Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (40 page)

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's radio program,
The Art of Living
was still going strong in 1977, forty-two years after its premiere. (It would air for a total of fifty-four years.) Diane owned almost all of his books,
The Power of Positive Thinking, Stay Alive All Your Life, Reaching Your Potential
. She spent entire days sitting on the couch, holding a doll and listening to Dr. Peale or paging through one of his books. She wasn't bowling anymore. She wasn't doing much of anything. She watched
Hee Haw
on Friday nights. Occasionally, she cleaned, or cooked (if putting a pot roast in the slow cooker was cooking). She went to the grocery store once a week. She ate all the time. Chic would often discover her in the middle of the night leafing through one of Peale's books and eating peanut butter toast or Twinkies. When he came home from work, she'd be eating popcorn or potato chips or hot dogs, a mess of bun crumbs on the front of her nightgown.

Chic became curious about Peale's appeal. If Diane was getting insight from him, maybe he could, too. So he started listening to
The Art of Living
. During the program, he kept looking over at his wife, hoping to spot something in her face—merriment, understanding—but she just sat there with a dull half smile on her lips and a glazed expression in her eyes. One night, he asked her what it was about Peale, what the attraction was. “Does it help?” he asked.

“Does it look like it helped?” she answered. Listening to Peale's message of positive thinking for the past twenty years hadn't made a positive difference in her life. Yes, she was still here, breathing (though even that was getting harder, as she was starting to get short of breath often, like when she climbed the stairs
or pushed the grocery cart to the car in the Stafford's parking lot). However, she was still a very big woman, had been a very big woman for almost fifteen years, would be a very big woman until the day she died. Every single day, she still went into Lomax's old bedroom and held one of the dolls. (Lomax would have been almost thirty now, and probably married, maybe with children of his own.) Peale wanted her to think differently about her life, to think positively, and if she did that, everything would change. She had tried to do as he asked, but the only thing that happened was she got older. For a time, she blamed Chic. Now, what was the point? She was too tired to blame anyone. She just wanted to be left alone; she just wanted to eat, to feel the fizzle of soda in her mouth, to chew a hot dog and taste the sharpness of the mustard mixing with the tanginess of the ketchup. If she could just sit on the couch and eat forever, that would be better, that would make everything better.

Across town, Buddy and Lijy rocketed into their future, the proud parents of Erika Waldbeeser. When she was a baby, Buddy had loved to hold her and make faces at her. Now that she was older, he liked to hold her hand while the two of them walked up and down the gravel driveway. He read books to her. He sat on the floor and helped her learn shapes and colors. He carried a wallet picture with him, and whenever a customer came into the health food store, he took out the picture and talked and talked and talked about his daughter. Russ took a real interest in his sister as well. He took her for nature hikes along the Mackinaw River and pointed out the different kinds of trees. When they got home, he showed her pictures of the trees and quizzed her on what type they were. She entered kindergarten the smartest kid in Middleville, according to Buddy. In class one day, she made a crayon drawing of her family. Each member—Buddy, Lijy, and Russ—was represented as a different-color stick figure with a different geometrical-shaped head. Buddy swooned over the drawing. He marched it into the bedroom where Lijy was taking a
nap, woke her, and insisted the drawing was the work of a young genius. He called Erika's teacher and asked her if she'd ever seen something so creative in her entire teaching career. The teacher told him that it was a “solid effort.” Buddy framed the picture and hung it behind the counter at the health food store. He told customers that Erika was destined to paint or draw or maybe do clay sculptures. One day, he bought her some clay and sat her down at the kitchen table and encouraged her to make something, but she told him she just wanted to go outside for a walk.

Sometime in the early 1980s, Lijy received an envelope in the mail without a return address. She knew immediately that it was from Ellis McMillion. She took the envelope outside, dug a hole in the ground, and buried it. That chapter was behind her now, and she never, ever wanted to think about Ellis McMillion or her mistake again. They—all of them—were in a better place. Buddy had gotten beyond her mistake, and Russ was a well-adjusted boy who accepted the lie she had told him about who his father was. (Even if the lie was built atop another lie.) Sometimes, she felt guilty about lying to her son. She'd always meant to tell him the truth, but somehow the right time never presented itself, and then he was in high school, and she tried to imagine herself sitting him down for a talk, but she always anticipated it going terribly. He'd be mad at her. He'd be sad. He'd be hurt. He'd be so many things, so she chose not to say anything, and she did her best not to think about it, even when he did something that offered a painful reminder, like pushing his glasses up on his nose.

Russ graduated from high school in 1978 and went off to Illinois State University, where he majored in botany. He spent a lot of time by himself, studying in an unfurnished room in the basement of his dorm, next to a couple of coin-operated washers and dryers. To help alleviate his loneliness, he joined a socialist group and grew a mustache because all the other guys in the group had a mustache. He didn't really believe in socialism. If he worked hard, why should someone else receive the fruits of his
labor? He told one of the leaders of the socialist group, a guy who didn't attend ISU but audited philosophy classes, his beliefs. The guy told him that he was a capitalist, and that capitalists were the scum of the earth. Russ didn't like being called the scum of the earth. At the next meeting, in the basement of the theater building, the guy told the group that Russ had something to say. Russ said that he didn't have anything to say. The guy said, “Go on and tell them what you told me the other day.” Russ then told the group he didn't think it was fair that others should receive the fruits of his labor. The group suddenly became very agitated, demanding that Russ explain why he was attending a socialist meeting when, in fact, he wasn't a socialist. Russ told them he attended the meetings because he didn't have any friends. (Not to mention that the group threw potluck-style dinners where Russ was always a big hit because he brought vegetarian treats that Buddy had sent him in the mail.) This was Russ's last socialist meeting. The next semester he threw himself into his schoolwork and made the dean's list with straight As. However, he still wanted to be a part of something, as he always had this under-the-surface feeling that he wasn't quite a part of anything. Maybe this was because Chic was his father. He didn't really know, but he didn't like the way he felt.

Back in Middleville, the health food store was a smashing success. The health fad of the seventies had never gone away, and people were driving to Middleville from Peoria and Mackinaw and other small Central Illinois towns to purchase tofu, vitamins, herbal teas, bulk honey, unsalted peanut butter, and dried fruit from the store. Buddy also bought a commercial juicer and concocted new recipes like the Spinarrot (spinach and carrot), the Middleville (pumpkin, chili powder, honey, and carrots), and the Waldbeeser (ginger, apple, kale, lemon, and carrot). Kids and adults alike loved Buddy's juices; even people who didn't buy their groceries from the store would swing by for a fresh juice. The popularity of the juices catapulted the store into an entirely
different level of success. The store was doing so well that Buddy was able to transition out of working the counter, spending more of his time on a cookbook/memoir about his life. Lijy encouraged him, but Buddy wasn't a natural writer, so it took him a long time to construct a sentence. Sometimes, Lijy would find him at his desk in the back of the store, a mess of papers spread out before him. She thought that he was thinking about the next sentence, but he was in fact daydreaming about the day that he could sell the store and move his family to a state like Arizona. Maybe they'd open another health food store there? Or a store that sold diet books? Or fresh-squeezed juice? Even though he was past fifty, retirement was not in his future. He wasn't about to sit idle and spend his afternoons fishing in the river.

One day during the spring semester of his senior year, Russ spotted a flyer for something called Greenleaf hanging on a bulletin board in his dorm. There was no meeting advertised on the flyer, just a phone number handwritten at the bottom. That night Russ called the number. Jacob Honness, a senior and political science major, answered and told Russ that Greenleaf hadn't held a meeting in a year and a half and that, in fact, he was the only member of the group. He further explained that he didn't want the club to require a large time commitment or make its members march through campus protesting this or that. Russ didn't want to belong to a club that required a large time commitment or made its members march through campus protesting this or that. He asked about the next meeting, and Jacob said they could get together the following Saturday.

The meeting was held at Jacob's one-bedroom apartment, a messy place not far from campus with empty soda cans on the coffee
table and a big fish tank. The meeting didn't turn out to be much of a meeting. Russ completed some paperwork, and Jacob collected a ten-dollar fee from him and gave him a button to hang on his bag or coat or wherever. After that, Jacob shook his hand and said the meeting was over. He looked at Russ like he wanted him to leave, but Russ wasn't ready to leave. He wanted to talk about Greenleaf, about what the group was going to do next. He told Jacob that he was a botany major and was interested in the group's efforts and wanted to know how he could help. Jacob told him he could hang some flyers. Russ had hung flyers for the socialist club; flyer hanging was tedious and boring. He wanted to organize something. Jacob pretended to share Russ's enthusiasm, while at the same time slowly ushering Russ toward the door. At the door, Jacob asked Russ to write up a proposal. On the spot, Russ blurted out, “Maybe we can plant a tree or something. For Arbor Day.”Jacob shrugged and said he'd check with his Greenleaf contacts in Portland, Oregon. Then, he wished Russ good day and shut the door.

Two weeks later, Jacob interrupted Russ while he was studying in the library and told him that he'd talked to his contacts in Portland and that they thought an Arbor Day event was a good idea. Jacob, however, said he didn't have the time to help plan the event. This was his final semester, and he was taking a 300-level political science class and a linguistics class that required him to read two hundred pages per week. Russ said he'd be happy to plan the event by himself. Before Jacob left, he gave Russ an application. “The Greenleaf people said to give this to you. Since you seem to like this stuff, they thought you might want to do it.”

“What is it?”

“An internship or something. I don't really know.”

Russ stuffed the application into his backpack without reading it. He was too excited to concentrate on anything other than the Arbor Day event.

The Greenleaf Arbor Day Event was set for April 6, 1982, at noon. It would take place on the east side of campus behind
the football stadium; the closest dorm was half a mile away. Russ had hung flyers all around campus announcing the event, and he had roped off the area—a square about five feet by five feet—where the tree was to be planted. Jacob rode up on his bicycle a few minutes before noon, joining a few other people around the rope: Dr. Spenser, Russ's mentor in the botany department, who lived with his four dogs outside of Normal, Illinois, in a school bus converted into a trailer; a student Russ didn't recognize; and a guy and a girl from Oregon who said they were affiliated with Greenleaf and had driven there for the event on a spring break trip. With the help of Dr. Spenser, Russ had gotten a local tree nursery to donate a blue spruce, a sapling about the size of a five-gallon bucket. At noon, Russ and Dr. Spenser dug a small hole in the center of the roped-off area. It took about five minutes to plant the tree. After they were finished, everyone wished each other, “Happy Arbor Day,” and then scattered back to their lives. Dr. Spenser had to take care of some things in his office; the unknown student waved and said he needed to meet up with some friends. Russ was tying a ribbon on the tree when he noticed that the two Greenleaf representatives were watching him. They suggested getting a drink to celebrate Arbor Day.

At the Thirsty Scholar, the three of them cozied up together in a booth. The two Greenleaf representatives, Tyler Wilcox and Ginger Beauchamp, wanted to know what Russ's major was. When he told him that it was botany, they both looked at each other and smiled. They wanted to know his plans for after college. Russ shrugged and said that lately he'd been thinking about farming Christmas trees. The idea had come to him that past winter, when he saw Christmas tree stands being set up around campus. He told them that those trees needed to be grown somewhere, and that he wanted to be the person to grow them. This idea troubled Ginger and Tyler; they asked Russ if he wouldn't rather grow trees than cut them down. Russ told them that he had to make money somehow. They suggested a tree nursery instead.
Russ said that a tree nursery could be part of the business, but the real money would be made harvesting trees and that there probably wasn't enough demand for a tree nursery because once a tree was planted it lasted for a long time, like fifty years, so he'd basically sell one or two trees to a customer over the course of their lifetime, and that, according to Russ, was no way to run a business. But, he told them—and here was the “good part”—for every Christmas tree he cut down, he'd plant two new ones. In his mind, he was being ecologically prudent, and he was making a little money, which, for any business, he said, was the goal. Both Ginger and Tyler nodded. Tyler took a sip of his beer. At that moment, Russ felt a light tapping on his leg. He looked under the table and saw the toe of Ginger's boot tapping his shin. She winked at him. Then she asked, “Have you given any thought to the Canadian internship?”