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Family

Things That Shouldn’t Have Happened

by

My father: Good God!

I look at his life and think of it as tragedy. Truly heart-breaking tragedy.

  • His mother going off the deep end
  • His bigotry: given that THEY WEREN’T WHITE!
  • That he dropped out of school
  • My mother, the love of his life, killing herself with tobacco
  • Me thinking that I was better than him: what a little twit!!
  • Why didn’t he go to work for Metzgers Dairy in Texas, as his brother did? The brother became an executive with that outfit.
  • Actually, he did have a delivery route for them, when he was a young pup. Why didn’t he get further?
  • Apparently, it was spending hours watching the rear ends of horses as he delivered milk around the countrified environs of Ft. Worth, then a hick town in the middle of nowhere.
  • So, it was off to join the Navy!
  • And from there, to move on to the Merchant Marine.
  • Why did he dislike queers…uhm, gay men…so much…but also enjoy the company of teenaged boys to a surprising degree? What WAS he trying to say to us? Or…to not say?

Every glance at the man’s life brings up a slew of questions. But…isn’t that so of everyone?

Possibly he and my mother shouldn’t have moved to Sun City, here in balmy Arizona. If they had stayed in Southern California (whence they came), would a competent doctor there have recognized her cancer in time to save her?

Probably not.

Smoking tobacco should never have been legal. The accursed, poisonous stuff should have been banned the minute it was proven that smoking that shit causes cancer, and that it is addictive.

Some doctor should have had the wherewithal to at least TRY to talk my mother into quitting.

My father should have insisted that she quit, at the same time he did.

Their horrific experience in the Sun City nursing home, as she lay dying, should have been actionable. We should have sued that outfit.

Why didn’t DXH, a partner in a heavy-hitting law firm, suggest that? Probably because I’d already taken up with TJK and so he didn’t give a damn about my family.

My father shouldn’t have had to transport my mother 20 miles from Sun City into North Central Phoenix to get decent nursing-home care.

DXH and I shouldn’t have blithely acquiesced to my father’s proposal that he marry the Dragon Lady, after my mother had died. We should have suggested he wait for a year. And during that year, we should have socialized with him, taken him on trips, had him meet people.

I should never have taken up with TJK. By the time my mother got sick, DXH probably didn’t want to have anything to do with any of us.

Hmmmm…. Y’know…about a third of my life shouldn’t have happened…

Retiring to the Life of Riley?

by

Gettin’ old…gettin’ old. 

My son is beginning to fret, far more vocally than before, about my staying here alone in my middle-class four-bedroom house. Quite reasonable is his fear that I’ll trip (AGAIN!) and fall (AGAIN!!), but this time inflict some much more serious harm (breaking a shoulder was quite enough…) or even kill myself.

So he’s begun lobbying for me to sell this place and move into one of those horrid holding pens for old folks, like the one my father went into.

Now…my father went to sea all his life. He ran away from home at the age of 17, lied about his age, joined the Navy, and never looked back. And it was a good life: he earned a good living without a college degree (in fact, I don’t think he even graduated from high school). He saw the world — big time — there are not many countries outside the Soviet Union that he didn’t visit. And he landed a harbor pilot’s job in Saudi Arabia that, thanks to the hideous living conditions, paid enough for him to retire at the age of 50.

He did, eventually, have to go back to sea — he didn’t understand about inflation and so found himself short of enough to support himself and my mother for the rest of their lives. But it was only for a year or so.

After my mother died, he immediately moved into an old-folkerie — uhm, “life-care community” — where he lived out the rest of his life in brain-banging misery. No, not because of the institution, called Orangewood, which treated him well — after 30 years on tankers, he was used to crowded living conditions and bad food. But because he stupidly remarried and ended up stuck with with a harridan. He probably figured he could rebuild his former life by replacing my mother with another old gal. But…oh, my….

So my view of old-folkeries is tainted by his remarkably unpleasant experience…which admittedly was tainted not by the old-folkery itself but by the bitch he married.

Let’s suppose I were to give up on staying in my own place and succumb to my son’s demands that I move into an institutional setting…

What would you need to know about a place to live in your dotage?

  • What services and physical amenities would be needed for one to live on one’s own?
    • Meals (served in a student union-like setting)
    • Cleaning services
    • Repair services
    • Chauffeuring (in a limited way)
    • Power bills
  • Could you provide them for yourself?
    • I’m already doing that, except for the chauffeuring…and we do have plenty of those services hereabouts
  • How much would providing them cost?
    • Certainly not as much as your entire net worth, which you pay to get entry to one of those places

What attracted my father to the whole idea of Orangewood, at the outset?

  • He didn’t want to deal with the work of maintaining a house, i.e.,
    • yard work
    • repairs
  • Utility bills were probably included as part of the monthly Orangewood bill
  • Meals were provided
    • He didn’t have to make regular or large grocery-store runs
    • He didn’t mind institutional cooking
  • Orangewood staff would drive inmates to doctors & other destinations
    • In fact, I think they had a bus service that would tote the inmates to grocery stores. Yea verily…I do remember he and Helen ended up sitting for hours in some doctor’s waiting room until the OW bus showed up to drive them home. Hardly ideal!!!
  • He was used to living in an institutional setting, and did not mind cramped, noisy quarters

The fact is, he probably would have been fine there if he had not become involved with Helen. This hints that trying to replicate what made you happy in your previous life is not a good idea.

  • There was no way another woman could replace or duplicate my mother
  • The apartment quarters were too cramped for a couple to live in comfortably unless they were hardly ever home.

If this observation is accurate, then it would seem you have two choices:

  • Don’t remarry or otherwise try to rebuild your prior lifestyle. Engage the new life and do as much as possible in new ways and different ways.
  • If you just must remarry, do not imagine the new married life will be anything like your prior lifestyle. ENGAGE CHANGE and build an entirely new outlook and lifestyle in the new married life.

Why did my mother not want to move to Orangewood?

  • She loved that house in Sun City. She repeatedly told me how much she loved the house and liked living there.
  • She had dear friends out there.
  • She had no desire to leave those friends or build a new social circle
  • After a lifetime of major moves, she probably had figured the move from Long Beach to Sun City would be the last household move she would have to make, and she didn’t want to do it again.

Why might she have been willing to move?

  • Orangewood was within walking distance of my house (but she couldn’t or wouldn’t walk that far)
  • Luke Air Force Base generated a LOT of noise (although she was not bothered by it)
  • She might have felt safer, given her burglar paranoia
  • She would have been closer to fancy shopping centers
  • Although probably unaware of this: she would have had access to better doctors and medical facilities

None of these were strong enough motives to make her want to move.

 What are the pro’s & cons of my own place vs an OldFolkerie? Can these be weighted for comparison?

Pro’s

Staying here:

  • Maintain independence
  • Yard
  • Private pool
  • Spare room for guests
  • Quiet: privacy
  • Full kitchen
  • Separate freezer
  • Indoor, private garage for car
  • Own washer & dryer

OldFolkerie:

  • Communal living: meet new friends
  • Communal living: authorities keep eye on you
  • Relieves my son of responsibility
  • Bus to take you places

Is there a way to replicate the benefits of an old-folkerie?

Along those lines, note this site: https://my.aarpfoundation.org/ Many resources that could help you stay in your home.

Weighted value of pro’s & con’s:
(Sorry: WordPress will NOT let me format this table sanely…and just now I’m not in the mood to retype the whole thing…)

Issue/item Cons, my pl Pro’s, my place Cons, OW Pro’s, OW Real & potential drawbacks
Independence 2 10 1 2 Risk of fall
Yard 3 10 10 0 No yd @ OW
Private Pool 3 8 10 0 Expense, risk
Privacy 5 10 8 1 Limited, OW
Full kitchen 0 10 9 1 OW: no full kitchen
Sep freezer 0 10 10 0 OWs: none
Private parking 0 10 5 5 OW: none
Own w/d 0 10 10 0 No w/d in apt.
Hired workers 2 10 5 5 n/a
Taxi/Uber 3 10 3 10 T/U: about the same
Trans included 0 10 8 8 Slow, PITA; no transit officially “included” at my place
Meals 8 10 8 5 OJ food was awful! Limited mealtimes
Frees Son 10 2 2 8 Need to find services to help when he is unavailable
Social life 8 2 3 7 Need to reach out to make friends here
Sum above 54
Cons, my place
 112 Pro’s, my place
 92
Cons, Orangewd
 52 Pro’s, Orangewd

 

If this list is reasonably complete (is it??), from my point of view: the pro’s of living at my place outweigh the pro’s of Orangewood by more than twice; the con’s of living at Orangewood outweigh the cons of staying here by almost twice.

If fear of a catastrophic fall or a sudden health emergency is the main motivator for institutionalizing oneself, would it not make as much sense to ALWAYS CARRY A CHARGED-UP PHONE or one of those call-for-help buttons?

Either of those is infinitely cheaper than forking over the value of your home plus still more of your assets to some institution. And, IMHO, infinitely better  than consigning yourself to a prison for old folks.

Ancestors

by
Olive Getten DeLong

Whiling away some idle moments — fast turning into hours! — exploring the Web for clues to my honored (and not-so-honored) forebears… Sources like Ancestry.com are full of stuff: if you’ve got a name, they’ve got the dope. The obvious, of course: details like birth and death dates, places of residence, relatives’ names. And some things that are less obvious, like marriage and divorce records, leads to relative after relative after never-heard-of ’em relative.

Some of this stuff confirms the family legends; some of it contradicts the stories you were told; some of it amounts to brand-new revelation. And some of it poses new mysteries.

Always entertaining.

The current entertaining mystery goes like this:

Ancestry.com says my grandmother — my mother’s mother — died in 1979. That would have put her in her 80s, which is far from impossible: other women in her family lived into their 90s.

However….

My mother said she died in her 40s (this would have been in the late 1920s or early 1930s), of uterine cancer (supposedly brought on by her extravagantly wild lifestyle). My mother claimed to have attended her at her deathbed, as a teenager caring for her dying mother at the California grandparents’ home in Alameda. Like her maternal relatives, we’re told, Olive was a Christian Scientist (despite her loose sexual mores). Thus she refused to go a doctor for the obvious symptoms until it was too late to save her life.

At least, so my mother claimed.

If Ancestry.com has the story right (BIG “if”), that claim was fabricated and richly embroidered. And the horror of this speculation is…well…truth to tell, anything’s possible.

Ancestry.com has her dying in 1979.

Double-check that. Triple-check it: yes, 9 December 1979, in Berkeley, California.

But…but…but…. that doesn’t even make sense! We were back in the States by then. My mother, claiming I was too ill to continue in the miserable school in lovely Araby, demanded to bring me home. She and I arrived in San Francisco when I was in the 6th grade: around 12 years old. That would have been 1956 or 57. But by then my mother was already claiming that her mother, Olive, was dead. The rest of the family lived in Berkeley and Sausalito, and believe me: there was no sign of a wild-assed grandmother there.

As a teenager, my mother had been sent from Upstate New York to California — to the East Bay — when her paternal grandmother died, leaving the grandfather with a dirt farm to cultivate and no help in caring for a teenager. The grandmother dies in 1927, when my mother would have been 16. Olive already has the Big C, and my mother ends up tending her during what must have been my mother’s mid-teens. BUT….

Yes. But…the notes I’m finding at Ancestry.com say Olive died in 1979. Fifty-two years later!

Where WAS she all that time? If she wasn’t in the ground, that is…

Most likely, the date is actually 1929…it’s probably a typo. But still…it’s intriguing.

Innaresting.

My cousin, who probably is responsible for this narrative, converted to Mormonism many years ago. Though he lives in California, these records are probably at the Temple in Salt Lake City.

However, my dear friend and erstwhile business partner happens to be — yea verily! — a nice Mormon girl! A-a-a-n-d she’s active with the Church. So she knows whereof she speaks and how to speak it.

The Temple here in Arizona — in a suburb called Mesa — has access to these records.

My thought is that I should get off my duff while I’m still capable of rising from a chair, drive out there, get myself signed in, and go through whatever records they have.

Lemme tellya: Olive’s life is the stuff of novels. If I had enough information, I could write a story that truly wouldn’t quit. Very possibly one that could become a best seller or the foundation of a movie. She was one. wild. lady. And her relatives, while outwardly stodgy, were…well, verrreee strange.

 

Did she…or didn’t she?

by

Sometimes in the wee hours of the morning, I find myself turning over the small (and large) mysteries of life. You know what I mean?

One of those mysteries is whether my mother deliberately committed suicide by smoking herself to death. It strikes me as a distinct possibility. But as is so often true, when one thinks about such a thing one encounters seven kinds of ambiguity.

She had a difficult life — one that might reasonably be expected to lead many of us to contemplate suicide.

Her mother was, shall we say, a bit “fast.” My mother was the woman’s second unwed pregnancy…I found out by accident that somewhere out there I have an unknown uncle. Ohhh well.

A custody fight ensued after this second unwanted birth. The father lived in Glen’s Falls, then a tiny farming town in upstate New York. The mother’s family lived in the San Francisco Bay area. The case was argued in front of a court in Glen’s Falls, where the father’s relatives pretty much owned the place. Not surprisingly, custody was given to the paternal grandparents, wasting a trip East and a lot of money for the San Francisco set.

My mother’s earliest memory was of her mother packing up a little red kiddie wagon and sending her off to live with her grandparents — telling her to walk to the paternal manse, dragging the wagon behind her.

So she grew up on a farm in rural upstate New York, evidently working as the family serving girl. She spoke of hanging the carpets on clotheslines each spring and pounding the dirt out, of having to wash the soot off the kerosene lanterns every day, and of the family canning kitchen garden vegetables and setting eggs to keep in big barrels over the winter. And of how cold it was in the outhouse in the wintertime. And of the time snowdrifts came up to the second-story windows and her grandfather had to dig a tunnel so they could get out of the house.

About when my mother reached her teens, the grandmother developed diabetes. In those days, there was no such thing as insulin. They tried to control the symptoms with what apparently was a pretty bizarre diet…and a pretty ineffectual one. When her grandmother died, she was at last sent to live with the maternal grandparents, who lived in Berkeley.

For my mother, this was a fortuitous development. Suddenly she was riding on streetcars and buses — conveyances she had never seen before. She once remarked on how utterly amazed she was to find you could turn on the lights in a room by flipping a wall switch.

But as arrangements go, living with the mother’s family also had its peculiarities. These folks were Christian Scientists. They never went to doctors. Period. They would go to dentists — provided no pain-killing chemicals were applied — but medical doctors were verboten.

Meanwhile, the mother had apparently continued to cat around. It was, after all, the Roaring Twenties, and you may be sure the nicey-niceness that infected her sister and her mother did not affect her. My uncle once remarked, in passing, that “Olive marched to a different drummer.”

Heh! I guess!!

She married — apparently a pretty nice guy — and unloaded him. And continued to enjoy the Roaring Twenties as a flapper.

Not surprisingly, eventually she developed a reproductive malignancy — she believed God was punishing her for all the abortions she’d had. On her female relatives’ advice, she delayed going to a doctor until it was way too late to save her life. My mother, who by then apparently was in her mid-teens, nursed her through her grim final illness.

As a result, my mother was simply terrified of cancer. Seriously: it was almost a phobia.

Pack that away in the back of your mind.

***

Years passed. She married some guy. Divorced him. Married my father. Got dragged to Saudi Arabia, where we spent ten years in the hot sands by the Persian Gulf, basically imprisoned inside the chain-link fences of an American oil compound.

Came back to the States. Got three whole years in San Francisco (where she really wanted to live) while my father went back to sea.

Next: dragged to Southern California when my father quit that job and took up with another shipping company. Spent another three monotonous years there.

My father wanted nothing more than to retire, and he had decided that they would move to Sun City, Arizona, for the purpose. Neither of them knew anything about Arizona…but hey: it couldn’t be any worse than the Rub al’Khali, could it?

One morning when he was home from the boat and they were getting into their cups, he had the bright idea that if he could shoehorn me into college a year early — at this time I was a high-school junior — he could quit his job and they could move to their dream tract house in Sun City.

So, amazingly, they broke out the portable typewriter and sent a letter to the University of Arizona (they didn’t quite know where it was, vis à vis lovely Sun City, but hey: it’s all Arizona, right?) and proposed that since I was such a bright little kid the university should accept me a year early — in the fall of that year.

Even more amazingly, forthwith the admissions officer wrote back with Sure! Send her right along!

Holeee shee-ut.

So they yanked me out of high school, bought a house in the cotton fields to the west of Phoenix, and took off for Arizona.

Yay. So much for UC Berkeley, hm?

My mother was always an avid smoker. I hated the stink of cigarettes. But the parfum de burning tobacco was what graced our homes, wherever we happened to be. She smoked more and more as the months and years proceeded. One day I realized I could tell when she awoke in the morning, because before she even rolled out of the sack, she’d light up a cigarette.

Before she turned off the light at night, she puffed one last cigarette down to the filter. And before she lifted her head in the morning, she fired up another one.

In fact, there was almost never a time that she didn’t have a cigarette in her hand, except when she was shoving food in her face. When we went to a restaurant, she would smoke until the food was set on the table, smush it out to eat, and then light up again as soon as she finished her meal.

After I married and had my own home, I asked her to please not smoke inside my house. She threw a sh!t-fit in which she exclaimed, “I’m your mother and you can just put up with my smoking!”

No kidding! I remember the exact words to this day.

You understand: She knew. The Surgeon General’s report to the effect that smoking tobacco was proven to cause cancer came out in the late 1950s.

I remember the day, back in that decade, when she brought some friends home to our apartment in San Francisco. The subject of that report came up, and they exchanged skepticism about it. One PR stunt that had appeared on a national TV show entailed having a smoker take a puff on a cigarette and exhale into a white handkerchief. The result was a big brown spot.

They wondered if this trick was real.

So my mother trotted back to her bedroom and brought out a brand-spanking-clean, freshly ironed white handkerchief. In those days, a proper San Francisco woman carried a white handkerchief wherever she went.

They lit up a cigarette, one of them inhaled deep and puffed out dramatically into the hanky. And yup: left a big, dark brown filthy blot in the middle of the white cotton.

They all went “Isn’t that amazing” and laughed.

It took her another 18 years to smoke herself to death, but kill herself she did. She died in 1976, in agony, of cancer. On my birthday.

***

She was terrified of getting cancer. She knew smoking was a cause of cancer. She had seen the brown gunk just one puff of burning tobacco deposits in your lungs. And yet she continued to smoke. Not because she couldn’t quit. Because she wouldn’t try to quit. Not once, right up until the time she could no longer hold a lighter in her hand, not once did she make any effort at all to quit smoking.

If that isn’t deliberate, I’d like to know what it is.

Routine, Crisis, and Grief in the Age of Covid

by

Up at 3:30 sharp. Hate this…especially in the Age of Covid. In the middle of the night, your neuroses and your hypochondria are unleashed. But it has become a custom, a habit, some kind of physiological necessity. The internal alarm clock goes off every morning between 3 and 4.

M’hijito is bringing his dog over here around 8, on the way over to pick up his dad and New Wife. Word came down that his grandmother — DXH’s mother — is breathing her last in the Grand Junction, Colorado, nursing home where she’s spent the last 20 years or so of her life.

She is 106 years old, God help her.

They were told that they would all have to take and pass covid tests if they are to go in to her room to say good-bye. Not that this would make much difference, as she’s been blind and deaf for upwards of a decade.

My son used to go over there several times a year to visit with her. But finally he announced he was not going back, because he didn’t believe she even knew he was there. That decision came down several years ago.

At any rate, from here he will run over to his dad’s house, pick them up, and drive them to Grand Junction, a 10- or 12-hour junket.

I am not pleased.

DXH is 80 years old, for God’s sake! He’s had a heart attack and bypass surgery. If he catches this thing, he is not going to get to be 81. NW is significantly younger…but you can be a whole lot younger than 80 and still not be a spring chicken. So both of them are put at risk by this junket, as indeed is my son. Unless they brought food with them, they’ll have to stop to eat either at Flagstaff or at Kayenta. They might make it to Four Corners without fainting from hunger…but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Kayenta, where we always used to stop to grab a bite to eat partway through this journey, is in the middle of the Navajo. The plague is holding forth there, as it has from the outset, with a vengeance. On the Rez, 8,243 people have fallen sick…they’re not even saying how many have died, but other sources report that it is a LOT. These are rural, almost nomadic people. There are no large towns on the Rez. By comparison, Yavapai County, which comprises the town of Prescott (once the state capital) has counted 1,167 cases so far. The population of the Navajo Nation is 273,667. The population of Yavapai County is 235,099. So…uhm…think of it this way: 273,667 is NOT to 8,243 as 235,099 is to 1,167.

Not by one helluva long shot.

So. I do not want my son or his father or his father’s wife driving through that area!

Of course, I have no choice in the matter. They decided not to fly, apparently figuring that was riskier for the old folks than driving. And that no doubt is true.

§§§

At 4:20 sharp, the hound and I are out the door!

Took her out to pee about 4:15 to find it was JUST GORGEOUS outside, Venus in the morning sky, the air highly tolerable.

I had decided to opt the morning walks until it cools off a little: by 5 or 5:30 a.m. it’s just gawdawful out there. (To give you an idea: it was 113 yesterday, down from 116 a couple days ago.) But in the predawn gloaming a thought occurred: y’know…we could shoot out, make our dash through Upper Richistan, and get back before the heat comes up.

What a brilliant idea! It was just lovely out. We encountered only one(!!!) dog, and that was on the way back into the ’Hood. Normally I have to wrestle Ruby past a dozen or more dogs. A coyote lives on the road that leads through Lower Richistan, but if she was in the shrubbery over there, she didn’t make herself known. Forgot to bring my shilelagh, so felt a little antsy about that…but mercifully, nothing happened.

Back in the house by 5:20. Dog fed. Human dropped into the pool. Plants watered. Bird dish refilled with water. Hot dang!

§§§

I never got along very well with my mother-in-law. She’s way too much like me: highly opinionated, and not very polite about it.

My mother, who struggled all too visibly to reserve judgment, was nevertheless unmistakably abhorred. And over time MiL did not wear well with me. I do not care whether your political and social and moral beliefs fail to come up to my elevated standards. Seriously. You can be as wacksh!t crazy as you like, you can even be a damned Trumpeter, and as long as you stay out of my face, you’re welcome to it. But that one…could not stay out of your face. If you did not think just the way she did, well then…obviously you were none too bright. And she was happy to tell you about it.

You know the type. Facebook is littered with them.

So that marriage entailed a 20-year struggle to stay polite around the woman. Thank God she lived in another state.

Yet at this point…well, I feel sorry for her but do not feel sorry she is passing.

To live to be 106 years old is to outlive life.

That horror is not something you would wish on anyone. Imagine being confined to a bed in a nursing home, unable to so much as get yourself to the toilet or into a shower stall, unable to see, unable to hear. Not even a mindless daytime TV show to while away the endless hours. There must be a better way to get off this mortal coil.

Her other son lives in Texas. I assume he’s flying over to Grand Junction. Whether they intend to linger at her side until she passes (if she passes…), I do not know. Whether funeral arrangements have been made, I do not know — although given that New Wife is a woman of sterling common sense and considerable prescience, I would assume so. And if so, are they going to stay in Colorado until a funeral and wake and whatever hoohah take place? Or what?

MiL made herself a minor celebrity there on the Western Slope, during her heyday. She wrote a newspaper column for the Grand Junction paper, worked for awhile as an announcer for the local NPR station, and carried a bright red banner of feminism over the heights of Grand Mesa and right into the precincts of Denver, where she got herself appointed to various political jobs, whenever a Democratic governor was in office. So active was she that at one point she was anointed Colorado’s Woman of the Year.

She did a lot, for a small-town librarian who had ill-advisedly married a bright but mentally questionable young man, struggled through 20 years of marriage, finally unloaded the clown (after he took up with his old college girlfriend), and ended up stuck in a small city in the middle of nowhere. Overall, she seemed fairly happy. She had friends. She adored her sons. She achieved a degree of recognition for her public work.

Not a bad life. All things considered.

Texas Soap, Continued…

by

After the last post went up, the one carrying on about my father’s branch of the genealogical tree, I thought maybe I was a little sharp about those people, the ones whose offspring seem to keep the Tarrant County Jail in business. Soo…to revisit, a little more reflectively.

It’s my opinion — and strictly my opinion, one I cannot prove — that my father suffered various kinds of abuse as a child and possibly as a young man. It would explain his own approach to child-rearing, which was seasoned with bullying and beating. How would he know any better, if that was the way he was raised himself?

In the first place, I know he resented his brother Tom, the senior of the two elder brothers — the younger of these men was 18 years older than my father. Family lore has it that my father was a change-of-life baby, an unpleasant surprise to his father, who so much did not want to start all over with a third child that he ran off, abandoning his wife with the infant. He later was found by the side of a west Texas road, a bullet in his head — presumed a suicide.

However…

So much time passed between these events that it’s unlikely my father’s birth was the immediate cause of his father’s troubles. My father was born in 1908; the errant sire died in 1927: that’s a 19-year hiatus. If the man’s suicide had anything to do with his abandoning my grandmother, the connection would seem to be distant, indeed. If he committed suicide at all: he’d spent some time as a prison guard, which would have earned him some enemies. Out in the middle of nowhere, you could put a bullet in a man’s head and the gun in his hand, then walk, ride, or drive off unnoticed.

Well…what was going on during those 19 years?

In the absence of her honored husband, my grandmother allowed herself to be drawn into the sticky webs of a variety of con artists:

A nascent church of Pentecostal nut cases. Today this is more or less a mainstream church, but at the time it was decidedly a fringe element.

A coven of spiritualists who persuaded her that they could talk with the dead, and who would gather at her home to conduct séances.

Crooked building contractors who scammed her of that part of her inheritance that she hadn’t forked over to the church and to the ghost-hunters, by talking her into endless, expensive additions and improvements to her home.

My grandmother had inherited a lot of money. Her father had freighted buffalo hides out of Oklahoma into Texas during the 19th century. The amount she would have had around the time my father was born would be worth around $2.8 million today. In addition, she owned a gas station in Fort Worth and a large family home. The older brothers had figured they would split this inheritance when she died, and they would then be set; even if the kid brother got an even cut, each one would have come out with the equivalent of almost a million dollars.

After she died, however, they learned to their horror that she had given every cent that had not been scammed away by the spiritualists and the “contractors” to the church. The two older brothers were alienated over this — Tom, who by then was living out on the range in West Texas or Oklahoma, blamed Ed for not having ridden herd on their mother. My father was deemed too young to know any better, although if I’m right about his age, he must have been in the Navy by then.

At any rate, by the time I was old enough to know any of the characters in this road show, a permanent schism had developed, and it was clear even to my childish eyes that my father did not care for his oldest brother. I must have been about eight or ten years old when we came back to the states from Arabia for one of my father’s biennial three-month leaves. We would drive from New York City to Texas, hang out with the second brother, Ed, and his wife Audie for a while, then push on to California for another few weeks with my mother’s relatives, and then fly low across the roads back to New York, where we’d catch a plane and cross the Atlantic, Europe, and the Middle East to return to Saudi Arabia.

So this one time, I’m eight or ten and we’re in Texas. For reasons altogether unclear to me (I knew nothing in those days, but just tagged along), my parents decided to visit Tom, somewhere in the boondocks. He met us in his pickup and proposed to drive us out to the ranch. I was to be privileged to ride in the truck with Uncle Tom, and my father and mother were to follow in the car that they’d purchased in New York for the cross-country trip.

This would have been a pretty nice car. My father made good money working for Aramco, and when we came back to the States for these “long leaves,” he would buy a large, comfortable sedan in New York, drive us across the country to California, stopping in Texas to visit his brother Ed, and proceed straight back to New York, where he would sell the car. You also should know that when my father was sober (which was most of the time), he was a fairly conservative and cautious man.

So the kid — that would be me — is put into the pickup and we take off across the West Texas hinterlands.

It is raining. We’re driving on a rutted, potholed dirt road across a remote prairie with NOTHING around us. (See the banner image above…only the place didn’t have that much grass, as I recall).) Tom lays on the gas and takes off across the prairie like a spooked longhorn. I’m a little kid and even I know this is kinda crazy.

Following behind us, my father can’t keep up. My mother is frantic. So, presumably, is he, although “frantic” was never one of his affects.

Out in the middle of effin’ nowhere, my father finally manages to catch up, honk Tom down, get him to pull over. He is in a flying rage. He grabs me back and throws me in the car, tells Tom how the cow ate the cabbage, jumps into his car, and drives us all back into Ft. Worth.

That, to my knowledge, was the last time my father saw or spoke to his oldest brother until Tom died in 1973.

So there’s that lovely family. My sense is that Tom probably did that to prove some kind of point, or maybe just for the fun of goading my father. It appears that he indeed was a bit of a sh!thead.

I’m pretty certain that my father experienced a fair amount of what we would consider physical abuse as he was growing up. It’s possible he also was sexually abused, but I have no proof of that, except that he was homophobic to the point of being neurotic about it. Simple violence is more credible: he was a believer in spanking and beating, and no quarter was given to small children. It was what he took to be the proper way to bring up a child. That was current in his generation — he and my mother were no believers in progressive child-rearing methods.

It also appears possible that both of my fathers’ parents came from broken homes — which is saying something in the 1800s. The various genealogical websites contain hints that my grandfather’s parents and my grandmother’s parents were living in separate states. This, too, would seem not to bode well for the offspring.

So…do I feel a little tart about these folks? Oh, yes. I was never close to them, because my father was not close to them. And a signal characteristic of my father’s personality was a kind of restrained abuse (restrained, I suspect, by my mother) layered with habitual distance.