Author Archives: Paul Steven Stone

Sidekicks Of The Canyon


A remembrance of a great spirit and friend.

Dear David:

There’s a photo I’ll forever cherish. It shows the two of us standing together, posing like two campfire buddies for the camera. We were starting a five-day rafting trip down the Colorado River. And there we were—poised to raft through canyons carved out millennia ago—two old friends, both a little overweight. Maybe you a little more overweight than me. Anyone could look at that photo and tell we were buddies, David, clearly comfortable with sharing each other’s space…two sidekicks of the canyon poised to begin yet another adventure.

That photograph came to mind several times over the course of the last seven months. The seven months it took for Cancer to write a triumphant final chapter to the last days of your life, the life of David Sumner Cutler. And it was a triumphant ending, David. Glorious in many ways. How wonderful for you to be surrounded by the love of family and friends. What a gift to have Josh, Ben or Carolyn read you the daily postings on your Caringbridge.org web site. And what a marvelous idea—a web site where all of us could go to celebrate and share memories of your life!

And so many people did. Over 4,500 visits.

You heard from old friends, aging marine buddies, former and current employees, minor acquaintances, children of friends, business partners, ex-wives, all manner of passersby on your journey through life. And many of them had a story to share. A story about you—about how you helped shape their lives, or mentored them, or made their lives richer, or taught them to be good journalists or helped nurture their communities. What a difference you made in their lives, Mr. Cutler, and we were privileged to witness you hearing it for yourself, taking it in, learning what an impact your life had on so many others.

But there’s a third sidekick who’s missing from the ‘Sidekicks of the Canyon’ photo, David, and she was definitely there—from start to finish—at your side all the way, a loving guide and navigator (and sometimes pizza-orderer), dear Catherine. She created a space around you that was large enough to contain all our pained spirits. I cannot say enough about your wisdom, Catherine, your generosity or your strength of purpose and insight. So many of us owe you a debt for your graceful, faithful management of David’s final days. Your strength gave us strength. You were the rock so many of us held onto as the tide steadily rose.

Catherine, I speak for all who hold David in their hearts when I say with sincere love and appreciation, “Thank you!”

The rest of your family was there, too, David, surrounding you with love and support. Foot massages from your sister Gail and twin sister Meg were little things that meant so much. Meg’s husband Jim taking night duty, as did Catherine’s brother Jay. Mindy and Patti lending their nursing expertise. And, of course there were your children, helping you, loving you, searching for their place in a world where one of their pillars of strength would no longer be standing.

I can hear you barking out their names in your best patrician voice: Josh, Ben, Jonathan; Mandy, Carolyn, Becky. And their spouses, your other children: Leslie, Nancy, Heidi and Mike. How you enjoyed those July 4th family gatherings, those outings in the boat with Mike and Jonathan, taking Becky to play softball or ride her horse, dressing up as Santa for all the little ones at Christmas. Nothing filled your spirit and brightened your skies better than family. Take a look at any photo with you holding a grandchild, David, and you’ll see the biggest, sloppiest, unabashedly happy grin splashed across your face.

Now, I would not be a true friend if I passed up this opportunity to remind local residents that your son Josh is running for public office, and you would appreciate their votes.

How proud you were of Josh’s efforts to enter public service, even when he lost in an earlier bid to become state rep. I remember you outside the polls pumping arms as if they were attached to water pumps, telling anyone who would listen “I’m Josh Cutler’s dad!” as if that obviously explained your excess of pride and enthusiasm.

Oh, what a delight you were when the wind filled your sails! How many lives did you enrich with that wide open, ready-to-engage spirit? With that ever-ready laugh, that eager expectant smile, those rich, patrician articulations you used both for scolding and pontification, none of which was meant to be taken seriously? You could sound like the severest Scrooge yet never lose that Peter Pan twinkle in your eye. A scold from you was nectar to a neophyte journalist or a struggling sales rep. You were the boss people complain about but really love—because you trusted them enough—cared about them enough—to push them outside their comfort zone, to test their courage and plumb their depths.

“Give it a try,” you would encourage them. “Go for it.” Always pushing them, opening doors, standing behind them. I know because, almost 30 years ago, I was a young inexperienced writer and you phoned out of the blue to offer me a weekly newspaper column. And thus, “A Stone’s Throw” was born, a column that would see hundreds of stories, essays and insights published in print and online across a span of 25 years.

What a gift to my life! What a candy store for a writer to be given! You changed my life, dear friend, even before you became my friend. You took a chance on someone who had no experience. You opened a door for me as a writer and gave me a forum in which to develop my talent.

Ah, the curious workings of fate that put two lives such as ours on intersecting courses? We were not always sidekicks of the canyon, nor would we have seemed likely candidates. You were a child of privilege, at least on your mother’s side, the Sumner side of your family tree. I was a struggling writer, born in the Bronx but capable of speaking fluent English. From such meager ingredients a great enduring friendship would arise.

You were never one to dwell on emotions, were you, David? Discussing emotions went counter to your natural reticence. How hard for you to say the words “I love you.” Remember that time in Norwell when I told you, as a friend, that I loved you? You responded like a burdened nobleman, declaring in a fit of noblesse oblige, “Well I guess these things must be said”, adding, “I love you, too” in a hasty conclusion. Watching you exchange “I love you’s” with all of us these last few months…well you came a long way, baby, that’s all I can say.

And when Fate (with a capital ‘f’) touched your shoulder and tested your mettle last summer, your overriding concern was not for yourself but for the impact your illness would have on your children, especially those who were youngest and most vulnerable. There was never a hint of complaint about life’s injustices, or the cruelties of fate, just a resigned Marine-like commitment to see things through as best you could. And so you did, Old Friend. With your customary grace and silent strength.

You were always destined to be a hero, David. It was in your DNA. Not just in Viet Nam where, by braving enemy fire to retrieve a fallen comrade, you received bullet wounds to both your legs. In some ways it’s easier to be a hero in war than in peace, in Khe Sanh rather than Duxbury, easier to take up the mantle of leadership in Viet Nam than in New England. But you were a hero for all seasons. The letters to your web site repeatedly speak of you as a personal hero to those who knew and worked under you. Hero, mentor, counselor, role model, inspiration and, always, friend. Raw testimony to your leadership skills in the trenches of the real world, in everyday life. You were huge in their lives, David, but you never saw it till the end. Just four weeks ago, before the Caringbridge web site was launched, you described your life as unremarkable—as if it had never been touched by greatness.

Most of us here today know the greatness contained in your life, David. But you never knew how good you were. Your huge heart, generous spirit and tolerant nature were so intrinsic to how you lived your life you couldn’t see how special they were. Nor could you see how many lives were influenced by yours. You and I shared each other’s secrets, but you never told me about the single mother you helped with a job, or the photo journalist whose career you launched with a camera, or the reporter you told not to worry about the $25,000 his story cost the paper, or the sick couple you kept on the payroll for six months, or the dozens of others who wrote to testify what a difference you made in their lives.

I always thought Viet Nam was the anvil on which your character was beaten, shaped and polished. But if Nam was the anvil then the United States Marines Corps had to be the hammer. The corps gave you a palpable sense of yourself, and of your capacity to overcome enormous odds, a guiding star that stayed with you your entire life.

How else would you have had the nerve to turn your back on a weekly paycheck from the Patriot Ledger to make the biggest decision of your professional life—to start publishing a community newspaper. You were all of 29 when you, your wife Suzie and Michael Sterns started the Marshfield Mariner with your saved-up vacation pay. You were destined to be a publisher, David. You knew instinctively which elements made for a good local newspaper, which stories to feature. When it came to the business side, however, your business model rivaled the bumblebee for its ability to fly when the laws of physics say it should never have gotten off the ground. By all rights, the Mariner papers should have gone out of business any number of times.

My writing a weekly column for the Mariner was the bedrock of our friendship. A friendship that over the years saw both of us neck-deep in one adventure after another. Running out of gas on the North River. Living as Odd Couple roomies when my marriage failed. Retracing the Colorado River expedition your Grandmother braved 65 years earlier. Discovering Iceland. Escaping from Iceland. Almost getting stuck on a sandbar next to Nantucket. Braving open seas in a boat too small for such nonsense. And learning to tell jokes about cancer and death, especially when cancer and death were staring you in the face.

“We joke about death and dying,” you proudly informed a visitor one day, as if we no longer followed silly outmoded social conventions. What better place for laughter than a sick room? Who better to laugh than the man whose remaining laughs could now be counted in single or double digits? And we had a lot of laughs during those last crowded months. Best of all, you got to hear from many folks who loved you, whose lives would have been different without you. Like George Bailey, the James Stewart character in “It’s A Wonderful Life”, you were given a glimpse of your life’s real value. And just like George Bailey, you discovered you were the richest man in town.

It was an honor being with you these last seven months, sharing the adventure with you and Catherine. Just as its been an honor sharing my road with you for almost 30 years. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you for going away so soon, leaving me to carry on without my dear friend and fellow adventurer at my side. I had planned for us to grow old sitting in boats, talking about grandchildren.

But, as John Lennon said, life is what happens while you’re busy making plans. It was by the side of the pond at my Plymouth cottage that you first told me you were sick. Remember what I said? I said I wasn’t going to lose you. And I’m not. I’ll always have you in my heart, dear friend, in my memories, and in my prayers.

You and I will meet up again, someday, somewhere, eager for our next adventure, just as one might expect from two old and trusty sidekicks of the canyon.

Goodbye, David. I love you.

David Sumner Cutler passed away February 28, 2010. He was a wonderful fellow to have in your life whether he was your friend, father, partner, boss or neighbor. In giving the above eulogy I was fulfilling an ironic arc in which David, by discovering me as a writer, had chosen me almost 30 years earlier to chronicle and honor his life. As you can tell, I loved David, greatly enjoyed our shared time together, and looked forward to our growing old and serene together, secure in our friendship. Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans! Goodbye, old friend. Thanks for the laughs, the hugs and for just being you. Which was pretty special.

Tales Of The Book Part Thirteen

“OR SO IT SEEMS”
By Paul Steven Stone

Reviewed by Manson Solomon

If the title of Paul Steven Stone’s novel doesn’t tell us that we are about to enter a world in which we are not quite sure what is real, the blind elephant tapping his way across the cover confirms it: something different is about to happen in these pages. The old Hindu legend of the blind men each feeling a different part of the elephant and coming to different conclusions as to what they are confronting is well known, but when it is the elephant itself which is portrayed as blind and groping its way through the world, what’s up with that?

Stone’s view of the world as it might appear through the eyes of a blind elephant will not surprise those already familiar with his wry sense of humor portrayed in his collection of pieces assembled in How to Train A Rock. Serious stuff masquerading as burlesque, Mark Twain meets Philip Roth meets Saul Bellow meets Paul Steven Stone. The hilarity begins very early on with the protagonist being dragged towards a ratty couch by his determined would-be seducer, who, we later discover, turns out to be his nine-year old son’s schoolteacher. Whom he discovered at a bizarre singles dance which he finds himself attending after his disorienting divorce. And then there is the hilarious encounter with the gold-digging single mother whom he picks up at the scouts’ pinewood derby — where his creative effort to fashion a car from a wooden block – painted pink! — results in embarrassment for him and his son. Yes, it’s funny, but it’s also serious, since behind the humor the protagonist’s escapades constitute an existential exploration, a quest to find solid reality – what is — behind the illusion of appearances — what seems — and to restore dignity to his life after a debilitating divorce.

Sound like Bellow’s Moses Herzog with a sense of humor, Roth’s Alexander Portnoy without the hysteria? Well, perhaps so, since where Bellow tried to restore his hero’s emotional equilibrium via intellectual scribblings, and Roth paraded his overwrought Freudian ejaculations for help, Stone gives us an ongoing dialog conducted with The Bapucharya, a giggling videotape Hindu guru. Ah, the elephant, the Hindu god Ganesh seeking reality beyond the facade of illusion! But, being Stone, the dialog is laced with wry humor, parody, irony, is never didactic, always offbeat, amusing. How is this possible? Well, you’ll have to read it yourself to find out and to have your sight restored. And if you don’t make it all the way to Enlightenment, at the very least you will be wholeheartedly entertained while engaged in the quest.

Manson’s review struck me as particularly perceptive, especially as it places the book into direct comparisons between the works of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Very interesting, I thought, and well worth sharing. So here we are. Sharing.

A LITTLE SHORT-TERM MEMORY LOSS

He was one of my more sober and saner friends. So it was surprising to see him so worked up, so inexpressively frustrated by his inability to remember most of what happened during the last ten years.

“I get flashes,” he admitted, “sometimes full blown images that bring back those events. But mostly they’re gone.”

“For instance…” I prodded.

“Like this budget mess,” he explained. “I get so worked up by Obama spending so much money. But then I get one of these flashes and I remember, oh yeah, Republicans were in charge for the last ten years. It’s like I totally forgot they spent incredible sums on a small war that was totally unnecessary! Shelled out billions to Halliburton, Blackwater and other Republican-supporting friends, with no accounting, no auditing, no…”

“Okay,” I said, trying to calm him down. “Anybody could forget a trillion-dollar mistake like the Iraq War.”

“Yes, but I forget it all. You hear me screaming about the cost of healthcare reform, but then…sort of hazily…it comes back to me that Republicans voted in prescription drug coverage for seniors that forbade the government from using its buying power to negotiate lower prices with the drug companies.

“How could I forget something so egregiously wasteful as forcing the government to pay list price!”

“Do you remember Terry Schiavo…?” I asked tentatively.

“Only when I find myself arguing against ‘death panels’ or some other leftist intrusion into people’s lives.”

“How about the fact we Americans tortured our prisoners?”

“I still don’t believe Americans in the employ of their government would commit acts of torture. Of course that depends on how you define torture…”

“Meaning…?”

“One man’s torture is another man’s enhanced interrogation!”

“You do remember a number of people died from those enhanced interrogation sessions?”

“Not really. At most, I remember some Fox TV commentator offering to get waterboarded to show what pussies the liberals were.”

“Well this is pretty bad,” I sadly acknowledged. “If what you say is true, you probably have no memory of the Great Financial Collapse that occurred the last year of Bush’s term?”

“Is that why we’re suffering 10% unemployment? And here I was thinking Obama had ruined our economy in merely a year’s time.”

“Do you recall Dick Cheney outing a CIA spy to get back at her husband for writing a New York Times Op Ed piece?”

“I vaguely recall something.”

“Or that we had advance information about Al Quaeda’s plans to attack us, and that the CIA titled its August 6, 2001 Presidential Briefing: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”?

“No, I don’t.”

“How about tax cuts?” I pursued. “Do you recall Bush and his Republican majority cutting taxes twice at the same time he was borrowing money from the Chinese to pay for two wars?”

“Is that where we got the money?”

“Or that President Bush violated our constitution any number of ways—by reading our emails, intercepting our phone calls, telling lies to lead us into war, using the Justice Department to go after political enemies, using the levers of government to create a permanent Republican majority…?

“You protest about Obama bankrupting the country,” I concluded, “and yet you forget that Republicans practically picked clean the Treasury’s pockets.”

“Wait, before you go on, just tell me,” he shouted, almost in despair. “Was there anything that George W. Bush and his Republican majority in Congress did right during the last ten years?”

“Do you remember Hurricane Katrina?”

“Sure,” he said, almost smiling. “Wasn’t she an exotic dancer…?”

A SHEEP IN WOLF’S CLOTHING

For any democrats, progressives or dumbstruck Obama supporters wondering “What the hell happened?” in Massachusetts yesterday, let me offer a few thoughts.

As Pogo once said in a famous cartoon strip, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

After eight years of Bush-Cheney malign neglect, the American presidency was turned over to a man who promised to change the way Washington worked. To take back power for the people. To curtail the power of the lobbyists and their entrenched special interests. To fight Wall Street for Main Street. To bridge partisan divide. And to restore America’s pride, not just as a powerful nation but a moral one as well.

And where do we find ourselves a year later?

Stuck.

With a president who appears to value comity over fighting for what he believes in. With a president who promised to fight for real health care reform but appeared to quickly abandon the very drug cost containment and public option elements that real reform requires.

We voted for a president who would fight drug companies for the right to import drugs from Canada and who would use America’s colossal bargaining power like a club to lower drug prices. Instead we ended up with a president who negotiated away his power in exchange for the pharmaceutical industry’s collusion in a program that would never threaten either their American monopoly or their colossal greed.

We voted for a president who would fight Wall Street but who quickly brought in the usual suspects to run things, some of them clearly tarnished by their inside involvement in the financial crisis or their initial efforts to make whole the bankers and CEOs whose greed and system manipulation caused the crisis.

This last year we have hungered for a President who would worry less about upsetting the apple cart and more about removing the bad apples and cleaning up the mess. It may have been politically expedient to give Bush and Cheney a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card, but America’s constitution has been bloodied by their cowboy-up approach to starting wars, torturing prisoners, denying constitutional rights and subverting civil liberties.

To not shine a light on these illegal and destructive behaviors is to allow them to eat away in the dark at the cornerstone of rights that others have died to secure.

We voted for a president who, if he didn’t have the heart or courage to pursue these miscreants, would at least have had the wisdom to convene a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If only to uphold the honor of his office and his somber responsibility to our Constitution.

Over the last year we have watched President Obama repeatedly step back from using the full weight and power of his position to foster the policies and programs he was elected to pursue. His willingness to enter into compromise or meaningless negotiation with fanatical Republicans so invested in protecting the wealth and power of entrenched interests they would never meet him halfway on any field, over any issue, will prove to be his—and probably our—undoing.

Mr. President, we elected you to clean up Dodge City, but it appears you’ve settled in far too comfortably, and much more quickly than anyone could have expected.

If your advisors tell you that you are doing a good job, fire them. If you can’t find worthy advisors to replace them, perhaps you’ll need to look beyond the boundaries of Washington, D.C.

That would be change we could believe in.

Tales Of The Book Part Twelve


MAN ON THE RUN

Move it, he said, there isn’t much time.

So you stepped on the gas or walked a bit faster or hurried your phone conversation, and still arrived late for your next activity.

Faster, he said, only losers slow down.

So you worked late at the office or left the party early or rushed out of the house without kissing the kids goodbye, and still never made up for the time you lost.

Hurry up, he said, you’ll miss your big opportunity.

So you took a second job working weekends or cheated in business or cancelled the family vacation, and still never found the opportunity you were looking for.

Skip the formalities, he said, you’ll have time for that later.

So you forgot your anniversary or never showed up for parents night at school or stepped over a friend to better your position, and still found yourself dreaming about all the things you didn’t have.

Don’t slow down, he said, time grows shorter every minute.

So you pretended to stay young or cheated on your marriage or forgot to watch your children growing up, and still never found someone who could understand you.

Pick up your speed, he said, time’s almost up.

So you grew bitter and resentful or left your family or started a list with everything the world owed you, and still grew older every day.

Final seconds, he said, last chance to make good.

So you looked around and wondered where all the time had gone or searched out those you had wronged or started making friends with priests, and still couldn’t get his voice out of your head.

Move it, he said, you’re running out of time.

And finally he was right.

You ran out of time.

The above is from the collection, “How To Train A Rock” by Paul Steven Stone, available on Amazon.com. For more information, go to HowToTrainARock.com, or the author’s site at PaulStevenStone.com