Tag Archives: Ohio

Encore Excerpt From ‘The Butterfly Tree’

by Woody

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here) and orderable at all bookshops.

*

A good many readers in response to the column two weeks ago excerpted from my new novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations” asked for more. Who am I to argue with taking the day off? And so, from the opening chapter, an encore:

Ka-BOOM!

Thunder exploded, its volume deafening, its lightning flash brilliant as the Biblical bolt that blinded Saul, shooting down from the heavens with the earthshaking power of a million hatchet blows. The blade of electricity cleaved The Black Walnut Tree as effortlessly as a honed hunting knife slicing a stalk of celery.

A life of 231 years ended in a split-second.

The regal tree was sliced cleanly in two, from leafy crown to grassy ground, the splayed halves as identical as a left and right hand. The newly exposed surfaces seemed as if a master cabinetmaker had spent endless hours sanding, varnishing, buffing.

In death The Black Walnut Tree had been a lifesaver, shielding a clan of Roma migrants from being lanced by the thunderbolt. The ensemble, encamped along the riverbank in March 1852, had sought shelter beneath the tree’s colossus canopy—most importantly, Aisha Beswick, who was in labor with her first child. Huddled alongside Tamás, the expectant father, was Dika, Aisha’s mother and a revered fortuneteller.

Half an hour before the fateful lighting strike, as moody clouds roiled ominously darker, darker, closer, closer, Dika bemoaned, on the edge of weeping: “The peril is great for Aisha and the baby. We must fetch a doctor or they shall both die, this I know.”

Without hesitation, Hanzi volunteered for the emergency errand. The teenager, as if a descendant of the wing-footed Greek messenger god Hermes, raced two miles to town with such swiftness that the falling raindrops seemed to miss him.

*

Aisha’s contractions became more frequent, more fierce, more worrisome.

The apocalyptic sky was having its own contractions, three-hundred-million-volt flashes of lightning followed by deafening whipcracks.

“Oh, Lord, please watch over my child,” Dika said softly, head bowed, “and keep safe my precious grandbaby.”

Dika’s prayers seemed suddenly answered with Doc’s hasty arrival, but just as he set down his medical bag—

—Ka-BOOM!

The fateful thunderbolt smote The Black Walnut Tree like a mighty swing of Paul Bunyan’s giant axe. Miraculously, no one was killed by the lightning strike, nor injured by the falling twin timbers. All, however, were dumbstruck with fright.

All, except Doc.

“Gentlemen, I need you to hold a blanket overhead—like a tent,” Doc calmly directed the gathering. “We want to keep our expectant mother here as dry and comfortable as possible.”

As this was being done, Doc removed his raincoat and favorite derby hat, dropped to one knee, went to work.

Another wave of contractions washed over Aisha and she wailed loud as a thunderclap.

“Omen bad,” Dika sobbed, staring at the felled tree halves. “Two sunrises this poor child will not live to see.”

Not a believer in prophecies, Doc was deeply concerned nonetheless. His heart raced like Hanzi’s feet had for this was the first baby—the very first—Dr. Lemuel Jamison would endeavor to deliver all by himself.

Only two weeks earlier, Doc had completed a nine-month obstetrics internship at Cincinnati’s Commercial Hospital that was affiliated with The Medical College of Ohio from which he graduated top of his class.

During his internship, Doc delivered countless babies. Always, however, there had been an experienced obstetrician by his side, ready to help—or take over fully—if things turned dicey.

Things were dicey now.

And about to turn dicier.

* * *

Excerpt from “The Butterfly Tree” by Woody Woodburn, BarkingBoxer Press, all rights reserved, now available at Amazon and other online booksellers, and many bookshops. Woody can be contacted at woodywriter@gmail.com.

Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

*   *   *  

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

*

Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Excerpt from ‘The Butterfly Tree’

by Woody

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here) and orderable at all bookshops.

“Life imitates art,” Oscar Wilde famously asserted and his words proved eerily accurate a month ago when my 97-year-old father, a surgeon turned patient, was battling cancer to the courageous end.

One night, after Pop’s breathing had grown shallower by the day and more and labored by the hour, I read him the excerpt below from my newly released novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations.”

*

“What I want you to promise me,” Doc said—breathe—“is that you’ll grieve only one day for me.” Breathe. “After one day, dry your eyes and focus on always remembering our good times together”—breathe—“and never forgetting how much I love you.”

Tears bathed his twin sons’ cheeks.

“There’s something I never told you”—breathe—“and probably should have,” Doc, now 83, continued weakly, pneumonia’s grip growing strong. With effort he proceeded to share the depths of his long-ago widower’s bereavement and suicide attempt, including the exploding ether bottle that awakened him the night his house burned down. “So you see”—breathe—“you boys saved my life.”

“We had no idea,” said Lemuel.

“We’ll still never say who really started that fire,” Jamis said, impishly.

“I have my suspicion,” Doc retorted, winking intimately at Jay-Jay.

Turning serious again: “As I’ve often told you, try to make each day your masterpiece. Breathe. If you’re successful doing that most days, day after day and week after month after year”—breathe—“when you get to the end of your adventure you’ll have lived a masterpiece life. Breathe. I’ve made some flawed brushstrokes, certainly, but all in all, I’m pleased”—breathe—“with my life’s painting. Yes, I feel happy and fulfilled. My only real regret”—breathe—“is that it’s all passed by so swiftly, in a blink it seems. Breathe. I feel like I did when I was a kid on the pony ride at the fair”—breathe—“I want to go around one more time.”

Jamis leaned over and hugged Doc, embracing his Pops longer than he ever had, and still it was far too brief. Lem, lightly stroking Doc’s left arm, suddenly realized the brushstroke-like birthmark resembled Halley’s Comet—The tail of a comet that Grandma warned us would bring tears, he thought.

Doc slept for most of the next two days, awaking only for short spells—including evening shaves from the town barber, Jonny Gold. Breathing became more labored as his failing lungs slowly filled with drowning fluid. During Connie’s illness long before, and again with Alycia’s not so long ago, Doc lovingly told them it was okay to “let go” rather than suffer. But he found it impossible to grant himself similar merciful permission.

Jamis and Lem gave it instead.

“Keep fighting if it’s for you, Pops,” Jamis said, his tone tender as a requiem. “But if you’re doing it for Lem and me, we’ll be okay—go be with Aly and Connie. We love you beyond all measure.”

“We’ll never forget your love,” Lem whispered, his lips brushing his namesake’s ear.

Doc opened his eyes, blue-grey like the ocean on a cloudy day, and with clear recognition grinned fragilely at Jamis, then at Lem, letting them know he heard their lovely words. His eyelids lowered shut as he squeezed his sons’ hands and whistle-hummed, almost inaudibly, before being gently spirited away.

*

When I finished reading, and then echoed the twins’ words with my own, my dad opened his ocean-hued eyes, briefly; smiled, faintly; gave my hand a tender squeeze, lengthily; and death imitated art before my next visit the following day.

*   *   *  

            Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

*

Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Excerpt from “The Butterfly Tree” by Woody Woodburn, BarkingBoxer Press, all rights reserved, now available at Amazon and other online booksellers and many bookshops. Woody can be contacted at woodywriter@gmail.com.

*

Hands of Time Stop, Tears Start

by Woody

The photograph is of two hands, right hands both, one holding the other. More specifically, the hand on top is wrapped around the index and middle fingers of the bottom hand, with the top thumb resting upon – in truth, gently and tirelessly caressing – the metacarpophalangeal knuckles.

Look more closely and you will see that the embraced hand is more aged and that the younger wrist wears two similar bracelets: a sunny yellow “Livestrong” cancer silicon band and a green-and-yellow swirly one.

The joined hands are resting on a red fleece blanket mostly, partially on a blue bedsheet, and if the photo were not cropped so tightly you would see an oxygen breathing tube running across the mattress – and suddenly the yellow bracelet would take on added gravity.

Pop and me…

For 20 years I have worn this Livestrong bracelet in remembrance of friends and family and colleagues, a roll call that has tragically grown far too lengthy, who have died from cancer. The swirly bracelet, meanwhile, is in similar honor of cancer survivors, the green, like spring leaves on a tree, signifying lives still blooming.

Two days ago, on the last day of February if this were not a Leap Year, the bracelet honoring my 97-year-old dad who previously defeated an array of serious skin cancers, and most recently battled bone cancer, switched from green-and-yellow to all yellow. On John Steinbeck’s birthday, just as the Pacific sun was setting on the Channel Islands, a sight my dad dearly loved to watch but for the past few weeks could not, Dr. James Dallas Woodburn II – a formal mouthful of syllables but just “Pop” to me – left our earthly Eden.

The eyes may be windows to the soul – Pop’s were blue and clear until the very end – but it is his hands I wish to focus on here. Those hands had magic in them. I mean that truly. Those hands saved far too many lives to count, and restored the quality of life to endless more, for they were a surgeon’s hands.

During my final visit with my dad…

Amazingly, those hands, quite large and strong, kept their skill and dexterity well into their ninth decade, performing their magic in the Operating Room at Ventura’s Community Memorial Hospital, where he joined the staff in 1972, in mid-career, until three years ago. That’s right, Pop was operating until age 94, albeit in the latter decade only assisting. It may not be a record for surgical longevity, but surely it makes the hall of fame.

Those hands, belonging to the son of a country physician, had the proud joy of performing their magic alongside his two eldest sons, my older brothers, general surgeons both.

“Are Jim and Doug as good as you were?” I asked Pop during our daily evening visits the past few months. With Midwest modesty, for he was born and raised in Ohio, he answered, “You’ll have to ask them,” but his wry smile revealed his true feelings of mastery.

Those hands, as a boy tossed, footballs and baseballs and shot basketballs with his friends and later did so with his three sons.

Those hands, as father of the bride, guided his fourth-and-youngest child down the wedding aisle.

Those hands blessedly held nine grandchildren, “The Grands” he proudly called them, and even more blessedly held “a lucky 13 Greats.”

Those hands did crossword puzzles in a flash, always in ink, up until the final few days when his razor-sharp mind finally became foggy from increased painkillers.

While heinous cancer and toxic chemotherapy, four rounds of three sessions each, a medical torture for a nonagenarian, seemingly stole every ounce sans his skin and bones, those hands amazingly did not become skeletal and knobby. Indeed, caressing the hand in the photo, I marveled at its soft and smooth skin.

Long, long ago on a blind date in college, on a hayride, those hands of a Navy veteran, back home from World War II, bravely held the hand of a beautiful blonde college coed for the first time, and would eventually hold that woman, my mom, through 38 years of marriage before she died three decades ago.

 I like to imagine those hands now gently brushing away the happy tears from the cheeks of my mom upon their reunion.

*   *   *

Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations” will be published in late March.

Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Shared Memory is Music to My Heart

by Woody

Approaching the front door of an attractive home, two stories and gated, I was greeted with a gentle breeze that carried upon it a jazzy piano melody.

So lovely was the music, which I soon learned came from a gorgeous Steinway – a century-old family heirloom, in fact, played by a gifted pianist – that before gently knocking, rap-rap-rap, I stood outside the threshold for a very long moment and listened.

And yet an even more beautiful song awaited me inside, the song of a story shared about my paternal grandfather, life-changing memories from 69 years ago and 2,300 miles away.

Dr. Ansel Woodburn, aka my Grandpa

Before moving forward with this song, I must first briefly go backwards. Three years ago in this space, I wrote about my Grandpa Ansel who was a country physician in Urbana, Ohio. In part, I quoted from a yellowing newspaper clipping from The Urbana Daily Citizen with the headline “Fond Memories of Doc Prevail” below whichMarilyn Johnson recalled being treated by my grandfather many, many years ago.

“When I was small,” she wrote, “I was always breaking a bone. Dr. Ansel Woodburn would first of all use his trusty (and hated) thumb to locate the fracture. He would then set the bone and cast it.”

She specifically recalled one fracture and treatment: “After he casted my arm, he asked how my favorite doll was doing. Before I could say ‘Jack Robinson,’ he had fashioned a doll cradle with Plaster of Paris and wires on which to rock.”

In response to my column, I received an email from another patient my grandpa had cared for a long, long time ago. Suzie told me she was given an even greater kindness than a toy doll cradle.

Wondering how in the small world Suzie had come across my column nearly across the nation in Ohio, and also wishing to hear more of her recollections about Grandpa Ansel, I wrote her back and asked. Surprise of surprises, it turns out she now lives in Camarillo and subscribes to The Ventura County Star.

Moreover, Suzie very kindly invited me to come for a visit so she could share her memories in person. Alas, the busyness of life, as it has a way of doing, along with the pandemic, as it had a way of doing, got in the way. Recently, at long last, our get-together happened.

By convenience, and by a 1-in-365 coincidence, we unintentionally met up on the very day marking the 55th anniversary of Ansel’s death. Adding to the serendipity, perhaps raising it to fate or a Godwink, is this: In 1954, when Suzie was an 18-year-old high school senior walking into Ansel’s physician’s office, he was 62 years old. When Suzie, now an octogenarian, welcomes me into her home with a piano’s song, I too am 62.

Music and poetry go hand in hand, so I am reminded of an original poem Grandpa penned on the title page of his copy of “Modern Surgery,” an heirloom holy as scripture. It is dated October 1, 1919, four days before his 28th birthday:

“The worker dies, but the work lives on / Whether a picture, a book, or a clock

“Ticking the minutes of life away / For another worker in metal or rock

“My work is with children and women and men – Not iron, not brass, not wood

“And I hope when I lay my stethoscope down / That my Chief will call it good”

A narrative Suzie shared with me, and which I will share here next week, confirms that Ansel’s “Chief” called his life’s work “good.”

*   *   *

Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Ocean Rescue Rescues Memories

by Woody

A big-wave warning was issued at Magic Sands Beach, as previously mentioned here about my recent trip to The Big Island of Hawai’i, and a strong rip current carried a swimmer further and further from shore.

The lifeguard on duty, sitting in a towering chair, called out with a bullhorn for the man to come back in. Either the command was ignored, or the swimmer was unable to heed it, and he was pulled deeper out to sea.

Before tense seconds could add up to a New York minute, the lifeguard – imagine David Hasselhoff in the old TV show “Baywatch” and you have an accurate portrait – flew down from his perch, ran and dove into the surf, and swam like he was challenging for an Olympic gold medal.

David Hasselhoff as Mitch Buchannon in “Baywatch.”

“Baywatch” originally aired from 1989 to 1999, but my mind raced all the way back to “Quarrywatch” in the 1940s starring my dad as the fictional Mitch Buchannon in red swim trunks.

During summers in high school through medical school, Pop was a lifeguard at Muzzy’s Lake, a flooded rock quarry in Urbana, Ohio. He started out earning fifty cents an hour.

“That beat the heck out the twenty-five cents an hour I made at my first summer job when I was fourteen, pumping gas at Blue Synoco,” Pop, now 95, recalls vividly. “Gas was sixteen cents a gallon – I remember that because most customers bought a dollar’s worth which was six-plus gallons.”

At Muzzy’s he eventually worked up to one dollar an hour and notes: “That was good money!”

He earned it. One single summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Pop made 46 saves. Understand, Muzzy’s attracted upwards of a thousand people a day on weekends. Combine those crowds with a gently sloping bottom that in one blind step dropped off suddenly from friendly chest-deep water to 30-plus feet and you had the deadly ingredients for drowning.

Once, far outside the buoys marking off the swimming area, a car rolled off a towering bluff at the far end of the quarry and plummeted into deep, deep water. As it sank, Pop – an intercollegiate swimmer – raced freestyle to the crash site and dived down to the ear-popping cold depths in hopes of rescuing anyone trapped inside. It took three lung-burning tries before he finally located the car.

Thankfully, it was empty.

When a tow truck arrived at the scene, Pop dove down, down, down a fourth time to attach a chain so the car could be pulled out. It was a “Baywatch”-like episode in real life. Indeed, in photographs during his final years lifeguarding at Muzzy’s Pop seems chiseled from quarried stone at 6-foot-3 and 205 pounds and comes into black-and-white focus like Mitch Buchannon with a crew cut instead of longish curls.

In more than half a dozen summers in the tower chair, Pop – and his best friend and co-lifeguard, Dunny – had only one death occur during their Quarry Watch. A young boy, with a congenital heart problem it turned out, quietly sunk down underwater. There was no splashing, no struggle, no telltale sign of trouble for a lifeguard to see.

Meanwhile, the boy’s parents were not keeping a watchful eye and eventually sounded the alarm too late. Their son tragically drowned in less than three-feet of water that he could stand up in.

Happily, the Magic Sands Beach lifeguard towed the struggling swimmer to shore with the aid of a small torpedo-shaped buoy.

Isn’t it funny that traveling on vacation not only creates new memories, it can also rekindle old ones.

To be continued…

 *   *   *

Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

My Farming Roots Run Deep

by Woody

STRAW_CoverWoody’s highly anticipated new book “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” is NOW available! Order your signed copy HERE! 

*   *   *

Family Roots: Soil, Seed and Corn

This Tuesday past was National Agriculture Day, a day I observed by enjoying some fresh guacamole made from local-grown avocados and earlier giving thanks to those doing backbreaking work in a strawberry field as I drove past.

As John Greenleaf Whittier wrote: “Give fools their gold, and knaves their power; let fortune’s bubbles rise and fall; who sows a field, or trains a flower, or plants a tree, is more than all.”

And, the poet should have added, he and she who harvest a field.1cornpic

My farming roots run five generations deep into the rich soil of Ohio.

My paternal great grandfather, J.D., in particular, was renowned in the agricultural community. His 330-acre farm on Route 68, south of the small town of Urbana, was saturated with nutrients from long-ago floodings of the Mad River. On this fertile land, over many years, he developed what respectfully became know far and wide simply as “Woodburn Corn.”

J.D. began with a variety of dark corn called “Ripley” that his grandfather began growing on the family farm 70 years earlier as animal feed. J.D. cross-pollinated Ripley with a light-colored variety called “Loudenbark.” The result was what you would expect: ears of corn with a mix of both light and dark kernels.

For several successive years, J.D. selected the darker of these new ears to use as seed to repeat the process, believing this would result in a more robust and bountiful variety.

A few years into his experimentation, J.D. tested his hypothesis by planting his hybrid seed in a side-by-side test. Specifically, he sowed seven acres with the darker selection he favored and seven acres with the lighter kernels he was trying to eliminate. To his surprise, the lighter corn out-yielded the dark – and greatly so.

Thereon, J.D. switched his focus to developing an improved variety of light-colored corn. Importantly, he also selected the ears with the largest kernels – the result being corn with more animal feed per ear. He ultimately would spend more than four decades improving his corn.

About 10 years into the process, a grain elevator worker noticed that J.D.’s corn was far superior to the other corn coming in. The worker started recommending it to others, and soon J.D. was selling all his extra seed to neighbor farmers – and much further away, too.

And for good reason: J.D.’s “Woodburn Corn” won the gold medal for the Utility Contest at the Ohio State Fair as well as the silver medal for Yield. With a test result of 98-percent germination, J.D.’s entry crop in the ten-acre contest resulted in 112.64 bushels of corn per acre.

“Topping one-hundred bushels per acre was like breaking the four-minute mile,” my dad recalls, adding of his trips as a young boy to the State Fair: “Farmers from all over would come up to ask Grandpa for advice.”

Interestingly, and remarkably, J.D. grew the prize bounty without using any manure or fertilizer. Rather, he simply grew it in a virgin pasture – that is how fertile his farmland was. “One of the choicest farms of his township,” according to The History of Champagne County, Ohio.

However, it took more than choice magical land to grow medal-winning crops.

“Good seed, that’s the one big secret of our crop,” J.D. told a newspaper reporter. “But I don’t know as you would call it a secret. It’s a thing any good farmer knows.”

While my great-grandfather won prizes for his corn, my great uncle – “Unc” – earned his own measure of local fame in Urbana for his green thumb.

Instead of using wooden stakes for his garden beans to climb, Unc got the idea to plant a single sunflower seed inside each circle of planted bean seeds – the beans, he reasoned, would then be able to climb the rising sunflower stock.

Well, as they say, the best laid plans . . .

The beans withered and died because the sunflowers bogarted the extra fertilizer and water intended for the beans. Not all was lost, however, as Unc boasted – and was teased for – “the tallest crop of sunflowers in town.”

*  *  *

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden&Me_cover_PRCheck out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”