I will probably not bother with the new Superman flick. I only watched one of the recent Batman movies because of Keith Ledger’s stunning Joker. Mark Hamill does an equally good voice characterization for the cartoon series (go find the YouTube where a fan asks Hamill to do his Joker saying that “Why so serious?” line and the crowd goes wild.)
It’s that Batman cartoon series that’s clarifying for me. It works because its setting is a Gotham City that stylistically could be both today and yesterday. That 1930s-ish styling makes it work and that’s because that’s the period that character emerged from in the comics. These characters, Superman, Batman, and so forth, belong in the timeframe they were created in. That is where they make the most sense. Notice how modern film makers (and comic book producers) struggle with updating their costumes. Those costumes reflected those of circus strongmen and trapeze artists, and were instantly recognizable and believable to the readers of that time. Nowadays they just seem…weird.
Instead of updating the old superheroes we should set their stories in the times they were born, and create new ones for our own. Were I to do a Superman series I would start with his being found by a childless couple in rural Smallville, sometime in the 1920s, when the information highway was the daily newspaper and the vacuum tube radio in the living room. You wouldn’t have to make him a god to make him believable as an awe inspiring figure in a world that didn’t know what we know about time and space. He was a child from a lost world raised on Earth to be one of us. But he was different, he could fly, he had x-ray vision, he could bend steel in his bare hands, bullets just bounced off him. That was amazing back then and I believe there are still lots of good stories, relevant stories, you could tell about that character without having to make him more than he was to fit into a 21st century he really does not belong to.
They say cats don’t have owners, they have staff, and the same might be said of little Baltimore rowhouses…like on days like today when the sky is blue and the air is clear and clean and crisp and your car says Come with me and see what we can see and your cameras say Oh, Oh, Take Us, Take Us Too! and the house says Not On Your Life You Don’t you have grass to mow and railings to paint and concrete to patch and seal!
Something I try to do to Spirit once a month is clean and condition its vinyl and leather upholstery and the rubber gaskets around the doors, hood and trunk. The steering wheel is wrapped in a nice soft leather but the rest of the car is the legendary MB Tex upholstery which a lot of Mercedes affectionados will recommend over the leather because it lasts longer and is easier to clean. But something in my body oils dries up and hardens vinyl severely.
I discovered this effect back when I was a teenager, on the Koss Pro 4AA headphones I happened to love the sound of. I was always having to buy new ones every a couple years because of what my skin oils did to the ear pads. Those really nice soft vinyl ear pads would become rock hard and useless after a couple years just from contact with my skin and you couldn’t just buy new ear pads. Eventually even the cable connecting the headphones to the stereo would harden and start coming apart wherever my fingers touched it and then the headphones were finished and I would have to buy new ones.
So, decades later and two years after I bought it, the driver’s seat on my ‘C’ class, Traveler, began to harden and crack where my bare legs touched it in the summer while wearing cutoffs and when I took it in for repair my dealer said he’d never seen that happen to MB Tex before, and I remembered what my skin oils did to all the Koss headphones I used to own.
So now that I have Spirit, my ‘E’ class Dream Come True car, I do a careful cleaning and conditioning of my driver’s seat and while I’m at it I do the rest of the car too. I have it down to a routine now.
The dream world can be an amazing, lovely place to spend some time. But it has its drawbacks. Some of the following is obvious, some not so much, at least to me…
The Part Of My Brain That Can Read. I am completely illiterate in my dreams. Whenever I come across a book or sign or anything I need to read, I just can’t. I can see the text, I just can’t make sense of it. This is interesting in a somewhat disturbing way: in real life I am a voracious reader, but I’ve read that others experience this same effect in dreams. I assume it’s because that part of your brain is…well…sleeping. Sometimes, but very very seldomly, I remember the text well enough that when I wake up I can then read it. And as you would expect, it’s pretty odd, random and meaningless. Like the title to the book I found on a pile of trash in a bookstore that I was so frustrated I could not read the frustration woke me up and I remembered it and it was “Old Book”
The Part Of My Brain That Sees Color. This is also something I’ve read that others experience. My dreams are almost exclusively in black & white, though lately I’ve experienced the occasional color moment.
Light Switches. Lately in my dreams, whenever I find myself entering a dark room or house and I try to turn on the lights, nothing works. This is usually a prelude to the dream going bad on me, but sometimes it’s just frustrating. I’m writing this post just now because last night it happened again…I was walking into a house to find something, and it was dark inside and I tried various light switches and nothing would come on, and I remember in my dream getting really irritated that I was having “that damn light problem” again so I pulled open some window shades and let light in that way. At least the sun still works in my dreams.
Bullets. While being pursued by thugs or monsters in my dreams, reliably when I reach for a gun the gun works just fine but the bullets have no effect. I don’t get the click, click, it’s EMPTY, effect other friends of mine do. My gun is loaded and I can shoot just fine, but nothing I hit seems to care. It’s gotten to the point now that I usually just start beating the damn things over the head with the gun rather than bothering to pull the trigger.
Toilets. This is usually my dream telling me that I need to wake up and go to the bathroom. When in a dream I get the urge to go, and I start looking around for a bathroom, inevitably in every bathroom I check the toilet is missing. The hole in the floor where it connects is there alright, but the toilet is gone.
Automobiles. This isn’t something that does not work, so much as one very odd thing I almost never do in my dreams, that I would expect after having lived to the threshold of old age to have done at least once. In real life I absolutely love driving. In my dreams I am nearly always walking. Which is also something I like doing, don’t get me wrong. When the weather is nice I am always out for a walk, and I bought my house where I did specifically so I would be close enough to work I would walk it. I grew up in a household without a car, so maybe this is part of it. But I have owned a car since I was old enough to drive and I love to drive too and it’s just odd that in my dreams I never seem to even think to drive anywhere. And what is more, there are almost never any cars in my dreams, even parked nearby. Trains yes. Lots of trains for some odd reason. Train tracks and trains show up in the strangest places in my dreams. But the one and only time I can remember ever dreaming about driving somewhere, it was This Horrible Dream that still creeps me out.
My husband doesn’t like me to take our baby on the bus, even to visit friends who live near the bus line. He thinks buses are dirty, that my time is too valuable, and that it makes us look poor.
I stare at the screen and a much younger inner me looks at that entire conversation in wonder at how thoroughly the creation of the suburbs made the automobile so dominant. Now it’s if you have to take the bus you must be poor. But we always took the bus and we weren’t poor. Not very well off exactly, but never poor.
I was raised by a single working mother and we didn’t have much, but there wasn’t that automatic assumption back in the 50s and 60s that if you took the bus you were poor, and actually back then having more than one car in the household meant you were pretty well to do. Dad went to work in his car and mom stayed home to take care of the kids and do her housework and if she went shopping it was usually via the bus. So seeing me and my mom sitting on the bus going somewhere was no stigma…mother and child on the bus in the afternoon going shopping was the usual thing.
Cars were expensive things, and especially so for single working moms. We didn’t have one in our household until I was fifteen. Suddenly our world opened wide. We could drive the the store and pack back lots of groceries and I didn’t have to pilot a full grocery cart all the way home. We could drive to the beach. It was instant liberation. I still remember how that felt, to have all those distant places suddenly within reach. Probably my itch to get in the car and just go somewhere for the shear joy of driving has its roots here…not in the fact of our carlessness, but in how the car opened up the world to us. 90 percent of the miles I have put on every car I have ever owned have been pleasure driving. I love the automobile, and perhaps it may seem a bit paradoxical that this is why I would not want to live somewhere I had to use the car for everything. I hate traffic and I hate using the car for mere commuting. The same boring route and traffic jams over and over and over and over and over… It seems disrespectful somehow. The car is for exploring.
This is why the suburbs have always felt suffocating to me. You can’t walk to anything. There is no good public transportation for the common chores of life. You’re trapped inside a spaghetti tangle of twisty roads and cul de sacs that are specifically designed to thwart drive through traffic, that also make it impossible to walk to anything. City life is good precisely because you don’t need a car for every little thing. That used to be the norm. I remember it. I still think that way.
Saw this flit across my Facebook stream this morning…
There’s a surprisingly fine line between laziness and vanity, and sometimes they enable each other in a good way. Following the herd is too much work. Being different just for the sake of being different is too much work. Eventually you see that it’s faking it either way. I never worried about my artistic “style” because I knew the moment I started obsessing about that it would stop being genuinely me. Morals aside (which you really do need to think carefully about) you really needn’t worry about Who You Are. What you do is follow your bliss, take the path with heart, and the person you are just happens.
…it’s almost exclusively to prevent spam in the comments. Those of you who don’t run your own blog would not believe how much spam tries to invade blog comments these days. It’s amazing. I suspect most of it is simply to jack up Google rankings. Anyway, that’s why you have to wait for me to approve comments. It isn’t about controlling what opinions get expressed here, though if I see post or thread highjacking taking place I’ll put a stop to that too. The moderation is about blocking spam. Sorry. This is why we can’t have nice things.
I bought the ‘E’ class diesel, Traveler II, last December. It wasn’t exactly the kind of money I had in mind to spend…I would have been thrilled to own a ‘C’ class diesel…the smaller car seemed more reasonable for a single guy…but Daimler still won’t import those for some reason. As it turns out, I really Really like the ‘E’ class after all. It is a solid, beautiful car, very nice on my occasional passengers, has lots of extra trunk space (which is nice for people who take road trips with lots of camera equipment), and yet gets absolutely great fuel economy. It has been an absolutely solid and reliable ride all the way.
It’s already time for Traveler IIs 20,000 mile ‘B’ service. Since the plan is to eventually become one of those wirey old codgers with a Mercedes diesel that has half a million miles on it I feel off to a reasonably good start.
Thank You For Choosing A Mercedes-Benz…NOW TAKE CARE OF IT!
Just received in the mail today a nice letter from Mercedes-Benz USA, all done up on Very Nice stationary, thanking me for “choosing one of the most advanced diesel automobiles in the world…” and then just about screaming at me to stick to the factory maintenance schedule.
It is critical that you follow the service interval requirements of not more then 10,000 miles or one (1) year, whichever comes first. Permanent engine damage can occur if the interval is not closely followed.
(Emphasis theirs!) Followed by two more pages of Very Nice stationary detailing the maintenance schedule. As if I’d buy a car this expensive and not read the service book. You best believe I read the service book. Like a seminarian studying the holy writ I read the service book.
But I get their concern. I don’t think American drivers understand diesels. I wonder sometimes if one reason the Germans don’t import many of their diesel models into this country is because most American drivers just don’t know how to take care of one. The reputation of diesels, particularly Mercedes diesels, for über longevity probably doesn’t help any. People think hey…it’s a diesel…they’re tough. Well…yes. They’ll outlast a gasoline burner every time. But you have to do the maintenance. Oh…and don’t stomp on the accelerator in a futile attempt to get gasoline engine acceleration out of one because it isn’t in there.
The simplest routine thing you do for a car’s engine, the oil change, is absolutely vital for a diesel engine. That’s because the compression ratios on a diesel are greatly higher then even a high performance sports car’s is. Compression is how a diesel ignites its fuel. They work on the principle that compressing air heats it up. So at operating temperature a diesel gulps down a bunch of air, compresses it to temperature, and then at the right moment injectors squirt in the fuel and it ignites and you get your power stroke. For that to work compression has to be high enough to heat the air enough. (when starting cold, diesels use either glow plugs or pre-heat the fuel before it is injected.)
Compare: The Corvette LS9 6.2 liter V-8 with an Eaton four-lobe Roots type supercharger has a power output of 638 bhp at 6500 rpm and 604 lb ·ft at 3800 rpm and a compression ratio of 9.1:1. My 3 liter V-6 twin turbocharged Mercedes diesel on the other hand has a compression ratio of 17:1. In diesel fashion it only generates 240 bhp at a red line of 4500 rpm…about a third the Vette’s. However it generates 400 lb ·ft at 1800 rpm. So the Vette engine has it on torque and horsepower, but the diesel is less then half its displacement, still has 2/3rds its torque and look at where the torque Is.
These engines are not racehorses, they’re draft horses and they will go any distance and bear loads that would give a gasoline burner of equal size a heart attack. But you absolutely have to do the maintenance. You can slack on the oil changes in a gasoline burner or cheap out on the grade of oil used and still get good service out of one for quite a while before it catches up with you and gets expensive. A diesel can be completely destroyed in a very, Very short time if you do that. Like in under 30k. Try this wee experiment: look at the dipstick right after you’ve given a diesel engine an oil change. See how nice and golden the oil is? Look at it again at 100 miles. Looks dirty as hell doesn’t it? 17:1 and running on diesel oil not lightweight gasoline will do that.
This is the big reason why I never bought one second hand though I’ve wanted one since I was a teenager. By the time I was old enough and making enough to afford a second hand Mercedes diesel I’d seen tragically what your typical American driver does to a diesel engine. Yes, they’ll last practically forever. You can’t build 17:1 ignition-by-compression on the cheap and expect it to outlast the warranty. And the routine maintenance isn’t expensive. But you have to do it.
And I would recommend changing the oil twice as often as the factory recommends on any car. I’ve done that on every car I’ve ever owned and never had any engine problems. But it’s especially critical for a diesel. Daimler gives its engines very large oil reservoirs…something around nine quarts in the V-6s (compared to around 6 in an American V-8) and they say change every 10k. I change at five. The other service gets done on schedule.
So anyway…I’m looking at this very nice letter from Mercedes-Benz USA printed on Very Nice stationary and what I’m seeing is evidence that Americans just don’t know how to take care of a diesel. And these aren’t just any diesels. These are Mercedes-Benz. These are magnificent automobiles, they are expensive, they are exceptionally well made, and it is so embarrassing to see how MBUSA needs to gently remind its customers…it’s presumably well to do customers…on Very Nice stationary, to take fucking care of their cars.
Dogs Have Owners, Cats Have Staff, And Birds Have Waiters…
I hear some thunder, check the weather radar and step out onto the front porch to watch a passing thunderstorm. I’m no sooner out the door when suddenly this little chickadee starts sassing me. I mean it’s cursing up a storm, calling me every name in the book. Fine, thinks I, I’m interrupting dinner at the suet feeder. I’ve noticed the chickadees and tufted titmice have been at it at the suet feeder lately. So I go back inside. Doesn’t shut the little dickens up. DeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDee!!! So I go back outside thinking there might be a cat lurking. No cat, and chickadee turns up the volume. DEEDEEDEEDEEDEEDEE!!! Sass Sass Sass Sass Sass!!!
What the hell? Then I notice the sunflower feeder is empty. So I take it downstairs and refill it, and I swear I can still hear that little thing cursing me all the way down in the basement. I put the sunflower feeder back up, full now, and go back inside and it’s all peace and quiet in the neighborhood.
Geeze… If you thought cats were demanding… How does something that small get that loud? If you’re all lungs in that little featherball then your stomach is too small to be eating all that.
Some random linkage. Most other bloggers I read do this occasional post of links they haven’t and aren’t likely to get around to riffing on, and rather then let them keep nagging me to post about them until they get old and broken and die I reckon I’ll just start doing it too…
Gay rights’ surprise weapon: Morality. I have been on about this for decades, literally. Back in the 1990s, before I started blogging, when USENET was all there was, I kept engaging the bigots on the unmoderated alt.politics.homosexuality on moral issues and it was so unsurprising and disheartening how they’d figure the moral arguments against homosexuality were their trump cards because no one ever bothered engaging them directly on it.
There is nothing innately wrong with homosexual relationships. There is no science that says otherwise, there is no moral argument that makes that case, there are only arguments from supposed religious authority, junk science and outright lying. Mostly, from Paul Cameron to Mark Regnerus the moral case is based on outright lying. Listen…when you have to lie constantly to make your moral case, that should tell you something about your moral case
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In the battle between morality and faith, morality is winning. “Obviously, as an atheist, I can’t see this as a bad thing. I appreciate that liberal Christians like Rachel and Jamelle find spiritual solace in having faith, but by and large, the historical purpose of religion is not to comfort but to control.” Well…yes and no. I am an atheist myself (coming out to myself as atheist a couple years ago felt a lot like coming out to myself as gay…something I keep wanting to write about but the words just haven’t gelled yet), and it has always looked to me that religion isn’t so much for control as it is all too often used by tyrants to control.
What I see in this is people, mostly but not always young people, leaving a lot of greedy possessive cults and going on their own journeys. That’s a good thing. Hopefully they will find their way to a place that genuinely speaks to their heart. Just as they are. Something that never fails to cheer me whenever I see it is the rainbow Christian fish. It tells me that people are holding on to their inner sense of self, their spirituality, despite the relentless efforts of spiritual dictators to snuff it out within them, so they can fill the void left behind. Regardless of my own path in life, there will probably always be that Baptist part of me in there cheering that private personal journey on. We are all strolling on Newton’s beach, now and then picking up and appreciating that prettier seashell then ordinary.
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I Don’t Care Who Financed Prof. Regnerus. I think he should. “I see this scenario all too often in our opponents: A scientist makes an objective study of gays and lesbians and announces favorable results. Our opponents seize on that as proof that the scientist is a pro-homosexual activist, and therefore fatally tainted with bias.” But there’s a difference between seeing a conflict of interest in a study’s conclusions and seeing one in who paid for the study. It’s like saying we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about tobacco industry funded studies of lung cancer, or oil industry funded studies on global warming and fracking.
But there’s more to it then even this. It’s about integrity and who is trustworthy and who is not. When you see data and facts that consistently, reliably, inevitably turn out to be laughingly bogus coming consistently from of a particular source, it isn’t anything like an ad hominem attack to point out that these people simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth. It’s just…well…telling the truth.
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Scandinavia And The World – Metal. Some days the little rocker boy in me comes roaring out, and listening to the radio I feel a bit like Denmark here…a little rocker boy trapped between a world of metal and glitter.
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Kathryn Schulz thinks Frost is much, much darker than anyone suspects… Well she’s wrong. Or maybe not. Haven’t you ever wandered out into a winter forest, in the snow, in the night, just stood there and breathed in the silence before continuing on your way? That’s not Nietzsche’s abyss. The forest, the earth, is alive, not even really sleeping. Our lives are so short, and time is not what we think it is. In the quiet winter darkness you can almost sense the scale of it. A little bit. This rhythm of growing season and winter hibernation has been going on for ages. The darkness and silence is the beat between one breath and the next in a story that is very very old. It’s not scary, it’s sublime. Better then any man made cathedral. You are not getting out of these woods, but why would you want to? The woods are in you and you are the woods.
I’ve been very graciously linked to recently by a couple folks, including Fred Clark whose readership I must assume is every bit as decent and good hearted as he is. So for the sake of those just tuning in, and especially after that last post, I feel should explain something.
You may have noticed things are a bit odd around here. Hi…my name is Bruce Garrett. This is my place. It’s odd because I am.
I started blogging back before blogging really took off, years ago in the late 1990s when I read about someone who was just basically posting their diaries online as a kind of living art project. I thought that was kinda cool and started doing it myself. I wasn’t about getting attention. If you have the art gene in you too then you understand. Mostly, I do graphic art…imagery. Try the cartoon and photo galleries sometime. But sometimes I try to write.
I started blogging back in 1998, although this blog’s archives only go back to 2002. Before then it was just a random note here and there on what was nominally my cartoon and photography web site, hosted by the company I had my email account on. Then in late 2001 a friend showed me how to get my own domain started up and offered to host me. Once again the site was mostly about my political cartoons and my photography, with the blog being an extra…a place I could write about this and that. The blog, like everything else about the site back then (and mostly still now) was hand rolled. I was earning a good living then as a software developer and I just typed my own HTML into my programmer’s editor and uploaded it. It wasn’t until my original domain host retired and I had to move the site elsewhere that I was talked into switching the blog software over to WordPress. Even so, most of the rest of the site, like my household computers (apart from the Macs), is hand built.
Of course, being the times we live in, the blog started capturing my feelings about political issues and in particular the gay rights struggle. But this is not actually a political blog. It is not a blog about gay rights specifically, or religion or philosophy or economics. It is not about my opinions on anything. I am not doing punditry. I only vent a lot about politics here because it’s more satisfying then yelling at the TV. But that’s not what this blog is. It’s a life blog. Basically just random bits and pieces of one guy’s life as he lives it, like an always changing collage. It’s The Story So Far…
If it seems confusing at times, that’s normal. I’m confusing. Just ask anyone who knows me. Especially the certain someone whose regrettably thin skin I’ve been poking with that Llama. Or maybe you shouldn’t ask him. No…don’t ask him…
A few years ago, I decided that it would be interesting to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Not just regular “from scratch,” but really from scratch. Like, I’d make the buns, I’d make the mustard, I’d grow the tomatoes, I’d grow the lettuce, I’d grow the onion, I’d grind the beef, make the cheese, etc…
Therein follows many months of building a house, raising livestock, planting gardens, realizing he needs to mine his own salt, needs not one but three cows (one for milk for butter, one for the beef, one for rennet for the cheese)…and so on…
Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.
A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society…
Some would say that’s a good reason not to have a post-agrarian society. I strongly disagree. Never mind steel and integrated circuits. The Industrial Revolution gave us Cheeseburgers.
Ayn Rand placed the dollar sign as the iconic symbol of capitalism and the Industrial age…proof I submit, that the lady had no art in her soul. She should have made it the cheeseburger. Seriously. When her and Owen Kellogg left the abandoned train at the end of part two, instead of revealing himself as an agent of the strike by pulling out a cigarette with a dollar sign on it, he should have started snarfing down a cheeseburger from Hugh Akston’s diner. That newstand at the end of chapter three should have been a burger joint and the old man reminiscing about when they made burgers out of real meat and cheese, not collectivist tofu and soy. He should have said to Dagny Taggart, “I like to think of burgers held in a man’s hand. Big fat juicy ones dripping with cheddar cheese and mustard. Food, a dangerous force, served with a side of fries and maybe also a dollip of coleslaw…” At the end of the book John Galt could trace the outline of a cheeseburger in the sky.
We ask these questions naturally. And as we grow up we are given answers. We sit in our parents laps and we are told how it was the family came to be where it is now. How it was mom and dad met. How it was we ourselves came to be. And when we are young, we do not question them. They become unconsciously part of the bedrock of our lives.
And sometimes…sometimes…some few of us when we are older, look back upon those answers and discover that they make no sense.
I was born in California, to a mother who had traveled there shortly after her father had passed away. That is the basic fact of my life. Mom grew up, was born and raised in Greensburg Pennsylvania. But I was born in Pasadena California, and raised in Maryland after mom divorced dad and moved here. And it’s only been recently, now in my fifties, that I’ve looked at that and wondered. She was born and raised in Greensburg, and yet suddenly her and her mother uproot themselves in the late 1940s and move clear across the country to live somewhere they knew practically nobody. And when she divorced dad, her and her mother moved back across the country again. And it wasn’t back to their childhood home they moved, but once again to somewhere else that they knew practically nobody.
Well even when I was a small child I often wondered about that. And always when I asked, I got the same story.
Mom’s father had died she said, from a series of massive strokes, back in a time when medicine could do little for stroke victims. The event had disturbed her deeply. She moved to California she said, because she could not bear to live in the house she had grown up in, because the memories of the events of her father’s death were too traumatic.
Mom’s emotional life during that period was rough. Before her father died mom had loved a man, a navy man, who had gone to war. It was world war II. He was Jewish and, she told me, her father had not particularly liked Jews. But, she said, he had come to know the man she loved and that had changed him. He had eventually come to like this man, Morris she said his name was, and as time went on approved of their love.
Then one day, so she always said, he had come back from the war changed, disturbed. Her beloved sailor had been on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended. His ship she said, became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it from the atomic bomb. She said the sight of it had driven him mad.
So her relationship with her sailor came undone. Morris’ family, she said, had taken him off to a mental hospital. She never saw him again. And then her father had his stroke. He lingered horribly, for months incapacitated, unable to do anything for himself, unable to speak or even feed himself. After six months of it he had another stroke and died.
Mom said that afterward her dreams tormented her. In the way people did back then, before the funeral his body had laid in rest in a coffin situated right in the living room of the house. Family and friends had held the service for him right there in the house. That was common in those days. Mom said that afterward she had dreams of her father rising out of his casket, and walking up the stairs to her room.
After her father was laid to rest, her mother sold the house, and also his nice cabin in the woods in the hills of Pennsylvania. That cabin was a special memory of hers….of summer months spent there with her father and the family, her dog Jigs, and all her childhood friends from Greensburg. Sweet childhood memories. She would tell me fondly of the summer months spent there. She loved that cabin, and was for the rest of her life sorry that it had been sold. The new owners had left a fire burning on a stove…the cabin had no electricity…and it had burned down.
But they had to leave Greensburg, mom always said, because she could no longer bear to be in the house she grew up in. During the war her younger brother, Dean, had found work in California, and so mom and grandma left Greensburg and traveled to California to live near him. Grandma bought a house in Pasadena, presumably with what she had gotten from the sale of the house and the cabin. They moved close to where her brother lived. And one day they traveled to Catalina Island, and there, on the pier in Avalon, she met dad. They married, and soon they had a son. Me.
That is the story I was always told. It is the story of how I came to be. And now I look at it, and it makes no sense.
My grandfather, who I never met, who mom always told me because I took an interest in electronics and technology that I took so much after him, had two nice homes, and a business. And after his death they sold it all, and simply left everything they had, everyone they knew, and moved across the country to a new place where they knew nobody but her brother and his wife. Because mom could not bear to live in the house where she grew up.
Really?
I’m fifty-eight years old now, and now I look at this story and it makes no sense. Maybe everything happened just for the reasons she said it did…but now that I look at it with the experience of my own adulthood I can’t escape the feeling that some important piece or pieces are missing. Perhaps to understand my doubt you need to understand something I do and maybe you don’t: what the distances we’re talking about here seemed like back in the day before cheap jet air travel and the Internet.
I am old enough to have glimpsed the last days of the great passenger trains. When I was a kid, most people didn’t travel by air…that was for rich people. And in their day passenger air travel would have been burdensome even if you were rich. Before the first Boeing 707s passenger airplanes were propeller things that took much longer to go from coast to coast. Nearly everyone back then traveled by bus or by train. Train mostly for the longer distance trips if you could afford it. It took days, not hours, to go from coast to coast. So any sort of travel from the east coast to the west wasn’t just a trivial thing back then. If you traveled far away, let alone moved, you just about fell off the planet as far as your family and friends back home were concerned. You might send a postcard or two back home… Having a wonderful time, wish you were here… You sure wouldn’t phone home. Way too expensive. Back then long distance phone calls were an expensive luxury. Postal mail had two grades…regular and air mail. You sent letters by air mail if you wanted them to get there in a couple days. Otherwise it might be weeks to get something from clear across the country. The highways and the rails where how most people and everything including mail traveled.
So if you went on a cross-country trip you were on another planet until you came back home. And then it was everyone gathered around while you showed your snapshots and told your stories of the far away place you’d been to. To actually go live on the other side of the country, well, you might as well have moved overseas. It’s hard to grasp now, but that is how it would have been for my mom and her mother back then. When they left Greensburg they didn’t just go move to a neighboring town…they didn’t even move to a neighboring state. They moved about as far away from Greensburg as they could and still remain in the lower 48.
Now I’m grown up and I look at this and wonder…did she not have any roots there? I know she had a job there for a brief period at an architectural firm…she used to tell me about working with the ammonia stench of the old blueprint machines. And…she had friends there. I know because he spoke of them, but not often. There were a few she kept in correspondence with. They were friends she never saw again. After mom passed away I was given a stack of her old correspondence, but there were no letters to her from her Greensburg friends among them.
And there is this…as I grew up I just accepted the constant tension that was in the family. It was just part of the background noise. But she was the apple of her father’s eye…daddy’s girl. That is the one thing everyone seems to agree on, even the ones who later cut her out of the family. I have albums of the photos her father took of her…he was, like me, an amateur photographer. The photos all show a beautiful young girl, posed in various scenes in and around the house and the cabin.
He loved her very much. And she loved him very much. If there is anything I am certain of it is this. But throughout my own childhood there was tension between her and the rest of her family…all except her younger brother Dean and one cousin. It was a tension I always put down to her marrying my father, who they all despised. But looking back on all of it now it just seems to me that the tension had to be caused by more then that. Something more must have happened to her to make her mother take her away from the town they both grew up in, and had spent their entire lives in. Whatever caused the friction in that side of my family tree, it started well before mom met dad at the pier in Avalon.
I’m fifty-eight years old now, and while I don’t think of myself as worldly I am old enough now to understand some things better that I could not have while I was growing up. She had a life in Greensburg. She had friends, family, community. And so did her mother. Greensburg was their home. They were both born and raised there. It was where everything and everyone they had ever known was. And I was told they sold everything, their house and the cabin, and left it all for California. Because mom could not bear to stay in the house she had grown up in after her father had died.
It makes no sense. They could have bought another house. Surely whatever trauma mom experienced she’d have needed her friends. Surely grandma would have had friends of her own there as well to help her through the death of her husband. In an age before cell phones and cheap long distance, when letters took days to arrive from the next state over, let alone clear across the country, and when long distance cross-country phone calls were so expensive people would gather around the telephone at the appointed time to wait for the call, to move from one end of the country to another would have been like moving to another planet. They’d have both given up everything they knew, everyone they knew, to literally start life all over again in California. Because granddad died of a stroke?
No. Just…no. It makes no sense.
I am not on friendly terms with that side of the family anymore…not that I ever really was. Except for uncle Dean nobody was really nice to me. I was my father’s son, and they despised him and I was living evidence of that marriage they all hated. I had his face. At various times when it was useful to them, and particularly to grandma, I was told I had all his bad traits too. Did I talk too much? Well he’s his fathers son isn’t he. Did I forget to do my homework? That’s his dad in him. Was I too proud of something I had accomplished? A piece of artwork? A good grade in school? His dad was vain like that. Did I a get a bad mark in class? His dad was shiftless like that. Stubborn? His father’s blood obviously. Whatever I ever did that was wrong, it was always because I was my father’s son. I got used to it. By the time I was seventeen and began to realize my homosexuality, I already had a lifetime of training in coping with being hated for something I was that I couldn’t help being. So it wasn’t all for nothing.
The only one who really took an interest in me was uncle Dean. Mom and he always got along great, and I have lived to regret I grew up on the east and not the west coast where I could have been near him and away from the others. Whatever it was that was the cause of so much tension in the family, her brother Dean was never bothered by it, or blamed her for it. Shortly after mom passed away, I took a trip out to California and visited my aunt Cleone, uncle Dean’s wife, and she told me something that shocked me enough to make me pretty much divorce myself, finally and forever from that side of the family. She said one of my cousins, a daughter of mom’s oldest brother Wayne, an uptight right wing jackass, had told mom after Wayne passed away that mom would not be allowed a grave in the family plot in the Greensburg cemetery. I put it down to their hatred of dad, but it made me furious. It still makes me furious to think about it. So I’ve pretty much disconnected myself from that branch of the family tree entirely.
Whatever they thought of mom, she was a good mother to me, and a thoroughly decent person. She set a good example for her son. After she passed away people in the town she had retired to would come up to me…people I didn’t know from Adam…and tell me what a ray of sunshine she was everywhere she went. That wasn’t an act…I grew up with it, it was her. It made me absolutely furious how that side of the family treated her…all except her brother Dean and her cousin who lived in the small Virginia town she retired to. He cousin also loved her very much. Her older brother and the rest of that family, not so much. And me…I’m living evidence that mom married a man they all hated. So I can get no answers from them, and I wouldn’t trust any I got now if I asked.
I had always, until now, put the family static down to her marrying dad. But now I look at it and it just seems so…wrong…so incomplete an explanation. Was that really all of it? I don’t know, but I am certain now that there is something that I was never told, because the story makes no sense. You just don’t pack up and leave everything, even over such a traumatic experience as your father dying of a lingering illness. Something happened.
Dad, let it be said, had…issues of his own. The marriage didn’t last. Mom loved him to the day she died, but the marriage didn’t work. Mom divorced dad when I was two, and she and grandma took me and moved back across the country…but not back to Greensburg. They moved to Washington D.C., to live near mom’s cousin, who was living there at the time. She got a job as a clerk for the Yellow pages. We lived in a series of small apartments. Whatever money they had from the sales of the house in Greensburg, the cabin, granddad’s business, and the house in Pasadena, somehow was all gone. I grew up in a very low budget household, being raised by a single working mother, in a time when women made about 60 cents for every dollar a man doing the same job made. Mom’s family in Pennsylvania made no effort whatever to help her out. It was something I took for granted as a child…but now it really stands out. I’m having a hard time now believing that was all because of her marrying dad. They basically shut her out.
But not grandma. Someday maybe I’ll write about what growing up was like with that cold constantly angry, fire and brimstone Yankee Baptist women in the house. Somehow she remained a bridge between mom and I and the rest of that side of the family, and a powerful force in it. She stayed by mom’s side from the time granddad died to the day she died, but at times it seemed to me more to punish her daughter then support her as she tried to raise a kid by herself in a 1950s/1960s world that regarded single divorced women with children as less worthy of respect then prostitutes. I never saw grandma smile, unless it was at the misfortune of others. When bad luck struck other people it always seemed to satisfy her somehow. And I remained a favorite target until the day she died, because I had the face, and the last name, of the man she hated. Stinking Rotten Good For Nothing Garrett Just Like Your Pap was her favorite name for me.
And me…I grew up with next to nothing, but I never really noticed that until I got older. I was fed on a bland, low budget diet but I never went to bed hungry. I often wore hand me downs but I never left the house in dirty clothes. I never saw mom cheat another person, lie to them or say anything about them behind their back that she wouldn’t have said to their face. I never once heard her utter a curse word or saw her take a drink or light up a cigarette. When I was a kid the first time I ever saw someone else’s mother smoking it shocked me…I didn’t think mothers did that. Mom sat down with me and my homework, tried her best to teach me right from wrong, and always encouraged my creative impulses. We didn’t have much, but I had what I needed to grow up on: I never doubted mom’s love. Never. Grandmas hate, and the disdain of most of that side of my family, I just accepted as part of the background noise. The love of a good mother can give a kid all he needs to stand up to whatever static life brings his way.
How her older brother, various other members of that side of the family, and especially her own mother treated her is something that some days makes me livid to think about, and others completely baffles me. She really was that ray of sunshine everywhere she went, a completely decent person and a good mother. Some of my childhood friends had horrible parents. Everyone told me how nice mine was. Everyone. It wasn’t an act. Yet her own family, with one or two exceptions, treated her miserably. I never once heard her complain. At least, not when I was there to hear it. Mostly the family tension was just there in the background. Always there. Something I just shrugged off whenever I thought about it. Mom loved me, that was all that mattered. The only time it burst out into the open in my presence, was when I was 16 and they discovered she had started seeing dad again. It was like being in the center of a nuclear blast. But that incident centered on dad. That they hated him does not really explain it all.
Something happened. Something more then just her marrying dad. Something that made them leave Greensburg and everything and everyone they knew, and when her marriage failed, prevented them from returning. Something her family, other then her brother Dean and her cousin, never forgave her for. Probably I’ll never know what it was. Mom never strayed from the story. Nobody else did either.
[Edited some for clarity, and add a few details that I missed occurred to me…]
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