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Family

Hurts Like Hell! Down through the ages…

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No kidding. It’s 6:00 in the evening, and the hip pain has been holding forth all day. Not any better as the sun goes down.

Seriously, this thing DOES hurt like the dickens. Won’t say I’ve never had anything hurt this much…but it’s close. Very close.

Contemplating the ancestors and the family history… 

Here’s my grandmother, who never met me and never met her fine Arizona grandson. That, as it develops, is because her cancer killed her before either of us came along. Apparently her promiscuity (so we’re told by the more prudish set in the family) was what did her in: fu*king every guy who came along gave her cancer. Right?

Or not: Ancestors.com tells us she died in 1979…

WHERE do people come up with this stuff? 

At any rate, no matter what caused it or when, my mother’s story was that the woman’s gut filled up with what apparently was a reproductive cancer, and that was the end of her. My mother, then a young teenager, was made to attend her on her deathbed, an experience guaranteed to instill horror in the kid for the rest of her life.

Didn’t stop her from smoking, though….

I incline to believe her story about Olive’s death over the one on Ancestors.com. After all, my mother was not an Internet page. 😀

But seriously: her recollections of what she saw and did while tending to Olive were vivid and gawdawful, not something she would have made up. At no time was it necessary to invent some wild story about being present at the woman’s deathbed — all she had to do was say, in the simplest of phrasing, that her mother died of uterine cancer. Period.

That’s quite horrifying enough.

But…BUT…. It gets a whole lot more horrifying when you contemplate the possibility that my mother may have been lying about Olive’s death. Altogether. That Olive did not die of cancer in the 1930s and that she may have been living when I was born. Yea verily: she could have still been living when my son — her great-grandson — was born.

And that, my friends, is what we call bizarre….

Rain, Wet Dog, Cranky Human

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As predicted, water is falling out of the sky now, along about 9:00 p.m. And, as predictable, Ruby the Corgi decides nothing will do but what she must go outside.

Of course. I expected a unicorn?????

Drag dawg off bed, stumble to the back door, stagger out into the soggy darkness.

For a change, Ruby performs promptly. But it’s wet enough that she IS a soggy doggy by the time she trots back in the house.

Weather reports imply that it’s likely to rain all night. This would suggest an even soggier morning.

arf!
😀

Hope she stays down all night, ’cause I yam not in the mood to stand around in the rain at two or three in the morning.

***

Gosh… Just ran across — quite by accident — the obituary notice my not-quite-relatives posted after the death of the woman my widowed father married. LOL! Just as obnoxious as she was in person. They list her relatives, including those on my father’s side…and leave my name and my son’s name out.

Cute, huh?

They hate my branch of the clan because we’re LIB-uh-rulls. My former husband was president of the ACLU’s Arizona chapter and was on the Civil Liberty Union’s national board. This, to their minds (well, to the extent that they have minds) proved that he and I were COMM-you-nists! 

No kidding. If you’re anywhere to the left of Adolf Hitler, you’re a commie.

Gosh, I get tired of narrow-minded stupid stuff. Don’t you?

BANG! BANG!! BANG-A-DA-BANG!!!

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Eight-thirty of a New’s Eve! And everyone within (and beyond) earshot is celebrating: BANG! BANG!! BANGA-DA-BANG!!! 

Amazingly, Ruby the Corgi is taking it all in…very relaxed stride. Really: I would have expected her to be all nervous and jumpy and spooked.

But nay! She seems to realize all that racket is coming from somewhere else: somewhere a fair distance from the Funny Farm. Not only is she NOT spooked, just now she’s flopped on the foot of the bed, loafing!

How weird is that, I hafta ask you?

LOL! This evening the brain-pan filled with memories of a very weird experience...one I never really have been able to make much sense of.

My father, you need to understand first-off, was a very macho sort of guy. Anything that smacked of “queer” would set off his rage genes. He hated queers (so he said), and would launch into paroxysms of disgust on the subject if given half a chance.

Sooooo….  It struck me as VERY weird when one time in a balmy Arizona season, he took it into his head to gather a bunch of Boy Scouts to go out on the desert and shoot at stuff. Target shooting.

Not too weird, until you learned that — hang onto your hat — he proposed to stay out there overnight with the passel of teenaged boys. All of them ejaculatedly revved up by shooting guns into the night air.

Yeah.

Whaaaaa???????

To my astonishment, my mother said nothing to try to derail this plan. Probably, I imagine, because she couldn’t think of anything…or maybe she just didn’t want to get into a quarrel with him.

So he rounds up a troop of senior Boy Scouts, and off they go into the desert night.

No other adults with them: just my father and a half-dozen or so teenage boys.

Uhhmmm…..

Since I wished to continue living, I, too, said nothing about this…but thought any number of unmentionable thoughts.

Well. OK….

Off they went, into the desert and the dark. Far as I know, nothing much transpired — or if it did, you may sure none of them mentioned it.  They drove off, set up camp somewhere, and spent the night shooting their bang-bangs and sittin’ around the campfire.

You understand: my father wasn’t given to that kind of thing. By and large, he didn’t much like kids — these were not kids, though, but teenagers. And this was the ONLY time in my life that I’d ever heard of him or seen him go camping. Not that he couldn’t: he grew up out in the Texas boondocks. But he didn’t subject me or my mother to it.

So…when I hear the BANG BANG BANG of fireworks or firearms echoing through the night, that’s what I think of: my father out on the desert with a passel of teenage boys, shooting off their guns into the dark.

Or whatever.

And that makes these firework-accented holidays feel…weird, to me. Very, very weird. 

***** GODAMMIT!*****

Now we’ve got idiots out there shooting off fireworks over the tops of the palm trees.

I’ll have to go out there and keep an eye to be sure the damn trees don’t catch fire.

WHY ARE WE SURROUNDED BY MORONS?

She Would’ve Loved….

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Oh, my goodness! How my mother would have loved this adorable little corgi. Ruby is…

…hopelessly cute(!!)
…sweeter than candy
…doggily persuasive
…richly funny

What a charmer. She surely would have seduced my mother within minutes of their meeting. And they would have been pals for life.

Or at least, for rest of my mother’s life.

She’s long-gone now. My father remarried; then he died in misery. The new wife was merrily ejected from my life…she’d be about 181 by now, I imagine, if she were still living.

My mother was murdered by the tobacco peddlers.

Yeah. If you have a kid…or anyone you care about or who cares about you…don’t get seduced into smoking. It truly is a murderous custom.

She deserved to see her grandson. She deserved to see the cuteness that is the corgi. She deserved to live out her husband’s life. But no. She smoked herself to death, and so never saw any of those things…or any of the other beautiful things that should have graced her later life.

Don’t let them kill you, friends!

But do get a corgi!!!! 😀  Everyone should have a corgi. Right?

What a Life She Had!

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Migawd! I think about my mother and all the things that happened to her over her 65 years on this earth...and I wonder…how EVER did she survive that long? 

My father, clearly was the best thing that ever happened to her. He rescued her from what I would describe as Hell. And he gave her some 30 years of happy married life.

And that, my friends, is an accomplishment.

She was born shortly after the turn of the 20th century, the child of an upstate New York farmer’s boy and a California chippy.

The chippy abandoned her to the paternal grandparents. What happened to the father, I have no clue…I assume he died or ran off.

After a series of court battles, her California grandparents succeeded in gaining her custody. So, a kid in grade school, she was sent to the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Spending half her childhood in the boondocks of rural upstate New York meant she enjoyed few of the accoutrements of 20th-century American civilization. She told me she’d never seen a school bus before she got to Berkeley. Back home, the kids were taken to school on the back of a hay-wagon. And she described how flabbergasted she was when the California relatives brought her to their house, opened the front door, flipped a switch on the wall next to it, and magically the lights across the room came on!

Before long, she adjusted (more or less) to urban California life. What amazing experiences she must have had! She managed to get all the way through high school, but she surely didn’t go to college. Even my uncle — the one who designed the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco — never got a university degree.

As a young woman, she met my father at a party. He barged up and told her, “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever met!”

😀  Now there’s a line, eh?

Apparently, though, it was more than a line. They quickly became a pair, and before long they married. Yes: into a marriage that lasted over 30 years, until she smoked herself to death.

He worshiped her. And what a life he led her into! Ten years in Saudi Arabia. Journeys all over the planet, by plane, car, train, and ship. Homes in San Francisco, in the East Bay, in Saudi Arabia, in Southern California, in Arizona…here, there, and everywhere.

It was a life much shortened by the homicidal tobacco products that enrich their makers so. She died at about the time my son was born — over 30 years ago now! (Thirty years????  How did that happen?)

So my son never saw his grandmother. She saw him once, a few weeks before she died. When I showed him to her, a brand-new baby, her response was a shrug and “meh!”

She knew, I realize now, that she would never see him grow up…or even reach the toddler stage. Did she care?  I dunno… No doubt by then she was just too sick to care about much of anything or anyone. And truth to tell, I don’t think either of my parents were wild about kids.

But in between that boondock birth day on an upstate farm and her death in a comfortable bed in Sun City, she had an amazing life. One adventure after another, one country after another, one conveyance after another…all around the world.

I miss her. Wish we could bring her back.

‘Round & ‘Round They Go…ARF!

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Eighty-nine degrees out there, sez Wunderground, with 12% humidity.

Ohhh yah? Couldn’t prove that by me.

Just back from a junket around the park, dragged forth by a small dog. I’d have said it was nigh unto 90 degrees, ayup… and freakin’ WET. Humid. Soggy. 

😀

Thinkin’ about my late stepsister as we traipsed along. Many of the 70s-ish ranch houses remind one of her family’s place. I do miss her. Even though her politics were somewhere to the right of Benito Mussolini’s, she was a smart woman, an interesting woman, and a fun person to be around.

{sigh} Ah, the bygone days…

How she came to spring from the loins of the witch my father married after my mother died: that escapes me. That woman was one of the meanest humans I’ve ever met: nasty, nasty, and nastier. In startling contrast, her daughter, who became a Superior Court judge, was one of the nicest people you could hope to meet.

They’re all dead now: Witch stepmother, smart step-sister, sister’s bright daughter, sister’s mentally stunted son, and her lawyerly husband. Ohhh well: nothing lasts forever.

Which is probably just as well…