Matters of Method

Seeing the extended family always reminds me of Granny, the woman at the historical center of our common sense of clan. A while ago I sat down to write about this strong, spiritually emanative woman, and though I never finished the piece, two things occur to me: one, that I probably never will, and two, that this blog is as reasonable a forum as any other to give it air time. It is as fragmentary and inconclusive as any life, and should probably be read as something like an abortive statement of purpose for was ultimately to be a much larger project, namely a psychological and perhaps novelistic history of an odd and talented family. (Think Salinger's Glass family.) It was called Matters of Method, and goes like this:

Sunlight infuses this vision of my grandmother standing akimbo in the clearing. She wears light slacks and running shoes, supports a small dog chain in her right hand, and gazes at a clump of manzanita ten yards off, a thick, tangled briar that bristles and cracks as her two golden retrievers hone in on the target. Her long, brittle frame is erect, her head is slightly back, her eyes are narrow and she is smiling. It is a vision of beatification: my grandmother, Saint Jean of the Dog Trainers.

Jean was a Granny, not a Grandma. Grandma was the short frumpy one who gave away prayer cards and watched TV. But it was Granny who played gin rummy, wrote plays, boogied at the hoe down weekends with gramps and slipped her grandkids thin, decadent slices of homemade apple strudel late nights on the sly. It was Granny, with her laughter, her energy, her myriad interests, who stood at the epicenter of what I eventually understood as family. And it is in Granny’s life that I now comb for clues as, at the age of 37, newly gifted with a son and reconfiguring my own sense of family, I try to understand the grip and pull of wayward genes.

I do not agree with Tolstoy that all unhappy families are unique, while all happy families resemble one another—bliss is misery’s double, and each anguish holds the seeds of a unique and elusive joy. But though every hue of unhappiness find a twin in the spectrum of bliss, the palate of misery is vivid and sharp. There is a reason that we read Inferno with pleasure and sputter mid-Purgatorio, and that Satan is the only character who lingers after a brush with Paradise.

There is a dark thread that runs through my family. Our closets team with skeletons. This in itself does not interest me: dark threads are common as blue jeans, and skeletons dance daily on the airwaves. But I think it is a clue; I want to follow it from its murky socio-biological origins generations hence to its frayed end in the present, wound round the fingers that write these words. This is a sort of operation Ariadne, a guide-threading through the labyrinth of forgotten or excised fact. I am prepared to face my minotaurs.

* * *

She had a reputation as a woman who could coax magic from her dogs, and seemed to have settled comfortably into her status as someone with a touch, a nuance, a rare canine sensitivity. Years later fate dropped a mannerless pup on my own front step and Granny interceded by sending me a hardbound copy of the Koehler Method.

William Koehler was a famous dog trainer. He had coached such Hollywood Wunderhunds as Lassie, Big Red, and the Shaggy Dog, and marketed a training system that “produces a dog capable of performing … Heel, Come, Sit, Down, Stand, and Stay, both on & off-leash in about 13 weeks.” Koehler was old school, a firm believer in ‘spare the rod, spoil the canine’. He worked in the fifties and sixties, and in my mind’s eye I have always associated him with the austere sensibilities of the westerns of the time, a large, leather-skinned man with a black moustache staring into the eyes of a terrier, saying in a low, gravelly voice “I’ll count three, I suggest you roll.” Memory is tricky, and mine is more devious than most, so I checked the web, just to make sure. There was Koehler, bald as an egg and looking more like Humpty Dumpty than a gunslinger. Zero for one. But koehlerrdogtraining.com did find the proviso “there are those who will find this method offensive...so be it; even Jesus Christ couldn’t please everybody. But there are many more who would bet the life of their dog on it’s result...a reliable off-lead dog.” Maybe I was on to something.

I believe, broadly, in the law of cause and effect. I believe that if you spit in my eye, I will wash my glasses, and that if a pencil-necked stoolie in concrete boots is found bug eyed at the bottom of the Charles, then a man named Mugs sits sipping capuchino somewhere in the North End, his trousers dusted with limestone. It does not surprise me that my grandmother’s ‘secret’ lay hidden among strong arm techniques. Hell, she had been strong armed much of her life—why should she have thought other methods more effective? What interests me is not the fact that my grandmother used the Koehler method; what interests me is to what extent the Koehler method used her, used my father, used my family; to what extent the generational silence, the suicide, the long sequence of fractures and frayed ends struck, tamed, cowed and inspired this witting league into its present shape: a normal, American family.

Perhaps to be continued some day.