the Teaching Assistant coordinator, recommended that I go to a Goethe Institute in Germany to get my German Language back up to speed. So I packed up and headed to Prien am Chiemsee for an 8 week immersion program that began in June and ran through July. I left the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in May 1994 - just shy of twenty years after I had started as a fifer in the Fife and Drum Corps at the age of 11.

All during that period, I had two tapes on frequent rotation in my little Dodge Ram 50 which I had acquired in 1987 or 1988, my memory is a little fuzzy on that. One was “The Ride of the Valkyries” by Wagner which felt empowering. The other was “Compensation” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The comfort this provided saved my life. I landed in Munich through the good offices of my father who provided financial support beyond all reason as I went through the experiences of studying with people from all over the world. Having a “Eurail Pass” allowed me to hop onto passenger trains to go with my friends all over the place. Most were younger than me and when we weren’t scurring around seeing the sites, we were having parties in the kitchen of “Bahnmeisterei” where my single room was just off of the kitchen. I had no idea how lucky I was, but I think I figured it out in time. As we parted eight weeks later, heading off in so many different directions, I took a train to Vienna, arriving in the evening and walking from the station to the Hotel Kummer. I explored Vienna for a few days before catching a train to Berlin where I spent a night sleeping on the floor of a Croatian friend’s flat before making my way back to Munich to fly home and take up my position at the University of Pittsburgh.

Telling myself these stories is helping me to process the past. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for years and something I have done in fragments many times.

A clearer version of Silvio - Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics - back up singers include “the Dead Men” - Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Brent Mydland!

This is something of a theme-song for me - and I had Holly Lorien Adams play it before a couple of interviews we did on her show on KSKQ - available here:

https://archive.org/details/morning-show-friday-202107300800

https://archive.org/details/hal-gill-morning-show-interview-july-29-22

So much fun!

Onward!