Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Genealogy Part II: The Texas Soap Opera

by

Having mined the Web for information about the forebears on my mother’s side, I decided to Google my father’s family name.

Heh…

Y’know…a few years after my father married his endlessly annoying third wife, whom he took up with at the old-folkerie where he moved after my mother died, he took her with him to visit his brother in Texas. While there, they drove around to meet other surviving members of the clan.

You have to know this: Mrs. Third was not the brightest rhinestone on the cowboy vest. But she was convinced that she was a 24-carat diamond. 😀 Godlmighty, that woman was stupid.

At any rate, so away she goes with my father. They charge off through the dust of West Texas, and they spend three weeks or a month driving around the Lone Star State.

You understand…my father used to say the best thing about being from Texas was being from Texas: as far from it as you can get. As a teenager, he dropped out of high school, lied about his age, and enlisted in the Navy, thereby launching himself into that ideal state of being from. He went back only briefly, during the Depression, a sojourn that didn’t last long. Of that you may be very sure.

His brother Ed was a good man, kindly and quiet, married lovingly to a harridan my mother loathed right up until her (the sister-in-law’s) demise: a Southern belle who slathered over her meanness with honey and maple syrup. Strangely like my father’s Wife Number Three…. Edwin worked all his life for Metzger’s Dairy in Ft. Worth, where he provided a solid, comfortable middle-class life for his family.

Their brother Tom, on the other hand, was…well…somewhat rough. Far as I could tell, Tom was a ranch hand who eventually rose to the elevated status of ranch manager, way to hell and gone out in West Texas. My mother said their forebears migrated to Texas from the deep south: Alabama or Arkansas. However, it appears that in 1860 the family was in Illinois; by 1894, when the second brother was born, they were in Texas.

We’re told that my father was a change-of-life baby, a little surprise to his mother born in 1908. The sire, who evidently did not want to support and raise another child, ran away and some time later was found by the side of a Texas country road, dead of a gunshot wound to the head: presumed a suicide. They were not, shall we say, members of an elevated social class.

The reason my father ran away from Texas was that he learned to deeply hate cattle ranching from his brother Tom, who took him on the last cattle drive from Texas to Dodge city. From this and similar adventures, he learned that he did not wish to spend his life watching the rear ends of cows from the back of a horse. Or a pick-up, either.

So anyway, some time after my father and the dear wife get back into town, DXH and I are at my step-sister’s house for some de rigueur holiday get-together. Mrs. Third has me cornered, and in the course of yakking at me brings up the subject of this trip, which was still pretty recent at that point. She mentions it in tones of awed horror.

“You know,” she says, confiding, “they’re not our kind of people!”

No shit, Pocahontas!

I managed not to laugh aloud, but it’s always been one of my most hilarious memories of that woman.

So yesterday I google up the clan name. You would just not believe the number of my tribe who are now or who have been guests of the Tarrant County slam! They’re a bunch of effing petty criminals. Well, assuming you regard murder as a petty crime.

LOL! I knew he was WT made good…but this is ridiculous.

That self-congratulating twit must have been so abhorred when she saw the folks from whom her honored husband sprang. A-n-n-n-d…knowing my father, who had a knack for acting dumb-as-a-post but who was very far from it, he probably did that on purpose.

It’s “poke,” goddammit. “Poke sallet.” From pokeweed, a mildly toxic weed that grows all over the Southeastern U.S.

Waco cattle sculptures: By Dfwcre8tive – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8917140

 

The Genealogy Jamboree

by

In an idle moment, I happened to google the name of some long-dead relative, and lo! up came a bunch of interesting stuff, not just dry government documents but newspaper articles and obituaries written by surviving loved ones. Genealogical records tend to suck you in. Like history (of which, I suppose, genealogy is a branch), the stories of the dead can be hypnotic.

Fooling around, I had the idea of creating a table that would compare the family lore about people on my mother’s side with what appear to be the facts, as reflected in public records. And…whoa! This is when you begin to realize how curious are some of the things your relatives have said.

My father never talked about his family, most of whom he was alienated from or just didn’t care about. But my mother’s stories…oh, my!

Gree, presumably in her younger days

One particularly memorable legend has it that my great-grandmother, familiarly known as “Gree,” was brought up by Mary Baker Eddy after her own parents died. This is why Gree was a staunch Christian Scientist right up to her dying day, at the (very active!) age of 94.

Think of that. She and her daughter both lived to 94, and they never saw a doctor in their lives. The evening before she died (of heart failure), she entertained a dozen people for Christmas dinner in her dining room.

Well, anyway: Mary Baker Eddy as stepmother. Right?

Start to look into it, and you find exactly zero evidence that Gree ever came anywhere near Mary Baker Eddy during her childhood. Eddy lived in New England: mostly in Massachusetts. Gree was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, and as far as I can tell, lived most of her younger years in Michigan and Illinois. She married in the Midwest, and she and her husband moved to California after they were well into adulthood.

It is true that Gree’s mother died when Gree was three years old. However, the father lived another ten years. That would have left Gree unparented at the age of 13…but again, there is exactly zero evidence that she was ever sent East. And as far as I can tell, Mary Baker Eddy never inhabited either Michigan or Illinois. 😀

My mother believed that Gree and her widowed, never remarried daughter Gertrude were prominent in the Christian Science movement at the start of the 20th century. She said they used to contribute frequently to the Christian Science Monitor.

Okay. Yes. The Christian Science Monitor was founded in 1908. So…yeah. Could be.

Look into it, though, and you find their sole surviving squib in any CS publication was a testimonial to the miracles of Christian Science in The Christian Science Sentinel, which appears to have been a kind of propaganda bullhorn whose nature was akin to a newsletter.

None of this means they didn’t know Mary Baker Eddy personally. Surely one or both of them could have. But evidently my great-grandmother never spent any time as Eddy’s stepchild. Unless…she was sent east on an orphan train (at the age of 13? In the 1800s, when she would have been considered old enough to earn a living?) and nabbed as a free servant by Eddy. But there’s no word of this either in fact or in family lore. Besides, the orphan trains went in the other direction: from East Coast cities into the hinterlands.

Interestingly, in this testimonial Gertrude remarks that she survived typhoid(!) and appendicitis grâce à the miraculous qualities of Christian Science. She also remarks that her brother went to France during World War I.

Then we have the story of Gertrude’s brother, my uncle Albert, who designed the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. We’re told that Al wanted to go to college but that his father refused to let that happen, saying no one needed a college diploma to earn a living. This, in the backlit haze of family lore, made Al’s accomplishments as an engineer and designer all the more astonishing.

Well. No. Mucking about on the Internet, what DO I come across but an article in an antique university newsletter indicating that at the age of 23 he was a junior at the University of Illinois, Champaign — majoring in civil engineering.

He was born in 1892. So if he was a junior in 1915, then he would have been a little old for an undergraduate. This could indicate that he didn’t start college until a year or two after he left high school. Or that he was working his own way through and so had to take a lighter than normal course load. Assuming he was able to carry a regular schedule of classes, though, he would have graduated in 1916. The U.S. entered World War II in April, 1917, and so it’s possible that he might have dropped out of college to volunteer for the war. But it’s just as possible that he finished his course of studies before joining up.

Whatever: this bit of intelligence gives the lie to the tale that he was entirely self-educated.

Amusing, isn’t it?

I have a cousin in California who converted to Mormonism shortly after he reached adulthood. He compiled a large genealogical record, we’re told, which in the first place would be lodged here in town at the Temple (and I do have Mormon friends who could get me in there) or which, in the second place, he may have information about. His sister, who lives in Fountain Hills, has completely alienated herself from me, for reasons unknown. Apparently I said something to offend her — what, I can’t imagine. My father had plenty to say about her conversion to Roman Catholicism, some of it extremely nasty — he was a bigot who operated in the highest stratosphere of bigotry, and if he made any of his remarks to her (God help us!), she no doubt thinks I’m just as stupid and vicious as he was. It remains to be seen if she passed this opinion along to her brother.

One would assume she did. But I figure it can’t hurt to try to get in touch with him. He can’t hit me over the Internet.

 

A-n-n-d…The July 4 Jamboree

by

Happy Independence Day, one and all, whatever your particular political weirdness. Enjoy your freedom…such as it may be.

Here in the ’hood, the locals throw a great old-timey small-townsy July 4 parade. It’s grand. Did I go to it this morning? Not a chance…nothing will peel me away from my 7 a.m. coffee.

The Ruby and I were out the door shortly before 5 a.m. “As dawn cracks” is the best time to get out onto the streets for the daily two-mile stroll. Wait till 5:15 or, gawd forbid, until 5:30, and you’re elbowing aside every other dog-owner, dog-pisser, and dog-pooper in the city. Fly out the door just as the eastern horizon starts to gray out, and you have the place largely to yourself.

Except for my colleague, the other Old Bat in the hood who likes not to have to wrestle her dog away from the competition’s nuisance mutts. 😀 This is a fellow LOL (Little Old Lady) who is dragged around the hood by an ill-tempered shi-tzu. Whereas Ruby will (foolishly) try to love up every dog that walks past us, the shi-tzu will simply try to kill them all.

This old gal keeps herself in action, despite braces on her ankles and knees, by strolling about a mile every day around Upper and Lower Richistan. She lives in Lower Richistan, so this area is her territory. In chatting with her, I’ve learned that she is the living, breathing avatar of Aging in Place. Yes. She’s 93, she lives alone, she wrestles with whatever disability puts her in braces, and she does just fine. She’s an upbeat and happy human being.

Today I learned that one way she manages this is by having someone come in two days a week to help her out.

Ah hah.

And how much does this cost?

Let us posit $80/day, the going rate for a cleaning lady in these parts. Oh, hell: let’s give them a raise for putting up with an old bat: $100 a day.

That would be… $200 a week x 4 weeks in a month = $800 month. And how does that compare with the posited $3,000 a month to live in the Institute? Plus all the proceeds from the sale of your home…

Not bad, I’d say. Even if you figure taxicab rides and food deliveries and the cost of one of those Save-My-Ass buttons… Ninety-three years old and she’s still goin’ strong.

This evening I’m going over to watch the public fireworks displays from the 12th-floor balcony of some friends’ condo. Looking forward to it: it’s a yearly Event.

Last year I was afraid to go because of the neighbor’s alley weeds. Arizona has lifted all restrictions on fireworks, so we citizens can indulge ourselves in whatever suicidal idiocies we please. And since, as we know, at any time on the roads one in ten people around us is a moron, this is…problematic.

The city of Phoenix, faced with this new Freedom legislation, outlawed certain kinds of particularly dangerous, blow-your-hands off ordnance. The state, outraged by any such imposition on a Free Society, said okay, you can have that, but you cannot place any limit on any fireworks a retailer can sell.

This means that the local morons can buy any face-blasting hand-maiming kid-crippling fireworks they please; they just can’t legally set them off inside the city limits. Knowing this, the morons bring this crap into the alleys to set it off, figuring if a cop (or anyone else) catches them in the act, they can run off down the alley to escape capture. So you have all this garbage going off, ALL. NIGHT. LONG in the alley behind your bedrooms.

Ruby the Corgi, like most dogs, is terrorized by the sound of exploding fireworks. And of course if one of the morons sets fire to the mounds of cat’s-claw vines that insure my privacy along the back alley fence, the fire will jump to the roof (no, it’s not “if”: it happened already to another house in the neighborhood, which burned to the ground, leaving only a pile of ash on the concrete slab) — and my little dog will be incinerated.

But really. I do want to go to the party.

So I put up my son to watching the dog tonight. This evening I’ll drop her off at his place, fly down to my friends’ place, enjoy the company and the spectacle, and then pick her up on the way home.

How stupid is this?

Well. This is what we call Arizona.

😀

Good things…Dumb things

by

In the GOOD THINGS department… Have you ever noticed how little disasters seem to lead to large benefits? Why is that, d’you suppose?

Case in point today: the busted tooth disaster. How did I NOT want to have my muzzle cut open to remove that broken tooth? And how did I TOTALLY not want to pay out my entire goddamn year’s tax refund to an endodontist for the privilege? Let me count the ways…oh, wait! I can’t count that high.

But…oh, yes, but…

With that cracked fang out of there, the mouth doesn’t hurt annnnyyy more.

That is correct: no pain. Zero-point-zero-zero twinges, stabs, or aches.For the first time in a couple years, I can chew on that side of the maw…and did you know your taste buds are different, one side of the tongue from the other? Yeah: food tastes different (read BETTER) when you can munch it on the other side of your mouth.

I know: weird.

Yet another benefit of the Battle of the Busted Tooth: whilst convalescing, I learned about Pacific boxed soups. Not that I hadn’t tried a few of them. But canned (and by extension, packaged) soups are not my cuppa. My experience with canned soups and broths has been that they’re oversalted and they taste of industrial chemicals.

But I had to eat something. One of Funny’s readers had recommended the Pacific brand, so I picked a variety of them at Sprouts.

Hot dang!

These things taste like REAL SOUP. I mean, they taste like that soup would taste if I’d made it myself, upon mine own stove.

The potato soup? Outta the way, Julia Child!

The tomato soup… What? It seems to have…well…tomatoes in it. The sweet potato ginger Thai soup? To DIE for.

What? Today, after having had a lovely and interminable morning farting with the computer, I finally rose from the chair into which I had been frozen along about 11 a.m., starved and craving a ration of strong drink. Remaining in the cupboard: a little box of Pacific brand lentil soup.

Dump into pan. Add a little chard. Heat. Zing up with a squeeze of lemon. Use it as an excuse to pour a glass of wine. And…

Dayum! How do they do that? Once again, it actually tasted like real lentil soup. If I made a giant pot of lentil soup, it would taste just like that.

In other precincts, check out this little post at Quora: it’s garnered 242 “likes” since I put it up just a few hours ago. Probably because it’s kind of funny. Stupidly hilarious, we might say, if we were cynical enough…

In the Dumb Things department: might as well ’fess up: I just do not have it anymore when it comes to techno-talent.

Yea verily. Back in the Dark Ages, I was ahead of the wave. Always on top of the computer revolution. And all that bullshit. But today: I do not care soooooo much that I can’t remember stuff I learned and knew and used for years.

Last night I set up the first raft of FREE READS Fire-Rider stories to post automatically starting about 7:00 this morning. There. All done. Nice, eh?

Heh.

Well. It would be if I were still even faintly competent with computers.

What did I fail to take into consideration? Wellllll….  With a blog, the most recent post is what appears first to the reader. Soooo… If you posted chapter 1 and then chapter 2 and then chapter 3 and then chapter 4, your reader sees your posts effing BACKWARDS: she sees chapter 4 FIRST.

Arrrghhhhh….. Yea verily, I failed to remember this basic factoid — i.e., the computer universe is unstuck from reality every which way from Sunday, which in computer land is the last day of the week, not the first day. So when I got back from this morning’s wee-hours doggy-walk, I found that the first few posts had appeared…bass-ackward.

So I had to sit down and repost every goddamn entry, with the first entry to go online last, so that it appeared at the top of the queue…

THEN…then I discovered that for the life of me I can. not. remember. how to build a widget.

Worse yet, I do not want to know.

Absolutely positively not. I do. fucking. NOT. want. to track that BS down and relearn it!

See why I don’t own a smartphone? Because I do not want a damn telephone that’s smarter than me, that’s why.

 

Why I Love Walmart People…

by

So, it’s coming onto the noon hour when I stumble into the neighborhood Walmart grocery store. This is when workin’ (and non-workin’) folks get off for a bit. Both the check-out lines run by humans are backed up halfway to the pharmacy counter. (I know: self-service checkout…but no. Do not do that. Keep your fellow Americans employed, dammit!).

So I join the shortest human-operated checkout line. I know this clerk. Which means I know better. She’s gotta be 80 years old if she’s a day, and she’s sloooowwwww as molasses in January. She comes from an era where that old chestnut made literal sense.

We stand and we stand and we stand and we stand and we stand and we stand while she goes through one (1) lady’s only moderately large basketful of purchases. I would guess we spent at least 15 minutes waiting to get up to the cash register.

But….. Ya can’t complain.

We — that would be me and half the planet’s population in line behind me — are standing behind THE single cutest little boy that God and all His Goddesses ever put on this earth. He’s parked in the shopping cart’s baby seat and is being, sporadically, doted upon by the woman he has with him. He is a creature of great cheer.

Believe me. This is a male child who will ALWAYS have women with him.

He is not cute. He is staggeringly, movie-star handsome. Every future woman in this child’s generation is dooooomed! The same is no doubt true of a fair number of male children.

Between the woman and the boy, a family resemblance is obvious. Is she the mother? Or is she the grandmother?

“Look! Flags!” the little boy points to patriotic tinfoil decorations strung over the check-out lines.

“Those are for the Fourth of July,” the matron explains.

“When is the Fourth of July?” he asks.

We line-waiters watch. All RIGHT! Tell him: when IS the Fourth of July?

Flummoxed, she shrugs. Luckily for her (and for the rest of us), she reaches the head of the line and so is forced to abdicate this Teaching Moment by forking over a basketful of groceries.

A bum walks by behind us.

He is tired. He is hot. The ambient temperature out of doors is 105 degrees. He heads for the hallway that houses the men’s room. And the women’s room.

We in line think: and THAT is why we don’t use the toilet in the Walmart: so we don’t get nits.

But he doesn’t go into the men’s. He marches up to the water fountain and drinks. And drinks. And drinks.

The old lady behind me and I glance at each other. Without a doubt, we each have the same thought: There but for the grace of God…

The agèd cashier finally dismisses the little boy and his grandmother/mother/whatever, just about that moment.

“That was a cute one,” I say to my informal cashier friend, whom I see almost every time I go through that store.

Her tired expression brightens. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, he was!”

Thank you, God, I think. And it is not because I’ve finally reached the front of the line.

Pests…and pests

by

Eight a.m. sharp and a damned robocaller pest gets through the new CPR Call Blocker. Occasionally they do slip by. That notwithstanding, though, we’re still down from a dozen nuisance calls a day to one, at most. Often whole days go by without a single nuisance call!

The FCC recently passed a rule allowing phone companies to block robocalls. BUT…they’re allowing the companies to gouge us an extra fee for the privilege! Naturally. The effin’ phone company gets you comin’ and gets you goin’. If I’ve had to go out and plunk down a hundred bucks for a gadget to block pestering calls when the phone company could’ve been doing it for me all these years, then I should not be required to pay still more for the privilege after the phone companies decide to move, a day late and a dollar short.

Blanket robocall blocking poses a number of problems, the main two being school systems and emergency alert systems. Personally, I do not need to be reminded by some GD recording that I have a doctor’s appointment this week or a prescription waiting at the Walgreen’s. BUT…if a wildfire is bearing down on my little town out in the boondocks or if my kid is sick and needs to come home or be taken to a doctor — or is playing hooky — I sure want to know about it. To my mind, the CPR Call Blocker is about as good as it gets in that department, because it gives the user the discretion to choose which nuisance calls will get through.

Also in the Department of Pests, the weather is gorgeous at this time of year…and so naturally we’re overrun by mosquitoes.

To my knowledge, there’s no actual standing water in my yard, and I kind of doubt there’s any in my neighbor’s…she never replaced her deceased dog (hence, no water dish), and she’s not into container gardening.

I, however, decidedly am. Into container gardening, that is. Bzzzzzzzt!

The outdoor plants do not have saucers under their pots: they rest either directly on the ground or on the plastic fake “wood” deck on the side. BUT…once temps reach the 90s, they have to be watered every…single…day. Miss one morning drench, and the potted plant keels right over dead.

This means the soil itself is damp all the time, and so the soil itself is probably what harbors the mosquito larvae. Confirmation: leave the sliding door to the deck open for a few minutes, and you’ll be swarmed.

So I ordered up a 30-ounce bottle of Mosquito Bits. This stuff is the business. It contains a bacterium (Bacillus thuringii) that produces a toxin that affects only the larvae of mosquitoes, blackflies, and fungus gnats. You apply it to standing water (such as water in the drip dish of a potted plant, or birdbaths, or backyard ponds), perennially damp soil (such as the soil in potted plants that have to be watered every day…), and the like. It works, and it does no harm to any other critters.

In the past, I’ve bought the stuff from an outfit in Arizona that supplies organic farms and ranches. That’s their business: providing environmentally friendly products and tools for organic farmers. The problem is, they charge an arm and a leg for this stuff. You get a tiny bottle containing just enough to apply it to the potted plants outside and to the very few spots where standing water occasionally accumulates, however briefly. (Mosquitos can go from pupa to flying dive-bomber overnight in this climate.) But lo! At Amazon, here we find this freaking pail of the stuff for all of 18 bucks!

Sold!

Sprinkling it into every pot I even vaguely suspected might harbor skeeters and working it into the cracks between boards on the deck (you just know the pot water is dripping down under the deck’s flooring and puddling there, don’tcha?) used less than a third of the bottleful. So I figure this ought to last through the season, at least.

Speaking of pests, Ruby is campaigning for a doggy chew treat. She’s already had her morning ration. So the mumbling and boofing around the kitchen is likely to go on for awhile. {sigh}

In the doggy pest department, though, it’s other people’s damn dogs that are the pests hereabouts. After the Loose GerShep Attack, I’ve taken to carrying a heavy ironwood walking stick with me when I take Ruby out for her morning doggywalk. This morning we stupidly walked down Feeder Street Northwest — having gotten a late start, we were encountering enough traffic that I could not easily step out into the traffic lanes to avoid incoming, a little detail that gave me pause when we started…but it was a shortcut, and because we were late, the heat was starting to come up, and I was hungry, and…and…I just wanted to get home quicker.

Naturally, around the corner came a guy with two dogs in hand, one of them a large pit bull. Sheee-ut! That sidewalk is narrow and there’s no way to easily cross the street at that hour, because of the commute traffic. I had to climb up on a xeriscaped yard to drag Ruby out of the oncoming doggitude.

“Ohhh don’t worry, they’re friendly,” says the dog lover.

“Sorry. I’ve had my fill of dog fights,” say I, “and I don’t want another one today.”

That’s gotten to be my standard keep your damn dog at heel! line. It gives even the dimmest nitwit enough pause (they apparently have to think about this…) that I can usually slip past them without incident.

Well…here’s the client on the e-mail. So i suppose i’m going to have to get back to (ugh!) werk!