I’m experimenting with woodcuts instead of lino blocks. This is a “quick and dirty” little image called Taurus. The odd surface of the ink is because I’m doing something like a novice…but I think I like it, given the subject matter. Image 3.5″ x 4″ 1/10
[15]
Monthly Archives: January 2023
What Was Your First Big Trip?
Our family never got to take many trips. It was outside the budget to travel, so, as a rule we didn’t do it.
I can think of two early exceptions that I will write about today and another bigger vacation later that I will write about tomorrow.
I am writing this on National Michigan Day, that is the anniversary of the date of admission to the Union for our lovely pair of peninsulas. If you have read “The Great Toledo War” by Harold “Swampy” Marsh, you know that the only war fought between states other than that other Civil War was fought between Ohio and Michigan. Ohio won and got Toledo and we got stuck with the Upper Peninsula. But it wasn’t until my lifetime that Michiganders could even get to the U.P. without a boat.
Sometime in what was probably late summer of 1956, or early summer of 1957 Mom and Dad bundled us into the car and we headed north. The reason I know the approximate timeline is that the object of our wandering was the car ferry at the Straits of Mackinac. It was the last year the ferry operated before the Mackinac Bridge opened on November 1, 1957. I can’t say for sure why I remember that date. It must have been strongly impressed on me as a kid, probably by my Dad. He had a head full of historical minutia.
The bridge had been a huge capital plan since about the birth of my great-grandfather. In fact, the research I did today, mostly from the Mackinac Bridge Authority https://www.mackinacbridge.org , indicates the first meeting that discussed the need for a bridge spanning the Straits was held at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in 1888! By 1934 the first price tag on such a project came in at $33,400,000. But no plan came to fruition until 1953 when bonds totaling $99,800.000 were issued and the Bridge was on its way to reality.
I believe we took this boat ride to the U.P. so that I could remember a time before the direct route. It seems to have worked.
Michigan was home to the Motor City. The entire state’s economy and culture was built upon names like Ford, Olds, Chevrolet and yet no person had ever driven the length of Michigan without that 5 mile boat ride from Mackinac City to St. Ignace. In 1956 or 57 Harold and Joyce set out to do it again.
I remember nothing from the drive up to the ferry. We left very early in the morning and all three of us kids slept much or most of the trip to the top of the Lower Peninsula. But we were awake and anxious as we waited in what seemed like a huge line of cars and trucks queued up to board the boat. I feared we were too far back in the line and we would have to return the next day. The ferry itself was the biggest boat I had yet seen in all of my 6 years. The photo above is the ship we rode in 1956. “The Vacationland” could transport about 150 vehicles at a time. I do not remember a thing about that time in the Upper Peninsula. I don’t know if we stayed a day or a week, but I remember that boat ride (and the horrible stink of diesel fumes in the hold). The ride seemed like an ocean voyage.
Fast forward to some date in 1958. The Marsh family was off to make that trip again. The “Mighty Mac” had opened the previous November and thousands had crossed the Straits by passenger car. I remember this trip much better. There are some old black and white photos somewhere that support my memories.
It seems to me now that the original goal was to drive across the bridge and so we went there apparently without stopping. I don’t think we had bought the almost new 1957 two-tone Chevy. (I’d give an arm for that car today!) So we must have been driving the old ’53 Plymouth. Either way, I was old enough to have a window seat in the back and I was subjected to my first taste of vertigo as we drove across the steel grid of the inner lane on the bridge. I could look out the window and all the way down to the Lake, 199 feet below. Neither of my sisters would even look out the window.
I’m not sure of all the places we went in the Upper Peninsula. I am certain we saw the Tahquamenon Falls, referred to sometimes as the Root Beer Falls because of the unique amber colored water. They were cool for about 15 minutes to a 7 year old, but it seemed to take a very long time to get there (not far from Paradise).
The Toonerville Trolly, was a big hit on that trip. It was (and still is) a steam powered, narrow gauge train that takes you through Black Bear country to a riverboat landing. The boat is called the Hiawatha today, and it may have had the same name back in the 50s. That is a longer ride. When you arrive there is a longish hike to see the falls. (Today I discover the hike is 5/8 of a mile each way with a lot of stairs to climb. I’ll bet there was a lot of complaining from people with short legs.)
Other than the Bridge and the Falls, I only remember one more significant event from that trip. We had stopped somewhere near Lake Superior in Christmas, Michigan. This is the kitschiest Christmas town in the world, complete with a 35 foot Santa Clause standing out by the road. I remember sending a postcard to a friend from the post office (with Christmas stamps and a Christmas, Michigan post mark). We met the “real” Santa and got to spend a good amount of time with him. As I said, I was 7 and had been clued in to the real meaning of Santa, but both of my sisters believed in the conventional children’s way. What poor Santa didn’t know (but my parents did) was that Karla had an active case of the mumps. (When we got home, both Crystal and I came down with the mumps too. She was definitely contagious.) To help disguise her ailment, Mom had put Karla in a hat that tied under her chin with a wide ribbon. I’m still not certain it did any disguising as much as it accentuated her condition but when Santa met my sister, he leaned over and said to Karla, “Ho Ho Ho! You have some cute, chubby cheeks, don’t you?” Karla was over the moon that her hero spoke directly to her. The rest of us hoped Santa had already had the mumps as a child, otherwise he was in for some hurting.
A quick search today reveals that there is a distance of 376 miles between Charlotte, MI and Christmas, MI. That’s how far we spread the mumps virus that summer. Karla was our own little 3-year-old Typhoid Mary. That’s the story of how the Marshes made an impact on the health history of the great State of Michigan.
[5]
House of the Rising Sun by James Lee Burke and It’s Place in Literature
Is this a review? Kinda. Go ahead and buy it. If you like Burke, you’ll like it. If you like Hackberry Holland, you’ll love it. If you think it is beneath your literary values to read a “cowboy story,” you’re just full of crap.
When I was in college back in the Pleistocene, the world was still enamored with Ernest Hemingway. He was the “man’s man” writer of the early 20th Century and that reputation lasted until near the end of my time teaching. Something happened along the way and men’s men, especially white men’s men, became passè in literature. That standard can be argued by a different literary generation than my own, BUT (you knew I’d say that, didn’t you?) a thing that critics raved about in the 30s and 40s, that catapulted Hemingway into his weird status as the epitome of “manly” is the same thing that catapulted him to a Nobel Prize for Literature. Like his character Hackberry Holland, Burke is a man/writer out of his own time. He handles the disconnect like a master.
It is my contention that much of the spirit of the Hemingway Code is captured (and its flaws demonstrated) in a parallel construction between a very good Hemingway book, The Sun Also Rises, 1926, and this very good Burke book, 2015.
A few housekeeping duties: In TSAR, the characters have just come through the War to End All Wars—the first mechanized war—and many millions are killed and maimed. In HOTRS, the main character is older and it is his son who has come through The Great War and experienced his own tragic injuries. This parallel is necessary for a master novelist to measure the moral effect on the human spirit. The lesson is taught through the rejection of religion. But both writers find that humans have a need for some moral equivalent to fill the void, aching in some ways to be filled by some spiritual meaning.
One of the clearest ways each novelist deals with the problem of spiritual loss is to convert man’s interaction with the natural world to “secular equivalents of religion.” Those actions can be taken alone or in communion with others, most often, other men. Consider this classic exchange between characters Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton. Note the language and the ritual-like behavior, especially in the treatment of the fish, a classic symbol of Christianity.
I did not feel the first trout strike. When I started to pull up I felt that I had one and brought him, fighting and bending the rod almost double, out of the boiling water at the foot of the falls, and swung him up and onto the dam. He was a good trout, and I banged his head against the timber so that he quivered out straight, and then slipped him into my bag.
While I had him on, several trout had jumped at the falls. As soon as I baited up and dropped in again I hooked another and brought him in the same way. In a little while I had six. They were all about the same size. I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them. They were beautifully colored and firm and hard from the cold water. It was a hot day, so I slit them all and shucked out the insides, gills and all, and tossed them over across the river. I took the trout ashore, washed them in the cold, smoothly heavy water above the dam, and then picked some ferns and packed them all in the bag, three trout on a layer of ferns, then another layer of fems, then three more trout, and then covered them with ferns. They looked nice in the ferns, and now the bag was bulky, and I put it in the shade of the tree.
It was very hot on the dam, so I put my worm-can in the shade with the bag, and got a book out of the pack and settled down under the tree to read until Bill should come up for lunch.
…
“Get any?” he asked. He had his rod and his bag and his net all in one hand, and he was sweating. I hadn’t heard him come up, because of the noise from the dam.
“Six. What did you get?”
Bill sat down, opened up his bag, laid a big trout on the grass. He took out three more, each one a little bigger than the last, and laid them side by side in the shade from the tree. His face was sweaty and happy.
“How are yours?”
“Smaller.”
“Let’s see them.”
“They’re packed.”
“How big are they really?”
“They’re all about the size of your smallest.”
“You’re not holding out on me?”
“I wish I were.”
“Get them all on worms?”
“Yes.”
“You lazy bum!”
Bill put the trout in the bag and started for the river, swinging the open bag. He was wet from the waist down and I knew he must have been wading the stream.
I walked up the road and got out the two bottles of wine. They were cold. Moisture beaded on the bottles as I walked back to the trees. I spread the lunch on a newspaper, and uncorked one of the bottles and leaned the other against a tree. Bill came up drying his hands, his bag plump with ferns.
“Let’s see that bottle,” he said. He pulled the cork, and tipped up the bottle and drank. “Whew! That makes my eyes ache.”
“Let’s try it.”
The wine was icy cold and tasted faintly rusty.
“That’s not such filthy wine,” Bill said.
“The cold helps it,” I said.
We unwrapped the little parcels of lunch.
“Chicken.”
“There’s hard-boiled eggs.”
“Find any salt?”
“First the egg,” said Bill. “Then the chicken. Even Bryan could see that.”
“He’s dead. I read it in the paper yesterday.”
“No. Not really?”
“Yes. Bryan’s dead.”
Bill laid down the egg he was peeling.
“Gentlemen,” he said, and unwrapped a drumstick from a piece of newspaper. “I reverse the order. For Bryan’s sake. As a tribute to the Great Commoner. First the chicken; then the egg.”
“Wonder what day God created the chicken?”
“Oh,” said Bill, sucking the drumstick, “how should we know? We should not question. Our stay on earth is not for long. Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks.”
“Eat an egg.”
Bill gestured with the drumstick in one hand and the bottle of wine in the other.
“Let us rejoice in our blessings. Let us utilize the fowls of the air. Let us utilize the product of the vine. Will you utilize a little, brother?”
“After you, brother.”
Bill took a long drink.
“Utilize a little, brother,” he handed me the bottle. “Let us not doubt, brother. Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hen-coop with simian fingers. Let us accept on faith and simply say—I want you to join with me in saying—What shall we say, brother?” He pointed the drumstick at me and went on. “Let me tell you. We will say, and I for one am proud to say—and I want you to say with me, on your knees, brother. Let no man be ashamed to kneel here in the great out-of-doors. Remember the woods were God’s first temples. Let us kneel and say: ‘Don’t eat that, Lady—that’s Mencken.’”
“Here,” I said. “Utilize a little of this.”
We uncorked the other bottle.
AMEN! If the same activities and conversation had been held between two medieval monks, very little might change. Hemingway and other men of his time, think Teddy Roosevelt for example, transmogrified the cathedral to the wilderness.
Along very similar lines, Consider this from Burke’s House of the Rising Sun. Burke tells us early in the story, Hackberry Holland has a certain moral void of which he is aware: Hackberry got put in jail twice on drunk and disorderly charges and sank into all the solipsistic pleasures of dipsomania, a state of moral insanity that allowed him to become a spectator rather than a participant in the deconstruction of his life. Also, if he wished, he could visit the path up Golgotha without ever leaving his home. Who needed nails and wooden crosses and the Roman flagella and the spittle of the crowd when an uncorked bottle of mescal or busthead whiskey was close by?
Cruder, perhaps, but appropriate to an Oklahoma cow wrangler.
In this long (over 400 pages) novel, Burke pauses at nearly the exact center of the story to insert this scene of his lone protagonist encountering his own moral deficit after he kills a man (justifiably, if you squint).
That night Hackberry put on his canvas coat and a flop hat and went down to the riverside with a wicker chair and a bait bucket and a cane pole strung with a fishing line and a wood bobber and a treble hook and a weight made from a miniè ball, and set up shop at the edge of the water. He baited the treble hook with a piece of liver and cast it close to an eddy behind a downed cottonwood tree where yellow catfish as thick as his upper arm hung in schools. But the real purpose of his visit to the riverside was not to catch fish. A few feet away, under a tangle of cable left over from a logging operation, was the hiding spot he had chosen for the artifact he now thought of as the cup. He had wrapped it and its wood case inside a rubber slicker, and then a tarp, and tied it with rope, and at night had buried it up the slope in a dry spot that never collected water.
He was not sure why he was drawn to this particular spot by the river on this particular night, but he knew his purpose did not have to do with fish. The truth was, he could not deal with the image of the burned man lying in the alley, his head resting in the Mexican woman’s lap, blood pumping from holes in his stomach.
Hackberry shut his eyes and opened them again, trying to restart his thought processes before they led him into the dark places that were a trap, never a solution. He looked over his shoulder at the tangle of cable and the burial spot he had planted divots of grass on. “I don’t know if you actually used that cup or not, but I need some he’p.”
He was surprised at his request. He had never been keen on prayer and in fact was not exactly sure what it consisted of. In his experience, religious moments tended to occur when people were about to fall off a cliff or get rope-dragged through a cactus patch.
“I was set up, but I doubt if anybody will believe that. Were it not for the sheriff in Bexar County, I’d probably be charged with manslaughter. The sheriff in Bexar County is not the type of man I want to be indebted to. I’m open to any suggestions you have, sir.”
There was no reply. The moon was full above the hills, its mountains and craters and ridges like an enormous bruise on its surface. Hackberry looked again at the burial spot. “Tell me what to do, sir. Tell that boy in the brothel I’m sorry. Maybe he was a friend of my son. The prewar army was a small group. Sir, what am I going to do? I feel absolutely lost.”
He felt his cane pole throb in his hand. His bobber had been pulled straight down in the eddy, the moisture squeezing from the tension in the line, the weight of the fish arching the pole to the point of breaking. He slipped his hands down the pole and grabbed the line and twisted it around his wrists and pulled the catfish clear of the eddy and the rotted cottonwood, through the reeds and onto the bank, it long, sleek, grayish-yellow sides and whiskers and spiked fins coating with sand.
He put his foot across the fish’s stomach and worked the treble hook free of its mouth, then picked it up by the tail, avoiding its spikes, and swung its head against a rock, slinging blood on the grass. He put the catfish in the bait bucket and squatted by the water’s edge and began washing the blood and fish slime from his hands. The water clouded and the blood disappeared inside it, but he could not get the smell of the fish and what it reminded him of off his hands.
I contend this scene is every bit as artful a construction as the one from Hemingway. And every bit as demonstrative of a man seeking out and practicing spiritual rituals in his participation in nature.
I will assert here that this scene is also very similar to the scene in Huckleberry (Hackberry) Finn, in which Huck has his conversation with God about the nature of friendship inside of religion and the law.
This novel was an old man author doing an excellent job of examining what a moral life is like to an old man character. At one point I took it to heart when someone admonished Hackberry Holland to choose in which Century he wanted to live. It does give an old man pause.
[4]
How Did You Get Your First Job?
The short answer is the typical one. Privilege. Smith’s Men’s Wear had been a fixture on the first block of South Cochran in Charlotte since 1934. (Smith’s is on the right end of stores in the picture above.) They had always had a part-time position for a high school boy. The job was not exciting, but it was public. Sweep the floors, sweep/shovel the sidewalk in front of the store, wash the windows once a week, constantly polish the glass display cases, break down boxes, empty the trash. But once in a while, if all that other stuff was done and everyone else was with a customer, I got to work on the sales floor.
For several years, Smith’s had hired the high school “Mayor.” The Mayor was the equivalent of President of the Student Council. That was the job I had coveted since the eighth grade. I didn’t know it came with a cash-paying job too. But it did.
The election took place in the late spring. That should be a story of its own. I won. The guy who had the jobs (Smith’s and Mayor) before me was Val Nelson. He got ready to go off to college and he was the one who told me to go in and talk to Mr. Smith. I did and I was hired.
It paid 90 cents an hour. That was minimum wage in 1967. Actually, it wasn’t minimum wage. It was the minimum they were allowed to pay to hire a minor for less than 20 hours a week. Since I was working an hour and a half each day after school, four hours on Friday night and 8 hours on Saturday for a weekly total of 18 hours, I met the standards to pay a sub-minimum wage. I also got a 20% discount on anything in the store. That was the whole package.
I liked working there. Mr. Harold Smith (always Mr.), Dick Cooper, and Russ Last name I can’t recall (maybe Barnhart or Bernard, can’t recall) were the staff. Later, they would add a woman, Chris (Crystal) Taylor who brought a certain talent in dealing with women customers that the men didn’t seem to have. Every person on the sales floor could sell anything in the store except suits. Suits were sold by the men. I suspect there was a commission on suit sales for everyone but me and they didn’t trust the big sales to a kid.
I had a knack I discovered early. It was a narrow niche but no one on the floor could sell more men’s underwear to older women than me. We even had a contest one weekend. Starting Friday afternoon when I came in until we closed the store at 5 pm Saturday, I sold more underwear than everyone else in the store combined! I cannot explain this talent, but women, especially older women, displayed a moment when they were buying a present that seemed to say “but what else?” My immediate answer was underwear. And they almost always they said yes. We are a collection of weird talents. It got to the point that anyone handling an older woman customer always finished up by handing them off to me to ring them up and add some boxer shorts to her order.
I wish I could say I held that job through my Senior year of high school, that I passed it off to the next Mayor the following summer as I got ready to go to college. It didn’t work out that way. Instead I quit Smith’s to go to work across the street at some chain discount store. There I became a union member for the first time (much to the chagrin of my Dad) and made $1.40 an hour (the actual minimum wage). But I never felt a “part” of something at work again until I started teaching at Ithaca High School, eight years later.
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What was your dad like when you were a kid?
Harold Edwin Marsh was a victim of the Korean War. I don’t use that term lightly. He clearly suffered from PTSD his whole life and spent huge amounts of energy trying to disguise that fact from anyone who suspected. Those of us closest to him didn’t suspect because to do so would have been a kind of betrayal. And you didn’t admit a thing like that in those days because it went directly to the core of manliness.
My mother probably could see it better than any of us. She, of course, knew him before he headed to Korea and when he got home. But the unspoken rule of not mentioning it, ever, was followed by all of us. By today’s standards of mental health, that was an absurd behavior. But it was how it was done at the time. There was too much shame associated with it. It has a lot to do with why the 50s were so idealized. It was never real.
I could see the cracks later. I was two weeks old and living with both parents in Kansas City, Missouri where Dad was going to watchmaker’s school in preparation for working in his parents’ jewelry store in Flushing, Michigan. He had joined the Marine Corps as soon as he was old enough, in 1947, but missed WWII. So, in Kansas City he joined a Reserve unit (he said often it was for the fellowship and camaraderie) to earn a few extra bucks a month and when the Korean War (Police Action) broke out, his unit was activated. Poof! Dad was gone and my mother and I found ourselves living with her parents on Hall Street, in Charlotte, Michigan. I didn’t know then it was an ironic homecoming, as one of the greatest motivating factors for my mother to marry my father less than a week after high school graduation was to get away from her abusive father.
In Korea, Dad was injured by a piece of shrapnel from an explosion while he was trying to repair a communications line 60 feet up a pole. Only once he described how, when the explosion went off he was suddenly stone deaf. He leaped down to the branches of a nearby tree, swung to ground and found cover from the Korean artillery assault. He carried that shrapnel the rest of his life. He never viewed his injury as worthy of the purple heart he earned because he didn’t have to stay in a hospital. A half a day in the battalion first aid station was enough to patch him up and send him back to his unit. He told me once, years later when I had joined the Marines, that he changed his mind about the medal when a young Lieutenant received one for slicing his thumb on a beer can. Hey, blood is blood.
He finished his tour and came home to his young, beautiful wife with his two-year-old son and tried to resume a normal 1952 existence. He tried to enroll in some courses at Michigan State University but it took only several days for the Korean War vet to learn that the aesthetics of an academic life was too effete for the man who had lived in the mud and ice and snow of Korea and who had out-marched the Chinese army one night to survive a trap. That is probably where his disdain for higher education blossomed.
I think my father sincerely tried to become the stereotypical 1950s father, head of the stereotypical 1950s family. But he was star-crossed often.
With higher education out of the picture and trade school hopes gone, he settled down in Charlotte trying to get on with the business of raising a family. He took a job as a “puller” in an aluminum extrusion plant. It was a mindless job. Later he got a promotion to “sawman.” Between the artillery in Korea and the high, constant whine in the metal saw shop, his hearing was shot before he was 30. But the American Dream persisted.
We lived, for a while, in a second story apartment on Cochran. I have no particular memories or images from inside that apartment, but I do have a recollection of the long porch-like structure on the second floor. It makes no sense to me now, why the building was built that way, but there it was. It is torn down now, like so much of my childhood. My mother, my father and I were walking down that porch one day, headed somewhere important because we were dressed up. Maybe it is because I was told this story by my mother enough (never by my father) but I think I recall a moment when Dad was there and suddenly he was not. A car backfired or some other loud sharp noise reached Dad and he just leaped over the pony wall that ran along the side of the porch. He jumped into the tree that grew there and disappeared. Mom and I hurried down the stairs and found him below, just fine, acting like nothing happened. Again, we didn’t talk about that much over the years.
We moved into our first house (a rental) sometime in 1953. My sister Crystal was born while we lived there. I think Mom was convinced that would be her life: lower middle class, two kids, stay-at-home mom (like all moms were). When Karla came along in 1954, my mother was not pleased. She blamed my father in front of others for that pregnancy. I think he took some kind of pride in having “tricked” her into a larger family.
I remember many things from our time on Munson Street (it was literally on the wrong side of town exactly next to the railroad tracks). Some memories are very sweet. Some are traumatic.
I remember a fishing trip to Duck Lake when I was five. We left before dawn. We found a giant bullfrog that morning and Dad dispatched it with the butt of a cane pole. We put it in the trunk of the car while we fished (and caught nothing). When we came home, we discovered the frog had regained consciousness and Dad had to kill it again. Then we ate frog legs. They really do jump in the skillet!
I remember Dad teaching me how to use a hammer. He often bought a half pound of roofing nails and I was permitted to pound them into an old stump we had in our triangular shaped back yard (the railroad tracks cut the corner off). By the time we moved from there in 1957, I had pretty much galvanized that stump. Mostly I did this without him nearby. Work became a solitary endeavor for 5-year-old me. And decidedly blue-collar.
In 1957 (the year the Mackinac Bridge opened), we moved to a small house outside of town on Lansing Road. (It may have been US 27 at that time, but I’m unclear.) Dad bought it privately on a land contract from a local entrepreneur named Sam Combs at 4% interest. (Here’s a little joke: Sam Combs was bald.)
It was bit of a dump, but it fit my dad’s idea of working class, bootstraps philosophy. It was a two bedroom, one bath with a Michigan basement under some of it and a crawlspace under most of it. An old fuel oil-fired furnace labored in the attic of the one story structure to blow heat through ceiling vents, a system that insured perpetually cold feet. An outdoor fuel oil tank was troublesome when temps fell below about 25°. But there was a tiny 4 room rental on the property which sometimes had tenants. (Not always since there was no bathroom, the renters had to use the privy (look it up). A big old barn, unused for years and a couple of dilapidated out-building sheds full of rusty everything. It didn’t take long to find out what a tetanus shot was.
Dad was the master of this vast empire. And provided a ton of sweat equity. And about six tons of extra sweat. Remember, this was the house we had no television in for about 2 years (maybe 3), no air conditioning ever, no heat when the fuel oil froze in the fuel tank, and no water all one summer when the pump went out. But we still believed we were middle class. Mom took a job in Lansing with the Mental Health Department to prove it. She had taken a course in Speed Writing which apparently was a version of shorthand but the course was cheaper and the textbook was free. So in addition to “taking memos” she also got an education typing and transcribing case records. I promise more on that story later. It was a typical inside/outside division of labor at home. Everything outside was Dad’s responsibility. Everything inside was Mom’s responsibility except the things she told Dad to do.
I hope there are chances to tell the stories of each of these elements of this house in the future. There seems to be a lot to say about them, but the question here is: “What was my father like?” He felt responsible for this home, this family. He did what he could to ensure our safety and our success within the (often self-imposed) limits he was facing. He made as many good decisions as he could and my mother sometimes let him take credit for good decisions she made. He also made some bad decisions and Mom never took much responsibility for those. In those days I believe they conferred on questions of family policy often and sometimes they got it right and sometimes they got it wrong…just like most of us.
One event that has always stuck in my mind happened at a time that Dad was under more stress than he let any of us understand. This was at the end of his first and longest employment with Aluminum Extrusions. He had (with a little reluctant help by me) planted a too-large garden. I think he was pretending he was a farmer and I was the eldest (only) son. We were to tame this land together. He also was planning on this food to help with the inevitable layoffs in his job. Except I thought a garden was a lot of work for a little reward. (And I still believe that if the only thing you are after is vegetables. You work your ass off all summer to be able to pick a few tomatoes at exactly the moment the market bottoms out because of a glut in supply.)
But here was Dad, busting his ass tending the cucumbers, knowing that the rest of his life looked pretty dismal at this point. Always laboring for the man in his non-union shop, subject to annual layoffs, and beginning to feel the effects of a life-long addiction to alcohol. His kids were growing up with interests in things outside of Dad’s experience, his wife was working outside the house (the humiliation was real back then). And his oldest son was a horrible gardener.
So, anyway, I was bitching about being out in the hot sun and not inside reading a book. And then I bitched about how my sisters were going to eat these onions too but I didn’t see them out in the garden weeding and cultivating and watering. Pretty typical for a smart-ass 14 year old, but I stopped when I looked up and saw a look on his face I had never seen before. It was a little bit scary.
He started yelling. Dad wasn’t much for shouting, but he let it fly on this day. Some internal restraint had given way.
“When you grow up, you better get a job with your head…” He screamed this at me while pounding the vegetables with the garden rake in his hands. “Because you sure as shit aren’t worth a damn with your hands!” And each time he swung the rake down, his feet came up off the ground and his long, skinny legs bent at the knees. He looked for all the world like a cartoon of himself. “I ask you to offer something toward living here…” The rake banged down again. “the least you could do is give an hour of your time,” Bang the rake. The scene lasted about 90 seconds and then it stopped, very suddenly. He went silent, I turned away (weirdly embarrassed) and tended to a different part of the garden and we never spoke about it with each other after. Never speaking about it was typical in our family.
My father was many things, but he was not given to screaming very often. I cannot recall him doing that to me again (although we had a huge falling out early in my senior year in high school). But something changed in my father that day. I think he stopped trying as hard.
I also mark that day as the change in our relationship, the end of my childhood with my father, if you will. Our interaction after that was less friendly, more distant. That never changed until the day I came home and told him I had enlisted in the Marine Corps. That began a new relationship with him, adult-to-adult, sort of.
I want to make it clear that I loved my father, but often it was in spite of himself.
[2]
Of Resolutions and Obstacles
If it is depression,
it comes and goes.
You know that.
Sometimes, like a cat,
it takes its own sweet time leaving.
It glides slowly out the door,
threatening to run back inside every step or two.
It changes its mind and returns
And reverses again.
It seems particularly fickle
when there is rain or snow.
[1]
Lofty Goals
It is my intent to create 365 pieces of art this year. Genre doesn’t matter. A short poem counts as one. A chapter in the memoir counts as one. Each copy of a new print counts as one. I’ll note the “score” as we go. Oh, that and FAT. I should count the loss of one pound as a piece of art.