My parents labored through much of their forty-five years of marriage. In that sense, it is fitting that their wedding anniversary–September 4–often coincides with Labor Day, as it does this year.
Despite their differences, struggles, and heartaches, by the late 1980s Mom and Dad seemed more content whenever I drove from Chicago to visit them in St. Louis.
Mom had retired from her stressful government job. She spent more time in her beloved garden. Dad’s mental illness had quieted. He found solace, reading his Daily Word in their wing-backed chair.
Ironically, this more even footing in their relationship appeared as their physical frailties–and risk of falling–became more obvious.
They went to church together. They cultivated deeper friendships with neighbors. They dined regularly at nearby Grone’s Cafeteria. Life was much simpler.
Comparatively, Tom and I are far more active in our “retirement” than my parents ever were. But we have discovered a similar contentment. There are fewer demands on us. We spend more time on the things we enjoy with the people–friends and family–who mean the most to us.
Today–on what would have been Helen and Walter Johnson’s 75th wedding anniversary–the two people holding hands in this photo are the ones I choose to remember.
But, even during the troubles and heavy lifting of their younger years, I’m grateful for the many things they taught me. How to respect the elderly. How to save for a rainy day. How to be kind to neighbors and care for animals. How to put people before material things. How to be a loyal friend. How to work hard and earn my keep. How to show compassion.
Most important of all, how to love my family, warts and all.
Certainly, by watching Helen and Walter struggle, I learned lessons about how to endure in a world that can often feel unendurable. That may feel like a strange way to pay tribute to my parents on their diamond wedding anniversary. But it’s honest and true.
Though Dad has been gone thirty years and Mom ten, the love I feel for them endures.
In the summer of 1988, Helen and Walter Johnson enjoyed their suburban St. Louis backyard. Mom was 65; Dad was 74.
Remarkably, here in the Valley of the Sun, we have enjoyed a relatively comfortable early June. Seventies in the mornings. Low-to-mid nineties in the afternoons.
I’ve made the most of these breezy bonus days. Walking, hiking, swimming outside to rediscover my energy after a few weeks of long rehearsals and performances on stage indoors with my pals in the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus.
Of course, all of us Sonoran Desert rats know the mild temperatures won’t last.
We now brace ourselves, before triple-digit high temperatures arrive later this week and stay like unwelcome houseguests through most of September.
I’m not complaining. The summers here are quiet, beautiful, and hot–gorgeous sunsets, rugged buttes–away from the rush of the world and the traffic generated by snowbirds.
Our sizzling stillness is punctuated in July and August by monsoon storms that boil down from the mountains that surround us.
Now that Tom and I have lived here almost six years, our Midwestern years and associated memories have begun to fade like colorful t-shirts, hanging on a clothesline, bleached by constant exposure to the sun.
This day-in, day-out aging awareness, as we approach our shared 66th birthday in early July, makes me especially thankful that I wrote stories about my Illinois, Missouri, and North Carolina memories when they were fresh in my brain.
I guess you could say I’m between creative projects. I don’t know what I’ll decide to write next, beyond the weekly ramblings that appear here.
There is a fictionalized story I set aside late last year, when I devoted more time to writing dialogue for the chorus and completing my book of poetry.
In my mind, the main character of this yet-to-emerge family drama is living in the mountains near Flagstaff, Arizona–trying to come to terms with a significant loss he has experienced.
The good news is Tom and I have made plans to spend several days in the higher, cooler altitude of that area in late July to commemorate what would have been my mother’s 100th birthday.
Maybe this journey north, several thousand feet over the saguaros and into the ponderosa pines, is exactly what I need to rekindle my next story away from the scorching sunsets of our regular Sonoran life.
Losses and stories come in many forms. This one is best told by my husband Tom, today’s guest blogger.
***
Ode to a Fig Tree
by Tom Samp
When my grandparents moved in 1972 to the Scottsdale condo where Mark and I now live, my grandfather planted a fig tree.
This tree grew and flourished. It was unique and magnificent. It produced sweet purple figs every summer.
There was never a time when this tree wasn’t a part of the condo, and of my memories of my grandparents and parents. The tree became a part of the lore of our condo complex.
Last Friday, a victim of the carpenter bees that nested and chewed slowly through the bark and the wood inside, the tree had literally cracked in half and fell bent to the ground.
The sadness was immediate and deep.
But why feel this way for a tree? It’s only wood, bark, leaves, and, in the summer, sweet purple fruit.
My mourning certainly could not compare to that felt by our friend and neighbor Aggie, whose husband Bill, also our friend, passed away during the week.
Still, it was the sentimental images and feelings I attached to the fig tree that made its death so emotional for me.
It was a part of our home that I almost took for granted. A splash of green we saw when we opened our blinds every morning.
A place for the small birds–sparrows, finches, lovebirds–to wait their turn at the bird feeder we hung right outside our window.
The shady spot where our neighbors Pat and Gary placed their lawn chairs to read or relax; and where Gary took his last breath on Good Friday, 2021.
A topic of awed comment and conversation from friends and passers-by.
An ingredient in the fig jam that our neighbor Jeannie made for us.
The February morning every year, after the leaves all fell for the winter, when Mark and I trimmed the branches way back.
The excitement each April when we saw the tiniest green buds, signifying that the tree had survived, and would again thrive.
A final remnant from my grandparent’s lives, when they pioneered to Scottsdale from Chicago in retirement.
On Saturday, after the condo landscaping crew kindly and efficiently chopped the broken tree and carried away the pieces, Mark created a container garden in its place, filled with colorful flowerpots which held desert plants and cactus.
It will be an adjustment. Maybe we will plant another tree in the fall. In the meantime, the memories will always linger.
I captured our glorious, gnarled, and storied fig tree just before dusk during the summer of 2022.
Yesterday, after a trip to Walgreens for our latest Covid boosters, Tom and I enjoyed thirty minutes walking through Vista del Camino Park in south Scottsdale.
It’s one of many washes and greenspaces that run north and south, connecting walkways and bike paths throughout our community.
After parking our 2012 indigo Hyundai Sonata–our same faithful friend that carried us west from Illinois in July 2017 after I suffered a mild heart attack–we followed the path.
We smiled as ducks paddled through a meandering creek. It is adorned with a wild splash of lavender lilies that climb the bank in one small section.
We waved to a few disc golfers, and watched a few others wade through murky water to fish out errant throws.
We admired a thicket of tall reeds, flourishing near the northern edge of the park thanks to our wetter-than-normal winter.
But the highlight came as we made our way back to the car. We paused under this enormous eucalyptus tree. It’s one of our favorite Scottsdale nature spots–a place we have visited many times over the past nearly six years.
I was compelled to capture the strength and shade of the tree, because I wanted to savor the memory and carry it home.
In that moment, I also realized I needed to write about the tree–its enduring status–and what it represents on the fifth anniversary of my blogging adventure.
Back on May 4, 2018, when I wrote my first blog post, I was looking for a way to carve my initials into the blogosphere. (Incidentally, I never considered carving my initials into the trunk of this beautiful tree. Sadly, over the decades, vandals have had different ideas. Whatever happened to the notion of respecting property and nature?)
Anyway, through my books and blog, it has been my goal to leave a trail of my thoughts and observations for anyone who might want to follow the late-in-life stories of a sixty-five-year-old heart-attack survivor living a warmer, lighter, and gayer existence in the Sonoran Desert with his husband.
This odyssey has helped me connect with all sorts of people all around the world. To voice my opinions. To learn more about yours. And, to frequently step back to marvel at the beauty of nature in Arizona and how I desperately need it.
Perhaps most important of all, blogging has helped me stay sane, vital, and relevant. We’ve all had to look for ways to navigate a raging pandemic and try to come out the other side as relatively whole human beings.
Last night, Tom and I watched a program about Gordon Lightfoot, the prolific Canadian singer and songwriter who died recently. In one particular clip, he talked about the salvation his music provided–allowing him to work out his emotions (perhaps, his demons) through song.
My writing serves that same purpose. On my saddest, most anxious, happiest, and most triumphant days–all of it–writing down my ideas and preparing them into something artful and reasonably coherent helps me make sense of the idiosyncrasies and madness in the world. In other words, my writing helps me rise above the fray … and we all know there is plenty of fray today.
It helps me feel less afraid about a whole host of things … growing older in a more vulnerable and less safe society … seeing previously recognizable American institutions (like truth, honor, and decency) vanish … cringing as my favorite baseball team from the sepia-tone recollections of my 1960s childhood (the St. Louis Cardinals) coughs up another game and sinks further into the abyss of last place (something they have seldom seen in their rich history) … and shedding a few more tears to say goodbye to old friends and Polynesian Paradise neighbors. (Another of our desert-loving flock, Bill, died yesterday after a hard-fought battle.)
While all of this happens around me and is out of my control, I feel as if I am like the eucalyptus tree in Vista del Camino Park. Despite the increasing number of wrinkles and imperfections on my skin, I’m still strong enough to smear ointments on the rough patches and move ahead along this path I might have missed. To live, love, sing, swim, and survive. To write more poems and tell more stories.
Specifically, along the banks of whatever may come next, I’ll continue to strive to produce some degree of shade for the ones I love: my husband, my sons, my friends, my neighbors, and my followers.
Thank you, Carol, for your enduring sense of humanity and a lifetime of laughs.
I’m so glad we had this time together.
***
A Custodian, A Scrub Woman, and Me
At 9 p.m. Central Time on Monday nights in 1970–fifty years before the contagious Covid-19 stunned our world–a kooky comedienne with a toothy smile and infectious laugh captured my twelve-year-old heart and creative imagination. Her name was Carol Burnett.
Born April 26, 1933–in the depths of the Great Depression–this legendary actor of stage and screen first tasted success with her Tony-nominated Broadway performance in Once Upon a Mattress in 1959. Soon after she appeared as a regular on The Gary Moore Show. My exposure to her madcap comedic skills began on September 11, 1967. That’s when The Carol Burnett Show debuted on CBS-TV.
Through the spring of 1971, the network ran the hour-long variety and sketch comedy format opposite two popular programs: NBC’s I Spy; and ABC’s The Big Valley. (Later in the seventies, as the show gained a larger audience and momentum, CBS moved The Carol Burnett Show into its Saturday night lineup following four other prime-time powerhouse comedies: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Bob Newhart Show.)
Back in 1970, after I finished my homework on Monday nights, the lights on stage came up around Carol and were transmitted through our Zenith color TV in suburban St. Louis. Long before I first imagined taking flight in my dusty desert time machine, she proceeded to field questions from her studio audience and lead me and thousands of other viewers across the country on a metaphoric and comedic joy ride.
Every week we sat mesmerized. We watched Carol and her creative troop–Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Lyle Waggoner … and later Tim Conway–perform their magical TV mayhem. Together they represented creative constancy in my life.
At that time, Dad worked the night shift as a custodian for a government agency in St. Louis: sweeping and mopping floors; cleaning toilets and urinals; emptying waste baskets.
It was a life of late-night drudgery my father, the ex-salesman and unfulfilled poet, couldn’t stomach and never dreamed of—especially when the rest of the world had Carol and the hilarity of her As the Stomach Turns weekly soap parody at their disposal from the comfort of their living room couches.
But like clockwork, at 9:30, Dad called during a break from his janitorial job. He craved a creative escape too. He wanted my color commentary on Carol’s show. The ringing on our kitchen phone was my cue to fill in the comedic gaps.
I stretched the curly cord into the living room and translated Carol’s hour-long variety show into something positive that might sustain him….at least for one night.
To put this in its proper personal perspective, Dad felt he was missing the important moments in life: a traditional schedule of evenings at home with his wife and children watching Carol’s shenanigans. All for the sake of a weekly paycheck and a job that clogged his ego like a stopped-up toilet.
As far as Walter Johnson was concerned, there was nothing else remotely funny about 1970. The Vietnam War was raging. Nixon was president. That was awful enough. Especially for a life-long Democrat.
I’d like to think our phone exchange during his break and my play-by-play of Carol’s comedy sketches and crazy Bob Mackie costumes he missed helped transform his melancholy spirit.
Ironically, over the course of Burnett’s career, she frequently reprised the role of a soulful scrub woman, who cleaned up after everyone else went home. It was Burnett’s tattered-but-enduring character, which became her show’s symbol of humor, heart and humanity.
Like the rotary phone that rang on our kitchen wall, I never imagined the show would one day disappear. But on March 29, 1978, after eleven seasons and 279 episodes (notwithstanding another nine episodes that aired in the fall of 1991) the curtain came down on The Carol Burnett Show.
In the mix, the Vietnam War ended. The troops came home. Nixon resigned in 1974. I graduated from high school and went on to college in 1975. Dad did his best to complete his night-shift janitorial duties.
In August of 1976, at sixty-two-years old—the age I am now—he retired from a job he despised but tolerated to contribute what he could to the well-being of our family. Remarkably, my father lived another seventeen years, despite his struggles with heart disease and depression.
“I’m so glad we had this time together, just to have a laugh or sing a song. Seems we just get started and before you know it, comes the time we have to say so long.”
At the close of each of her shows, Carol Burnett sang this familiar tune, tugged on her left earlobe, and signed off. Evidently, it was a signal to her grandmother to let her know she was doing okay.
I loved it all. Carol’s shenanigans, her show, her sidekicks, her song, her signal, her sentiment. Dad did too. Everything she represented … her physical humor, uproarious laughter and wacky demeanor … sustained us through difficult times.
Fortunately, Carol Burnett lives on. So do the best moments from her comedy sketches on her Carol Burnett and Friends shows that appear in syndication.
In the universe of potential outcomes, I’ve discovered that an idea can spring out of nothing and lead nowhere. But, more often than not, like a hummingbird on a mission it takes flight to somewhere and lands somewhere else. It’s really an associative process of linking one idea to another.
Often this odyssey is driven by a sensory experience. Maybe it’s a familiar scent (like fresh-mowed grass) or sound (like the coo of a dove). Or a compelling image, such as a trail of hidden stairs. Or a winding creek rambling through nature with no end in sight. Or a defined space on a windy day with a few options to pursue toward a final destination.
As I writer, I’ve learned that I am at my best when I am open to all of these eventualities and possibilities. In other words, it’s better to say “yes” to an idea and let it simmer than to say “no” outright to something that might become something more.
I suppose you could call this my creative philosophy. It led me to write four memoirs and–more recently–a book of poetry. All of these are the result of committing to the practice of writing frequently. Often, I find myself composing words in my head while I’m swimming or exercising. Then, a few hours later, they travel to my fingers and land on a page as a story or poem.
One thing’s for sure. I know my life would feel relatively empty if I could never write again.
Back in January, Marc–the artistic director for the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus (PHXGMC)–asked if I would develop the stories and dialogue for five fictionalized LGBTQ characters. The script would provide the framework for the chorus’ June 2023 concert, Born To Be Brave.
If you follow my blog, you know I sing with PHXGMC and have written lyrics for the chorus in the past. Both the singing and the lyrical adventure have proven to be exhilarating creative experiences. So, I immediately said “yes” to Marc’s request, and knew this new challenge would stretch me in unfamiliar ways.
Sitting before my laptop, I began to create these five individuals–composites of people I have known. With time and nurturing, they began to represent the joys, fears, hopes, dreams, uncertainties, and triumphs of what it means to be gay, bi, or transgendered living in 2023.
In March (after numerous drafts, edits and tweaks), I finalized the script for the concert. In the process, five fully defined and diverse characters–Les, Bry, Q, Gregory, and Toni–were born on the page. Since then, the roles have been cast. Rehearsals are running full tilt.
On Saturday and Sunday June 3 and 4, Les, Bry, Q, Gregory, and Toni will take the stage. They will tell their stories and connect the music at Tempe Center for the Arts.
That weekend, I will be singing with the chorus. From my tenor-two position somewhere on stage, I will watch with wonder as five other chorus members embody the five characters. They will bring them to life, tell their stories, sing their songs, and shape their journeys in their own personalized ways.
What a mysterious, organic, and fulfilling creative path this has become. With every step forward, it is leading me to places I never imagined. And, ironically, I’m discovering this new fertile ground in the desert in my sixties.
We are human, not robots. So, we all do it to some degree or another. We reflect on seminal moments that have passed rather than living in the present.
In my case, that means occasionally remembering the full moon, which dominated the January horizon the morning my mother died in 2013.
Or–further back in my psyche–the sweet scent of magnolia blossoms, emerging in late March on the front lawn of my suburban St. Louis childhood home. Often, mother nature tricked them with an early April frost that turned the pink petals brown.
Oddly, when we aren’t contemplating the past, many of us focus on the future. We anticipate significant events–personal and social–that approach.
We ponder pressing issues ahead, such as paying the rent or mortgage when it comes due at the end of the month, speculating on the latest batch of troublesome news on the world stage, or waiting impatiently for medical test results.
Though I am a memoir writer–and soon-to-be-published poet (stay tuned)–once-unforeseen yoga sessions (which I now practice frequently on the aqua mat of my sixties) teach me that I am better off focusing on the space in between the memories and the what ifs.
It is the breathing in and out that keeps me whole as I write this sentence on the keys of my laptop. It is the random chirping punctuating my afternoon in the palm tree outside my back door.
It is the rushing water of life, which currently swooshes through the normally dry Salt River gulch in Tempe, thanks to frequent rains in the Valley of the Sun and melting snow from Arizona’s high country.
At this moment in time, I need to remind myself that it is all of these things–happening now–that make life rewarding and meaningful on an otherwise gauzy Wednesday in March.
It’s March. The Christmas cactus adorning our den is definitely a late bloomer–and so am I. I turned 65 in July, but that number hasn’t deterred me from continuing to write, sing, and create.
When I close my eyes, I can still channel 18-year-old unaware me. Tall and thin with long straight blond hair in 1975. Seated in an uncomfortable wooden fold-down chair. Legs crossed in Middlebush Hall on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia.
I was an aspiring journalism major. One of a few hundred freshmen and freshwomen taking a required business course. Bleary-eyed from guzzling too much beer and demolishing late-night Shakespeare’s Pizza, we listened to our Marketing 101 professor.
He waxed on about demographics and American consumption. We doodled in our spiral notebooks.
What I remember most is that he told us the range of consumption occurred between the ages of 18 and 65. That’s when Americans had the most disposable income to spend.
The implication was that life, purpose, and relevance stopped after that. After retirement. After 65.
Of course, these days, life expectancy–for those who live to be 65–is more promising. But nothing is guaranteed.
At any age, “seize the day” is a smart strategy. Especially in your later years when (at times) it feels like you are riding in a runaway wagon racing downhill. Even if on most days you are enjoying the freedom and wisdom that comes with age as the wind rushes through your greying hair.
All of this is preamble to tell you that I am on the cusp of publishing my 5th book. It will be a collection of my best poems. Many of them explore love, loss, identity, discovery, disorientation, transformation, realization, and acceptance–spun through the ever-present influences of time and nature.
I began writing poetry in 1993. I was newly divorced, raising my boys as a single dad, working long hours as a communication consultant for Towers Perrin in Chicago, dashing for commuter trains, grieving the loss of my father, and beginning to understand myself and my emerging gay identity.
I have written dozens of poems over the past 30 years. Stashed them in an ever-expanding Word file. (If you follow me, you know I have shared some of them here over the past four years. The act of doing that has fed the poetry beast inside me. He’s now ready to emerge.)
Yes, at age 65 it thrills me to defy the logic of my marketing professor. To assemble my poetry and share it publicly–all in one place–for anyone who chooses to consume it.
I take a blood thinner; therefore, I bruise easily.
So, for instance, if I’m putting away dishes in our cupboard after dinner and bump the top of my hand on the corner of the cabinet, I am sure to leave that mundane household experience with a souvenir–an immediate red patch that will last a few days in the afflicted area.
I haven’t always been ultra-self-conscious about the condition of my extremities. It’s only lately–in my sixties with thinner skin on my thinner body–that I’ve become aware of my aging hands and, of course, my mortality. They go hand in hand.
Since I’m a writer and rely on my fingers, wrists, and hands to write these sentences on my laptop, I’m fortunate not to have arthritis in my joints–in my hands.
My sister Diane seems to be the one in our family who has inherited that painful component of our mother’s DNA. Particularly in her hips, knees, and feet.
Diane is sixty-eight-years old. She doesn’t read what I write. We live seventeen hundred miles apart. She in Illinois. Me in Arizona.
Even so, I love my sister. I always have and will. Tom and I visited her and Steve (Diane’s husband) for an afternoon last October while we were in the Chicago area. In this age of Covid, we recounted all the things we are thankful for.
Diane will always be my only sibling, my only big sister. We talk and text occasionally. I worry about Diane’s physical wellness and longevity. We’re the only two remaining in our family of origin, since Mom passed away ten years ago.
Diane also is the only other person who remembers the nuances of our St. Louis childhood, our homelife (good, bad, and indifferent), our difficult plight as a family after Dad’s heart attack in 1962, our mother’s resolve in her fifties and fragility in her eighties, our mother’s aging hands.
I came across this photo of Mom’s folded hands from Christmas Eve 2008. That night, we gathered at Diane’s home in Illinois to celebrate the holiday and open gifts. Mom would live to share another four Christmases with us.
It’s a cropped image and not the clearest, but when I saw it, I was reminded of Mom’s age spots and blemishes that grew with the passage of time on her fair, loose, thin skin. The rough patches on her hard-working hands go back in time to her rural southern roots in High Point, North Carolina, and fifty years in St. Louis, Missouri, which I chronicle in From Fertile Ground.
In her final nine years living in northern Illinois, our mother had this habit of clutching a tissue in her palms. She often hid an auxiliary one in the arm of her blouse or sweater. If you look closely, you can see it peeking out of the sleeve of her heather-flecked turtleneck.
These are the little personal idiosyncrasies that only a sibling would remember. They don’t matter in the grander scheme of things, but they do when it’s your mother and you still love and miss her after ten years of living without her. And you realize that your own mortality creeps ever closer with every blogpost.
Sure, I stay active–mentally and physically–and will continue to mount the treadmill several times each week to keep my heart strong.
But there is no denying the evolving appearance of my spotted, aging hands. They are looking more like my mother’s every day.
Nearly ten years have passed since she passed January 26, 2013.
As this seismic anniversary of my mother’s death approaches, I feel a degree of grief’s numbness reappearing.
The time is right for me to sprinkle this space with reflections on Helen F. Johnson’s life: how much I loved her; what I learned from her; and why I still miss her.
I watched my mother grow in wisdom and shrink in physical presence–simultaneously–in her final ten years.
In those poetic moments–especially 2004 to 2009 when we visited at her condo in Winfield, Illinois–the two observations felt incongruent as we sat side by side on a park bench reflecting on her love of family, nature, photography, and letter writing.
But they don’t anymore.
Now that I’ve surpassed the midpoint of my sixties–favoring the quietest moments of life over all the rest–I see and feel the same transformation happening within me.
I’m far more inclined to record the moments that happen around me, because–like her–I have the time and the interest. She has left me an invaluable gift: a recognizable path and impulse to emulate.
My life has changed immensely since she died. I’ve retired from corporate life, married Tom, moved across the country, survived a heart attack, lost forty pounds, written four books, endured Covid, and built a new life in the desert.
Yet, it is when Tom and I spend time with my sons Nick and Kirk–her only grandchildren–that I am most aware of how long she has been gone and how much she loved us all.
They were both in their twenties in 2013. Searching. Unsettled. Preparing to launch. On the cusp of new personal discoveries and adventures. Since that time, they’ve traveled, found new loves, new jobs, new homes.
Kirk is now nearly 34; Nick almost 39. How she–a lover of plants and trees–would have loved learning that her oldest grandson stopped by our condo last Friday to pluck grapefruits, oranges, lemons, and tangelos from our citrus trees.
Or that Nick coached a Boys and Girls Club basketball team last year.
Or that Kirk traveled to Vanuatu with the Peace Corps in 2014 and more recently has found his counseling stride in a small practice in Chicago … helping patients who’ve experienced some sort of trauma.
Over this past weekend, Tom and I watched Milo and Miley (a friend’s two Shih Tzus) again.
The dogs are sweet, lovable characters. But I needed a little time to escape on Sunday to my thoughts and devices. So, I drove to Chaparral Park and walked around the lake for about an hour.
As I rounded a bend of pine trees which Tom and I love, I spotted an older man. He sat quiet, content, and alone on a park bench.
Seeing him reminded me of the moments my mother cherished in her eighties, pondering the world from a park bench. She could simply sit, enjoy the shade of the trees, read the newspaper or gaze at passersby.
Or she could wonder about the lives of her children and grandchildren … long after she was gone.
Mark Johnson Stories 